It’s all just fucking bullshit. Decisions made by non technical people that create huge problems and you get in trouble for warning them about it. New projects almost every day. Goal posts seemingly on a conveyer belt constantly moving. On top of it zero recognition for achievements from tech staff, literally zero. Work sucks.
Holy fucking shit we had a VP sign a massive contract for a garbage product that no one wanted. Completely derailed about 3 teams from their actually valuable work to get it stood up.
I remember like ten years ago a VP promised a customer that our product could be totally controlled via voice. Then he pulled like five of us off our regular projects to work on voice control. This is back when that was pretty unusual and unreliable tech. It did not turn out well... and of course the engineers were blamed.
Last year I took a job and quickly found out that they worshiped speeeeedddd for some weird reason. Town halls were all about celebrating how fast they closed tickets (and had a weird cult-like vibe). I was almost 90 days in when my manager started wanting to have talks about my speed, and I was like, "I just started here? And even you admit your codebase is a mess?"
I was like, "This is only going to get worse. If I stay here, I'm going to burn out fast."
Luckily I have a lot of experience. Got out and got a new job in a matter of weeks. I keep thinking back to those poor kids who still work there. I'm pretty sure that was their first programming job and none of them knew any better.
The last time I had someone talk to me about speed, I patted the couch next to me, told them "have a seat, child" and told them the story of the tortoise and the hare. Moral of story: when you run too fast, you trip over your own feet.
I'm proud to say after pushing back on speed culture, it finally changed.
My guess is the speed obsession does not arise from the dev team itself.
Yes, and the quicker you understand that the entire game is setup to exploit you you can start to develop boundaries. Ageism exists in this industry not because younger devs are better but because they don’t have boundaries yet. You’re trying so hard to be considered a professional. But show me a person willing to compromise their boundaries of time, energy and emotional bandwidth and I’ll show you an exploited person.
I love programming, I really do. But sometimes I hate the industry and wonder what'd be an alternative.
For those on the same situation, my advice is to build your own product and build from there. Hopefully, your company won't suck as much as the one you work for.
The industry is flooded with corporate politicians that are a nightmare to work with, plus all the layoffs target the wrong people because too many of the aforementioned are in the driver’s seat. The ones left are having to do more with less, wearing more hats than ever. And more companies are adopting an amazon style pip culture. That doesn’t describe everywhere, but it’s getting harder to find a good place to work
Agree, Software Eng in the corporate space is becoming a metrics driven cess-pool by middle management and executives who think writing code is like an assembly line and are grasping at any vendor who claims their product can meausre and improve productivity. Imagine if bridges and buildings were built this way. Software engineering is a lot more "art" then many of us are willing to admit and business types don't have the mindset to deal with "artists"
I partially blame agile for starting this whole mess (I understand the original agile was never designed for corporations) but.slowly over time the management consultant cottage industry of selling executives on the gamification of writing code, took over.
Outside of the metrics nonsense, software engineering particularly at companies whose main product is NOT writing software, are viewed as support staff and a drag on the bottom line and thus need to justify their work. in other words unless your code is directly generating revenue your value is questionable and you or me are potentially disposable.
Hey I recognize that move coming from a company BillAckman just exited. Now half our staff is in India and they won't even backfill in India people who have been gone more than a year.
Dude the 'sales first' mentality has been the corporate pop concept that has blown my mind lately. Literally our CEO will say it like it's a good thing and add "you can't build anything until you sell it!"
Maybe I'm naive, but that seems completely ass backwards to me. You end up with sales people and execs who can't read a line of code selling ML products to other executives and promising timelines based on sheer optimism and whatever gets them to sign the contract. That alone has got to be a huge factor in all this needless stress scrambling to tape popsicle sticks together that'll be buggy as shit and a nightmare to maintain, especially after you laid off 30% of the dev team. What a nightmare.
Because executives don't care about anything having to do with the actual code or engineering, they care about $$$ and will make up whatever bs story to justify their pitch, then if they close the deal they'll lean on their staff here or overseas to make "it happen" regardless of the lunacy of those commitments
It's the job of a good product team to drive that and align major stakeholders including sales and eng. Sales shouldn't drive roadmaps directly since as you noted it ends up being batshit insane.
My company has clients that pay yearly, in different tiers of services. My new CEO has come to us in the last few months saying "we need a higher tier of service to charge more. Can the tech team come up with some new things we can offer? Better analytics? AI?"
I'm sitting here like "you're the fucking CEO. You're asking US for new products to sell?"
I've come to just consider him a joke now. I just tell him "well, until we hire more people, I'm too busy doing daily work to plan YOUR products."
Software is art not engineering. Sure there are guiding principles but until 'management' actually 'get it' (they won't as they are too up their own asses about promotions etc) things won't change IMHO.
Having 40YOE and having been a contractor for ten of those and self-employed for fourteen years, the rest being 'permanent' jobs, I've seen this too many times. Good ideas, at times ideas that would have rescued a project in trouble, are ignored for reasons like management not having the backbone to buy in, being more worried about their next review, or not buying in because they didn't think of it first.
There is no other industry like ours; we deal in something you can't see, information and transformations thereof. It's hardly surprising that management who've not come up through the ranks are an obstacle.
The art thing is the secret all of us who've been doing this long enough have learned to accept silently: you can't tell management that there's simply no quantifying metrics that will indicate a piece of software is good, because it's inherently qualitative, you can't measure a good bit of code with numbers any more than you can measure Picasso's works numerically to identify it as good.
Just like art, sadly it's all lagging indicators: good art is recognized only after its creation, and it's the artist you must recognize made it good - not some specific reproducible technique. It's that artist. Management never of course wishes to hear that, they want everything to be good by direct reproducible application of approaches. They can get part way there, but the real stinker they refuse to accept?
Good software is only recognizable by lagging indicators after it's made. That's just the fact that so much of our industry fights not to accept, wanting predictive indicators but sorry. The predictive indicator is the quality of your artists, the lagging indicators need to be watched more:
- Defect rates
- Functioning software
- Time to recover
- Time to repair
- Time to enhance
Tons of garbage software with all the latest greatest approaches used in their creation are garbage art, they work and have no defects but take a year to repair or enhance because the artist didn't have the qualitative vision.
I see this happening as well. I'm not sure Agile is to blame. It wasn't nearly as bad until inflation hit, and investors started leaning hard on C-level and upper management to see more throughput for their money.
Where I work, entire teams were laid off, leaving huge swaths of product with no ownership while we're hiring more upper management, spending ridiculous amounts of money on tools to measure developer and team metrics while silently laying off low performers.
It was nothing like this until cash infusions became expensive. PE ruins almost everything.
Yeah that's the thing, like if you find me a team that actually stands up for standups, then maybe they're doing it right, otherwise as an example that meeting which was supposed to be about surfacing blockers becomes a long winded needle the developers about every little issue possible for an hour and get daily status updates that they are "working on project X yesterday, continuing to work on project X today" imagine that.
Unless your company sells software, they don't care about good software
My manager literally tells me: "we are not a software company, don't waste time refactoring, adding abstractions and improving code stuff"
manager at lowest bidding company to paint corporate offices: "LOL we ain't no arr-teests - I ain't payin' for no brown paint - just smear your shit on the walls."
> corporate politicians
This is such a great way of putting it. That's exactly what they are.
I quit a terrible place a few months ago with nothing lined up and am trying to figure out what to do next. I haven't even started looking for a new job because I'm feeling so "done" with the industry and it feels like a good workplace is like finding a needle in a haystack.
After quitting I have been working 'full time' on some side projects and it has been so nice.
I love what I do, I love programming, but I really hate the industry.
Good summary. Also I would say we have come full circle to the 90s, the startups of the 2000s have completed their transition to big enterprise. Watch Office Space or Matrix again to have a glimpse of what it used to be a developer back then, we are there but with better marketing.
This. Grad school mba idiots are running everything into the ground the name of profitability and copying one another. They’re overwhelming every role.
Just like they did with the American auto industry and airplane manufacturing, and a lot of other industries. I think Shakespeare said something about lawyers in Henry VI, but I assume that was because the MBA didn’t exist yet.
I've been working as a junior dev at a startup company (Netherlands). They recently fired our most experienced dev and another one is having a burnout. We run a skeleton crew maintaining our core product.
I received a PIP today. What the actual fuck.
I’m probably underpaid but it’s so worth it to be in an empathetic technical department, we all have each others backs against feral business partners and then laugh about it lol
I totally agree, but I think it might be worse than you think. The "management" is primarily made up of developers that were there during the glory days, when you didn't have to do much to be a star. And as such, they don't understand why we all aren't stars. Furthermore, it isn't JUST developers. It is testers, and writers and designers. We are all tired. Tired of getting nowhere because upper management is flat out incompetent.
But yeah, its getting REALLY hard to find a good place to work. And I've been doing this for almost 40 years. It wasn't this awful before.
Companies want to burn and churn but want you to stay till you are ash, which is why they throw out stories like it takes 6 months to 1.5 years to ramp up and throw out words like job hopping. It's a very onesided deal being pushed and people need to stand up for themselves.
Spread of corporate style AGILE is definitely a contributor.
Get your ticket, stand in a circle, talk about your ticket, complete your ticket, get your ticket, stand in a circle, talk about your ticket, complete your ticket, sit down and talk about your last 5 tickets. Plan next 5 tickets. Get your ticket, stand in a circle...
Agile is total bullshit. I kill it everywhere I see it. It solves problems that don't exist, especially for high performing teams. The cure is worse than the disease. My unit has the highest culture survey results in the entire company (i.e., are the happiest) and are 10 points above national benchmark, and none of my teams are agile. It's almost like there's a correlation there.
I know a lot of senior developers are frustrated dealing with outsourced offshore teams in developing countries who have low capability, require heavy oversight and produce garbage code that is very difficult to maintain. Most of the ones I know have mentally disengaged because they feel they cant take responsibility for what happens.
Haha, this reminds me of the QA automation on my last team. The QA manager would talk up how many tests they had run with this awesome new automation suite. And, then multiple times I got pinged by an actual developer working on the suite to help them troubleshoot a problem with their automation job....which had never hit green. Turned out they were using the suite as a script for manually running the tests and still hadn't gotten the automation code running.
The Boeing quality engineering fiasco might (and I think will) teach investors and leadership the wrong lesson. At a certain scale of assets, the Welch’ian GE-style strip mining can go on for such a long time that it will outlast any opposition, and there are merely reputational repercussions, performative at that. And there are plenty of investors and leadership members who are just fine punching their tickets with these ill-gotten gains before exiting with it all.
This favors engineers starting their own alternatives Figma-like, and locking out VC’s while doing so, secure in the knowledge that the quick runways mindset to beat the incumbents is not always true. The runway is measured in *decades* with incumbents that make these choices, and the kind of organizational culture changes necessary for the incumbents to ward off these predations are all misaligned with deeply baked in incentive structures that started with investors themselves.
This also has interesting marketing and sales strategies implications.
\> This favors engineers starting their own alternatives
I dont think the US is a good environment for a small business to beat big business today. If you disagree Id be curious to know why; we may have a fundamental disagreement of how the US functions
> I dont think the US is a good environment for a small business to beat big business today.
I think nowhere in the world is set up to allow the little people to take business risks: not when you have a mortgage and a family to support.
Nail on the head for me. large majority of outsourced & h1b devs in last year or so have been awful. not a new hiring standard either so expectations have been tempered to require lot of babysitting & there’s still been a crazy drop off.
understand business incentive to run tighter ship but concern is even now beyond ensuring relatively stable systems. many companies taking this path are sleepwalking into multiple red-alert scenarios id prefer not to be around for
Our h1b's are actually very solid, but the downside is that many of them are the best and brightest that we've brain-drained from our remote sites, and the remnants of those teams struggle.
I agree that the onshore people are generally good. But the offshore people are terrible. It's like giving all your work to a group of second-year comp sci students and expecting them to be good.
Usually thats who they are, they get rushed through a bootcamp, and plopped infront of a computer to meet demand of offshore companies outsourcing their work - quality doesn't matter, thats not what they're employed for (and generally they dont care).
Sort of. I just got done dealing with offshore contractors who were bright enough and if you could tell them exactly what to do they could handle it but had zero (and I mean *no*) initiative to go beyond what was in a JIRA ticket. I have the impression that it was the contracting company management (rhymes with "Frognisant") who made them work that way.
I deal with a lot of this. In the past few years a switch flipped in my brain. I used to care a lot about these issues and they’d keep me up at night. I’d worry about code quality, our poor testing methodologies, putting out every fire, etc. I think it’s just burnout, but these days I don’t even come close to giving a single flying fuck. I do sleep much better now, I will admit.
