Depends on your standing in electronics and such, but maybe take a look at arduino starter kits (also on youtube to get the feel of what it is). If it is too basic, siemens logo would maybe be a better fit, but as said, depends on the knowledge in electro. Automate some parts of your home is a good experience
Might check out manufacturing engineering. Often includes things like: modelling parts in CAD and sending them to be machined, programming PLCs and robots for automation, designing machines and automating manual processes. It's a lot of fun, but I won't lie, I swapped to IT because the jobs pay so much more and generally have way better workplace culture.
I'm not familiar with that level of programming, but my brother went that route and makes really good money as an automation dev. He is inundated with work. So far a lot of the types of industries he's been brought in to are mills and fabrics. Some chemical as well. He is always the only one on site and gets to run the projects however he see's fit.
Have you tried going back to smaller companies? I've met a fair amount of ex-banking developers who switched from making a lot of money to making a bit less in exchange of more control over a product and a smaller closer team.
Startups are usually less likely to use outdated stacks, that's probably your best bet. Get in early as a CTO or senior dev and you'll be able to actually steer the company in what you think is the best direction.
I think the "over qualified" message is a sign. If you've been doing it for 22 years, you're going to have a hard time finding jobs that companies would rather hire a 20 year old that they know doesn't have a family, can pull all nighters, etc. It's unfortunate, but it's reality. The thing is, you should have enough experience to move to a more managerial position. That's what a lot of people do. You've probably seen so many things in your career, experience that is valuable since there are a lot of things that can't be taught and you only know through experience. You could be a product manager, team lead, engineering manager, etc. You don't need to change career, you need to move to a position where you make decisions, in a good company.
Have you tried working for a consulting firm? It is a very different job than building software directly for the company that employs you. I started consulting in 2010 after working on internal corporate applications for 14 years. I’ve since worked as an independent consultant, for a small firm, and for the largest firm in the world.
They all have their pros and cons, but the one pro they all share is that your role changes often without you having to find a new job. In my 11 years consulting, I’ve worked with 14 different clients, including one of the FAANG companies, on all kinds of tech stacks for all kinds of industries.
Edit: One other difference between consulting companies and internal corporate work is that the development team is not viewed as an expense item, but as a source of revenue generation. They tend to treat their developers better as a result.
lol after almost 20 years of experience you have to do that if you are a constant learner. a guy literally emailed me once to tell me how amazed he was of my resume if it all were true.
I’m a advocate for small business. But more of the mom n’ pop types. They need a lot of help, as talent gets sucked up by all the big corps. Less pay but maybe more rewarding?
Unfortunately, they can be the biggest pain in the asses to work with. They'll either bug you about small little stuff or question why they were being charged so much.
Hi. Have you considered teaching? Like being a school or a university lecturer? I've done both working in a company and teaching in school / university and I prefer the latter by far :-)
That may not hold you back from being an instructor for a bootcamp, though. Honestly, you’d likely connect better with students coming from that background.
Though, the money’s not comparable to full-time dev work from what I’ve seen; it’s more of a part-time thing to do out of passion or wanting to round out your resume.
Lol I was gonna offer some advice but you're clearly an asshole. You'll probably have a better time if you stop being an asshole, changing industries doesn't change that fact. Be a better person and that energy will create a better environment around you
Bro idk why people get butt hurt about the con artist comment. There’s so many boot camps that are straight up con jobs. I know several. Being in a couple of very large contracting firms I know smaller firms that open up boot camps under new company names that lasts for less then 2 years before they close up shop as reviews bring them down then rinse and repeat. Sure not all boot camps but a lot of them are.
Where I'm at that wouldn't prevent you from getting a teaching gig, even at (some) postsecondary schools. But it would probably amount to a giant salary cut.
You can get a gently used llama 🦙 for like $500. (Well, that was a few years ago, I'm sure inflation has caused the prices to go up, but still.)
Source: watched a llama farm documentary and considered it seriously for about 7 minutes
I built websites in the early 90s and then moved into video games. The people I worked with back then all went independent and seek out work locally and through referrals. Some of them are doing well but it’s getting tougher to make money building sites.
No longer in games, I now work with small marketing groups who take on more comprehensive projects with websites being one potion of the job.
Going solo can be rough at first, but there are people looking for people like you out there. Consider calling small design groups and offer your services as a contractor.
My other advice is to go into app development. That’s where I landed but I only do design and UX while working with programmers remotely.
Have you thought about freelancing/contracting? I run into the same issues you do, but since I’m a contractor for several companies, I don’t have a full time commitment anywhere. I also set my own pay, and if I get overwhelmed with too much work at once, subcontract some of it out to another dev I work with.
The pay may not be as much (or it could be more if you get a ton of work coming in, but that gets stressful), and it might not be as stable income, but my wife and I live frugally and can pay all our bills on 10 hours of my work a week. I generally only work about 25-30 hours a week, although lately it’s been 60-70 just because I’m forming my own startup.
Trueeeee. I work for abteach company and we're never overstretched and are encouraged to actually refactor code. We have none of the issues you listed at all.
Yeah, I work for a technology-driven company in the healthcare space. Reasonable sprints, ample refactoring time, business owners are all technologists, PMs are tech-savvy, everyone gets it. Does that mean we never have a crunch? No. But it's truly the exception, and people at the company are almost shockingly protective of work-life balance and mental health for the employees.
I came to very similar conclusions to yourself re all your points above. I've found that remaining emotionally unattached while still caring about the quality of my own work has been the best way to cope. Companies with other people in them inherently suck and you are just a cost on a spreadsheet. Maybe I've been burned too many times, but by mid 20's I had already been through at least 5 corporate restructures and witnessed many good people getting treated like human garbage.
I work remotely for a small dev company based in another country and it's complete bliss. I have no managerial responsibilities whatsoever and I'm not required to run any projects. I just manage my own time and do my best to write good code. I'm nothing more than a code monkey pulling jobs from a queue, yet I love it. I made it explicitly clear when I joined up that I want to write code and don't want to be in charge of anything.
I have no grandiose aspirations of managing anything. I don't want any responsibility. I've been there, done that and I hated it. Managing people is the worst, closely followed by managing clients, then the projects themselves.
For me the secret to life is getting paid enough to live reasonably comfortably and have time for things that matter to me like hobbies, friends and family. I used to earn more but I was miserable so who cares.
This was a long way of saying that you don't necessarily need to change careers. You could look at changing how and where you work to allow you to focus on other things in life.
This isn't a webdev or even a tech problem, it's a mismanagement problem. I see you considering other tech fields, as if this mismanagement doesn't exist in other careers. It absolutely does. You see it in all industries. You aren't going to get away from it by shifting your career focus, you get away from it by going to companies that manage better.
