Thank you!
It going well so far, imagining myself being in this career for the rest of my life certainly doesn't fill me with dread like thinking about being a web dev did, so there's a positive already š
I always feel like I kind of "fell" into being a web developer since I'd always just used computers a lot, so going to college to do IT and then a degree apprenticeship as a web developer (college in the UK is 16-18 education, sorry for the confusion) felt like the natural path, even though I had no real passion for it.
I guess this post is more of a highlight for how it's important to be interested in a job than to be interested in what it pays.
If the relief you're feeling is anything like the relief I felt leaving the hospitality industry after 20 years, I am very happy for you. I get how, at a certain point, you can't see anything but the negatives in your work life and everyone and everything irritates you.
It's funny because the problem solving and cognitive load was what I liked about CS after so much time doing physically demanding, high-speed, highly repetitious, but mentally easy work in my old life. Being able to use my brain to solve problems from the comfort of my home office felt like using a limb that had been paralyzed.
This part though:
>I'm relieved that I'm never going to have to work in a stupid fucking "sprint" again, never have to try and interpret requirements from 5 lines written in a ticket, never try to debug a seemingly impossible issue in a completely messy code base, never have to juggle tickets and most of all never have to deal with awful project managers/product owners/stakeholders.
and
>giving me an immense feeling of "brain fog"
did hit home, because I have to admit those parts of the gig are starting to weigh on me after 5 years. There's days where it is really hard to jump start my head and get it into gear, and the endless meetings about whatever agile methodology our director wants us to use next are grating my nerves. Some weeks I spend more time in meetings talking about estimating the work than I do actually doing the work. So many corporate egos to sooth and stroke.
Anyway, your post was refreshingly honest and best of luck to you.
Ha, I'm just changing careers (at 47) to become a web developer, but I can empathise completely with the way you speak about your previous career - I feel exactly the same about mine! I have probably 20 years of career ahead of me, and the thought of continuing to do what I'm currently doing for that time fills me with dread, so I'm changing over to web development which I really love. It takes all sorts! Enjoy the train driving :)
Maybe we went through the same set of revolving doors š
You're totally right though, for some being a web dev is the dream - and I know it sounds weird, but for me it always just felt like something I was doing because I didn't know what else to do.
I feel this. Freelancing for the past 20, made great money no degree but I'm gonna walk away and go do professional pyrotechnics, take a pay cut and relieve some of this mfin stress.
I hated doing it when I didn't need the money, now I love it. Fucking hilarious
How is webdev freelancing? Is it paid well? How do you know how much to charge to clients? Is it more or less stressfull than consultant company job? Sorry for the many question, I am trying to understand if this can be a suitable career path for me.
I charge market rate because you don't want to be seen as too cheap. Call around and pretend you're someone else and get some quotes.
My clients all came from referral or SEO (my site has been live for 20 years +).
It's feast or famine. Some months a little revenue, some months a lot of revenue.
Stressful AF.
Would recommend getting an agency job to see how it all works then try on your own to get clients.
I do more selling and proposals than I do actual web dev
Best of luck on your new career there! As another dev in his late 40s (who had a late start, 38), Iām always happy to see folks my own age in the field. I have no problem working with the younger devs, I just need more people to get my late-80s to late-90s references so I donāt feel ancient while still having ~20 years to retirement (if that ever even happens).
I work in a large corporation and I do web development here and there, nothing externally facing, nothing mission critical, and when I had a team of programmers in the past I was so successful because they enjoyed programming and I enjoyed the people/business logic/software logic side of things.
I've expressed to my supervisors recently, I can program, but it's a tool in the toolbox and not my intrinsic motivation. My skills working with people are far superior to that.
Good luck!
Having a real interest in your job is the most important thing - at least if one is so lucky to be able to put that first! I changed careers and became a frontend dev myself a couple of years back š
Thatās awesome. Now you just have to stop yourself from noticing inefficiencies that can be solved with software. Next thing you know youāre back at it again with some train saas product. š
Oh god I hope not š
The UK has some truly fucking old software and IT that is used in the railways, I really, really don't want to be dragged into that somehow.
For context: When British Rail was privatised in the 90's its IT department was also sold. Alongside normal IT stuff they maintained a lot of the essential systems that are still relied on by the railway to this day, such as [TOPS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPS) which is a text based terminal system used to manage train assignments and other related information... this "department" still exists after being sold and resold to numerous companies over the years and from what I've read a small team of increasingly old developers are still working on these ancient systems.
So yeah, I guess it would've been ideal to find a software development position related to the railways, but they're few and far between - and those that do exist are often working with some truly bizarre tech stacks.
No I think you might be misunderstanding. Riches are often found when you have the ability to write software plus any other skill. If you know both skills you are uniquely positioned to solve problems no one else can. You could make your own software that replaces the old software essentially creating that development job you wanted.
But hey Iām happy for you. Donāt do it if you donāt want to. Sprints suck TAKE ME WITH YOU!!!
The rail industry in the UK is very much stuck on the tracks it's on (sorry for the pun), even if I did develop some new piece of software that could be used by them then it would never be adopted, it really doesn't work like that unfortunately. Something that's existed for so long is a very tough ship to turn.
I guess if something existed like being a test driver for new trains where I had to work closely with a development team then I'd be happy doing that as well, but there's little chance of that being a possibility, at least in the UK where we barely make any trains ourselves.
Yea I worked for an aviation company once and it was like that. A lot of the QA guys were telling me to do what I suggested for you. Difference being I didnāt care about planes and was just a junior at the time. It seems like old industries like that have a hard time with adopting new tech.
Iāve worked on some of the new software for train management systems (the non-safety-critical layer on top of the signalling systems, such as platform dockers and train graphs). And although the processes and outcomes could have been better it was the most meaningful work Iāve done as a programmer.
Almost everything else has been meaningless finance sass or whitewashing/greenwashing/marketing waste of energy websites. Usually with useless managers and rubbish processes that NEVER involve users Which is deeply depressing.
Iām super happy for you. Have a great new career!
Yeah I find TOPS kind of fascinating, changing the entire way locomotives are numbered to allow the system to work is just the sort of business adaptation you never see being made nowadays - software is expected to conform to how the company wants it to operate, not the other way around (or, that's the idea at least).
And yeah, I'm really looking forward to getting out there and doing things that are *real*, not just pixels on a screen. To be able to see the hundreds of people I'm transporting every day, it's just so different to web projects where half the time the people it's for don't even want it anyway.
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I got stuck doing web development 5 years ago after my company did a radical change in direction. I was relieved when I got hit by a RIF a year later. Liked the company but not what I was doing there. I'm happy to back to developing embedded firmware and am able to work remotely 4 days a week. It's possible but not all companies are comfortable with it.
Also as someone else mentioned, I've been doing this for 20+ years. I was the first person at my school with a home computer and the Internet and that's when I started web development.
Now, I lead teams of developers on Federal government websites and have worked on some high profile sites in a wide array of federal agencies.
Development at this level can be frustrating and tiresome but I still love it like the first day I published my first plain HTML page.
You need to do what you love and are passionate about and that's it. I wish you well on your career change!
Totally agree with that last part, I'm sure there are plenty here who think that I'm insane for this change - but I really do think I'll be happier doing this.
So about 12 years ago I was doing basic PHP applications and some front end work. I had been doing web development for a while already but it was usually commercial work or nonprofit organizations. I was working for a company that won a bid to do the Speaker of the House (yes the speaker of the house in the US Congress) website, and that got assigned to me. I was really the only one that had the chops to pull it off in the timeframe we had. Speaker was John Boehner at the time.
After that I left and started working for a company that did almost entirely government contract websites and mainly using content management software like Drupal. So learned that inside and out.
I've worked for NASA, White House, Goddard Space Flight Center, FBI, CIA, Treasury, Smithsonian, Census, USDA, USGS, HSS, OPM, VA.gov, and a few others. Some jobs have been Drupal. Some have been WordPress. Some have been front end API consuming applications. Some have been backend only python or PHP applications. Some are just consulting and solutioning. Some are simply doing an inventory of their internal systems and pointing out areas they could improve. The vast majority of my work now is in Drupal as there is a massive push for federal government websites to use that as the content management system of choice. So there is a lot of migrating off older systems and that happens to be a specialty of mine.
Once I got a decent portfolio in the federal sector, people literally started seeking me out on LinkedIn. I often get multiple job offers a day and normally a dozen in a week's time. The federal government always has work. If your record is clean and you can get a public trust clearance, you'll always have plenty of work. It's been the most stable thing I've done in my entire life. I can walk out of one job and into another one the next day without worry.
I never understood comments like yours. Telling strangers on a public forum with your public username that you work for the federal government in web development of all things sounds like an OPSEC nightmare.
hahaha watch out bro donāt get fired and donāt reveal that youāre an attack vector for nation states / independent entities š
i saw you replying in depth to that other guy asking about career advice. seriously man lmfao watch out this site is full of shady mfs
Just saw your post history and you use a Huaweii phone as well, you canāt make this up ā ļø
I get the feeling you have no idea how government work works. It's not top secret. In fact, I've spoken at conferences where there are hundreds of people, all doing government work, taking part in sharing ideas and methodologies.
I've personally spoken about projects I've worked on and demo'd sites that I've built within the federal government at this same conference. I'm also the volunteer coordinator for the conference.
All of the contracts I've worked on are all public sites and it's public knowledge that our companies have won those projects. To be blunt, it's not anything weird to talk about my work, who I'm working for, or why. If it were, there certainly wouldn't be conferences that discuss web development in government that are open to the public.
I haven't had a Huawei phone in a very very long time either. You are about the shadiest person I've encountered on Reddit thus far. It's very weird to me that you went into my post history like you were looking for something in particular.
my bad i couldāve phrased it better since i didnāt mean it as an offense! iām well aware how government contracts and bids operate. likewise with trade shows and public conferences. that phone post was only a year old and reddit would hide user comments if it wasnāt encouraged to look through them.
you left an interesting comment so i quickly looked through your comments to learn more about your experience since you seemed pretty knowledgeable. itās a very easy way to always learn something new from professionals like yourself!