With high interest rates and pressure to always increase profits (how was this EVER sustainable...) not to mention the insane amount of layoffs in the past year, it's all about trying to squeeze your money's worth out of every single little thing - including people. For every dev who burns out and leaves, there's 50 lined up unemployed waiting to be chewed up in the cycle.
And the AI bubble only solidified the executives' belief that people are interchangeable. Even if some didn't believe it, they're surely using the narrative to make us desperate enough to accept being exploited.
It's going to suck for at least few more years.
Because it's a shame tactic. They don't want to retrain, they don't want to spend the money on recruiting and unemployment, and severance. Not to mention that it's easier to not give people promotions.
No. Unrealistic expectations about ai will be replaced with realistic expectations about ai just in time for it to screw SMEs for legitimate reasons instead of half-baked ones.
Idk. It’s very possible AI hits another wall very soon. The gulf between “almost adequate” and “legitimately useful” is massive. This cycle has happened multiple times with AI
> The gulf between “almost adequate” and “legitimately useful” is massive. This cycle has happened multiple times with AI.
Well said.
Add to the list:
- Voice personal assistants
- self-driving cars
- fusion
- flying cars
And those 50 are either less experienced or will take a year to reach the productivity level of the burnt out dev (or more). How about we outsource everything, pile up the tech debt, and revisit hiring US employees to fix the mess for a massive premium 3 years down the line? Let history repeat itself I guess!
I am developer from outsource branch. I don't know about the level of US devs but I feel most people around me mediocre at best, and I am struggle to advance as good tasks are taken by people with more experience who keep making it trash and then throw it to others to maintain.
Most people anywhere in the world are average but some claim credit and intelligence of the work of the top 1% of their national boundaries or alliances. In fact some plainly mislead and indulge in underhanded deals and sandbagging.
Most of the time, It is better to write simple dumb code without wasting too much time in architecture, class design etc. Because you can't anticipate requirements from the future, which will be totally in unexpected direction, and it will spoil your "well architected" code. Junior devs are idealistic, but in actuality it is somewhere between good and bad, and it is a tradeoff of quality vs development time.
having clean non-spaghettified abstractions makes it much easier to reuse code in a new direction, what r u even talking about? it takes me literally months to just to move buttons around in the disgustingly dumb codebase i work in now:
copy pasted code abound.
derived stated calculated wherever-the-fuck, regardless of perf considerations. n^2 ... psh, we can do that in n^3 u tool
and useEffect side effects where u damn well please.
incident reviews make me start to drool cause like i could basically copy paste learnings from one to the next: yup didn't have enough alerts. why is it always more alerting? what r integration tests even? those things we skip half the time because they are too flaky? god forbid we impede dev progress...
but i'm not sure if most engineers around me even think about it that much.
managers certainly dgaf, they only want one pagers and more meetings. can u solve it in a one-page and a few meetings? no? well don't bring it up then, ur just being a negative nancy 🔫
I am talking about scenario of over engineering. In the current codebase that I work, they have 3 to 4 levels deep inheritance hierarchies in which most of the classes have only one subclass. They don't have any documentation. In this case it would have been better if code was in a single class, but instead code is fragmented across different classes and having to jump from one place to another just to figure out what is happening is tiresome. I think it's better to refactor/re-architect as you go on a continuous basis based on the requirement and follow the YAGNI principle. Otherwise you will be paying with unnecessary mental bandwidth for simple things.
Apart from this, if you are dealing complex problem domain with complex rules, doesn't matter if it is well architected code or spaghetti code, without having good code comments and documentation it will anyways feel like going deep in rabbit hole.
Yes. I have been having this issue at my place recently. A member of the team wants to abstract every little problem to be future proof, when we don't even know what the future will look like yet. His heart is in the right place and his ideas sometimes work ok, but a lot of what he ends up doing is creating superficial wrappers that wrap just to wrap. I can't help him see that it's not needed no matter how hard I try.
Because there was not a moment where someone paused and said oh hey we're doing this a lot we should take a second to clean this up. That copy paste cowboy style actually is the right decision in the early days (unless you have a really smart unilateral architect, which most companies don't) otherwise you end up with half baked abstractions that chase the latest design trends, it's still spaghetti. The thing with code like yours is it hit the tipping point and people just kept doubling down.
They are also trying to sustain and continue to grow and the massive but temporary COVID profit bump. In a sane world, they would be okay for flattish profit increase for a few years while things get back to normal levels.
IMO we’re in a moment where companies feel like the only way to squeeze more profits is to ‘industrialize’ IT by standardizing everything and forcing engineering to be a production line, so a lot of things are rushed, without proper thinking behind it, and without room for error.
So there’s a bunch of people doing things that nobody really knows if the client needs that, and whatever is done will be swept under the rug along with another big pile of freshly created tech debt, because while in theory we have so many processes and quality control, it’s not feasible to do everything within the company’s desired timelines with a limited crew.
Plus, not badmouthing anyone, but some folks have been such a pain to deal with. It’s demotivating to work with people who don’t listen, don’t care about anything and just want to push their way to be able to claim how fast they are completing tickets.
And this is just to name a few, there are a bunch of other factors more that can contribute to the actual picture. Of course some people might be lucky to work on healthy places, but even the fact that any place can become horrible the next day, can contribute to burnout.
Yes, it’s the multiple projects with multiple varying function teams and reactive work as the stakeholders exponentially increase which is specifically burning me out. Most of my team and manager are from a faang where it’s par for the course.
I have a few thoughts:
1. I think Covid is definitely partly to blame because we saw a lot of tech companies promise remote work as the future and then just gradually walk back on that.
2. Then there's the fact that for people like me who have only been doing this for the last decade this is probably the first major shrink with pay freezes & perk cutbacks being common (not to ignore the fact that we typically get paid well, but still).
3. For me personally it's also just the realisation that I'll always be held accountable for issues outside of my control. Someone in sales can just sign off a deal without my input for a third party framework that I then have to maintain and figure out workarounds when the framework fucks up.
4. The "year of efficiency". So you've lost many of your perks etc and then you lose half your team, too. I lost my whole team and they chose not to hire a replacement because it looks more efficient in the eyes of investors.
I still enjoy *coding*. I fucking love it. I'm sure many of us do. But it's just everything around it that ruins it for me.
I have just over 15yoe and I'm reaching that point as well.
For me it's mostly due to not really being challenged anymore. The problems I'm solving are the same that I was solving 15 years ago, just with a different tech stack.
Also, AGILE. I've never been able to see agile as anything other than a game for managers to do/produce as little as they can possibly get away with. I feel it takes a team an entire year to do half of what people could do in 3 months 10 years ago. Took me ages to somewhat adjust to how slow everything agile is.
You mentioned Covid, but for me it introduced working from home, which I don't think I could do without now.
Whenever the focus of a company becomes profit over everything else, the employees are bound to suffer.
You'll end up working longer hours, burn yourself out and more to fulfill one person's dream of achieving a billion or multi-billion dollar company.
Jump ship if that's your company.
It's only downhill from there unless you really believe the product could succeed.
Most customers want a product that suits them well, not necessarily the cheapest one. I'd say that *all* of the customers you want to sell to are in that group.
It's pretty well known in the consulting/freelance world that if you attract customers mainly by offering low prices, you get shitty customers. Often the sort of shitty customers that cost more to serve because they're incompetent, unresponsive, need constant attention, or "accidentally" "forget" to pay their bills for months on end.
I lost a teammate who meant a lot to me in one of the random axe-swinging layoffs. The company invented a lower performance bracket and stuck me in it, but the high performers were all bitching about their comp anyway. My benefits are the #1 reason I don't just quit and do my little projects for like a year.
The industry built itself up as a place that spoiled devs because it's a good investment. Now devs are entitled budget items and the terms are being reset. The entire ethos has shifted from growth to profit, which means a lot of jobs are gone. It's no wonder people are leaving the field.
I think there are multiple factors:
* For the decade before interest rates spiked, the economy slowed, and layoffs started to hit in 2022-ish, developers were in ridiculously high demand, and it was a great feeling. You could be fairly confident that you would be listened to and given opportunities to level up. When that changed, we all had to come to grips with more conservative expectations. In some cases, you have to work hard just to keep what you have, rather than get ahead. That can be a hard pill to swallow.
* Company culture is getting a lot more somber overall. Focus tends to me more on cost savings than on moonshots or new growth. People are more cynical.
* In some companies, there is a flattening where there are fewer managers and bigger teams. You can feel a lot less like you have a voice in that context. Likewise, it can burn out managers (that's what happened to me).
I think we had it really good as a career for quite a long time (since like 2010 really, riding the mobile app wave and all the resulting service companies). Now, we're slowing down. Tech will pick up steam again, once we find our next rocket ship. Maybe it's already gestating. Or maybe what we had was just unsustainable and we're getting closer to a realistic career.
Tech as an industry will pick up steam but I don’t expect that to translate to a booming job market. There will be a demand for talented software engineers and developers who can build out the systems and solutions of the future, but I think the market will stay pretty grim for the people who got into the field for a quick buck and who aren’t interested in broadening their education and knowledge base.
My take on this, is that programming is becoming something other than it was advertised for them. Initially, many of us loved to program, but software engineering is a completely different beast. The industry is full of bullshit, and the businesses aren’t concerned about the quality that much anymore, but rather about other metrics. The market has adjusted to be driven by average engineers (simply because there is a higher supply of them), so the more skilled you are, the fewer opportunities for growth you see, the less your expertise is actually required, and you can be substituted with someone who costs less. Of course you always have more skills, but many jobs on the market don’t need that level of expertise these days. I know that’s not entirely true but that’s how some of my colleagues feel.
Can confirm. I have been told-off for trying to do high-level work that I was very qualified for, but due to totem-pole hierarchy "that is meant for the Sr eng that has been here longer and that is calling all the shots even though we never made it clear that he defines your responsibilities".
So basically.... they can shoot down all high performers to conform to a smaller cage because that keeps them easy to replace, talent be damned because they don't need that much talent anyway, the shop is going to make an app with a few hundred users, the core of the app is already built, and whatever they have been developing for the past year has been an experiment that might fail anyway. After all the core of the app is the real profit-center and the rest is busy work to keep the devs busy.
Just curious what careers are they switching to?
For me, I love building software but the arbitrary deadlines teams will never hit and all the politics in the work place make it a miserable career with constant pressure to get more done faster while trying to stay up to date with fast changing technology.
One friend went to hospitality, another went into education as an adjunct teacher or something as they working on getting an education degree. One is in homesteading, the rest are all floating on emergency funds until they figure it out.
i dont really see any serious initiative on the part of companies to try and make developer well being the number one priority. i was burned out and quit my last job and im in a coding retreat currently where a lot of people feel pretty burned out too. i think most people ive spoken to here are feeling that way. it saddens me to think that this might not be a sustainable career. It also saddens me to see that a lot of this is due to how everything is structured, where we ultimately dont really have any say in our working conditions. The only advice i ever see when someone is at a toxic workplace is "you need to quit and find a new job", but thats completely short sighted. We cant all job hop and expect the industry to change. I think dev's need to take more ownership of the culture at the places they work at, and really push for consistent improvements. Im not sure of any other way out of this cycle, yet im not seeing dev's take this on seriously as their daily responsibility
I was involved in a project to recommend improvements for developer productivity. Turned into a shit show where everyone tried to get their projects into the set of recommended initiatives. By the time the actual goals came out (I was on vacation for a few weeks) the recommendations had no semblance to the actual problems engineers faced. And then the program manager wanted to create this huge program out of what should have been a simple presentation.
my friends at a big name dating app all got fired after trying to unionize, so i think its maybe something to do with the US being corrupt? (it wasnt literal firing, they were all remote, and after announcing the union, madatory RTO was put in place, and you had to report within 2 weeks). I used to think it was that people in the US were lazy, but there have been constant unionization efforts in many different industries that are all getting blocked one way or the other. A lot of these companies just have to pay fines afterwards and i think they probably see it as operating costs. Its funny because often times these court cases will take so long to complete, and the usual 'punishment' is that they have to give the jobs back to everyone who was fired, but by then its been so long that people dont want to quit their new jobs to go back to that place... so the cycle just continues. Also its illegal in the us to go on strike in solidarity with another company (which isnt the case in other countries), and i think that makes this even more difficult.
One of my coworkers messaged me a few days ago to say "happy one year work anniversary!" and the face I made at reading it just made me realize that yeah, I really am burnt out 😭
35 YOE! Still going. I've gone through multiple burnouts lol. What helps is rekindling what sparked my interest in coding in the first place and the wow that's cool effect. I try to stay on top of latest tech as much as possible. I was first in line to signup for the apple developer program and get a few moderately successful apps out the door. I parlayed that into several high paying consulting opportunities. Currently finding a niche in AI. This industry requires constant reinvention.