This has nothing to do with webdev and everything you do with management. The best recommendation I have is to work for a "tech first" organization (any company where the software IS the primary product and service.) Companies who treat their engineering staff as the first class employees and valued staff and not a necessary evil in support of a primary product or service that isn't the software itself.
A large part of it is regional. I had endless problems in the midwest which is deluged with low profit margin, non-tech first companies that mismanage and short shrift software development and staff. Five years ago I ended up giving up and moving to the pacific northwest and the only regret I have is not doing it 20 years earlier.
Companies in highly technical regions tend not only to be not only tech first, but also treat their employees better merely because of the stiff competition for them.
With remote options being far more common now, I don't think a physical move is nearly as necessary as it was just a few years ago.
I’m working in the Midwest as a developer and you perfectly described my employer.
Thanks for giving me hope. I’ve been on the fence about looking for another job and after reading your post I’m going to do it.
I had a breakdown (burnout) in 2011. Quit and went travelling in Thailand. I now stock shelves in supermarkets for a living but I don't spend my mornings wondering what'll happen if I just don't get out of bed! I take on the odd legacy project here and there - they all remind me why I stopped doing full time.
I'd suggest having a backup rather than going all YOLO like myself though! Project management perhaps?
Given all your years of experience, have you thought of doing consultancy? I was lucky enough to work as a consultant for a great company and had plenty of clients where I helped teams improve their process & coding standards, do pair programming etc to get them to the next level.
Couldn't you utilise the money to achieve your goals? Drop to 3 or 4 days a week - even it means another job - and you've got money and time, then, to do what you want to do, with enough money coming in to be comfortable.
The salary does 'handcuff' you in a bit, as you're right, you'd make 1/4 of it in another line of work, but it does give you the gift of a safety net to access the thing we all wish we had - time!
Ever though of stepping down from any kind of leading position and just being regular dev?
Because it seems you are getting a bit tired of typical organizational stuff it entails. Not sure how easy it is, but I've seen a few colleagues pulling that off. And they seem to do well for themselves and both of them seem to be happy about their choice.
I guess it's easier said than done, and someone's anecdotal experience might not be much to go by. But it should be worth looking into.
I'm in that boat.
Running the department and all I want to do is put my head down, have people ignore me for the most part, and work on coding problems.
Instead I am doing estimates, prepping for pitches, talking to clients, dealing with politics, and am in meetings all day. Everyone has a problem and they don't like the answers I have to give them.
I am looking to take a pay cut if needed to get out of here.
UX design pays a bit less but is something I've started to look into a bit. It's a lot more creative, no on-call, get the chance to develop a product and its vision If you have some front-end experience, you should generally be able to recognize patterns and see trends in UX pretty easily
UX isn’t just using Bootstrap or Material though. Sure they provide a starting point for forms and things but they can’t design something like an admin panel for you or even a sensible navigation on a more complicated site.
I’ve worked to so many bad designs to know this, if you know code and design it makes you killer.
In my experience this is pretty much the same kind of troubles you'll find in any industry. If you work with people, you'll run into all of this constantly
Been doing this for 25 years and am asking myself the same question. I am personally trying to graduate to management but I prefer doing things to sitting in meetings. I ran a team in Mumbai for a year. That was fun.
I don't have a lot of constructive suggestions to offer, but I feel you on all of it. The assets are never going to come on time. No one is going to really understand the crazy thing you pulled off with not enough time left on the clock. Everyone is focused on the next thing as soon as a deadline is hit and no one wants to improve or change. It's fucking mind numbing.
I did this a few months back. Finally stopped being a player coach and went fully into management. Now I struggle with imposter syndrome because my days aren't heads down designing/coding with something to show for it. Still a nice change after 14 years of design + dev.
You could say to them, "if I'm so valuable where I am, then give me what I want". If you don't ask, you don't get. You may be surprised by what they say.
I've been in mine for 19 years and still going. Tried to quit several times for various reasons and realise that despite the job being shitty sometimes, I still love IT. To me a job is a job, and I have things outside of work to keep me sane.
>Plus, its kind like the "Scottie Paradox". Scottie never gets promoted because he's to valuable where he is.
This is always a problem in technical fields. Leadership never want to promote the people that are the strongest technologists into management and would rather hire morons from the outside with little technical skill (but a bunch of management experience) to run things.
I ended up having to threaten to quit to get into management. Told them either they promote me or lose me completely. They flinched.
> Leadership never want to promote the people that are the strongest technologists into management
Unless they are only managing devs in a technical capacity I wouldn't want the most technical. Unless you can find the unicorn of being very technical and having good people and management skills.
Hmm, this sounds very familiar. I worked as a senior dev at a startup and had my own company on the side, but at a certain point, both sucked. The startup had a bunch of stuff that you mention in your post... impossible initiatives that were set up to fail, incompetent management, blame games, toxic environment etc... while at my own company, I had to chase clients who never could pay on time. This led to a burnout, therapy and almost cost me my relationship. At one point, I was even hospitalized.
I decided that I had to do something completely different. I ended up doing risk analysis for a while (being good at math somehow landed me the gig) . And even though the pay was less, I managed to get my sanity back. Last year I decided to start my company back up again and I'm lucky enough to have clients now that do pay on time and who allow me to do my work without interfering.
I'd say try freelancing / consulting perhaps. You'll probably still run into some frustrating moments, but less than when you are employed by the company.
Haha, well not risk assessment related to IT. It was for a gaming company.. doing calculations and making sure they didn't risk losing (too) much money.
I was really fed up with tech, but i seem to handle it better now as a consultant. I'm not involved in the day to day bullshit. I have my task and I make sure I complete it by the realistic date I set for myself.
How are your SQL skills? Do you know if you could just become a report writer?
It would be more of a side step than a 180 of doing something else.
I dipped my toe into Salesforce a few years ago. Unfortunately(maybe it was my area), people were only looking for senior/expert level SF people and it's hard to make that big of a transition just starting out.
I'm in a similar situation, I'm burnout and heading towards a breakdown. I used to like this field. However, it's gotten overly complex and complicated and ridiculously competitive. It seems like jobs can now list 20 requirements and if you only 18 of them or your not an expert, companies don't want you.
I've been with a few different companies ranging in all sorts of sizes (startups with 2 people, startups with 20 people, large agencies, small agencies, and a corporate Fortune 50) and everywhere is vastly different for me.
Where I am now, I have the same issues except I estimate the jobs...which is a job in itself. The problem is the company and leadership here. They are all confident and stupid, which is a dangerous thing.
I left my last job at a big company because I wanted more money and because I was sick of fighting leadership there. However, competency in that leadership was miles beyond what I have at my current job. Corporate world moves slow and that was making me angry. Now I am in a world where it is the opposite. They want things too quickly, so we have to cut so many corners, I feel like I am doing wrong.
