My life got much better when I realized that I actually don't like "programming".
I like solving problems using programming languages, and like designing large systems with computers, but I don't actually enjoy the programming itself. Programming without the designing part just feels like data entry to me. There's nothing clever, or creative, or interesting about it.
For years I've dealt with severe burnout because I had been lying to myself and taking jobs that where I didn't really have to "think", and I had no fun doing it, leading to me feeling like I had really chosen the wrong career path and that I was stuck feeling bored for the rest of my life.
Once I realized that programming for the sake of programming isn't fun, I started putting my attention to jobs where I made it clear that I'm going to be involved in the design and decision-making process, and almost immediately I actually enjoyed working again, after many years of not.
I'm not saying this is universal, if you like writing Java for the sake of writing Java, don't let me take that away from you, it's just not something I enjoy. Figuring out what you actually enjoy doing is deceptively hard, but a worthwhile goal.
I was lucky (and blessed) that I also realized this early on.
I was an idealist, following best practices, learning the language to the dot until I stumbled upon a different enjoyment in work: mentoring, guiding, helping, cheering co-workers to be on the same page, same direction, and to eventually deliver the software/feature/product.
Once the clock hits 5.30PM, I checked out and ride my bike.
I had the opposite experience. I actually left the industry and then suffered a workplace injury in the new job(PTSD). Trust me when I say this, PTSD really messes you up. One of the biggest injuries was my brain's ability to logically reason.
So with lots of free time due to medical leave I got got back into coding. Picking it up after having not done it for some time was not too bad. After a while I was ready to start learning new stuff. As I got better at coding a lot of my PTSD symptoms started to subside. I had an easier time organizing my thoughts.
Eventually my PTSD symptoms subsided and I knew enough code to get a job writing code. So while yes, I have burned out on coding it was also the old friend that dug me out of the hole.
> My life got much better when I realized that I actually don't like "programming".
I think I'm the same.
I like programming when it's "free form" and I'm doing something creative, but dislike fighting with: obscure build system/dependency crap, under-documented APIs, complexity that makes something as simple as "append an element to a list" an entire exercise in understanding some obscure Design Pattern, and the general realization that most software written today is putting strings in databases* and finding "new" ways to do so.
I used to find new languages/framworks/libraries interesting and occasionally still do, but a lot feels like going in circles with dubious benefits.
Definitely you are tired my friend; I know exactly what you are talking about!
I find it extremely amusing and energy draining at the same time, when I see some projects that are unnecessarily over-engineered, when I could write a simple shell script that produces the __exact__ output, but it's deemed un-enterprise-y!
Same here, I stepped away from actual software writing as a career and moved into Product management and then later Project management, where I fit better. These kinds of roles give you a bigger picture view, and put you in the position to help prevent big planning or design mistakes from happening. Having an actual software-writing background also helps immensely since you need to interface with engineering daily and need to speak their language. Too bad the compensation is a faction of what it is in software development, but I happily made the tradeoff.
I write code as a hobby now, and am much more satisfied with that because I make all the decisions on my own personal projects.
I'm still very much in the "engineering" space, but I do a lot more stuff with the whiteboard, and even spend some time doing TLA+/Pluscal before writing any code.
I think I'd be a pretty bad manager, I'm flaky in a way that doesn't lend itself to that, but I think I'm ok at the more "architectey" roles.
I think 8hr/day is a bigger issue… I feel EXACTLY the same way as you but after 25-ish years in the industry I also realized that there is nothing I like enough to enjoy doing for 8hrs per day, 1920 hrs per year…
It's embarrassing how long it took me to realize that; for years I wondered why I enjoyed working on my personal projects but not my paid work, despite them being nominally the same thing, and eventually I realized it was because I made the decisions on my personal projects.
I find that making design decisions about the class/feature you’re writing or how data is going to flow through your little corner of the software scratches similar itch to “big picture” architecture. What sucks is standups, deadlines, constant having to give updates and being measured on output. Take all that away and programming is a _joy_
I had a similar-ish realisation recently when writing a business plan - having the ability to program felt like a massive advantage (for e.g. writing a dynamic cashflow forecast) but programming wasn't the main goal.
I like working in a language that I enjoy, that is expressive (I can think in it), and on projects that I started.
If it is a bad language, if I am fumbling through it, and I'm plowing through some one else's bad code, life is a slog.
There is possibly some middle ground, where a new language or environment is fun and educational. Just so you're on an acceptable learning curve, not burning out.
Just in case you haven't tried it - perhaps it might ignite the love to programming (if you want that).
Python made the programming fun to me again. Especially without the boilerplate code.
Try to ignore the community strong push to use typing everywhere and just write some clean small code and it feels amazing. Designs and ideas in simple implementations.
Isn't it the other way around? Java (in enterprise) is just exceptionally able to suck the fun out of programming? It's not even the fault of the language per se, it's just home to a lot of "best practices" that ultimately end with productivity coming to a grinding halt.
That's just a matter of personal taste. Using python makes me want to pull my hair out. However, I could write C# all day everyday.
A better way to put it would be find a language you like and are productive in, and get very good at it. Then it almost becomes second nature, you can almost forget about the programming itself and focus on the problem solving.
Honestly, I feel like I could recommend embedded programming if you like solving problems, especially if you can find a company working on a cost-, power- or size-limited device, where you actually need to do some low level optimization once in a while, or have to come up with some hack to use a peripheral for something it wasn't really designed for. Combine that with working in a small team with a flat hierarchy and you lose a lot of the red tape as well.
> My life got much better when I realized that I actually don't like "programming".
I like programming, but hate most things around it.
Under-documented code with odd patterns, no comments and bad discoverability, like the code doesn't want you to explore it and work with it, but you instead have to dig in a whole bunch to understand what you're looking at, while you're already juggling the problem domain in your head.
Same extends to working with projects themselves, like having a placeholder README, no ADRs, no information about why certain choices have been made, no investment into tooling or automated linting etc., especially if some things are expected to be done manually by the developers ("order the variables this way", "format the code this way", "you must manually create these N layers of abstraction to make the code consistent"), also things like having no examples of how to use some of the abstractions and if it's a front end project, no examples of the components in isolation, separate from where they're used in the main codebase, no gallery of sorts. Maybe things like manual deploys, or environments with no monitoring/APM/uptime alerting and other bits of tooling that are pretty much essential, no clear information about how things are run on the servers etc., where working feels like some form of archaeology and detective work.
Also things like bike shedding, yak shaving, cargo culting, taking practices as gospel (DRY/SOLID come to mind, though they have their place), infrastructure aspects like not having your local DB that's safe to break, slow compilation, flaky tests, bad tooling, outdated packages and dependencies. Throw in conflicts of interest and opinion that aren't managed well and you have a recipe for burnout, the kinds of situation where people are pretty much "against" you and what you're trying to do, e.g. holding up a release over unrelated, non-blocking concerns, or having drawn out discussions about how to write code, when it doesn't feel like you're working "together" to make things better for everyone. Even when there are disagreements, it's possible to get to that better place, but often time egos go unchecked, instead I actively try to be kind to others in code review etc. nowadays.
But honestly, a lot of working in the industry also sucks due to technical concerns. This might be a more personal example, but I was trying to write some load tests in K6 for a web API. The API uses STOMP on top of SockJS (using WebSockets when available). K6 has support for WebSockets, except there's two packages, one of which is experimental. I quickly realized that SockJS wouldn't work, so I had to get rid of it in the project (since IE doesn't need to be supported anyways), but even then I realized that STOMP isn't supported out of the box, in part due to the protocol never really taking off: https://stomp.github.io/ I could find an extension, but getting it working also proved to be a bit of work: https://github.com/walterwanderley/xk6-stomp What sucked in particular was not only not having that much documentation about how to manage multiple subscriptions at the same time, but also the fact that reads were blocking instead of Promise based, though that might be due to how everything integrates with K6, it's not like I can shoot off a background thread. Eventually I got some jank implementation working that's based on blocking until a short timeout (like 2 seconds) after which the next subscription is done and data from it read, but it feels like if the industry was a bit more coherent we'd have like 2-3 solutions for similar use cases all of which would work well, instead of the current disjointed mess. This also applies to everything from OSes, to back end languages, front end libraries/frameworks etc., though I guess the variety is needed even if painful, so the better ideas survive the test of time. Until someone does some CV driven development and adopts a technology that's not ready.
That said, a lot of those things can be made better, as long as you care enough (and hopefully are rewarded for making the work not miserable).
Work is named "work" for a reason. Its a lot not fun. I've been slinging code for 35 years. It pays the bills, sends my kids to college etc. Of course i'm burned out but I would be tired of anything after this long. Trick for me is to not to make work my purpose. Instead I bike, hike, make music, raise my kids, etc. I also don't work overtime or weekends even though almost everyone else on my team does. They will not make it for the long run like that.
> I also don't work overtime or weekends even though almost everyone else on my team does. They will not make it for the long run like that.
Not only will they not make it for long, but they're actually devaluing their own work. You're paid a salary for a standard work week. If you're working nights and weekends, you're giving away that portion of your work for free. I learned and appreciated this fact too late in my career.
IMO a business that can only function/succeed if employees give away their time for free is not a viable business and probably just shouldn't exist. Don't Do Crunch Time.
in addition to not doing overtime/weekends, when you're doing work during the day you should monotask as much as possible. just focus on one thing at a time, preferrable until you're done with it.
the cost of constantly shifting attention to multitask made everything seem frantic and you never got the sense to appreciate that a thing was 'done' because there was always ten other things cooking in the background.
you'll be surprised how much this doesn't kill your overall productivity while also preserving mental health. slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
I've been coding for 25 years in many jobs & many industries (although banking featured a bit tooooo much).
Our industry is volatile, and right now it feels like a 'micro' repeat of the dotcom bust, where even the very good devs are increasingly under an unreasonable amount of pressure (financially, finding work, or otherwise).
Agree - life outside work is v. important, but I think it's equally important to work in an industry which aligns with one's values, rather than just for the money etc. At the end of the day, every role will be difficult at times, but if you're behind the potential impact of the company, then that makes the challenge more tolerable
Yeah, it's probably a personality thing in large part. I find that the sense of my creative energy being wasted on something pointless disagrees with me so much that I'd rather do almost anything else (I actually find jobs to be a great source of inspiration in that way - ideas for better things to do keep springing to mind - although not great for productivity on the job).
I do think there are different types of "work" though, and the worse programming jobs have some of the worst combinations of attributes - inherently pointless but require intense mental effort.
> I'm seeing folks like you get laid off with the current climate.
Who cares? At this stage in my life (and a distant second my career too), if that's the kind of attitude your work demands of you, there's plenty of other validating things to do that also provide a living. And I always hear that people don't quit their jobs, they quit their bosses. But yeah, I would never fire someone for setting appropriate life/work boundaries and sticking to them.
I do worry about that and that's why the most important thing is to work for the right manager. Keep on their good side, make them feel like you're an asset even if not sprinting every sprint, and I've found that they'll go to bat for you at review time.
not at my workplace, people usually work 8 hours on average and that’s it. Find a better employer, they exist. Yes even ones that pay $200k+.
I realize not everyone is so fortunate. I had to start at some not so great companies in my career, but over time if you’re picky enough, you can find a great employer. I encourage everyone to know their worth. Don’t settle.
Disclaimer: nothing substantial, just a bit of trauma dump
I've been a developer for more than a decade. Body-shops. Founding engineer. Chief Technology Officer. After every job in my life I took 6 - 12 months off.
Usually my desire for programming comes back somewhere around the 5th month mark. I'm in such a 'holiday' now, and just passed the 12 month mark. I don't feel that desire coming back anymore.
I've been blessed to have a friend that had a gig where I can do some ETL and cover my monthly expenses, but whenever I start looking for new jobs, reading the ads, all those keywords, all those bullshit descriptions of what they expect, I'm starting to develop a physical repulsion.
I've done a couple of interviews, and the HR discussions and then the technical interviews have left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. I'm afraid I'll hiss in the next zoom call. And it's not even for not getting accepted, as I got an offer from all the talks. But the whole industry gives me a bad taste right now. Everything just feels futile and fluffed up. My last interview was for a hair & beauty appointment app start-up where they acted like they cure cancer.
I'd like to be my old self, but I'm afraid I might not get that part back. I took a look at 'regular' jobs and the idea of being a truck driver lit up something in me that programming hasn't in a very long time. Even being a shop clerk makes me dream more than wrangling code.
I realize this is childish, and that the grass is always greener on the other side. I know that there are challenges in every profession and that I have a comfortable home office and get paid a shit ton of money for what I do and this is better than 99% of the planet.
I just hope to be able to get back on track mentally and not feel like this.
I always suspected I had a doppelgänger but this proves it. Aside from the 6-12 breaks between each job I could have sworn this post was my own. I’m on the tail end of a sabbatical that is running far into overtime for the same reason - for the past year+ I’ve waited for the energy and desire to return as I expected it surely would.