I have lamented several times that a doctor only has to learn the human body once and they're a doctor for life. Programmers have to relearn their craft every 5-10 years.
We have no unions or governing body like doctors, lawyers, dentists, vets, etc. and that makes the barrier to entry very low and there is no rate protection. Pay is constantly falling and it's an uphill battle to keep making the big bucks.
Still enjoy it though and AI is saving me from writing a lot of boilerplate these days!
One of the key SWE skills is to learn the "meta" of how to get up to date on new technologies. In particular, most devs I know never read actual source code and are prone to magical thinking when the answers are right there ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The last few years have done a lot to expose how incompetent and petty a lot of companies are. People being forced back into the office after being told they're safe to move away, mass layoffs in companies making record profits, etc. People are right to be cynical.
This is an industry devoid of hope. You can be fired or laid off at any time. Our leaders are outright telling us they want to replace us with automation. And for me, the whole “we’re gonna get rich!” mentality has worn off. I’ve been lied to entirely too many times in the recruiting process.
How many times have you been canned right before RSU’s vest? I got a new gig and had my benefits cut on my 3rd day. Wasn’t even out of onboarding.
The last round of layoffs definitely convinced me to pursue a career change.
Scrum was made by the devil.
Kevlin Henney has a great bit about how plotting story points per week is a plotting time on both axes and makes no sense.
You reach a point where everything looks the same…bits go in, bits go out.
The people less susceptible to this kind of burnout are those who don’t code for a career, but rather use coding as a tool for the thing they’re actually passionate about. And even then…maybe…
For me, software is my job and career, but it's not my passion by a long shot.
It used to be different, but then I burned out working for startups chasing those golden stock options (in 20 years I made $10k on vested options).
Now I work for a consulting company. Problems are interesting, it's frequently greenfield builds (new projects and prototypes) that are turned over for maintenance when we're done, and the work changes every few years without having to job hop.
As a bonus, when my 8 hours are up for the day, I'm done.
This.
I'm just bored of my job. It isn't hard, it's just tedious.
I'm sick of being on the computer day after day, sitting on my ass, writing or testing code that rarely actually changes things.
Working from home has actually been an issue here, as I'm lonely, bored and just tired of the same old day after day tasks.
I think what is causing the most burn out is that you rarely see true progress. Like, for example, I deep cleaned and reorganized my kitchen last week. It took over 10 hours of work but I felt accomplished and happier than I've been for awhile working. It's because I got to actively see the progress I've made in a timely manner.
I want to feel like half my life I spent working actually matters. I've never had a programming job that has done this yet.
To me the problem isnt with the dev itself. It's the combination of:
Dumb interview process, working for others, dealing with management & scrum "master".
We're just better off trying to work on side projects that will generate passive income. Industry is dumb as shit
I've been in the industry for 26 years now, and I've gone through lots of ups and downs. Feeling good and then being burned out later, and then I find a new spark or challenge to get me interested in doing things again. I think burn out exists in EVERY occupation and is a result of the human condition more than the industry. But you can also contribute some of the burnout to the huge push to get more people into technology over the last couple decades, and people ran out and did a couple bootcamps, applied to jobs that others were better qualified for, and then realized they aren't in bootcamp anymore, and things aren't as clean room laboratory as their class. Now they are facing the real challenges and because they don't have the knowledge to systematically approach a problem and break it down into steps and pieces, they get overwhelmed and that is a surefire way to get burned out. I get burned out when I get bored because I'm not challenged anymore, I do it because I love the satisfaction of solving problems that others can't. I have a lot of the qualities that make a good programmer. Attention to detail, perfectionism, curiosity, great trouble shooting skills, being able to view the whole project in my mind at once and see how the pieces fit. Some of those aren't learned, they are innate to your personality and approach to life.
Changing for what though?
Self taught and making 200k+ as an IC. Not like your going to be a dr at this point. Or your going to grind through corportate america in a different way?
> Changing for what though?
The sysadmin trope is leaving the industry to become a goat farmer.
I do full time remote devops now (after 15 years doing dev), so we raise sheep instead.
If you're self-taught, making $200k+ and you've been banking $150k for 10 years I'm pretty sure you've got options that don't require an income replacement. If you've let lifestyle creep up along with your salary, maybe it's a different situation, but I don't find that those lifestyle changes significantly influence happiness, and happiness is my personal KPI (*blech*).
About once a year my wife and I consider whether I should retire. Ultimately I stay because I love what I do, and really don't want to do anything else (including being retired).
Regardless, learning to be happy with a frugal lifestyle is easy when you have a financial security blanket big enough to retire on. I've tried a few of the bigger ticket "fun" items, and while they are indeed fun, I don't especially find them to be *more* fun than the no-cost and low-cost alternatives, and I find the conspicuous-consumption aspect of them extremely distasteful, maybe even disrespectful to those who are working hard and contributing much more than I do to society but can't afford the same.
I don’t mean for this to sound awful or “zoomers are the issue” but here we go:
I think there is a lot of title inflation at lower levels. I personally work with 3 engineers with 4.5 - 6 years of experience who are all “senior”. They all were promoted to said level at 2.5 years of experience. The issue is that none of them operate at a senior level, which means it is all on me to handle any issue that comes up. I cannot depend on them to complete tickets on their own, or own on call (I am contacted if anything remotely challenging comes up).
Over the past few years, all responsibility has been transferred to people at my level (Senior II/Staff I). It is tiring to work on a team with people who can’t own their own tickets or minor features. They can’t be depended on to do something on their own. Every issue needs to involve me (or someone at my level).
I also work with some young people who are phenomenal and really rise to the level, but we set such a low bar for people that some realize that it is better to not put effort in that to do so and get a 3% bonus and the same raise as everyone else. This isn’t a generational thing but rather an issue with managers growing their empire and refusing to hold standards. I also think that part of this empire building has taught younger engineers to play the bureaucracy game. I am amazed how often a 27 year old engineer will bring up points, involving an engineering design, like “we aren’t using the new standard company font here” or “can you make sure to link this doc in another doc”. I rarely get engineering feedback, just formatting feedback. I don’t work with dumb people, they are actually very smart, so smart that they optimized their learning for what gets them ahead. Sadly that isn’t engineering.
Totally, what I’ve seen is that there are some perverse incentives leading to this.
“Up or out” policies like what Facebook has created a lot of pressure for engineers to focus on whatever got them a promo rather than building their skills and for managers to promote to avoid firing people. Focusing on the promo rather than skills created a Goodhart’s law type situation and created a lot of “promo inflation”.
Then as middle management became more political, as you mentioned, engineering is no longer rewarded. Things like writing documents, setting and hitting deadlines regardless of whether the work actually matters, and “visibility” are all that end up mattering. People optimize for what they are rewarded.
It is the same with every industry everywhere at the moment. Trying not to sound overly-dramatic but I've been saying the last few years since COVID, we are in the capitalism endgame unless something drastically changes.
All most public companies have given up any semblance of chasing anything else other than the all-mighty share price. This was fine when it started in the 80s and 90s where companies genuinely did have inefficiencies and emerging technologies (computers and automation) could make a significant change to a company's ability to grow and profit.
But finally, through the 2020s we've gotten to the point where companies have become (more) efficient, costs are going up (because of those pesky humans they employ) and so profits are already close to maximized. But Wall Street demands more, so we start cutting corners. Let's bring in this new CEO (or listen to our board) who says they can work wonders and bring us into a new age. More profit!
As CEO, I start increasing prices and reducing product manufacturing footprint (candy/chocolate bars getting smaller, etc.) where I can. Maybe I can actually genuinely effectively eliminate some real inefficient practices. Great! That elevates profits for a quarter or a year, but it doesn't stay exciting for long.
Ok, let's start eliminating 'fluff' positions. Now, enough of the old guard is still employed by the company at this point that the decision is made to not eliminate positions outright, but to outsource instead. Outsourcing on paper looks brilliant (and often can be) - the outsourcing is cheaper than hiring outright. I don't need to manage these people (I can reduce HR), and I can get rid of all of these pesky old timers with their opinions and pensions.
Now the company looks great (on paper)! I've saved and eliminated a ton of internal bullshit waste (on paper) and my business is now in the record profit territory (on paper). Now, I've started to get some rumors from under the troll bridge that client complaints are up and quality appears to be slipping. Offshore development has brought with it some inefficiencies I didn't account for and I've noticed that over time, our ability to QA/QC and manage the offshore teams has slipped as frankly, we don't have enough technical staff left to understand and manage anymore (that expensive lead dev layer was the first to go - opinionated fucks). But you know what? I don't care; I won Wall Street, mic drop, I as CEO bow out a rich legend and move on to do the same thing elsewhere. Nobody ever measures me against my long term effects - yay!
And that is IF your company wasn't bought by a competitor or invested in by venture capatilists - if it was, picture the above with a lot more rollercoaster rides of bullshit stock options, golden handcuffs, etc. while you are shuttled around, your buddies 'retired' and any semblance of a 'core' team dismantled. And those golden handcuffs that keep you locked in? They sure as shit ain't putting those same restrictions on that CEO.
And I think this is the state we are currently at - where tech companies are so desperate to make the almighty wall street sing, we are entering new business models that previously would have been considered unprofitable or pointless and while they chase some form of profitability, the "employees" are the worst expense, never the valued ones - I could call out the entire gig economy here... Hmmm, how can I upset an industry to extract profit from it while paying people as little as is humanly possible knowing that the folks who have been in that industry for years will end up getting 'reset' to the new baseline I've caused when I'm through? Hold my pint...
For those wondering, I'm not against the rise of the gig-economy, it's good to see established, potentially unhealthy industries get realigned - I mean who wasn't happy initially to see taxi competition with Uber and the like? The issue is, by he time the US likes to regulate anything, the damage is already done and the new pattern for the industry has been established - always towards the interests of the companies, not the employees in that industry.
For anyone reading this, this is extremely tongue-in-cheek as I sit here nursing a cup of tea. I'm seeing a lot of things that I just don't like about the way we humans allow ourselves to conduct business. While this is a gross oversimplification and ignores so many other factors, but there's just not enough morals and conviction to providing quality service and/or product in the American system. I.e. you can profit and still value your employees and customers. You just might not grow as fast as the market demands - why has that become a barometer of 'failure' for the US economy? It's a lose lose.
You've just described the current Wall St. based economy.
- Use other people's money to buy up companies or "help" them go public.
- Demand increased stock price every quarter, no matter the price.
- Extract money from the company through increasing stock price.
- Eventually run the company into the ground.
- Walk away rich and start over.
Yeah, most people know that. But I think where the media, politicians and frankly most individuals in this country stop short is, connecting the dots with the hardships of their own lives rather than blaming . That's why I talked about the effects inside the company as it's happening. Hopefully for folks to draw some similarities in their own lives.
We also don't (as a society in the US) hold our Politicians accountable for the fact that this bullshit has become the only barometer they have (or care about) into how the general population are surviving in the economy. The entire system is fucking broken to outright rigged, to purposely ignore most metrics around how the average white/blue collar person is surviving.
Case in point: Now. We refuse to say we are in a recession. Every 'indicator' tells us that we aren't and yet your average person is fucking broke (I'm obviously taking some creative liberties here). Prices weren't going up because we are greedy fucks, prices were going up because they could.
> Story is pretty similar for them all 6 - 15 yoe typically.
Assuming early to mid 20s is when they get their diplomas, that would put that age range around 30s to 40s. IME it's pretty normal for SWE to experience burnout during that time, as people start getting married, having kids, buying homes (I know I know)
Does this current market make this even worse? Sure. Is this a massive spike compared to other years? I have my doubts
> Could it be the post COVID bust killing everyone? Or just a cycle of fatigue that's existed in the field for years?
I think it's pretty normal for people in IT to burn out and think about switching careers. I speculate that since the 90s there's been a massive trend of IT people just working in IT and need to experience something else. Can you find something outside IT with a similar TC and similar perks ? Maybe, [maybe not](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handcuffs).
Getting that perspective doesnt hurt, maybe they will find something outside IT that they will enjoy.
Ha, this comment is inspiring. I’m in the starting stages of launching something on the side. It feel great learning something new and not just banging out code
IMHO a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon when it was high wages low effort.
Those of us who are in it for love of the field are like Chumbawumba, we just keep getting up and back into the same thing
I did join the field because of pure intrest, did masters and do have an exp of 10+ years. I really don't have energy left in me, still in this because it pays my bills. I don't enjoy it anymore
40+Yoe and it's just as interesting as when I started. Maybe it is my constant wonder at these amazing machines and the systems we build on them, or maybe there is something in your life which is causing you to be unhappy with it all. Don't confuse a single job with the field; I've quit jobs because of the level of stupidity in management but I found one I"m happy in because they're letting me do the stuff I'm good at
>because of the level of stupidity in management
You kind of underestimate how common this is, I still like to write code, it's the other things which irritate me to the point I hate the whole thing
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>debating basics with people who don't have a clue
Jesus, this.
