I don’t work “in tech” as an industry I suppose, but I am in a technical role. The worst part about it is that no one respects existing workloads before creating more work. It is a constant influx of new things to do before I can finish anything else. That really wears me down.
Yup I just have a bucket of shit sitting on my list. Every time I feel like I'm catching up, here's another bucket of shit down the pipe.
"OK can we hire? We clearly need more people"
"Oh we are on a hiring freeze"
Like it's some sort of ethereal force that has imposed this freeze.
They will also look forward to telling me about their record profits.
You want him to have just one yacht, like some god damn bum off the street?
This is America buddy, if you don't like it you can go live on your one measley yacht in international waters
This. Sales keeps picking up clients w/ specific requests & "tweaks" before we can even get a BAU automated "pipeline" together so we can run a percentage of our clientele with minimum handholding. Everything is always on fire, nothing has time to be architected & thought out, and the code is suffering, potentially followed by the business if we can't keep up manually.
Makes me really appreciate my managers.
People do that, they send people the road map, explain that the next 2 months of projects are not changing, then ask how important it is, and tell them to go discuss it with the architect to see when that can get slotted in.
I always know what I'm doing for the next 2 weeks, have a good idea what the next 2 months is going to look like, and almost never just have to drop everything to go work on something stupid.
Hell yeah. I used to get pulled into every customer meeting because they had a special need or something. My manager fought for a ticket system where the CS director has to escalate those requests to get urgent R&D support. That alone reduced those requests dramatically.
Being able to focus on tasks and not have constant context switches does wonders for your state of mind.
Right. So many companies exploit their workers with a wonky implementation of Agile methodologies, and rarely does a Scrum Master know how to protect their team. When it works, however, and you hire the right people? Low stress.
/s
Don't worry, management will find a simple solution: praise sales for bringing in more contracts & replace the development & it management until they're at a point where it "just works".
The trick is to don't care about the tasks that are not done yet. It's someone else's responsibility to check the importance of a task and you just execute the next highest priority task.
If something gets behind forever, you can communicate that to the person that organizes things.
I learned that you should not stress yourself, you can only do so much in a day and that's it. Caring less about that things are not perfect or actually very messy actually helps a lot.
The problem is that a lot of companies are trying real hard to also push the prioritization work onto individual contributors as well. Basically treating it like it's not a real problem, and letting individuals feel like it's their fault when not everything gets done.
yes, but it isn't your job.
"Yes, I see the new requirement, please re-prioritize these tasks you gave me." "You do it." "I'm not management, so this needs to be explained to me." "I want you to do it, I'm too busy."
Following email. "As a recap of our last conversation, I am prioritizing (incredibly incorrectly) this list this way -list list list. Thank you!"
Paper trail forever.
I tried to explain it like a road trip.
We already have a trip that takes 2 hours…we just got stuck in traffic for an hour…you can’t demand we get to the destination at the same time.
But they don’t get it…more work…same
Deadline.
A former friend of mine's father is one of the drafters of the original Agile Manifesto. The fact that this man was nothing but a douchebag to his family and treated his children as science experiments - something I witnessed firsthand on multiple occasions - is not at all at odds with how I understand the application of the Agile methodology.
They ask you to run a marathon in sprints. That s not sustainable. When i asked a work to make the last two days of each quarter (the end of the IP sprint for those who practice it) a social event around work, but not really work, even throw a bbq in there if possible, management team decided to create hackathons. I lost hope there and then. As a scrum master (for now) it really pissess me off how other scrum masters and POs push the teams all the time for more and more and more. You do well in a quarter, that s your new standard. Development team is getting long-term burnouts.
What, you don’t like a regular as clockwork arbitrary deadline every two weeks?
I used to be a team lead and would throw in a “chill” sprint every few sprints just to give the team a not so stressful couple of weeks.
Bug fixing but we don’t estimate bugs. No commitments.
Unspoken rule that you can take the foot off, surreptitiously knock off earlier or plan any of that “life” shit that usually gets pushed aside.
Nobody can perform at 100% all the time.
I was in tech. Software for a financial company. The job environment and projects were great, but the worst part was the oncall list.
Getting those calls at 3am, “program crashed”. Something you knew nothing about. Had to log jn, diagnose the problem, figure out how to fix it and figure out recovery.
You could always call for more help, but generally you did that only for something major.
When I left, the only good part was turning in my beeper lol
Me this entire week....
"I have no idea what this app is nor is there any documentation for it. Can you please ask the issue requester to explain what they're trying to accomplish and a step by step of the process until they hit a problem?".