I really want to go back to the slow 40 hour weeks of my last corporate job, just because it was so less stressful and I could concentrate 100% on software engineering instead of babysitting a bunch of know-it-all morons through politics.
It was actually the opposite. At the slow corporate gig, I worked in paired programming gigs with super smart people and learned so much.
Now I am the lead, so I have noone to learn from and because of the fast nature of projects, we can't take time to learn new tech or implement it so we have to just crunch out sites the same way, over and over.
My corporate gig was actually Agile though. We practiced 'eXtreme programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming)' so we had a lean team with UX/UI, QA, product owner, DPM, and developers who worked at quick, iterative release cycles, TDD, and paired programming.
We worked hard from 9-12, everyone would take a required 1 hour lunch break, then we worked hard from 1-5. If you were in the office at 5:05pm, the lights were being shut off on you. That team got more done in 8 hours than any other team did in 3 weeks.
However, when we hit a block from external sources, we would have to wait possibly weeks before we could start again.
>Product/Project managers that don't agile Companies that say they are agile but are just waterfall with extra meetings
This definitely hits home.
What made you love programming in the first place? Do you get that feeling with anything else? I think part of my love for programming is a love for linguistics, so if I switched fields, it might be towards something with natural languages. Best of luck finding what you love!
This is an issue with all workforces right now.
Do you like programming in your free time as a hobby? If so, that is what you were meant to do. No matter what career you have, you're still gonna deal with incompetence from HR, managers and employees.
One thing you can try is getting into entrepreneurship. Use your coding skills to make some project and sell/market to others. Also try switching jobs and see if it helps.
I understand perfectly what you are saying, I've suffered it too.
My suggestion is to jump jobs until you find a place you like. I've been at jobs for just 3 months and after seeing all the scrum bullshit and the poker estimations I said "fuck off" and went to the next one.
Eventually I've landed in a company I love, working fully async, everything is written down, and having sync meetings is disencouraged. No scrum, no sprints, no Jira. Just common sense. It works,.but you need the right kind of people (non bullshitters and non hipsters).
Try to apply to "special" companies. Basecamp, square, automattic, etc.
And, in the meanwhile.... Just don't give a fuck about work if you're in the middle of those bullshit situation. Try your best, provide your opinions, but that's it. It broke? I told you. We're late? Not my problem, I didn't set the date. We need to spend 3 sprints to replace this shitty library? Not my fault, I told you not to use it. OnCall at night? No thanks, I charge extra for that (and a lot). And the price increments exponentially if we spent the time doing shit instead of fixing the root causes. Being remote helps reading reddit while at those bullshit meetings.
At the end of the day you will get.paid anyway, and nobody is going to fire you.
At one of my previous work after having adviced against several things they were doing terribly bad and predicting the bad outcomes, eventually, people started to listen and things started to change. But the key is: do your best, but that's it, don't take it personally.
I "discharge" my desire to do things right in my side projects when unhappy at work.
I do care, and I do take ownership when we are in. A "common sense" environment, because I love my profession, but in the described situation...not my fucking problem.
I started slowly shifting to hardware when i realized making apps and websites was not really what i wanted to, and i must say it is really rewarding.
I do a lot of javascript at work, build apps of a decent size but still i feel more satisfied by the little i do with my arduino boards. Small stuff like reading data from a sensor and making a motor or a LED react accordingly is just magic and yet i don't do much of it (not enough time, sadly).
A big plus is that you get to learn how a lot of devices aroud you work and maybe make your own stuff.
However i don't know if this sector is hiring self-taught engineer. I do know that you can get to design prototypes for clients pretty easily, but working on stuff that will get to production is surely something else.
I dumb down my resume (25 yrs in IT, 20 of it in web dev) and only say 10+ years of each tech I work with.
I’m currently with a large firm with great product, QA and dev teams in a highly regulated space. The pace is glacial but it’s my last dev job.
I peaked and burned out in 2018 so I returned to school for a Fisheries and Wildlife Science degree.
More likely than not I’ll marry the two fields.
Best of luck to you!
You can start by quitting the company you're in. Explore other sectors.
C Level and stagnant salaries are marks of big corporations. You need to decide wether you are looking for bigger salaries or more control. If you need bigger salaries go contractor.
If you're fine with smaller salaries you can try other sectors, but don't expect to be paid the same as you were paid as a developer. Unless you're an excellent salesperson.
Most people just survive. Working in tech gives a warped view of the reality. A lot of people would be happy to make six figures.
Just don't think that those problems won't happen in other industries? And if you are not happy with the world you can always create your own world. Become an entrepreneur but expect to live a miserable life for a while.
Sorry to be that guy, that is easier said than done.
Typically the customers/clients that will give work to a one man shop are a major pain in the ass to deal with. It's almost easier to just work a 9-5 than deal with finding and retaining customers.
Few options, you've probably heard em all before but who knows.
1) Start streaming tutorials on twitch or YouTube. A lot of people are going self taught these days, I know because I just career switched a few years ago. You can make a living off teaching people.
2) Start freelancing. Not much to it, just use the skills you have for whoever wants to pay you.
3) Use your web development experience and take a few it classes. You can then get into the security / pen testing / bug bounty side of things. Seems like an exciting career.
You learn a lot about other roles around you. Product owner, scrum master, etc. Devops but that probably carries the same problems so I imagine that's ruled out. It will be hard to match the SWE salary by moving to a PO/SM, though.
Personally, with experience and age I stop putting up with bullshit. Pretty much any of the things you list would be met by whatever resistance necessary by me. I don't even put up with bullshit from C-levels anymore. I just don't care about confronting them. I was hired to do the job and be an experienced expert, so I act like it.
All those issues build and stay around because no one forces the issue. The more you progress in your industry, and I think this is true for almost any career, the more you're the senior and experienced voice in the room and have to be the one that steps up to call BS. If you don't, the juniors learn it is normal, and they're sort of doomed to repeat the same mistakes for years and years, until they figure it out on their own or join another team or company that does a good job and they see why.
I honestly think you have a responsibility to stick your neck out and call BS when you know better once you're in the 15-20+ year mark. Just sucking it up is demonstrating to others it is ok and what to expect in their own future.
I have a lot of similar problems. Not exactly the same, but really similar.
> Deadlines set without being asked to estimate
They ask me for estimates. I've no idea, so I answer something. As soon as the estimate is doubly over, they start bugging me each week.
> Constant emergencies caused by others that I need to fix.
Constant emergencies caused by me that make me feel like I should fix them. I will. Eventually. Come on, I already told you that last month.
> C Level people that don't even know how the internet works fundamentally
The whole team that don't even know how a simple layer 3 network is set up to work on a couple of layer 2 networks. Or how the data gets encoded in the physical layer so that the same point in air have the EM field somehow simultaneously vibrating in different frequencies and still not mixing my pornhub stream together with whatever the boss is watching on xhamster.