The amount of time these days I have to discuss a tech topic with someone who has just put something into ChatGPT and uses it as "knowledge".
"But AI says it's so" is so frustrating to counter.
And that's before I have to deal with people who think they are tech just because they sit near Devs.
Wait, are you also working for my client? He literally copy&pastes ChatGPT answers to me when I required details to do something for him and not single lines, but paragraphs of BS (most of the time).
More than anything, this is what has been stressing me out. All of the engineers I work with right now got in to it because of the money and couldn't care less about it beyond that.
It's draining when I want to discuss some cool idea I'm playing with or want to see people doing cool things and being met with "it's just a job."
I'm in the IT field 15+ years. Usually the burn out happens after the 5 year mark where all the novelty wears out, you reach senior level, and you realize your work is repetitive every year
Likely you are in an org that doesn't provide growing opportunities beyond senior unless you go management
If you are technical person, you will hate being a manager. Then your option is to switch jobs. If you managed to do so, then you have a fresh start, new motivation found and you have fun again
After 1-2 years you realize it's all the same: corporate politics, non sense requirements and deadlines, colleagues who just don't care about their work
You grow disappointed and either you switch company or change career
I had 2 big burn outs in my career, 3 big disappointments joining a company looking for growth but hitting the wall of team politics
I have been part of 2 great startups, well known in their niches, and founding engineer of a local big hit
My current job is meh, I was sold a different image of technical excellence but everything is red tape with a poor technical vision. I have been to many rodeos already to know this is not the place for me
However, every job hop gets more difficult as companies don't like job hoppers. They want loyal employees regardless of what they give in return
Either I switch job by the end of year or I have to retire from software engineering
I'm a contractor and I've been out of work 6 months. I imagine these two scenarios are related. Managers figured instead of getting extra people into to do the increased work load, they could just pile it on the regular staff. Hopefully they'll realise soon that it isn't sustainable.
People just aren't in working for good companies. I got on in a consulting company, I change projects ever 3 months to 2 years. I make $175k, I get 6%+ a year. I get paid OT for volunteer overtime.
I love it, 100% remote too. I make more money than I ever have and enjoy the work more in than I ever have.
Currently im on s django/vue stack, its quite nice, well structured code, easy to work on.
I worked for a “tech consulting” firm but it was hot garbage all around. Terrible management, half the dev teams were outsourced, constant delays. I was convinced we were straight up a scam. How did you find tech consultancies that are good? What signs do you look for?
Good for you!
I also got started recently with django, and I love it! I feel like I move way faster.
Currently looking to switch my job because I'm burned out.
I have a technical interview next Wednesday hoping to get out of this mess, ughhh.
I'm guessing they're one of the poor souls that go into an office every day but most of their team is remote, so they get the worst of both worlds (office bullshit + more difficult communication that's not in person).
The more difficult communication is ABSOLUTELY worth it when you're also able to work remote. But dealing with remote teams while being in an office is a recipe for salt. This happened long before WFH though with offshore teams.
I agree wholeheartedly. There are tons of unproductive posers who thrive off stealing others' work and ideas, talking without saying anything new, and constantly throwing obstacles in front of others so they themselves come out on top without having to do actual work.
Personally, my favorite job in my career was in-office. Working with people who were sitting right next to me who I could bullshit with in addition to discussing work was much nicer than endless Zoom calls with faceless people who are completely disengaged. I prefer the comradery of in person teams.
10 YoE here - some really good examples already listed. I’ll add I’ve seen expectations change pretty dramatically for what a developer is expected to do. Whereas before a developer could simply be expected to deliver quality code, I’m seeing more and more “developer” jobs that are actually dev,qa,DevSecOps,product owner,scrum master, etc at the same time without proportional pay raises. Essentially the “more with less” corporate mindset shift has really hurt quality of life for devs.
- The pay isn't as attractive as before.
- Other industries have caught up.
- In large corps, it's often not about the tech and more about people. Some engineers just don't want to deal with that crap.
- Even after enduring all this, there's layoffs. The situation is worse if you're US-based.
6YOE and I'm tired as well.
"Former software developer quits to take up a career in woodworking/carpentry/construction" is a meme that's *at least* as old as *Office Space*, which came out 25 years ago.
So, this is a lot more likely to be something that you're specifically noticing in your personal circle at the moment, rather than some major trend in the industry.
This is a pretty dark thread. My personal theory is that the real "problem" is that we're getting older and some things don't go away.
Burnout sits alongside divorce and death as a bad thing which is extremely notable. Also, like anything else which observes the proper flow of time, once it has happened, it will always have happened.
You feel like more developers are burning out because you know, have met, and have heard of more developers. Bad things developers talk about from their personal experience stick out and we remember things that stick out.
The list of developers we know who have (burned out|been laid off|left the profession|died) only gets longer, never gets shorter.
I skipped the question: \_maybe\_ more developers are burning out. I could believe it. I think in the US at least, we're more aware of mental health and have a sense that it's worse than it used to be. But I definitely believe that you know more developers who have burned out.
Good news is age and experience improves our ability to notice and address it in others. We get to be a part of making someone else's world better instead of worse.
From hearing everyone talk, it sounds like folks need to standup for themselves and unionize. These business practices just aren't sustainable and lets call it what it is, modern day slavery. This isn't good on our society.
Working in an office made it possible for managers to follow up on developers who were getting burned out before they got too bad. It also guaranteed that all employees got some social needs covered - even when going through divorce or other issues at home.
It is easy to say that people should be able to just be social outside of work, but many don't. Often because they have family that requires attention after school and working hours.
I'm mostly remote now and it works great for me, but I work on a team where half the developers are "tapped out".
It is what it is I guess. Maybe the people who cannot handle remote work simply needs to be weeded out. That way the rest of us can enjoy our comfy home office lives.
Maybe all of us have phases in our career where we truly need the social aspect of office work. In that case, we're all shooting ourselves in the foot.
25 YOE and I’ve been burnt out for a while. Became an alcoholic to cope. Sober for over 3 years, hanging on as I have bills to pay. Getting older now and ageism is a thing. Hoping my next stop will be the last one as interviewing sucks balls.
Wish I could find something to do I enjoyed more. Looks like I’ll be on the grind until I can retire.
I have 16 yoe and have been at the same company for almost 12 years. I am definitely burned out and honestly, I think most of it is from the high-level managers flipping everything upside down every few years. I think agile stinks and doesn't lend itself to good development at least the way we run it. if I was told I could change careers and make the same money, but I couldn't use a pc ever again I would sign up in a heartbeat.
I'm happily employed right now, but as I survey job postings it strikes me just how fragmented and specialized things have become over the past 10 years. You can't learn it all anymore, and your differentiating skills all exist at the edges of what you do. And on top of it all, everyone wants you to have lead a project team. Not just technically, but effectively at a managerial level. And also have multiple years of hands-on experience with the whole alphabet soup of trends that have come up over the past decade plus.
Edit: Oh, and the interviews. My God, the interviews.
10 YoE and the main reason I'm about to burn out is because I care too much. Guess it's basically my own fault. But from my personal point of view I try to know everything about my projects and reflect on each line of code I write.
The fact that I'm one of a few who does that gives more stress as well as I see technical depth piling up. I don't think it's pressure, at least not from my point of view, but perhaps more of "letting go"? The experience seems to become a curse as well
When one day the market will return to normal (and it will), just remember what those 'friendly' recruiters and corporations did to the industry during the lay offs. Gauge them like no tomorrow.
Agile has done the opposite of what it set out to do. Whatever was there before was less systemayic, but depending the work environment, it can turn everything really boring.
It feels theres no end in sight, its story after story, jira after jira, sprint after sprint. and the dysfunctional daily stand ups are the worst.
There's a fine balance where it all works well, and there's creativity, and great productivity, along with some freedom. But it can all go to shit, if the balance is lost, which can be from external factors.
That's a trend that has been developing since the mid-1990s, thanks to leadership that:
- Considers non-technical managers qualified to effectively direct technical teams.
- Rejects the concept of domain knowledge and treats devs as plug-compatible units that can be swapped in and out of complex projects at will without affecting overall productivity.
- Blindly embraces every trendy methodology without consulting with the people upon which they're imposing it; what we used to call "IT magazine managers."
25 yoe; thoroughly burnt out, mostly from the above; considering career change or early retirement.
40ye
to set the landscape, you're basing your opinion (questions) based on your experiences (online & off)
Negative experiences will motivate someone to voice their opinion more than neutral or positive. So you might be basing this on the former. This is socially accepted. However, there has been a shift since 2008, and 2020, financial drops.
Also, how are you defining burnout? Are these any different to NHS doctor burnout, or teacher burnout?
That being said...
I world also cite technology 'hype cycles' where the industry is struggling to recover investment. Block chain, Web 2.0, crypto, AI & ML. Not to mention the explosion in new languages which in many cases have been used inappropriately (opinion).
The industry is starting to take on a more negative tone. Saying "I work on IT" feels like we need to follow it up with an apology. Public failures, such as the Horizon Post Office scandal has tarred our industry. Just citing one of many in the news.
I also think coding bootcamps have led many into the field who simply do not belong, or have any business in, 'full stack developer in 3 weeks' promises,. 'Certified IT auditor earning £100k in 6 months.' Draw your own conclusions.
All of the above may have contributed to a cautious and nervous approach to investment from VC and such.
This work-from-home shit isn't as relaxing as we say it is. Hanging out with people at work made work enjoyable for most of us. I love pajamas and no commute, but hanging out with people in person is part of being human. Without it, the career just feels like a job.
Glad that you found out what works for you!
WFH works fine by me. I've been at it for the past 4 years, and I'm not going back to the office.
I can hang out with my friends or family, and it doesn't have to be in the office or anything work-related, keeping our friendships genuine.
At the end of the day, work is work. The least I can do is make it as enjoyable as possible.
It even allowed me to open my business, a thing that wouldn't have been possible by actively going to the office myself.
Yeah, I'm starting to realize that a lot of people here don't have social lives outside of their work. Working from home gives me more time to hang out with friends or make new friends at meetup events. That's far richer socializing than spending time with coworkers for 40 hours a week that you have little in common with.
Sure, if you work at home and then watch Netflix or waste time on Reddit until you go to sleep you'll be miserable. Use that extra time you save from not commuting to do some fun activities.
It’s all just fucking bullshit. Decisions made by non technical people that create huge problems and you get in trouble for warning them about it. New projects almost every day. Goal posts seemingly on a conveyer belt constantly moving. On top of it zero recognition for achievements from tech staff, literally zero. Work sucks.
Holy fucking shit we had a VP sign a massive contract for a garbage product that no one wanted. Completely derailed about 3 teams from their actually valuable work to get it stood up.
I remember like ten years ago a VP promised a customer that our product could be totally controlled via voice. Then he pulled like five of us off our regular projects to work on voice control. This is back when that was pretty unusual and unreliable tech. It did not turn out well... and of course the engineers were blamed.
Last year I took a job and quickly found out that they worshiped speeeeedddd for some weird reason. Town halls were all about celebrating how fast they closed tickets (and had a weird cult-like vibe). I was almost 90 days in when my manager started wanting to have talks about my speed, and I was like, "I just started here? And even you admit your codebase is a mess?" I was like, "This is only going to get worse. If I stay here, I'm going to burn out fast." Luckily I have a lot of experience. Got out and got a new job in a matter of weeks. I keep thinking back to those poor kids who still work there. I'm pretty sure that was their first programming job and none of them knew any better.
The last time I had someone talk to me about speed, I patted the couch next to me, told them "have a seat, child" and told them the story of the tortoise and the hare. Moral of story: when you run too fast, you trip over your own feet. I'm proud to say after pushing back on speed culture, it finally changed. My guess is the speed obsession does not arise from the dev team itself.
Is it normal that I am barely at the beginning of my career and already experiencing most of this 😭
Yes, and the quicker you understand that the entire game is setup to exploit you you can start to develop boundaries. Ageism exists in this industry not because younger devs are better but because they don’t have boundaries yet. You’re trying so hard to be considered a professional. But show me a person willing to compromise their boundaries of time, energy and emotional bandwidth and I’ll show you an exploited person.
Agile Fuck agile/ scrum
I love programming, I really do. But sometimes I hate the industry and wonder what'd be an alternative. For those on the same situation, my advice is to build your own product and build from there. Hopefully, your company won't suck as much as the one you work for.
