[UglyToad]

I'm currently on my first break after 6 years with no job lined up and I'm not sure I want to go back to software.

Unfortunately I don't have any answers but as the other responses point out software is a gilded cage because it would be very hard to get anywhere near an equivalent salary doing anything else.

I had become increasingly disillusioned with software, mainly the maddening bureaucracy, problematic management and lack of teamwork over my previous two jobs. But I also had something of an existential crisis when I realised I think that so much of what we do is just rewriting or updating apps to use the new hot tech in order to have something to do. I feel like so much of what's exciting people at the moment are solutions in search of problems, if StackOverflow can run on a few servers to serve an incredibly high traffic site why do we need k8s and serverless and firebase and microservices and kafka and whatever else (granted I have no idea what most of these things are or do)? Why in the name of God do I need an entire build pipeline and SPA framework to deliver some static HTML to users? I feel like Rust is interesting and potentially worthwhile but I don't have much interest in the domain of problems Rust excels at. Granted all this is coloured by the burnout I'm recovering from.

I think I will probably end up going back to software, maybe as a contractor, but I'm tempted to try something new. My belief is that it would be easier to do something socially meaningful in another field but even in scientific research most work is pointless and the reward/funding system is entirely dysfunctional.

[throwaway21311]

Wow, I feel exactly the same. Except that I have been a software engineer for 20 years. I lasted so long changing jobs every 4-5 years. Usually, every time I started feeling exhausted at a job, I started looking and changing before it was too late.

In my current job, we have a globally distributed application that can handle 1000 times more load than expected. We have a sufficiently complex CI / CD process that took almost as long to develop as the application. We have a developer whose job is to fill out TPS reports. The application could have been much simpler, but we had to use certain technologies. Then we have so many ceremonies around it, such as daily surveys, meaningless waterfall style planning and then the use of tools for agile practices for waterfall style releases. It takes at least one hour to create tickets for the approval of the commercial process before each production boost. All the time, they told us that we needed CI / CD so that we can release code more frequently and easily.

Now in my forties, I have a hard time changing and I have probably stayed too long in my current job. It's not that I'm not receiving offers, but I feel that all jobs are the same, at least, for web developers. Basically, create things that help with sales and marketing, either directly or indirectly.

Sometimes I think that my feelings are what some people call midlife crisis and that I should do something typical of people in their 40s, like buying a sports car.

Not sure what the answer is. I felt that I should also share my frustration.

[MS90]

Those last few paragraphs really resonated with me in a funny way. I find lately that the more bored and unfulfilled I become with my job, the harder I start staring at pictures of that new Corvette...

[StavrosK]

I'm the same way. The software development I do as a job stopped being a way to make cool things and has turned into a bunch of CRUD chores. Nowadays I vent my creative urges in various ways, one of which is writing software, but there's a clear motivating purpose or a hard problem that needs solving towards a specific goal.

[Aeolun]

I never really understood how insane it can get until my current job. We literally have a system diagram with like 30-40 different components (proxies, lambdas, pretty much all aws services), for a system that would work just as well with 3 (front/back/database).

At this point it’s become a kind of joke for me because anything else would be too depressing.

[sergiotapia]

Search for baklava code. Or architecture astronauts.

It's comes from leadership and trickles down to individual engineers. If your leader is deep into this mindset of completely over engineering things, you are screwed. I quit a job like this because the system was just too much. It was making me hate my profession and that's when I knew it was time to go.

You can get so far with a simple monolith, there is no need to suffer the whims of someone justifying their position.

[krzepah]

Hi,

I've had the luck to work on a 10 years old Django System. Everyone from the 6 people working on it said it was the purest sh.t they saw.

On the other hand, I need to learn new stuff. I tried Express or other JS fmw but these are not new things.

You can get pretty sh.tty unusable code with a monolith, while state-of-the-art is expected to be understood and seek by people that crave for more.

Tbh, I think it all depends on how well a team is prepared, and ofc it is more complex with the later tools, but they definitely avoid a lot of useless and shame code.

It is also very common that business hasn't validated their initial client base.

[NicoJuicy]

It's called over engineering or premature optimalisation.

It's insane how many companies scale for growth that they will never achieve. Even if they are successfull.

It's not that you can, that you should do it is my living mantra.

[alexfromapex]

Are you me?! I have almost the exact same story and feel the same way. One thing that particularly annoys me is how interviews at a lot of places have devolved into 4 interviews and around the 3rd you talk to some smug engineer that expects you to have memorized pedantic things about programming languages. I’ve worked in senior level positions for years doing very high quality work but I still google a lot of stuff and it just makes no sense to me why they do this instead of evaluating applied knowledge. Most recently this happened AFTER I had already passed a HackerRank test. And the worst part is then companies might ghost you if you’re not selected as a candidate.

[eanthy]

It's good to see so many of us are in this boat and people notice it. Every company I've been in is always over engineering and overly complicating simple things. I think the solution is switch fields into something you like and move into a smaller start-up where people are more realistic and can't afford stupid over engineering.

[undef238]

Pretty much same, though I've been in analytics and PM at a few "unicorns" over the last 6 years.

For me the disillusion has more to do with feeling like working at a "unicorn" tech co is no different than any other corporate environment, where you have people who are optimizing for titles and influence doing anything to achieve those things, and feeling like playing those games is just not compatible with my personality.

The other part of it was the cognitive dissonance I got between hearing "this is changing the world" and thinking to myself "is this really that innovative and is this a net benefit to the world?"

I guess 6 years in tech is about the time when both you've saved enough and seen enough to decide you want to not do anything for a bit anymore...haha.

[draw_down]

It’s true that we’re just rewriting crap, but then most jobs are basically pointless. I see it as an opportunity to not take all this so seriously. Just shovel the shit and get paid. Could be a lot worse.

At the same time, the “change the world” rhetoric is even harder to swallow when you look at things this way.