Imagine as a plumber you need to fix a broken pipe but your toolbox decided to arbitrarily change the name of your ratchetWrench to ratchetingWrench and changed the switch from tight/loose to in/out, but forgot to add that detail in the updated ratchet manual and before you can grab your toolbox from your truck that contains your wrench, you discover your keys to your truck no longer work, so you have to get new keys but the new keys only work in a new truck, so you have to get a new truck for $79,000
… while your boss is puncturing the tires and the customer is pouring sugar in your tank; both are looking at you telling you to make it work anyway and have it fixed asap. Oh and you can’t rearrange the tools or use another truck, but you’re free to use as many rubber bands as you want to achieve their goal. And don’t forget, the whole afternoon is written off because it’s important all the team has touchy feely meetings where we compare tshirt sizes and build bridges out of spaghetti to talk about the last couple of weeks worth of disasters while not addressing any root cause. Also, there is no budget for a raise this year either.
The coding part was fine; it was all the corporate bullshit preventing us from coding: literal days-long meetings; incompetent leadership, management, and businesspeople; and the pointlessness of the projects we worked on.
Nailed it. It's not the money or the work that make programmers hate their life. It's their boss/manager / unrealistic expectations / infinite meetings / bad & constantly stressful work environment.
I'm surprised money came up as reason 1. I get maybe some feel it doesn't pay as much as they wanted. The real big payouts you hear about are at big tech firms. But most programming jobs pay well above median. It's the management and other things that are hard to quantify or ferret out before accepting an offer. Sure, you can ask questions during interviews, but they often lie.
From experience of family and friends, I could well imagine the issue being programmers seeking jobs in programmer companies. An IT department in a non-it company is going to be smaller and allow you to actually do some meaningful stuff and have some choice in how you do things.
There are also those "fun" open office enviroments, where you are constantly brought out of focus and has to constantly strain yourself mentally to just get a medicrum of work done.
Yeah those are mostly build to: 1) Pack more employees into tighter spaces. and 2) allow managers to watch employees from afar because they think that "big brother watching" = "productivity"
This 100%. And for me and probably a lot of other people, this is a big reason we prefer remote. I kind of miss seeing coworkers in person sometimes and doing lunch and all, but I just absolutely can't flow state code focus mode work in a big open office where "collaborate" translates to everyone hollering over at each other all day long, nerf balls being thrown around and everyone in all your business. I've found it a lot easier to collaborate over teams /teams calls with screen share, than in a room where you can't even talk without the whole room in it.
I'm working towards becomming a programmer cause i'm depressed and it seems like i get good money for little effort, as i grew up on the pc and have no interest in anything else anyways. Most other things would require more work from me and depression is making it hard to put work into anything. Is that your guys reasoning aswell?
I quit my job last year because I had been assigned to a long term project highly in technical debt and it was depressing to deal with the same morons every day. At my new job, I got assigned to a long term project which is highly in debt, with a bunch of morons, but I'm getting paid twice as much as before. Modern problems require modern solutions.
But are you really happier ? I'm always surprise to see people that ask for better job conditions be satisfied by better pay, while keeping the same job conditions...
@@pierrotA it's hard to say - happier "comparing to what"? I can guess how it would have been if I stayed in the previous job, but I don't know with certaincy. I'm just going to "claim" that I am. The job conditions may not have changed but I have had new experiences due to changing, and the extra cash helps outside of the job
@@pikolino210 Its great if it's good for you. In my opinion, it's like asking a friend to stop treating you like sh*t, and instead of changing (or at least speak about it) he give you $30, and it suddenly make it ok for him to treat you like sh*t... If I'm not happy by the way I'm treated, it's not money that will make me happier... I'm not a prostitute, you cannot buy the right to treat me as an object.
I am relatively new to working professional as a software engineer. The issues raised in the video, and in the comments, in particular technical debt, and lack of freedom in your work, have been difficult for me. I just spent 6 months doing nothing but refactoring code to eliminate technical debt in one specific part of our product. I was hoping it was just this particular job that I had, and not something associated with software engineering jobs in general. Maybe I chose the wrong career? :(
As a programmer that quit my job to be a farmer, I'm infinitely happier now. No more dreading the next day, no more worries about whether corporate politics or "shareholder expectations" will cost me my job, and no more being forced to make bad products, because doing it right would take too long. I have a job that positively impacts the world, gives me time off to pursue personal projects, and the weather is somehow more predictable than middle management.
They just keep telling themselves "it's only temporary, I'll get a job eventually, they always said that programmers will always be in demand, they can't replace someone like me" while channeling their frustration by playing Fallout New Vegas fighting in the arena in Caesar's base or playing Sleeping Dogs fighting in the underground fight clubs.
Programming is a creative activity, when the programmer makes decisions. When the corporate virus makes other people make the decisions and only need coding "as you are told", there is no creativity and no happiness either
@@midoevil7 and then another opensource project is born because of some stupid architecture argument which splits the original developers between two projects which eventually leads to both of the project's deaths
Bold assumption that accumulated domain knowledge is even a concern, or they wouldn't be hiring external developers to fill the gaps and laying them off for the next fiscal quarter.
@@Excalibaard Most managers are incapable of seeing the bigger picture, ironic given their titles, but managers create a situation where the only people available to lead once they're gone are incompetent leaders, and the cycle perpetuates itself until the company runs into the ground. Of course I'm talking about medium to small sized companies, big tech can always just pump up the salary and they'll have a huge menu to choose from.
Microsoft is one of the absolute best examples of this shit--teams fight for resources and the knowledge siloing at Microsoft is insane. There's so much lost knowledge WITHIN the company itself, it boggles the mind.
"YOU WANT TO WORK REMOTELY!?!?!?!! NO!!!! YOU SIMPLY MUST COME INTO THE OFFICE TO SIT IN ON ZOOM MEETINGS WITH WORKERS HUNDRED, IF NOT THOUSANDS OF MILES AWAY!!!!"
Please redo this presentation. It should be: -Under 2 minutes -More content -More positive and inline with our company objectives -Add some charts Can you please have it on my desk by tomorrow 8 AM Have a nice weekend
Record financial results - little to no pay rise. Bad financial results - little to no pay rise and layoffs. And "anonymous" satisfaction surveys, ofc.
I work for a company with ~200.000 employees, and we made record profits last year. But we have a salary-freeze to "survive the recession" And salary-freeze of course doesn't apply to executives and shareholders
@@xXYannuschXx Out of the assumption that idle staff are nothing but a drain on resources, and should be cut as soon as they have no further ongoing tasks. This is especially true in game studios, where the differing sections of the development team can sit idle for long stretches as other parts of the studio work on the project. In a well-managed studio, these 'idle' staff should work on other projects, research, prototypes, concepts, and so on. Building resources to apply in future projects. But it is a cost that looks deceptively easy to cut.
For me, the main issue is the "Hustle or Die" culture. Recently, a director put me in charge of doing an MVP for a client. We earned the client. I was expecting to have the company moving to be ready for the full project. Nope. No planning, just pushing forward... Now, they are ramping up five different projects without enough people after signing the contracts. No setup period, pure hustle, and now we are basically delivering at a very slow pace because of lack of resources. What will definitely happen is that deliverables will fail deadlines, while we will be screamed to deliver anything at a breaking-neck pace. This cycle over and over again sucks the life of any individual.
@@Systemreboot96 I will hire your cats to replace the bosses. They're more effective because they help me manage my stress.
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That's the time they need you the most. Use it against them. Because if it's not your company, it's not your project, they are just hoping you would feel like that. It's theirs and if they make shitty decisions without you, they should deal with the consequences without you. Now you can take your time and ask for more money, time, and so on. Or they can fire you, but that will be the better thing because that kind of shit project is good only for burnout.
I mean, if chatgpt can solve everything in a few years as people predict then we will live in bliss, can just create anything we can imagine ourselves.
It became an issue when management types shifted from the old dogs of the foundation of the internet to people only in it for money or straight from business school. No longer is middle management SR devs forced into the position, but now its some dude who only looks at numbers instead of how product actually works.
I got started too late in life, so nobody wanted to hire me. They figure if you're over 30, you can't be up to date. I was passionate about programming for about 15 years. Dreamed in code. All that interest has faded. One thing that got to me was all that energy you would put into creating a new app, ... just to see it become obsolete and useless in a few years. That ONE reason is why I would rather have been a stone mason. It's nice to revisit your work from time to time, and you can when you've built something physical and useful. With programming, all your work just washes away after a while.
Your comment probably made me want to stop learning C on Bro Code's videos and probably made me want to do Art on MS Paint. I don't blame you for that.😔
Yeah... I've felt this ever since I got forcibly "promoted" to tech lead (aka the an omniscient god who knows everything so is put on the spot to answer every single question about systems he's never seen or touched). I've been trying to get demoted without being fired ever since... I'm terrible at being a tech lead, but apparently there's nobody else. But what is the point of taking somebody who's good at coding and shit at socializing, and forcing them to be in meetings all day?
@@Zeuts85I'm a tech lead and my favorite answer to any question is, "I don't know". They usually follow up this answer with the usual question, "who does?". I say, "future me, let's make a research spike ticket for me to investigate so I can find the best answer." It drives them crazy not to know now. But usually given enough time I can find a really good answer to their questions I feel you in the meetings but though. Way too many of them. I've said no to meetings with the comments, "Ticket XYZ will be late if I attend this meeting so I'm not attending without approval from the scrum master and delaying XYZ ticket to the next sprint." This works pretty well for cutting out nonsense meetings in some companies. Gotta draw them workplace boundaries. I'm not sure how you go about getting demoted but you can make being a lead less bad by setting boundaries and being clear to why you are doing them with a bit of cleverness. Best of luck to you!
@@Zeuts85 The question is; what has been going wrong with your money management that you are worried of being fired? Sounds like with at your position you must have earned enough money to last without a job for years. In worst case scenario, 1-2 years in your country, or several years some place cheaper. So my question is; where did all of your money go?
That's why devs are considered "too old" to code by the age of 25... they demand more money as they get older and theres no reason to pay more for a bunch of clerks.
I recently joined a new company and I found myself with 10 year old code with enormous amounts of technical debt to the point where simple coding was difficult slowing everything down and the code was unreliable. I spoke to a senior engineer at the company who provide us with the SDK and he said that this code is beyond repair and that it should be replaced ASAP which is precisely what I wanted to hear. My manager happened to be a former engineer and he was also eager to get rid of this old codebase. We started rewriting the codebase from scratch and upper management ended up being happy that the development was faster and more reliable so now they are allowing us to carry on.
Yeah right. And then you found the new codebase was missing a bunch of business rules for edge and other obscure cases built up over decades of knowledge that within a few months bankrupted the company when something happened that you didn't expect when you did the rewrite. Old codebases are gnarly because they contain a great deal of corporate wisdom, usually the sort of business thing programmers, especially naïve ones with only a few years experience, miss
@@gon8330People in some socialist countries were in fact happier on some levels. The Soviet Union is far from a good example, though, but look into Yugoslavian socialism for example
I am programmer and hate my job, have to do this because it's the only thing that pays decently in my country, it was either choosing this or follow my passion and starve.
Coding a personal project that will probably be used by 5 people at most: The most euphoric feeling in the world Coding a software on your job that is used by millions: Why am I not dead yet?
I would feel uneasy if more than a dozen people start using my personal projects At work I made a simple script that clicks buttons for me in a repeatable manner. The manager liked it so much that they requested a dozen more feature and extensive logging. Now it is one of the internal tests we run but it always fails and nobody looks at the logs. I still use it to click buttons for me tho
@@harrytsang1501 I've done a similar one-day project to make work easier before, and my immediate higher-up informed me that no one outside of the immediate team was allowed to know about it because management might try to make it part of the product flow.
In corporate programming jobs, there's those bosses that drags you to 4 different meetings taking hours of your day and then asks you where the project is at, then complains about the progress.
You spend every day in standup explaining what is blocking you (often other people) and why there is slow progress and then have to sit through one-on-ones with your manager where he lets you know he is disappointed by you progress and that other people not doing their job is not an excuse 🤷♂
It's been twenty years, but I still remember when I transistioned to development. At night I had no mental energy left for my family -- it's still an issue for me today. For me that's probably the worst part of the job.
Money is unlikely to equal happiness, but creating value and being passionate about your work helps. The challenges with technical debt and work culture are particularly relatable.
happiness will come when people stop working at corporations and work at profit-sharing companies or employee-owned companies. Make the beast starve. Once critical mass of people stop working at greedy corporations, the world can change.
Do you know what gets in the way of creating value? Your own boss that doesn't understand how programming works, and it's always changing priorities or stuff to do without allowing you to finish the first thing they assigned you to do. Hearing the words "it should be easy to do" from someone that doesn't even know how to open an IDE makes me want to break the social contract
After a few years of experience and seeing what happens to those workers who have health issues, you'll be back. Happened to me. But that return will never be like the start of the career...
@@seetheious9879 I grew up loving to code, but about six years into a senior dev role I got to the point where I couldn't even look at a screen without wanting to throw it out a window, along with everyone I worked with and all our clients. practically did the Office Space meme and did manual labor for a bit. would still be there if it included health insurance - had to get my own shitty insurance for about $350/mo. ended up having to go back to dev - haven't written anything for fun since. not sure what I'd do if I got laid off. 😮💨
@@AcvaristulLenestbh, I got a lot of health issues from dev. standing & sitting still for so many hours has messed up my feet, legs, back. gotten all kinds of weird neuropathies in my hands and feet trying to fend off high blood pressure with exercise while edging carpal tunnel. it's ironic - I'm in really good shape, especially for my age, but I often feel like shit because I spent most of my life working towards something that constantly betrays me. I have a ton of other skills, but only the one I've grown to hate can pay the bills.