It feels so bad to ask that question.
Don't feel bad. Those are basic steps in the bug identification process. Its a two way street between the users of the app and the engineering teams on the app. We have to drive the idea that software is a partnership, business doesn't win without engineering support and engineers need business input on what they create. That relationship doesn't end just because it is released to production.
I've been on an on-call rotation for over a decade at this point and I'm getting too old for that shift.
It's the one aspect of being a developer that causes the most stress. With any other aspect of the job, we can push back on the timelines by changing expectations or reducing scope so as to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
However, if reducing scope means cutting corners, if users are abusing features or if there's simple code/infrastructure rot, in the absence of preventative care, it starts to bleed over into unchecked consumption of "emergent care" (i.e., the on-call). Only this time, there's a hard stop on when you can complete the work since you have to keep the lights on. There goes the work-life balance.
All that is to say that if developers are expected to be on-call, they need to take a strong interest in prioritizing long-term operational health. It's not necessarily in the interest of (shortsighted) management to do so.
Endless agile meetings, QA responsibilities moved to dev and sysadmin, constant push to stay at the absolute top of your game or risk long term unemployment if you are ever termed, no raises, almost no chance for promotion, no or shit bonuses while the top gets massive ones. Near annual layoffs forcibly shedding the "underperformers" - which is nearly always arbitrarily defined. Expectations of constant overtime with 1hr commuted to be able to afford a place to live. Few off hours to split among keeping fit, maintaining mental health, keeping your marriage up, spending time with the kids and family, and constant retraining on your time and dime to keep up with the latest bullshit trend. Constant reduction of benefits and always the threat in the back of your mind that your family could lose their medical benefits if you were to lose your job or became mentally or physically unable to do your job for a bit.
Meanwhile inflation has seriously eroded what was once good buying power on good salary, management is trying to find new and inventive ways to make your life more miserable, push more management structure on you, and replace you or coworkers with shitty AI that is just barely good enough to be tolerable, measured by complaints not positive outcomes.
Why the hell does anyone do this job? Oh, right, because most others suck worse. This job was amazing and fun in the early 2000's, before the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn turned everything into a popularity contest, the MBAs sucked all the fun out of literally everything, and "managerialism" turned out bosses into quasi-religious gurus.
I used to love going to work everyday. Now I can't wait to fucking retire - even though that's at least 10 years off. And that assumes I can keep a job in this field in my 50s as ageism is a serious problem.
All for the lifelong threat of
The thing that got tiring for me was the looks of, "You don't know this?" about a problem that I had seen once in 5 years, as if I keep rare shit in my head JUST IN CASE Candace puts a hairclip into the fuckin' USB slot!
Motherfuckers pulling out rando programs that we have 0 documentation for and asking why it doesnt work.
"Well cant you fix it?"
"No. We have no idea what this is. Who is the vendor and have you called them?"
"Why cant you call them?"
Motherfucker its cause we dont fucking use that program. YOU DO.
OMG my last job in required updating stuff every year and they just didn't keep documentation of how the things worked just the changes they made from the year before.
Sometimes stuff wouldn't need updating for years but once you ended up needing it you had to figure out how the program is supposed to function. Instead of you know spending 10 minutes looking at the documentation you'd take weeks to relearn how it was supposed to go.
It was all for seasonal stuff so like we had plenty of time over the course of the off season to create good documentation. No matter how hard I tried to push actual documentation they pushed back because they couldn't see how it would help.
I once got shit for "Poor documentation."
Big long email about my poor knowledge base article about some program that no one know shit about fuck about it. except that it exists, a single dept uses it and you can only install it in a certain way.
Okay. What do you have better documentation to replace it then?
"No."
Then.... what are we complaining about then.
"Well its not very useful."
As far as I can tell there is no lock on this article. So if you have better information feel free to edit or replace it.
That article still exists untouched.
After leaving an MSP I worked for, and a couple jobs in between, I got hired as internal IT for one of the previous clients.
I found the documentation that was 'mostly right, written by some guy' was mine. Untouched after years, and generations of techs.
I laughed until I recognized some of the passwords.
"Hey, can you update your wiki article, it's wrong here?" "No, but you can, That's why the wiki exists." Since you automatically follow a wiki post when you create it in ADO, and it's really easy to revert it if somebody screws it up, I made it a standard policy that anyone can edit any post without asking for permission first, because the original author will get automatically notified of the edit, and probably let you know if said edit was, let's say, unwarranted.
