[devjab]

I’m curious about what is stopping you. I know I’m very privileged to be in a position where there is a lot of doors open, but at least in my part of the world, this seems to be pretty much the common thing for programmers.

I personally think it’s what made my adult life possible at all. I have ADHD and I have a very hard time working on things I don’t find interesting to the point where I might not be a functional adult if I couldn’t. So I’m very grateful that I can job hop and work where I want sort of frictionless. I’ve never had a bad experience switching jobs. I’ve been to some interviews where someone better beat me, which sucks, but I’ve also been to several interviews where it was clear that me and them just weren’t the right fit. The latter has never been a bad experience for me, I’ve even made some friends along the way and sometimes I’ve gotten different jobs because the boss I was talking with knew another boss with a better match in their organisation.

My best advice is to just get out there and look!

[ido]

To be undiplomatic, most jobs suck - most work for devs is “enterprise” or web development, usually for companies that are either not tech companies or that the tech is not that interesting.

Even in the prestige companies like Amazon or Microsoft most devs don’t work on greenfield projects but on maintaining the cash cows.

[devjab]

I guess it depends on what you like. I’m fortunate in the way that I like doing most programming. I love building things, even if they aren’t exciting or if they are using “un-cool” technologies. Heck, I even enjoy maintenance work as long as the end goal is for it to never need human eyes again.

What I dislike is typically tied to all the bullshit that comes with programming. Because I’m mentally damaged the way I am, I have to expend an enormous amount of energy to pretend to listen in a daily standup meeting when people I don’t work directly with mill about whatever the code I’m not at all involved with does. Which is how SCRUM “works” in basically any Danish organisation because none of them have teams actually working on the same thing to justify using SCRUM. Or if you bill by the hour, so you can’t help another developer chase down that silly mistake that turns out to be ridiculously obvious because then how do you bill that half an hour in JIRA? Those things are what I personally look to avoid.

So yeah, if you’re not that into programming anything, then I guess it’s harder but it’s still possible. The first thing I did at my current job was to work with solar inverters and collect massive amounts of data from our solar plants. Which was certainly a challenge, I haven’t really read a manual the way I needed to read those solar inverter manuals since I did some silly stuff in C with BitMap images during my computer science education. So those jobs are also out there.

[ido]

I think at the beginning of my career (I'm 40 and got my first job as a dev at 18) I really was, I just wanted to program and didn't really care what. That led me to enterprise dev as that was the most available work. After a while though I really did feel dead inside, working on stuff I didn't really care about felt like wasting my life. These days I'm doing better but I had to start my own company to truly get over it :)

[proprietario]

wow, this really resonates with me as I am 18, straight out of highschool and landed my first job at a swift shop for enterprise programming, I really didn't care where I started, I really just want to pogram stuff

Can you share more of your story and maybe give me some advice, I really don't want to end up burnt out

[ido]

I don't regret my path at all! I learned a lot at these early jobs, and honestly at 18 I wouldn't have gotten anything better (and for good reason).

I started uni at 19 (math & computer science at a local state university, I didn't have to go into debt for it) and that gave me a big boost in my programming ability (i continued working in that first job part-time throughout school). After that I went through several jobs in the next ±decade and made sure to always apply to places where I'd learn something new and level up as a developer.

At that point I knew a lot better what I wanted & didn't want to do. But I don't think I could have learned that without that experience and I don't regret it as it really helped me hone my skills and learn a lot. I also learned that the people you work with often make a bigger difference to the experience than the product you work on.

[versteegen]

...and may I ask, how did your hobby roguelike projects factor into your career? (Hi ido! It's been some years!) Were they significant for gaining skills, or are coworkers and existing codebases crucial for learning from? I often feel like I learn more slowly writing code from scratch rather than studying and contributing to someone else's.

[jnovek]

To me, this is the biggest challenge that comes with having ADHD as an adult. The quality of my work slips if I can't find some sort of novelty in it.

It doesn't always have to be greenfield, though. It can be complex and layered with legacy problems, it just has to be something I haven't explored before to be engaging. Right now I'm lucky to have a job where I'm assigned tasks from a variety of projects, modes and tools which really helps keep me focused.

[flashgordon]

Reality is it is a tight tension between affording a job that is interesting (ie small teams, interesting work, low TC) vs patience for minutiae of politicking, dealing with sociopaths, working on bowels of legacy systems at a big co (with satisfying TC). Even at faangs (especially?) You are working 9999->9999.1 type projects. Even getting to an interesting project or team needs so much networking and branding clout. Now if your question is why do I need the TC - well I guess I made some wrong life choices in going for luxuries like getting a family, a home to live in etc :).

Btw I resonate with not having the patience for bs jobs. Thankfully I don't have ADHD (I think) but working on something I dont enjoy is such a struggle that I have to think of it is a checklist of chores i have to get through the day for the reward at the end - working on side projects in the night! Sad I know.