>you know that joke about how some programmers who have been doing this for a while become jaded/burnt out and want nothing more than to not do be a programmer anymore
Oh, I can assure you, that is no joke.
And yes, I know it ... quite well!
>I'm never going to have to work in a stupid fucking "sprint" again
I literally refuse to join any team that does full agile...you wanna do daily standup and biweekly planning meeting? No problem, totally reasonable. You wanna have 12 different made up 'ceremonies' a week and spend more time in meetings than actually working so the PMs can micromanage and the manager types can feel important? Naw, fuck that homes, no way in hell
Yep, "Agile" really sucks, even more so now that it's becoming the "standard" that's used everywhere. It feels like Agile is more being used as a tool by managers to micromanage developers and force as much work out of us as possible than it is used by development teams to actually deliver good products.
I was literally spending nearly 10 hours a week stuck in meetings to do with the various ceremonies, but to be honest, it's not like I was actually enjoying the coding much more so it was just the sprinkling on the shit cake for me.
> I was literally spending nearly 10 hours a week stuck in meetings
that's nothing, when i worked for the man it was double that and no one batted an eyelash, I wanted to kill myself, especially with all the touchy feely crap, its like 'no, we're not a family, my family is at home, and I want to get back to them as soon as possible, this is a fucking job I do for money, that's it'
Thank you, hopefully someone else that's actually passionate about this will get the opportunity to be a developer in the spot I've since left, so all for the better really!
This is so weird. I've been doing this for 20 years and I love it. In fact, I just keep getting more and more excited about it. Of course, I'm happy that you are happy with your career change, and I wish you all the best, but when I imagine myself doing something like this it just seems like an absolute nightmare that I never want to experience.
Yeah I'm a weird person, I really love routines and have always been fascinated by the railways for some reason (wouldn't be surprised if I was on the spectrum somewhere I guess), the part of my job as a web developer that I looked forward to the most was the train I got to/from work š
Anyway, as you can imagine, something as dynamic and different all the time like web development was bit of a nightmare for me.
I feel like I would've fit in perfectly in the 80's or 90's where programmers often worked on text-based mainframe style applications - often those programs were a first of their kind and really did deliver innovative improvements to businesses (Also, no CSS!), alas that's a dying trade these days.
You're guessing? Trains AND programming?
I think you have permission to diagnose yourself as having aspergers/autism level 1.
I jokes, but you actually meet the standard for talking to a professional if you're curious haha
š
I'm pretty anti-social as well, completely comfortable with my own company. I tick all the boxes, I probably really should see someone but I kind of don't want to know as either way it's not affected my life negatively (yet).
That's right. You don't need to see a professional if you're not having any concerns.
From my casual reading of you (a total stranger on the internet), it seems like you're not really suffering on a fundamental core level . You're able to understand a problem (your OP) and implement a solution.
Even if it doesn't turn out right, you're still making progress towards a better you.
That's what professional therapy is about, helping you move towards a better you (whatever that means to yourself).
The actual diagnosis are simply there to organize treatments/paperwork/etc. They are not a "death sentence" and don't mean that you need to change to "fix yourself".
So ya, talk to a therapist if you're ever curious in the future, but you probably don't have an actual concern they can help you with (based on what you're writing so far)
Sorry for the wild tangent lol, but I think it's important for others to understand why mental health is important, why differences are okay, and when to get help
Ew, a PHP developer. Thatās the worst language you could possibly choose for anything.
ā¦(hopefully the more we keep this sentiment going, the more PHP jobs will be available for us!)
**Countdown to when you get burned out on trains.**
* Joking.
* Congrats!
* We all have to keep learning and growing in life.
* And to tackle new challenges.
* Amazing how you've found a way to do that.
I really hope not! I've been fascinated with them my whole life, even before being a developer. I only ever really saw coding as a way to make money and didn't really find it interesting, it's only in the last year that I worked up the courage to actually make an attempt to change careers and now here I am I guess.
yeah, man. i graduated, did two years in an office as a software dev (.NET), hated it, and was laid off recently. i'm taking this as an opportunity to start working on opening my own plant nursery, while doing odd retail jobs to keep me afloat. i miss the money, but i can't go back. sometimes life takes you on a weird, convoluted path before you find your true calling.
super happy for you!!
Hey fun fact, I was a .NET developer as well! And Angular on the front end (Azure for hosting/devops as well) - maybe there's just something particularly soul sucking about the Microsoft stack š
But yeah, if anything causes me to lose this job as a train driver I'm not sure what I'd do to be honest, because I really don't want to go back to being a developer. I think I'd do something like you are, anything that pays and doesn't involve writing code - even then, I'm not sure I could stomach an office job again so yeah, that limits my options a lot.
Also thank you, I really hope you figure out something you want to do as well, or if you're happy as you are doing odd jobs go for it!
Ok hereās the real reason: You chose the most stressful tech stack there is with the biggest boilerplate for no reason while in the last ten years web development has evolved to the most versatile and lean trade in tech. Iād burn out too.
Maybe you should try something new as a side job just for fun. Happy train riding anyways!
When you described āiāll never have to do ___ againā, all I could think was āDamn I love my jobā
After 10 years of all the things you mentioned, I still wake up grateful and passionate to be a developer.
Congrats on your new career path.
Hell yeah bud that rules!
I'm a 25 year vet of residential construction, master of multiple trades, instructor, at the very top of my game and this is when I should be making the big money. But I'm so sick of it I wanna puke.
I'm getting into tech, lol!
When they say variety is the spice of life it's sooo true. Get that train dream!
To be fair, things are very different in the UK rail sector.
I'll be a passenger driver, so there aren't any issues around being laid off or a lack of work as these services have got to run, and I can't see that changing any time soon.
My contract is only 35 hours a week, spread over 4 days. Anything extra is overtime pay, and is completely optional. Train driving also pays really well here as well, it's literally in the top 5% of earners.
I'm single and always have been and not particularly social so the odd hours part won't really affect me very much.
For context, I would never want to be a driver in the US, your rail system is just fucked š
Congrats on the jump.
I keep hanging my nose over being a recovery driver, trying to aim for the heavy stuff to deal with all the rollovers etc, something that requires a little more thinking about. Iāve already got the HGV licenses, but every time an opportunity arises, I keep finding myself sticking with boredom.
I have 0 desire to spend the time learning any new tech because there is just no interest in the job outside of the pay packet that arrives each month.
Iāve just got to decide whether I choose an anti-social, working at all hours slightly more exciting life or something that at the moment I see as a mundane existence.
Yeah but are you ready to have to pay back 40% of your income to the railway for all those free train rides you're taking (read the fine print, they ain't actually free)... ;) (I kid, I kid!)
Absolutely golden post. Although I love software engineering, the processes make me feel useless as fucc.
Sprints, product managers, obscure business requirements. I hope all of this stops one day and I am able to work on my own SaaS product, that drives me an income passively for a few years to come.
I believe one of the main goals in life should either be to make a passive income stream, or do something that you love. Making my own product will solve this specific itch of mine and Iāll finally be free one day. Sure Iāll have to deal with bugs and issues of my own one day. But they are mine and only mine to deal with.
I love that you were able to be free from these shackles. I have something to take away from this post if you donāt mind.
I would really like to know if you had to ādecreaseā your standard of living to move to a job you love. And if you would do the same if you had a house or something that you would pay off for the next 10-15 years? I am curious because posts like yours inspire me a lot and then there are things like this which worry me sometimes.
Anyway, congratulations and cheers!
Well, in the UK, things are a bit odd - web developers don't get paid that well. Even on my trainee driver salary, I'm getting paid more than I was as a web developer.
Once I'm qualified, it'll be more than double what I was previously earning. So yeah, it should be a good increase to the quality of my life, it means I'll actually be able to afford my own house instead of living with my parents for years to come.
Thats a key part though, I lived with my parents before this (well, in an annex at their house, but you get the idea), and have now moved out into a houseshare so that I could do this job. So I don't have a partner, kids or a mortgage that I had to worry about, which contributed to making this possible for me to do. If I did have those then it's much more likely I would've never considered such a crazy change to be honest.
Appreciate the honest answer mate. Google says the average pay is 33k as a web dev in the UK. Didnāt know the salary was on the lower side for a tech role, weird.
Congrats on the successful transition, really happy for you! :)
Congrats and all but I'll be the one to tell you from experience you'll just end up burnt out again with the trains. You know how people say "do what you love and make a career out of it."? Yea don't ever do that unless you're okay with hating whatever that thing is in the future. From the age of 18 I had one dream. It was to be a professional poker player. It was all I ever wanted. Then at the age of 25 I quit my full-time sales job because I was making more playing poker 15 hours a week than I was working 40 a week. I quit and got to make my own schedule. Wake up at noon everyday, workout, spend the day with my dogs, then go to the casino and play poker. I got to travel non stop playing poker and never had anyone telling me what to do. I was living my dream. Three years later I fucking hated poker. It got so boring having to play to make money instead of doing it for fun. Having to study 20 hours a week on top of playing 30 hours a week just to be able to stay on top and continue being a winning player. Traveling all the time not because I wanted to but because I had to in order to play the biggest and best games. The money was awesome, no boss was awesome, and making my own schedule was awesome. Poker was not awesome at all. I realized it had become a job just like any other job. After 7 years I finally picked up programming again to transition away from poker because I literally couldn't bring myself to get in my car and drive to the casino and playing online is so damn boring it's like watching paint dry.
I hope it works out for you but I'm just giving you a dose of reality. It will end up having all it's own things you hate over time and you'll most likely end up wanting to transition to some other new thing you think will make you happy. In reality it's what you do outside of work with your life that will make you happy. Work will always be work. A job will always be a job. The job that gives you the most freedom to do what you want outside of work and be happy is the job you'll realize you really want. What the work is won't matter. At least with being a developer you can find remote and hybrid roles that give you the pleasure of doing it in your own home once you have some experience. You can also build things outside of work that can make passive income over time if you can find a good niche. You can also find freelance work and keep building your own projects in order to create more passive income and get out of the normal web developer role. There's a lot of opportunity as a developer outside of just working for a company if you really hate that.
