[gandolfinmyhead]

Sadly yes. It's been very frustrating at times. I thought of becoming an environment artist for videogames instead.

Though OP hasn't asked for the following here goes, I feel the IT field has a lot of people wanting to change career paths, more than any other field because of the following:

1. Programming is an art, if not done right and assuming the product is in continuous development, will come back to bite you in the rectum like there's no tomorrow.

2. 99 percent of the industry is about shoving products out without any care for proper architecture or refactoring of any sort. Result -> feature addition/ bug fix times grow exponentially with time.

3. The IT field has no concept of overtime pay

4. 1 + 2 + 3 => loads of burnt out devs :-> people wanting to switch jobs regardless of how high paying programming can be

[bshimmin]

I feel the IT field has a lot of people wanting to change career paths, more than any other field

This feels like a bold claim. Is there anything to support it?

I would also dispute "The IT field has no concept of overtime pay" as being a meaningful reason - many "white collar" professions don't really pay overtime. (I will say that as a contractor, I managed to negotiate a higher rate for working at weekends a few times, but as a permanent employee, the best I ever managed was "time in lieu", which at least a few times basically meant a lie-in after working late.)

[throwanem]

Points 1 and 2 can be a good thing, if you have the mental fortitude and cast-iron gullet to specialize in cleaning up other people's messes. There's a lot of money to be made that way. It doesn't tickle the artistic urge the same way greenfield development often can, but that's what creative hobbies are for - I write - and you can derive considerable satisfaction from the knowledge that you're bringing order from chaos, and being quite well paid and appreciated for it besides.

[notdonspaulding]

    > if you have the mental fortitude and cast-iron gullet
    > to specialize in cleaning up other people's messes. 
    > There's a lot of money to be made that way.

How does an individual or a consultancy go about finding these messes to be cleaned up? I feel reasonably-qualified to go in and take the necessary steps to get engineering projects back on track, but I'm not sure how you would get started doing that?

[rfrey]

This is surprising and interesting... how do companies who do not value quality when the code is first written come to value quality later?

I'd expect a pattern where the original thrower-of-spaghetti-against-the-wall has left, and management assumes the later devs - who can't go as fast, or get more bugs because of the holy mess of the codebase - are just not as good as the first guy.

[throwanem]

> how do companies who do not value quality when the code is first written come to value quality later?

Not for nothing is it said that the burned hand teaches best.

It also helps to avoid organizations where immediate management is nontechnical - not an absolute guarantee of sensible behavior, of course, but at the very least it's a good baseline to set. And it's hard for any manager, especially any manager accustomed to being on the hook and under the gun for the myriad problems with unmaintainable code, to get too upset when people start saying things like "wow, this is amazing, this never used to work before and now it does exactly what we need, thank you so much, you guys are awesome!"

[thecatspaw]

> 3. The IT field has no concept of overtime pay

this very much depends on the location. The US seems to be lax on overtime laws, whereas in europe its more strictly defined, and I have not worked for any company in europe where we didnt get overtime pay/compensation

[ajosh]

The US is actually very strict with a variety of penalties for companies that violate the law regarding overtime. The amount of overtime pay and the hours at which it starts are clearly defined.

There are, however, some exemptions for some occupations. Computer professionals, farmers workers, artists, professions (i.e. doctors and lawyers) and managers are all exempt.

It's debatable which professions should remain on this list but the law is reasonably strict with respect to over time pay.

[Grangar]

Not true everywhere. In the Netherlands I'm expected to learn courses in my own time. A new major version of the opensource system we extend came out recently, it's completely different, and I'm expected to read it in my evenings and weekends.

I mean, I'm okay with investing in my own knowledge, but at some point it's just too much.