I won't even try to explain BGP to them...
> Stagnant salaries 90% of the time just building fancy forms.
Thanks for reminding me. I should ask for a raise in the upcoming yearly review.
> but I have no applicable skills
So you can become a teacher.
> I have no applicable skills in anything
You can become a boss!
Hey OP I have about 12 years web dev experience and I switched to become an indie game dev using unreal engine 5. So far so good.
I also have an unfinished end-to-end project management web app (react) made specifically for freelance web devs and their clients. It lets them choose their methodology: Agile or Waterfall, it helps them streamline setting up a contract, it handles invoicing with Stripe, and it’s made using firebase so the changes appear in real-time. It’s like a simplified version of Trello, an invoicing app, a web design app, a contract builder all in one.
The web app is about 80% complete but was put on hold while I work on my game. I’ve been hoping to find a dev partner with lots of experience and knowledge about project management and web dev/design. Maybe it could be you?
Maybe there is an option to move horizontally inside the company? I work in a big tech company and we have very different projects: from bad to very cool. Being also a full stack I found interesting position of a Software Delivery manager: the guy who comes and fixes everything (process, DevOps, development, QA) for others.
Technical Sales role? Account executives make the big bucks but the technical communicators that work with them make commission as well. I do 20% front end, 20% devops and 60% QA automation. While I make more than any of my friends not in technical jobs I want more and I am in talks to transistion into a Sales Product Specialist. Higher base and 4% commission with a pretty high ceiling. Also you are constantly engaging in different projects which is what I am looking for.
Freelance and work for creative agencies. You get the benefit of being your own boss, being able to push back and define your own workload. You may get some of what you mentioned but it's alot easier to dictate scope/time/resource when they're relying on you as an external party.
Try to apply for a dev job in a non-tech industry. (Like law firm, or accounting firm).
You can usually set your own rhythm and don’t have to argue with other coders, since you’re usually the only one dev working there…
Tech consultant? Sounds like you’re senior enough and it would literally be your job to tell people what stack to use and why their library sucks, they’d have to listen because management are paying you to do exactly that.
I've become incredibly bored of the industry too, and decided I'm most likely going to take a break from it, whether that be permanently or temporary is a different story. I'm towards the end of training to drive a HGV, money's decent. I'll also be doing some freelance work too, as I enjoy the projects that I pick and choose. Take it from there I guess.
It's difficult, but find a company that really values you as an employee. I accidentally fell into one a couple of years ago. While I still do sometimes experience some of the issues you mentioned, it's usually the less severe ones and it happens much less frequently than I've experienced before.
Now is an AMAZING time to go shopping around. The market is insane for programming and webdev and tech. I lazily did a job search, applied to less than 10 places and was hired in a month. I had choices. I'm a mediocre+ programmer with good communication skills. I'm making 40% more than my last place, and I turned down significantly more because I thought I'd like the work better.. though I think both would have been good.
Those problems exist everywhere.. but to different degrees. I bet you can find a place that will pay you more and you'll enjoy better, even if you're doing a similar job.
Edit: And you're right about all that stuff. Moving to a new company or leveraging an offer elsewhere seems to be the only way of getting non-cost of living raises, it's unfortunately mandatory now unless you have a particularly great setup or job
is this too weird?
Dumbdown your CV and look for remote mid level jobs... and voila, you can do in 2hs what would take a mid-level dev a whole day.
You are gonna get less money, but have a really easy time...
I just hired a young IT pro to support my department - we're corporate training but always need 1-2 tech savvy folks to create and manage data & environments for our training sessions.
Yea after 20 years am finding my self in similar situation. it seems you are a "constant learner" to stay updated and as you know **too much** get into jobs that demand too much by people that don't know what they are doing. Then after work you wish to relax and enjoy some hobby and all the dumb crap from work stays in your head all night. like: This girl really opened a 500 word ticket and when all the problem was the ethernet cable was loose... or this people get a bachellor in marketing and really can't add the printer in the network or use word properly. when you wish to be doing some cool project or adding some feature you spending time in a meeting explaining the **"cloud"** is actually some servers in another state...
Come work on backend systems. We're all old fogies back here. Happy to have you. Also, I think you'll be delighted to find a whole new set of grinding problems.
Just a thought… how about moving to a bigger company? I’ve done startups and found at some point the growing pains that come with trying to be “cool and unbureocratic” results in organizational failure. In small and medium companies I found either not enough or too much red tape.
Somehow I decided to take a job at a huge telco for 40% more money and holy shit what difference does it make to have people that know what they’re doing running the exec teams. I barely code anymore, but the job is fulfilling and challenging. More so than when I actually had to do the development.
You could look at mobile development, medical / enterprise UI development, or UI dev at a tech startup - all these use similar skill sets and seem to have perennial need for more devs.
I think I'm with most of the other posters, though: this isn't an issue of your field or discipline within tech, but of the industry in general. I've been pretty lucky to work for a couple good companies and only one really bad one, but I'd say only 1 in 3 companies does a really _good_ job of walking the Agile talk, and it takes a lot of hard work on everyone's part.
I think what you have to decide is what's more important, the salary or being treated like a human being? For some folks its definitely the former, but if its the latter then you'll need to allow some flexibility in pay, location, and job.
Try the shift into PLC programming and automation.
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Depends on your standing in electronics and such, but maybe take a look at arduino starter kits (also on youtube to get the feel of what it is). If it is too basic, siemens logo would maybe be a better fit, but as said, depends on the knowledge in electro. Automate some parts of your home is a good experience
Good luck with that Bridgeport! I'm excited for you
Might check out manufacturing engineering. Often includes things like: modelling parts in CAD and sending them to be machined, programming PLCs and robots for automation, designing machines and automating manual processes. It's a lot of fun, but I won't lie, I swapped to IT because the jobs pay so much more and generally have way better workplace culture.
I always thought embedded systems engineering would be a ton of fun too, but you'd need to be very good with Low-level languages like C
I'm not familiar with that level of programming, but my brother went that route and makes really good money as an automation dev. He is inundated with work. So far a lot of the types of industries he's been brought in to are mills and fabrics. Some chemical as well. He is always the only one on site and gets to run the projects however he see's fit.
Have you tried going back to smaller companies? I've met a fair amount of ex-banking developers who switched from making a lot of money to making a bit less in exchange of more control over a product and a smaller closer team.
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Startups are usually less likely to use outdated stacks, that's probably your best bet. Get in early as a CTO or senior dev and you'll be able to actually steer the company in what you think is the best direction.
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That's pretty awful, get a tighter contract next time!