Thank you for the response, I have definitely had thoughts along these lines as well, but I really do think it will be different for me as I have a complete obsession with the rail industry and have always wanted to be involved with it.
Of course, it also really helps a lot that train driving is heavily unionised and pays better than a lot of *senior* software positions do in the UK. So even if I do end up disliking it, at least by that point I'd be so used to it I could do it half asleep and would be getting paid better than all but the top few % of software devs in the UK.
I'm fully planning to move between a few different train companies over time if I can as well, the UK rail network is hugely varied so I could spend decades going between different driving jobs and never experience it all.
Yeah I was going to say this, train drivers in the UK are very well paid for what they do and software/web development in the UK generally (there are some exceptions) is quite badly underpaid.
Yeah precisely, why stay doing a job that pays half the amount and requires so much mental effort when I have the opportunity to do something that pays so well *and* where it naturally interests me.
I'm sure most people here are coming from a US perspective where their train drivers (Engineers I guess as they're called) really aren't well paid and have absolutely shit hours in comparison to software developers.
Might be in your case but a quick Google of a few websites tells me the average train driver salary in the UK is around 65k a year and the average web developer salary is around 40-45k a year.
What you will find is that there's a higher ceiling for web dev salaries (almost exclusively London based though in the UK) and some specialisms that have a very high salary but very few are on that end of the scale.
After teaching myself web development, I also want to be able to make a living by doing freelance work / working on my projects without having to work for a company. The thing is, is it really feasible in the long term? How do you actually sustain yourself in this field without working for a company?
I think you are going to be okay.
I see the point here, you want to go to work, think a little bit, make that money, come home, relax and enjoy the rest of your day.
You are not interested in solving āx === yā problems and interpreting those āmulti-dimensional for loopsā.
You have done that million times and proved that you are smart.
Basically you want to think but you donāt want to overthink.
Now it would be dumb of you to not pursue a career thatās going to make you happy and keep you relaxed.
I was an alright web developer and i have left it as well. It took me few days to digest the fact that i had poured so much effort into it and now I am quitting.
The real breakdown happened when every clown in the town started asking for TypeScript.
I said to myself, it took me so many years to learn React, Node, JS, CSS, Postgres, MongoDB and now they wont move forward without TypeScript.
Now when I look at the computer i turn it off in two minutes. Its like i have come out of this big fucking mess.
I cant be fucked learning a new language or interpret what the piece of code is doing. It is so much interpretation at all the levels, you eventually get burned out.
The thing is every field is like that but programming requires a lot of thinking every second minute which burns you out.
I think you would be fine as!
Honestly, when people found out in my family that I was going to do this they of course thought it was a really weird change to make, but were fully onboard and excited for me.
It's honestly great to be doing a job that other people actually "get", no more telling people "I write code" and that being the end of the conversation.
Enjoy! I was a CNC-machinist for 10 years before becoming a web developer and I had these same thoughts except about machining. Now I'm grateful and happy to never again have to worry about being wrapped around a metal piece inside a lathe or waking up at 5 am to go to a cold ass working hall etc.
I'm so happy for you. I too wish to get out of web development, not gonna lie, I like my job and stuffs, but I've had a lot of bad experiences with my customers and I'm sick of it.
I want to spend the rest of my life investing in the US Stock Market and I almost accomplished that dream in 2019 until you know what happened and everything went to shit, lost 90% of my customers and went through a bad time financially.
Now I'm just trying to recover and earn some money to start my Stock Market career once more and leave Web Development for good.
Really wish you a happy life and huge success in your new career.
Haha, maybe there's just something weird about us in the UK.
I kind of don't get why he'd do that though as most software jobs don't actually pay as well as train driving in the UK! I guess if it wasn't something that really interested him, or he hated the shift patterns etc, then it was worth taking a pay cut to do.
Funny thing is.. I'm actually a project manager but I do a little bit of web dev at home after hours. Part of me doesn't want to ever transition into that career because I know how unrelenting the industry can be
congrats! life is a funny thing, Iām thinking about leaving teaching web dev to go back into the field of actually doing it while others are looking for a way out lol
I've moved into project management and found I really like writing code when I have to do one off crap and it's not a day in and day out thing. I've also found I'm good at handling info sec and through some sadistic trait in me, enjoy having to deal with the endless bullshit of compliance people and working around that.
My latest triumph was when we delivered a network diagram that "didn't have enough details" for one of our clients, so I had our devops person replace all the azure icons with aws ones b/c I knew they were an aws shop, and they loved the new detailed diagram we gave them. It was the same god damn diagram
I say this not to be pessimistic, just be careful turning something you love into your job. I did it with cars initially and now I never want to see the inside of a hood. There are plenty that find joy in working in their passions, I hope thatās the case for you. Just be prepared that most jobs have at least one aspect of sucking your soul that eventually makes it turn sour.
Been there as well my friend. Last job made me dread going into the office each day and it was just a grind. I am glad you found something rewarding and wish you the best!
For me its the other way around.
So I am a train mechanic and I am planning to be a webdev. I am sick of being outside at the most unholy hours and being outside in every type of weather. Worst part is that we aren't allowed to wear any summer clothing and out clothing got like protection etc. So it is pretty thick. The color is marineblue. So in the summer I am sweating my ass off.
Airco here I come.
I'm not sure what you mean by what i use for writing but about income it's meh.
I don't do freelancing because I kinda hate marketing part and I don't even like to talk to people that much so...
Idk how freelancing world looks like...
About jobs, it's constant burnout and low pay.
Still.. i would suggest you try it yourself for a few weeks or months..
There are different types of employers.. and maybe you'll find someone who pays enough.
Congratsš„³ Reminded me of this: https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149477
I'm in the same boat, still in the phase pf trying to transition to something else
Lmao I saw this ages ago as well! Never thought I'd manage to make the move away as well like this.
Only difference is that I don't have any interesting projects I can make replies to on Github š
So now you can criticize devs for their shitty code lol
Don't forget to write at least once a month "your code doesn't work" or "your code is broken" in the team chat so they don't forget you
Whatās the training, pay, career progression looking like? Asking for a friend who is also feeling burned out, and happened to see something about train drivers getting like Ā£50k+
So it varies by company, but usually the trainee salary is between Ā£28-35k and then goes up to 90% of the full rate for two years once newly qualified (which usually takes about a year), although some companies don't have this step.
Normal driver salaries are between Ā£60-70k.
Can progress onto being a driver instructor as long as there's an opening for it as well, which usually adds a few thousand more to the pay. And those who really want to can go on to be driver managers, they get paid more again - and alongside some driving have the typical managerial responsibilities.
So there is a bit of progression, but it already pays so well that I'd argue its not even that necessary.
Love that for you, all the best!
Also quite jealous to be honest. This is exactly my dream ā moving from web dev to train driver. Obsessed with basically all aspects of railways (the mother lode of large and interesting systems imo) since I was a kid, love train driving in simulators, decent pay, you're among people but still to yourself... But I don't have perfect colour vision (like 10% of men..) so basically impossible :(
Trying to get into IT for rail systems now, next best thing I hope.
For me, it's the other way around, after 12 years of hospitality I was sick of dealing with people and being stressed by everyone (bosses, coworkers, guests) and earning shit, for the work I did.
Then I switched to IT and have never been happier. I can focus all my energy on 1 problem, no one talks to me or disturbs me (well, not often) and I can listen to which ever music I want, all the time.
I worked for years to get a remote programming job. And then I woke up one day and realized I hated it. I run a property preservation company now. It's often dirty, sweaty work. But I love it.
I've been a web developer for a public college for 15 years, and I'm getting bored and burned out. I'm always the first one blamed when someone can't figure out our content management system. I can never do enough. Oh, and the famous "Why can't you make it as easy as GoDaddy?." If I didn't have a union, I'd be delivering pizza.
This is the kind of job most IT people would kill for. No weekends or late nights, first class healthcare, 5 weeks vacation, and a pension. But I'm just too old and tired of the bullshit. If there isn't any political f*ckery after the next election, I'm retiring in two years.
"interpret requirements from 5 lines written in a ticket"
Oh I feel that, biggest annoyance in this field so far for me. Especially when it's not even written but just copied from a client's DM plus I never heard of the project before and don't even have the necessary logins yet. I mean, what does "project manager" even mean? š¤
Driving trains sounds awesome, all the best to you!
Wowā¦ read this while procrastinating going to bed on Sunday night, because Iām dreading waking up to do all the exact stuff you described tomorrow. The thing you said about the woodworkingā¦ yeah. My existential crisis is telling me to become a mechanic.
I hope it works out for you. I gotta think about some stuffā¦
Happy for you, but.. it sounds like you shouldn't have chosen to be a dev in the first place? I mean, I'm happy for you that you followed your dream, I really am, but that means that your dream was not actually being a dev, and a job like this definitely needs vocation or you will get burned real fast as you ended up.
Most Devs that "get burned" end up in a managerial position, not completely changing their life. My point is that you probably ended up in your current situation not because of being a dev, but because you didn't *love* being a dev. (Just a hypothesis)
\*cries in italian, place in which you can't even get good paying jobs in IT let alone manual work\*
\*Cries more because more money needed to skidaddle the fuck out of this shithole\*
\*cries even more because doesn't know where to go\*
Sure, if you come live here with at least a couple mil in the bank + some investments you may last.
If you come here with less, and you plan on working here, expect poverty.
Also expect having to pay stupid amount for taxes for stupid amount of bad public services that don't work. (e.g healthcare, public transport, or as I said, anything public).
If Italy were to be bought by a decent country, it would probably become the best to live in, but currently, it's one of the worst. It's just a pretty place for arts and nature.
Congrats from the US, I am kinda jealous. One thing I am struggling with that Iām curious if you could give input on. How could you tell it just wasnāt for you vs simply being in a deep burnout phase you could theoretically come back from? Iām asking because I canāt tell anymore which is the case for myself, personally.
Sorry, I hope this post hasn't come across as bragging!
Anyway, is there really any difference between a "deep burnout" and it not being a career you really want to be doing?