Just give them a couple years. I went in "bright-eyed and bushy-tailed". After working extra hard and getting no recognition for it, and then just doing my job, but good, and ending up doing the work of other people who didn't do their job, the happiness of problem solving coding gave way to endless side issues. Like spending 2 months trying to get the speed testing engineer to do his job, only to spend another month of chasing people down to get the permissions to do it myself, only to find the job required writing and running one script... that I already made... 3 months ago...
I'm part of that 20%!! let's go! all you need is a 120k+ job that is remote! almost went homeless getting the dream job, had to visit a food bank once, and I focking made it, never give up! I focking did for a bit, went to work at retail, but I'm so back baby!
The programmers are actually the most likely to be happy being 24/7 in front of a screen, it's all the other morons glued to theirs that you should worry about, there's billions of them.
As a programmer who tries to hard limit his time on the PC and online, I certainly did. As a teenager I kinda enjoyed it but as an adult I do not want to sit in front of a screen all day.
I started programming when I was a kid, 27 years ago. I got a CS degree and was a professional software engineer for 11 years. I had jobs that paid well, jobs that didn't. I tried a big company, and I tried startups, and I tried being a founder myself. I hated it 90% of the time and really wish I could go back and pick another career. And when I say I hated it, I mean I hated it so much it ruined my entire life. It's not for everyone.
@@RAHULTMNT100 I'm still trying to answer that question. Probably something non-STEM that pays less but is not so demanding. I'm an extrovert and I hate sitting at a desk.
@@TastelessSoftware I think the same way too. I don't want to sit behind a desk all the time. I only have 2 years of experience, but I occasionally think about other careers I could switch to
I quit my last job (due to burnout) because I was tired of having my hands tied while being expected to do more with less all while the company continued to expand year over year. It's simply not sustainable but anyone middle management and above doesn't seem to understand such a concept.
Man, I feel you. I quit my last job also due to burnout. Spent 2 years building a product that middle management didn't care about, gave us no ressource and just wouldn't want to pull the plug because that wouldn't reflect well on them. Last straw was when they forced us to work on something else that we thought was stupid, had us all burnt out and said the day after the push to prod that we wouldn't use it in the end ... Half the team ended in burn out and quit ...
I'm not even a programmer and that's exactly why I quit my last job. nobody anywhere has any agency in their role. management either needs to throw their hands up and say "fine! do it your way then!" or pull the trigger on replacing us all with chatGPT because larping as a robot isn't working out well for at least 4/5ths of working adults.
These corporations have perfected the artist assembly line where one does the sketch, another does the lines, another animates the arm or hair, another just does texturing, one does rigging. But you went to school and did projects where you must learn the whole thing. And you need a portfolio of animated of shorts all just so you can be part of 1% of a production process.
The problem is not that technical debt exists, the problem is that we're prohibited from fixing it. Managers saying "if it works, don't touch it" (because the customer won't pay for that fix). Usually startups don't have this problem, as they realize that their velocity will go down if they accrue too much technical debt. However, when the company grows and more middle managers enter, it becomes a lot harder to get time to fix things. What was only touched on, but what I see as another major topic is: Having to write code for the trash. A lot of projects never go anywhere. If you're on your third or fourth project which just gets canned after you put in months of work, that's seriously demotivating. I'm seeing this in a lot of companies and quite a few of my friends are affected by it; I think the issue is at least as big as the technical debt one.
I've changed my opinion on this over the years. These days, I couldn't care less if they canned the project I'm working on. I literally have no love left for any of the work I do. If they want to waste their money paying me to do a load of work and then just chuck it in the bin it doesn't change anything for me at all. I still got paid so whatever.
I do find it hilarious that there's always enough time and money for something new with no future, but never any time to fix up the backbone of the company. By the way, you should try adding in acquisitions. Always love adding new tech debt to our ecosystem and figuring out how to barely make the new tech debt work with the old tech debt and then laughing about how it's technically impossible to build the things the company wants built because you can't support a skyscraper with a house of cards.
For us it's "Take care of technical debt and stay updated on everything, but also cut out everything not critical and work overtime so that we can meet these deadlines", guess what ends up being left behind and pushed into the future? lmao
what would it be like if everyone said no to a project until the code gets redone. unfortunately the metaphorical cog of the machine is already in motion, integrity is a luxury when someone else behind you will do the deed instead and you still have bills to pay. I'm not excusing them for cutting corners, but I find it rather convenient that society just happens to encourage nearsighted habits
I visited my grandma who lives in a rural place and a half of the kids over there are studying full stack or ml striving to get into top college and into one of those FAANG companies. On the contrary most faang managers, senior managers are pooling their money, buying some farmland and during soul sucking monotonous meetings they often talk about how they will spend their retirement with nature, raise a couple of animals and finally be at peace....kind of ironic lol
The part about tech debt hit me hard. We have so much shitty code at our company it's exhausting to work on it. Sometimes I feel like everyone who worked here before me was a complete idiot but then I remember that they were in the same spot as me and didn't have time to refactor this junk for the next 2 weeks risking breaking something. Then I add my shitty workaround, push it and call it a day.
It doesn't help when most of the time the starting code was written but some guy that thought it would be cool to try some new super convoluted idea which the rest of us then have to endure every day for years, plus the guy that wrote it is now the manager
@@tarquin161234yeah, but in the other hand. Many changes are for solving an immediate problem, not for a long road. Just after some time guys with authority and money do not want wasted money in a proper migration. Not always is for try something new(just Linux users are like that, and for that we put them in the attic alone and without light, maybe a mirror for remembering to take showers).
@@tarquin161234or when the original code base was never meant to be pushed to production, but the junior staffer took the consultant's source code and moved it to the production environment. Simultaneously pulling the wool over their manager's eyes through office politics.
17 year old Computer Science student here. Seeing all these bad news and bad perspectives on programming and *conveniently it all being my dream job* it already makes me very hopeless and honestly I don't even want to start, a depressing life as a cog for a no-name company to get the payments delayed and be able to barely pay the bills is NOT a life I want to live.
Don't feel discouraged. It's not actually all doom & gloom. The skills you are learning will become the tools that you use to navigate life. Being a programmer/engineer has tremendous value that extends well beyond just whatever job you happen to end up with. You are learning HOW to learn as well as how to apply what you know from past experiences to better understand new concepts. The end goal is to be confident that you can overcome any problem that you come across. If there is a problem you "cannot" solve, rather than giving up, you will have an idea of what you need to learn and you will have the tools to do so.
It’s not that bad, the internet is full of doomers. Either way it opens up doors, you can always later go into IT which is a more chill job, become a consultant or a more generic type job. In terms of pay I would say it isn’t better in other fields, so that’s not something to be depressed about. If you are still depressed at the state of the computer science field realise you are young and have I finite time to discover yourself still, explore other fields
Get the degree anyway. At least learn to code. I can tell you that I work at FAANG and I also find it soul sucking like the rest of the comments here. However, you might be able to find enjoyable work in a smaller company
Money is like health, lack of it will make you miserable but having it is no guarantee you'll be happy. After a certain point though, there's little difference in happiness no matter how much you make.
@byorce yeah I hate sprints as well. Even worse is constantly having meetings to estimate how long each ticket will take to complete. Like how the hell am I supposed to know how long a bug will take to fix when I don't even know what the cause is yet. It might take 4 hours, or it might take weeks. WTF are we debating it for. Just leave it with me and let me get on with it.
As someone relatively new to full-time software engineering, I thought the exact same thing whenever my manager would mention starting a new "sprint" after we only just met the last arbitrary deadline by slapping together terrible code because there was no time to write anything even somewhat decent. Shouldn't there be time to catch your breath?
god... sprints... we started that at the start of this year, so bad... Like half the week is just meetings to estimate and refine tickets. Then constnatly being asked how long everything will take even tho they are estimated already. Then having to work overtime cos managers and whoever set impossible deadlines and won't hire more resources.
naw man people like to complain about everything. What other job allows you to sit on your butt, listen to music all day, and avoid human interactions for 40 hours a week for 6 figures
"programmers are well paid" is what they all say, but my boss thinks otherwise. I hate this job, not only because it's stressing me out, but because it is also underpaid af
I don’t even know anymore dude. I make more than the average wage, even get €750 to drive maybe 15km (I guess 8 miles) per week. Barely have to do any ‘real’ stuff, talking to people here and there seems to be enough. Still the money feels as not enough, I live in a small apartment and it feels like I’m stuck or something.
As an older developer who lived through happier times... a lot of the camaraderie within tech teams is gone, partly due to daily involvement of non-techies and kindergarten rituals that suck all the air out of natural communication. Imagine you were working at a hair salon and the boss had all stylists stand at attention each morning to report (1) how many haircuts they gave yesterday (2) how many they are going to give today and (3) any blockers? (no complaints allowed though! or you're not a "team player"! Also, no discussions... "take it offline" please!). Combined with endless micro-management and performance metrics. Most people would find that demoralizing, unprofessional, and pointless. But in our industry it's called "agile" and developers put up with it for some reason. No wonder developers get depressed, if they have to start each workday that way. We love solving tricky problems and get appreciated for highly-qualified work that requires focus. Not all this B.S.
@@johnm8358 Born in the 70s 😎 A woman btw. Missing the times when we could throw jokes like "that's what she said" around or discuss politics and religion, without fear of offending anyone or running afoul of the HR police. Everything corporate is so darn sterile these days
@@MeowImages I'm the same decade:) I hear you... There is zero fun in the work environment anymore 😕... Are you still developing? I glad I'm not the only dinosaur (according to what others say)still developing
@@johnm8358 I'm still developing! It's still the most fun for me. Could never get myself to rise up the ranks and leave programming behind. Call it a personal fault, lol 😄
Record profits, no rises, endless meetings, things pretending to be agile that are just waterfall with a frock on, no independent agency, no outlet for creativity, no joy, PMs playing chase the shiny, an endless chain of semi completed projects shelved because of a change of focus. I could go on for a while. For me it was the zero percent chance of any genuine creativity that meant I gleefully accepted the news when the hammer fell.
Worse than waterfall. Waterfall implies there's a plan (which probably went fatally wrong a year ago). Scrum means the managers have no plan, just a bunch of desires that need to be fulfilled this instant.
Oh man, same here dude. I am working together with another architect but we don't get any time for creativity, or framework/package updates nontheless, even though we mention those need to be done.. The unrealistic deadline for the agile project that is just waterfall with outsourcing code quality that gets you depressed just by looking at it.. yeah the joy is gone for sure.
I have extremely few meetings as a software engineer. I actually feel like I would be happier with more because otherwise we are expected to write code all day, non stop. Two, four hour blocks of straight debugging can't be good for the brain.
I used to love programming, spent entire summer breaks just fking around with code, creating simulations, small games, visuals, leet code, you name it..... Then i started getting paid for it and it slowly sucked all the joy out of it
@@sotam1069for me is working with people that are impossible to cooperate with. Managers suck 99% of the time anyway but crappy people you have to cooperate with suck any joy left.
@@sotam1069hard to explain. I guess because the decision is not yours, so you have to compromise on quality a lot. Coding as hobby is art, coding as job is labor
All the programmers I’ve worked with at a very large international company seem to love their job. I think because they reported to middle and senior managers that were both programmers. Managers actually cared about their staff and acted as a buffer between them and the stakeholders. A good manager plays a huge role in job satisfaction.
Good management in general, not only the manager. My old manager just told us the higher ups wanted things so he was just passing things on and the new manager doesn't even respond to msgs and sets up meetings to tell us there's a deadline coming up so please work overtime and get it done. "Not that you weren't doing it, but please do it"..
I took a programming class in highschool, and the teacher told me straight up, if you are good at this job, you will be on call, and a total slave to your company, or you can be sub par and scoot on.
True. Also, the mediocre ones learned well how to stall all the overachievers so that the mediocre ones don't have to deal with their new code every day.
Remind me of my first programming job when I noticed problematic code that could cause race condition leading to a service that is dependent of another service malfunctioning or can't even start. It was probably a one in a hundred thousand chance that it happens, no body cared about it. Only until the traffics get way too large and weird useless error messages poping off on a daily basic do they eventually acknowledge what I said and put some synchronize there. All the insane, weird errors miraculously disappeared, who would have thought. It was one of the told ya situation and I would expect at least a raise because naive me. 2 years later, still heavily underpaid for all the extra hours they demand. I just called it quit and they can all go f themself. When you start out you are likely to be motivated because you would expect your hardwork and performance to reflect in your salary , but that is just not always the case. If you do well, your po/manager is the one getting raised, not you.
very true, although back in the day it didn't matter much. nowadays, however, the generation that grew up with social media can't function unless everything is done by majority rule, and in this industry the sub-pars always out-number the ones that actually know what they're doing by at least 4:1.
@@aa-fi9ks Yup the best way to deal with the job is be good enough so you can buy yourself enough time without anyone noticing to be able to find out where most of the other bugs are and then when they break be around to magically fix them. Cause getting ahead in the game is all about the perception of being good / productive rather than actually being moral, ethical, good, productive and there is no reward for working harder, better, cleaner in fact often its punished
What I hate is when I'm told I'll be writing code and then I find out that most of the time I'm fixing configuration issues, network related bugs and nannying offshore "developers".
Welcome to the job life. Most of professional are like that. Here in Mexico the medics have all the same problem, is a pretty common problem in modern society where no one represent something in real numbers. It is funny because in the past, fighting it was for winning "individualism against society" now we have more of what we need 😂. Is like "don't care for others because they don't care for you". Who cares what you boss, employee, medic, neighbor, etc; thinking you have "a real problem not like them".
The fantastic element that explains the appeal of games to many developers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a task from start to finish without any change in the user requirements.
With my experience, I would like to differ. If your boss at the games company can't make up his mind what game mechanic to do and how to monetise the game it quickly becomes a new type of hell. Also server response times are super low, requirements are way more difficult than the average app. Then you realise the breaking bug that you couldn't find is due to the hardware controllers.
