We had a huge project converting a payroll/personnel system from one mainframe to another. The programs were ancient and written in COBOL 68. There were no IO statements. All files and database reads were external calls to a system library. We converted to COBOL 85, with standard read/write statements and we upgraded the hierarchical database (IDS I). Massive project with five of us working 55 hours a week. I put everything I had into that project. Even coming up to the office weekends to work. Lost a gf because my entire focus was this project. Biggest thing I ever worked on.
Seven months after getting the converted system into Production, management elected to purchase a canned software package. We had to convert the data and get it running.
The sting of seeing all that work flushed down the toilet stuck with me for years. All that crap about being creative and even artistic in my programming approach was gone. I spent a lot of time trying to optimize code, be creative in white space, comment etc. For the first time, I realized it was nothing more than a f’ing job. Clock in at 8 and get the hell out of there at 5. This bullshit of coming in on my own time was over. Took at least 2 years before I stopped dreading coming into work
Tough lesson that every programmer has to learn. We are cogs in a machine just like the guys flipping burgers.
given the likely size of your salary, what is stopping you from hiring somebody who knows whatever framework you want to learn to teach you, provide you with demo apps, answer your dumb questions etc?
On the meta level, a very prominent feature of today’s software industry is that there is no structured, efficient way of teaching people new frameworks/platforms. As a result, people who know whatever framework is needed “now” get overpaid whereas people who don’t know it get fired and their skills go to waste while they are looking for a new job. (plus interesting implications for those good at lying on the resume, especially from certain “global” areas).
I’ve been a SW Engineer for about 16 or 17 years. I’ve been burnt out several times. I’m lucky enough to have gone up the management chain a bit, and, thanks to some layoffs and other reductions, fallen back down.
I’m now somewhat underemployed, but still make good money…and I no longer work insane hours to make deadlines, because I’m good enough at what I do that I can get things done during the normal work day. I take the job as a means to pay bills, and use my added free time to make a difference in my community. I find it rewarding to run charity events, volunteer at local events, etc. So I take the job as a necessary evil to enable the good things in my life.
It doesn’t work for everyone, but it’s doing ok for me…
Yup yup. In a way, I regret doing this for a living because now I never want to do it as a hobby, but at the same time, at least it’s something I do like. You just have to get into the mindset of it not being for fun anymore.
That’s an important point, too.
I’m a software developer by trade. I also like to bake, and am told I’m good at it.
One Christmas, a bunch of my coworkers paid me for cakes for parties. I was making two a night for a week.
I didn’t enjoy that at all. It might be in part because I was doing it in the evenings after a full day of work..but I decided there is a difference between something I can do as a hobby, and something I can do as a job.
I am in the minority I guess, as I still program for fun too. I just do things other than what I’m working on at work. Right now I’m playing with this head set. I can’t think of a practical application for it yet, but it is fun anyway.
Wow! I can relate to this. In '96 I couldn’t stay focused on my code, lost the rush of creation and the satisfaction of having something working. I couldn’t wait to finish my “last” project and be done. A vacation? Ha! It won’t be long enough. A related field? You’ll drag all the burn out baggage with you.
I’m 51, and with the exception of 5 years, have written code all my life. From '96 to '01, I became a watercolor artist… a “hobby” I had had all my life. Yes it was a huge salary reduction, but my prior software years had let me own my home and have a small nest egg. With this, it was easy to keep my head above water in the low paying career of a small time artist. I’ll tell you this. My life was great! Outdoors for much of the time. When a painting was complete, it was done. No lingering issues or late projects, or trying to meet magic timelines without practicality, no lack of appreciation when deadlines were met or an elegant algorithm paid dividiends. But '01 brought market crash, and you couldn’t give away luxury items. Luckily an old client happened to call me up, and I returned to software development.
WOW!! It was fun again. So I strove for balance. Mixing my art with 4 days per week of development. But of course as you produce, more is wanted, in less time, with higher expectations. What was perceived as magic is now the norm, then the expected minimum. Eventually I lost the balance, and once again I can’t wait to be done with my “last” project.
IMHO, I don’t think a vacation or closely related career will help. Identify the things which are driving you nuts (sounds like you have a start). These things must be completely absent from your new pursuit.