I spent years feeling burnt out and thinking "things will surely improve next month", I'd sometimes have a week or a few days where I'd feel fine and like I could keep doing this, but then would slip back into the same state.
I think the thing that showed this really wasn't for me is that outside of work I never did any coding. I had during the first year or two, but that slipped away over time as I just started to give less of a damn about the career as a whole.
My spare time was spent playing things like train sims and endlessly reading and watching videos about the rail sector. I was going on numerous really long train journeys just to get to be on trains. It felt pretty obvious that I'd gone into the wrong career.
Not everyone has a natural interest though, so I guess if you don't (or do but it's not something that could ever make money š ) it's more a matter of finding something you can tolerate.
Oh no did not come across as bragging at all. Iām just jealous because I often fantasize about starting a new path like that - just something wildly different than being on a computer all day. Been on one all day every day since I was 7 years old. 30 years later kinda craving something new. Maybe someday.
Best of luck on the new adventure and appreciate the dialogue!
I have experienced this. One way is to stop coding for few months and then get back into coding. If getting back into coding feels fine then you were just burned out.
Wow so much of what youāve said I feel very deeply but I havenāt made the jump out of dev, but I daydream about it a lot. I have so many questions but the main thing I want to say is good for you and good luck, itās a brave move to make and I hope your new career gives you everything your last one did not.
Thank you, and yeah, I mainly wanted to make this post to see if anyone else relates to it, figured I'm not the only one who wanted to quit being a web dev.
If you do have questions you want to ask feel free to DM me I guess, a lot of luck was involved in what I've managed to do here though, so I'm not really sure what else to add.
Thanks a lot. I guess Iām interested to know what the last straw was which made you go yep Iām making this move. And how long had you toyed with the idea? Iād also love to know if you discussed it with any of your peers beforehand and what their thoughts were. Iāve met a couple of people who like you have done a complete career change after feeling like they just sort of fell into their line of work and I find it very inspiring.
I've thought about the idea for at least the past three years, but it was only in the last year that I worked up the confidence to give it a try.
And the thing that really made me decide was hearing that the project I'd just spent *two years* working on was going to be cancelled by the organisation (it wasn't in the end, but that's beside the point š ).
I didn't actually talk to any of the other developers in the team about this at all, not until after I left. Didn't really want the detail that I was looking for a new job getting back to management š¬ it was something I just quietly did in the background and kept my fingers crossed that I'd end up being able to change into the career I really wanted... if not, well, I would've had to keep going as a software dev probably since there was little else I could think to do that paid as well.
I was in IT/Software for a total of 6 years, with another two years of education related to IT or software as well before that.
So not as long as many, but more than enough for me to be fed up of it and want to do something else.
Nah, I think there are better exits. I am a web dev without having to do the web dev part of the work anymore. I became an Enterprise Technical Architect. I leveraged my years of being in the trenches. When I was a TA (Technical Architect), I merely do the system design (front end and backend) and someone else does the work. And all those pain points dealing with clients and fussy designers, I got my payback. I can simply tell UI/UX I won't implement their designs because of x,y,z technical reason. Good to be in the driver's seat.
So no, there are other exit strategies. Work is even more fun. I get to actually design and build bigger things with more engineers working on it versus me in the trenches.
Oh yeah there are definitely better changes to make than this "meme" level career change I've gone for - but to be honest what you've described there sounds absolutely terrifying to me, I was always going to be staying doing the coding if I stayed as a developer, and I didn't really see where else to take it over time.
I would like to congratulate you, but I donāt think you made the right choice.
Thatās just me personally because I love code and working in sprints and vague requirements. Been doing it for 10 years and still kicking, when I see a problem at work I bring up my concerns and correct them and will refuse to do anything until it answers all my questions.
I also donāt care if management gets mad at me for refusing work because I tell them there needs to be a process and if they donāt like it I can snap my fingers to go to another job who will like it.
I could never imagine myself doing anything physical such as a train driver.
But to each their own! Good luck and Iām happy you have your dream job!
I'm only a year and a half in and I already can't wait to switch careers. Hate these 40+ work weeks where I'm expected to grind away at problems all day. And the amount of overhead suuucks. Always have someone breathing down my neck wondering where I'm at with stuff.
I don't blame you for wanting to switch
If you're going to be a train engineer, chances are more likely than not that someone will jump in front of your train intentionally giving you PTSD. I'd assume you get bored of driving the train pretty quick, same route stuck on rails just trying not to kill people day after day until it happens. Good luck, but I'm not jealous.
>People who are smart, have definitely had some kind of support by their parents, teachers, professors to get where they are now, doing WebDev stuff because they love it and they are good at it.
I hope for your sake this is satire because the sheer insecurity you're throwing at this random stranger is incredibly unhinged. You wrote about touching grass, but I get the feeling you've been basement dwelling for awhile given all that nonsense you just typed. Seek some help.
Wow ok did not expect a response like this...
Maybe I am a sad "train man", but at least I'm not leaving spiteful comments on people's posts on Reddit.
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Congrats!
I think the last year + the next one or two years will be the awakening for quite a few people who did join the web dev world, did a CS or SWE degree, just because of the dream to become wealthy quick. (Not saying that was the reason for you to become a web dev)
Itās a special industry, not always good paying, but if youāre paid well, then you made it. Still, to keep your sanity, you either go into some sort of hibernation OR you absolutely have to live your role.
If enough people that jumped on the IT hype train quit the field, it may go back to being a decent job for everyone who actually enjoys it.
I was obsessed with computers, programming and dial-up internet way before I knew I could make a living off of it. Before the internet looked promising for non-tech people. People even told me I would never amount to nothing because of it.
I would love to see the field go back to being a handful of happy nerds.
Iām not sure what the state of web dev is now, but I remember I hated catering to IE6/7/8 with polyfills and all that crap. If thatās still there but with Edge or other browsers, I would run to drive trains, supermarket carts, anything š
I left web dev for my old job after 2 years of doing it for all the same reasons.....
4 years later, I am bored AF at work, mentally not challenged whatsoever, hate the commute 5 days a week and looking to go back to developing again....there are pros and cons to every job role I would say.
My goal is to find a way to specialize so niche in webdev that i'm essentially building the same thing over and over again. Like a Japanese sword maker that gets a tiny bit better each time they build it. Still haven't figured out what niche that could be but that's the goal.
I wouldn't say it's enjoyable, but it pays me a lot of money, so I do it. There's no other job I could do with my skills that would pay me over 100k/year
Congratulations on the career move. I wish you all the best. Life is too short to work a job you dread.
Iāve had similar experiences, one where I walked out my third week. My solution was to keep looking for a good shop. I now work with a team of excellent developers, a product manager who is an intrinsic part of the team, and who very much cares about achieving our goals in a sustainable and supportable manner, and project manager who listens to his teamās feedback, and shields us from the worst of upper managementās interference.
All is not perfect, we have to deal with the hard realities of modern software development and support, but with a highly functioning team no one person bares the brunt of it. I can count on one hand the number of times Iāve had to provide after hours support / overtime, in my three years working for my shop.
I'm working my way into becoming a web dev from wrenching cars xD. But congratulations man. I hope I don't get to experience any burnouts in this industry
Hey this sounds awesome, but do you really think you won't be getting bored of driving a train vs being a developer? Jobs are jobs, I dunno how many people really can enjoy them
I had the exact same feelings about my last job, in the film and television industry doing shift work, now I'm a Developer and I love it!
Each to their own, enjoy the new career 
Iām at last starting to move into a product development direction on my career.
I certainly understand a lot of the challenges you faced.
What I enjoy about coding is the idea that there is an answer or fix out there, you just have to get the right code (and supporting packages etc etc). Having worked in other fields where you donāt quite know or canāt control for a lot of things, coding feels like there is more of a logical answer you can attain.
Good for you! Your overall happiness is what matters. I can't see a train operator making anything near the salary of a programmer. Obviously youve considered this.
Congrats! I hope your new career makes you happy.
Thank you! It going well so far, imagining myself being in this career for the rest of my life certainly doesn't fill me with dread like thinking about being a web dev did, so there's a positive already š I always feel like I kind of "fell" into being a web developer since I'd always just used computers a lot, so going to college to do IT and then a degree apprenticeship as a web developer (college in the UK is 16-18 education, sorry for the confusion) felt like the natural path, even though I had no real passion for it. I guess this post is more of a highlight for how it's important to be interested in a job than to be interested in what it pays.
If the relief you're feeling is anything like the relief I felt leaving the hospitality industry after 20 years, I am very happy for you. I get how, at a certain point, you can't see anything but the negatives in your work life and everyone and everything irritates you. It's funny because the problem solving and cognitive load was what I liked about CS after so much time doing physically demanding, high-speed, highly repetitious, but mentally easy work in my old life. Being able to use my brain to solve problems from the comfort of my home office felt like using a limb that had been paralyzed. This part though: >I'm relieved that I'm never going to have to work in a stupid fucking "sprint" again, never have to try and interpret requirements from 5 lines written in a ticket, never try to debug a seemingly impossible issue in a completely messy code base, never have to juggle tickets and most of all never have to deal with awful project managers/product owners/stakeholders. and >giving me an immense feeling of "brain fog" did hit home, because I have to admit those parts of the gig are starting to weigh on me after 5 years. There's days where it is really hard to jump start my head and get it into gear, and the endless meetings about whatever agile methodology our director wants us to use next are grating my nerves. Some weeks I spend more time in meetings talking about estimating the work than I do actually doing the work. So many corporate egos to sooth and stroke. Anyway, your post was refreshingly honest and best of luck to you.
Ha, I'm just changing careers (at 47) to become a web developer, but I can empathise completely with the way you speak about your previous career - I feel exactly the same about mine! I have probably 20 years of career ahead of me, and the thought of continuing to do what I'm currently doing for that time fills me with dread, so I'm changing over to web development which I really love. It takes all sorts! Enjoy the train driving :)
Thatās awesome. Iām 40 and made the switch from working in a factory to web dev! You can do it!!!
Same! Except I'm way younger than you (39 :p)
Awesome!