Not a programmer, but an electronics engineer, so some hardware and some firmware development. However what I often see is the forever projects of software. When I am done with a project, I can proudly point to a product and say "I helped build that, and here are the parts I designed.", same goes for the mechanical engineer. It doesn't usually take multiple years from idea to market, but the poor guy who handles the database and cloud platform has pulled so many hairs out that he is bald. I think that a lot of programmers are stuck in these forever projects, where you get in to a project in the maintenance phase and get stuck adding small features for years and years, so you really don't get challenged in the same way anymore and you feel the skill rot set in, which is why you see a rather high attrition rate for software developers (burnout). It is the feeling of getting stuck and your hands are tied.
While manufacturing has it's own problems, I think the fact that electrical and mechanical engineers usually have a manufacturing step at the end of the design helps in many areas. It gives you a more clear-cut "done". Also you can blame suppliers, and manufacturers for delays. We cannot get that done in 2 weeks, our suppliers require 6 months lead time. Oh, I guess that is ok then. Software engineer just must have not worked enough overtime.
There are forever projects in hardware/firmware, particularly iot solutions with embedded linux. The rot catches up to every field as long as there's jerry rigged stuff holding product lines together.
And you cannot rush PCB layout because manufacturing takes time and remakes cost money vs. pushing a patch in software. There is also an element of art as well. Making efficient parts and trace placement that looks good is also satisfactory.
I worked for a company with perks like this. Everyone is different but I prefer without. It encourages the wrong kind of staff. I like engineering for engineering. A flashy work environment brings in people who don't know anything but hear that "tech" is great.
We just all work from home, screw those pointless perks when you can have whatever you want at home. I agree too with the other reply it brings in the wrong types, or it's to encourage bringing in people they want to exploit (but they can't code anyway so meh, that's why they end up with a massive office of thousands of devs and somehow do nothing). Every once in a while I take joy telling an Amazon recruiter that I wouldn't want to work for them anyway, seriously what are they actually doing where is the output and why is their retail site like it's from 2005 but even worse actually? I guess it's too important to change anything because the users will react so much that it could have any kind of impact so they don't risk it. In fairness they don't pay the huge bucks here otherwise I may be tempted.
@@username7763 Yeah, true. Some companies even use those perks solely to attract new employees, while dicouraging their use (through negative performance reviews if you use them) once you’re actually working there. I’d rather have a great working environment and leadership that properly understands the problems their teams face than useless gimmics.
Simple: - cleaning lady working 8 hours a day: $800 / month income, no responsibility -- skills required: coming to work on time, moving your hands when you broom / vacuum a place. - senior dev working 8-16 hours a day: $805 / month income, huge responsibility -- skills required: at least 16 years of education, and constant improvement to keep up with technology so as to not fall off "Why are devs unhappy, truly a mystery, no one will ever know"
Things really went downhill when companies turned Jira into MS Project. It's a bug tracker! Just put your bug list in there and that's it. Its a substitute for putting bugs in an Excel file. Don't break your work into all these tiny tasks into and put them in Jira, it never helped anyone. If you have more than 5 tasks to keep track of, that's your problem right there.
I have being in companies where the product owners were ex developers and the whole ethos of the company (at least that area of about 200 developers) was to write the best code possible, there were code reviews, training sessions, regular meetings about the latest tech, libraries and processes. Latest languages like Rust, go. Devops was huge, developers could get something into prod in about 6 minutes. All the developers loved it, everything was solid, the business side was happy. Then "they" decided to remove the current product owners and put in business people. Half the developers left in 2 months, the quality tanked. Productivity ground to a halt, applications were on life support as technical debt sky rocketed as product owners did not let anything get fixed but rushed in business features. I think it is the natural cycle of companies and goes round and round with management making an awful developer experience then developers in ascension until management decide to take control/direction for "reasons".
This!!! I however must add most kids nowadays haven't experienced such companies. And even worse they "grow up" to be just as incompetent so the good cycles are rare..
I can confirm. I've worked full-time at software companies since I was 21 years old. (I'm now 39, so I'm a dinosaur.) I ABSOLUTELY don't want to do this anymore, especially now with the state of the industry. I was deeply unhappy at my last job. I moved back in with my family to hunker down and start my own business.
Because of scrum, sprint planning, lean startup model, story points, medium size T-shirt, jira black belt taekwondo ninja, jujutsu kaizen six sigma kanban planning...
I started working as a student and was able to code for money. However, when I told my Father some stories about how annoying everything is and described it, he just laughed and said, "Looks like Software Engineers are one of us, too." (He is a Civil Engineer.) Short: Software Engineers are engineers and all of them are unhappy f*cks. My Father's solution was drinking.
Chemical engineering here, and I am unhappy as duck, specially working with wastewater treatment, something that no company wants to spend on, but they have to, so they push you to solve problems with very limited resources
@@etcher6841 My cope was to stop giving a fuck because I'm not being paid to care about the company's health (equity compensation). So as long as the price is right I don't care about your tech debt or security issues. I don't even bring it up like I used to anymore.
I am an accountant and same thing goes for everyone. I think it’s just jobs in general. 😪 Humans are just not meant to be working so many hours for so many years of our lives.
Problem is that software is so pervasive and barriers to entry comparatively low that quality invariably suffers. But, like any profession, becoming a good developer is hard, takes many years of practice and requires a specific type of person. The happiest developers are always those that have a deep appreciation of the craft AND can practice said craft in an environment that respects them.
And Jensen over at Nvidia can't stop talking about how his Ai tech will lower the barriers of entry to programming for the masses. To oblivion and beyond!
I'm feeling frustrated because people assume I make a lot of money, but due to inflation, my earnings don't go as far as they used to. For example, a house that used to cost $300,000 now costs around $1 million. It feels like I'm constantly chasing a goal that's becoming increasingly unattainable, like running on a treadmill that keeps speeding up while I get more and more exhausted.
there used to be a sign that said question authority. then they changed it to obey authority it's gonna be fine, and it just kind of faded in somewhere.
@@atomictraveller "Be the change you want to be". Also, if you do not come to our mandatory voluntary team meetings where we fantasize about violence against people who have different opinions you are fired.
Technical Debt is an unspoken crisis. One employer had me doing very little, but de-spaghettifying the project is a HUGE no-no (and so is watching videos on TH-cam). It's like I'm supposed to be a robot waiting to be turned on that cannot engage my mind. But when I do have something to do, touching one little variable breaks everything. EDIT: After firing me for not meeting their expectations, they are in a hiring freeze, as they are likely filing for bankruptcy.
Then in comes Phase 2: Supporting legacy in parallel with new platform/product dev. Yes. Because it’s legacy there are no story points needed and this certainly poses no issue to clients.
Only resolution is migrating to newer versions or technologies all together in that case. My company tried to refactor 2 year old code (which isn't even that old, guy that wrote it still worked at the company) but it broke so often we just decided to move to a modern framework altogether since it would take less time overall that refactoring and bringing all code up to date. Unless you're working with something like java that has good compatibility with older versions you might as well migrate.
There's a lot of stuff here that we can always complain about, but the real reasons are 1) pay is decreasing while prices are going up (inflation) over the last couple years, and 2) big tech layoffs mean a) there are fewer people to do the same amount of work, b) your job is under threat in the next round of layoffs, and c) your options for switching jobs have diminished.
@@games4us132no. The perception or dream of management is that AI can do better. In practice, it writes a ton of nonsense code that needs to be carefully inspected.
@@games4us132 I used to think this, but was pleasantly surprised to see AI repeatedly fail to solve a medium-level LeetCode exercise I completed without much trouble the other day. Even with multiple prompts and my solution as an example, it couldn't get its own solution correct. It is a very powerful tool and will only get better over time, but for now it still requires heavy oversight.
I don't work as a programmer (although I code), I work as a lead at a service desk. I deal with the same type of nonsense. Constant pressure to improve results, while nobody addresses legacy problems that cause a lot of frustration and they end up building on a weak foundation. I've been burned out for awhile and think about quitting most days. I'm guessing it's common in a lot of fields.
In my own experience, being developer is depressive bcause not much people understands your job and is difficult that other get the value of what you do, the probability to meet people that can understand and emphatize in what are you concerns in the day by day and is low, besides is a abstract, cold job.
Backend developer here. Yeah, 99% of the people don't understand or appreciate it. Luckily I grew up in a family that didn't appreciate me either so I'm indifferent in that aspect!
I came to same conclusions. And to make things worse, business people don't seem to understand that IT performance is measured not just by what you do, but what you prevent from happening, like fixing a problem before it crashes something or organizing stuff before the mess gets too big to handle.
The “higher salaries in US” is such a trap. Yes, you get paid much more but you’re supposed to save this money for your retirement, to cover your health insurance and anything potentially not covered by it and, like, a million other things most EU countries will take care of for you. Most people take that surplus and buy crazy expensive SF real estate or stupid cars.
that's not true, most retirement programs in europe are a scam, not enough people are born. By the time you retire it will not be enough to live, so you still have to have your own money to retire or are expected to work at retirement. Also a lot of governament run health programs are so bad most people use private anyway. These things worked maybe 50 years ago
In Germany, we have to give up a part of our income so that the old people can retire. But we will not get money for our retirement. It is a pyramid scheme and is collapsing at the moment. Our generation has to pay for the old people and must also save money for the own retirement, while we get only 1/3 of the American salary
Just throwing it out there but in those EU countries they do not actually take care of you, they just claim they will, unless you are part of certain "in groups" or groups that the elite are currently favoring. And on top of that the systems that are in place to "take care of you", not that they do, are in a slow collapse which has led to things like "the second german economic miracle" being forced onto the people, whether or not they want it. Or in the UK where they introduced a second state pension (NEST) because of a tacit acknowledgement that the first state pension (NI) isn't going to last into the future.
You are misinformed. We also have to pay the insurances in Europe from that Salary. I earn 70k and have 43k left after Taxes and Insurances. Than you have to pay high rent if you live in Big Cities. This varies from around 12k to 15k a year. Now you have ~ 30k left as a single. Its just basic Math at the end. If you double your income and you double your cost you still have more money than if you dont double the cost and income.
@@theterribleanimator1793 He really didn't want to say that the next step after Blackrock is that most of that money they manage belongs to retiring boomers or trust fund kids who need to see line go up.
Programmers used to be a rare breed it took loads of hard work to even become a programmer, those that did get good enjoy it because they crossed the skill hump. These days every man and their dog has done a 3 month bootcamp and is unhappy writing javascript because it's "not what instagram said it was". Ditto the above paragraph for technical debt...
It all started going down hill with the “learn to code” movement and those “day in the life of a SWE at [big company]. Everyone thought it was all easy work to be a programmer and now the market is saturated
@@javiereduardo89 yeah so true! People all around the world think swe are racking millions when only those at tier 1 company in countries like US get something even above few thousand $ Recently colleges in my state took 25k seats from mechanical and civil and gave to cs, now many of them (same % but higher no.) won't study and learn before an exam for 2hrs from some yt video and won't get a job then they will start complaining ed system to govt.
You think writing tests is the worthless part? How about writing a compliance document for a feature nobody uses that is scheduled to be deprecated in a year. At least with unit tests you're usually improving the code base. That being said, nobody should only write unit tests for more than a couple months.
I retired after 33 years as a SW developer. Here's how the last part of my career played out... From 1999-2018, I was super happy because I owned my own company and was the lead developer on a really cool piece of software. 2018-2020, I worked as an embedded software developer for a company that did contract development. It was great until it wasn't and I wound up on a project with insane deadlines using technologies I was not familiar with. Quit that. 2020-2021, worked on a Perl-based project. I lasted 9 months because my manager was a terrible micro-manager. 2021-2023, worked on legacy Perl code for a web host. The software was full of technical debt, but the people were great and I kind of enjoy cleaning up technical debt. 2023, retired because it became financially viable. Now I maintain several open-source hobby projects to get my programming fix, but would never go back to programming as a job. The tech industry nowadays just sucks.
@@ajassharafudeen As a software engineer myself, well, my ultimate goal has always been to work for myself, and that only became reinforced after I realized how difficult being a programmer can be. I have seriously been considering making a jump to UX--something with fewer "puzzles" and more creative freedom.
Oof, I understand that micro-manager, I had a team lead that would come up behind you like 4-5 times a day asking how things were going, so annoying and just ruins your concentration.
I don't get paid enough - Its about communication with others. If you are just making youtube videos or making your own code, then you would be more happy. Working with others is what causes chaos.
All those things go hand in hand, focus on lowering stress so that you can avoid the stomach issues and make it a point to go to bed early. Otherwise, I fear you may end up getting gallbladder stones, just ask my wife.
michael jackson lyrics. you're a vegetable they planted you chase the cheese or own the maze. money is not every thing and Is Rather Limiting Really. locate your psoas because its gonna locate you.
I'm sorry. I don't have much to add, but reading your comment, and so many others, I really feel for you. People shouldn't be driven to feel this way, doesn't matter how much they pay you. Take care of yourself.
Same thing can be said by us hardware engineers. Broken tools, bad institutional practices and receiving tremendous pressure to get tasks done when nobody else can seem to find the time to provide the bare minimum is maddening. It’s almost enough to make you want to find an open window and fashion yourself into a macabre art exhibit.
Can be said about most engineering jobs tho, you stay on a desk 95% of the day, get endless meeting and meeting to discuss meeting, have huge turnover and lost knowledge, get pressurized go meet unrealistic deadline. The difference is that the vast majority of it guys are only attracted to the technic part of their job, they can't stand the social interaction/debates/or a bit of corporate BS so it make them extremly unhappy even if they have to endure a tenth of what an average manager or engineer in term of meeting
No offense to them, I encourage anyone serious about software development to try this career, but those chasing it for the wrong reasons should leave now, leave us seasoned devs with the projects we're looking for.