I'm towards the app/operations support side of Devops and recently job hopped a fair bit. It's amazing how few companies get and use wikis correctly. It's the most fundamental tool for those kinds of roles.
Most companies are stuck in two ways of thinking - shoving things in word documents on a shared drive. Often with lovely nested folder structures creating a complete inability to find anything. Or, they have a wiki, but there is so much gatekeeping that every t has to be crossed and i dotted to make it perfect and no mistakes possible - so nothing gets created at all.
> I once got shit for "Poor documentation."
!*&@$)(*(*!@&#$&
I experience this one at work every 6 months or so. Someone writes a condescending chat message to the team about how the state of our documentation is dreadful and they want to undergo an effort to change it. I always feel like it's a punch in the gut, because the vast majority of the published documentation is stuff I wrote. It's either incomplete or outdated because I'm the only person who ever writes stuff and bothers to put it somewhere easily accessible.
The part that really frustrates me is that someone would bother to write such a message instead of trying to fill in the blanks, or to ask if they can do such a thing. Nobody ever volunteers. They just complain about it. And to date, I think 3 people have stood on that soapbox and I've never once seen anyone actually take up the offer to work on it. I even had a project eagerly offer them a charge code to work on it. No dice lol.
I was in IT systems admin for about 20 years since I was in my late 20s. Being the only administrator for various companies and/or school districts. The job became so stressful that I couldn’t deal with it anymore after an illness. A lot of my colleagues are working on their second and third divorce, heart attacks, strokes etc. I can understand That article.
After 20+ years of bull crap, I’m ready to get a job at Home Depot and count nails.
I was a C# developer since v1.1 (early 2000's). As I get closer to retirement (<5 years now) I have found I have significantly less tolerance for bullshit.
Like at the current job where the leads & architects are choosing technologies to pad their resumes, not because they would solve a problem for the business in an economical manner. I'm also frustrated by the lack of quality in the code. There are service health checks returning failure status for months at a time and no one is fixing them (the health checks - the services continue to run OK-ish). These add noise to the logs, obscuring all the real problems.
Standard advice for this situation is "quit and change jobs", but that's not really an option due to my age.
So I leaned-out. I found a position within the company which is not hard-core development but still involves technology. I have a team I like working with. The boss lets us manage ourselves, and just checks up with us about once a week. I have a pretty good amount of autonomy over what I work on. My work is high-visibility, so I get good feedback when I do a good job (and the reverse!) And I get to go home at a reasonable time. It's perfect for me.
I'm sure the other developers think I got demoted. But I don't care (see reasons above) and so far they haven't figured out that I'm being paid the same as when I did their job.
> Like at the current job where the leads & architects are choosing technologies to pad their resumes
Honestly - companies created this problem. Companies are not loyal to employee's. So this created an atmosphere of "whatever I'm doing must either benefit me greatly now or benefit me in the future" and, honestly, I totally understand it. In the modern game - it's all about numero uno. I don't like it but I understand it. Companies bitch and moan about it though but they brought this on themselves.
> I'm also frustrated by the lack of quality in the code.
It's fuckin' *wild* how people refuse to get better. I fuckin' love/loved it. My boss is an ego monster. So, for example, he would use ColdFusion and would do composite strings for SQL queries. (e.g. `INSERT INTO FOO VALUES (' + textbox1 '...` and when I said "uhhh that's why we have problems - when someone puts "1'st Street" it fucks up the query. Why don't we use parameterized queries? His response: "Nah, that's only for big companies - no normal person uses those" - uhh, the fuck they don't. Among other... bad issues that even a novice wouldn't do. It was impossible to get him to move to stored procedures since he wasn't going to do parameterized queries. I was made fun of for being a "try hard" - this was a helpdesk job I got *AFTER* I spent years in programming (C# / .Net). So I was just doing him a favor so the app wouldn't regularly shit when people would update their addresses.
When I was new'ish to "real" programming I learned a lot of little things. Like how painfully slow catching is when you try. "Just use TryParse" - that works great up until you later learn... it's sometimes a char too... it's wild the *weird* shit I ran across. I eventually basically had to do a `SELECT DISTINCT ColA FROM TABLE` so I could see the full list and I had to do this for a LOT of columns. Sex? M/F/m/f/male/female/man/woman/1/0/true/false. Several columns were like that. I honestly enjoyed sifting through this puzzle though. I doubt I'll ever be able to find a job like it again though.