But no. Nothing. Reading a job req still induces a wince. Reading the fluff from and about companies sends me recoiling. These things were never pleasant but they were tolerable. Now, the limbo bar has been set too low and it’s getting harder to compel my body to contort enough to slip under.
I’m pretty sure there is an eventual return somewhere ahead and the scariest thought is that I’ll get back and swirl back down to life as it was before. The past year+ becomes a puff of a memory. The good news (!) is that knowing you feel this way is critical knowledge. With that understanding we can rearrange our values and tackle the feeling constructively.
> But no. Nothing. Reading a job req still induces a wince. Reading the fluff from and about companies sends me recoiling. These things were never pleasant but they were tolerable. Now, the limbo bar has been set too low and it’s getting harder to compel my body to contort enough to slip under.
What infuriates me about this process is this experience.
For a time, I worked as a consultant doing cloud-related development, with many F500 companies (non-FAANG ones)
Generally, the staff on these projects were ok to mediocre in terms of skill. I KNOW I'm more competent than the median in those orgs at those companies, and yet if I apply for those exact jobs, my resume disappears into a black hole.
This isn't a testament to my skill, rather how poorly staffed major companies are. I don't mean "they don't know some nerd sniped trivia" either, I mean don't use version control, codebases full of dead commented code, hardcoded credentials, individuals with 0 troubleshooting ability or initiative, etc etc
After working for basically 25 years straight since high school, I’m really wanting to take an extended sabbatical from the software industry to do my own thing. I’m scared that the longer I stay out though, the harder it will be to reenter, because I already have the disgust you describe. My hope is that since I still love the actual technical work that I can eventually turn some little side project into a real product and carry that through for a while.
This is spooky similar to how things have been for me. Also 6-12 month breaks, also the itch to start doing something at about 6 month mark. I’m about to take another one of my breaks and too think this time will be different. I get paid an eye watering amount of money, and I don’t want it anyway. Instead of taking up truck driving (which will get old in a week), I’m thinking of taking up sailing.
> It doesn’t require the full engagement of your entire person, like psychotherapy or software engineering. A long career would be soul-destroying, for sure, but a day of driving can be ploughed through much more easily by physical brute force than can a day of software engineering.
I think this post comes across as unpleasant because it is so dismissive of other peoples struggles. If you just said, yeah software engineering isn't for me, that's one thing. But you're saying software engineering is objectively the most difficult, soul-destroying, draining job, and other people have it easier in this respect. Im sorry but that's just objectively not true.
I would push you to consider that, maybe, something else is going on for you individually, rather than write off the entire endeavor due to an objective analysis. I worked for years at a cancer center and while there were many times that the work was dry, lonely, alienating, at the end of the day I still felt I was doing something good for the world and that felt really good.
There's a lot of ways to apply software, and, maybe more to the point, a lot of ways to integrate it into your life with balance. What about part-time work, so you have more space for other parts of your life you find satisfying? You may find that, with more balance, you enjoy what the work does have to offer, such as being part of a team, being needed, being well-compensated, using your whole intellect, etc.
Software and more broadly IT are soul crushing jobs though, practitioners seem to get upset when that's pointed out but it's still true. Very few other jobs require the always on mentality that comes with IT work. Other folks typically show up, do their jobs, and leave. Very few folks in software/IT are able to have that type of relationship with their work. Maybe it isn't personally draining for you, but it is a very mentally taxing career path overall. This seems to get lost in the broader perspective because a lot of IT practitioners like this type of lifestyle, it doesn't change the fact that it's demanding and I think we can do better in regards to recognizing that as an industry. This also doesn't come across as dismissive to me either, every job has its inherent challenges and we should take time to reflect and recognize the ones present in our own careers.
It is very demanding and that needs to be said, but I don't like positioning it as more demanding than other careers. People do a lot more for a lot less money. And people do a lot more for the same amount of money. Every individual should decide what trade off is best for them, but if someone enjoys programming and are good at it, it could potentially be better that they find a way to balance it in their lives rather than writing it off completely.
> Other folks typically show up, do their jobs, and leave.
I don’t really buy this. When I was in kitchens, I used to agonize over the injustices done by the more psychopathic coworkers/bosses, not to mention the nightmares like you see in some episodes of The Bear. I would also often think about how to improve some situation going on, like kitchen/station layout, workflows, inventory, etc.
My wife works in psych and often ruminates on her patients, trying to figure out some thing about them long after she’s done seeing them for the day. And also the same story as me with psychopathic bosses.
I’m sure there are just people who genuinely care and then people that don’t give a fuck in any given field. I know I’ve run into plenty of both all across society.
I will agree that there is a unique aspect to the mental distress caused by industry software work though, although I don’t want to spill the ink required to elaborate on that here.
> I would push you to consider that, maybe, something else is going on for you individually, rather than write off the entire endeavor due to an objective analysis. I worked for years at a cancer center and while there were many times that the work was dry, lonely, alienating, at the end of the day I still felt I was doing something good for the world and that felt really good.
The difference being that the majority of software jobs are not doing anything remotely good for the world, or if you are, you are a infinitesimally small part of it to where you couldn't possibly derive this same rewarding feeling. I would push you to consider that maybe, your situation is one of privilege that people in the OP's spot are not often in.
> There's a lot of ways to apply software, and, maybe more to the point, a lot of ways to integrate it into your life with balance. What about part-time work, so you have more space for other parts of your life you find satisfying? You may find that, with more balance, you enjoy what the work does have to offer, such as being part of a team, being needed, being well-compensated, using your whole intellect, etc.
Again, not everyone is afforded an extraordinary privilege of just arbitrarily deciding to work part time. I certainly couldn't. If I could, burnout would be less of an existential risk. It's like telling someone with clinical depression "have you tried cheering up?"
> The majority of software jobs are not doing anything remotely good for the world
Firstly, this isn't true except in the narrowest sense where only people working on cancer are doing anything good for the world. Contributing to the economy in a non-destructive non-evil way is still good, people need goods and services to live a good life and almost every part of the economy plays some positive role in that.
Secondly, my point is that one could find a non-sexy job in tech at a hospital, or in an academic institution, that don't necessarily pay top FAANG salary but, if fulfillment is more important (as it seems to be for the OP), this would be a good option.
> Not everyone is afforded an extraordinary privilege of just arbitrarily deciding to work part time.
Of course that's true, but I was directing my comment at OP, who said in the blog post that "I quit my last contracting gig in August with £40k in debt, no other income, and only a business idea (it failed). It was still the right decision."
It certainly wasn't meant to be dismissive, can see how it would come across like that though. I kind of rushed this post out, and really should have stopped to think more about what I wanted to say and how - wasn't expecting it to get on the front page. I don't even think "burnout" is the right topic for it, it probably just seemed like the closest title that would get some interest.
I think very few software engineering jobs are set up to be enjoyable (or even tolerable) to a large fraction of the people who are drawn to such jobs.
I'm self taught[0]. I was drawn to computers at an early age, and I was hacking little projects together in a couple of different languages by the time I was in middle school. This was a very solitary activity for a very introverted boy, and I loved it. I still love it. Nothing compares to sitting down at a computer and just letting the logic flow through me unimpeded and onto the screen.
My job is not like that. I have 2 - 5 meetings a day. I am constantly coordinating and brainstorming and just plain dealing with other people. That is more draining than the coding. Sometimes I have a decent chunk of time at the end of the day, but I can't even bring myself to code because I am so drained by all of the non-coding stuff I had to do earlier in the day.
I love my job. I do impactful work for an impactful company that I think is doing actual good in the world. I work on an interesting project, and they pay and treat me well. But in my heart of hearts what I really want to be is not a software engineer but instead some kind of self-directed code hermit.
[0] By which I mean I learned from books and examples and experimentation. I did eventually get a computer science degree also, but I had been coding for years before I took my first class in it.
So far, from the majority of comments here, yours included, I have concluded that we somehow got tricked to "upgrade" our hobby to a career, with one major cost: sacrificing our creative freedoms that companies demand us to give up on in place of daily meetings.
Getting paid for doing something you love (or at least like when it comes to work tasks) is far better than having to spend 40 hours a week doing something you hate (in what is likely a much lower paid job), and then still getting home with no energy left to do that thing you love for maybe 1 hour.
Yeah this sounds a lot like me. I find it hard to imagine what kind of personality _could_ tolerate a software job. Maybe some people are more amenable to accepting the company's mission as part of their identity, and can therefore find the inherent satisfaction of doing a good job. But yeah, I always found the meetings and coordination aspect to be quite taxing.
I have known a lot of people at work who don't really care about computers at all. (Not at my current job, more at previous jobs.) They don't go home and do more computer stuff for fun. They don't geek out over the new things coming in C++23 or get nerd sniped by computer science problems. If you ask them why they became a software engineer, they'll say it's because the pay is good.
A lot of us are just drawn to computers and couldn't imagine not tinkering with them constantly, but for some people this is just, like, an office job. No different from being an accountant or an insurance claims adjuster or something.
This is where you see the injustices of life my friend...some people desperately want to get a job like this because technology is their passion and others change them like shirts because they have the work experience but it's not their great love...they just happen to know how to interview and get hired! And here's the sad thing for me; these people are actually unhappy because they're not doing something they love; they're just doing it for the money, when they could be doing something else that was their great passion. Can you imagine how many well-hidden unknown `Picasso`s, `Mozart`s, and `Meryl Streep`s are out there unbeknownst to us?! It drives me crazy!
One can also go through the phase of programming being the most fun hobby, getting into a career related to it, and phase out programming as a hobby.
It was one of the most fun hobbies I had earlier in life, now after 20+ years of career, and even longer from starting to program, it's just not that fun anymore.
I still tinker with it in fun ways I could never try as a career, like electronics projects with microcontrollers, but since my free time and energy dwindled with age I allocate my hobbies' time to other more personally fulfilling endeavours than keeping up with languages' updates, compsci problems, etc. It's just not that interesting anymore.
I stumbled upon this career, at the time I never even considered or had known it was a very well paid one so I've been extremely lucky for that but I don't hold that much more interest in it as a hobby, for that I believe the time has passed. It's now, to me, a very well paid office job.
> One can also go through the phase of programming being the most fun hobby, getting into a career related to it, and phase out programming as a hobby.
Yeah this is my path.
I'd guess 50% of the code I've ever written was from when I was a hobbyist for many years, and a large portion of the "general" software skills I've gained are from that as well.
I feel this very deeply. At the same time, I feel shame for feeling this way. I have a very high paying job, excellent flexibility, and I work from home. It doesn't get much better. Except that when I sit down at the computer, the actual work and meetings to talk about the work are unbelievably draining.
The shame is because I know others would love to be in my position and there is an almost endless list of jobs that are worse than this, but it's brutal sometimes. I workout daily and spend the vast majority of my time away from the keyboard, outside.
The worst part is, it's not just a matter of embrace the suck and push on. In a physical labor job, you can just command the body to move and push through it. In this line of work, you don't really have that option. You can't just command the brain to solve difficult problems and design complex systems.
Yeah, I think there's this idea of programming as something you 1) know how to do and then 2) can just sit at a computer and do some typing, and it happens. It's hard for outsiders to understand just how dependent it is on being engaged and in a position to direct your full mental attention to abstract problems for long periods.
I think I’ve found the remedy to my experience of burnout.
I burnt out hard last year and earlier this year (frontend dev). Mental exhaustion, dissatisfaction with work and colleagues, and especially the boss at the time.
I made several major changes to fix this.
- Dropped to 32 hours in my contract (with pay cut)
- Requested to move teams (request fulfilled)
- Deep dived into my weak areas that were causing work stress
- A short holiday
Now I’m happy as can be. Sure I earn 20% less now, but it’s just money. I now have a 50% longer weekend (2 days -> 3 days) AND a 20% shorter work week (5 days -> 4 days)
This is the best move I have ever made.
Working 5 days a week is a grind, no matter which way you slice the pie. It’s a marathon that never ends. I think it’s okay for most jobs, but in dev jobs you can’t be on autopilot. So often I’m solving bugs that haven’t been seen before.
A 4 day week doesn’t seem much different on the surface, but it’s a major change. It no longer feels like a marathon. I actually get more work done comparatively, as I’m more focused and less stressed.
Furthermore, I’ve stopped doing projects that relate to my normal stack in my spare time.
In my ample spare time, I deep dive C programming and graphics.
Meaningful jobs do exist and more can be created. You are a probably high-paid, skilled professional and, contrary to popular belief, you do have agency.
Quit your job and start doing something meaningful. Start a company or join one that makes a difference.