As a near-depressed developer in south east Asia, I believe the reason of that depression distribution survey result is lacking of samples from south-east Asia programmers... Actual depression rate should be much higher..
I think it's because too much is left to the engineer to do. They're part product owner, part architecture, part designer, part QA testor, part support and full time engineer. Vast majority of the team can slack off while a couple rock star engineers do all the work.
I'm a back-end guy, I'm a data engineer pipeline building guy, I'm a front-end react UI guy, I'm a devops/devsecops azure/github guy, I'm a database admin, etc. Literally, It's like 10 roles combined into 1.
@@jerseyse410 Me too, with almost any tech company I worked with (all small) except my first gig a long time ago where I had the luxury of being only sysadmin (with customer support and the expectation of zero-tier troubleshooting / no escalation)
It's the worst when it becomes a janitorial position for product leads and customer support. When "product design" meetings end up being product people going on a 30 minute rant about some specific feature request, when no one has time or mental energy to actually work on that for weeks to come, so you get caught up in the details of some random thing that's not even shippable for months anyways. And then you have to step away from the important bug fix or feature to look into a user issue that leads to another 12 hour debugging session, all because you shipped the last feature before it was ready so you'd have time to work on the current feature. 😮💨
I remember a couple decades ago in my country there was this really big boom telling all the girls if they wanted to become wealthy they MUST become psychologists, and maybe around the same time it was oil engineer for boys (yes, I live in a really male centric country). Fast-forward to today, there are THOUSANDS of engineers driving cabs and Uber and what not, and THOUSANDS of psychologists working as assistants or cab drivers as well. Choosing a career that makes money is important, but don't choose the one just because is the "boom" at that moment. If you don't like it you'll end up miserable and working in a different industry.
that's why I want to become an endocrinologist, and eventually a plastic surgeon. Nothing like helping other trans people get the care they need while getting a decent pay too.
@@mike74h it was a really seemed career a few decades ago so all parents forced/advises their kids to study that, now there are way too many psychologists
They promised I'd be working on something innovative, that I'd build a solution that would change the world, but here I am, trying to center a div for a useless application.
I used to code for small businesses; agriculture, retail, construction, and charities etc. Now I'm pushing up through the London corporate bs and people are so unbelievably detatched it is incredibly painful as you say :) I could manage devs but the people above, what the helllll. Even though individually they are sound.
Being a programmer sucks it's like you're doomed to constantly keep learning forever, or you will stay behind whereas plumbers and farmers learn one thing once and polish their skills
There's a few problems that cause this in the first place: - Everyone needs to stop making the umpteenth JS framework; Just rally behind one, but for sure it should not be React as it doesn't help polish the fundamentals of web development - We need to focus on programming languages that cover as many use cases as possible so we are not jumping around ecosystems. JS may be one but JS is also a terrible language. Great alternatives are C#, Kotlin, Dart, and possibly Go (although UI development is not good with this one). By just focusing on one or two languages that cover most cases, there's lest cognitive overload - We need to stop making so many libraries and use stdlibs or creating our own code for utilities wherever possible where it's not too time consuming. - Companies need to stop hiring by framework and hire instead by field (are you a front end dev, back end, full stack, mobile, data analyst, game dev.... well ok game dev is a bit more extreme as the whole job revolves around the game engine chosen). The point is, just because a guy knows one framework doesn't mean he can't work with another one.
My problem is that I know I can make more money at a new job. I have experience and don't think it will be that hard to find something else. But why on earth do I want to put myself through the software engineering job market. It's filled with denials of companies that I fill the role of perfectly and technical interviews I have to study my ass off to be able to pass. Will I ever use the knowledge that I gain from that studying? No. But it won't change the fact that for months I'll need to hone my skills on something that just doesn't matter.
@@frankhuurman3955 What are you talking about ? In Czech Republic a good programmer gets paid like 2.5-4 times the average salary (1800 usd/month and thats still a good salary in my country). I am year after high school (no university) and i already have 2k and could have more if i would went to bigger city. What country are you from ?
@@feisikLetsPlay Netherlands, close to 5k € a month in a big city with about 10 years of work experience. That ~60k EUR is about 65k USD a year. Ok perhaps I was comparing it to the FAANG jobs level of paychecks because I've got a few friends around me that are in the 120k+ range. It's definitely not bad but you'll have to job hop a lot to get to a good paycheck in the EU.
@@feisikLetsPlay Depends on the place, france the salary are horrible for example, in the range of yours, but life is 2-3 times more expensive. Crossing the border to germany or switzerland multiplies the salary by 2 to 5 times...
i started programming when i was doing my undergrad degree like 15 years ago. programming back then was a bit easy, you just had to write the business logic and connect some dots and boom you have a working solution. however it became a nightmare now. -Managing git branches -make sure u deploy latest solution and push latest changes -serverless computing -useless permissions and security roles between different components -maintaining different environments (dev,pre,prod) all such things has made programming difficult and boring. on the top of that most tech companies offers very similar kind of roles. all you are doing is writing lambda functions, there is no creativity and no new exciting projects.
Aside from "serverless" all these things make it far easier. Security roles debatable, depends on what the actual system is, I've seen a lot of completely pointless "security" while glaring low hanging fruit are just ignored and the better solution for the harder problem is standard separation of concerns, opsec, observability, and just actually doing it properly.
Knowing you have the power trough code to change the world, but eventually you are selling your time to a corporate which career plan can't keep up with inflation, I think is a big chunk of that 80%.
I quit a 6-figure job to be a house husband and raise a kid. Year after year the industry promised that the job and the life would get better; if only we kept up the same pace of work a bit longer. 13 years of overtime... watch savings, retirement, investments lose 40% of its buying power over 2 years of a pandemic. I'd rather watch Peppa Pig and bring my daughter to the park. F this.
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Money cant buy happiness but poverty cant buy anything
Based on
Really true
If you learn to stay happy without money, you can learn to stay happy with money.
first world problems is a privilege
Money can buy a minimum of happiness, but, poverty makes you more miserable and unhappy.
Imagine as a plumber you need to fix a broken pipe but your toolbox decided to arbitrarily change the name of your ratchetWrench to ratchetingWrench and changed the switch from tight/loose to in/out, but forgot to add that detail in the updated ratchet manual and before you can grab your toolbox from your truck that contains your wrench, you discover your keys to your truck no longer work, so you have to get new keys but the new keys only work in a new truck, so you have to get a new truck for $79,000
… while your boss is puncturing the tires and the customer is pouring sugar in your tank; both are looking at you telling you to make it work anyway and have it fixed asap. Oh and you can’t rearrange the tools or use another truck, but you’re free to use as many rubber bands as you want to achieve their goal. And don’t forget, the whole afternoon is written off because it’s important all the team has touchy feely meetings where we compare tshirt sizes and build bridges out of spaghetti to talk about the last couple of weeks worth of disasters while not addressing any root cause. Also, there is no budget for a raise this year either.
That's an eerily accurate description
you hit the nail on the head.
(But someone updated the nail package so now you need to rewrite your codebase for the seventh time (this month))
I'm crying, but I am not laughing.
I'm personally hurt by this comment thanks
80% said yes to "Are you sad?", the other 20% didn't speak English
Yeah show me a programmer that doesn't speak English
@@stefanbabukov1744 My uncle, Spanish programmer, cant speak fluent English
Please rephrase the question using the word "needful"
@@stefanbabukov1744 a lot
@@AytherAlt Nobody expects the Spanish I̶n̶q̶u̶i̶s̶i̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ Programmers
The coding part was fine; it was all the corporate bullshit preventing us from coding: literal days-long meetings; incompetent leadership, management, and businesspeople; and the pointlessness of the projects we worked on.
it's all starts from incompetent HRs
This! Empty headed corporate business grads are the fkn worst. Agile is their whip.
I'll keep this in mind in my company
Amen.
Definitely relate. Been in the corporate world for years and the nonsense that goes along with it is what really grades on me.
Remember guys: 'Pain is temporary'.
And as we know, nothing is as permanent as a temporary solution.
Only if it involves the government.
"i fix this later"
Nothing is as permanent as a temporary solution that works
ah shit
@@benshiotsu8553 yes, that is the definition of a solution
"You have to go to work again because you didn't die in your sleep." Brother, truer words have never been spoken.
FACTS
School shooters need to shoot us instead smh
amen
I wish I died tonight
ROFL....thats a good way to look at it
Nailed it. It's not the money or the work that make programmers hate their life. It's their boss/manager / unrealistic expectations / infinite meetings / bad & constantly stressful work environment.
Yeah working with dumb ducks who can't even express themselves
it's mainly unemployment or the stress knowing there will be more layoffs
I'm surprised money came up as reason 1. I get maybe some feel it doesn't pay as much as they wanted. The real big payouts you hear about are at big tech firms. But most programming jobs pay well above median. It's the management and other things that are hard to quantify or ferret out before accepting an offer. Sure, you can ask questions during interviews, but they often lie.
From experience of family and friends, I could well imagine the issue being programmers seeking jobs in programmer companies. An IT department in a non-it company is going to be smaller and allow you to actually do some meaningful stuff and have some choice in how you do things.
well said
There are also those "fun" open office enviroments, where you are constantly brought out of focus and has to constantly strain yourself mentally to just get a medicrum of work done.
Yeah those are mostly build to: 1) Pack more employees into tighter spaces. and 2) allow managers to watch employees from afar because they think that "big brother watching" = "productivity"
Thats the same enviroment where you have a meeting at 0900, 1000, 1400, 1600 for status updates
God I hate those open layouts with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns
And if you make any noise (like getting startled), you have death glare from the teams around and get the "talk" from management.
This 100%. And for me and probably a lot of other people, this is a big reason we prefer remote. I kind of miss seeing coworkers in person sometimes and doing lunch and all, but I just absolutely can't flow state code focus mode work in a big open office where "collaborate" translates to everyone hollering over at each other all day long, nerf balls being thrown around and everyone in all your business. I've found it a lot easier to collaborate over teams /teams calls with screen share, than in a room where you can't even talk without the whole room in it.
I’m not depressed cause I’m a programmer, I’m a programmer cause I’m depressed .
I feel that
true dat
I'm working towards becomming a programmer cause i'm depressed and it seems like i get good money for little effort, as i grew up on the pc and have no interest in anything else anyways.
Most other things would require more work from me and depression is making it hard to put work into anything.
Is that your guys reasoning aswell?
I'm not a programmer because I'm depressed
REAL
I quit my job last year because I had been assigned to a long term project highly in technical debt and it was depressing to deal with the same morons every day. At my new job, I got assigned to a long term project which is highly in debt, with a bunch of morons, but I'm getting paid twice as much as before. Modern problems require modern solutions.
dang😂
But are you really happier ?
I'm always surprise to see people that ask for better job conditions be satisfied by better pay, while keeping the same job conditions...
@@pierrotA it's hard to say - happier "comparing to what"? I can guess how it would have been if I stayed in the previous job, but I don't know with certaincy. I'm just going to "claim" that I am. The job conditions may not have changed but I have had new experiences due to changing, and the extra cash helps outside of the job
@@pikolino210 Its great if it's good for you.
In my opinion, it's like asking a friend to stop treating you like sh*t, and instead of changing (or at least speak about it) he give you $30, and it suddenly make it ok for him to treat you like sh*t...
If I'm not happy by the way I'm treated, it's not money that will make me happier... I'm not a prostitute, you cannot buy the right to treat me as an object.
I am relatively new to working professional as a software engineer. The issues raised in the video, and in the comments, in particular technical debt, and lack of freedom in your work, have been difficult for me. I just spent 6 months doing nothing but refactoring code to eliminate technical debt in one specific part of our product. I was hoping it was just this particular job that I had, and not something associated with software engineering jobs in general. Maybe I chose the wrong career? :(
As a programmer that quit my job to be a farmer, I'm infinitely happier now. No more dreading the next day, no more worries about whether corporate politics or "shareholder expectations" will cost me my job, and no more being forced to make bad products, because doing it right would take too long. I have a job that positively impacts the world, gives me time off to pursue personal projects, and the weather is somehow more predictable than middle management.
@calebmeyer2121 please can you tell me how you did it. I would love to do something like that. I'd love to have an orchard and make cider.
This is also my long-term goal.
Me too. Guess there's a few of us out there.
Im glad you’re loving it in the field of actual workers (mover here). Its great to not get “cancelled”.
I locate utilities and I don't hate it. I just enjoyed studying programming. Kind of a downer to see all the unhappiness.
i like that these videos are very to-the-point instead of taking the 5 minutes of content and stretching it to 15 minutes with filler words. thank you
if employed programmers are depressed how depressed are unemployed programmers
Very i think i evolved something darker then just depression
Linus Torvalds seems to be doing alright so idk
How are the normal unemployed people❓
💀💀💀💀💀
If i was living in a developed country and programming didn't work with me i would shift to become a farmer
They just keep telling themselves "it's only temporary, I'll get a job eventually, they always said that programmers will always be in demand, they can't replace someone like me" while channeling their frustration by playing Fallout New Vegas fighting in the arena in Caesar's base or playing Sleeping Dogs fighting in the underground fight clubs.
Programming is a creative activity, when the programmer makes decisions. When the corporate virus makes other people make the decisions and only need coding "as you are told", there is no creativity and no happiness either
Aaaaaaaand then ... a new opensource project is born ...
@@midoevil7 and then another opensource project is born because of some stupid architecture argument which splits the original developers between two projects which eventually leads to both of the project's deaths
@@WHAT_TAHW
The sad little story of Linux distros ...
Well said!
@@PhilDietz Picasso would sketch on a napkin to pay for a bar tab, which was usually rather large, to avoid spending the cash.
Companies: "Why do people leave so quickly? We're losing all our accumulated knowledge!"