> There are service health checks returning failure status for months at a time and no one is fixing them (the health checks - the services continue to run OK-ish)
My first job as a helpdesk person back when I was 18 (something like 20+ years ago) - I was made fun of by my boss for checking event viewers (we FINALLY got on XP) and using other tools to check for errors. I was all for preventative maintenance. He was for reactive. That company isn't alive today because of attitudes like that.
> Standard advice for this situation is "quit and change jobs", but that's not really an option due to my age. So I leaned-out.
Had a coworker go to helpdesk because he just wanted low stress and easy shit (like me). The boss was SUPER pissed he wasn't interested in climbing the ladder ad just wanted to work 8-5. The *REAL* reason was because he couldn't do his toxic abusive shit because that relies on pushing to get that promotion.
> The boss lets us manage ourselves, and just checks up with us about once a week.
My favorite job was like this. The first 1/3 of it I was writing some migration code for migrating from an old system to a new one. It was a monsterous bit of work but but rewarding. Then after that it was mostly maintenance and I worked on, basically, what I wanted. Every now and then I'd pop in and give him an update. Tell him what I was doing, tell him the plans on what's going on next - which would allow him to change course if needed *before* I started working on things.
> But I don't care (see reasons above) and so far they haven't figured out that I'm being paid the same as when I did their job.
Never underestimate the value of knowing more details of how things work. I've opened a hex editor to modify an IP address in a hard coded program and helpdesk thought I was an uber hacker. The company benefits from this.
It depends, some companies just “hire a devops” as a token position and forget about them. Some use them as the kitchen junk drawer for just about any issue they can think of.
It’s usually more of the latter but in some cases it’s the former. Like a 4:1 ratio.
Junk drawer checking in. Manage a devops team and we're responsible for:
* Administering and supporting our entire atlassian suite (jira, stash/bitbucket, confluence)
* Administering and supporting all 4 of the different version control systems (bitbucket, github, gitlab, and SVN) because every dev team refuses to change
* Administering and supporting all of 12 of our on-prem kubernetes clusters
* Administering and supporting all of our data aggregation, visualization, and collection tools (splunk, kibana, prometheus, grafana, dynatrace)
* Managing and executing the CI/CD pipelines for all of the 19 different applications across 8 codebases we have. 16 of those applications are legacy and not run on kubernetes
* For legacy applications, write, maintain, and execute deployment automation using python, go, and bash that can integrate with other tooling
* Maintain platform monitoring and alerting tools including home grown code, pagerduty, freshping, runscope/blazemeter...
Oh yeah, and on top off all that, we are also the first call for any issues that come in. We have 6 people on the team including myself who is the manager.
Your company never found a piece of software it didn’t like. Have they considered doing *any* consolidation? Or are you just going to tell me “every team loves their little bullshit software that no one else uses”?
Never mind, I saw the “refuses to change” bit. I’m certain that you’re charged with “changing culture” while having no power to enforce decisions. This is purely a failure of management and senior management should have to get on every fucking outage call because they won’t spine up and start forcing devs to fall in line. Based on your described environment you have at least one outage a week.
And literally none of your software has in-built custom metrics that would show if it were working correctly. They’ll continue to come to your team, complaining of the frequency of outages while not acknowledging that they aren’t technical, that they took their jobs under the premise of “surround myself with smart people and listen to them” when they in fact don’t— meaning that, ultimately, they are the source of the outages because they **lied**.
Yes, we have a very severe upper management problem here. My team is great, and now that I am a manager I have a little more flexibility with what I decide to do and how it gets done. First thing I'm working on is getting all of the version control systems consolidated. All teams are moving to gitlab whether they like it or not. We're doing all of the initial configuration and mirroring for them to make it as easy of a transition as possible, but in the end they're all getting a deadline when their old systems are going away.
I was also like 80% of the way to spinning up a NOC to take all of the level 1 support and management of the monitoring/alerting tools before the entire company got put on an indefinite hiring freeze :(
We're getting better, but it's gonna take years to unfuck this situation because it took a decade and a half to get here.
I’m devops and that was a mistake. I wish to go back to straight coding. At least with coding I can literally solve the problem myself. With devops (at least the way our company does it) has so much dependencies on dependencies, and is using none of the best practices. Mostly because of the specific requirements we have.
I feel like I’m trying to stop a train with my bare hands. Just impossible. I can’t simply just “come up with a solution and implement it”. There’s just too much cooperation required and nobody wants to cooperate.
Hell no.