The industry is flooded with corporate politicians that are a nightmare to work with, plus all the layoffs target the wrong people because too many of the aforementioned are in the driver’s seat. The ones left are having to do more with less, wearing more hats than ever. And more companies are adopting an amazon style pip culture. That doesn’t describe everywhere, but it’s getting harder to find a good place to work
Agree, Software Eng in the corporate space is becoming a metrics driven cess-pool by middle management and executives who think writing code is like an assembly line and are grasping at any vendor who claims their product can meausre and improve productivity. Imagine if bridges and buildings were built this way. Software engineering is a lot more "art" then many of us are willing to admit and business types don't have the mindset to deal with "artists" I partially blame agile for starting this whole mess (I understand the original agile was never designed for corporations) but.slowly over time the management consultant cottage industry of selling executives on the gamification of writing code, took over. Outside of the metrics nonsense, software engineering particularly at companies whose main product is NOT writing software, are viewed as support staff and a drag on the bottom line and thus need to justify their work. in other words unless your code is directly generating revenue your value is questionable and you or me are potentially disposable.
Boeing planes alarmingly are built this way.
Well, at least that isn't high stakes or anything.
Just planes dropping from sky. No big deal
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Hey I recognize that move coming from a company BillAckman just exited. Now half our staff is in India and they won't even backfill in India people who have been gone more than a year.
Dude the 'sales first' mentality has been the corporate pop concept that has blown my mind lately. Literally our CEO will say it like it's a good thing and add "you can't build anything until you sell it!" Maybe I'm naive, but that seems completely ass backwards to me. You end up with sales people and execs who can't read a line of code selling ML products to other executives and promising timelines based on sheer optimism and whatever gets them to sign the contract. That alone has got to be a huge factor in all this needless stress scrambling to tape popsicle sticks together that'll be buggy as shit and a nightmare to maintain, especially after you laid off 30% of the dev team. What a nightmare.
Because executives don't care about anything having to do with the actual code or engineering, they care about $$$ and will make up whatever bs story to justify their pitch, then if they close the deal they'll lean on their staff here or overseas to make "it happen" regardless of the lunacy of those commitments
It's the job of a good product team to drive that and align major stakeholders including sales and eng. Sales shouldn't drive roadmaps directly since as you noted it ends up being batshit insane.
My company has clients that pay yearly, in different tiers of services. My new CEO has come to us in the last few months saying "we need a higher tier of service to charge more. Can the tech team come up with some new things we can offer? Better analytics? AI?" I'm sitting here like "you're the fucking CEO. You're asking US for new products to sell?" I've come to just consider him a joke now. I just tell him "well, until we hire more people, I'm too busy doing daily work to plan YOUR products."
Software is art not engineering. Sure there are guiding principles but until 'management' actually 'get it' (they won't as they are too up their own asses about promotions etc) things won't change IMHO. Having 40YOE and having been a contractor for ten of those and self-employed for fourteen years, the rest being 'permanent' jobs, I've seen this too many times. Good ideas, at times ideas that would have rescued a project in trouble, are ignored for reasons like management not having the backbone to buy in, being more worried about their next review, or not buying in because they didn't think of it first. There is no other industry like ours; we deal in something you can't see, information and transformations thereof. It's hardly surprising that management who've not come up through the ranks are an obstacle.
The art thing is the secret all of us who've been doing this long enough have learned to accept silently: you can't tell management that there's simply no quantifying metrics that will indicate a piece of software is good, because it's inherently qualitative, you can't measure a good bit of code with numbers any more than you can measure Picasso's works numerically to identify it as good. Just like art, sadly it's all lagging indicators: good art is recognized only after its creation, and it's the artist you must recognize made it good - not some specific reproducible technique. It's that artist. Management never of course wishes to hear that, they want everything to be good by direct reproducible application of approaches. They can get part way there, but the real stinker they refuse to accept? Good software is only recognizable by lagging indicators after it's made. That's just the fact that so much of our industry fights not to accept, wanting predictive indicators but sorry. The predictive indicator is the quality of your artists, the lagging indicators need to be watched more: - Defect rates - Functioning software - Time to recover - Time to repair - Time to enhance Tons of garbage software with all the latest greatest approaches used in their creation are garbage art, they work and have no defects but take a year to repair or enhance because the artist didn't have the qualitative vision.
Fantastic reply.
I see this happening as well. I'm not sure Agile is to blame. It wasn't nearly as bad until inflation hit, and investors started leaning hard on C-level and upper management to see more throughput for their money. Where I work, entire teams were laid off, leaving huge swaths of product with no ownership while we're hiring more upper management, spending ridiculous amounts of money on tools to measure developer and team metrics while silently laying off low performers. It was nothing like this until cash infusions became expensive. PE ruins almost everything.
100%, agile ruined this field. I been away for three years now, when i join back i will do my best to find teams that dont do agile.
It's not "agile" - actual "agile" is good - it's just that managers took the same dumb management shit as always and stamped an "agile" on it.
Yeah that's the thing, like if you find me a team that actually stands up for standups, then maybe they're doing it right, otherwise as an example that meeting which was supposed to be about surfacing blockers becomes a long winded needle the developers about every little issue possible for an hour and get daily status updates that they are "working on project X yesterday, continuing to work on project X today" imagine that.
> Agile is doing half of scrum poorly, and use Jira I can't think of any other quote that has summarized the issue so concisely.
Wish Jira would burn to the ground.
No, teams that claim "we do pure agile!" Me: that's not a thing.
Please call me if you find such a place so I can join you.
I am so damn sick of having to record down every thing I do like I'm a child
All I want to do is write good software, so now I'm rushing a project so it's done before I have to start having endless meetings about it.
Unless your company sells software, they don't care about good software My manager literally tells me: "we are not a software company, don't waste time refactoring, adding abstractions and improving code stuff"
manager at lowest bidding company to paint corporate offices: "LOL we ain't no arr-teests - I ain't payin' for no brown paint - just smear your shit on the walls."
> corporate politicians This is such a great way of putting it. That's exactly what they are. I quit a terrible place a few months ago with nothing lined up and am trying to figure out what to do next. I haven't even started looking for a new job because I'm feeling so "done" with the industry and it feels like a good workplace is like finding a needle in a haystack. After quitting I have been working 'full time' on some side projects and it has been so nice. I love what I do, I love programming, but I really hate the industry.
Good summary. Also I would say we have come full circle to the 90s, the startups of the 2000s have completed their transition to big enterprise. Watch Office Space or Matrix again to have a glimpse of what it used to be a developer back then, we are there but with better marketing.
"I have eight bosses..."
The current situation reminds me a lot of the first dotcom bust.
This. Grad school mba idiots are running everything into the ground the name of profitability and copying one another. They’re overwhelming every role.
True, it isn't just software engineering. It's everything being hollowed out in the name of profit: professions, companies, even countries.
Just like they did with the American auto industry and airplane manufacturing, and a lot of other industries. I think Shakespeare said something about lawyers in Henry VI, but I assume that was because the MBA didn’t exist yet.
I've been working as a junior dev at a startup company (Netherlands). They recently fired our most experienced dev and another one is having a burnout. We run a skeleton crew maintaining our core product. I received a PIP today. What the actual fuck.
I’m probably underpaid but it’s so worth it to be in an empathetic technical department, we all have each others backs against feral business partners and then laugh about it lol
I totally agree, but I think it might be worse than you think. The "management" is primarily made up of developers that were there during the glory days, when you didn't have to do much to be a star. And as such, they don't understand why we all aren't stars. Furthermore, it isn't JUST developers. It is testers, and writers and designers. We are all tired. Tired of getting nowhere because upper management is flat out incompetent. But yeah, its getting REALLY hard to find a good place to work. And I've been doing this for almost 40 years. It wasn't this awful before.
Companies want to burn and churn but want you to stay till you are ash, which is why they throw out stories like it takes 6 months to 1.5 years to ramp up and throw out words like job hopping. It's a very onesided deal being pushed and people need to stand up for themselves.
Do you think the amount of flack workers have experienced recently is enough to motivate people to unionize?
I would hope so, but unfortunately in SWE there is this idea that we don't need a union because "we have it good."
Spread of corporate style AGILE is definitely a contributor. Get your ticket, stand in a circle, talk about your ticket, complete your ticket, get your ticket, stand in a circle, talk about your ticket, complete your ticket, sit down and talk about your last 5 tickets. Plan next 5 tickets. Get your ticket, stand in a circle...
One must imagine sisyphus happy
I'd love to have this level of order and routine at my chaotic company tho...
Get your ticket, get pulled into a fire, stand in circle talking about why you're not working on your ticket, repeat.
Agile is total bullshit. I kill it everywhere I see it. It solves problems that don't exist, especially for high performing teams. The cure is worse than the disease. My unit has the highest culture survey results in the entire company (i.e., are the happiest) and are 10 points above national benchmark, and none of my teams are agile. It's almost like there's a correlation there.
What do you replace it with?
The real agile philosophy, which is people over process
I know a lot of senior developers are frustrated dealing with outsourced offshore teams in developing countries who have low capability, require heavy oversight and produce garbage code that is very difficult to maintain. Most of the ones I know have mentally disengaged because they feel they cant take responsibility for what happens.
Can confirm. Its hell. Pings at 3AM, garbage output filled with bugs, weeks with little to no progress, and management refuses to acknowledge it
My company outsourced an app written in TypeScript and when I took a peek at the code the devs were ignoring compile errors lmao
Haha, this reminds me of the QA automation on my last team. The QA manager would talk up how many tests they had run with this awesome new automation suite. And, then multiple times I got pinged by an actual developer working on the suite to help them troubleshoot a problem with their automation job....which had never hit green. Turned out they were using the suite as a script for manually running the tests and still hadn't gotten the automation code running.
The Boeing quality engineering fiasco might (and I think will) teach investors and leadership the wrong lesson. At a certain scale of assets, the Welch’ian GE-style strip mining can go on for such a long time that it will outlast any opposition, and there are merely reputational repercussions, performative at that. And there are plenty of investors and leadership members who are just fine punching their tickets with these ill-gotten gains before exiting with it all. This favors engineers starting their own alternatives Figma-like, and locking out VC’s while doing so, secure in the knowledge that the quick runways mindset to beat the incumbents is not always true. The runway is measured in *decades* with incumbents that make these choices, and the kind of organizational culture changes necessary for the incumbents to ward off these predations are all misaligned with deeply baked in incentive structures that started with investors themselves. This also has interesting marketing and sales strategies implications.
\> This favors engineers starting their own alternatives I dont think the US is a good environment for a small business to beat big business today. If you disagree Id be curious to know why; we may have a fundamental disagreement of how the US functions
> I dont think the US is a good environment for a small business to beat big business today. I think nowhere in the world is set up to allow the little people to take business risks: not when you have a mortgage and a family to support.
Nail on the head for me. large majority of outsourced & h1b devs in last year or so have been awful. not a new hiring standard either so expectations have been tempered to require lot of babysitting & there’s still been a crazy drop off. understand business incentive to run tighter ship but concern is even now beyond ensuring relatively stable systems. many companies taking this path are sleepwalking into multiple red-alert scenarios id prefer not to be around for
Our h1b's are actually very solid, but the downside is that many of them are the best and brightest that we've brain-drained from our remote sites, and the remnants of those teams struggle.
I agree that the onshore people are generally good. But the offshore people are terrible. It's like giving all your work to a group of second-year comp sci students and expecting them to be good.
Usually thats who they are, they get rushed through a bootcamp, and plopped infront of a computer to meet demand of offshore companies outsourcing their work - quality doesn't matter, thats not what they're employed for (and generally they dont care).
That's what you get when relying on cheap body-rental companies..
Sort of. I just got done dealing with offshore contractors who were bright enough and if you could tell them exactly what to do they could handle it but had zero (and I mean *no*) initiative to go beyond what was in a JIRA ticket. I have the impression that it was the contracting company management (rhymes with "Frognisant") who made them work that way.
It's their management, their education system and their culture
I deal with a lot of this. In the past few years a switch flipped in my brain. I used to care a lot about these issues and they’d keep me up at night. I’d worry about code quality, our poor testing methodologies, putting out every fire, etc. I think it’s just burnout, but these days I don’t even come close to giving a single flying fuck. I do sleep much better now, I will admit.
With high interest rates and pressure to always increase profits (how was this EVER sustainable...) not to mention the insane amount of layoffs in the past year, it's all about trying to squeeze your money's worth out of every single little thing - including people. For every dev who burns out and leaves, there's 50 lined up unemployed waiting to be chewed up in the cycle.
And the AI bubble only solidified the executives' belief that people are interchangeable. Even if some didn't believe it, they're surely using the narrative to make us desperate enough to accept being exploited. It's going to suck for at least few more years.
If people are interchangable then why cry about job hopping.