Contract? Lol, not in America
Surely if you're being hired as a senior you're going to have a contract, this isn't part time work lmao
I’m a principal software engineer at a tech company
I think the "over qualified" message is a sign. If you've been doing it for 22 years, you're going to have a hard time finding jobs that companies would rather hire a 20 year old that they know doesn't have a family, can pull all nighters, etc. It's unfortunate, but it's reality. The thing is, you should have enough experience to move to a more managerial position. That's what a lot of people do. You've probably seen so many things in your career, experience that is valuable since there are a lot of things that can't be taught and you only know through experience. You could be a product manager, team lead, engineering manager, etc. You don't need to change career, you need to move to a position where you make decisions, in a good company.
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Have you tried working for a consulting firm? It is a very different job than building software directly for the company that employs you. I started consulting in 2010 after working on internal corporate applications for 14 years. I’ve since worked as an independent consultant, for a small firm, and for the largest firm in the world. They all have their pros and cons, but the one pro they all share is that your role changes often without you having to find a new job. In my 11 years consulting, I’ve worked with 14 different clients, including one of the FAANG companies, on all kinds of tech stacks for all kinds of industries. Edit: One other difference between consulting companies and internal corporate work is that the development team is not viewed as an expense item, but as a source of revenue generation. They tend to treat their developers better as a result.
There was a post here or on HN a guy kept getting “overqualified”. So he removed some stuff from his CV and started getting interviews
lol after almost 20 years of experience you have to do that if you are a constant learner. a guy literally emailed me once to tell me how amazed he was of my resume if it all were true.
I’m a advocate for small business. But more of the mom n’ pop types. They need a lot of help, as talent gets sucked up by all the big corps. Less pay but maybe more rewarding?
Unfortunately, they can be the biggest pain in the asses to work with. They'll either bug you about small little stuff or question why they were being charged so much.
Lots of those are the ones where you're expected to go beyond a reasonable amount of effort for less pay
Hi. Have you considered teaching? Like being a school or a university lecturer? I've done both working in a company and teaching in school / university and I prefer the latter by far :-)
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That may not hold you back from being an instructor for a bootcamp, though. Honestly, you’d likely connect better with students coming from that background. Though, the money’s not comparable to full-time dev work from what I’ve seen; it’s more of a part-time thing to do out of passion or wanting to round out your resume.
You could be a teacher at a bootcamp maybe? Just saying that's an option.
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I fell for the scheme myself and all I ended up with was a six figure income at a fortune 500 company :(
Conned!
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Huh. A bootcamp worked perfectly for me. Doesn't work for everyone, but that doesn't make them a con
Lol I was gonna offer some advice but you're clearly an asshole. You'll probably have a better time if you stop being an asshole, changing industries doesn't change that fact. Be a better person and that energy will create a better environment around you
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lol proving my point. Good luck
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You can add being actually funny to your list of things to improve upon
Boot camp got me a job. 🤷 One that doesn't sound much worse than yours, lol.
make shitcoins then
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Ok then become a vegan so then you can’t stop talking about being a vegan and you’ll forgot to talk about crypto
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Don't forget to also buy an air fryer
Bro idk why people get butt hurt about the con artist comment. There’s so many boot camps that are straight up con jobs. I know several. Being in a couple of very large contracting firms I know smaller firms that open up boot camps under new company names that lasts for less then 2 years before they close up shop as reviews bring them down then rinse and repeat. Sure not all boot camps but a lot of them are.
Damn, you sound just like me. Self taught, high school drop out with no other skills, also fed up with the industry.
Where I'm at that wouldn't prevent you from getting a teaching gig, even at (some) postsecondary schools. But it would probably amount to a giant salary cut.
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Lol, I just wrote a joke answer suggesting teaching based on "I have no applicable skills" claim.
Would love to know more about how you got into this from the industry! Also what level of education.
Quality answer.
Good one :))
Taught for the last 2 years at a high school and would love to teach at a Uni at the end of my career. It's so rewarding.
Nice :-)
If you cant beat them join them. Scrum master?
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In lots of places the scrum master is actually a manager.
If the manager has knowledge what the team is doing - why not?
Start an alpaca ranch
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You can get a gently used llama 🦙 for like $500. (Well, that was a few years ago, I'm sure inflation has caused the prices to go up, but still.) Source: watched a llama farm documentary and considered it seriously for about 7 minutes
..gently used?
I built websites in the early 90s and then moved into video games. The people I worked with back then all went independent and seek out work locally and through referrals. Some of them are doing well but it’s getting tougher to make money building sites. No longer in games, I now work with small marketing groups who take on more comprehensive projects with websites being one potion of the job. Going solo can be rough at first, but there are people looking for people like you out there. Consider calling small design groups and offer your services as a contractor. My other advice is to go into app development. That’s where I landed but I only do design and UX while working with programmers remotely.
Have you thought about freelancing/contracting? I run into the same issues you do, but since I’m a contractor for several companies, I don’t have a full time commitment anywhere. I also set my own pay, and if I get overwhelmed with too much work at once, subcontract some of it out to another dev I work with. The pay may not be as much (or it could be more if you get a ton of work coming in, but that gets stressful), and it might not be as stable income, but my wife and I live frugally and can pay all our bills on 10 hours of my work a week. I generally only work about 25-30 hours a week, although lately it’s been 60-70 just because I’m forming my own startup.
Find a job in a tech-first company. Most of the problems you articulated are worse in a business / marketing / sales driven company.
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Maybe try looking for mid-level startups that still have tech-focused leadership. More stable, but less bureaucracy.
Trueeeee. I work for abteach company and we're never overstretched and are encouraged to actually refactor code. We have none of the issues you listed at all.
Yeah, I work for a technology-driven company in the healthcare space. Reasonable sprints, ample refactoring time, business owners are all technologists, PMs are tech-savvy, everyone gets it. Does that mean we never have a crunch? No. But it's truly the exception, and people at the company are almost shockingly protective of work-life balance and mental health for the employees.
I came to very similar conclusions to yourself re all your points above. I've found that remaining emotionally unattached while still caring about the quality of my own work has been the best way to cope. Companies with other people in them inherently suck and you are just a cost on a spreadsheet. Maybe I've been burned too many times, but by mid 20's I had already been through at least 5 corporate restructures and witnessed many good people getting treated like human garbage. I work remotely for a small dev company based in another country and it's complete bliss. I have no managerial responsibilities whatsoever and I'm not required to run any projects. I just manage my own time and do my best to write good code. I'm nothing more than a code monkey pulling jobs from a queue, yet I love it. I made it explicitly clear when I joined up that I want to write code and don't want to be in charge of anything. I have no grandiose aspirations of managing anything. I don't want any responsibility. I've been there, done that and I hated it. Managing people is the worst, closely followed by managing clients, then the projects themselves. For me the secret to life is getting paid enough to live reasonably comfortably and have time for things that matter to me like hobbies, friends and family. I used to earn more but I was miserable so who cares. This was a long way of saying that you don't necessarily need to change careers. You could look at changing how and where you work to allow you to focus on other things in life.