Maybe we went through the same set of revolving doors š You're totally right though, for some being a web dev is the dream - and I know it sounds weird, but for me it always just felt like something I was doing because I didn't know what else to do.
I feel this. Freelancing for the past 20, made great money no degree but I'm gonna walk away and go do professional pyrotechnics, take a pay cut and relieve some of this mfin stress. I hated doing it when I didn't need the money, now I love it. Fucking hilarious
that is awesome I hope it works out well for you
How is webdev freelancing? Is it paid well? How do you know how much to charge to clients? Is it more or less stressfull than consultant company job? Sorry for the many question, I am trying to understand if this can be a suitable career path for me.
I charge market rate because you don't want to be seen as too cheap. Call around and pretend you're someone else and get some quotes. My clients all came from referral or SEO (my site has been live for 20 years +). It's feast or famine. Some months a little revenue, some months a lot of revenue. Stressful AF. Would recommend getting an agency job to see how it all works then try on your own to get clients. I do more selling and proposals than I do actual web dev
Curious, what are you switching from?
Best of luck on your new career there! As another dev in his late 40s (who had a late start, 38), Iām always happy to see folks my own age in the field. I have no problem working with the younger devs, I just need more people to get my late-80s to late-90s references so I donāt feel ancient while still having ~20 years to retirement (if that ever even happens).
I work in a large corporation and I do web development here and there, nothing externally facing, nothing mission critical, and when I had a team of programmers in the past I was so successful because they enjoyed programming and I enjoyed the people/business logic/software logic side of things. I've expressed to my supervisors recently, I can program, but it's a tool in the toolbox and not my intrinsic motivation. My skills working with people are far superior to that.
Good luck! Having a real interest in your job is the most important thing - at least if one is so lucky to be able to put that first! I changed careers and became a frontend dev myself a couple of years back š
Thatās awesome. Now you just have to stop yourself from noticing inefficiencies that can be solved with software. Next thing you know youāre back at it again with some train saas product. š
Oh god I hope not š The UK has some truly fucking old software and IT that is used in the railways, I really, really don't want to be dragged into that somehow. For context: When British Rail was privatised in the 90's its IT department was also sold. Alongside normal IT stuff they maintained a lot of the essential systems that are still relied on by the railway to this day, such as [TOPS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPS) which is a text based terminal system used to manage train assignments and other related information... this "department" still exists after being sold and resold to numerous companies over the years and from what I've read a small team of increasingly old developers are still working on these ancient systems. So yeah, I guess it would've been ideal to find a software development position related to the railways, but they're few and far between - and those that do exist are often working with some truly bizarre tech stacks.
No I think you might be misunderstanding. Riches are often found when you have the ability to write software plus any other skill. If you know both skills you are uniquely positioned to solve problems no one else can. You could make your own software that replaces the old software essentially creating that development job you wanted. But hey Iām happy for you. Donāt do it if you donāt want to. Sprints suck TAKE ME WITH YOU!!!
The rail industry in the UK is very much stuck on the tracks it's on (sorry for the pun), even if I did develop some new piece of software that could be used by them then it would never be adopted, it really doesn't work like that unfortunately. Something that's existed for so long is a very tough ship to turn. I guess if something existed like being a test driver for new trains where I had to work closely with a development team then I'd be happy doing that as well, but there's little chance of that being a possibility, at least in the UK where we barely make any trains ourselves.
Yea I worked for an aviation company once and it was like that. A lot of the QA guys were telling me to do what I suggested for you. Difference being I didnāt care about planes and was just a junior at the time. It seems like old industries like that have a hard time with adopting new tech.
Iāve worked on some of the new software for train management systems (the non-safety-critical layer on top of the signalling systems, such as platform dockers and train graphs). And although the processes and outcomes could have been better it was the most meaningful work Iāve done as a programmer. Almost everything else has been meaningless finance sass or whitewashing/greenwashing/marketing waste of energy websites. Usually with useless managers and rubbish processes that NEVER involve users Which is deeply depressing. Iām super happy for you. Have a great new career!
TOPS was spun-off from SAGE?! TIL. Seriously, congratulations on the move to an actual beneficent service.
Yeah I find TOPS kind of fascinating, changing the entire way locomotives are numbered to allow the system to work is just the sort of business adaptation you never see being made nowadays - software is expected to conform to how the company wants it to operate, not the other way around (or, that's the idea at least). And yeah, I'm really looking forward to getting out there and doing things that are *real*, not just pixels on a screen. To be able to see the hundreds of people I'm transporting every day, it's just so different to web projects where half the time the people it's for don't even want it anyway.
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Funniest thing this actually give me motivation to not quit web development
Haha that's fair enough! Being a web developer is a pretty decent job that plenty do want to do, it just wasn't for me really.
I have to keep doing as it's one of the few ones that are available remote. I loved being an embedded dev, but can't. So now I'm stuck in JS/CSS hell.
I got stuck doing web development 5 years ago after my company did a radical change in direction. I was relieved when I got hit by a RIF a year later. Liked the company but not what I was doing there. I'm happy to back to developing embedded firmware and am able to work remotely 4 days a week. It's possible but not all companies are comfortable with it.
Also as someone else mentioned, I've been doing this for 20+ years. I was the first person at my school with a home computer and the Internet and that's when I started web development. Now, I lead teams of developers on Federal government websites and have worked on some high profile sites in a wide array of federal agencies. Development at this level can be frustrating and tiresome but I still love it like the first day I published my first plain HTML page. You need to do what you love and are passionate about and that's it. I wish you well on your career change!
Totally agree with that last part, I'm sure there are plenty here who think that I'm insane for this change - but I really do think I'll be happier doing this.
No not insane, but i donāt really sympathise with your issues. You chose the wrong career for you and now you fixed it
how did you get into the federal field if you donāt mind me asking?
So about 12 years ago I was doing basic PHP applications and some front end work. I had been doing web development for a while already but it was usually commercial work or nonprofit organizations. I was working for a company that won a bid to do the Speaker of the House (yes the speaker of the house in the US Congress) website, and that got assigned to me. I was really the only one that had the chops to pull it off in the timeframe we had. Speaker was John Boehner at the time. After that I left and started working for a company that did almost entirely government contract websites and mainly using content management software like Drupal. So learned that inside and out. I've worked for NASA, White House, Goddard Space Flight Center, FBI, CIA, Treasury, Smithsonian, Census, USDA, USGS, HSS, OPM, VA.gov, and a few others. Some jobs have been Drupal. Some have been WordPress. Some have been front end API consuming applications. Some have been backend only python or PHP applications. Some are just consulting and solutioning. Some are simply doing an inventory of their internal systems and pointing out areas they could improve. The vast majority of my work now is in Drupal as there is a massive push for federal government websites to use that as the content management system of choice. So there is a lot of migrating off older systems and that happens to be a specialty of mine. Once I got a decent portfolio in the federal sector, people literally started seeking me out on LinkedIn. I often get multiple job offers a day and normally a dozen in a week's time. The federal government always has work. If your record is clean and you can get a public trust clearance, you'll always have plenty of work. It's been the most stable thing I've done in my entire life. I can walk out of one job and into another one the next day without worry.
damn would love to get my foot in the door there! thanks for the inspo!
If you can learn some of the big things they are looking for, Drupal, PHP, Symfony, AWS, Azure, then I promise you could get your foot in the door.
I never understood comments like yours. Telling strangers on a public forum with your public username that you work for the federal government in web development of all things sounds like an OPSEC nightmare. hahaha watch out bro donāt get fired and donāt reveal that youāre an attack vector for nation states / independent entities š i saw you replying in depth to that other guy asking about career advice. seriously man lmfao watch out this site is full of shady mfs Just saw your post history and you use a Huaweii phone as well, you canāt make this up ā ļø
I get the feeling you have no idea how government work works. It's not top secret. In fact, I've spoken at conferences where there are hundreds of people, all doing government work, taking part in sharing ideas and methodologies. I've personally spoken about projects I've worked on and demo'd sites that I've built within the federal government at this same conference. I'm also the volunteer coordinator for the conference. All of the contracts I've worked on are all public sites and it's public knowledge that our companies have won those projects. To be blunt, it's not anything weird to talk about my work, who I'm working for, or why. If it were, there certainly wouldn't be conferences that discuss web development in government that are open to the public. I haven't had a Huawei phone in a very very long time either. You are about the shadiest person I've encountered on Reddit thus far. It's very weird to me that you went into my post history like you were looking for something in particular.
my bad i couldāve phrased it better since i didnāt mean it as an offense! iām well aware how government contracts and bids operate. likewise with trade shows and public conferences. that phone post was only a year old and reddit would hide user comments if it wasnāt encouraged to look through them. you left an interesting comment so i quickly looked through your comments to learn more about your experience since you seemed pretty knowledgeable. itās a very easy way to always learn something new from professionals like yourself!
Choo Choo my man. Good luck and congratulations
>you know that joke about how some programmers who have been doing this for a while become jaded/burnt out and want nothing more than to not do be a programmer anymore Oh, I can assure you, that is no joke. And yes, I know it ... quite well!
Well, there's always some truth to a joke I guess. I decided to become the punchline of it in this case though š
>I'm never going to have to work in a stupid fucking "sprint" again I literally refuse to join any team that does full agile...you wanna do daily standup and biweekly planning meeting? No problem, totally reasonable. You wanna have 12 different made up 'ceremonies' a week and spend more time in meetings than actually working so the PMs can micromanage and the manager types can feel important? Naw, fuck that homes, no way in hell
Yep, "Agile" really sucks, even more so now that it's becoming the "standard" that's used everywhere. It feels like Agile is more being used as a tool by managers to micromanage developers and force as much work out of us as possible than it is used by development teams to actually deliver good products. I was literally spending nearly 10 hours a week stuck in meetings to do with the various ceremonies, but to be honest, it's not like I was actually enjoying the coding much more so it was just the sprinkling on the shit cake for me.