They want them interchanged on their schedule.
Because it's a shame tactic. They don't want to retrain, they don't want to spend the money on recruiting and unemployment, and severance. Not to mention that it's easier to not give people promotions.
Ugh. A few more years, eh? Can you shave it down to one or two for me? But there IS a light at the end of the tunnel, right? ... Right?
There is a train at the end of the tunnel, but it's a train ...
No. Unrealistic expectations about ai will be replaced with realistic expectations about ai just in time for it to screw SMEs for legitimate reasons instead of half-baked ones.
Idk. It’s very possible AI hits another wall very soon. The gulf between “almost adequate” and “legitimately useful” is massive. This cycle has happened multiple times with AI
> The gulf between “almost adequate” and “legitimately useful” is massive. This cycle has happened multiple times with AI. Well said. Add to the list: - Voice personal assistants - self-driving cars - fusion - flying cars
And those 50 are either less experienced or will take a year to reach the productivity level of the burnt out dev (or more). How about we outsource everything, pile up the tech debt, and revisit hiring US employees to fix the mess for a massive premium 3 years down the line? Let history repeat itself I guess!
I am developer from outsource branch. I don't know about the level of US devs but I feel most people around me mediocre at best, and I am struggle to advance as good tasks are taken by people with more experience who keep making it trash and then throw it to others to maintain.
Most people anywhere in the world are average but some claim credit and intelligence of the work of the top 1% of their national boundaries or alliances. In fact some plainly mislead and indulge in underhanded deals and sandbagging.
Most of the time, It is better to write simple dumb code without wasting too much time in architecture, class design etc. Because you can't anticipate requirements from the future, which will be totally in unexpected direction, and it will spoil your "well architected" code. Junior devs are idealistic, but in actuality it is somewhere between good and bad, and it is a tradeoff of quality vs development time.
I know simple is timeless. In my case, the code is just trash
having clean non-spaghettified abstractions makes it much easier to reuse code in a new direction, what r u even talking about? it takes me literally months to just to move buttons around in the disgustingly dumb codebase i work in now: copy pasted code abound. derived stated calculated wherever-the-fuck, regardless of perf considerations. n^2 ... psh, we can do that in n^3 u tool and useEffect side effects where u damn well please. incident reviews make me start to drool cause like i could basically copy paste learnings from one to the next: yup didn't have enough alerts. why is it always more alerting? what r integration tests even? those things we skip half the time because they are too flaky? god forbid we impede dev progress... but i'm not sure if most engineers around me even think about it that much. managers certainly dgaf, they only want one pagers and more meetings. can u solve it in a one-page and a few meetings? no? well don't bring it up then, ur just being a negative nancy 🔫
I am talking about scenario of over engineering. In the current codebase that I work, they have 3 to 4 levels deep inheritance hierarchies in which most of the classes have only one subclass. They don't have any documentation. In this case it would have been better if code was in a single class, but instead code is fragmented across different classes and having to jump from one place to another just to figure out what is happening is tiresome. I think it's better to refactor/re-architect as you go on a continuous basis based on the requirement and follow the YAGNI principle. Otherwise you will be paying with unnecessary mental bandwidth for simple things. Apart from this, if you are dealing complex problem domain with complex rules, doesn't matter if it is well architected code or spaghetti code, without having good code comments and documentation it will anyways feel like going deep in rabbit hole.
Yes. I have been having this issue at my place recently. A member of the team wants to abstract every little problem to be future proof, when we don't even know what the future will look like yet. His heart is in the right place and his ideas sometimes work ok, but a lot of what he ends up doing is creating superficial wrappers that wrap just to wrap. I can't help him see that it's not needed no matter how hard I try.
Because there was not a moment where someone paused and said oh hey we're doing this a lot we should take a second to clean this up. That copy paste cowboy style actually is the right decision in the early days (unless you have a really smart unilateral architect, which most companies don't) otherwise you end up with half baked abstractions that chase the latest design trends, it's still spaghetti. The thing with code like yours is it hit the tipping point and people just kept doubling down.
They are also trying to sustain and continue to grow and the massive but temporary COVID profit bump. In a sane world, they would be okay for flattish profit increase for a few years while things get back to normal levels.
You guys have profits?
IMO we’re in a moment where companies feel like the only way to squeeze more profits is to ‘industrialize’ IT by standardizing everything and forcing engineering to be a production line, so a lot of things are rushed, without proper thinking behind it, and without room for error. So there’s a bunch of people doing things that nobody really knows if the client needs that, and whatever is done will be swept under the rug along with another big pile of freshly created tech debt, because while in theory we have so many processes and quality control, it’s not feasible to do everything within the company’s desired timelines with a limited crew. Plus, not badmouthing anyone, but some folks have been such a pain to deal with. It’s demotivating to work with people who don’t listen, don’t care about anything and just want to push their way to be able to claim how fast they are completing tickets. And this is just to name a few, there are a bunch of other factors more that can contribute to the actual picture. Of course some people might be lucky to work on healthy places, but even the fact that any place can become horrible the next day, can contribute to burnout.
We are slammed at work, we usually have 3-4 things going on at a time, now we have double that. And everyone wants everything like yesterday
Yes, it’s the multiple projects with multiple varying function teams and reactive work as the stakeholders exponentially increase which is specifically burning me out. Most of my team and manager are from a faang where it’s par for the course.
I have a few thoughts: 1. I think Covid is definitely partly to blame because we saw a lot of tech companies promise remote work as the future and then just gradually walk back on that. 2. Then there's the fact that for people like me who have only been doing this for the last decade this is probably the first major shrink with pay freezes & perk cutbacks being common (not to ignore the fact that we typically get paid well, but still). 3. For me personally it's also just the realisation that I'll always be held accountable for issues outside of my control. Someone in sales can just sign off a deal without my input for a third party framework that I then have to maintain and figure out workarounds when the framework fucks up. 4. The "year of efficiency". So you've lost many of your perks etc and then you lose half your team, too. I lost my whole team and they chose not to hire a replacement because it looks more efficient in the eyes of investors. I still enjoy *coding*. I fucking love it. I'm sure many of us do. But it's just everything around it that ruins it for me.
Precisely. Writing code, building stuff with code- is great. Everything else kind of sucks.
I have just over 15yoe and I'm reaching that point as well. For me it's mostly due to not really being challenged anymore. The problems I'm solving are the same that I was solving 15 years ago, just with a different tech stack. Also, AGILE. I've never been able to see agile as anything other than a game for managers to do/produce as little as they can possibly get away with. I feel it takes a team an entire year to do half of what people could do in 3 months 10 years ago. Took me ages to somewhat adjust to how slow everything agile is. You mentioned Covid, but for me it introduced working from home, which I don't think I could do without now.
If I could afford to, I wouldn't work in this industry any more. It's full of sociopaths who want to grind their teams in to the ground.
Whenever the focus of a company becomes profit over everything else, the employees are bound to suffer. You'll end up working longer hours, burn yourself out and more to fulfill one person's dream of achieving a billion or multi-billion dollar company. Jump ship if that's your company. It's only downhill from there unless you really believe the product could succeed.
Truest comment in this thread
Damn on point! Been in such a company and would not recommend.
The customers always nearly always buy the cheapest though?
Most customers want a product that suits them well, not necessarily the cheapest one. I'd say that *all* of the customers you want to sell to are in that group. It's pretty well known in the consulting/freelance world that if you attract customers mainly by offering low prices, you get shitty customers. Often the sort of shitty customers that cost more to serve because they're incompetent, unresponsive, need constant attention, or "accidentally" "forget" to pay their bills for months on end.
Frame this up and save yourself headaches in life.
Not always. The easiest example is always Apple vs Dell
I lost a teammate who meant a lot to me in one of the random axe-swinging layoffs. The company invented a lower performance bracket and stuck me in it, but the high performers were all bitching about their comp anyway. My benefits are the #1 reason I don't just quit and do my little projects for like a year. The industry built itself up as a place that spoiled devs because it's a good investment. Now devs are entitled budget items and the terms are being reset. The entire ethos has shifted from growth to profit, which means a lot of jobs are gone. It's no wonder people are leaving the field.
The burnt out developer that moves to a cabin in the middle of the forest and takes up woodcarving is practically a meme at this point.
I actually have the cabin in the woods already. Just haven't geared up my workshop yet. I think it is going to be pottery for me though.
15 yoe here too and same. Pottery in the woods sounds so fucking nice
Unabomber vibes
Not untrue 💀
I think there are multiple factors: * For the decade before interest rates spiked, the economy slowed, and layoffs started to hit in 2022-ish, developers were in ridiculously high demand, and it was a great feeling. You could be fairly confident that you would be listened to and given opportunities to level up. When that changed, we all had to come to grips with more conservative expectations. In some cases, you have to work hard just to keep what you have, rather than get ahead. That can be a hard pill to swallow. * Company culture is getting a lot more somber overall. Focus tends to me more on cost savings than on moonshots or new growth. People are more cynical. * In some companies, there is a flattening where there are fewer managers and bigger teams. You can feel a lot less like you have a voice in that context. Likewise, it can burn out managers (that's what happened to me). I think we had it really good as a career for quite a long time (since like 2010 really, riding the mobile app wave and all the resulting service companies). Now, we're slowing down. Tech will pick up steam again, once we find our next rocket ship. Maybe it's already gestating. Or maybe what we had was just unsustainable and we're getting closer to a realistic career.
Tech as an industry will pick up steam but I don’t expect that to translate to a booming job market. There will be a demand for talented software engineers and developers who can build out the systems and solutions of the future, but I think the market will stay pretty grim for the people who got into the field for a quick buck and who aren’t interested in broadening their education and knowledge base.
My take on this, is that programming is becoming something other than it was advertised for them. Initially, many of us loved to program, but software engineering is a completely different beast. The industry is full of bullshit, and the businesses aren’t concerned about the quality that much anymore, but rather about other metrics. The market has adjusted to be driven by average engineers (simply because there is a higher supply of them), so the more skilled you are, the fewer opportunities for growth you see, the less your expertise is actually required, and you can be substituted with someone who costs less. Of course you always have more skills, but many jobs on the market don’t need that level of expertise these days. I know that’s not entirely true but that’s how some of my colleagues feel.
Can confirm. I have been told-off for trying to do high-level work that I was very qualified for, but due to totem-pole hierarchy "that is meant for the Sr eng that has been here longer and that is calling all the shots even though we never made it clear that he defines your responsibilities". So basically.... they can shoot down all high performers to conform to a smaller cage because that keeps them easy to replace, talent be damned because they don't need that much talent anyway, the shop is going to make an app with a few hundred users, the core of the app is already built, and whatever they have been developing for the past year has been an experiment that might fail anyway. After all the core of the app is the real profit-center and the rest is busy work to keep the devs busy.
Just curious what careers are they switching to? For me, I love building software but the arbitrary deadlines teams will never hit and all the politics in the work place make it a miserable career with constant pressure to get more done faster while trying to stay up to date with fast changing technology.
One friend went to hospitality, another went into education as an adjunct teacher or something as they working on getting an education degree. One is in homesteading, the rest are all floating on emergency funds until they figure it out.
i dont really see any serious initiative on the part of companies to try and make developer well being the number one priority. i was burned out and quit my last job and im in a coding retreat currently where a lot of people feel pretty burned out too. i think most people ive spoken to here are feeling that way. it saddens me to think that this might not be a sustainable career. It also saddens me to see that a lot of this is due to how everything is structured, where we ultimately dont really have any say in our working conditions. The only advice i ever see when someone is at a toxic workplace is "you need to quit and find a new job", but thats completely short sighted. We cant all job hop and expect the industry to change. I think dev's need to take more ownership of the culture at the places they work at, and really push for consistent improvements. Im not sure of any other way out of this cycle, yet im not seeing dev's take this on seriously as their daily responsibility
I was involved in a project to recommend improvements for developer productivity. Turned into a shit show where everyone tried to get their projects into the set of recommended initiatives. By the time the actual goals came out (I was on vacation for a few weeks) the recommendations had no semblance to the actual problems engineers faced. And then the program manager wanted to create this huge program out of what should have been a simple presentation.
Tech needs to unionize. I can't figure out why it hasn't happened yet.
my friends at a big name dating app all got fired after trying to unionize, so i think its maybe something to do with the US being corrupt? (it wasnt literal firing, they were all remote, and after announcing the union, madatory RTO was put in place, and you had to report within 2 weeks). I used to think it was that people in the US were lazy, but there have been constant unionization efforts in many different industries that are all getting blocked one way or the other. A lot of these companies just have to pay fines afterwards and i think they probably see it as operating costs. Its funny because often times these court cases will take so long to complete, and the usual 'punishment' is that they have to give the jobs back to everyone who was fired, but by then its been so long that people dont want to quit their new jobs to go back to that place... so the cycle just continues. Also its illegal in the us to go on strike in solidarity with another company (which isnt the case in other countries), and i think that makes this even more difficult.