Also companies: "A raise? Pffff, best I can do is 1.3%"
Bold assumption that accumulated domain knowledge is even a concern, or they wouldn't be hiring external developers to fill the gaps and laying them off for the next fiscal quarter.
@@Excalibaard Most managers are incapable of seeing the bigger picture, ironic given their titles, but managers create a situation where the only people available to lead once they're gone are incompetent leaders, and the cycle perpetuates itself until the company runs into the ground.
Of course I'm talking about medium to small sized companies, big tech can always just pump up the salary and they'll have a huge menu to choose from.
And they will happily pay 10% more than you were earning to the guy that will replace you. Depressing.
Microsoft is one of the absolute best examples of this shit--teams fight for resources and the knowledge siloing at Microsoft is insane. There's so much lost knowledge WITHIN the company itself, it boggles the mind.
"YOU WANT TO WORK REMOTELY!?!?!?!! NO!!!! YOU SIMPLY MUST COME INTO THE OFFICE TO SIT IN ON ZOOM MEETINGS WITH WORKERS HUNDRED, IF NOT THOUSANDS OF MILES AWAY!!!!"
Please redo this presentation. It should be:
-Under 2 minutes
-More content
-More positive and inline with our company objectives
-Add some charts
Can you please have it on my desk by tomorrow 8 AM
Have a nice weekend
Record financial results - little to no pay rise. Bad financial results - little to no pay rise and layoffs. And "anonymous" satisfaction surveys, ofc.
You get laid off even with record profits these days
@@niamhleeson3522 I can confirm that.
@@niamhleeson3522 Record profits due to layoffs! Seriously, how did that became a thing? You cut off your legs and then proclaim you lost weight?
I work for a company with ~200.000 employees, and we made record profits last year.
But we have a salary-freeze to "survive the recession"
And salary-freeze of course doesn't apply to executives and shareholders
@@xXYannuschXx Out of the assumption that idle staff are nothing but a drain on resources, and should be cut as soon as they have no further ongoing tasks. This is especially true in game studios, where the differing sections of the development team can sit idle for long stretches as other parts of the studio work on the project. In a well-managed studio, these 'idle' staff should work on other projects, research, prototypes, concepts, and so on. Building resources to apply in future projects. But it is a cost that looks deceptively easy to cut.
For me, the main issue is the "Hustle or Die" culture. Recently, a director put me in charge of doing an MVP for a client. We earned the client. I was expecting to have the company moving to be ready for the full project. Nope. No planning, just pushing forward... Now, they are ramping up five different projects without enough people after signing the contracts. No setup period, pure hustle, and now we are basically delivering at a very slow pace because of lack of resources. What will definitely happen is that deliverables will fail deadlines, while we will be screamed to deliver anything at a breaking-neck pace. This cycle over and over again sucks the life of any individual.
Oh yeah, same story as always, take on big projects, dont hire enough resources and then bosses expect us to work as efficient as 3 devs lmao.
If you want you can hire my cats they are quite resourceful, i have 3 of them.
@@Systemreboot96 I will hire your cats to replace the bosses. They're more effective because they help me manage my stress.
That's the time they need you the most. Use it against them. Because if it's not your company, it's not your project, they are just hoping you would feel like that. It's theirs and if they make shitty decisions without you, they should deal with the consequences without you. Now you can take your time and ask for more money, time, and so on. Or they can fire you, but that will be the better thing because that kind of shit project is good only for burnout.
Sounds like you need more devs, yet I bet like most places I worked that is supposedly to expensive
Programmers are not happy because they LOST control of the internet and are now working for billionaries instead of developing interesting things
Under rated comment
facts
I mean, if chatgpt can solve everything in a few years as people predict then we will live in bliss, can just create anything we can imagine ourselves.
I think you are pretty close to the truth
It became an issue when management types shifted from the old dogs of the foundation of the internet to people only in it for money or straight from business school. No longer is middle management SR devs forced into the position, but now its some dude who only looks at numbers instead of how product actually works.
I got started too late in life, so nobody wanted to hire me. They figure if you're over 30, you can't be up to date. I was passionate about programming for about 15 years. Dreamed in code. All that interest has faded. One thing that got to me was all that energy you would put into creating a new app, ... just to see it become obsolete and useless in a few years. That ONE reason is why I would rather have been a stone mason. It's nice to revisit your work from time to time, and you can when you've built something physical and useful. With programming, all your work just washes away after a while.
Never too late to get into stonemasonry :)
would you share the age when you became a programmer?
Tbh I think it has little to do with being up to date and more about the cost of your health benefits
Your comment probably made me want to stop learning C on Bro Code's videos and probably made me want to do Art on MS Paint. I don't blame you for that.😔
Programming now means being a digital clerk, 90% administration and meetings, 10% coding, depending on your company 0% room for creativity.
Yeah... I've felt this ever since I got forcibly "promoted" to tech lead (aka the an omniscient god who knows everything so is put on the spot to answer every single question about systems he's never seen or touched). I've been trying to get demoted without being fired ever since... I'm terrible at being a tech lead, but apparently there's nobody else. But what is the point of taking somebody who's good at coding and shit at socializing, and forcing them to be in meetings all day?
@@Zeuts85I'm a tech lead and my favorite answer to any question is, "I don't know". They usually follow up this answer with the usual question, "who does?". I say, "future me, let's make a research spike ticket for me to investigate so I can find the best answer."
It drives them crazy not to know now. But usually given enough time I can find a really good answer to their questions
I feel you in the meetings but though. Way too many of them. I've said no to meetings with the comments, "Ticket XYZ will be late if I attend this meeting so I'm not attending without approval from the scrum master and delaying XYZ ticket to the next sprint."
This works pretty well for cutting out nonsense meetings in some companies.
Gotta draw them workplace boundaries. I'm not sure how you go about getting demoted but you can make being a lead less bad by setting boundaries and being clear to why you are doing them with a bit of cleverness.
Best of luck to you!
@@Zeuts85 The question is; what has been going wrong with your money management that you are worried of being fired? Sounds like with at your position you must have earned enough money to last without a job for years. In worst case scenario, 1-2 years in your country, or several years some place cheaper. So my question is; where did all of your money go?
Yes, because you are making a product for a company that owns it. Of course they're not going to let you be creative in that case.
That's why devs are considered "too old" to code by the age of 25... they demand more money as they get older and theres no reason to pay more for a bunch of clerks.
I recently joined a new company and I found myself with 10 year old code with enormous amounts of technical debt to the point where simple coding was difficult slowing everything down and the code was unreliable. I spoke to a senior engineer at the company who provide us with the SDK and he said that this code is beyond repair and that it should be replaced ASAP which is precisely what I wanted to hear. My manager happened to be a former engineer and he was also eager to get rid of this old codebase. We started rewriting the codebase from scratch and upper management ended up being happy that the development was faster and more reliable so now they are allowing us to carry on.
Rare win
Rarely they agree to rewrire from scratch tho, in my case i am forced to work with legacy c++ code@@mahdimoradkhani6610
Yeah right. And then you found the new codebase was missing a bunch of business rules for edge and other obscure cases built up over decades of knowledge that within a few months bankrupted the company when something happened that you didn't expect when you did the rewrite.
Old codebases are gnarly because they contain a great deal of corporate wisdom, usually the sort of business thing programmers, especially naïve ones with only a few years experience, miss
God I need this 🥹
I don't believe you. 😌
It's not just programmers, it's any soul sucking office job.
its any job working for some capitalist monstrosity
@@thesquirrel082190people in societ union were happy?😂
@@gon8330 got that 'if water really makes plants grow, why aren't there plants in my toilet?' kinda logic
@@gon8330People in some socialist countries were in fact happier on some levels. The Soviet Union is far from a good example, though, but look into Yugoslavian socialism for example
@@gon8330 Ha! Exactly
I am programmer and hate my job, have to do this because it's the only thing that pays decently in my country, it was either choosing this or follow my passion and starve.
Coding a personal project that will probably be used by 5 people at most: The most euphoric feeling in the world
Coding a software on your job that is used by millions: Why am I not dead yet?
so true
I would feel uneasy if more than a dozen people start using my personal projects
At work I made a simple script that clicks buttons for me in a repeatable manner. The manager liked it so much that they requested a dozen more feature and extensive logging. Now it is one of the internal tests we run but it always fails and nobody looks at the logs. I still use it to click buttons for me tho
do you have that kind of projects? i am curious could you share if you have?
Exactly, I get way more joy coding stuff that I will only ever use myself once a month than work bs.
@@harrytsang1501 I've done a similar one-day project to make work easier before, and my immediate higher-up informed me that no one outside of the immediate team was allowed to know about it because management might try to make it part of the product flow.
In corporate programming jobs, there's those bosses that drags you to 4 different meetings taking hours of your day and then asks you where the project is at, then complains about the progress.
You spend every day in standup explaining what is blocking you (often other people) and why there is slow progress and then have to sit through one-on-ones with your manager where he lets you know he is disappointed by you progress and that other people not doing their job is not an excuse 🤷♂
mental exhaustion is seriously a killer. id rather be physically exhausted every day than mentally exhausted.
this is exactly the reason why i made up my mind to never work in a company...specially as a fulltime employee
@@ANTICHRIS619 So now you do what to sustain yourself?
honestly both are the exact same, physical exhaustion is also not easy at all
@@Polygarden Need to stay dry and warm all year. Typically need energy for that. Thoughts?
It's been twenty years, but I still remember when I transistioned to development. At night I had no mental energy left for my family -- it's still an issue for me today. For me that's probably the worst part of the job.
Money is unlikely to equal happiness, but creating value and being passionate about your work helps. The challenges with technical debt and work culture are particularly relatable.
happiness will come when people stop working at corporations and work at profit-sharing companies or employee-owned companies. Make the beast starve. Once critical mass of people stop working at greedy corporations, the world can change.
Do you know what gets in the way of creating value? Your own boss that doesn't understand how programming works, and it's always changing priorities or stuff to do without allowing you to finish the first thing they assigned you to do. Hearing the words "it should be easy to do" from someone that doesn't even know how to open an IDE makes me want to break the social contract
5 years in the game and I quit. Just started a physical job instead. My brain needs rest and my body needs work. Wish me luck boys
I wish you all the best!
After a few years of experience and seeing what happens to those workers who have health issues, you'll be back.
Happened to me.
But that return will never be like the start of the career...
You will find that you took the comforts for granted and glamorized physical labor.
@@seetheious9879 I grew up loving to code, but about six years into a senior dev role I got to the point where I couldn't even look at a screen without wanting to throw it out a window, along with everyone I worked with and all our clients.
practically did the Office Space meme and did manual labor for a bit. would still be there if it included health insurance - had to get my own shitty insurance for about $350/mo.
ended up having to go back to dev - haven't written anything for fun since. not sure what I'd do if I got laid off. 😮💨
@@AcvaristulLenestbh, I got a lot of health issues from dev. standing & sitting still for so many hours has messed up my feet, legs, back. gotten all kinds of weird neuropathies in my hands and feet trying to fend off high blood pressure with exercise while edging carpal tunnel. it's ironic - I'm in really good shape, especially for my age, but I often feel like shit because I spent most of my life working towards something that constantly betrays me. I have a ton of other skills, but only the one I've grown to hate can pay the bills.
0:19 " 20% with delusion of Happiness " is wild 💀💀
See you in the sewer
For real hhhhh
Just give them a couple years. I went in "bright-eyed and bushy-tailed". After working extra hard and getting no recognition for it, and then just doing my job, but good, and ending up doing the work of other people who didn't do their job, the happiness of problem solving coding gave way to endless side issues. Like spending 2 months trying to get the speed testing engineer to do his job, only to spend another month of chasing people down to get the permissions to do it myself, only to find the job required writing and running one script... that I already made... 3 months ago...
I'm part of that 20%!! let's go! all you need is a 120k+ job that is remote! almost went homeless getting the dream job, had to visit a food bank once, and I focking made it, never give up! I focking did for a bit, went to work at retail, but I'm so back baby!
@@JohnSmith-xv1tp man you just described my experience 💯. No point in going all out when it gets you nowhere
i wonder then all the programmers will find out that their mom was right, you cant stay 24/7 in front of a screen and expect to be happy
This
*"It's always the damn screen"*
The programmers are actually the most likely to be happy being 24/7 in front of a screen, it's all the other morons glued to theirs that you should worry about, there's billions of them.
As a programmer who tries to hard limit his time on the PC and online, I certainly did. As a teenager I kinda enjoyed it but as an adult I do not want to sit in front of a screen all day.
when their psoas contracts
I started programming when I was a kid, 27 years ago. I got a CS degree and was a professional software engineer for 11 years. I had jobs that paid well, jobs that didn't. I tried a big company, and I tried startups, and I tried being a founder myself. I hated it 90% of the time and really wish I could go back and pick another career. And when I say I hated it, I mean I hated it so much it ruined my entire life. It's not for everyone.
what would you have rather done
@@RAHULTMNT100 I'm still trying to answer that question. Probably something non-STEM that pays less but is not so demanding. I'm an extrovert and I hate sitting at a desk.
@@TastelessSoftware I think the same way too. I don't want to sit behind a desk all the time. I only have 2 years of experience, but I occasionally think about other careers I could switch to
.
I quit my last job (due to burnout) because I was tired of having my hands tied while being expected to do more with less all while the company continued to expand year over year. It's simply not sustainable but anyone middle management and above doesn't seem to understand such a concept.
Man, I feel you. I quit my last job also due to burnout. Spent 2 years building a product that middle management didn't care about, gave us no ressource and just wouldn't want to pull the plug because that wouldn't reflect well on them. Last straw was when they forced us to work on something else that we thought was stupid, had us all burnt out and said the day after the push to prod that we wouldn't use it in the end ... Half the team ended in burn out and quit ...
@@Dimfacion1oh no :(
They understand alright. Using employees up and discarding each one like a tube of toothpaste is intentional.