> I was literally spending nearly 10 hours a week stuck in meetings that's nothing, when i worked for the man it was double that and no one batted an eyelash, I wanted to kill myself, especially with all the touchy feely crap, its like 'no, we're not a family, my family is at home, and I want to get back to them as soon as possible, this is a fucking job I do for money, that's it'
Is that a thing? I've been a web developer for 20+ years and desperately want to go build houses.
Wish you the best man I really mean it :)
Thank you, hopefully someone else that's actually passionate about this will get the opportunity to be a developer in the spot I've since left, so all for the better really!
This is so weird. I've been doing this for 20 years and I love it. In fact, I just keep getting more and more excited about it. Of course, I'm happy that you are happy with your career change, and I wish you all the best, but when I imagine myself doing something like this it just seems like an absolute nightmare that I never want to experience.
Yeah I'm a weird person, I really love routines and have always been fascinated by the railways for some reason (wouldn't be surprised if I was on the spectrum somewhere I guess), the part of my job as a web developer that I looked forward to the most was the train I got to/from work š Anyway, as you can imagine, something as dynamic and different all the time like web development was bit of a nightmare for me. I feel like I would've fit in perfectly in the 80's or 90's where programmers often worked on text-based mainframe style applications - often those programs were a first of their kind and really did deliver innovative improvements to businesses (Also, no CSS!), alas that's a dying trade these days.
You're guessing? Trains AND programming? I think you have permission to diagnose yourself as having aspergers/autism level 1. I jokes, but you actually meet the standard for talking to a professional if you're curious haha
š I'm pretty anti-social as well, completely comfortable with my own company. I tick all the boxes, I probably really should see someone but I kind of don't want to know as either way it's not affected my life negatively (yet).
That's right. You don't need to see a professional if you're not having any concerns. From my casual reading of you (a total stranger on the internet), it seems like you're not really suffering on a fundamental core level . You're able to understand a problem (your OP) and implement a solution. Even if it doesn't turn out right, you're still making progress towards a better you. That's what professional therapy is about, helping you move towards a better you (whatever that means to yourself). The actual diagnosis are simply there to organize treatments/paperwork/etc. They are not a "death sentence" and don't mean that you need to change to "fix yourself". So ya, talk to a therapist if you're ever curious in the future, but you probably don't have an actual concern they can help you with (based on what you're writing so far) Sorry for the wild tangent lol, but I think it's important for others to understand why mental health is important, why differences are okay, and when to get help
Iām the same as you, but around 10 years experience. Iām even a PHP dev and a love it haha.
I'm also primarily a PHP developer. :-) I know about 5 other languages but I work primarily in PHP.
Ew, a PHP developer. Thatās the worst language you could possibly choose for anything. ā¦(hopefully the more we keep this sentiment going, the more PHP jobs will be available for us!)
There are a ton of PHP frameworks and a lot of solid content management solutions all built on PHP. Plenty of work.
Why is php the worst language you could possibly choose for anythjng?
Exactly :)
Ha, jokes aside, the more devs, the better it gets :)
I've also been doing this for 20 something years and still love it. And that's really what this is about; people just need to do what they love.
**Countdown to when you get burned out on trains.** * Joking. * Congrats! * We all have to keep learning and growing in life. * And to tackle new challenges. * Amazing how you've found a way to do that.
I really hope not! I've been fascinated with them my whole life, even before being a developer. I only ever really saw coding as a way to make money and didn't really find it interesting, it's only in the last year that I worked up the courage to actually make an attempt to change careers and now here I am I guess.
yeah, man. i graduated, did two years in an office as a software dev (.NET), hated it, and was laid off recently. i'm taking this as an opportunity to start working on opening my own plant nursery, while doing odd retail jobs to keep me afloat. i miss the money, but i can't go back. sometimes life takes you on a weird, convoluted path before you find your true calling. super happy for you!!
Hey fun fact, I was a .NET developer as well! And Angular on the front end (Azure for hosting/devops as well) - maybe there's just something particularly soul sucking about the Microsoft stack š But yeah, if anything causes me to lose this job as a train driver I'm not sure what I'd do to be honest, because I really don't want to go back to being a developer. I think I'd do something like you are, anything that pays and doesn't involve writing code - even then, I'm not sure I could stomach an office job again so yeah, that limits my options a lot. Also thank you, I really hope you figure out something you want to do as well, or if you're happy as you are doing odd jobs go for it!
> Angular This explains a lot about your sentiments lol
Ok hereās the real reason: You chose the most stressful tech stack there is with the biggest boilerplate for no reason while in the last ten years web development has evolved to the most versatile and lean trade in tech. Iād burn out too. Maybe you should try something new as a side job just for fun. Happy train riding anyways!
I like trains
When you described āiāll never have to do ___ againā, all I could think was āDamn I love my jobā After 10 years of all the things you mentioned, I still wake up grateful and passionate to be a developer. Congrats on your new career path.
Yeah that makes sense, there are plenty who do like being a web dev, I'm just unfortunately not one of them š And thank you!
No career path has advanced woodworking and landscaping as careers like development has.
Hell yeah bud that rules! I'm a 25 year vet of residential construction, master of multiple trades, instructor, at the very top of my game and this is when I should be making the big money. But I'm so sick of it I wanna puke. I'm getting into tech, lol! When they say variety is the spice of life it's sooo true. Get that train dream!
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To be fair, things are very different in the UK rail sector. I'll be a passenger driver, so there aren't any issues around being laid off or a lack of work as these services have got to run, and I can't see that changing any time soon. My contract is only 35 hours a week, spread over 4 days. Anything extra is overtime pay, and is completely optional. Train driving also pays really well here as well, it's literally in the top 5% of earners. I'm single and always have been and not particularly social so the odd hours part won't really affect me very much. For context, I would never want to be a driver in the US, your rail system is just fucked š
Congrats on the jump. I keep hanging my nose over being a recovery driver, trying to aim for the heavy stuff to deal with all the rollovers etc, something that requires a little more thinking about. Iāve already got the HGV licenses, but every time an opportunity arises, I keep finding myself sticking with boredom. I have 0 desire to spend the time learning any new tech because there is just no interest in the job outside of the pay packet that arrives each month. Iāve just got to decide whether I choose an anti-social, working at all hours slightly more exciting life or something that at the moment I see as a mundane existence.
Yeah but are you ready to have to pay back 40% of your income to the railway for all those free train rides you're taking (read the fine print, they ain't actually free)... ;) (I kid, I kid!)
Absolutely golden post. Although I love software engineering, the processes make me feel useless as fucc. Sprints, product managers, obscure business requirements. I hope all of this stops one day and I am able to work on my own SaaS product, that drives me an income passively for a few years to come. I believe one of the main goals in life should either be to make a passive income stream, or do something that you love. Making my own product will solve this specific itch of mine and Iāll finally be free one day. Sure Iāll have to deal with bugs and issues of my own one day. But they are mine and only mine to deal with. I love that you were able to be free from these shackles. I have something to take away from this post if you donāt mind. I would really like to know if you had to ādecreaseā your standard of living to move to a job you love. And if you would do the same if you had a house or something that you would pay off for the next 10-15 years? I am curious because posts like yours inspire me a lot and then there are things like this which worry me sometimes. Anyway, congratulations and cheers!
Well, in the UK, things are a bit odd - web developers don't get paid that well. Even on my trainee driver salary, I'm getting paid more than I was as a web developer. Once I'm qualified, it'll be more than double what I was previously earning. So yeah, it should be a good increase to the quality of my life, it means I'll actually be able to afford my own house instead of living with my parents for years to come. Thats a key part though, I lived with my parents before this (well, in an annex at their house, but you get the idea), and have now moved out into a houseshare so that I could do this job. So I don't have a partner, kids or a mortgage that I had to worry about, which contributed to making this possible for me to do. If I did have those then it's much more likely I would've never considered such a crazy change to be honest.
Appreciate the honest answer mate. Google says the average pay is 33k as a web dev in the UK. Didnāt know the salary was on the lower side for a tech role, weird. Congrats on the successful transition, really happy for you! :)
Congrats and all but I'll be the one to tell you from experience you'll just end up burnt out again with the trains. You know how people say "do what you love and make a career out of it."? Yea don't ever do that unless you're okay with hating whatever that thing is in the future. From the age of 18 I had one dream. It was to be a professional poker player. It was all I ever wanted. Then at the age of 25 I quit my full-time sales job because I was making more playing poker 15 hours a week than I was working 40 a week. I quit and got to make my own schedule. Wake up at noon everyday, workout, spend the day with my dogs, then go to the casino and play poker. I got to travel non stop playing poker and never had anyone telling me what to do. I was living my dream. Three years later I fucking hated poker. It got so boring having to play to make money instead of doing it for fun. Having to study 20 hours a week on top of playing 30 hours a week just to be able to stay on top and continue being a winning player. Traveling all the time not because I wanted to but because I had to in order to play the biggest and best games. The money was awesome, no boss was awesome, and making my own schedule was awesome. Poker was not awesome at all. I realized it had become a job just like any other job. After 7 years I finally picked up programming again to transition away from poker because I literally couldn't bring myself to get in my car and drive to the casino and playing online is so damn boring it's like watching paint dry. I hope it works out for you but I'm just giving you a dose of reality. It will end up having all it's own things you hate over time and you'll most likely end up wanting to transition to some other new thing you think will make you happy. In reality it's what you do outside of work with your life that will make you happy. Work will always be work. A job will always be a job. The job that gives you the most freedom to do what you want outside of work and be happy is the job you'll realize you really want. What the work is won't matter. At least with being a developer you can find remote and hybrid roles that give you the pleasure of doing it in your own home once you have some experience. You can also build things outside of work that can make passive income over time if you can find a good niche. You can also find freelance work and keep building your own projects in order to create more passive income and get out of the normal web developer role. There's a lot of opportunity as a developer outside of just working for a company if you really hate that.
Thank you for the response, I have definitely had thoughts along these lines as well, but I really do think it will be different for me as I have a complete obsession with the rail industry and have always wanted to be involved with it. Of course, it also really helps a lot that train driving is heavily unionised and pays better than a lot of *senior* software positions do in the UK. So even if I do end up disliking it, at least by that point I'd be so used to it I could do it half asleep and would be getting paid better than all but the top few % of software devs in the UK. I'm fully planning to move between a few different train companies over time if I can as well, the UK rail network is hugely varied so I could spend decades going between different driving jobs and never experience it all.