I think for me at least, the difference between "programming for fun/own projects" and "programming for work" goes deeper than the difference between say a company with neutral/bad values and a company you might be passionate about mission-wise. At the end of the day, as the software guy, your job still consists of:
1) taking instructions from someone else on exactly what to build, and how (choice of framework etc)
2) working backwards from someone else's code to figure out what they were thinking and how to modify it to the requirements/add a new feature/whatever
I got into programming because it was a great form of self-expression. I've had some great jobs that related to my interests, e.g. adding variants to Chess.com, but at the end of the day that was still someone else's project and I was just the guy they were getting to build it for them. The inherent satisfaction wasn't there. YMMV though obviously, but I like to use an art analogy: if you're a painter, you'll always be frustrated and demotivated painting portraits of people's pets -- even if it's for charity, or you like the person, or whatever.
Another way personal projects are different is the fact that there's not usually someone depending on you- whether that's in the form of timelines, API stability, tech choice, etc.
I'm working on a large breaking change to a personal codebase right now, and its taken almost 3 years of procrastination, lazy research when I feel like it, and the API changing and changing again due to rewrites. I'd like to finish by 2025, but if I don't, nothing happens!
The whole thing has felt fun due to the lack of pressure and just... not working on it when I feel like doing something else.
Very different from work projects, even the interesting ones with great bosses and teammates.
1/ SWE jobs where you have some agency on what to build and the tooling choice do exist. Try working as an employee for an engineer-driven company.
2/ that can be rewarding. I have found nuggets of genius in other people's code. Being able to think like someone else is a valuable intellectual exercise.
On self-expression: the most highly trained musicians at the best orchestras spend their time refining the interpretation of music they didn't write. The more constraints are written into the sheet music, the more creative you have to get.
I'm not saying your perspective is wrong. I'm just saying someone could have your job and come to completely different conclusions.
Maybe you have to change your perspective or find an occupation which matches your perspective on life and work.
Or you could keep your job and rant on your blog from time to time if that's what you need. Ranting is sometimes necessary for mental hygiene.
Out of curiosity: What exactly kept you from working on a pet project instead of adding variants to Chess.com? Fear of failure? Fear of rejection from your audience? Something else entirely? Sometimes a little courage is all it takes to bring more happiness into your life.
> [highly trained musicians in orchestras spend all their time playing pieces they didn't write]
That's an interesting point, but if you got into programming via working on your own projects, the musical analogy is "I loved play jazz saxophone with my cool cats, but every paid gig I get just wants me to play note-for-note Duke Ellington transcriptions." The essence of jazz is improv, but playing classical music is more about playing/experiencing beautiful music which I am probably lack the capacity to write myself. (Not saying classical is better than jazz or vice-versa, you just go into them for very different reasons.)
But the analogy is kind of interesting, since there might be jobs for which the outcome (e.g. beautiful music) is so compelling that I will happily take their directions. I got in software to do jazz, and would be willing to do pre-scripted beauty, but unfortunately, most software jobs are not either of those.
> > Quit your job and start doing something meaningful
I think when people say that they forgive that unless you are calling the shots over the direction of the work of a bunch of people, then you are not really moving anything, even at the microlevel you need to be at the helm of a group of 5-6 people to move things at a speed that is not as depresingly slow as watching paint dry.
It's not that easy because quitting your job might mean less burnout but also mean that you'll find yourslef alone without any team and most importantly renouncing your ability to call the shots or influencing the direction of the work in which the team is heading, very quickly you can go from burnout to irrelevance.
At that point the only things you can do in order not to feel like a suck are the things that everybody else is doing alone and hence kinda everybody is doing at the same speed such as learning a new language or becoming stronger at the gym or learning to surf but nobody would be paying you to do that.
The problem with programmers is that the mind works non-stop while the body is completely still, which goes against its nature, in all respects. When the body is tired, at most a week of rest it recovers nicely and is full of energy! This unfortunately does not apply to the mind, I have tried it and unfortunately I suffer from long-term mental burnout. If I could find another job that wasn't so mentally demanding and easy to do, then yes I would quit this field yesterday!
I've often thought we're doing something fundamentally wrong by treating programming like any other office job, or even like a "production" type job like manufacturing. It's of course nothing like that - as you say, the mind doesn't have the same recharging characteristics as the body. I get the feeling people maybe compensate for it by having a lot of downtime in the day where they're kind of pretending to work, but I would find that maddening. I'm either working or I'm not, in which case I want to be free to do what I want without someone looking over my shoulder.
I wholeheartedly agree with you, especially on the shoulder part.
The reason I regretted dealing with programming from a professional standpoint is that I have realized I like it more as a hobby, not as a profession!
When it's your hobby, no one is telling you what to do, whether you are doing something wrong or not, nor to follow the latest trend with <X> framework or this new <Z> programming language; quite frankly, you simply don't care what others say to you, because you have found your rhythm, your pace if you will, with the tech stack of your choice; you know, the one that clicked with you immediately!
This is my personal experience up until I switch my hobby to professional career; that's when it went downhill and have stopped loving it ever since...I feel trapped, like millions of others than cannot escape this category.
Yea, I got into programming because I love Lone Wolf Programming. Programming as part of a team is a completely different endeavor and liking one doesn't necessarily mean you'll like the other.
Lone Wolf Programming...I love that! LOL :D For some reason I was thinking of it more as "My Hermit Life" type of Programming, but yours is more accurate!
Come on. The majority of programming work isn't particularly mentally demanding, at least not any more so than other professional office jobs. It's not like lawyers or mechanical engineers have it any easier.
When your boss would like you to be a DevOps and a full-stack developer, while following all the latest trends, their ins and outs, the countless JS / TS frameworks out there, we can have a chat on who's having it worse or easier than the other.
Some HN users have a really skewed sense of how software development works in most of the industry. Only a small minority of jobs involve full-stack web development with JS / TS frameworks. If you want a slower pace of change then go get a job writing embedded missile avionics software for Raytheon or something. This is a serious suggestion, I'm not being sarcastic. Jobs like that are a good option for a lot of developers.
Thank you for the suggestion, but I doubt I would work as a foreigner for a US defense contractor company that produces military weapons; that's the last thing I would want to do.
When I was younger, I always had 6 months of living expenses in the bank, a cheap life style, and a willingness to work (and a lot of experience of) menial jobs.
That meant that going in to work every day was a choice, not an obligation. More than once, I quit a job and took a break.
These days, with mortgage, kids etc, I still maintain the escape hatch.
Good analogy presented here, except some situations can be far worse - what he's describing is best case scenario. You can very easily end up in toxic teams/situations or with a toxic boss that makes every day miserable for absolutely no reason. Plus all that other stuff.
Burnout is real and if I get a whiff for it I immediately seek other options. Having experienced it before, it took about 6 months to recover. There are a lot of warning signs I had ignored when it happened.
Unlike the author, I don't find any particular joy in programming for the sake of it. It is difficult though, sometimes you can have an extraordinarily complex task that requires a flash of inspiration to solve. The kind of rumination that leads to these flashes typically comes to me in non-working hours, so I feel like I am never "off." You can't just force that kind of thing. If you're burnt out, that dynamic is even worse.
I like my job (I think..) and am on my third burnout. There's no worse feeling than being barely able to muster pinky finger strength equivalent brain processing power over an 8 hour working day, on high viz projects with tight time lines and daily stand up reporting on progress. Today I literally noped to bed with the laptop, looked at the problem a few times and concluded it can wait until Monday.
Yeah, true. I learnt to avoid those pretty quickly thanks to my fairly disagreeable and risk-tolerant nature. Still had some not very good experiences though.
> That is what professional programming is like. You don’t care about the goal to begin with, it doesn’t have any noticeable effect on the world once each Jira ticket moves over to the Done column, and you don’t have any ownership over the finished product. You just wait for the next Jira ticket.
Sure, there are jobs like this, but it's super weird to claim that all programming jobs are like this.
Just.. don't work those jobs! Find real jobs at real companies making real products for real people. Don't stay at a job where all your work ends up in a black hole of nothingness until you burn out. The burnout means you quit too late.
I'm not saying it's easy to find programming jobs that cure cancer, fix climate change or cause world peace, but it's really not that hard to find programming jobs where what you make is used by real people and if you make the thing you make better, these real people will tell you that they're happy that it's now better (and, immediately after, what else needs fixing). This can be all the way from super challenging computer sciency shit to line-of-business CRUD app coding at a small shop in a mid size provincial town for regional customers. It exists everywhere.
ps. Personal context: Articles like these mildly offend me because I run a company and we try very hard to make everybody's time at the company worth their while. The suggestion that business owners like me do not exist hits hard. In fact, we are many. There's plenty bosses and entrepreneurs and managers out there who realize that the more motivated and involved and happy team members are, the better their work will be. Also being the boss of stressed out burned-out programmers sounds like hell to me. I'd much rather run a team of enthusiastic self-starters! Incentives are, actually, pretty aligned (happy people = great results) and companies where they're not are just, in my humble opinion, badly run companies. Don't work there.
To be honest I've just never really liked programming for work, and have felt kind of trapped in it as my only source of good money for a few years. So there's probably some bitterness there that I don't mean to offend anyone with. Even at what on paper seemed to be a great job - fully remote, annual retreats, great teammates, etc - I just couldn't resist the desire to work on something that was actually mine, in some fundamental way. So maybe "has no effect on the world" isn't the right way to put it - but that's how it feels. I guess it's in the sense of, if it wasn't me doing it, it would get done anyway, or something. And at all the companies I've worked at at least, my job as a programmer has been totally interchangeable with other people. I think my main skill as a programmer is writing really clear, solid code - line managers/clients have said this so it's not just my own bias - and you get a little kick of dopamine whenever you check some code in and someone goes "great!". But then they go "OK, now do that again, forever". The Jira tickets never end. You never get a big payout. That's been my experience anyway. Maybe having equity would significantly change the calculus.
This holds for psychotherapists too. Quit being a psychotherapist and people will find another psychotherapist.
If this here is really how you feel then IMO your article is misrepresenting things. Feeling like you want to work on something that is your own makes a lot more sense to me than suggesting that every programming job out there doesn't affect anybody anywhere ever. I mean, I recognize this one completely - it's why I started my own business in the first place!
Thanks for the comments. I wasn't expecting this to get on the front page (although that is why I posted it, obviously) and kind of wish I'd spent more time thinking about what I actually wanted to say first. If I'm 100% honest I was mostly trying to get clicks, which is always a bad motivation and I am generally deliberate about this kind of thing, sorry about that... I don't actually feel bitter, or particularly burnt out, with software specifically, it just feels like it's not the career for me at the moment. The general point about it often being misunderstood is something I've wanted to articulate at various times though.
I agree with the effortfulness that he writes about here. Thinking involves an effort and concentration, that we tend to avoid if not necessary and use shortcuts. I started out enjoying coding a lot and enjoying the learning process that required the hard thinking.
For me, about a decade ago, it was going from working on a Winforms app to rewriting it to a web app. We went from about 4 layers to about 6 layers including a .net web api and javascript. Instead of creating business logic classes, most of the work went into plumbing the layers. Instead of being fairly simple, the UI became a slog to get right, and there were constant distractions of code design that looked sloppy in the new layers. Also I think the ASD (or is it ADHD) made it harder to overlook those messy layers. I've never had much patience for the boring stuff and those mental distractions made it harder to persevere through rewriting it.
These days I enjoy hobby coding in python and go, but I find it hard to imagine going back to it as a job.
Haha, that's actually something I've been doing for years as well. Had jaw issues from underdevelopment and premolar extractions since 2011. Only discovered that it was a known thing and started getting treatment in 2023 though.
I grew up as an introvert who liked solving puzzles and problems, so I gravitated towards computer programming. I retired a few years ago after a career of 30 years with seven different companies. I still have a personal project (a data management system) that I think about often and write code for new features.
Over my career, I had jobs that were interesting and I looked forward to each day (well...most days). I also had some that were soul crushing and I dreaded.
Looking back, I realized that the ones where I felt I was in control of my work product were the most fulfilling. I got to decide what to work on and how much effort and time to spend on each task. I wanted the product to succeed in the marketplace and I gave it my best effort.
The jobs where it didn't feel like my ideas were valued or my work appreciated were the worst. Burnout happened very quickly and I moved on.
Interestingly, the ones that I controlled turned out to also be the most profitable for the companies.
This says to me these people are working on projects that are not challenging/interesting enough with people who don't respect their intellect. That's a solvable problem.
Anecdote... I function as a product manager, and I have a lot of fun with the developers I work with (and have a lot of respect for), and they enjoy working with me. I come to them with complex, interesting problems and my framework for potential solutions, and we talk through whether they think it's the right direction and, if so, what I've missed... or they propose alternatives. It's like a chess game where we can both win.
I hope the OP and anyone feeling this way tries working with other projects and people.
That has certainly been a major aspect of it in the past - feeling like I don't have enough autonomy to decide on the best approaches etc - but I think now I probably have too much of a high-level "what are we actually doing here?" kind of uninterestedness for even that to make it work.
Maybe if we could go right to the bottom and start getting everyone to be a bit more computer literate, so the software didn't have to be so complicated, or something... I don't know.
It's hard for me as a software developer to understand how soul-destroying it is to work for someone else in this industry.
