Programming As a Career Isn’t Right for Me

I am looking forward to follow up articles like "woodworking as a career isent right for me", "bookkeeping as a career isent right for me" and the really enlightening "any job sucks when your boss is shit".

It's a little curse to be remotely passionated about programming and be a programmer nowadays. Some companies make it extremely dull and toxic with all their additional requirements and managerial practices. But there's hope, there are good companies or teams, and eventually if you stay long enough you will find your place.

That was my case.

The only lesson you need to learn is to make distinction between your interests, side projects and hobbies and the actual work you need to do ar work. If they overlap that's amazing, if not you need to adapt. You need to give the company what the company wants (so you can get paid), and to yourself what you want, so you can be fulfilled.

All the problems mentioned here are common to various tech jobs and possibly other fields as well. It's nothing specific to programming. All problems mentioned are societal issues and not inherent problems of any profession. Things like student loans, hustle culture that leads to burnout, over compartmentalization of work, clueless managers, etc. We need a social revolution, not a career change.

This is unfortunate, but all to common. The joy of coding gets lost in politics, deadlines,.documentation and process. If this is you, you might want to give gig process work a shot. As a developer, you're actually intimately familiar with how systems work and interact, abstraction, and the interactions between the boxes. I'm pushing 50, have 4 consulting retainers going that have been with me for over 10 years each, and I'm still feeling the same buzz of figuring out my customers processes, developing a solution and seeing it implemented as I designed. Coding is the drudgery, but when you're playing a meaningful part in effecting company wide change, it's something else.

Now my day-to-day is filled with process. We must break our deliverables into 2-week chunks so that the stakeholders can see our progress and know that we’ll deliver on time. But it’s not on time. Everything must be tested. But it still has bugs. Everything must have thorough documentation. But it quickly gets out of date and we never read it.

that sounds like burnout as well. You can't have your job also be your hobby and not burnout

I write programs for myself. I have learned enough C, Pascal, Fortran, Basic to write small things and even larger things like a visual file manager for MSDOS, or my own version of the venerable STAR TREK game. I even know of big O notation (But I don't know how to calculate it for a given algorithm)

But I never wanted to be a programmer - having to work on other people's programs 8 hours a day. That would ruin programming as a hobby. When I am self-directed it is fun.

I was a Data Center tech instead. Minding 3 football fields of other people's computers.

Being limited and tortured by some shitty design decision that someone made 10 years ago that you have to just live with is a special kind of hell that only developers, mechanics, and engineers understand.

Programming is thankless work best left undone if at all possible.

Dude is burnt out in 6 years? I've been doing it 25+ professionally and still love it, started as a kid writing basic with the line numbers.