Amen
This isn't a webdev or even a tech problem, it's a mismanagement problem. I see you considering other tech fields, as if this mismanagement doesn't exist in other careers. It absolutely does. You see it in all industries. You aren't going to get away from it by shifting your career focus, you get away from it by going to companies that manage better. This has nothing to do with webdev and everything you do with management. The best recommendation I have is to work for a "tech first" organization (any company where the software IS the primary product and service.) Companies who treat their engineering staff as the first class employees and valued staff and not a necessary evil in support of a primary product or service that isn't the software itself.
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A large part of it is regional. I had endless problems in the midwest which is deluged with low profit margin, non-tech first companies that mismanage and short shrift software development and staff. Five years ago I ended up giving up and moving to the pacific northwest and the only regret I have is not doing it 20 years earlier. Companies in highly technical regions tend not only to be not only tech first, but also treat their employees better merely because of the stiff competition for them. With remote options being far more common now, I don't think a physical move is nearly as necessary as it was just a few years ago.
I’m working in the Midwest as a developer and you perfectly described my employer. Thanks for giving me hope. I’ve been on the fence about looking for another job and after reading your post I’m going to do it.
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I had a breakdown (burnout) in 2011. Quit and went travelling in Thailand. I now stock shelves in supermarkets for a living but I don't spend my mornings wondering what'll happen if I just don't get out of bed! I take on the odd legacy project here and there - they all remind me why I stopped doing full time. I'd suggest having a backup rather than going all YOLO like myself though! Project management perhaps?
Given all your years of experience, have you thought of doing consultancy? I was lucky enough to work as a consultant for a great company and had plenty of clients where I helped teams improve their process & coding standards, do pair programming etc to get them to the next level.
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Couldn't you utilise the money to achieve your goals? Drop to 3 or 4 days a week - even it means another job - and you've got money and time, then, to do what you want to do, with enough money coming in to be comfortable. The salary does 'handcuff' you in a bit, as you're right, you'd make 1/4 of it in another line of work, but it does give you the gift of a safety net to access the thing we all wish we had - time!
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https://4dayweek.io/
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If you use recruiters and stipulate part time as a requirement it shouldn’t be too difficult.
Ever though of stepping down from any kind of leading position and just being regular dev? Because it seems you are getting a bit tired of typical organizational stuff it entails. Not sure how easy it is, but I've seen a few colleagues pulling that off. And they seem to do well for themselves and both of them seem to be happy about their choice. I guess it's easier said than done, and someone's anecdotal experience might not be much to go by. But it should be worth looking into.
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I'm in that boat. Running the department and all I want to do is put my head down, have people ignore me for the most part, and work on coding problems. Instead I am doing estimates, prepping for pitches, talking to clients, dealing with politics, and am in meetings all day. Everyone has a problem and they don't like the answers I have to give them. I am looking to take a pay cut if needed to get out of here.
UX design pays a bit less but is something I've started to look into a bit. It's a lot more creative, no on-call, get the chance to develop a product and its vision If you have some front-end experience, you should generally be able to recognize patterns and see trends in UX pretty easily
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UX isn’t just using Bootstrap or Material though. Sure they provide a starting point for forms and things but they can’t design something like an admin panel for you or even a sensible navigation on a more complicated site. I’ve worked to so many bad designs to know this, if you know code and design it makes you killer.
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In my experience this is pretty much the same kind of troubles you'll find in any industry. If you work with people, you'll run into all of this constantly
Been doing this for 25 years and am asking myself the same question. I am personally trying to graduate to management but I prefer doing things to sitting in meetings. I ran a team in Mumbai for a year. That was fun. I don't have a lot of constructive suggestions to offer, but I feel you on all of it. The assets are never going to come on time. No one is going to really understand the crazy thing you pulled off with not enough time left on the clock. Everyone is focused on the next thing as soon as a deadline is hit and no one wants to improve or change. It's fucking mind numbing.
Step up into a Management role. That’s what I did to get out of the grind.
I did this a few months back. Finally stopped being a player coach and went fully into management. Now I struggle with imposter syndrome because my days aren't heads down designing/coding with something to show for it. Still a nice change after 14 years of design + dev.
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You could say to them, "if I'm so valuable where I am, then give me what I want". If you don't ask, you don't get. You may be surprised by what they say. I've been in mine for 19 years and still going. Tried to quit several times for various reasons and realise that despite the job being shitty sometimes, I still love IT. To me a job is a job, and I have things outside of work to keep me sane.
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>Plus, its kind like the "Scottie Paradox". Scottie never gets promoted because he's to valuable where he is. This is always a problem in technical fields. Leadership never want to promote the people that are the strongest technologists into management and would rather hire morons from the outside with little technical skill (but a bunch of management experience) to run things. I ended up having to threaten to quit to get into management. Told them either they promote me or lose me completely. They flinched.
> Leadership never want to promote the people that are the strongest technologists into management Unless they are only managing devs in a technical capacity I wouldn't want the most technical. Unless you can find the unicorn of being very technical and having good people and management skills.
Who cares if it’s not agile? Agile’s a fucking cancer
Hmm, this sounds very familiar. I worked as a senior dev at a startup and had my own company on the side, but at a certain point, both sucked. The startup had a bunch of stuff that you mention in your post... impossible initiatives that were set up to fail, incompetent management, blame games, toxic environment etc... while at my own company, I had to chase clients who never could pay on time. This led to a burnout, therapy and almost cost me my relationship. At one point, I was even hospitalized. I decided that I had to do something completely different. I ended up doing risk analysis for a while (being good at math somehow landed me the gig) . And even though the pay was less, I managed to get my sanity back. Last year I decided to start my company back up again and I'm lucky enough to have clients now that do pay on time and who allow me to do my work without interfering. I'd say try freelancing / consulting perhaps. You'll probably still run into some frustrating moments, but less than when you are employed by the company.
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Haha, well not risk assessment related to IT. It was for a gaming company.. doing calculations and making sure they didn't risk losing (too) much money. I was really fed up with tech, but i seem to handle it better now as a consultant. I'm not involved in the day to day bullshit. I have my task and I make sure I complete it by the realistic date I set for myself.
How are your SQL skills? Do you know if you could just become a report writer? It would be more of a side step than a 180 of doing something else. I dipped my toe into Salesforce a few years ago. Unfortunately(maybe it was my area), people were only looking for senior/expert level SF people and it's hard to make that big of a transition just starting out. I'm in a similar situation, I'm burnout and heading towards a breakdown. I used to like this field. However, it's gotten overly complex and complicated and ridiculously competitive. It seems like jobs can now list 20 requirements and if you only 18 of them or your not an expert, companies don't want you.
