[jaaames]

Can anyone that has been in the industry for a significant period of time comment on this feeling?

I'm 5 years deep professionally, 15 years as a hobby, and no longer enjoying software, at least in it's form consumed by a customer.

Similar to a sibling poster, I'm envious of the landscaper, school teacher, or electrician.

Has anyone left software and felt better off for it, or regretted it?

Interested to hear any anecdotes or insight.

[marcus_holmes]

I remember the moment I hit this. I was developing a desktop app in C#, using Entity Framework (v1), and I had just had the realisation that lazy loading in EF didn't, and the bugs I was seeing in my application were because I hadn't checked whether EF had actually loaded the data (and loaded it myself if it hadn't).

I lost it. I was done. That was it. I couldn't get past the lies (the documentation was outright lying about this behaviour). My entire career had been in the Windows stack, almost 20 years from VB3 to C#, but I was done. I loved coding, but this... this was bullshit... this had to change.

The next day I installed Linux and started again, learning web development properly and eventually finding Go, which I still code in to this day. I have never touched C#, or developed anything on Windows, since that day (roughly 8 years ago now).

I was freelancing, and doing OK at it, and that was hard, but I picked up some JS work and some prototype work for local startups (and tried a few of my own). I joined all the meetups and made friends who I could ask questions of.

Now I'm pretty much back to where I left off, and much happier for it.

I know that most people wouldn't consider this to be a "career change" story - after all I stayed a software developer. But I did have to throw most of what I knew out of the window(s) and start again from scratch, and which was hard but incredibly enjoyable. I fell in love with coding again, and it took me years to rebuild my career on my terms again.

I don't know what your circumstances are, but if you're burned out from 5 years of professional development, maybe try changing what you hate about it?

[pasta]

Stress comes from (the feeling of) responsibility you can't control.

So I think it's not about what you hate but about what you can't control.

Maybe you did not hate Windows, C# and EF, but when it turns out to be a big stress factor it can be good to swap and take control again.

[achievingApathy]

When my grandfather died a few years back, I went to the funeral and one night sat at a table with all the men of my family as we went around lamenting about how we'll miss him and what he wanted out of life. I am the first in my family to go to college, went straight out of HS. Every other member of my family has been extremely blue collar. Miners and factory workers, for generations that's how it was. I wanted something different out of life, and they found happiness doing what they did. it was ultimately more of a means to an end for them. They wanted to provide for their family and the work let them do that.

When the conversation came to me, I didn't know what to say. Here were men who spent 14-16 hrs a day in some of the worst conditions, and that's when they weren't on strike-- there I was, the guy who gets to work from home and sits at a desk all day. Its hard to think of a place where you could feel more alone than at a table with family who share nothing in common with you but DNA.

I love what I do. Well what hasn't been whittled away in the name of efficiency or productivity, but I would consider giving it all up.

[eecc]

Yes, I know the feeling. My guess is that it’s lack of agency (if I’m using the word correctly.)

Basically as an engineer you put some creative effort - or at least try to - in what you do thinking it’s some sort of one-of-a-kind artifact, and therefore touch your aesthetic sense.

Management doesn’t give 2 f*cks, they’re just into producing output (not necessarily profit) and CYA, and they’re hell bent into turning you into a predictable blue-collar. It’s not because they’re evil, in a corporate org eventually everyone’s purpose gets optimized away.

We’re lucky the software factory model crashed and burned in the ‘00 but we’re still craftsmen (and women), so we need to think like one.

Become a contractor, do what you’re asked for with the best of your skill but that’s it. Don’t let that “mission”, “purpose”, “we’re a family” rhetoric fool you. Build a wall between yourself and them . Be a carpenter, make it flat and level, invoice and bye.

[pkaye]

One of my hobby is doing small improvements around the house. I really enjoy the work that a electrician or carpenter or landscaper does. I fancy myself running one of those businesses but in reality I know the job can be grueling as you get older and the pay is not always great. Also due to major health issues, I think a desk job is the best for me. I think in reality as a developer if you get bored you should change employers and work on different problems.

[VBprogrammer]

Same, or possibly more extreme. I've renovated most of the rooms in my house which were in a bad state of repair. I've installed a new kitchen. Just got to finish the bathrooms.

I do find that spending a weekend putting up plasterboard or tearing out a fireplace gives one a new appreciation for the mental challenges of coding.

[ThePadawan]

It's funny, but growing up as a shut-in kid into a career in software development, I think working at a desk is one of the worst parts about it.

[nf05papsjfVbc]

Please do consider that school teachers have unappreciated jobs while they work with insufficient resources to build the future of our socieities. Just imagine "classroom control" for classrooms at different age-groups. If you feel jaded/worn-out/burnt-out by the software field, though teaching can be rewarding, please do try and understand what it entails before getting into it.

Perhaps you already know all this and in that case please forgive my unsolicited advice.

[katzgrau]

I'd agree here. My wife was a teacher (teacher of the year in her second year, promoted to admin in her last) but left after 8 years. Why? The depressing realities of the state of the teaching profession - she decided she wanted to leave it behind to work with me in software and is much happier.

[nren]

Graduated in 2011 with degrees in CS and mechanical engineering. Did 1.5 years working on an iPhone app startup in SF, which shut down/failed. Grew frustrated with SF hype and wanted to work with my hands again, took a risk and moved to work at a drone startup in small town in the desert Southwest, turning down software jobs. Turned down a Google software offer a bit later as well. Two years in, the drone startup was bought by Google. Almost 5 years since then, and I'm still doing mechanical engineering, have done a bit of code relevant to my role but nothing in production. Very much lucky, but also glad I left software and get to use my hands as much as I love to. Sometimes I toy with code a bit.

