[austin-cheney]

So I am a 45 year old former JavaScript developer with 15 years experience. I burned out last year just before being laid off.

The challenge that I could not see is that I absolutely love writing applications in JavaScript (really TypeScript now). I loved the flexibility of the language with its lexical scope and functions as first class citizens.

What I had grown to hate was JavaScript at work. Most of my peers were afraid to do anything other than basic CRUD apps in exactly the same way with multiple, often unnecessary layers, and tremendous hand holding. This pattern of fear felt universal across multiple employers, a faulty attempt to mitigate risks by avoiding uncertainty. The things people stressed over most were problems of their own invention and the solutions they chose were always finding some additional tool so that they could further avoid the uncertainty around the problem. It is/was stupid and completely unnecessary. Worse, you couldn’t talk to people about it without invoking bizarre behavior, which is what people do when they are afraid and not able to see it.

Fortunately, I was able to transition to something else in a far more mature environment.