@@Dimfacion1 i want to see the road map of those managers
Really what did they have achieved to make people burnout and earn money on it
I'm not even a programmer and that's exactly why I quit my last job. nobody anywhere has any agency in their role. management either needs to throw their hands up and say "fine! do it your way then!" or pull the trigger on replacing us all with chatGPT because larping as a robot isn't working out well for at least 4/5ths of working adults.
80% aren't coding anything meaningful that spurs their imaginations. A portrait artist would find little joy in painting the walls of your kitchen
I like that analogy
Sadly coding isn't painting
It doesn't come natural like painting
It's just hard for us
Bro architects make shitty glass skyscrapers that all look the same they just get paid for it,
@@last.journeyCoding came pretty naturally for me, and painting doesn't.
These corporations have perfected the artist assembly line where one does the sketch, another does the lines, another animates the arm or hair, another just does texturing, one does rigging. But you went to school and did projects where you must learn the whole thing. And you need a portfolio of animated of shorts all just so you can be part of 1% of a production process.
The problem is not that technical debt exists, the problem is that we're prohibited from fixing it. Managers saying "if it works, don't touch it" (because the customer won't pay for that fix). Usually startups don't have this problem, as they realize that their velocity will go down if they accrue too much technical debt. However, when the company grows and more middle managers enter, it becomes a lot harder to get time to fix things.
What was only touched on, but what I see as another major topic is: Having to write code for the trash. A lot of projects never go anywhere. If you're on your third or fourth project which just gets canned after you put in months of work, that's seriously demotivating. I'm seeing this in a lot of companies and quite a few of my friends are affected by it; I think the issue is at least as big as the technical debt one.
I've changed my opinion on this over the years. These days, I couldn't care less if they canned the project I'm working on. I literally have no love left for any of the work I do. If they want to waste their money paying me to do a load of work and then just chuck it in the bin it doesn't change anything for me at all. I still got paid so whatever.
I do find it hilarious that there's always enough time and money for something new with no future, but never any time to fix up the backbone of the company.
By the way, you should try adding in acquisitions. Always love adding new tech debt to our ecosystem and figuring out how to barely make the new tech debt work with the old tech debt and then laughing about how it's technically impossible to build the things the company wants built because you can't support a skyscraper with a house of cards.
yup. If it's not time efficient I won't want my employee to be working for endless hours fixing something that's not broken. That's the mindset.
For us it's "Take care of technical debt and stay updated on everything, but also cut out everything not critical and work overtime so that we can meet these deadlines", guess what ends up being left behind and pushed into the future? lmao
what would it be like if everyone said no to a project until the code gets redone.
unfortunately the metaphorical cog of the machine is already in motion, integrity is a luxury when someone else behind you will do the deed instead and you still have bills to pay.
I'm not excusing them for cutting corners, but I find it rather convenient that society just happens to encourage nearsighted habits
Humans need physical work, fresh air, and sunshine. Sticking people in a dark office working 40hrs a week or more is literal torture.
40 hrs pays a lot,,, I mean a LOT $$$
I visited my grandma who lives in a rural place and a half of the kids over there are studying full stack or ml striving to get into top college and into one of those FAANG companies. On the contrary most faang managers, senior managers are pooling their money, buying some farmland and during soul sucking monotonous meetings they often talk about how they will spend their retirement with nature, raise a couple of animals and finally be at peace....kind of ironic lol
Blr. Blerr. Blwrrr. Blurrrr. Blyrrrrr. Blirrrrrr.... It's all the same blurry BLEWRRRR
damn
LOL damn, don't come here kids, you got it good there.
Managers really have their priorities in life messed up.
I'm curious how these results compare to ANY office job, as I don't think it's limited to just software developers
Yep. Although it's good to go through the specifics of any particular industry. I imagine mostly it's just the vampiric nature of our economic system.
Well number 1 issue was money and managers got paid more, so probably happier.
Breaking News being a wagie is miserable
if programmers are not happy just imagine doing the same thing for less money
Yeah and most university graduates get an office job in the end. And I know many of them and they are so depressed. 😑
The part about tech debt hit me hard. We have so much shitty code at our company it's exhausting to work on it. Sometimes I feel like everyone who worked here before me was a complete idiot but then I remember that they were in the same spot as me and didn't have time to refactor this junk for the next 2 weeks risking breaking something. Then I add my shitty workaround, push it and call it a day.
It doesn't help when most of the time the starting code was written but some guy that thought it would be cool to try some new super convoluted idea which the rest of us then have to endure every day for years, plus the guy that wrote it is now the manager
@@tarquin161234yeah, but in the other hand.
Many changes are for solving an immediate problem, not for a long road.
Just after some time guys with authority and money do not want wasted money in a proper migration.
Not always is for try something new(just Linux users are like that, and for that we put them in the attic alone and without light, maybe a mirror for remembering to take showers).
@@tarquin161234or when the original code base was never meant to be pushed to production, but the junior staffer took the consultant's source code and moved it to the production environment. Simultaneously pulling the wool over their manager's eyes through office politics.
@@Gregory-o6v :D
17 year old Computer Science student here.
Seeing all these bad news and bad perspectives on programming and *conveniently it all being my dream job*
it already makes me very hopeless and honestly I don't even want to start, a depressing life as a cog for a no-name company to get the payments delayed and be able to barely pay the bills is NOT a life I want to live.
Don't feel discouraged. It's not actually all doom & gloom. The skills you are learning will become the tools that you use to navigate life. Being a programmer/engineer has tremendous value that extends well beyond just whatever job you happen to end up with. You are learning HOW to learn as well as how to apply what you know from past experiences to better understand new concepts. The end goal is to be confident that you can overcome any problem that you come across. If there is a problem you "cannot" solve, rather than giving up, you will have an idea of what you need to learn and you will have the tools to do so.
It’s not that bad, the internet is full of doomers. Either way it opens up doors, you can always later go into IT which is a more chill job, become a consultant or a more generic type job.
In terms of pay I would say it isn’t better in other fields, so that’s not something to be depressed about. If you are still depressed at the state of the computer science field realise you are young and have I finite time to discover yourself still, explore other fields
Get the degree anyway. At least learn to code. I can tell you that I work at FAANG and I also find it soul sucking like the rest of the comments here. However, you might be able to find enjoyable work in a smaller company
people say "money is not everything" but "you need money for everything"
Simone Giertz calls it 'Life Lube', makes things run smoother and get you access to places you couldn't without it
Money is not everything, it's the ONLY thing.
Money is like health, lack of it will make you miserable but having it is no guarantee you'll be happy. After a certain point though, there's little difference in happiness no matter how much you make.
Money can't buy happiness. The best you can do it rent it for a while.
We’re always doing “sprints” of work. Nobody can continuously sprint!
I’ve been burnt out for years but got bills to pay
@byorce yeah I hate sprints as well. Even worse is constantly having meetings to estimate how long each ticket will take to complete. Like how the hell am I supposed to know how long a bug will take to fix when I don't even know what the cause is yet. It might take 4 hours, or it might take weeks. WTF are we debating it for. Just leave it with me and let me get on with it.
As someone relatively new to full-time software engineering, I thought the exact same thing whenever my manager would mention starting a new "sprint" after we only just met the last arbitrary deadline by slapping together terrible code because there was no time to write anything even somewhat decent. Shouldn't there be time to catch your breath?
@SynthAir nope. But you can assign longer estimated times for the tasks in order to give yourself more room to breathe.
god... sprints... we started that at the start of this year, so bad... Like half the week is just meetings to estimate and refine tickets. Then constnatly being asked how long everything will take even tho they are estimated already. Then having to work overtime cos managers and whoever set impossible deadlines and won't hire more resources.
@@Ripcrazeis every software company will be like this? I am curious
I think we're at a point in time where general dissatisfaction has dug into all sorts of careers
Most careers don't have scrum sprints nor the ever increasing technical debt produced by scrum sprints.
What is a scrum sprint?@@DemPilafian
Most places don’t have nap pods or anything extra. It’s just a regular office like any other office….
And they don’t pay thaat well either unfortunately
The git blame obituary joke had me cackling
More coherent if that programming position is on COBOL or ALGOL
Relatable AF, indeed. And then you realize what you produced is probably part of that same circle of happiness.
@@RottenMuLoT yep🙁
20 years ago, being a programmer was badass, now it's just ass.
underrated comment.... and 30 year ago you were master of the universe
naw man people like to complain about everything. What other job allows you to sit on your butt, listen to music all day, and avoid human interactions for 40 hours a week for 6 figures
No 20 to 30 years ago everyone ignored you and thought you were boring for being a programmer, that's if they didn't actively insult you.
MATH IS HARD. Aww the replaced me with AI.. Maths might be good
and bad
80% of coders are forced to work in scrum.
thats the problem
what's scrum? I'm from Germany and I work for the government
@@gridcoregilry666 Du bist hier nicht an deiner SINA du hast Internet und darfst googeln
@@gridcoregilry666 agile development, the bane of developers's sanity
@@gridcoregilry666 It's like scrotum but as a software development strategy.
in short, what would you fix in scrum? give an example please
"programmers are well paid" is what they all say, but my boss thinks otherwise.
I hate this job, not only because it's stressing me out, but because it is also underpaid af
I don’t even know anymore dude.
I make more than the average wage, even get €750 to drive maybe 15km (I guess 8 miles) per week.
Barely have to do any ‘real’ stuff, talking to people here and there seems to be enough.
Still the money feels as not enough, I live in a small apartment and it feels like I’m stuck or something.
As an older developer who lived through happier times... a lot of the camaraderie within tech teams is gone, partly due to daily involvement of non-techies and kindergarten rituals that suck all the air out of natural communication.
Imagine you were working at a hair salon and the boss had all stylists stand at attention each morning to report (1) how many haircuts they gave yesterday (2) how many they are going to give today and (3) any blockers? (no complaints allowed though! or you're not a "team player"! Also, no discussions... "take it offline" please!). Combined with endless micro-management and performance metrics. Most people would find that demoralizing, unprofessional, and pointless. But in our industry it's called "agile" and developers put up with it for some reason.
No wonder developers get depressed, if they have to start each workday that way.
We love solving tricky problems and get appreciated for highly-qualified work that requires focus. Not all this B.S.
How old are you btw... I agree with everything you say
@@johnm8358 Born in the 70s 😎 A woman btw. Missing the times when we could throw jokes like "that's what she said" around or discuss politics and religion, without fear of offending anyone or running afoul of the HR police. Everything corporate is so darn sterile these days
@@MeowImages I'm the same decade:) I hear you... There is zero fun in the work environment anymore 😕...
Are you still developing? I glad I'm not the only dinosaur (according to what others say)still developing
@@johnm8358 I'm still developing! It's still the most fun for me. Could never get myself to rise up the ranks and leave programming behind. Call it a personal fault, lol 😄
Interesting comment. Sounds like a bunch of non-techies hanging onto techies to try and justify a job, but just make it harder.
Record profits, no rises, endless meetings, things pretending to be agile that are just waterfall with a frock on, no independent agency, no outlet for creativity, no joy, PMs playing chase the shiny, an endless chain of semi completed projects shelved because of a change of focus. I could go on for a while. For me it was the zero percent chance of any genuine creativity that meant I gleefully accepted the news when the hammer fell.
Worse than waterfall. Waterfall implies there's a plan (which probably went fatally wrong a year ago). Scrum means the managers have no plan, just a bunch of desires that need to be fulfilled this instant.
Too real.
Oh man, same here dude. I am working together with another architect but we don't get any time for creativity, or framework/package updates nontheless, even though we mention those need to be done.. The unrealistic deadline for the agile project that is just waterfall with outsourcing code quality that gets you depressed just by looking at it.. yeah the joy is gone for sure.
I have extremely few meetings as a software engineer. I actually feel like I would be happier with more because otherwise we are expected to write code all day, non stop. Two, four hour blocks of straight debugging can't be good for the brain.
I used to love programming, spent entire summer breaks just fking around with code, creating simulations, small games, visuals, leet code, you name it..... Then i started getting paid for it and it slowly sucked all the joy out of it
Could you elaborate on why?
I feel it - same for me
@@sotam1069for me is working with people that are impossible to cooperate with. Managers suck 99% of the time anyway but crappy people you have to cooperate with suck any joy left.
it becomes an obligation. you dont choose anymore, you just work.
@@sotam1069hard to explain. I guess because the decision is not yours, so you have to compromise on quality a lot. Coding as hobby is art, coding as job is labor
Who else felt a bit demotivated to pursue software engineering after watching this video...?
All the programmers I’ve worked with at a very large international company seem to love their job. I think because they reported to middle and senior managers that were both programmers. Managers actually cared about their staff and acted as a buffer between them and the stakeholders. A good manager plays a huge role in job satisfaction.
Thank you for sharing this, actually.
I used to have a job I loved, and yes it was exactly that for me too. Well, and I really liked my team.
Good management in general, not only the manager. My old manager just told us the higher ups wanted things so he was just passing things on and the new manager doesn't even respond to msgs and sets up meetings to tell us there's a deadline coming up so please work overtime and get it done. "Not that you weren't doing it, but please do it"..
I took a programming class in highschool, and the teacher told me straight up, if you are good at this job, you will be on call, and a total slave to your company, or you can be sub par and scoot on.
Your teacher was bang on. This is absolutely the best area to be mediocre at.
True. Also, the mediocre ones learned well how to stall all the overachievers so that the mediocre ones don't have to deal with their new code every day.
Remind me of my first programming job when I noticed problematic code that could cause race condition leading to a service that is dependent of another service malfunctioning or can't even start. It was probably a one in a hundred thousand chance that it happens, no body cared about it. Only until the traffics get way too large and weird useless error messages poping off on a daily basic do they eventually acknowledge what I said and put some synchronize there. All the insane, weird errors miraculously disappeared, who would have thought. It was one of the told ya situation and I would expect at least a raise because naive me. 2 years later, still heavily underpaid for all the extra hours they demand. I just called it quit and they can all go f themself.
