| I have been feeling the same way as you. I excelled working at Amazon and a few other companies for a decade, but I decided that the nature of the work just wasn't for me anymore. I felt like I was building systems that would fundamentally make everyone's lives worse, and at the request of reprehensible executives who can't justify their behavior. I couldn't help but see the bloated disaster of whatever organization I was in, how most of our problems came from lack of communication and a few people's personal agenda, and pitied us all that we had to spend our days in a chattering, dimly-lit concrete box hunched over our screens. When you learn programming, it feels like it gives you incredible agency. That, I think, is the reason that many people take up jobs with computers. The parallels to wizards, dark magic, and alchemy present in classic programming texts like SICP is no accident, with programming you really do create something from nothing! The issue is that it gives people /too much/ agency, more so than any medium-sized business has any intention of giving to a mere employee. Many popular websites could be programmed and maintained by a very small group of people, but it is in the business's best interest to split the work into many microservices such that the loss of any one employee doesn't even slow team velocity. Scrum isn't a way of estimating projects, it is a regime for developing a 100% replaceable workforce. On the other hand, the agency you feel when programming is actually very ephemeral and abstract. Most code at a tech company of any size is lucky to exist for more than a few years. And while you are physically programming, you are really a human ape checked out at a computer screen frying your brain on meaningless puzzles. Now this isn't so dire--in fact it is no worse than what the rest of the workforce has to put up with, other than the fact that for some reason at this job people are supposed to have some internal "passion for building". So I assessed how I wanted to actually spend my days, took my poorly-managed 401k and savings and picked up a retail job. I'm ramen-retired, meet new people all day and help them figure out what they want. I haven't had to debug Kubernetes for months! I might not get paid like I used to, but I feel better than I have in years. I'm sure that other people have better ways of coping with tech than I did, and I don't really feel any ill-will to those in the industry, I mostly just don't understand how they do it. |
What kind of retail do you work in? Something technical?