I have worked as a developer for someone else's company since college, for 15 years now, and I don't know how else to describe it other than I like what I do and find it fun and stimulating.
I don't think it's strictly the profession. I think either the person doesn't really like it as much as they think they do, or they work for a company that pushes them too hard and doesn't treat them well.
I guess that's obvious, but in my experience at least it doesn't have to be that way.
I love how out there this guy seems and kudos to his courage for sharing his thoughts and feelings and being able to go and do something to the beat of his own drum.
> It’s hard to explain to people who aren’t programmers just how soul-destroying it is to work for someone else in this industry. Maddeningly hard, in fact.
It's hard for me to understand this _as a programmer_. I've been through burnouts and every single time it's been a matter of me pushing myself too hard, the external pressure was never actually real.
From your blog post it sounds as if realistically you're 40k in debt due to jaw surgery which really has nothing to do with programming at all?
I dunno man, with the greatest of respect (I appreciate that this is a serious health issue for you) the blog comes across as if you like mushrooms a bit too much.
> My sense is that the constricting effect of modern narrow footwear inhibits proper tongue posture via this connection.
Seriously? 99% of people wear shoes, have a mouth and have no issues at all with... tongue posture? I don't even know what my tongue posture is.
No, there is actually a fascial connection that runs all the way from the tongue to the big toe I think. The idea is that tension or misconfiguration at one end of this connection could affect the other end. So in this case, maybe modern narrow footwear that causes the big toe to point inward has an effect on the tongue.
If you've ever tried walking long distances with even a slightly ill-fitting shoe, or carrying something of an awkward shape, you'll know the kind of thing I'm talking about - in order to function under load for long periods without incurring damage, everything kind of has to be coordinating perfectly. Maybe over months to years, especially in early development, confining the feet to an unnaturally-shaped space could have a measurable effect on oral posture.
Haha, yeah I can see why it would sound like that if you haven't experienced similar issues. I would disagree on 99% of people not having tongue posture issues though. If you look at the structure of a lot of modern people's faces, we have an "adenoid" face - narrow, long midface, lack of pronounced cheekbones and eye support. The hypothesis is that chewing is an essential part of proper jaw development, and modern soft diets don't make us do enough of it.
(The relationship with tongue posture is possibly two-way - lack of chewing and/or proper tongue posture causes the upper jaw to develop narrower, which eventually prevents the tongue from adopting its ideal position suctioned to the roof of the mouth. The tongue not being there causes further narrowing and downswing.)
Does burn out exist in other professions? I recall seeing something about doctors/lawyers.
I know (distantly) some folks in the medical profession and it sounds way worse than what we go through. Not trying to diminish the real stress that we go through in this industry. Wondering if we can learn something from other industries in a similar (or indeed more difficult) position.
Given that burnout is a physiological state of emotional|physical|mental|... exhaustion, yes, other professions experience burnout. However, which subtype of burnout is more prevalent in different career fields, or at different stages of life.
When someone says they are experiencing burnout, my first question is, what type of burnout is it? Have they broken down the problem yet?
Is it Overload? Their pace of work could be more sustainable, work/live commitments are imbalanced, or there is a mismatch in where they spend time vs. where they wish they were spending time?
Is it Under Challenged? Do they not feel stimulated by the work, are their abilities not being developed, or are they wasted in their current role? Are they more interested in what comes next?
Is it Neglect? They don't feel recognized for their efforts, they don't have a good mentor or sponsor, they give up on themselves when faced with challenges, or they abuse themselves through unhealthy habits (neglect can be self-neglect)?
Doctors can be exploited further because they're typically in far deeper. More medical debt, more education, more of their life has been given to the medical world. To leave that would be to throw it all away. Maybe they'd be happier that way anyway. On the flip side, they know they're making a genuine difference in people's lives. Doctors do incredibly important work, and if they just don't show up, people can die. If a programmer doesn't show up for work, In many cases, an ad tragically goes unclicked, or a feature doesn't get released for a few extra days.
There are absolutely more meaningful jobs for programmers, where they have more impact on the product, get to actually influence lives, or work with challenging and fulfilling technical problems. But most of them aren't doing that.
You know what? If you don't like your job I'll take it. Seriously that's what I wanted to do since I was a teenager. Now I spend my time counting other people's money. That's an even worse life.
Anyone in any profession can have burnout. Set money aside, set boundaries, have a life outside of work. It's not exclusive to computer programmers, and there's lots of worse burnout-inducing jobs that pay less.
Especially if you make them a consistent thing and start upping the distance over time and varying the routes.
It becomes incredibly enjoyable to just get out and fucking walk around, look at things, listen to music maybe, and explore a bit.
Something I’ve been looking to write for a while is some kind of thing that I can input a distance, my location, and have it plot unique and somewhat random loop routes. Ideally optimising for exploring novel areas of where I live, with some kind of “route tracking”.
Burnout is awful, but this post seems preachy and out of touch.
>It’s hard to explain to people who aren’t programmers just how soul-destroying it is to work for someone else in this industry. Maddeningly hard, in fact. Your profession involves hard mental work. You work at the limit of your creative, analytical and problem-solving abilities. You think and read outside of sessions to improve your craft. You bring your entire self to the task of healing someone’s trauma, figuring out what’s holding them back, or whatever. Now imagine it was all completely pointless.
What part of this doesn't apply to every other discipline? Plenty of people feel that everything they do is pointless. Plenty of people spend their entire mental effort at work.
The Hacker News crowd has a higher than average fraction of people who think they have to never turn off and always be doing computer science work even when not at work. That correlates strongly with burnout, but that's not a programming thing, that's a personality type. Go outside and get some fresh air. Every day. Stop staring at screens 24/7. That can't entirely prevent burnout but it helps a lot.
I think IT being exempt from overtime is part of the problem. Nurses for example see a direct increase in wage when they work extra, and many lawyers bill by the minute.
But I think the biggest thing is that programming is a craft, and many programmers think of themselves as artists. As an artist it is heartbreaking to see your creations tainted and then discarded by corporate politics.
In my experience, devs who take more pride in closing tickets than coming up with elegant solutions are less susceptible to burn out. I don’t know exactly how they do it, but they do tend to have many hobbies. They don’t lose sleep over shipping some spaghetti code they copied from stack overflow without understanding.
They just treat it as something to get out of their way so they can get to the things they actually enjoy.
At first glance this seems like a healthy attitude (and probably is)
On the other hand this spaghetti stuff usually comes back to them in form of new (bug) tickets or even worse on-call alerts. Then they (or some other poor soul) has to deal with it again.
It's a false dichotomy. Software engineering skills and workaholism are independent axes. There are people who work 80 hours a week and write poor code. There are amazing coders who go home by 5:00 on the dot and spend their evenings with their family.
If a product is successful, eventually the tech debt price will have to be paid, but that tech debt is just as often (more often, in my experience) generated by "rockstars" burning the midnight oil to ship a prototype than "bad coders".
I think it applies to an extreme degree in programming - but probably in eng. & STEM fields generally as well. Something about having to care a lot about very small details, and especially when the big picture is not something you particularly care about. But yeah, I don't have any experience in other fields so maybe it's not that unique - I guess it was driven mostly by the experiences I've had with people not getting it, and being frustrated with me that I wouldn't "just work a well-paid coding job for 5 years".
It seems to me that many people dislike their software developer job not because they don't like programming but because the programming they get to do at work is not like the ideal world of an interesting hobby project where you alone decide scope, stack, deadline etc.
Meetings can suck. Design by committee. Scope creap. Crunch time. Lack of respect. Constant distractions. All this sucks but is part of many jobs, many workplaces. Expecting work to feel like a hobby is admirable but sets you up for some disappointments.
I see my job not as the programming part, but the part of making myself and my team experience the hobby project state as much as possible, against all odds. The job is the struggle.
Edit: I realize I might come off as insensitive. Burnout is a real thing. However at most jobs that sweet hobby project feeling is basically unattainable. I try to manage my energy so that I have some left after work to do stuff purely for my own enjoyment. I still enjoy my office job more than a I would a similar job outside tech
My first real job while living away from my parents was being a performer at Disneyland. It was actually fun as fuck, but they scaled back the entertainment department after 9/11, laid off a bunch of people, and that included me. In a relatively low-paying job with no savings, I couldn't make rent and had to live out of my car for a month and rely completely on the kindness and generosity of others to get back on my feet.
Right after college, I managed a bar for a while. Again, very fun, but it's hard not to drink too much, especially when very young and very stupid. I woke up one morning blacked out with a dent in my car and still have no idea what happened. I got to witness women I hired being pressured into shooting for a swimsuit calendar I could tell they didn't want to do. Rich kid assholes utterly ruin people's lives out of pure spite. The owner made me fire a woman for theft when I knew she was innocent.
I eventually joined the Army. Again, quite a bit of fun charging around on top of tanks, firing a .50 caliber machine gun and standing on top of a cannon, in a vehicle that can go right through 6-foot diameter trees like they aren't even there. But my buddy's gunner got hit by a rocket and he had to spend two days cleaning barely differentiated guts off of everything in the conex. Guy in my platoon shot himself on the last day of deployment because his wife was leaving him and he didn't want to go home. I was in the last unit to leave Iraq, and seeing what happened after, and then adding Afghanistan on top of that. Man, if you feel like you suffered for nothing, this was just next level 'what the fuck did we do all this for?' 20-hour shifts with 30 minutes of sleep a night if you got lucky. Zero days off for months on end. Marriages ruined left and right. I even got my own thankfully amicable, no kids at least divorce out of it.
I ended up with pretty horrible chronic spine problems that led to multiple interbody fusions, a whole lot of titanium hardware, and years being barely able to walk, often in enough pain that my entire personality palpably changed and I felt powerless to stop it. When the Army tried to treat me, they put me in traction to the point that it herniated worse, I passed out on the machine, and fell so hard onto the hospital floor that I got a TBI bad enough that I wasn't allowed to drive for two months until I could prove I was able to stand straight and touch my hand to a moving pencil. I went back to my hometown and totally forgot entire people existed who had apparently been huge parts of my life. I have no idea how many memory holes I have as I continually discover them talking to my family. Got 0% from the VA for that one.
I'm not here for the pain Olympics or anything and don't want to downplay the struggles of others, but being in software is the cushiest, easiest shit I could ever have imagined. I'm paid more than I ever would have thought possible without running my own business or being a surgeon when I was a kid. I work from home with all the free time in the world but still travel enough that I'm not just sitting in the same room every day forever. I very rarely work more than a 40 hour week or 8 hour day. The vast majority of what I work on goes nowhere and ends up abandoned or canceled, but every now and then, something makes it to fruition and I get to see it used and feel legitimate pride knowing I made it happen. People nominally above me in an org chart are deferent, polite, constantly asking if they can do anything for me. People just believe me when I say something.
Contrast this with the Army where it's legal, in-line with normal culture, and all but expected that bosses will publicly humiliate you, yell at you in front of your coworkers, you're constantly under a spotlight, stack ranked annually against your entire battalion by people who don't even know you. You'll get fired if you can't run fast enough or get fat. I got yelled at and censured once for not returning a call from my commander within five minutes when I was mowing my damn lawn and didn't hear the phone ring. You have literally no time off, whether or not you're home or out of town. Continuous mandatory recall. I was called in to bail guys out of prison at 3 AM on a Sunday morning. You rotate through 24-hour shifts called "staff duty" once a month because someone has to always be present in the headquarters. You don't get a day off the next day.
Software developers have absolutely no appreciation of how good they have it.
My life got much better when I realized that I actually don't like "programming".
I like solving problems using programming languages, and like designing large systems with computers, but I don't actually enjoy the programming itself. Programming without the designing part just feels like data entry to me. There's nothing clever, or creative, or interesting about it.
For years I've dealt with severe burnout because I had been lying to myself and taking jobs that where I didn't really have to "think", and I had no fun doing it, leading to me feeling like I had really chosen the wrong career path and that I was stuck feeling bored for the rest of my life.
Once I realized that programming for the sake of programming isn't fun, I started putting my attention to jobs where I made it clear that I'm going to be involved in the design and decision-making process, and almost immediately I actually enjoyed working again, after many years of not.
I'm not saying this is universal, if you like writing Java for the sake of writing Java, don't let me take that away from you, it's just not something I enjoy. Figuring out what you actually enjoy doing is deceptively hard, but a worthwhile goal.
I was lucky (and blessed) that I also realized this early on.
I was an idealist, following best practices, learning the language to the dot until I stumbled upon a different enjoyment in work: mentoring, guiding, helping, cheering co-workers to be on the same page, same direction, and to eventually deliver the software/feature/product.
Once the clock hits 5.30PM, I checked out and ride my bike.
I'm convinced bicycle commuting is what's going to make my 8:30-5:30 bearable. Hope I'm right.
I had the opposite experience. I actually left the industry and then suffered a workplace injury in the new job(PTSD). Trust me when I say this, PTSD really messes you up. One of the biggest injuries was my brain's ability to logically reason.