When you start out you are likely to be motivated because you would expect your hardwork and performance to reflect in your salary , but that is just not always the case. If you do well, your po/manager is the one getting raised, not you.
very true, although back in the day it didn't matter much. nowadays, however, the generation that grew up with social media can't function unless everything is done by majority rule, and in this industry the sub-pars always out-number the ones that actually know what they're doing by at least 4:1.
@@aa-fi9ks Yup the best way to deal with the job is be good enough so you can buy yourself enough time without anyone noticing to be able to find out where most of the other bugs are and then when they break be around to magically fix them.
Cause getting ahead in the game is all about the perception of being good / productive rather than actually being moral, ethical, good, productive and there is no reward for working harder, better, cleaner in fact often its punished
What I hate is when I'm told I'll be writing code and then I find out that most of the time I'm fixing configuration issues, network related bugs and nannying offshore "developers".
I‘m only two years in as a programmer at a company after I graduated, and I have gone from lean, muscular and healthy to overweight and an alcoholic.
Lol same
so real
Please join AA.
Welcome to the job life.
Most of professional are like that.
Here in Mexico the medics have all the same problem, is a pretty common problem in modern society where no one represent something in real numbers.
It is funny because in the past, fighting it was for winning "individualism against society" now we have more of what we need 😂.
Is like "don't care for others because they don't care for you".
Who cares what you boss, employee, medic, neighbor, etc; thinking you have "a real problem not like them".
The fantastic element that explains the appeal of games to many developers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a task from start to finish without any change in the user requirements.
Well said
With my experience, I would like to differ. If your boss at the games company can't make up his mind what game mechanic to do and how to monetise the game it quickly becomes a new type of hell. Also server response times are super low, requirements are way more difficult than the average app. Then you realise the breaking bug that you couldn't find is due to the hardware controllers.
@@applepie9806OP talked about playing games, not developing them.
Man, someone needs to make a game where the quest givers cannot decide and what they actually want and constantly change their quests.
Not a programmer, but an electronics engineer, so some hardware and some firmware development. However what I often see is the forever projects of software. When I am done with a project, I can proudly point to a product and say "I helped build that, and here are the parts I designed.", same goes for the mechanical engineer. It doesn't usually take multiple years from idea to market, but the poor guy who handles the database and cloud platform has pulled so many hairs out that he is bald.
I think that a lot of programmers are stuck in these forever projects, where you get in to a project in the maintenance phase and get stuck adding small features for years and years, so you really don't get challenged in the same way anymore and you feel the skill rot set in, which is why you see a rather high attrition rate for software developers (burnout). It is the feeling of getting stuck and your hands are tied.
While manufacturing has it's own problems, I think the fact that electrical and mechanical engineers usually have a manufacturing step at the end of the design helps in many areas. It gives you a more clear-cut "done". Also you can blame suppliers, and manufacturers for delays. We cannot get that done in 2 weeks, our suppliers require 6 months lead time. Oh, I guess that is ok then. Software engineer just must have not worked enough overtime.
There are forever projects in hardware/firmware, particularly iot solutions with embedded linux. The rot catches up to every field as long as there's jerry rigged stuff holding product lines together.
Man, now Mechanical Engineering sounds appealing to me. That feeling of finishing a project sounds nice. It’s like when I finish my movies.
And you cannot rush PCB layout because manufacturing takes time and remakes cost money vs. pushing a patch in software. There is also an element of art as well. Making efficient parts and trace placement that looks good is also satisfactory.
I think you missed the fact that most developers dont work at FANG company and got perks like "Nap Pod", most are luckily to get a pizza party.
I worked for a company with perks like this. Everyone is different but I prefer without. It encourages the wrong kind of staff. I like engineering for engineering. A flashy work environment brings in people who don't know anything but hear that "tech" is great.
We just all work from home, screw those pointless perks when you can have whatever you want at home. I agree too with the other reply it brings in the wrong types, or it's to encourage bringing in people they want to exploit (but they can't code anyway so meh, that's why they end up with a massive office of thousands of devs and somehow do nothing). Every once in a while I take joy telling an Amazon recruiter that I wouldn't want to work for them anyway, seriously what are they actually doing where is the output and why is their retail site like it's from 2005 but even worse actually? I guess it's too important to change anything because the users will react so much that it could have any kind of impact so they don't risk it. In fairness they don't pay the huge bucks here otherwise I may be tempted.
@@username7763 Yeah, true. Some companies even use those perks solely to attract new employees, while dicouraging their use (through negative performance reviews if you use them) once you’re actually working there. I’d rather have a great working environment and leadership that properly understands the problems their teams face than useless gimmics.
Simple:
- cleaning lady working 8 hours a day: $800 / month income, no responsibility
-- skills required: coming to work on time, moving your hands when you broom / vacuum a place.
- senior dev working 8-16 hours a day: $805 / month income, huge responsibility
-- skills required: at least 16 years of education, and constant improvement to keep up with technology so as to not fall off
"Why are devs unhappy, truly a mystery, no one will ever know"
I'm unhappy because I write Jira tickets I don't code anymore ..... The better you are at coding the less you will do at most companies.
I feel you im full remote monitoring vlans all day and revolving t2 tickets half time on service now...
"Boohoo I don't have to work"
Its more I don't have to work much but I'm not allowed to relax either. It could be full remote/hybrid but they want us in office.
@@markq722lol right. Seems ungrateful
Things really went downhill when companies turned Jira into MS Project. It's a bug tracker! Just put your bug list in there and that's it. Its a substitute for putting bugs in an Excel file. Don't break your work into all these tiny tasks into and put them in Jira, it never helped anyone. If you have more than 5 tasks to keep track of, that's your problem right there.
I have being in companies where the product owners were ex developers and the whole ethos of the company (at least that area of about 200 developers) was to write the best code possible, there were code reviews, training sessions, regular meetings about the latest tech, libraries and processes. Latest languages like Rust, go. Devops was huge, developers could get something into prod in about 6 minutes.
All the developers loved it, everything was solid, the business side was happy.
Then "they" decided to remove the current product owners and put in business people. Half the developers left in 2 months, the quality tanked. Productivity ground to a halt, applications were on life support as technical debt sky rocketed as product owners did not let anything get fixed but rushed in business features.
I think it is the natural cycle of companies and goes round and round with management making an awful developer experience then developers in ascension until management decide to take control/direction for "reasons".
This!!! I however must add most kids nowadays haven't experienced such companies. And even worse they "grow up" to be just as incompetent so the good cycles are rare..
I can confirm. I've worked full-time at software companies since I was 21 years old. (I'm now 39, so I'm a dinosaur.) I ABSOLUTELY don't want to do this anymore, especially now with the state of the industry. I was deeply unhappy at my last job.
I moved back in with my family to hunker down and start my own business.
been there, done that. being independent is stressful as heck. i went back!
Jezus
Remember, less is more. Don't get too many ducks or it'll be hard to keep them in a row. Good luck!
Good luck man, success, is the best revenge.
Hi mr. dinosaur🦖
This video made me realize:
1) I'm not alone
2) I need to fix my health bug
3) I hate Black Rock
4) This channel is awesome. Thanks for the video.
Because of scrum, sprint planning, lean startup model, story points, medium size T-shirt, jira black belt taekwondo ninja, jujutsu kaizen six sigma kanban planning...
I started working as a student and was able to code for money. However, when I told my Father some stories about how annoying everything is and described it, he just laughed and said, "Looks like Software Engineers are one of us, too." (He is a Civil Engineer.)
Short: Software Engineers are engineers and all of them are unhappy f*cks. My Father's solution was drinking.
I hope you'll find a better coping mechanism mate
Chemical engineering here, and I am unhappy as duck, specially working with wastewater treatment, something that no company wants to spend on, but they have to, so they push you to solve problems with very limited resources
@@etcher6841 My cope was to stop giving a fuck because I'm not being paid to care about the company's health (equity compensation). So as long as the price is right I don't care about your tech debt or security issues. I don't even bring it up like I used to anymore.
"I'm not a human, I'm an engineer"
I am an accountant and same thing goes for everyone. I think it’s just jobs in general. 😪 Humans are just not meant to be working so many hours for so many years of our lives.
Problem is that software is so pervasive and barriers to entry comparatively low that quality invariably suffers. But, like any profession, becoming a good developer is hard, takes many years of practice and requires a specific type of person. The happiest developers are always those that have a deep appreciation of the craft AND can practice said craft in an environment that respects them.
And Jensen over at Nvidia can't stop talking about how his Ai tech will lower the barriers of entry to programming for the masses. To oblivion and beyond!
I'm feeling frustrated because people assume I make a lot of money, but due to inflation, my earnings don't go as far as they used to. For example, a house that used to cost $300,000 now costs around $1 million. It feels like I'm constantly chasing a goal that's becoming increasingly unattainable, like running on a treadmill that keeps speeding up while I get more and more exhausted.
there used to be a sign that said question authority. then they changed it to obey authority it's gonna be fine, and it just kind of faded in somewhere.
@@atomictraveller "Be the change you want to be". Also, if you do not come to our mandatory voluntary team meetings where we fantasize about violence against people who have different opinions you are fired.
@@justachannel8600 i'm xoxos nobody talks to me like that they just lie down when the HSS tells them to. free west papua balls to the rest.
The part that I hate about programming is the corporate crap, the shitty meetings, I was happy when scrum wasn't around
Blr. Blerr. Blwrrr. Blurrrr. Blyrrrrr. Blirrrrrr.... It's all the same blurry BLEWRRRR... Oh wait Can you code in A subscription Fee
Brother I feel you. We grew up in labs, and ended up in offices
Technical Debt is an unspoken crisis. One employer had me doing very little, but de-spaghettifying the project is a HUGE no-no (and so is watching videos on TH-cam). It's like I'm supposed to be a robot waiting to be turned on that cannot engage my mind. But when I do have something to do, touching one little variable breaks everything.
EDIT: After firing me for not meeting their expectations, they are in a hiring freeze, as they are likely filing for bankruptcy.
Yep, and they blame you if it breaks even though there's no realistic way to avoid it without repaying the technical debt
Then in comes Phase 2: Supporting legacy in parallel with new platform/product dev.
Yes. Because it’s legacy there are no story points needed and this certainly poses no issue to clients.
Only resolution is migrating to newer versions or technologies all together in that case. My company tried to refactor 2 year old code (which isn't even that old, guy that wrote it still worked at the company) but it broke so often we just decided to move to a modern framework altogether since it would take less time overall that refactoring and bringing all code up to date. Unless you're working with something like java that has good compatibility with older versions you might as well migrate.
I dont understand, you are supposed to be working but are watching videos on TH-cam instead? What do you mean with it being a HUGE no-no?
Make more testing. Not unit test, integration or bdd test. If you can caught the error before it goes to prod you can get refactoring approved more
There's a lot of stuff here that we can always complain about, but the real reasons are 1) pay is decreasing while prices are going up (inflation) over the last couple years, and 2) big tech layoffs mean a) there are fewer people to do the same amount of work, b) your job is under threat in the next round of layoffs, and c) your options for switching jobs have diminished.
d) AI is doing better programming than you 24/7
@@games4us132no. The perception or dream of management is that AI can do better. In practice, it writes a ton of nonsense code that needs to be carefully inspected.
yes, but then again welcome to the real world, nice of you join us... most of us have been living that life for a while now.
@@games4us132 I used to think this, but was pleasantly surprised to see AI repeatedly fail to solve a medium-level LeetCode exercise I completed without much trouble the other day. Even with multiple prompts and my solution as an example, it couldn't get its own solution correct. It is a very powerful tool and will only get better over time, but for now it still requires heavy oversight.
@@games4us132bullshit excuse for wages dropping by people who weren't ever earning their jobs in the first place.
I don't work as a programmer (although I code), I work as a lead at a service desk. I deal with the same type of nonsense. Constant pressure to improve results, while nobody addresses legacy problems that cause a lot of frustration and they end up building on a weak foundation. I've been burned out for awhile and think about quitting most days. I'm guessing it's common in a lot of fields.
In my own experience, being developer is depressive bcause not much people understands your job and is difficult that other get the value of what you do, the probability to meet people that can understand and emphatize in what are you concerns in the day by day and is low, besides is a abstract, cold job.
Backend developer here. Yeah, 99% of the people don't understand or appreciate it. Luckily I grew up in a family that didn't appreciate me either so I'm indifferent in that aspect!
@@Mars-l9b 💀
@@Mars-l9b hahaja your skin gain thickness
I came to same conclusions. And to make things worse, business people don't seem to understand that IT performance is measured not just by what you do, but what you prevent from happening, like fixing a problem before it crashes something or organizing stuff before the mess gets too big to handle.
This industry got flooded with non technical parachuters who have no fucking clue what software development is about.
The “higher salaries in US” is such a trap. Yes, you get paid much more but you’re supposed to save this money for your retirement, to cover your health insurance and anything potentially not covered by it and, like, a million other things most EU countries will take care of for you. Most people take that surplus and buy crazy expensive SF real estate or stupid cars.
that's not true, most retirement programs in europe are a scam, not enough people are born. By the time you retire it will not be enough to live, so you still have to have your own money to retire or are expected to work at retirement. Also a lot of governament run health programs are so bad most people use private anyway. These things worked maybe 50 years ago
In Germany, we have to give up a part of our income so that the old people can retire. But we will not get money for our retirement. It is a pyramid scheme and is collapsing at the moment. Our generation has to pay for the old people and must also save money for the own retirement, while we get only 1/3 of the American salary
Just throwing it out there but in those EU countries they do not actually take care of you, they just claim they will, unless you are part of certain "in groups" or groups that the elite are currently favoring. And on top of that the systems that are in place to "take care of you", not that they do, are in a slow collapse which has led to things like "the second german economic miracle" being forced onto the people, whether or not they want it. Or in the UK where they introduced a second state pension (NEST) because of a tacit acknowledgement that the first state pension (NI) isn't going to last into the future.