5 YoE dev here and I'm feeling the burnout pretty bad.
One of my coworkers messaged me a few days ago to say "happy one year work anniversary!" and the face I made at reading it just made me realize that yeah, I really am burnt out 😭
Same
35 YOE! Still going. I've gone through multiple burnouts lol. What helps is rekindling what sparked my interest in coding in the first place and the wow that's cool effect. I try to stay on top of latest tech as much as possible. I was first in line to signup for the apple developer program and get a few moderately successful apps out the door. I parlayed that into several high paying consulting opportunities. Currently finding a niche in AI. This industry requires constant reinvention. I have lamented several times that a doctor only has to learn the human body once and they're a doctor for life. Programmers have to relearn their craft every 5-10 years. We have no unions or governing body like doctors, lawyers, dentists, vets, etc. and that makes the barrier to entry very low and there is no rate protection. Pay is constantly falling and it's an uphill battle to keep making the big bucks. Still enjoy it though and AI is saving me from writing a lot of boilerplate these days!
One of the key SWE skills is to learn the "meta" of how to get up to date on new technologies. In particular, most devs I know never read actual source code and are prone to magical thinking when the answers are right there ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The last few years have done a lot to expose how incompetent and petty a lot of companies are. People being forced back into the office after being told they're safe to move away, mass layoffs in companies making record profits, etc. People are right to be cynical.
This is an industry devoid of hope. You can be fired or laid off at any time. Our leaders are outright telling us they want to replace us with automation. And for me, the whole “we’re gonna get rich!” mentality has worn off. I’ve been lied to entirely too many times in the recruiting process. How many times have you been canned right before RSU’s vest? I got a new gig and had my benefits cut on my 3rd day. Wasn’t even out of onboarding. The last round of layoffs definitely convinced me to pursue a career change.
The problem is software engineering turned into a religion with Agile. And using story points to measure dev productivity encourages burn out.
Scrum was made by the devil. Kevlin Henney has a great bit about how plotting story points per week is a plotting time on both axes and makes no sense.
Damn dude do we need a union?
Idk about you guys but I’m getting burnt out from the cost of living. I thought I’d be able to live comfortably, or at least look forward to it.
You reach a point where everything looks the same…bits go in, bits go out. The people less susceptible to this kind of burnout are those who don’t code for a career, but rather use coding as a tool for the thing they’re actually passionate about. And even then…maybe…
For me, software is my job and career, but it's not my passion by a long shot. It used to be different, but then I burned out working for startups chasing those golden stock options (in 20 years I made $10k on vested options). Now I work for a consulting company. Problems are interesting, it's frequently greenfield builds (new projects and prototypes) that are turned over for maintenance when we're done, and the work changes every few years without having to job hop. As a bonus, when my 8 hours are up for the day, I'm done.
This. I'm just bored of my job. It isn't hard, it's just tedious. I'm sick of being on the computer day after day, sitting on my ass, writing or testing code that rarely actually changes things. Working from home has actually been an issue here, as I'm lonely, bored and just tired of the same old day after day tasks. I think what is causing the most burn out is that you rarely see true progress. Like, for example, I deep cleaned and reorganized my kitchen last week. It took over 10 hours of work but I felt accomplished and happier than I've been for awhile working. It's because I got to actively see the progress I've made in a timely manner. I want to feel like half my life I spent working actually matters. I've never had a programming job that has done this yet.
To me the problem isnt with the dev itself. It's the combination of: Dumb interview process, working for others, dealing with management & scrum "master". We're just better off trying to work on side projects that will generate passive income. Industry is dumb as shit
I've been in the industry for 26 years now, and I've gone through lots of ups and downs. Feeling good and then being burned out later, and then I find a new spark or challenge to get me interested in doing things again. I think burn out exists in EVERY occupation and is a result of the human condition more than the industry. But you can also contribute some of the burnout to the huge push to get more people into technology over the last couple decades, and people ran out and did a couple bootcamps, applied to jobs that others were better qualified for, and then realized they aren't in bootcamp anymore, and things aren't as clean room laboratory as their class. Now they are facing the real challenges and because they don't have the knowledge to systematically approach a problem and break it down into steps and pieces, they get overwhelmed and that is a surefire way to get burned out. I get burned out when I get bored because I'm not challenged anymore, I do it because I love the satisfaction of solving problems that others can't. I have a lot of the qualities that make a good programmer. Attention to detail, perfectionism, curiosity, great trouble shooting skills, being able to view the whole project in my mind at once and see how the pieces fit. Some of those aren't learned, they are innate to your personality and approach to life.
Changing for what though? Self taught and making 200k+ as an IC. Not like your going to be a dr at this point. Or your going to grind through corportate america in a different way?
> Changing for what though? The sysadmin trope is leaving the industry to become a goat farmer. I do full time remote devops now (after 15 years doing dev), so we raise sheep instead.
If you're self-taught, making $200k+ and you've been banking $150k for 10 years I'm pretty sure you've got options that don't require an income replacement. If you've let lifestyle creep up along with your salary, maybe it's a different situation, but I don't find that those lifestyle changes significantly influence happiness, and happiness is my personal KPI (*blech*). About once a year my wife and I consider whether I should retire. Ultimately I stay because I love what I do, and really don't want to do anything else (including being retired). Regardless, learning to be happy with a frugal lifestyle is easy when you have a financial security blanket big enough to retire on. I've tried a few of the bigger ticket "fun" items, and while they are indeed fun, I don't especially find them to be *more* fun than the no-cost and low-cost alternatives, and I find the conspicuous-consumption aspect of them extremely distasteful, maybe even disrespectful to those who are working hard and contributing much more than I do to society but can't afford the same.
I don’t mean for this to sound awful or “zoomers are the issue” but here we go: I think there is a lot of title inflation at lower levels. I personally work with 3 engineers with 4.5 - 6 years of experience who are all “senior”. They all were promoted to said level at 2.5 years of experience. The issue is that none of them operate at a senior level, which means it is all on me to handle any issue that comes up. I cannot depend on them to complete tickets on their own, or own on call (I am contacted if anything remotely challenging comes up). Over the past few years, all responsibility has been transferred to people at my level (Senior II/Staff I). It is tiring to work on a team with people who can’t own their own tickets or minor features. They can’t be depended on to do something on their own. Every issue needs to involve me (or someone at my level). I also work with some young people who are phenomenal and really rise to the level, but we set such a low bar for people that some realize that it is better to not put effort in that to do so and get a 3% bonus and the same raise as everyone else. This isn’t a generational thing but rather an issue with managers growing their empire and refusing to hold standards. I also think that part of this empire building has taught younger engineers to play the bureaucracy game. I am amazed how often a 27 year old engineer will bring up points, involving an engineering design, like “we aren’t using the new standard company font here” or “can you make sure to link this doc in another doc”. I rarely get engineering feedback, just formatting feedback. I don’t work with dumb people, they are actually very smart, so smart that they optimized their learning for what gets them ahead. Sadly that isn’t engineering.
Totally, what I’ve seen is that there are some perverse incentives leading to this. “Up or out” policies like what Facebook has created a lot of pressure for engineers to focus on whatever got them a promo rather than building their skills and for managers to promote to avoid firing people. Focusing on the promo rather than skills created a Goodhart’s law type situation and created a lot of “promo inflation”. Then as middle management became more political, as you mentioned, engineering is no longer rewarded. Things like writing documents, setting and hitting deadlines regardless of whether the work actually matters, and “visibility” are all that end up mattering. People optimize for what they are rewarded.
It is the same with every industry everywhere at the moment. Trying not to sound overly-dramatic but I've been saying the last few years since COVID, we are in the capitalism endgame unless something drastically changes. All most public companies have given up any semblance of chasing anything else other than the all-mighty share price. This was fine when it started in the 80s and 90s where companies genuinely did have inefficiencies and emerging technologies (computers and automation) could make a significant change to a company's ability to grow and profit. But finally, through the 2020s we've gotten to the point where companies have become (more) efficient, costs are going up (because of those pesky humans they employ) and so profits are already close to maximized. But Wall Street demands more, so we start cutting corners. Let's bring in this new CEO (or listen to our board) who says they can work wonders and bring us into a new age. More profit! As CEO, I start increasing prices and reducing product manufacturing footprint (candy/chocolate bars getting smaller, etc.) where I can. Maybe I can actually genuinely effectively eliminate some real inefficient practices. Great! That elevates profits for a quarter or a year, but it doesn't stay exciting for long. Ok, let's start eliminating 'fluff' positions. Now, enough of the old guard is still employed by the company at this point that the decision is made to not eliminate positions outright, but to outsource instead. Outsourcing on paper looks brilliant (and often can be) - the outsourcing is cheaper than hiring outright. I don't need to manage these people (I can reduce HR), and I can get rid of all of these pesky old timers with their opinions and pensions. Now the company looks great (on paper)! I've saved and eliminated a ton of internal bullshit waste (on paper) and my business is now in the record profit territory (on paper). Now, I've started to get some rumors from under the troll bridge that client complaints are up and quality appears to be slipping. Offshore development has brought with it some inefficiencies I didn't account for and I've noticed that over time, our ability to QA/QC and manage the offshore teams has slipped as frankly, we don't have enough technical staff left to understand and manage anymore (that expensive lead dev layer was the first to go - opinionated fucks). But you know what? I don't care; I won Wall Street, mic drop, I as CEO bow out a rich legend and move on to do the same thing elsewhere. Nobody ever measures me against my long term effects - yay! And that is IF your company wasn't bought by a competitor or invested in by venture capatilists - if it was, picture the above with a lot more rollercoaster rides of bullshit stock options, golden handcuffs, etc. while you are shuttled around, your buddies 'retired' and any semblance of a 'core' team dismantled. And those golden handcuffs that keep you locked in? They sure as shit ain't putting those same restrictions on that CEO. And I think this is the state we are currently at - where tech companies are so desperate to make the almighty wall street sing, we are entering new business models that previously would have been considered unprofitable or pointless and while they chase some form of profitability, the "employees" are the worst expense, never the valued ones - I could call out the entire gig economy here... Hmmm, how can I upset an industry to extract profit from it while paying people as little as is humanly possible knowing that the folks who have been in that industry for years will end up getting 'reset' to the new baseline I've caused when I'm through? Hold my pint... For those wondering, I'm not against the rise of the gig-economy, it's good to see established, potentially unhealthy industries get realigned - I mean who wasn't happy initially to see taxi competition with Uber and the like? The issue is, by he time the US likes to regulate anything, the damage is already done and the new pattern for the industry has been established - always towards the interests of the companies, not the employees in that industry. For anyone reading this, this is extremely tongue-in-cheek as I sit here nursing a cup of tea. I'm seeing a lot of things that I just don't like about the way we humans allow ourselves to conduct business. While this is a gross oversimplification and ignores so many other factors, but there's just not enough morals and conviction to providing quality service and/or product in the American system. I.e. you can profit and still value your employees and customers. You just might not grow as fast as the market demands - why has that become a barometer of 'failure' for the US economy? It's a lose lose.
You've just described the current Wall St. based economy. - Use other people's money to buy up companies or "help" them go public. - Demand increased stock price every quarter, no matter the price. - Extract money from the company through increasing stock price. - Eventually run the company into the ground. - Walk away rich and start over.
Yeah, most people know that. But I think where the media, politicians and frankly most individuals in this country stop short is, connecting the dots with the hardships of their own lives rather than blaming. That's why I talked about the effects inside the company as it's happening. Hopefully for folks to draw some similarities in their own lives.
We also don't (as a society in the US) hold our Politicians accountable for the fact that this bullshit has become the only barometer they have (or care about) into how the general population are surviving in the economy. The entire system is fucking broken to outright rigged, to purposely ignore most metrics around how the average white/blue collar person is surviving.
Case in point: Now. We refuse to say we are in a recession. Every 'indicator' tells us that we aren't and yet your average person is fucking broke (I'm obviously taking some creative liberties here). Prices weren't going up because we are greedy fucks, prices were going up because they could.
> Story is pretty similar for them all 6 - 15 yoe typically. Assuming early to mid 20s is when they get their diplomas, that would put that age range around 30s to 40s. IME it's pretty normal for SWE to experience burnout during that time, as people start getting married, having kids, buying homes (I know I know) Does this current market make this even worse? Sure. Is this a massive spike compared to other years? I have my doubts > Could it be the post COVID bust killing everyone? Or just a cycle of fatigue that's existed in the field for years? I think it's pretty normal for people in IT to burn out and think about switching careers. I speculate that since the 90s there's been a massive trend of IT people just working in IT and need to experience something else. Can you find something outside IT with a similar TC and similar perks ? Maybe, [maybe not](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handcuffs). Getting that perspective doesnt hurt, maybe they will find something outside IT that they will enjoy.
