This is unfortunate, but all to common. The joy of coding gets lost in politics, deadlines,.documentation and process. If this is you, you might want to give gig process work a shot. As a developer, you’re actually intimately familiar with how systems work and interact, abstraction, and the interactions between the boxes. I’m pushing 50, have 4 consulting retainers going that have been with me for over 10 years each, and I’m still feeling the same buzz of figuring out my customers processes, developing a solution and seeing it implemented as I designed. Coding is the drudgery, but when you’re playing a meaningful part in effecting company wide change, it’s something else.
I used to work in MNC consulting (big-5, tier-1 clients), but started a side gig for a friend’s sme company on weekends - it kinda grew from there. I had an opportunity to get into pretty much the entire business and mess around/ optimize different aspects of it, and built systems where they were needed, and as a nice side effect developed an intimate knowledge of said business aspects. End result? I have deep knowledge of particular niche segment and in my country at least, in this segment, I can confidently say I service, or have serviced the majority of companies.
Tl;dr: keep your ears open, find a friendly opportunity and work it hard. It gets easier as you go along.
Now my day-to-day is filled with process. We must break our deliverables into 2-week chunks so that the stakeholders can see our progress and know that we’ll deliver on time. But it’s not on time. Everything must be tested. But it still has bugs. Everything must have thorough documentation. But it quickly gets out of date and we never read it.
Most stakeholders don’t understand software-development, development cycles, or even SCRUM (the most known collaboration framework for software development). It always amazes me how managers and even seasoned developers do not understand these things. They don’t understand estimates, roadmaps, task division, the value of software architecture nor exploration, nor just how complex it is to write software.
This also leads to them not understanding the tools used to manage the process, the developers, the software, nor the outcomes.
It’s a little curse to be remotely passionated about programming and be a programmer nowadays. Some companies make it extremely dull and toxic with all their additional requirements and managerial practices. But there’s hope, there are good companies or teams, and eventually if you stay long enough you will find your place.
That was my case.
The only lesson you need to learn is to make distinction between your interests, side projects and hobbies and the actual work you need to do ar work. If they overlap that’s amazing, if not you need to adapt. You need to give the company what the company wants (so you can get paid), and to yourself what you want, so you can be fulfilled.
I am looking forward to follow up articles like “woodworking as a career isent right for me”, “bookkeeping as a career isent right for me” and the really enlightening “any job sucks when your boss is shit”.
All the problems mentioned here are common to various tech jobs and possibly other fields as well. It’s nothing specific to programming. All problems mentioned are societal issues and not inherent problems of any profession. Things like student loans, hustle culture that leads to burnout, over compartmentalization of work, clueless managers, etc. We need a social revolution, not a career change.
Cool, how much of your 25 years was to “write test automation to test the front end” full time?
This guy is in his 3th job after 6 years - so job-hopping every 2 years (as per the current programmer-job-meta. - ) trying to find the right job that fits him - but obviously he hopped into a disaster of a job. Its a personal anecdote of his experience so far.
If you have 25+ years of experience, but you can’t relate at all to what he’s experiencing, then this guy already has more experience than you do
I write programs for myself. I have learned enough C, Pascal, Fortran, Basic to write small things and even larger things like a visual file manager for MSDOS, or my own version of the venerable STAR TREK game. I even know of big O notation (But I don’t know how to calculate it for a given algorithm)
But I never wanted to be a programmer - having to work on other people’s programs 8 hours a day. That would ruin programming as a hobby. When I am self-directed it is fun.
I was a Data Center tech instead. Minding 3 football fields of other people’s computers.
Being limited and tortured by some shitty design decision that someone made 10 years ago that you have to just live with is a special kind of hell that only developers, mechanics, and engineers understand.