There's no salary high enough to make me face the cruel farce that is the US "health" system
You are misinformed. We also have to pay the insurances in Europe from that Salary.
I earn 70k and have 43k left after Taxes and Insurances.
Than you have to pay high rent if you live in Big Cities. This varies from around 12k to 15k a year.
Now you have ~ 30k left as a single.
Its just basic Math at the end. If you double your income and you double your cost you still have more money than if you dont double the cost and income.
that pressure hierarchy gave me serious existential dread
the interdimensional war rages on. are you ready to enlist into blackrock?
@@theterribleanimator1793 He really didn't want to say that the next step after Blackrock is that most of that money they manage belongs to retiring boomers or trust fund kids who need to see line go up.
@@sor3999 no, that's less than 0.001%, he was spot on with the trillionaires playing god
Programmers used to be a rare breed it took loads of hard work to even become a programmer, those that did get good enjoy it because they crossed the skill hump.
These days every man and their dog has done a 3 month bootcamp and is unhappy writing javascript because it's "not what instagram said it was".
Ditto the above paragraph for technical debt...
It all started going down hill with the “learn to code” movement and those “day in the life of a SWE at [big company]. Everyone thought it was all easy work to be a programmer and now the market is saturated
@@javiereduardo89 yeah so true! People all around the world think swe are racking millions when only those at tier 1 company in countries like US get something even above few thousand $ Recently colleges in my state took 25k seats from mechanical and civil and gave to cs, now many of them (same % but higher no.) won't study and learn before an exam for 2hrs from some yt video and won't get a job then they will start complaining ed system to govt.
😢 True.
@@javiereduardo89True.
4:01 Bingo. Writing stuff like unit tests for a living makes you feel worthless and insignificant. It's pretty soul crushing
Now imagine the horror that is debugging somebody else's unit tests
@@aravindpallippara1577 truly some next level pain.
there is a saying: If you feel *your* work pointless, remember the guy that makes turn signals for BMW 😊
You think writing tests is the worthless part? How about writing a compliance document for a feature nobody uses that is scheduled to be deprecated in a year. At least with unit tests you're usually improving the code base. That being said, nobody should only write unit tests for more than a couple months.
@@sergeikulikov4412I know this is a joke, but honestly, he's probably happier
2:06 Had to go back to double check… „Testical Debt“ did not go unnoticed 😄
This is a great channel.
I retired after 33 years as a SW developer. Here's how the last part of my career played out...
From 1999-2018, I was super happy because I owned my own company and was the lead developer on a really cool piece of software. 2018-2020, I worked as an embedded software developer for a company that did contract development. It was great until it wasn't and I wound up on a project with insane deadlines using technologies I was not familiar with. Quit that. 2020-2021, worked on a Perl-based project. I lasted 9 months because my manager was a terrible micro-manager. 2021-2023, worked on legacy Perl code for a web host. The software was full of technical debt, but the people were great and I kind of enjoy cleaning up technical debt. 2023, retired because it became financially viable.
Now I maintain several open-source hobby projects to get my programming fix, but would never go back to programming as a job. The tech industry nowadays just sucks.
Wow, thanks for sharing. Makes me happy that you got almost two decades of glory, which seems extremely hard to get nowadays.
Farmer or Software? I'm 29 and I can have a fresh start. What to choose if you were in my position?
@@ajassharafudeen As a software engineer myself, well, my ultimate goal has always been to work for myself, and that only became reinforced after I realized how difficult being a programmer can be. I have seriously been considering making a jump to UX--something with fewer "puzzles" and more creative freedom.
Oof, I understand that micro-manager, I had a team lead that would come up behind you like 4-5 times a day asking how things were going, so annoying and just ruins your concentration.
me: “You guys have jobs?”
I don't get paid enough - Its about communication with others. If you are just making youtube videos or making your own code, then you would be more happy. Working with others is what causes chaos.
Its the irony of life. I am a programmer because I'm not social and I have to be social in order to CONTINUE to be a programmer.
Friend, if you can't communicate with others, you're not going to be successful at anything. Art, perhaps, but nothing enterprising.
Sounds like Communication problems
You could also be a StarCraft II pro player.
@@helloukw relatable so much
Man life is a mess after i got my programming job , messed up sleep, messed up eyes, and a really messed up tummy
All those things go hand in hand, focus on lowering stress so that you can avoid the stomach issues and make it a point to go to bed early. Otherwise, I fear you may end up getting gallbladder stones, just ask my wife.
I am nearly a decade into this shit. I’ve never been richer, and I’ve never felt worse.
michael jackson lyrics. you're a vegetable they planted you
chase the cheese or own the maze. money is not every thing and Is Rather Limiting Really. locate your psoas because its gonna locate you.
I'm sorry. I don't have much to add, but reading your comment, and so many others, I really feel for you. People shouldn't be driven to feel this way, doesn't matter how much they pay you. Take care of yourself.
Because Waifus are not real
Facts.
They can be, you're just not programming hard enough.
Solution is get out from job and make waifu real.
sameee
@@cookingrabbitty Unfortunately, my background in robotics is insufficient to build myself a waifu.
I quit after 11 years as a software engineer. I couldn’t bare to go into work every day. Now I’m an airline pilot. I make way more and am way happier.
bro its like "I didn't like tropical climate thus I went north few miles and now i'm at north pole"
Same thing can be said by us hardware engineers. Broken tools, bad institutional practices and receiving tremendous pressure to get tasks done when nobody else can seem to find the time to provide the bare minimum is maddening. It’s almost enough to make you want to find an open window and fashion yourself into a macabre art exhibit.
Can be said about most engineering jobs tho, you stay on a desk 95% of the day, get endless meeting and meeting to discuss meeting, have huge turnover and lost knowledge, get pressurized go meet unrealistic deadline.
The difference is that the vast majority of it guys are only attracted to the technic part of their job, they can't stand the social interaction/debates/or a bit of corporate BS so it make them extremly unhappy even if they have to endure a tenth of what an average manager or engineer in term of meeting
May I ask you what field o hw Eng do you work on ? Id like to know which specialization they need people
Same, it's frustrating when your manager demands that you fit a perfectly efficient 100W power supply on a 40x40mm PCB 🙂,
This felt like a manager pre/post crisis meeting: "Everything is shit, but way to go team! We gotta stay focused"
Huge amount of people came into industry in the last decade not because they like this job but because of money.
Ahh yes evil kidz stealing jobs cause they know wikitext
true for every other job
No offense to them, I encourage anyone serious about software development to try this career, but those chasing it for the wrong reasons should leave now, leave us seasoned devs with the projects we're looking for.
I hate programming with all my heart, but it is still the best job overall.
Sooo true. Choosing a job for money is alright, but thousands of 'em joining only for that makes it super bad
As a near-depressed developer in south east Asia, I believe the reason of that depression distribution survey result is lacking of samples from south-east Asia programmers... Actual depression rate should be much higher..
do bongs
might also be under diagnosed
Most here don't believe depression exists 😮💨
2:06 bro caught lackin 😭
Was looking for this comment LOL
he made a typo let's move on
I think it's because too much is left to the engineer to do. They're part product owner, part architecture, part designer, part QA testor, part support and full time engineer. Vast majority of the team can slack off while a couple rock star engineers do all the work.
mad riff licks
I'm a back-end guy, I'm a data engineer pipeline building guy, I'm a front-end react UI guy, I'm a devops/devsecops azure/github guy, I'm a database admin, etc. Literally, It's like 10 roles combined into 1.
@@jerseyse410 Me too, with almost any tech company I worked with (all small) except my first gig a long time ago where I had the luxury of being only sysadmin (with customer support and the expectation of zero-tier troubleshooting / no escalation)
Full stack am i right
It's the worst when it becomes a janitorial position for product leads and customer support. When "product design" meetings end up being product people going on a 30 minute rant about some specific feature request, when no one has time or mental energy to actually work on that for weeks to come, so you get caught up in the details of some random thing that's not even shippable for months anyways.
And then you have to step away from the important bug fix or feature to look into a user issue that leads to another 12 hour debugging session, all because you shipped the last feature before it was ready so you'd have time to work on the current feature. 😮💨
I remember a couple decades ago in my country there was this really big boom telling all the girls if they wanted to become wealthy they MUST become psychologists, and maybe around the same time it was oil engineer for boys (yes, I live in a really male centric country). Fast-forward to today, there are THOUSANDS of engineers driving cabs and Uber and what not, and THOUSANDS of psychologists working as assistants or cab drivers as well. Choosing a career that makes money is important, but don't choose the one just because is the "boom" at that moment. If you don't like it you'll end up miserable and working in a different industry.
what country? Is it India ?
that's why I want to become an endocrinologist, and eventually a plastic surgeon. Nothing like helping other trans people get the care they need while getting a decent pay too.
There was a psychology boom a couple decades ago in your country but now it's over? I'd be interested to know more about that.
@@mike74h it was a really seemed career a few decades ago so all parents forced/advises their kids to study that, now there are way too many psychologists
@@ReptilianLaserbeam Tell them to come to the US. We're nowhere near all stocked up here yet.
They promised I'd be working on something innovative, that I'd build a solution that would change the world, but here I am, trying to center a div for a useless application.
Mbahahaha.
I went the route of "learn to talk to people and maybe become a manager" and it is painful 😂
I used to code for small businesses; agriculture, retail, construction, and charities etc.
Now I'm pushing up through the London corporate bs and people are so unbelievably detatched it is incredibly painful as you say :)
I could manage devs but the people above, what the helllll. Even though individually they are sound.
Money can buy happiness once you actually stop working.
Which is usually when you're too old to do a lot of the things you wanted to do.
Being a programmer sucks it's like you're doomed to constantly keep learning forever, or you will stay behind whereas plumbers and farmers learn one thing once and polish their skills
There's a few problems that cause this in the first place:
- Everyone needs to stop making the umpteenth JS framework; Just rally behind one, but for sure it should not be React as it doesn't help polish the fundamentals of web development
- We need to focus on programming languages that cover as many use cases as possible so we are not jumping around ecosystems. JS may be one but JS is also a terrible language. Great alternatives are C#, Kotlin, Dart, and possibly Go (although UI development is not good with this one). By just focusing on one or two languages that cover most cases, there's lest cognitive overload
- We need to stop making so many libraries and use stdlibs or creating our own code for utilities wherever possible where it's not too time consuming.
- Companies need to stop hiring by framework and hire instead by field (are you a front end dev, back end, full stack, mobile, data analyst, game dev.... well ok game dev is a bit more extreme as the whole job revolves around the game engine chosen). The point is, just because a guy knows one framework doesn't mean he can't work with another one.
My problem is that I know I can make more money at a new job. I have experience and don't think it will be that hard to find something else. But why on earth do I want to put myself through the software engineering job market. It's filled with denials of companies that I fill the role of perfectly and technical interviews I have to study my ass off to be able to pass. Will I ever use the knowledge that I gain from that studying? No. But it won't change the fact that for months I'll need to hone my skills on something that just doesn't matter.
"Programmers are well paid"
Apparently my current workplace didn't get the memo.
For sure, wish he'd include worldwide salaries instead of just US ones. EU programmers are paid peanuts mostly
Yall dont even watch the video? He said the best way to get paid is to respawn in US
@@frankhuurman3955 What are you talking about ? In Czech Republic a good programmer gets paid like 2.5-4 times the average salary (1800 usd/month and thats still a good salary in my country). I am year after high school (no university) and i already have 2k and could have more if i would went to bigger city.
What country are you from ?
@@feisikLetsPlay Netherlands, close to 5k € a month in a big city with about 10 years of work experience. That ~60k EUR is about 65k USD a year. Ok perhaps I was comparing it to the FAANG jobs level of paychecks because I've got a few friends around me that are in the 120k+ range.
It's definitely not bad but you'll have to job hop a lot to get to a good paycheck in the EU.
@@feisikLetsPlay Depends on the place, france the salary are horrible for example, in the range of yours, but life is 2-3 times more expensive. Crossing the border to germany or switzerland multiplies the salary by 2 to 5 times...
i started programming when i was doing my undergrad degree like 15 years ago. programming back then was a bit easy, you just had to write the business logic and connect some dots and boom you have a working solution. however it became a nightmare now.
-Managing git branches
-make sure u deploy latest solution and push latest changes
-serverless computing
-useless permissions and security roles between different components
-maintaining different environments (dev,pre,prod)
all such things has made programming difficult and boring. on the top of that most tech companies offers very similar kind of roles. all you are doing is writing lambda functions, there is no creativity and no new exciting projects.
"Serverless computing" is just a nonsense marketing term made up by cloud providers to mean they manage things for you.
very true, as a full-stack dev we're also expected to be devops experts.
Aside from "serverless" all these things make it far easier. Security roles debatable, depends on what the actual system is, I've seen a lot of completely pointless "security" while glaring low hanging fruit are just ignored and the better solution for the harder problem is standard separation of concerns, opsec, observability, and just actually doing it properly.
Jezus you kids
Knowing you have the power trough code to change the world, but eventually you are selling your time to a corporate which career plan can't keep up with inflation, I think is a big chunk of that 80%.
that's about it
that's the point
I quit a 6-figure job to be a house husband and raise a kid. Year after year the industry promised that the job and the life would get better; if only we kept up the same pace of work a bit longer. 13 years of overtime... watch savings, retirement, investments lose 40% of its buying power over 2 years of a pandemic.
I'd rather watch Peppa Pig and bring my daughter to the park. F this.
Peppa Pig is actually good programming. No shame in enjoying good content. My favorite is the glitter episode.
Good for you bro