Not a landscaper, school teacher, or electrician, but that's my anecdote for you.

[TeMPOraL]

After similar time in the industry (programmed for ~7 years professionally, 17 as hobby), I share your feeling. I had two big realizations that make me dislike my occupation.

1) Programming as a lone skill is essentially meaningless, in the same way being a master at using hammers is meaningless. The skill has to be applied to some domain in order to became useful for people. A hammer skill + steelworking skill = forging stuff. A hammer skill + carpentry skills = making furniture. Similarly, programming + medical knowledge = improving people's health by software. Programming + orbital mechanics knowledge = making space ships go where they need to. Etc.

(And by knowledge/skills I really mean knowledge + experience + being recognized in the community of practitioners.)

I remember when I first started to learn to program, I felt I can do anything with that skill. Only lately I come to realize that I can't do shit with that skill alone, and maybe I should've picked a different major.

2) Building things for sale != building things that're useful. There is a correlation between marketability and usefulness, but it's generally weak. At high level, there's plenty of ways to boost sales other than delivering actual value in exchange for money. Products that win tend not to be the best at their stated purpose; they're the ones best marketed. On low level, I see constant pressure towards reducing functionality, reducing interoperability, dumbing down the UI, which all makes software less useful, but better at making first impression and/or hooking people up.

I'm not likely to leave software, but right now, I'm focusing on acquiring knowledge, experience and contacts in other areas, so that I could do something with software that I also find worthwhile, instead of just settling on fighting to avoid jobs that are about maintaining the adtech machinery.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

A thought: your job is too divorced from the reason you are interested in technology in the first place.

For me, technology is attractive because I see its potential too improve lives, to remove tedium, to entertain, to teach, and to empower. But that isn't what the tech industry is about. I hesitate to say that it was different when I was growing up only because I'm aware of the rose-colored glasses through which we are prone to viewing our childhood.

The tech industry isn't about empowering people, it's about addicting people, selling them crap they don't need, un-informing them, constraining them, and turning them into cattle for advertisers. And it isn't just the industry. Even many open source developers have a culture of viewing people as mere animals to be herded.

You can't connect what you're building with real tangible benefit on the world. It is meaningless.

[mikekchar]

I left to teach English in Japan when I was 39. Originally I planned to stay for 1 year, but I ended up staying for 5. I wouldn't have gone back to programming except that my wife wanted to live in an English speaking country for a while and I figured it would be a good short term gig :-) Now I'm back, I guess.... (it's been 6 years since then) though working remotely in Japan at the moment.

In the past I have also taken sabbaticals. Probably about the same time as you, I quit my job (it was a terrible job) and decided not to get another one until I understood what I wanted. I knew I was unhappy for a long time, so I saved up for this event. After I quit my job, I ended up writing free software every day. I loved it. "I am a programmer after all", I thought. And then I went back into the industry with a renewed vigour.

I wrote this years later: http://mikekchar.github.io/portfolio//UsefulAndBeneficial

It might be useful to you. To give you a more concrete impression, I used to get caught up doing things that I thought were important (like trying not to let the company I was working for die a horrible death). After I quit my job I realised that there were things about my job that I hated. They were things like chasing people about following process, trying to get my idiot boss to do his job, etc, etc. Some of these things were in my job description (I was in charge of the software process for a group of about 60 people). But the most interesting thing was that if I looked at all the things I hated doing, they matched up exactly with all the things that other people hated me doing.

Then I looked at the things I liked doing. Programming. Well, pretty much it. I hated endless "discussions" about what technology to use or how we should do things, etc, etc. I just liked writing code and solving problems. And then I realised that if I picked some code that nobody else wanted to touch (because it stank to high heaven), I could do anything I wanted and everybody would be ecstatic.

So I tried it in my next job. I put my head down and just wrote code. I declined to offer any opinions on anything I wasn't actually working on. I just wrote (as it turned out) a shit-ton of code. And they loved me, of course. In fact, my boss loved me so much he started to privately ask for my opinions about stuff. So I cautiously told him and he went away and tried it for me. It turned out to be successful. "Oh... That's why you want a manager", I thought. "Someone who is good at not getting into arguments and persuading people and doesn't mind spending their whole day in meetings".

Anyway, from there it was pretty good. But I have to say that I loved quitting my job in the end. I even emailed RMS and said, "I now understand what you meant when you wrote, 'Not everybody needs to be a professional programmer'". Because you really, really don't. When I was teaching, I wrote so much more code for myself than I ever did when I was a programmer. If you really want to be a programmer -- a free programmer, then write free software. You can be a landscaper, school teacher, electrician or even a waiter and write free software. That's what freedom means.

Being a programmer is a job. It's a good job (kinda boring and you have to get good at those interpersonal skills, but at least you aren't hauling nuclear waste around). You don't have to do it, though. You can do any job. All jobs suck in different ways and are good in different ways. But you have a choice. You have freedom and that's a massive blessing.

These days I wonder about staying in this field. I like my boss quite a lot (amazing guy). I like my colleagues quite a lot. I like my work... kinda... I'd rather be doing my own thing, but it's still kind of fun. I like my situation. I don't get paid anywhere near what I would in the SV or the like, but it's still multiples of working as an assistant language teacher. I'm still not sure, though. Who knows what the future will bring.