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This is unfortunate, but all to common. The joy of coding gets lost in politics, deadlines,.documentation and process. If this is you, you might want to give gig process work a shot. As a developer, you’re actually intimately familiar with how systems work and interact, abstraction, and the interactions between the boxes. I’m pushing 50, have 4 consulting retainers going that have been with me for over 10 years each, and I’m still feeling the same buzz of figuring out my customers processes, developing a solution and seeing it implemented as I designed. Coding is the drudgery, but when you’re playing a meaningful part in effecting company wide change, it’s something else.
I’ve heard this a few times and honestly would love to do it. But I don’t really know where to get started. Any pointers?
I used to work in MNC consulting (big-5, tier-1 clients), but started a side gig for a friend’s sme company on weekends - it kinda grew from there. I had an opportunity to get into pretty much the entire business and mess around/ optimize different aspects of it, and built systems where they were needed, and as a nice side effect developed an intimate knowledge of said business aspects. End result? I have deep knowledge of particular niche segment and in my country at least, in this segment, I can confidently say I service, or have serviced the majority of companies.
Tl;dr: keep your ears open, find a friendly opportunity and work it hard. It gets easier as you go along.
Appreciate the advice! I’ll definitely be keeping my ears open, then.
Most stakeholders don’t understand software-development, development cycles, or even SCRUM (the most known collaboration framework for software development). It always amazes me how managers and even seasoned developers do not understand these things. They don’t understand estimates, roadmaps, task division, the value of software architecture nor exploration, nor just how complex it is to write software.
This also leads to them not understanding the tools used to manage the process, the developers, the software, nor the outcomes.
Everyone just wings it.
It’s a little curse to be remotely passionated about programming and be a programmer nowadays. Some companies make it extremely dull and toxic with all their additional requirements and managerial practices. But there’s hope, there are good companies or teams, and eventually if you stay long enough you will find your place.
That was my case.
The only lesson you need to learn is to make distinction between your interests, side projects and hobbies and the actual work you need to do ar work. If they overlap that’s amazing, if not you need to adapt. You need to give the company what the company wants (so you can get paid), and to yourself what you want, so you can be fulfilled.
If they overlap, aren’t you in danger of having your company try to take over your passion project?
That’s a possibility.
I am looking forward to follow up articles like “woodworking as a career isent right for me”, “bookkeeping as a career isent right for me” and the really enlightening “any job sucks when your boss is shit”.
All the problems mentioned here are common to various tech jobs and possibly other fields as well. It’s nothing specific to programming. All problems mentioned are societal issues and not inherent problems of any profession. Things like student loans, hustle culture that leads to burnout, over compartmentalization of work, clueless managers, etc. We need a social revolution, not a career change.
Exactly. This follows Marx’s theory of alienation closely. I found 3 out of 4 features described by Marx in the original article.
Dude is burnt out in 6 years? I’ve been doing it 25+ professionally and still love it, started as a kid writing basic with the line numbers.
what’s your mailing address? we’re sending you a gold star and a cookie.
Cool, how much of your 25 years was to “write test automation to test the front end” full time?
This guy is in his 3th job after 6 years - so job-hopping every 2 years (as per the current programmer-job-meta. - ) trying to find the right job that fits him - but obviously he hopped into a disaster of a job. Its a personal anecdote of his experience so far.
If you have 25+ years of experience, but you can’t relate at all to what he’s experiencing, then this guy already has more experience than you do
I write programs for myself. I have learned enough C, Pascal, Fortran, Basic to write small things and even larger things like a visual file manager for MSDOS, or my own version of the venerable STAR TREK game. I even know of big O notation (But I don’t know how to calculate it for a given algorithm)
But I never wanted to be a programmer - having to work on other people’s programs 8 hours a day. That would ruin programming as a hobby. When I am self-directed it is fun.
I was a Data Center tech instead. Minding 3 football fields of other people’s computers.
that sounds like burnout as well. You can’t have your job also be your hobby and not burnout
Being limited and tortured by some shitty design decision that someone made 10 years ago that you have to just live with is a special kind of hell that only developers, mechanics, and engineers understand.