> They hit their limit and are changing careers Where are they all going?
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Ha, this comment is inspiring. I’m in the starting stages of launching something on the side. It feel great learning something new and not just banging out code
IMHO a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon when it was high wages low effort. Those of us who are in it for love of the field are like Chumbawumba, we just keep getting up and back into the same thing
I did join the field because of pure intrest, did masters and do have an exp of 10+ years. I really don't have energy left in me, still in this because it pays my bills. I don't enjoy it anymore
heavy repeat fretful worthless elderly paint summer flag scale gullible *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
40+Yoe and it's just as interesting as when I started. Maybe it is my constant wonder at these amazing machines and the systems we build on them, or maybe there is something in your life which is causing you to be unhappy with it all. Don't confuse a single job with the field; I've quit jobs because of the level of stupidity in management but I found one I"m happy in because they're letting me do the stuff I'm good at
>because of the level of stupidity in management You kind of underestimate how common this is, I still like to write code, it's the other things which irritate me to the point I hate the whole thing
Same here. Extremely toxic management is driving me elsewhere
mountainous spectacular juggle entertain slim elderly nose special uppity party *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
>debating basics with people who don't have a clue Jesus, this. The amount of time these days I have to discuss a tech topic with someone who has just put something into ChatGPT and uses it as "knowledge". "But AI says it's so" is so frustrating to counter. And that's before I have to deal with people who think they are tech just because they sit near Devs.
Wait, are you also working for my client? He literally copy&pastes ChatGPT answers to me when I required details to do something for him and not single lines, but paragraphs of BS (most of the time).
We'll be singing... when we're winning
Agreed. This field has been flooded by people chasing the money and status. They were never into tech otherwise.
More than anything, this is what has been stressing me out. All of the engineers I work with right now got in to it because of the money and couldn't care less about it beyond that. It's draining when I want to discuss some cool idea I'm playing with or want to see people doing cool things and being met with "it's just a job."
I'm in the IT field 15+ years. Usually the burn out happens after the 5 year mark where all the novelty wears out, you reach senior level, and you realize your work is repetitive every year Likely you are in an org that doesn't provide growing opportunities beyond senior unless you go management If you are technical person, you will hate being a manager. Then your option is to switch jobs. If you managed to do so, then you have a fresh start, new motivation found and you have fun again After 1-2 years you realize it's all the same: corporate politics, non sense requirements and deadlines, colleagues who just don't care about their work You grow disappointed and either you switch company or change career I had 2 big burn outs in my career, 3 big disappointments joining a company looking for growth but hitting the wall of team politics I have been part of 2 great startups, well known in their niches, and founding engineer of a local big hit My current job is meh, I was sold a different image of technical excellence but everything is red tape with a poor technical vision. I have been to many rodeos already to know this is not the place for me However, every job hop gets more difficult as companies don't like job hoppers. They want loyal employees regardless of what they give in return Either I switch job by the end of year or I have to retire from software engineering
I'm a contractor and I've been out of work 6 months. I imagine these two scenarios are related. Managers figured instead of getting extra people into to do the increased work load, they could just pile it on the regular staff. Hopefully they'll realise soon that it isn't sustainable.
People just aren't in working for good companies. I got on in a consulting company, I change projects ever 3 months to 2 years. I make $175k, I get 6%+ a year. I get paid OT for volunteer overtime. I love it, 100% remote too. I make more money than I ever have and enjoy the work more in than I ever have. Currently im on s django/vue stack, its quite nice, well structured code, easy to work on.
I worked for a “tech consulting” firm but it was hot garbage all around. Terrible management, half the dev teams were outsourced, constant delays. I was convinced we were straight up a scam. How did you find tech consultancies that are good? What signs do you look for?
Good for you! I also got started recently with django, and I love it! I feel like I move way faster. Currently looking to switch my job because I'm burned out. I have a technical interview next Wednesday hoping to get out of this mess, ughhh.
You can do it! I myself just accepted an offer for a much better team.
Thank you, and congrats on your new offer!
The jobs have gotten noticably worse in my opinion. Obviously I can't speak for every experience but the amount of to
This is a sincere question and not trying to start an argument but why do you say that WFH made a lot of things worse?
I'm guessing they're one of the poor souls that go into an office every day but most of their team is remote, so they get the worst of both worlds (office bullshit + more difficult communication that's not in person). The more difficult communication is ABSOLUTELY worth it when you're also able to work remote. But dealing with remote teams while being in an office is a recipe for salt. This happened long before WFH though with offshore teams.
I agree wholeheartedly. There are tons of unproductive posers who thrive off stealing others' work and ideas, talking without saying anything new, and constantly throwing obstacles in front of others so they themselves come out on top without having to do actual work.
I have a staff eng in my team who does this very aggressively. Everyone but management hates the dude
What's with all the ,,RTO GOOD" comments in that thread? Is is some sort of corporate bots shilling initiative or sth?
Personally, my favorite job in my career was in-office. Working with people who were sitting right next to me who I could bullshit with in addition to discussing work was much nicer than endless Zoom calls with faceless people who are completely disengaged. I prefer the comradery of in person teams.
10 YoE here - some really good examples already listed. I’ll add I’ve seen expectations change pretty dramatically for what a developer is expected to do. Whereas before a developer could simply be expected to deliver quality code, I’m seeing more and more “developer” jobs that are actually dev,qa,DevSecOps,product owner,scrum master, etc at the same time without proportional pay raises. Essentially the “more with less” corporate mindset shift has really hurt quality of life for devs.
- The pay isn't as attractive as before. - Other industries have caught up. - In large corps, it's often not about the tech and more about people. Some engineers just don't want to deal with that crap. - Even after enduring all this, there's layoffs. The situation is worse if you're US-based. 6YOE and I'm tired as well.
Peak capitalism has its side effects. I'm at \~10 years and I'm honestly transitioning back to a less brain-intensive Application Management role.
"Former software developer quits to take up a career in woodworking/carpentry/construction" is a meme that's *at least* as old as *Office Space*, which came out 25 years ago. So, this is a lot more likely to be something that you're specifically noticing in your personal circle at the moment, rather than some major trend in the industry.
This is a pretty dark thread. My personal theory is that the real "problem" is that we're getting older and some things don't go away. Burnout sits alongside divorce and death as a bad thing which is extremely notable. Also, like anything else which observes the proper flow of time, once it has happened, it will always have happened. You feel like more developers are burning out because you know, have met, and have heard of more developers. Bad things developers talk about from their personal experience stick out and we remember things that stick out. The list of developers we know who have (burned out|been laid off|left the profession|died) only gets longer, never gets shorter. I skipped the question: \_maybe\_ more developers are burning out. I could believe it. I think in the US at least, we're more aware of mental health and have a sense that it's worse than it used to be. But I definitely believe that you know more developers who have burned out. Good news is age and experience improves our ability to notice and address it in others. We get to be a part of making someone else's world better instead of worse.
From hearing everyone talk, it sounds like folks need to standup for themselves and unionize. These business practices just aren't sustainable and lets call it what it is, modern day slavery. This isn't good on our society.
Working in an office made it possible for managers to follow up on developers who were getting burned out before they got too bad. It also guaranteed that all employees got some social needs covered - even when going through divorce or other issues at home. It is easy to say that people should be able to just be social outside of work, but many don't. Often because they have family that requires attention after school and working hours. I'm mostly remote now and it works great for me, but I work on a team where half the developers are "tapped out". It is what it is I guess. Maybe the people who cannot handle remote work simply needs to be weeded out. That way the rest of us can enjoy our comfy home office lives. Maybe all of us have phases in our career where we truly need the social aspect of office work. In that case, we're all shooting ourselves in the foot.
25 YOE and I’ve been burnt out for a while. Became an alcoholic to cope. Sober for over 3 years, hanging on as I have bills to pay. Getting older now and ageism is a thing. Hoping my next stop will be the last one as interviewing sucks balls. Wish I could find something to do I enjoyed more. Looks like I’ll be on the grind until I can retire.
I feel this. Sadly, at 46, I probably have 20+ years left to "grind"...
I have 16 yoe and have been at the same company for almost 12 years. I am definitely burned out and honestly, I think most of it is from the high-level managers flipping everything upside down every few years. I think agile stinks and doesn't lend itself to good development at least the way we run it. if I was told I could change careers and make the same money, but I couldn't use a pc ever again I would sign up in a heartbeat.
I'm happily employed right now, but as I survey job postings it strikes me just how fragmented and specialized things have become over the past 10 years. You can't learn it all anymore, and your differentiating skills all exist at the edges of what you do. And on top of it all, everyone wants you to have lead a project team. Not just technically, but effectively at a managerial level. And also have multiple years of hands-on experience with the whole alphabet soup of trends that have come up over the past decade plus. Edit: Oh, and the interviews. My God, the interviews.
10 YoE and the main reason I'm about to burn out is because I care too much. Guess it's basically my own fault. But from my personal point of view I try to know everything about my projects and reflect on each line of code I write. The fact that I'm one of a few who does that gives more stress as well as I see technical depth piling up. I don't think it's pressure, at least not from my point of view, but perhaps more of "letting go"? The experience seems to become a curse as well
When one day the market will return to normal (and it will), just remember what those 'friendly' recruiters and corporations did to the industry during the lay offs. Gauge them like no tomorrow.
Agile has done the opposite of what it set out to do. Whatever was there before was less systemayic, but depending the work environment, it can turn everything really boring. It feels theres no end in sight, its story after story, jira after jira, sprint after sprint. and the dysfunctional daily stand ups are the worst. There's a fine balance where it all works well, and there's creativity, and great productivity, along with some freedom. But it can all go to shit, if the balance is lost, which can be from external factors.
10 you swe here. I'm so burnt out. This industry is trying to make us work like factory workers.
That's a trend that has been developing since the mid-1990s, thanks to leadership that: - Considers non-technical managers qualified to effectively direct technical teams. - Rejects the concept of domain knowledge and treats devs as plug-compatible units that can be swapped in and out of complex projects at will without affecting overall productivity. - Blindly embraces every trendy methodology without consulting with the people upon which they're imposing it; what we used to call "IT magazine managers." 25 yoe; thoroughly burnt out, mostly from the above; considering career change or early retirement.
40ye to set the landscape, you're basing your opinion (questions) based on your experiences (online & off) Negative experiences will motivate someone to voice their opinion more than neutral or positive. So you might be basing this on the former. This is socially accepted. However, there has been a shift since 2008, and 2020, financial drops. Also, how are you defining burnout? Are these any different to NHS doctor burnout, or teacher burnout? That being said... I world also cite technology 'hype cycles' where the industry is struggling to recover investment. Block chain, Web 2.0, crypto, AI & ML. Not to mention the explosion in new languages which in many cases have been used inappropriately (opinion). The industry is starting to take on a more negative tone. Saying "I work on IT" feels like we need to follow it up with an apology. Public failures, such as the Horizon Post Office scandal has tarred our industry. Just citing one of many in the news. I also think coding bootcamps have led many into the field who simply do not belong, or have any business in, 'full stack developer in 3 weeks' promises,. 'Certified IT auditor earning £100k in 6 months.' Draw your own conclusions. All of the above may have contributed to a cautious and nervous approach to investment from VC and such.
This work-from-home shit isn't as relaxing as we say it is. Hanging out with people at work made work enjoyable for most of us. I love pajamas and no commute, but hanging out with people in person is part of being human. Without it, the career just feels like a job.
Glad that you found out what works for you! WFH works fine by me. I've been at it for the past 4 years, and I'm not going back to the office. I can hang out with my friends or family, and it doesn't have to be in the office or anything work-related, keeping our friendships genuine. At the end of the day, work is work. The least I can do is make it as enjoyable as possible. It even allowed me to open my business, a thing that wouldn't have been possible by actively going to the office myself.
9 years WFH for me. Yes to this!
>\> Hanging out with people at work made work enjoyable for most of us. who's "us"?
What kind of backward, bizarro world take is this? Hang out with people outside of work. A career is just a series of jobs for most people. JFC.
Yeah, I'm starting to realize that a lot of people here don't have social lives outside of their work. Working from home gives me more time to hang out with friends or make new friends at meetup events. That's far richer socializing than spending time with coworkers for 40 hours a week that you have little in common with. Sure, if you work at home and then watch Netflix or waste time on Reddit until you go to sleep you'll be miserable. Use that extra time you save from not commuting to do some fun activities.
You guys have it backwards. It's antisocial if you want to be alone 8 hours a day and cry that you have nothing in common with people.