So with lots of free time due to medical leave I got got back into coding. Picking it up after having not done it for some time was not too bad. After a while I was ready to start learning new stuff. As I got better at coding a lot of my PTSD symptoms started to subside. I had an easier time organizing my thoughts.
Eventually my PTSD symptoms subsided and I knew enough code to get a job writing code. So while yes, I have burned out on coding it was also the old friend that dug me out of the hole.
> My life got much better when I realized that I actually don't like "programming".
I think I'm the same.
I like programming when it's "free form" and I'm doing something creative, but dislike fighting with: obscure build system/dependency crap, under-documented APIs, complexity that makes something as simple as "append an element to a list" an entire exercise in understanding some obscure Design Pattern, and the general realization that most software written today is putting strings in databases* and finding "new" ways to do so.
I used to find new languages/framworks/libraries interesting and occasionally still do, but a lot feels like going in circles with dubious benefits.
Maybe I'm just tired, dunno.
*At least those jobs I'm "qualified" for
> Maybe I'm just tired, dunno.
Definitely you are tired my friend; I know exactly what you are talking about!
I find it extremely amusing and energy draining at the same time, when I see some projects that are unnecessarily over-engineered, when I could write a simple shell script that produces the __exact__ output, but it's deemed un-enterprise-y!
Same here, I stepped away from actual software writing as a career and moved into Product management and then later Project management, where I fit better. These kinds of roles give you a bigger picture view, and put you in the position to help prevent big planning or design mistakes from happening. Having an actual software-writing background also helps immensely since you need to interface with engineering daily and need to speak their language. Too bad the compensation is a faction of what it is in software development, but I happily made the tradeoff.
I write code as a hobby now, and am much more satisfied with that because I make all the decisions on my own personal projects.
I'm still very much in the "engineering" space, but I do a lot more stuff with the whiteboard, and even spend some time doing TLA+/Pluscal before writing any code.
I think I'd be a pretty bad manager, I'm flaky in a way that doesn't lend itself to that, but I think I'm ok at the more "architectey" roles.
I think 8hr/day is a bigger issue… I feel EXACTLY the same way as you but after 25-ish years in the industry I also realized that there is nothing I like enough to enjoy doing for 8hrs per day, 1920 hrs per year…
> I'm not saying this is universal
It's probably not universal, but I bet it's more common than most people want to admit.
Yeah, I think you're right.
It's embarrassing how long it took me to realize that; for years I wondered why I enjoyed working on my personal projects but not my paid work, despite them being nominally the same thing, and eventually I realized it was because I made the decisions on my personal projects.
Ditto. I don't like making decisions at work. I like the tech; not politics.
Not to deride things too much. I'm trying to get better about it, surrounded by good suggestions... I'm just categorically exhausted
I find that making design decisions about the class/feature you’re writing or how data is going to flow through your little corner of the software scratches similar itch to “big picture” architecture. What sucks is standups, deadlines, constant having to give updates and being measured on output. Take all that away and programming is a _joy_
I had a similar-ish realisation recently when writing a business plan - having the ability to program felt like a massive advantage (for e.g. writing a dynamic cashflow forecast) but programming wasn't the main goal.
So, a slightly different perspective.
I like working in a language that I enjoy, that is expressive (I can think in it), and on projects that I started.
If it is a bad language, if I am fumbling through it, and I'm plowing through some one else's bad code, life is a slog.
There is possibly some middle ground, where a new language or environment is fun and educational. Just so you're on an acceptable learning curve, not burning out.
I felt the same until I found python.
Just in case you haven't tried it - perhaps it might ignite the love to programming (if you want that). Python made the programming fun to me again. Especially without the boilerplate code.
Try to ignore the community strong push to use typing everywhere and just write some clean small code and it feels amazing. Designs and ideas in simple implementations.
Isn't it the other way around? Java (in enterprise) is just exceptionally able to suck the fun out of programming? It's not even the fault of the language per se, it's just home to a lot of "best practices" that ultimately end with productivity coming to a grinding halt.
That's just a matter of personal taste. Using python makes me want to pull my hair out. However, I could write C# all day everyday.
A better way to put it would be find a language you like and are productive in, and get very good at it. Then it almost becomes second nature, you can almost forget about the programming itself and focus on the problem solving.
The big problem with programming is its usually divorced from big picture thinking. Businesses keep you away from business conversations
Honestly, I feel like I could recommend embedded programming if you like solving problems, especially if you can find a company working on a cost-, power- or size-limited device, where you actually need to do some low level optimization once in a while, or have to come up with some hack to use a peripheral for something it wasn't really designed for. Combine that with working in a small team with a flat hierarchy and you lose a lot of the red tape as well.
> My life got much better when I realized that I actually don't like "programming".
I like programming, but hate most things around it.
Under-documented code with odd patterns, no comments and bad discoverability, like the code doesn't want you to explore it and work with it, but you instead have to dig in a whole bunch to understand what you're looking at, while you're already juggling the problem domain in your head.
Same extends to working with projects themselves, like having a placeholder README, no ADRs, no information about why certain choices have been made, no investment into tooling or automated linting etc., especially if some things are expected to be done manually by the developers ("order the variables this way", "format the code this way", "you must manually create these N layers of abstraction to make the code consistent"), also things like having no examples of how to use some of the abstractions and if it's a front end project, no examples of the components in isolation, separate from where they're used in the main codebase, no gallery of sorts. Maybe things like manual deploys, or environments with no monitoring/APM/uptime alerting and other bits of tooling that are pretty much essential, no clear information about how things are run on the servers etc., where working feels like some form of archaeology and detective work.
Also things like bike shedding, yak shaving, cargo culting, taking practices as gospel (DRY/SOLID come to mind, though they have their place), infrastructure aspects like not having your local DB that's safe to break, slow compilation, flaky tests, bad tooling, outdated packages and dependencies. Throw in conflicts of interest and opinion that aren't managed well and you have a recipe for burnout, the kinds of situation where people are pretty much "against" you and what you're trying to do, e.g. holding up a release over unrelated, non-blocking concerns, or having drawn out discussions about how to write code, when it doesn't feel like you're working "together" to make things better for everyone. Even when there are disagreements, it's possible to get to that better place, but often time egos go unchecked, instead I actively try to be kind to others in code review etc. nowadays.
Although humorous, posts like this still ring true in many respects: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
But honestly, a lot of working in the industry also sucks due to technical concerns. This might be a more personal example, but I was trying to write some load tests in K6 for a web API. The API uses STOMP on top of SockJS (using WebSockets when available). K6 has support for WebSockets, except there's two packages, one of which is experimental. I quickly realized that SockJS wouldn't work, so I had to get rid of it in the project (since IE doesn't need to be supported anyways), but even then I realized that STOMP isn't supported out of the box, in part due to the protocol never really taking off: https://stomp.github.io/ I could find an extension, but getting it working also proved to be a bit of work: https://github.com/walterwanderley/xk6-stomp What sucked in particular was not only not having that much documentation about how to manage multiple subscriptions at the same time, but also the fact that reads were blocking instead of Promise based, though that might be due to how everything integrates with K6, it's not like I can shoot off a background thread. Eventually I got some jank implementation working that's based on blocking until a short timeout (like 2 seconds) after which the next subscription is done and data from it read, but it feels like if the industry was a bit more coherent we'd have like 2-3 solutions for similar use cases all of which would work well, instead of the current disjointed mess. This also applies to everything from OSes, to back end languages, front end libraries/frameworks etc., though I guess the variety is needed even if painful, so the better ideas survive the test of time. Until someone does some CV driven development and adopts a technology that's not ready.
That said, a lot of those things can be made better, as long as you care enough (and hopefully are rewarded for making the work not miserable).
[dead]
Work is named "work" for a reason. Its a lot not fun. I've been slinging code for 35 years. It pays the bills, sends my kids to college etc. Of course i'm burned out but I would be tired of anything after this long. Trick for me is to not to make work my purpose. Instead I bike, hike, make music, raise my kids, etc. I also don't work overtime or weekends even though almost everyone else on my team does. They will not make it for the long run like that.
> I also don't work overtime or weekends even though almost everyone else on my team does. They will not make it for the long run like that.
Not only will they not make it for long, but they're actually devaluing their own work. You're paid a salary for a standard work week. If you're working nights and weekends, you're giving away that portion of your work for free. I learned and appreciated this fact too late in my career.
IMO a business that can only function/succeed if employees give away their time for free is not a viable business and probably just shouldn't exist. Don't Do Crunch Time.
in addition to not doing overtime/weekends, when you're doing work during the day you should monotask as much as possible. just focus on one thing at a time, preferrable until you're done with it.
the cost of constantly shifting attention to multitask made everything seem frantic and you never got the sense to appreciate that a thing was 'done' because there was always ten other things cooking in the background.
you'll be surprised how much this doesn't kill your overall productivity while also preserving mental health. slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
I would argue that instead of working till you're done with it, just work till it's the end of the work day. Subtle but important difference.
Oh, yeah. I didn’t mean all in one sitting. Definitely don’t work after hours.
Sounds more like you managed to avoid burning out.
Right. Work being "not fun" is a long way from Burnout (which looks a lot like, and maybe is, depression).
The difference between a Grind and Hopeless.
(My hat off to you for 35 years!)
I've been coding for 25 years in many jobs & many industries (although banking featured a bit tooooo much). Our industry is volatile, and right now it feels like a 'micro' repeat of the dotcom bust, where even the very good devs are increasingly under an unreasonable amount of pressure (financially, finding work, or otherwise).
Agree - life outside work is v. important, but I think it's equally important to work in an industry which aligns with one's values, rather than just for the money etc. At the end of the day, every role will be difficult at times, but if you're behind the potential impact of the company, then that makes the challenge more tolerable
(*cough* ~Don't be evil~ *cough* sigh)
Yeah, it's probably a personality thing in large part. I find that the sense of my creative energy being wasted on something pointless disagrees with me so much that I'd rather do almost anything else (I actually find jobs to be a great source of inspiration in that way - ideas for better things to do keep springing to mind - although not great for productivity on the job).
I do think there are different types of "work" though, and the worse programming jobs have some of the worst combinations of attributes - inherently pointless but require intense mental effort.
I'm seeing folks like you get laid off with the current climate. Your trick is to not play the game, which may not be feasible right now.
> I'm seeing folks like you get laid off with the current climate.
Who cares? At this stage in my life (and a distant second my career too), if that's the kind of attitude your work demands of you, there's plenty of other validating things to do that also provide a living. And I always hear that people don't quit their jobs, they quit their bosses. But yeah, I would never fire someone for setting appropriate life/work boundaries and sticking to them.
It's entirely feasible if you live in places that don't follow American-esque systems of labour relationship.
I do worry about that and that's why the most important thing is to work for the right manager. Keep on their good side, make them feel like you're an asset even if not sprinting every sprint, and I've found that they'll go to bat for you at review time.
not at my workplace, people usually work 8 hours on average and that’s it. Find a better employer, they exist. Yes even ones that pay $200k+.
I realize not everyone is so fortunate. I had to start at some not so great companies in my career, but over time if you’re picky enough, you can find a great employer. I encourage everyone to know their worth. Don’t settle.
Disclaimer: nothing substantial, just a bit of trauma dump
I've been a developer for more than a decade. Body-shops. Founding engineer. Chief Technology Officer. After every job in my life I took 6 - 12 months off.
Usually my desire for programming comes back somewhere around the 5th month mark. I'm in such a 'holiday' now, and just passed the 12 month mark. I don't feel that desire coming back anymore.
I've been blessed to have a friend that had a gig where I can do some ETL and cover my monthly expenses, but whenever I start looking for new jobs, reading the ads, all those keywords, all those bullshit descriptions of what they expect, I'm starting to develop a physical repulsion.
I've done a couple of interviews, and the HR discussions and then the technical interviews have left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. I'm afraid I'll hiss in the next zoom call. And it's not even for not getting accepted, as I got an offer from all the talks. But the whole industry gives me a bad taste right now. Everything just feels futile and fluffed up. My last interview was for a hair & beauty appointment app start-up where they acted like they cure cancer.
I'd like to be my old self, but I'm afraid I might not get that part back. I took a look at 'regular' jobs and the idea of being a truck driver lit up something in me that programming hasn't in a very long time. Even being a shop clerk makes me dream more than wrangling code.
I realize this is childish, and that the grass is always greener on the other side. I know that there are challenges in every profession and that I have a comfortable home office and get paid a shit ton of money for what I do and this is better than 99% of the planet.
I just hope to be able to get back on track mentally and not feel like this.
I always suspected I had a doppelgänger but this proves it. Aside from the 6-12 breaks between each job I could have sworn this post was my own. I’m on the tail end of a sabbatical that is running far into overtime for the same reason - for the past year+ I’ve waited for the energy and desire to return as I expected it surely would.