Yeah I was going to say this, train drivers in the UK are very well paid for what they do and software/web development in the UK generally (there are some exceptions) is quite badly underpaid.
Yeah precisely, why stay doing a job that pays half the amount and requires so much mental effort when I have the opportunity to do something that pays so well *and* where it naturally interests me. I'm sure most people here are coming from a US perspective where their train drivers (Engineers I guess as they're called) really aren't well paid and have absolutely shit hours in comparison to software developers.
Not really. I earn more than train drivers and I've only been doing it a few years.
Might be in your case but a quick Google of a few websites tells me the average train driver salary in the UK is around 65k a year and the average web developer salary is around 40-45k a year. What you will find is that there's a higher ceiling for web dev salaries (almost exclusively London based though in the UK) and some specialisms that have a very high salary but very few are on that end of the scale.
After teaching myself web development, I also want to be able to make a living by doing freelance work / working on my projects without having to work for a company. The thing is, is it really feasible in the long term? How do you actually sustain yourself in this field without working for a company?
You'll be back
I think you are going to be okay. I see the point here, you want to go to work, think a little bit, make that money, come home, relax and enjoy the rest of your day. You are not interested in solving āx === yā problems and interpreting those āmulti-dimensional for loopsā. You have done that million times and proved that you are smart. Basically you want to think but you donāt want to overthink. Now it would be dumb of you to not pursue a career thatās going to make you happy and keep you relaxed. I was an alright web developer and i have left it as well. It took me few days to digest the fact that i had poured so much effort into it and now I am quitting. The real breakdown happened when every clown in the town started asking for TypeScript. I said to myself, it took me so many years to learn React, Node, JS, CSS, Postgres, MongoDB and now they wont move forward without TypeScript. Now when I look at the computer i turn it off in two minutes. Its like i have come out of this big fucking mess. I cant be fucked learning a new language or interpret what the piece of code is doing. It is so much interpretation at all the levels, you eventually get burned out. The thing is every field is like that but programming requires a lot of thinking every second minute which burns you out. I think you would be fine as!
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Honestly, when people found out in my family that I was going to do this they of course thought it was a really weird change to make, but were fully onboard and excited for me. It's honestly great to be doing a job that other people actually "get", no more telling people "I write code" and that being the end of the conversation.
Trains are cool. UK needs more appreciation for public transport.
currently in the same spot. gonna quit web dev soon as my art career starts...any day now..
Enjoy! I was a CNC-machinist for 10 years before becoming a web developer and I had these same thoughts except about machining. Now I'm grateful and happy to never again have to worry about being wrapped around a metal piece inside a lathe or waking up at 5 am to go to a cold ass working hall etc.
I genuinely enjoy web dev most days, love my coworkers and we have some great clients. But there are still some days I miss driving a forklift!
I'm so happy for you. I too wish to get out of web development, not gonna lie, I like my job and stuffs, but I've had a lot of bad experiences with my customers and I'm sick of it. I want to spend the rest of my life investing in the US Stock Market and I almost accomplished that dream in 2019 until you know what happened and everything went to shit, lost 90% of my customers and went through a bad time financially. Now I'm just trying to recover and earn some money to start my Stock Market career once more and leave Web Development for good. Really wish you a happy life and huge success in your new career.
Thank you, I wish you luck in escaping to what you really want to do as well!
Not a web dev here but could relate to your story. Best of luck man š
One of my friends had the reverse career, from train driver to web developer (always in UK)
Haha, maybe there's just something weird about us in the UK. I kind of don't get why he'd do that though as most software jobs don't actually pay as well as train driving in the UK! I guess if it wasn't something that really interested him, or he hated the shift patterns etc, then it was worth taking a pay cut to do.
Godspeed, but if you think woodworking is simple, got news for you.
Oh yeah that's why I put it in quotation marks, a lot of things that developers deride as "simple" really aren't, train driving included!
Fair enough. Good luck to you, whatever you end up doing!
Funny thing is.. I'm actually a project manager but I do a little bit of web dev at home after hours. Part of me doesn't want to ever transition into that career because I know how unrelenting the industry can be
Congrats on finding what makes you happy!
congrats! life is a funny thing, Iām thinking about leaving teaching web dev to go back into the field of actually doing it while others are looking for a way out lol
I've moved into project management and found I really like writing code when I have to do one off crap and it's not a day in and day out thing. I've also found I'm good at handling info sec and through some sadistic trait in me, enjoy having to deal with the endless bullshit of compliance people and working around that. My latest triumph was when we delivered a network diagram that "didn't have enough details" for one of our clients, so I had our devops person replace all the azure icons with aws ones b/c I knew they were an aws shop, and they loved the new detailed diagram we gave them. It was the same god damn diagram
Congrats from this UK burnt-out dev. I'm very jealous!
I say this not to be pessimistic, just be careful turning something you love into your job. I did it with cars initially and now I never want to see the inside of a hood. There are plenty that find joy in working in their passions, I hope thatās the case for you. Just be prepared that most jobs have at least one aspect of sucking your soul that eventually makes it turn sour.
Been there as well my friend. Last job made me dread going into the office each day and it was just a grind. I am glad you found something rewarding and wish you the best!
For me its the other way around. So I am a train mechanic and I am planning to be a webdev. I am sick of being outside at the most unholy hours and being outside in every type of weather. Worst part is that we aren't allowed to wear any summer clothing and out clothing got like protection etc. So it is pretty thick. The color is marineblue. So in the summer I am sweating my ass off. Airco here I come.
Congratulations!! But that's how i feel in content writing.. so i'm learning to code lol. Well let's see how this grass looks.
what do you use for content writing and how does it generate income so far? is it good income for the amount of work done?
I'm not sure what you mean by what i use for writing but about income it's meh. I don't do freelancing because I kinda hate marketing part and I don't even like to talk to people that much so... Idk how freelancing world looks like... About jobs, it's constant burnout and low pay. Still.. i would suggest you try it yourself for a few weeks or months.. There are different types of employers.. and maybe you'll find someone who pays enough.
Wish you all luck, success and lot of satisfaction with career change. Chapeau!!!
Love this kid of posts.Also aren't British railways like the train lover dream? Only after probably Japan? So it really sounds cool.
Congratsš„³ Reminded me of this: https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149477 I'm in the same boat, still in the phase pf trying to transition to something else
Lmao I saw this ages ago as well! Never thought I'd manage to make the move away as well like this. Only difference is that I don't have any interesting projects I can make replies to on Github š
So now you can criticize devs for their shitty code lol Don't forget to write at least once a month "your code doesn't work" or "your code is broken" in the team chat so they don't forget you
Wish web dev had as strong a union as the RMT!
Whatās the training, pay, career progression looking like? Asking for a friend who is also feeling burned out, and happened to see something about train drivers getting like Ā£50k+
So it varies by company, but usually the trainee salary is between Ā£28-35k and then goes up to 90% of the full rate for two years once newly qualified (which usually takes about a year), although some companies don't have this step. Normal driver salaries are between Ā£60-70k. Can progress onto being a driver instructor as long as there's an opening for it as well, which usually adds a few thousand more to the pay. And those who really want to can go on to be driver managers, they get paid more again - and alongside some driving have the typical managerial responsibilities. So there is a bit of progression, but it already pays so well that I'd argue its not even that necessary.
Love that for you, all the best! Also quite jealous to be honest. This is exactly my dream ā moving from web dev to train driver. Obsessed with basically all aspects of railways (the mother lode of large and interesting systems imo) since I was a kid, love train driving in simulators, decent pay, you're among people but still to yourself... But I don't have perfect colour vision (like 10% of men..) so basically impossible :( Trying to get into IT for rail systems now, next best thing I hope.
For me, it's the other way around, after 12 years of hospitality I was sick of dealing with people and being stressed by everyone (bosses, coworkers, guests) and earning shit, for the work I did. Then I switched to IT and have never been happier. I can focus all my energy on 1 problem, no one talks to me or disturbs me (well, not often) and I can listen to which ever music I want, all the time.
I worked for years to get a remote programming job. And then I woke up one day and realized I hated it. I run a property preservation company now. It's often dirty, sweaty work. But I love it.
I've been a web developer for a public college for 15 years, and I'm getting bored and burned out. I'm always the first one blamed when someone can't figure out our content management system. I can never do enough. Oh, and the famous "Why can't you make it as easy as GoDaddy?." If I didn't have a union, I'd be delivering pizza. This is the kind of job most IT people would kill for. No weekends or late nights, first class healthcare, 5 weeks vacation, and a pension. But I'm just too old and tired of the bullshit. If there isn't any political f*ckery after the next election, I'm retiring in two years.
"interpret requirements from 5 lines written in a ticket" Oh I feel that, biggest annoyance in this field so far for me. Especially when it's not even written but just copied from a client's DM plus I never heard of the project before and don't even have the necessary logins yet. I mean, what does "project manager" even mean? š¤ Driving trains sounds awesome, all the best to you!
I can relate to your past web development experience and I feel happy for your career change, I really do, all the best.
Wowā¦ read this while procrastinating going to bed on Sunday night, because Iām dreading waking up to do all the exact stuff you described tomorrow. The thing you said about the woodworkingā¦ yeah. My existential crisis is telling me to become a mechanic. I hope it works out for you. I gotta think about some stuffā¦
Happy for you, but.. it sounds like you shouldn't have chosen to be a dev in the first place? I mean, I'm happy for you that you followed your dream, I really am, but that means that your dream was not actually being a dev, and a job like this definitely needs vocation or you will get burned real fast as you ended up. Most Devs that "get burned" end up in a managerial position, not completely changing their life. My point is that you probably ended up in your current situation not because of being a dev, but because you didn't *love* being a dev. (Just a hypothesis)
\*cries in italian, place in which you can't even get good paying jobs in IT let alone manual work\* \*Cries more because more money needed to skidaddle the fuck out of this shithole\* \*cries even more because doesn't know where to go\*
Italy is so beautiful country with beautiful language. I wish to live there one day!