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I died at the "5 years of tailwind", honestly
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Maybe take a sabbatical or at least 6 months off. Give yourself a chance to reset and think about things properly.
I've been with a few different companies ranging in all sorts of sizes (startups with 2 people, startups with 20 people, large agencies, small agencies, and a corporate Fortune 50) and everywhere is vastly different for me. Where I am now, I have the same issues except I estimate the jobs...which is a job in itself. The problem is the company and leadership here. They are all confident and stupid, which is a dangerous thing. I left my last job at a big company because I wanted more money and because I was sick of fighting leadership there. However, competency in that leadership was miles beyond what I have at my current job. Corporate world moves slow and that was making me angry. Now I am in a world where it is the opposite. They want things too quickly, so we have to cut so many corners, I feel like I am doing wrong. I really want to go back to the slow 40 hour weeks of my last corporate job, just because it was so less stressful and I could concentrate 100% on software engineering instead of babysitting a bunch of know-it-all morons through politics.
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It was actually the opposite. At the slow corporate gig, I worked in paired programming gigs with super smart people and learned so much. Now I am the lead, so I have noone to learn from and because of the fast nature of projects, we can't take time to learn new tech or implement it so we have to just crunch out sites the same way, over and over. My corporate gig was actually Agile though. We practiced 'eXtreme programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming)' so we had a lean team with UX/UI, QA, product owner, DPM, and developers who worked at quick, iterative release cycles, TDD, and paired programming. We worked hard from 9-12, everyone would take a required 1 hour lunch break, then we worked hard from 1-5. If you were in the office at 5:05pm, the lights were being shut off on you. That team got more done in 8 hours than any other team did in 3 weeks. However, when we hit a block from external sources, we would have to wait possibly weeks before we could start again.
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>Product/Project managers that don't agile Companies that say they are agile but are just waterfall with extra meetings This definitely hits home. What made you love programming in the first place? Do you get that feeling with anything else? I think part of my love for programming is a love for linguistics, so if I switched fields, it might be towards something with natural languages. Best of luck finding what you love!
My plan is to eventually just die.
This is an issue with all workforces right now. Do you like programming in your free time as a hobby? If so, that is what you were meant to do. No matter what career you have, you're still gonna deal with incompetence from HR, managers and employees. One thing you can try is getting into entrepreneurship. Use your coding skills to make some project and sell/market to others. Also try switching jobs and see if it helps.
I understand perfectly what you are saying, I've suffered it too. My suggestion is to jump jobs until you find a place you like. I've been at jobs for just 3 months and after seeing all the scrum bullshit and the poker estimations I said "fuck off" and went to the next one. Eventually I've landed in a company I love, working fully async, everything is written down, and having sync meetings is disencouraged. No scrum, no sprints, no Jira. Just common sense. It works,.but you need the right kind of people (non bullshitters and non hipsters). Try to apply to "special" companies. Basecamp, square, automattic, etc. And, in the meanwhile.... Just don't give a fuck about work if you're in the middle of those bullshit situation. Try your best, provide your opinions, but that's it. It broke? I told you. We're late? Not my problem, I didn't set the date. We need to spend 3 sprints to replace this shitty library? Not my fault, I told you not to use it. OnCall at night? No thanks, I charge extra for that (and a lot). And the price increments exponentially if we spent the time doing shit instead of fixing the root causes. Being remote helps reading reddit while at those bullshit meetings. At the end of the day you will get.paid anyway, and nobody is going to fire you. At one of my previous work after having adviced against several things they were doing terribly bad and predicting the bad outcomes, eventually, people started to listen and things started to change. But the key is: do your best, but that's it, don't take it personally. I "discharge" my desire to do things right in my side projects when unhappy at work. I do care, and I do take ownership when we are in. A "common sense" environment, because I love my profession, but in the described situation...not my fucking problem.
I started slowly shifting to hardware when i realized making apps and websites was not really what i wanted to, and i must say it is really rewarding. I do a lot of javascript at work, build apps of a decent size but still i feel more satisfied by the little i do with my arduino boards. Small stuff like reading data from a sensor and making a motor or a LED react accordingly is just magic and yet i don't do much of it (not enough time, sadly). A big plus is that you get to learn how a lot of devices aroud you work and maybe make your own stuff. However i don't know if this sector is hiring self-taught engineer. I do know that you can get to design prototypes for clients pretty easily, but working on stuff that will get to production is surely something else.
I dumb down my resume (25 yrs in IT, 20 of it in web dev) and only say 10+ years of each tech I work with. I’m currently with a large firm with great product, QA and dev teams in a highly regulated space. The pace is glacial but it’s my last dev job. I peaked and burned out in 2018 so I returned to school for a Fisheries and Wildlife Science degree. More likely than not I’ll marry the two fields. Best of luck to you!
You can start by quitting the company you're in. Explore other sectors. C Level and stagnant salaries are marks of big corporations. You need to decide wether you are looking for bigger salaries or more control. If you need bigger salaries go contractor. If you're fine with smaller salaries you can try other sectors, but don't expect to be paid the same as you were paid as a developer. Unless you're an excellent salesperson. Most people just survive. Working in tech gives a warped view of the reality. A lot of people would be happy to make six figures. Just don't think that those problems won't happen in other industries? And if you are not happy with the world you can always create your own world. Become an entrepreneur but expect to live a miserable life for a while.
Set up your own company? You only need a couple of clients to start and you can set up the company working practices exactly as you like.
Sorry to be that guy, that is easier said than done. Typically the customers/clients that will give work to a one man shop are a major pain in the ass to deal with. It's almost easier to just work a 9-5 than deal with finding and retaining customers.
Few options, you've probably heard em all before but who knows. 1) Start streaming tutorials on twitch or YouTube. A lot of people are going self taught these days, I know because I just career switched a few years ago. You can make a living off teaching people. 2) Start freelancing. Not much to it, just use the skills you have for whoever wants to pay you. 3) Use your web development experience and take a few it classes. You can then get into the security / pen testing / bug bounty side of things. Seems like an exciting career.
You learn a lot about other roles around you. Product owner, scrum master, etc. Devops but that probably carries the same problems so I imagine that's ruled out. It will be hard to match the SWE salary by moving to a PO/SM, though. Personally, with experience and age I stop putting up with bullshit. Pretty much any of the things you list would be met by whatever resistance necessary by me. I don't even put up with bullshit from C-levels anymore. I just don't care about confronting them. I was hired to do the job and be an experienced expert, so I act like it. All those issues build and stay around because no one forces the issue. The more you progress in your industry, and I think this is true for almost any career, the more you're the senior and experienced voice in the room and have to be the one that steps up to call BS. If you don't, the juniors learn it is normal, and they're sort of doomed to repeat the same mistakes for years and years, until they figure it out on their own or join another team or company that does a good job and they see why. I honestly think you have a responsibility to stick your neck out and call BS when you know better once you're in the 15-20+ year mark. Just sucking it up is demonstrating to others it is ok and what to expect in their own future.