But no. Nothing. Reading a job req still induces a wince. Reading the fluff from and about companies sends me recoiling. These things were never pleasant but they were tolerable. Now, the limbo bar has been set too low and it’s getting harder to compel my body to contort enough to slip under.
I’m pretty sure there is an eventual return somewhere ahead and the scariest thought is that I’ll get back and swirl back down to life as it was before. The past year+ becomes a puff of a memory. The good news (!) is that knowing you feel this way is critical knowledge. With that understanding we can rearrange our values and tackle the feeling constructively.
> But no. Nothing. Reading a job req still induces a wince. Reading the fluff from and about companies sends me recoiling. These things were never pleasant but they were tolerable. Now, the limbo bar has been set too low and it’s getting harder to compel my body to contort enough to slip under.
What infuriates me about this process is this experience.
For a time, I worked as a consultant doing cloud-related development, with many F500 companies (non-FAANG ones)
Generally, the staff on these projects were ok to mediocre in terms of skill. I KNOW I'm more competent than the median in those orgs at those companies, and yet if I apply for those exact jobs, my resume disappears into a black hole.
This isn't a testament to my skill, rather how poorly staffed major companies are. I don't mean "they don't know some nerd sniped trivia" either, I mean don't use version control, codebases full of dead commented code, hardcoded credentials, individuals with 0 troubleshooting ability or initiative, etc etc
After working for basically 25 years straight since high school, I’m really wanting to take an extended sabbatical from the software industry to do my own thing. I’m scared that the longer I stay out though, the harder it will be to reenter, because I already have the disgust you describe. My hope is that since I still love the actual technical work that I can eventually turn some little side project into a real product and carry that through for a while.
This is spooky similar to how things have been for me. Also 6-12 month breaks, also the itch to start doing something at about 6 month mark. I’m about to take another one of my breaks and too think this time will be different. I get paid an eye watering amount of money, and I don’t want it anyway. Instead of taking up truck driving (which will get old in a week), I’m thinking of taking up sailing.
> It doesn’t require the full engagement of your entire person, like psychotherapy or software engineering. A long career would be soul-destroying, for sure, but a day of driving can be ploughed through much more easily by physical brute force than can a day of software engineering.
I think this post comes across as unpleasant because it is so dismissive of other peoples struggles. If you just said, yeah software engineering isn't for me, that's one thing. But you're saying software engineering is objectively the most difficult, soul-destroying, draining job, and other people have it easier in this respect. Im sorry but that's just objectively not true.
I would push you to consider that, maybe, something else is going on for you individually, rather than write off the entire endeavor due to an objective analysis. I worked for years at a cancer center and while there were many times that the work was dry, lonely, alienating, at the end of the day I still felt I was doing something good for the world and that felt really good.
There's a lot of ways to apply software, and, maybe more to the point, a lot of ways to integrate it into your life with balance. What about part-time work, so you have more space for other parts of your life you find satisfying? You may find that, with more balance, you enjoy what the work does have to offer, such as being part of a team, being needed, being well-compensated, using your whole intellect, etc.
Best wishes
Software and more broadly IT are soul crushing jobs though, practitioners seem to get upset when that's pointed out but it's still true. Very few other jobs require the always on mentality that comes with IT work. Other folks typically show up, do their jobs, and leave. Very few folks in software/IT are able to have that type of relationship with their work. Maybe it isn't personally draining for you, but it is a very mentally taxing career path overall. This seems to get lost in the broader perspective because a lot of IT practitioners like this type of lifestyle, it doesn't change the fact that it's demanding and I think we can do better in regards to recognizing that as an industry. This also doesn't come across as dismissive to me either, every job has its inherent challenges and we should take time to reflect and recognize the ones present in our own careers.
It is very demanding and that needs to be said, but I don't like positioning it as more demanding than other careers. People do a lot more for a lot less money. And people do a lot more for the same amount of money. Every individual should decide what trade off is best for them, but if someone enjoys programming and are good at it, it could potentially be better that they find a way to balance it in their lives rather than writing it off completely.
> Other folks typically show up, do their jobs, and leave.
I don’t really buy this. When I was in kitchens, I used to agonize over the injustices done by the more psychopathic coworkers/bosses, not to mention the nightmares like you see in some episodes of The Bear. I would also often think about how to improve some situation going on, like kitchen/station layout, workflows, inventory, etc.
My wife works in psych and often ruminates on her patients, trying to figure out some thing about them long after she’s done seeing them for the day. And also the same story as me with psychopathic bosses.
I’m sure there are just people who genuinely care and then people that don’t give a fuck in any given field. I know I’ve run into plenty of both all across society.
I will agree that there is a unique aspect to the mental distress caused by industry software work though, although I don’t want to spill the ink required to elaborate on that here.
> I would push you to consider that, maybe, something else is going on for you individually, rather than write off the entire endeavor due to an objective analysis. I worked for years at a cancer center and while there were many times that the work was dry, lonely, alienating, at the end of the day I still felt I was doing something good for the world and that felt really good.
The difference being that the majority of software jobs are not doing anything remotely good for the world, or if you are, you are a infinitesimally small part of it to where you couldn't possibly derive this same rewarding feeling. I would push you to consider that maybe, your situation is one of privilege that people in the OP's spot are not often in.
> There's a lot of ways to apply software, and, maybe more to the point, a lot of ways to integrate it into your life with balance. What about part-time work, so you have more space for other parts of your life you find satisfying? You may find that, with more balance, you enjoy what the work does have to offer, such as being part of a team, being needed, being well-compensated, using your whole intellect, etc.
Again, not everyone is afforded an extraordinary privilege of just arbitrarily deciding to work part time. I certainly couldn't. If I could, burnout would be less of an existential risk. It's like telling someone with clinical depression "have you tried cheering up?"
> The majority of software jobs are not doing anything remotely good for the world
Firstly, this isn't true except in the narrowest sense where only people working on cancer are doing anything good for the world. Contributing to the economy in a non-destructive non-evil way is still good, people need goods and services to live a good life and almost every part of the economy plays some positive role in that.
Secondly, my point is that one could find a non-sexy job in tech at a hospital, or in an academic institution, that don't necessarily pay top FAANG salary but, if fulfillment is more important (as it seems to be for the OP), this would be a good option.
> Not everyone is afforded an extraordinary privilege of just arbitrarily deciding to work part time.
Of course that's true, but I was directing my comment at OP, who said in the blog post that "I quit my last contracting gig in August with £40k in debt, no other income, and only a business idea (it failed). It was still the right decision."
It certainly wasn't meant to be dismissive, can see how it would come across like that though. I kind of rushed this post out, and really should have stopped to think more about what I wanted to say and how - wasn't expecting it to get on the front page. I don't even think "burnout" is the right topic for it, it probably just seemed like the closest title that would get some interest.
I think very few software engineering jobs are set up to be enjoyable (or even tolerable) to a large fraction of the people who are drawn to such jobs.
I'm self taught[0]. I was drawn to computers at an early age, and I was hacking little projects together in a couple of different languages by the time I was in middle school. This was a very solitary activity for a very introverted boy, and I loved it. I still love it. Nothing compares to sitting down at a computer and just letting the logic flow through me unimpeded and onto the screen.
My job is not like that. I have 2 - 5 meetings a day. I am constantly coordinating and brainstorming and just plain dealing with other people. That is more draining than the coding. Sometimes I have a decent chunk of time at the end of the day, but I can't even bring myself to code because I am so drained by all of the non-coding stuff I had to do earlier in the day.
I love my job. I do impactful work for an impactful company that I think is doing actual good in the world. I work on an interesting project, and they pay and treat me well. But in my heart of hearts what I really want to be is not a software engineer but instead some kind of self-directed code hermit.
[0] By which I mean I learned from books and examples and experimentation. I did eventually get a computer science degree also, but I had been coding for years before I took my first class in it.
So far, from the majority of comments here, yours included, I have concluded that we somehow got tricked to "upgrade" our hobby to a career, with one major cost: sacrificing our creative freedoms that companies demand us to give up on in place of daily meetings.
The allure of "get paid well to do something I was going to do for free anyway" is strong.
Yeah...my thinking was more like "if I already love doing this as a hobby, why not do it and get paid for it?"; that was my biggest mistake -_-
Getting paid for doing something you love (or at least like when it comes to work tasks) is far better than having to spend 40 hours a week doing something you hate (in what is likely a much lower paid job), and then still getting home with no energy left to do that thing you love for maybe 1 hour.
Yeah this sounds a lot like me. I find it hard to imagine what kind of personality _could_ tolerate a software job. Maybe some people are more amenable to accepting the company's mission as part of their identity, and can therefore find the inherent satisfaction of doing a good job. But yeah, I always found the meetings and coordination aspect to be quite taxing.
I have known a lot of people at work who don't really care about computers at all. (Not at my current job, more at previous jobs.) They don't go home and do more computer stuff for fun. They don't geek out over the new things coming in C++23 or get nerd sniped by computer science problems. If you ask them why they became a software engineer, they'll say it's because the pay is good.
A lot of us are just drawn to computers and couldn't imagine not tinkering with them constantly, but for some people this is just, like, an office job. No different from being an accountant or an insurance claims adjuster or something.
This is where you see the injustices of life my friend...some people desperately want to get a job like this because technology is their passion and others change them like shirts because they have the work experience but it's not their great love...they just happen to know how to interview and get hired! And here's the sad thing for me; these people are actually unhappy because they're not doing something they love; they're just doing it for the money, when they could be doing something else that was their great passion. Can you imagine how many well-hidden unknown `Picasso`s, `Mozart`s, and `Meryl Streep`s are out there unbeknownst to us?! It drives me crazy!
One can also go through the phase of programming being the most fun hobby, getting into a career related to it, and phase out programming as a hobby.
It was one of the most fun hobbies I had earlier in life, now after 20+ years of career, and even longer from starting to program, it's just not that fun anymore.
I still tinker with it in fun ways I could never try as a career, like electronics projects with microcontrollers, but since my free time and energy dwindled with age I allocate my hobbies' time to other more personally fulfilling endeavours than keeping up with languages' updates, compsci problems, etc. It's just not that interesting anymore.
I stumbled upon this career, at the time I never even considered or had known it was a very well paid one so I've been extremely lucky for that but I don't hold that much more interest in it as a hobby, for that I believe the time has passed. It's now, to me, a very well paid office job.
> One can also go through the phase of programming being the most fun hobby, getting into a career related to it, and phase out programming as a hobby.
Yeah this is my path.
I'd guess 50% of the code I've ever written was from when I was a hobbyist for many years, and a large portion of the "general" software skills I've gained are from that as well.
You summed up my experience at big tech pretty well :)
I feel this very deeply. At the same time, I feel shame for feeling this way. I have a very high paying job, excellent flexibility, and I work from home. It doesn't get much better. Except that when I sit down at the computer, the actual work and meetings to talk about the work are unbelievably draining.
The shame is because I know others would love to be in my position and there is an almost endless list of jobs that are worse than this, but it's brutal sometimes. I workout daily and spend the vast majority of my time away from the keyboard, outside.
The worst part is, it's not just a matter of embrace the suck and push on. In a physical labor job, you can just command the body to move and push through it. In this line of work, you don't really have that option. You can't just command the brain to solve difficult problems and design complex systems.
Yeah, I think there's this idea of programming as something you 1) know how to do and then 2) can just sit at a computer and do some typing, and it happens. It's hard for outsiders to understand just how dependent it is on being engaged and in a position to direct your full mental attention to abstract problems for long periods.
I used to tell new engineers fresh out of school, "The hardest part of this job is thinking."
I think I’ve found the remedy to my experience of burnout.
I burnt out hard last year and earlier this year (frontend dev). Mental exhaustion, dissatisfaction with work and colleagues, and especially the boss at the time.
I made several major changes to fix this.
- Dropped to 32 hours in my contract (with pay cut)
- Requested to move teams (request fulfilled)
- Deep dived into my weak areas that were causing work stress
- A short holiday
Now I’m happy as can be. Sure I earn 20% less now, but it’s just money. I now have a 50% longer weekend (2 days -> 3 days) AND a 20% shorter work week (5 days -> 4 days)
This is the best move I have ever made.
Working 5 days a week is a grind, no matter which way you slice the pie. It’s a marathon that never ends. I think it’s okay for most jobs, but in dev jobs you can’t be on autopilot. So often I’m solving bugs that haven’t been seen before.
A 4 day week doesn’t seem much different on the surface, but it’s a major change. It no longer feels like a marathon. I actually get more work done comparatively, as I’m more focused and less stressed.
Furthermore, I’ve stopped doing projects that relate to my normal stack in my spare time.
In my ample spare time, I deep dive C programming and graphics.
> In my ample spare time, I deep dive C programming and graphics.
Noice. Join the Handmade Network [0] and/or Handmade Cities [1]. You'll be in great company.
[0] https://handmade.network
[1] https://handmadecities.com
Interesting stuff, bookmarked that first one
Meaningful jobs do exist and more can be created. You are a probably high-paid, skilled professional and, contrary to popular belief, you do have agency.