This is why, as a soon-to-be graduating student, I don’t plan on doing programming forever. In 10-15 years I’d like to be moving in to a more managerial role, preferrably with an MBA.
My suggestion is small business, either your own or helping others through consulting. I work in a small business and still program in QuickBasic and VB6! Code is code and it works, there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel every few years when the latest and greatest tools come out.
In fact if you have the time you could even start consulting on your own to see how it goes while keeping your current job.
I am the same age as the OP, with the same level of experience and the constant “learn a whole new thing in an unreasonable amount of time” situation, but never lost my job unless there was some corporate change (company went under, massive layoffs). I too feel completely burned out. And like trabajábamos, I’ve often thought about just going to the grocery store to work (although I was thinking of packing bags, rather than stacking oranges).
So while it sucks for all of us, it’s really good to know we’re not alone.
I’ve hated computer programming for a long time. I’ve always thought it was a shit job, no matter what company you work for or how much you get paid. The reason is, what you build actually has to work. You can’t just throw some crap together in a Powerpoint deck and bullshit for an hour. Of course, what you have to build is typically dictated by people with little to no understanding of how to build it or how long it will take. That is why most programmers experience the frustration of having to work all night for a month straight to build some application.
Also, unlike other professions like law or accounting, there is not much of a premium on experience. Most of what you learn will become obsolete in a few years.
Even if you go into “project management” it still sucks. PMs aren’t “real” management. They are often overdrones who are the ones actually on the hook for delivering projects.
My solution was to go to business school and mostly work in management consulting firms. But the trick is you can’t let anyone EVER know that you know how to actually program. My first job out of school, they didn’t have a lot of billable projects so I joined a team that needed an Access VBA / SQL programmer. Big mistake. Next thing you know I have some imbecile office manager bugging me to build her some sort of web reporting application on a “server” that basically consisted of some laptop connected to the network in another office. I basically refused to do any of it telling her I didn’t know how (for like 4 months). The partnership even gave me an offer to transfer to a full-time programming group (because they had high utilization).
The worst is these senior management types who are like “I miss programming”. Bullshit. You miss not having an office and working until midnight with your nose burried in some shitty laptop? Whatever.
The best job I had was as a strategy manager in some large company (after my insane boss was “retired”). All I had to do was talk to managment about ideas for how some other jerk in some other department MIGHT implement something and how it would change our business.
Basically, the trick is to simply not put anything on your resume that would indicate that you can do anything with computers besides talk about the technology at a very high level. Plus I like to tell people “sorry, they didn’t teach me how to fix your stupid laptop in my MBA program. Take it to IT like everyone else.”
I’d say every person, not just every programmer. I’ve had similar experiences as a tax lawyer.
I’ve tried to practice the fine art of really giving a shit (i.e., always doing the best job I possibly can) without really giving a shit (i.e., not caring if my work turns out to be wasted in the grand scheme of things). It helps that I essentially get paid by the hour (albeit in a very indirect way that sometimes doesn’t really work out that way at all).
I’m ten years older than the OP and after 28 years in the industry I was laid off in 2008 during a large-scale layoff. However, like the OP, for years I was certainly feeling burned out and wondering if I could keep up.
I spent the next year doing some consulting and odd jobs, and finally caught view of an advertisement for a computer science instructor position at a local technical college. The hiring panel loved having someone with some industrial experience (I also had a MS in Computer Science, which is required for the position), and I’ve doing this for the past year.
My wife said I’m “back” - I’m interested in going to work again, and I’m enthusiastic about learning new programming languages and skills. If it’s a possibility, look at teaching - the pay isn’t certainly as high, but I had a great summer off, and I really enjoy the interaction with students and other faculty.
If you are good at SQL language and Excel then sell yourself as an analyst. It doesn’t matter what number you’re grinding as long as you can grind them. You can go into any industry and do this. This allows you to use the skills you have now and polish them to a fine edge without ever having to learn another language beyond a SQL version.
But you can’t really be merely “putting crap together” and “bullshitting”, can you? Presumably your presentations have to show some coherence and factual accuracy, right? And where you get into proposals, plans, and predictions, don’t they have to show a reasonable track record of accuracy and success? I don’t see where this type of work is inherently any less onerous than programming. But the average programmer type, IME, definitely doesn’t relish giving presentations any more than you enjoy programming–all of which just shows that it takes all sorts to make a world.
