I’ve only been doing the job for 5 years now; but because burnout is such a regular occurence in my career, I’m thinking of switching careers.
I love programming, I just don’t enjoy doing it professionally and deal with the associated pressure/insignifiance of it all. No your CRUD app won’t change the world, and no we won’t die if users can’t share to facebook this Friday because we missed the deadline.
That being said, I’d like to use the skills I have acquired during these 5 years to find a role that might be a better fit.
On my shortlist so far:
SCRUM master (I enjoy spottinf inefficiencies in processes and fixing them)
Sales engineer (I’d deal with people more, exercise my social skills, and still use my technical knowledge)
I have a Bachelor in Business Administration and I’m self-taught when it comes to programming. I have worked for startups and medium sized companies on various web apps.
Are there other options? Did you switch from being a developer to something else because you didn’t enjoy it anymore?
I switched from being a programmer analyst (more programmer than analyst) to being a nearly 100% business analyst- I still dabble in SQL queries as part of the analysis work, but I’m not coding anymore.
I don’t know for sure if it was an unqualified improvement. On one hand, there’s less of the sort of stress where you have something to code and some kind of deadline and no clue whatsoever about how you’ll actually do it, but that’s traded for having to hound people for stuff and do a certain degree of support work, which I’m uniquely unsuited for, because I get irritated having to solve a problem more than once, and support seems to be 40% wishing you could tell people to RTFM, 30% dealing with known issues that you can’t solve, 20% breathtaking stupidity, and 10% actual, interesting problems, that once you solve, become part of that 90% that you still have to deal with, despite having actually solved the problem.
Still, I much prefer the non-technical side of things; it’s less awkward, and to a large degree, you’re solving the “big” problems for your company instead of solving smaller technical problems.
Code has such a short lifespan these days. It’s hard for me to get excited by a project anymore. Knowing it’ll be discarded for the new flavor of the month very soon.
I often feel like the guy manufacturing toilet paper.
I used to be very fussy about my code. Everything had to be aligned and indented. I’d obsess over variable names that were self documenting. I realized after a few years that these programs wouldn’t be around for that long. Why bother making them special? Write something that works and move on.
It was a lot different when I started. We had legacy systems that were almost a decade old. Many of the programs hadn’t been compiled since they were moved into production. The work those programmers did mattered.
One of my best friends started working when I did. He wrote a parking system that issued permits, kept data on what cars people drove, what lots they could use. It was in production maybe three years. Meanwhile he developed capnel tunnel. Had surgery and still has pain and numbess. A lifetimes problem for software that was shelved pretty quickly.
You well might like moving on to something on the interface between technology and people, so definitely think about it.
But, also consider that the other option is to not change fields, but just change organizations. Being a coder for a dot-com startup is very different than being a coder for a bank or government agency.
I started out my career as a developer/consultant for a tech consulting firm in the 90s. Over the years I gradually moved from developer to programmer/analyst to management consultant to various project/program management and management roles.
I still write code from time to time, but now it’s mostly small-level scripting and SQL to assist me with the more complex analysis my work requires.
There really are all sorts of jobs for people who have a deep understanding of technology, particularly if you also have an interest in the business/process side and actually like working with people.
From my experience they are just different kinds of horrible.
In 5 years, I’ve worked at 4 different places. I didn’t enjoy any of those places, they were all dysfunctional and alienating in their own way. I love writing code and materializing the concepts I imagined, but this doesn’t mesh well with the business reality where you’re expected to churn out code with the lowest amount of quality that will make it work.
I think another thing that stresses me out when I code professionally is that code is very binary: it either works or it doesn’t. And even when you’re 99% there, it’s still useless because it does nothing at all useful. It’s that one extra percent that will switch it over to fully functional.
I feel that this is something I have difficulty coping with. OTOH, most other jobs are much more nuanced, and there are many shades of “complete/functional” that you can get away with.
My 30 year career as a developer fits with what Quercus suggested. My first eight years were at a consulting company that did development for a Wall Street firm. There was a lot of time pressure on that job. After that I moved on to staff positions at larger and more stable companies. During the past 22 years, I have worked 40-hour weeks with very few exceptions. The ratio of coding to bureaucracy that I deal with may be lower than some coders might prefer, but to me it has been a reasonable trade-off for stability, autonomy and six weeks of vacation.
I did the same thing. What I noticed immediately is that by moving out of the tech area I suddenly felt more general respect from management and also felt like I had a career ladder. It’s wrong and disturbing that a smart, effective employee is disrespected and pigeonholed simply because they’re technical, but that’s what I discovered. On the other hand, because my work is so intertwined with other people (document reviews and meetings) when I get disgruntled with internal politics I can no longer hide my head in my work. So I’m spending a lot more mental energy fussing and I’m quicker to become disgruntled because I just can’t focus on my own work as an escape.
Although I feel much like the OP and others I’ve primarily worked for software companies throughout my career, IOW, the product was always software used by other companies to develop their own software. Even that field is falling into the same state as the rest of the software world, only the bigger companies survive and the individual becomes just another brick in the wall.
lojozwu, sales engineer sounds like a good path to follow if you’re suited for it. At least until you figure something else out.
If you have a serious interest in sales and want to move as high up the ladder as possible someday, that’s the way to go. People who know software and can deal with people face to face are a valuable commodity.
Of course there is. Technically it’s any of the various flavors of “Agile project manager”
Yeah, unless you work at someplace like Facebook or Google, no one gives the technical people any love. They are just resources to be utilized or outsourced.
That’s the main thing I hated. Having to stay up all night getting something to work, because unlike a PowerPoint deck, you can’t just pack it in and say “good enough, I’ll give it another once over for spelling in the morning”. Also dealing with having more and more technical crap dumped on you to code/fix.
A friend of ours went to Library School and became a university librarian. There’s so much technology involved in libraries that he was very desirable and is now head librarian at a very good school.