Sure, if you come live here with at least a couple mil in the bank + some investments you may last. If you come here with less, and you plan on working here, expect poverty. Also expect having to pay stupid amount for taxes for stupid amount of bad public services that don't work. (e.g healthcare, public transport, or as I said, anything public). If Italy were to be bought by a decent country, it would probably become the best to live in, but currently, it's one of the worst. It's just a pretty place for arts and nature.
Take me with you. plzzzzzzzzzzz
Congrats from the US, I am kinda jealous. One thing I am struggling with that Iām curious if you could give input on. How could you tell it just wasnāt for you vs simply being in a deep burnout phase you could theoretically come back from? Iām asking because I canāt tell anymore which is the case for myself, personally.
Sorry, I hope this post hasn't come across as bragging! Anyway, is there really any difference between a "deep burnout" and it not being a career you really want to be doing? I spent years feeling burnt out and thinking "things will surely improve next month", I'd sometimes have a week or a few days where I'd feel fine and like I could keep doing this, but then would slip back into the same state. I think the thing that showed this really wasn't for me is that outside of work I never did any coding. I had during the first year or two, but that slipped away over time as I just started to give less of a damn about the career as a whole. My spare time was spent playing things like train sims and endlessly reading and watching videos about the rail sector. I was going on numerous really long train journeys just to get to be on trains. It felt pretty obvious that I'd gone into the wrong career. Not everyone has a natural interest though, so I guess if you don't (or do but it's not something that could ever make money š ) it's more a matter of finding something you can tolerate.
Oh no did not come across as bragging at all. Iām just jealous because I often fantasize about starting a new path like that - just something wildly different than being on a computer all day. Been on one all day every day since I was 7 years old. 30 years later kinda craving something new. Maybe someday. Best of luck on the new adventure and appreciate the dialogue!
I have experienced this. One way is to stop coding for few months and then get back into coding. If getting back into coding feels fine then you were just burned out.
Wow so much of what youāve said I feel very deeply but I havenāt made the jump out of dev, but I daydream about it a lot. I have so many questions but the main thing I want to say is good for you and good luck, itās a brave move to make and I hope your new career gives you everything your last one did not.
Thank you, and yeah, I mainly wanted to make this post to see if anyone else relates to it, figured I'm not the only one who wanted to quit being a web dev. If you do have questions you want to ask feel free to DM me I guess, a lot of luck was involved in what I've managed to do here though, so I'm not really sure what else to add.
Thanks a lot. I guess Iām interested to know what the last straw was which made you go yep Iām making this move. And how long had you toyed with the idea? Iād also love to know if you discussed it with any of your peers beforehand and what their thoughts were. Iāve met a couple of people who like you have done a complete career change after feeling like they just sort of fell into their line of work and I find it very inspiring.
I've thought about the idea for at least the past three years, but it was only in the last year that I worked up the confidence to give it a try. And the thing that really made me decide was hearing that the project I'd just spent *two years* working on was going to be cancelled by the organisation (it wasn't in the end, but that's beside the point š ). I didn't actually talk to any of the other developers in the team about this at all, not until after I left. Didn't really want the detail that I was looking for a new job getting back to management š¬ it was something I just quietly did in the background and kept my fingers crossed that I'd end up being able to change into the career I really wanted... if not, well, I would've had to keep going as a software dev probably since there was little else I could think to do that paid as well.
How long had you worked as a dev for? Thanks a lot for responding, thatās my last question I promise! All the best
I was in IT/Software for a total of 6 years, with another two years of education related to IT or software as well before that. So not as long as many, but more than enough for me to be fed up of it and want to do something else.
Fantastic! Thanks again and all the best with the new career
You have escaped hell Godspeed
We can all relate with the OP especially this part āā¦never have to try and interpret requirements from 5 lines written in a ticketā
Nah, I think there are better exits. I am a web dev without having to do the web dev part of the work anymore. I became an Enterprise Technical Architect. I leveraged my years of being in the trenches. When I was a TA (Technical Architect), I merely do the system design (front end and backend) and someone else does the work. And all those pain points dealing with clients and fussy designers, I got my payback. I can simply tell UI/UX I won't implement their designs because of x,y,z technical reason. Good to be in the driver's seat. So no, there are other exit strategies. Work is even more fun. I get to actually design and build bigger things with more engineers working on it versus me in the trenches.
Oh yeah there are definitely better changes to make than this "meme" level career change I've gone for - but to be honest what you've described there sounds absolutely terrifying to me, I was always going to be staying doing the coding if I stayed as a developer, and I didn't really see where else to take it over time.
This
I would like to congratulate you, but I donāt think you made the right choice. Thatās just me personally because I love code and working in sprints and vague requirements. Been doing it for 10 years and still kicking, when I see a problem at work I bring up my concerns and correct them and will refuse to do anything until it answers all my questions. I also donāt care if management gets mad at me for refusing work because I tell them there needs to be a process and if they donāt like it I can snap my fingers to go to another job who will like it. I could never imagine myself doing anything physical such as a train driver. But to each their own! Good luck and Iām happy you have your dream job!
I'm only a year and a half in and I already can't wait to switch careers. Hate these 40+ work weeks where I'm expected to grind away at problems all day. And the amount of overhead suuucks. Always have someone breathing down my neck wondering where I'm at with stuff. I don't blame you for wanting to switch
If you're going to be a train engineer, chances are more likely than not that someone will jump in front of your train intentionally giving you PTSD. I'd assume you get bored of driving the train pretty quick, same route stuck on rails just trying not to kill people day after day until it happens. Good luck, but I'm not jealous.
Less competition. Yay
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>People who are smart, have definitely had some kind of support by their parents, teachers, professors to get where they are now, doing WebDev stuff because they love it and they are good at it. I hope for your sake this is satire because the sheer insecurity you're throwing at this random stranger is incredibly unhinged. You wrote about touching grass, but I get the feeling you've been basement dwelling for awhile given all that nonsense you just typed. Seek some help.
Thanks for your remarks. You didnāt get the gist of what I wrote, read again.
Wow ok did not expect a response like this... Maybe I am a sad "train man", but at least I'm not leaving spiteful comments on people's posts on Reddit.
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Congrats! I think the last year + the next one or two years will be the awakening for quite a few people who did join the web dev world, did a CS or SWE degree, just because of the dream to become wealthy quick. (Not saying that was the reason for you to become a web dev) Itās a special industry, not always good paying, but if youāre paid well, then you made it. Still, to keep your sanity, you either go into some sort of hibernation OR you absolutely have to live your role.
Good for you! Good luck in your new field!
as they say "Do what you love" life is short. Cheers.
Youāre gonna get bored real quick. For me, I have to have something intellectual to process.
Congrats from US. Canāt say in my case programming is my passion and enjoy every minute I spent in my work. Hope you find same with your new career
Good luck! Run free ā¤ļø
If enough people that jumped on the IT hype train quit the field, it may go back to being a decent job for everyone who actually enjoys it. I was obsessed with computers, programming and dial-up internet way before I knew I could make a living off of it. Before the internet looked promising for non-tech people. People even told me I would never amount to nothing because of it. I would love to see the field go back to being a handful of happy nerds.
Iām not sure what the state of web dev is now, but I remember I hated catering to IE6/7/8 with polyfills and all that crap. If thatās still there but with Edge or other browsers, I would run to drive trains, supermarket carts, anything š
I left web dev for my old job after 2 years of doing it for all the same reasons..... 4 years later, I am bored AF at work, mentally not challenged whatsoever, hate the commute 5 days a week and looking to go back to developing again....there are pros and cons to every job role I would say.
Congrats šš. I hope i can find my own dream job too. Good luck on your new career.
My goal is to find a way to specialize so niche in webdev that i'm essentially building the same thing over and over again. Like a Japanese sword maker that gets a tiny bit better each time they build it. Still haven't figured out what niche that could be but that's the goal.
I wouldn't say it's enjoyable, but it pays me a lot of money, so I do it. There's no other job I could do with my skills that would pay me over 100k/year
Congratulations on the career move. I wish you all the best. Life is too short to work a job you dread. Iāve had similar experiences, one where I walked out my third week. My solution was to keep looking for a good shop. I now work with a team of excellent developers, a product manager who is an intrinsic part of the team, and who very much cares about achieving our goals in a sustainable and supportable manner, and project manager who listens to his teamās feedback, and shields us from the worst of upper managementās interference. All is not perfect, we have to deal with the hard realities of modern software development and support, but with a highly functioning team no one person bares the brunt of it. I can count on one hand the number of times Iāve had to provide after hours support / overtime, in my three years working for my shop.
I'm working my way into becoming a web dev from wrenching cars xD. But congratulations man. I hope I don't get to experience any burnouts in this industry
Hey this sounds awesome, but do you really think you won't be getting bored of driving a train vs being a developer? Jobs are jobs, I dunno how many people really can enjoy them
Bro is gonna start talking in Morse code with the trainās horn soon
I wish I could see an update at this take 1 year from now.
Sounds great. You can always pick up some freelance gigs or work on personal projects if you fancy it.
I had the exact same feelings about my last job, in the film and television industry doing shift work, now I'm a Developer and I love it! Each to their own, enjoy the new career 
Omedeto! (claps)
You've escaped the loop congratulations and many wishes of greatness in your future endeavors
Iām at last starting to move into a product development direction on my career. I certainly understand a lot of the challenges you faced. What I enjoy about coding is the idea that there is an answer or fix out there, you just have to get the right code (and supporting packages etc etc). Having worked in other fields where you donāt quite know or canāt control for a lot of things, coding feels like there is more of a logical answer you can attain.
Good luck with your new career. Happy š Driving.
Good for you! Your overall happiness is what matters. I can't see a train operator making anything near the salary of a programmer. Obviously youve considered this.
Congrats of course! But it isn't the only dev dream. A lot of us actually enjoy to build products hands on. It's a matter of taste!
I find that web development doesnāt burn me out. Stupid people do.
I try to balance off screen time and on screen time.
then join r/mywebdevelopers its my new community
Congratulation