Quit your job and start doing something meaningful. Start a company or join one that makes a difference.
Take risks, it’s really rewarding.
I think for me at least, the difference between "programming for fun/own projects" and "programming for work" goes deeper than the difference between say a company with neutral/bad values and a company you might be passionate about mission-wise. At the end of the day, as the software guy, your job still consists of:
1) taking instructions from someone else on exactly what to build, and how (choice of framework etc)
2) working backwards from someone else's code to figure out what they were thinking and how to modify it to the requirements/add a new feature/whatever
I got into programming because it was a great form of self-expression. I've had some great jobs that related to my interests, e.g. adding variants to Chess.com, but at the end of the day that was still someone else's project and I was just the guy they were getting to build it for them. The inherent satisfaction wasn't there. YMMV though obviously, but I like to use an art analogy: if you're a painter, you'll always be frustrated and demotivated painting portraits of people's pets -- even if it's for charity, or you like the person, or whatever.
Another way personal projects are different is the fact that there's not usually someone depending on you- whether that's in the form of timelines, API stability, tech choice, etc.
I'm working on a large breaking change to a personal codebase right now, and its taken almost 3 years of procrastination, lazy research when I feel like it, and the API changing and changing again due to rewrites. I'd like to finish by 2025, but if I don't, nothing happens!
The whole thing has felt fun due to the lack of pressure and just... not working on it when I feel like doing something else.
Very different from work projects, even the interesting ones with great bosses and teammates.
1/ SWE jobs where you have some agency on what to build and the tooling choice do exist. Try working as an employee for an engineer-driven company.
2/ that can be rewarding. I have found nuggets of genius in other people's code. Being able to think like someone else is a valuable intellectual exercise.
On self-expression: the most highly trained musicians at the best orchestras spend their time refining the interpretation of music they didn't write. The more constraints are written into the sheet music, the more creative you have to get.
I'm not saying your perspective is wrong. I'm just saying someone could have your job and come to completely different conclusions.
Maybe you have to change your perspective or find an occupation which matches your perspective on life and work. Or you could keep your job and rant on your blog from time to time if that's what you need. Ranting is sometimes necessary for mental hygiene.
Out of curiosity: What exactly kept you from working on a pet project instead of adding variants to Chess.com? Fear of failure? Fear of rejection from your audience? Something else entirely? Sometimes a little courage is all it takes to bring more happiness into your life.
> [highly trained musicians in orchestras spend all their time playing pieces they didn't write]
That's an interesting point, but if you got into programming via working on your own projects, the musical analogy is "I loved play jazz saxophone with my cool cats, but every paid gig I get just wants me to play note-for-note Duke Ellington transcriptions." The essence of jazz is improv, but playing classical music is more about playing/experiencing beautiful music which I am probably lack the capacity to write myself. (Not saying classical is better than jazz or vice-versa, you just go into them for very different reasons.)
But the analogy is kind of interesting, since there might be jobs for which the outcome (e.g. beautiful music) is so compelling that I will happily take their directions. I got in software to do jazz, and would be willing to do pre-scripted beauty, but unfortunately, most software jobs are not either of those.
> > Quit your job and start doing something meaningful
I think when people say that they forgive that unless you are calling the shots over the direction of the work of a bunch of people, then you are not really moving anything, even at the microlevel you need to be at the helm of a group of 5-6 people to move things at a speed that is not as depresingly slow as watching paint dry.
It's not that easy because quitting your job might mean less burnout but also mean that you'll find yourslef alone without any team and most importantly renouncing your ability to call the shots or influencing the direction of the work in which the team is heading, very quickly you can go from burnout to irrelevance.
At that point the only things you can do in order not to feel like a suck are the things that everybody else is doing alone and hence kinda everybody is doing at the same speed such as learning a new language or becoming stronger at the gym or learning to surf but nobody would be paying you to do that.
The problem with programmers is that the mind works non-stop while the body is completely still, which goes against its nature, in all respects. When the body is tired, at most a week of rest it recovers nicely and is full of energy! This unfortunately does not apply to the mind, I have tried it and unfortunately I suffer from long-term mental burnout. If I could find another job that wasn't so mentally demanding and easy to do, then yes I would quit this field yesterday!
I've often thought we're doing something fundamentally wrong by treating programming like any other office job, or even like a "production" type job like manufacturing. It's of course nothing like that - as you say, the mind doesn't have the same recharging characteristics as the body. I get the feeling people maybe compensate for it by having a lot of downtime in the day where they're kind of pretending to work, but I would find that maddening. I'm either working or I'm not, in which case I want to be free to do what I want without someone looking over my shoulder.
I wholeheartedly agree with you, especially on the shoulder part.
The reason I regretted dealing with programming from a professional standpoint is that I have realized I like it more as a hobby, not as a profession!
When it's your hobby, no one is telling you what to do, whether you are doing something wrong or not, nor to follow the latest trend with <X> framework or this new <Z> programming language; quite frankly, you simply don't care what others say to you, because you have found your rhythm, your pace if you will, with the tech stack of your choice; you know, the one that clicked with you immediately!
This is my personal experience up until I switch my hobby to professional career; that's when it went downhill and have stopped loving it ever since...I feel trapped, like millions of others than cannot escape this category.
Yea, I got into programming because I love Lone Wolf Programming. Programming as part of a team is a completely different endeavor and liking one doesn't necessarily mean you'll like the other.
Lone Wolf Programming...I love that! LOL :D For some reason I was thinking of it more as "My Hermit Life" type of Programming, but yours is more accurate!
Come on. The majority of programming work isn't particularly mentally demanding, at least not any more so than other professional office jobs. It's not like lawyers or mechanical engineers have it any easier.
Allow me to disagree with you here.
When your boss would like you to be a DevOps and a full-stack developer, while following all the latest trends, their ins and outs, the countless JS / TS frameworks out there, we can have a chat on who's having it worse or easier than the other.
Some HN users have a really skewed sense of how software development works in most of the industry. Only a small minority of jobs involve full-stack web development with JS / TS frameworks. If you want a slower pace of change then go get a job writing embedded missile avionics software for Raytheon or something. This is a serious suggestion, I'm not being sarcastic. Jobs like that are a good option for a lot of developers.
The grass always looks greener on the other side.
Thank you for the suggestion, but I doubt I would work as a foreigner for a US defense contractor company that produces military weapons; that's the last thing I would want to do.
Depends for what, the energy you are required to spend to keep updated on new stuff coming up is greater than any other job I'm aware of.
Most other mental jobs change at a much slower rate than in tech.
When I was younger, I always had 6 months of living expenses in the bank, a cheap life style, and a willingness to work (and a lot of experience of) menial jobs.
That meant that going in to work every day was a choice, not an obligation. More than once, I quit a job and took a break.
These days, with mortgage, kids etc, I still maintain the escape hatch.
Good analogy presented here, except some situations can be far worse - what he's describing is best case scenario. You can very easily end up in toxic teams/situations or with a toxic boss that makes every day miserable for absolutely no reason. Plus all that other stuff.
Burnout is real and if I get a whiff for it I immediately seek other options. Having experienced it before, it took about 6 months to recover. There are a lot of warning signs I had ignored when it happened.
Unlike the author, I don't find any particular joy in programming for the sake of it. It is difficult though, sometimes you can have an extraordinarily complex task that requires a flash of inspiration to solve. The kind of rumination that leads to these flashes typically comes to me in non-working hours, so I feel like I am never "off." You can't just force that kind of thing. If you're burnt out, that dynamic is even worse.
I like my job (I think..) and am on my third burnout. There's no worse feeling than being barely able to muster pinky finger strength equivalent brain processing power over an 8 hour working day, on high viz projects with tight time lines and daily stand up reporting on progress. Today I literally noped to bed with the laptop, looked at the problem a few times and concluded it can wait until Monday.
Yeah, true. I learnt to avoid those pretty quickly thanks to my fairly disagreeable and risk-tolerant nature. Still had some not very good experiences though.
Is this supposed to be some art piece?
> That is what professional programming is like. You don’t care about the goal to begin with, it doesn’t have any noticeable effect on the world once each Jira ticket moves over to the Done column, and you don’t have any ownership over the finished product. You just wait for the next Jira ticket.
Sure, there are jobs like this, but it's super weird to claim that all programming jobs are like this.
Just.. don't work those jobs! Find real jobs at real companies making real products for real people. Don't stay at a job where all your work ends up in a black hole of nothingness until you burn out. The burnout means you quit too late.
I'm not saying it's easy to find programming jobs that cure cancer, fix climate change or cause world peace, but it's really not that hard to find programming jobs where what you make is used by real people and if you make the thing you make better, these real people will tell you that they're happy that it's now better (and, immediately after, what else needs fixing). This can be all the way from super challenging computer sciency shit to line-of-business CRUD app coding at a small shop in a mid size provincial town for regional customers. It exists everywhere.
ps. Personal context: Articles like these mildly offend me because I run a company and we try very hard to make everybody's time at the company worth their while. The suggestion that business owners like me do not exist hits hard. In fact, we are many. There's plenty bosses and entrepreneurs and managers out there who realize that the more motivated and involved and happy team members are, the better their work will be. Also being the boss of stressed out burned-out programmers sounds like hell to me. I'd much rather run a team of enthusiastic self-starters! Incentives are, actually, pretty aligned (happy people = great results) and companies where they're not are just, in my humble opinion, badly run companies. Don't work there.
To be honest I've just never really liked programming for work, and have felt kind of trapped in it as my only source of good money for a few years. So there's probably some bitterness there that I don't mean to offend anyone with. Even at what on paper seemed to be a great job - fully remote, annual retreats, great teammates, etc - I just couldn't resist the desire to work on something that was actually mine, in some fundamental way. So maybe "has no effect on the world" isn't the right way to put it - but that's how it feels. I guess it's in the sense of, if it wasn't me doing it, it would get done anyway, or something. And at all the companies I've worked at at least, my job as a programmer has been totally interchangeable with other people. I think my main skill as a programmer is writing really clear, solid code - line managers/clients have said this so it's not just my own bias - and you get a little kick of dopamine whenever you check some code in and someone goes "great!". But then they go "OK, now do that again, forever". The Jira tickets never end. You never get a big payout. That's been my experience anyway. Maybe having equity would significantly change the calculus.
This holds for psychotherapists too. Quit being a psychotherapist and people will find another psychotherapist.
If this here is really how you feel then IMO your article is misrepresenting things. Feeling like you want to work on something that is your own makes a lot more sense to me than suggesting that every programming job out there doesn't affect anybody anywhere ever. I mean, I recognize this one completely - it's why I started my own business in the first place!
Thanks for the comments. I wasn't expecting this to get on the front page (although that is why I posted it, obviously) and kind of wish I'd spent more time thinking about what I actually wanted to say first. If I'm 100% honest I was mostly trying to get clicks, which is always a bad motivation and I am generally deliberate about this kind of thing, sorry about that... I don't actually feel bitter, or particularly burnt out, with software specifically, it just feels like it's not the career for me at the moment. The general point about it often being misunderstood is something I've wanted to articulate at various times though.
I agree with the effortfulness that he writes about here. Thinking involves an effort and concentration, that we tend to avoid if not necessary and use shortcuts. I started out enjoying coding a lot and enjoying the learning process that required the hard thinking.
For me, about a decade ago, it was going from working on a Winforms app to rewriting it to a web app. We went from about 4 layers to about 6 layers including a .net web api and javascript. Instead of creating business logic classes, most of the work went into plumbing the layers. Instead of being fairly simple, the UI became a slog to get right, and there were constant distractions of code design that looked sloppy in the new layers. Also I think the ASD (or is it ADHD) made it harder to overlook those messy layers. I've never had much patience for the boring stuff and those mental distractions made it harder to persevere through rewriting it.
These days I enjoy hobby coding in python and go, but I find it hard to imagine going back to it as a job.
His response of switching to "ancestral" food and jawline modification is ... interesting.
Haha, that's actually something I've been doing for years as well. Had jaw issues from underdevelopment and premolar extractions since 2011. Only discovered that it was a known thing and started getting treatment in 2023 though.
Definitely not the left turn I expected either.
I grew up as an introvert who liked solving puzzles and problems, so I gravitated towards computer programming. I retired a few years ago after a career of 30 years with seven different companies. I still have a personal project (a data management system) that I think about often and write code for new features.
Over my career, I had jobs that were interesting and I looked forward to each day (well...most days). I also had some that were soul crushing and I dreaded.
Looking back, I realized that the ones where I felt I was in control of my work product were the most fulfilling. I got to decide what to work on and how much effort and time to spend on each task. I wanted the product to succeed in the marketplace and I gave it my best effort.
The jobs where it didn't feel like my ideas were valued or my work appreciated were the worst. Burnout happened very quickly and I moved on.
Interestingly, the ones that I controlled turned out to also be the most profitable for the companies.