Actually…yes, I can and no..they don’t. I can get in front of a group of people and tell them why a particular project is the greatest idea ever…or the worst. It all depends on what facts I want them to see and how I want them to see them.
And even if it didn’t. I can put together 80% of a Powerpoint deck that gets the job done. You can’t do the same with 80% of a computer program.
In fact, a lot of people are very critical of the use of Powerpoint in business and the military because it conveys a false sense of analytical rigor and certainty in communicating complex ideas and concepts.
Actually, I would imagine that the problem a lot of analytical programmer types have with giving presentation, selling, project management and other “soft” skill roles is that these jobs require a certain flexiblity that they are unable to wrap their brains around.
I vehemently disagree with this. Any meeting I’ve attended that involved information I supplied was subject to a great deal of scrutiny over the accuracy of the information supplied and the conclusion drawn from it.
Again, if you have a strong background in SQL and Excel then you should be able to start as a junior analyst in any company.
It’s still Garbage In Garbage Out. I’ve been doing this shit for years. People will subject these analysis to a great deal of scrutiny all the while the source of the data provided is often inconsistent, incomplete and innacurate. The actual analysis is often a black box concieling a total lack of understanding of the actual business problem.
Yes, and you better actually like “analysing” shit since you will spend most of your time building a myriad of ad-hoc Excel reports out of SQL Server or Oracle databases. I don’t think there is a question of whether there are jobs for people who have skills with SQL, Excel or computer programming. The question is how do you move out of the sort of jobs where you spend your entire day grinding through writing code or stored procedures.
It’s not just people who are 20+ years into their career as well. Always loved computers, and loved learning to program when I was younger. I graduated in '06 and have been working as a Java developer more or less since then, with stops over in Python land and the ruins of Fortran languages.
But I’ve rapidly approached the point where I sit down at night after getting home, and wonder what the hell I was thinking getting into this line of work. The most interesting, useful and enjoyable thing (in my opinion) that I’ve done in the last two years at my previous job was setting up an internal Python training course for developers and engineers (which was created/administered on my own time without being paid for!) And I’ve only been out of college for 7 years!
My ultimate fear is that, even after getting a new job (just started a few weeks ago), I’ll either be unable to keep up (like someone mentioned earlier, tech trends change every 10 years, something I’m hitting a wall with now with being new to web development), or I’ll just get into the same position again with coming home every night and wondering what the hell I was thinking this would be a fun and exciting career.
And unfortunately, I honestly don’t know what else I’d do if I can’t function as a developer.
I agree. I just spent a good portion of my Christmas holidays setting up a restful service for something there’s not even a hard deadline for. I implemented it in java and some related technologies. Basically I ran into a bug it took me the better part of the weekend to solve, and if I had just taken my time, I probably could have had it solved in an hour or two. But, I just wanted it done so I banged at it relentlessly. I finally solved it when I decided to download the source code of the one of the libraries, and it turned out there were conflicting jar files. But I went all around the mulberry bush first, as I needlessly do at times.
Anyway, I told my boss the client was all set and I was ready to send the spec and the JSON data to the offshore developers, who would write the service to consume in PHP. He suggested I write the service in PHP so they would know how to implement it. Ugh. They’re the experts - not me. I barely know PHP - I mean, I took a course in it a while back, and learned a framework. But I don’t work in it day-to-day, and I don’t have any desire to. But I’m not about to argue the point - “I’m to dumb to do this” - I don’t think so. But my concern is that I will one or more snags if a language which I’m not good at in the first place. Which is why I’m very carefully and reviewing the samples out there, and am determined not to repeat the same mistake of rushing into the code. When checking for possible solutions last time, I rushed from example to example to example, not giving enough time to let what I was reading kind of sink in.
In software development, understanding is the key. You have to deliver, but you will put in a lot of needless time if you let panic take root. Relax, relax. Relax. It’s going to be ok. Enjoy the power of learning. Let the light of knowledge be your guide. Seek to understand, and the solution will present itself before you know it. Working software is a beautiful thing.