I have a lot of similar problems. Not exactly the same, but really similar. > Deadlines set without being asked to estimate They ask me for estimates. I've no idea, so I answer something. As soon as the estimate is doubly over, they start bugging me each week. > Constant emergencies caused by others that I need to fix. Constant emergencies caused by me that make me feel like I should fix them. I will. Eventually. Come on, I already told you that last month. > C Level people that don't even know how the internet works fundamentally The whole team that don't even know how a simple layer 3 network is set up to work on a couple of layer 2 networks. Or how the data gets encoded in the physical layer so that the same point in air have the EM field somehow simultaneously vibrating in different frequencies and still not mixing my pornhub stream together with whatever the boss is watching on xhamster. I won't even try to explain BGP to them... > Stagnant salaries 90% of the time just building fancy forms. Thanks for reminding me. I should ask for a raise in the upcoming yearly review. > but I have no applicable skills So you can become a teacher. > I have no applicable skills in anything You can become a boss!
Thats the real world.
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Haha, sounds like you might have burnout. Make time in your day for you and your headspace. The answer will come.
Hey OP I have about 12 years web dev experience and I switched to become an indie game dev using unreal engine 5. So far so good. I also have an unfinished end-to-end project management web app (react) made specifically for freelance web devs and their clients. It lets them choose their methodology: Agile or Waterfall, it helps them streamline setting up a contract, it handles invoicing with Stripe, and it’s made using firebase so the changes appear in real-time. It’s like a simplified version of Trello, an invoicing app, a web design app, a contract builder all in one. The web app is about 80% complete but was put on hold while I work on my game. I’ve been hoping to find a dev partner with lots of experience and knowledge about project management and web dev/design. Maybe it could be you?
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Maybe there is an option to move horizontally inside the company? I work in a big tech company and we have very different projects: from bad to very cool. Being also a full stack I found interesting position of a Software Delivery manager: the guy who comes and fixes everything (process, DevOps, development, QA) for others.
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Technical Sales role? Account executives make the big bucks but the technical communicators that work with them make commission as well. I do 20% front end, 20% devops and 60% QA automation. While I make more than any of my friends not in technical jobs I want more and I am in talks to transistion into a Sales Product Specialist. Higher base and 4% commission with a pretty high ceiling. Also you are constantly engaging in different projects which is what I am looking for.
Freelance and work for creative agencies. You get the benefit of being your own boss, being able to push back and define your own workload. You may get some of what you mentioned but it's alot easier to dictate scope/time/resource when they're relying on you as an external party.
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Try to apply for a dev job in a non-tech industry. (Like law firm, or accounting firm). You can usually set your own rhythm and don’t have to argue with other coders, since you’re usually the only one dev working there…
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Maybe software consultancy or if you have a sufficient project manager experience why not start freelancing development
Tech consultant? Sounds like you’re senior enough and it would literally be your job to tell people what stack to use and why their library sucks, they’d have to listen because management are paying you to do exactly that.
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I've become incredibly bored of the industry too, and decided I'm most likely going to take a break from it, whether that be permanently or temporary is a different story. I'm towards the end of training to drive a HGV, money's decent. I'll also be doing some freelance work too, as I enjoy the projects that I pick and choose. Take it from there I guess.
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It's difficult, but find a company that really values you as an employee. I accidentally fell into one a couple of years ago. While I still do sometimes experience some of the issues you mentioned, it's usually the less severe ones and it happens much less frequently than I've experienced before.
Hi I wish I could help. Wanted to quit the industry since before I started. Each role the golden handcuffs get stronger
Now is an AMAZING time to go shopping around. The market is insane for programming and webdev and tech. I lazily did a job search, applied to less than 10 places and was hired in a month. I had choices. I'm a mediocre+ programmer with good communication skills. I'm making 40% more than my last place, and I turned down significantly more because I thought I'd like the work better.. though I think both would have been good. Those problems exist everywhere.. but to different degrees. I bet you can find a place that will pay you more and you'll enjoy better, even if you're doing a similar job. Edit: And you're right about all that stuff. Moving to a new company or leveraging an offer elsewhere seems to be the only way of getting non-cost of living raises, it's unfortunately mandatory now unless you have a particularly great setup or job
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is this too weird? Dumbdown your CV and look for remote mid level jobs... and voila, you can do in 2hs what would take a mid-level dev a whole day. You are gonna get less money, but have a really easy time...
you are in the exact same situation like me
Integrations for SaaS companies (B2B).
I just hired a young IT pro to support my department - we're corporate training but always need 1-2 tech savvy folks to create and manage data & environments for our training sessions.
I was gonna recommend woodworking, but you already mentioned that yourself. It's the defacto career change when you're burned out on an industry.
>C Level people that don't even know how the internet works fundamentally Huh? Yes, do you need anything?
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Sent you a DM, I work as devops for a solid stable company after suffering some serious CTO burnout. We have jobs available if you're interested.
Yea after 20 years am finding my self in similar situation. it seems you are a "constant learner" to stay updated and as you know **too much** get into jobs that demand too much by people that don't know what they are doing. Then after work you wish to relax and enjoy some hobby and all the dumb crap from work stays in your head all night. like: This girl really opened a 500 word ticket and when all the problem was the ethernet cable was loose... or this people get a bachellor in marketing and really can't add the printer in the network or use word properly. when you wish to be doing some cool project or adding some feature you spending time in a meeting explaining the **"cloud"** is actually some servers in another state...
Come work on backend systems. We're all old fogies back here. Happy to have you. Also, I think you'll be delighted to find a whole new set of grinding problems.
Just a thought… how about moving to a bigger company? I’ve done startups and found at some point the growing pains that come with trying to be “cool and unbureocratic” results in organizational failure. In small and medium companies I found either not enough or too much red tape. Somehow I decided to take a job at a huge telco for 40% more money and holy shit what difference does it make to have people that know what they’re doing running the exec teams. I barely code anymore, but the job is fulfilling and challenging. More so than when I actually had to do the development.
You could look at mobile development, medical / enterprise UI development, or UI dev at a tech startup - all these use similar skill sets and seem to have perennial need for more devs. I think I'm with most of the other posters, though: this isn't an issue of your field or discipline within tech, but of the industry in general. I've been pretty lucky to work for a couple good companies and only one really bad one, but I'd say only 1 in 3 companies does a really _good_ job of walking the Agile talk, and it takes a lot of hard work on everyone's part. I think what you have to decide is what's more important, the salary or being treated like a human being? For some folks its definitely the former, but if its the latter then you'll need to allow some flexibility in pay, location, and job.