This says to me these people are working on projects that are not challenging/interesting enough with people who don't respect their intellect. That's a solvable problem.
Anecdote... I function as a product manager, and I have a lot of fun with the developers I work with (and have a lot of respect for), and they enjoy working with me. I come to them with complex, interesting problems and my framework for potential solutions, and we talk through whether they think it's the right direction and, if so, what I've missed... or they propose alternatives. It's like a chess game where we can both win.
I hope the OP and anyone feeling this way tries working with other projects and people.
That has certainly been a major aspect of it in the past - feeling like I don't have enough autonomy to decide on the best approaches etc - but I think now I probably have too much of a high-level "what are we actually doing here?" kind of uninterestedness for even that to make it work.
Maybe if we could go right to the bottom and start getting everyone to be a bit more computer literate, so the software didn't have to be so complicated, or something... I don't know.
It's hard for me as a software developer to understand how soul-destroying it is to work for someone else in this industry.
I have worked as a developer for someone else's company since college, for 15 years now, and I don't know how else to describe it other than I like what I do and find it fun and stimulating.
I don't think it's strictly the profession. I think either the person doesn't really like it as much as they think they do, or they work for a company that pushes them too hard and doesn't treat them well.
I guess that's obvious, but in my experience at least it doesn't have to be that way.
I love how out there this guy seems and kudos to his courage for sharing his thoughts and feelings and being able to go and do something to the beat of his own drum.
> It’s hard to explain to people who aren’t programmers just how soul-destroying it is to work for someone else in this industry. Maddeningly hard, in fact.
It's hard for me to understand this _as a programmer_. I've been through burnouts and every single time it's been a matter of me pushing myself too hard, the external pressure was never actually real.
From your blog post it sounds as if realistically you're 40k in debt due to jaw surgery which really has nothing to do with programming at all?
I dunno man, with the greatest of respect (I appreciate that this is a serious health issue for you) the blog comes across as if you like mushrooms a bit too much.
> My sense is that the constricting effect of modern narrow footwear inhibits proper tongue posture via this connection.
Seriously? 99% of people wear shoes, have a mouth and have no issues at all with... tongue posture? I don't even know what my tongue posture is.
Maybe this is reference to the tongue of a shoe? IDK, still odd
No, there is actually a fascial connection that runs all the way from the tongue to the big toe I think. The idea is that tension or misconfiguration at one end of this connection could affect the other end. So in this case, maybe modern narrow footwear that causes the big toe to point inward has an effect on the tongue.
If you've ever tried walking long distances with even a slightly ill-fitting shoe, or carrying something of an awkward shape, you'll know the kind of thing I'm talking about - in order to function under load for long periods without incurring damage, everything kind of has to be coordinating perfectly. Maybe over months to years, especially in early development, confining the feet to an unnaturally-shaped space could have a measurable effect on oral posture.
Haha, yeah I can see why it would sound like that if you haven't experienced similar issues. I would disagree on 99% of people not having tongue posture issues though. If you look at the structure of a lot of modern people's faces, we have an "adenoid" face - narrow, long midface, lack of pronounced cheekbones and eye support. The hypothesis is that chewing is an essential part of proper jaw development, and modern soft diets don't make us do enough of it.
(The relationship with tongue posture is possibly two-way - lack of chewing and/or proper tongue posture causes the upper jaw to develop narrower, which eventually prevents the tongue from adopting its ideal position suctioned to the roof of the mouth. The tongue not being there causes further narrowing and downswing.)
Does burn out exist in other professions? I recall seeing something about doctors/lawyers.
I know (distantly) some folks in the medical profession and it sounds way worse than what we go through. Not trying to diminish the real stress that we go through in this industry. Wondering if we can learn something from other industries in a similar (or indeed more difficult) position.
Given that burnout is a physiological state of emotional|physical|mental|... exhaustion, yes, other professions experience burnout. However, which subtype of burnout is more prevalent in different career fields, or at different stages of life.
When someone says they are experiencing burnout, my first question is, what type of burnout is it? Have they broken down the problem yet?
Is it Overload? Their pace of work could be more sustainable, work/live commitments are imbalanced, or there is a mismatch in where they spend time vs. where they wish they were spending time?
Is it Under Challenged? Do they not feel stimulated by the work, are their abilities not being developed, or are they wasted in their current role? Are they more interested in what comes next?
Is it Neglect? They don't feel recognized for their efforts, they don't have a good mentor or sponsor, they give up on themselves when faced with challenges, or they abuse themselves through unhealthy habits (neglect can be self-neglect)?
Doctors can be exploited further because they're typically in far deeper. More medical debt, more education, more of their life has been given to the medical world. To leave that would be to throw it all away. Maybe they'd be happier that way anyway. On the flip side, they know they're making a genuine difference in people's lives. Doctors do incredibly important work, and if they just don't show up, people can die. If a programmer doesn't show up for work, In many cases, an ad tragically goes unclicked, or a feature doesn't get released for a few extra days.
There are absolutely more meaningful jobs for programmers, where they have more impact on the product, get to actually influence lives, or work with challenging and fulfilling technical problems. But most of them aren't doing that.
Burnout very much exists in other professions.
You know what? If you don't like your job I'll take it. Seriously that's what I wanted to do since I was a teenager. Now I spend my time counting other people's money. That's an even worse life.
Anyone in any profession can have burnout. Set money aside, set boundaries, have a life outside of work. It's not exclusive to computer programmers, and there's lots of worse burnout-inducing jobs that pay less.
Good luck. Burnout drains your soul. It gets better, but it takes time. Exercising outdoors helps, even if it is just taking long walks.
Long walks are honestly underrated.
Especially if you make them a consistent thing and start upping the distance over time and varying the routes.
It becomes incredibly enjoyable to just get out and fucking walk around, look at things, listen to music maybe, and explore a bit.
Something I’ve been looking to write for a while is some kind of thing that I can input a distance, my location, and have it plot unique and somewhat random loop routes. Ideally optimising for exploring novel areas of where I live, with some kind of “route tracking”.
The point is largely the journey.
> "You don’t care about the goal to begin with"
This seems key. Are there options in your area for work with goals you do care about?
Burnout is awful, but this post seems preachy and out of touch.
>It’s hard to explain to people who aren’t programmers just how soul-destroying it is to work for someone else in this industry. Maddeningly hard, in fact. Your profession involves hard mental work. You work at the limit of your creative, analytical and problem-solving abilities. You think and read outside of sessions to improve your craft. You bring your entire self to the task of healing someone’s trauma, figuring out what’s holding them back, or whatever. Now imagine it was all completely pointless.
What part of this doesn't apply to every other discipline? Plenty of people feel that everything they do is pointless. Plenty of people spend their entire mental effort at work.
The Hacker News crowd has a higher than average fraction of people who think they have to never turn off and always be doing computer science work even when not at work. That correlates strongly with burnout, but that's not a programming thing, that's a personality type. Go outside and get some fresh air. Every day. Stop staring at screens 24/7. That can't entirely prevent burnout but it helps a lot.
I think IT being exempt from overtime is part of the problem. Nurses for example see a direct increase in wage when they work extra, and many lawyers bill by the minute.
But I think the biggest thing is that programming is a craft, and many programmers think of themselves as artists. As an artist it is heartbreaking to see your creations tainted and then discarded by corporate politics.
In my experience, devs who take more pride in closing tickets than coming up with elegant solutions are less susceptible to burn out. I don’t know exactly how they do it, but they do tend to have many hobbies. They don’t lose sleep over shipping some spaghetti code they copied from stack overflow without understanding. They just treat it as something to get out of their way so they can get to the things they actually enjoy.
At first glance this seems like a healthy attitude (and probably is)
On the other hand this spaghetti stuff usually comes back to them in form of new (bug) tickets or even worse on-call alerts. Then they (or some other poor soul) has to deal with it again.
It's a false dichotomy. Software engineering skills and workaholism are independent axes. There are people who work 80 hours a week and write poor code. There are amazing coders who go home by 5:00 on the dot and spend their evenings with their family.
If a product is successful, eventually the tech debt price will have to be paid, but that tech debt is just as often (more often, in my experience) generated by "rockstars" burning the midnight oil to ship a prototype than "bad coders".
I think it applies to an extreme degree in programming - but probably in eng. & STEM fields generally as well. Something about having to care a lot about very small details, and especially when the big picture is not something you particularly care about. But yeah, I don't have any experience in other fields so maybe it's not that unique - I guess it was driven mostly by the experiences I've had with people not getting it, and being frustrated with me that I wouldn't "just work a well-paid coding job for 5 years".
find a meaningfull programming job. Here are quite a few on, but it's not the highest paying job.
It seems to me that many people dislike their software developer job not because they don't like programming but because the programming they get to do at work is not like the ideal world of an interesting hobby project where you alone decide scope, stack, deadline etc.
Meetings can suck. Design by committee. Scope creap. Crunch time. Lack of respect. Constant distractions. All this sucks but is part of many jobs, many workplaces. Expecting work to feel like a hobby is admirable but sets you up for some disappointments.
I see my job not as the programming part, but the part of making myself and my team experience the hobby project state as much as possible, against all odds. The job is the struggle.
Edit: I realize I might come off as insensitive. Burnout is a real thing. However at most jobs that sweet hobby project feeling is basically unattainable. I try to manage my energy so that I have some left after work to do stuff purely for my own enjoyment. I still enjoy my office job more than a I would a similar job outside tech
I try to keep perspective, anyway.
My first real job while living away from my parents was being a performer at Disneyland. It was actually fun as fuck, but they scaled back the entertainment department after 9/11, laid off a bunch of people, and that included me. In a relatively low-paying job with no savings, I couldn't make rent and had to live out of my car for a month and rely completely on the kindness and generosity of others to get back on my feet.
Right after college, I managed a bar for a while. Again, very fun, but it's hard not to drink too much, especially when very young and very stupid. I woke up one morning blacked out with a dent in my car and still have no idea what happened. I got to witness women I hired being pressured into shooting for a swimsuit calendar I could tell they didn't want to do. Rich kid assholes utterly ruin people's lives out of pure spite. The owner made me fire a woman for theft when I knew she was innocent.
I eventually joined the Army. Again, quite a bit of fun charging around on top of tanks, firing a .50 caliber machine gun and standing on top of a cannon, in a vehicle that can go right through 6-foot diameter trees like they aren't even there. But my buddy's gunner got hit by a rocket and he had to spend two days cleaning barely differentiated guts off of everything in the conex. Guy in my platoon shot himself on the last day of deployment because his wife was leaving him and he didn't want to go home. I was in the last unit to leave Iraq, and seeing what happened after, and then adding Afghanistan on top of that. Man, if you feel like you suffered for nothing, this was just next level 'what the fuck did we do all this for?' 20-hour shifts with 30 minutes of sleep a night if you got lucky. Zero days off for months on end. Marriages ruined left and right. I even got my own thankfully amicable, no kids at least divorce out of it.
I ended up with pretty horrible chronic spine problems that led to multiple interbody fusions, a whole lot of titanium hardware, and years being barely able to walk, often in enough pain that my entire personality palpably changed and I felt powerless to stop it. When the Army tried to treat me, they put me in traction to the point that it herniated worse, I passed out on the machine, and fell so hard onto the hospital floor that I got a TBI bad enough that I wasn't allowed to drive for two months until I could prove I was able to stand straight and touch my hand to a moving pencil. I went back to my hometown and totally forgot entire people existed who had apparently been huge parts of my life. I have no idea how many memory holes I have as I continually discover them talking to my family. Got 0% from the VA for that one.
I'm not here for the pain Olympics or anything and don't want to downplay the struggles of others, but being in software is the cushiest, easiest shit I could ever have imagined. I'm paid more than I ever would have thought possible without running my own business or being a surgeon when I was a kid. I work from home with all the free time in the world but still travel enough that I'm not just sitting in the same room every day forever. I very rarely work more than a 40 hour week or 8 hour day. The vast majority of what I work on goes nowhere and ends up abandoned or canceled, but every now and then, something makes it to fruition and I get to see it used and feel legitimate pride knowing I made it happen. People nominally above me in an org chart are deferent, polite, constantly asking if they can do anything for me. People just believe me when I say something.
Contrast this with the Army where it's legal, in-line with normal culture, and all but expected that bosses will publicly humiliate you, yell at you in front of your coworkers, you're constantly under a spotlight, stack ranked annually against your entire battalion by people who don't even know you. You'll get fired if you can't run fast enough or get fat. I got yelled at and censured once for not returning a call from my commander within five minutes when I was mowing my damn lawn and didn't hear the phone ring. You have literally no time off, whether or not you're home or out of town. Continuous mandatory recall. I was called in to bail guys out of prison at 3 AM on a Sunday morning. You rotate through 24-hour shifts called "staff duty" once a month because someone has to always be present in the headquarters. You don't get a day off the next day.
Software developers have absolutely no appreciation of how good they have it.