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I've walked away from software development

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Re: I've walked away from software development

#71
The author seems burned out given his age. (I'm going to assume a male author given how few women were in the field 20 years ago.) I went through the same stage after working for a mid-sized financial institution. I had a plan to retrain as a physical therapist. I left the job and lived on savings and my wife's salary. Six months into it I started to write software again: I missed it. So I contracted for 1.5 years and wound up working in-house for a university as a developer. Here I stayed for 14 years now.

Early in my time at the university I started to feel again the way the author describes. When I started to attend local tech meetups and started to take university CS classes out of interest, I started to feel rejuvenated. About 3 years ago, I changed to a team of much younger developers. They used modern tools, had less bureaucracy, and developed distributed applications, which I had little experience with. That was the step I needed to get excited about development again. Now I'm working extra time on my own because I enjoy the work. I'm also taking up niche areas, like language design, in my personal time.

To anyone reading this who might feel the way the author does, I give the advice to focus on finding your cultural fit and figure out the priority of your values. When I worked for startup companies I loved the absence of bureaucracy and the rapid adoption of new technology. But I hated having to wear a lot of hats: I really despise desktop configuration and system administration. My current team has some bureaucracy but we have teams to handle the things I dislike. So it's a compromise that I feel works in my favor.

Re: I've walked away from software development

#72
post #48

I think all of us 40+ folks are in the same place. When we first started we didn't mind the bullshit so much because we were too dumb to realize how much there was. Then we got older and, yeah, it's ridiculous, but we were pretty decent at surfing the bullshit waves so we still didn't mind so much. Now you're in your 40s and the real obligations of life have started piling up. You've gone from 7 hours of free time a…

Being on the steep part of the learning curve makes up for a lot of bullshit.

Re: I've walked away from software development

#73
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Identity politics have made it even more miserable.

what does that even mean?

People will start drama if you use the wrong words. Either the drama itself or trying to avoid it is an additional source of stress.

Re: I've walked away from software development

#74

I used to think that the current setup of writing software, with prevalent scrum, talking-head managers, resume-driven development, byzantine tech stacks, draining practices such as heavy CI/CD and code reviews etc. is what makes the jobs unpleasant. But then I watched the documentary about the creation of the first Netscape web browser around 1995 or so, when they presumably didn't have any of the above. And yet, th…

> But then I watched the documentary about the creation of the first Netscape web browser around 1995 or so, when they presumably didn't have any of the above.

Maybe not scrum and CI/CD stacks. Talking-head managers and various byzantine process decisions stemming from that and from management-resumé-driven decisions they did have; in fact, the agile movement was a reaction against that. CI/CD was a reaction against often heavy manual testing and endless bug hunting fromm bugs discovered far downstream (often, in prod) and the attendant pressures. Sure CI/CD may suck, but getting a ticket from support because the installer for your enterprise product with license cost starting at over $100K/year shipped to customers with a syntax error in the install script and the accompanying pressure from customers (and thus from sales, and thus from engineering management) that go with it isn't great, either.

At least I imagine it wasn't for the dev team; when I experienced it in 1999 I was the support engineer who identified the problem...

Re: I've walked away from software development

#75
post #44

Well said. I'm rotting from the inside out. The only problem I have with the post is that they have the luxury of quitting. People like myself are trapped in the job. They're likely making 5x many people's salary if they are a principle engineer at a large tech firm. I dream of quitting everyday, but I know I have to deal with this job for the next 2 decades at least (about 9 years in). I'm miserable and know I'm was…

I'm curious how exactly you're trapped. Do you have any dependents? I'd understand in that case but, if you were single or unmarried, then I would argue that you aren't trapped at all.

Yep, wife and kid. Wife won't contribute financially and refuses to move to a lower cost area. She also complains about our 1800sqft house being too small. Not sure how I ended up in such a bad situation... oh wait, it all changed once we got married. Damn legal documents.

Re: I've walked away from software development

#76

SW people are well payed to provide RoI for their company. If you get the opportunity to do something you like then that's great. But ultimately SW people left to their own devices will never ship product. This is why you have people like Program Managers and people managers to drive the product and the resources to deliver to schedule. Processes like Agile and SCRUMs are there to stop SW people from getting wayward…

Sorry no,that's just delusional. Software gets shipped despite Program Managers and SCRUM masters, not because of them. Agile was developed by Software devs to manage management and scope,you got the whole thing backwards.

Re: I've walked away from software development

#77
post #48

I think all of us 40+ folks are in the same place. When we first started we didn't mind the bullshit so much because we were too dumb to realize how much there was. Then we got older and, yeah, it's ridiculous, but we were pretty decent at surfing the bullshit waves so we still didn't mind so much. Now you're in your 40s and the real obligations of life have started piling up. You've gone from 7 hours of free time a…

> Oh, by the way, it's December, so we need you to watch that 45 minute security training video again so you don't accept USB flash drives from strangers in the parking lot. The ability to mute a tab and have it run in the background is at times a beautiful thing.

Unless you work at Amazon where the training pauses if the tab isn’t actively focused.

I’m convinced that it’s a form of torture.

Re: I've walked away from software development

#78
post #48

I think all of us 40+ folks are in the same place. When we first started we didn't mind the bullshit so much because we were too dumb to realize how much there was. Then we got older and, yeah, it's ridiculous, but we were pretty decent at surfing the bullshit waves so we still didn't mind so much. Now you're in your 40s and the real obligations of life have started piling up. You've gone from 7 hours of free time a…

So true... I’m in my early 30s and already started to refuse any meetings without a clear agenda and call out for none stopping blabbering nonsense. It’s been much better for reducing unnecessary overheads but at the same time it would probably only work for my current project which is small scale and I have the most expertise. I will never move or take a job in large development shop with a beaucratic leadership structure.

Re: I've walked away from software development

#79
I think it's possible to avoid a really stressful corporat job and still develop software. For example, working for a small startup or maybe an individual small client. Or launching your own startup if possible.

For me, it has not been possible to avoid corporate stress and BS and still maintain a high salary. I moved to another country.

Re: I've walked away from software development

#80

In the middle of the rant on burnout, he says: > I'm sick of everyone being on Adderall. Is that really a thing? ie What proportion of software folks are using it?

My guess is that the author feels like others are more productive than he is, and is dealing with that by claiming everyone is on Adderall.

It’s more likely that he is struggling with a common psychological distortion - minimize his accomplishments and maximize his failures.

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