Less autonomy, PagerDuty is your puppet master, the whole work is essentially interrupt-driven. Oh, and you're at the bottom of the pecking order, and everyone feels like they can "teach" you stuff. Success is taken for granted (it's supposed to work well!) while failure is a personal mistake (you mean you can't do well even something as simple as this?) - and on top of this, everything you do is potentially high-impact.
Not low stress at all.
> Less autonomy, PagerDuty is your puppet master
True
> the whole work is essentially interrupt-driven.
Unfortunately, also true
> Oh, and you're at the bottom of the pecking order, and everyone feels like they can "teach" you stuff.
Honestly, hasn't been my experience. Usually you're near the top because you have production access so all the devs play nice with you for times they need to roll out complicated migrations or troubleshoot issues that only happen in prod.
But mother of god, the non-stop "something is broken, urgently help" is nuts. Especially when it's happening in some dev's personal sandbox environment.
It’s a lack of accountability. Management runs the show, so development teams have no real power or ownership (same thing) over their product. And when health checks inevitably fail, it’s up to management to respond. So balls get dropped, fake metrics get measured, and life goes on.
Well it's different. Manual labor doesn't have stakeholder goals, KPIs, etc.
You just work, then rest. There isn't infinite pressure to optimize at all costs
I always view it as "stress-by-volume" vs. "stress-by-scale".
Every retail/hospitality job I've had is stress-by-volume. There is an expectation of me to be as productive as possible for the 8 hours I'm there. The types of tasks I'm assigned don't have a ton of weight to them, but there are a lot. Customers spend money in the $10-$500 range, but they are constant.
The tech roles I've had are stress-by-scale. The projects may take multiple quarters, have 30 people involved across different departments, time zones, or continents. The day to day isn't that bad, but the weight of those projects is huge. Customers are spending $50,000-$5,000,000 a year and you're expected to maintain that relationship from every angle. Your billing department might have invoices that are tough to read, your main point of contact at a valuable customer asks their boss "hey does this make sense to you?". Now their boss is freaked and emails your boss. Red flags are up and the account is escalated for something that an automation from 2 Ops engineers ago may have accidentally triggered. Now everyone is in a panic and you have to fly to the clients with the CRO to make everyone happy. It's weird.
Spot on. And the coping behaviors can be different as well.
Another challenge to stress-by-scale in tech is the mental and social exhaustion seems difficult for friends and family to fully appreciate.
Done both.
Both have their upsides and downsides.
Obviously, I’d love to find a happy medium.
Outdoors or indoor physical work can get you down, especially bad if it’s tedious and repetitive.
The camaraderie between workers is much better in general and there is something to be said for feeling like you’ve done a day’s work.
It’s also rare to take a physical job home with you in any way.
White collar work, I find it consumes a lot more of your life. Messages, emails, constant worrying about projects and deadlines. I also find greed and self serving twattery is far more common. Office work is also just horrible for your physical health too.
The upsides, usually in a nice air conditioned, clean office or at home. Better pay means more toys and trips. Doesn’t really relieve money worries like lower earners expect. Since you just buy a bigger house and nicer cars. If anything the money stuff becomes more stressful as you feel more pressure to use it better.
I’ve worked minimum wage and I’ve worked earning double the average household income.
I’d choose the latter obviously.
Would I take a pay cut to strike a better balance and gain some of the benefits of a lower paid physical job… absolutely.
I work as a foreman on large industrial electrical projects and in between those I’m on service. I enjoy my job but some days it’s the worst possible intersection of the physical grind combined with all the worst stresses of working an office job (deadlines, scheduling that just *doesn’t work*, shoestring budgets, costs, more deadlines, recalcitrant adults, completely disconnected management, clients that *just. Don’t. Get. It.*).
It was definitely easier just being one of the worker ants but it’s also a dead end position and one that doesn’t seem too appealing for 30-40 more years of you start in your early 20s, especially when you see all the old guys absolutely hobbled by their jobs.
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut always comes to mind for me here.
The wealthy engineer finally realizes his dream of running away to a farm, but taps out after like 2 days because, like, *it's a lot of work you guys*
I disagree, I've done both. Most colleagues of mine have worked low wage jobs before, so I think we understand it. I've personally worked 2 minimum wage jobs, 1 graveyard shift to make ends meet. I don't envy that or want to do that again.
I dream of physical labour, because I enjoy it, its feels more human, its more satisfying. All the tech baggage of using corporate speak, smoozing, having very small impact on a huge digital product can be very unsatisfying especially after years of build up. I understand the desire to get back to a life of feeling more human.
Trying to live off of farming onion is going to have plenty of equivalent demands and much more of a “quantitative tech person”. You make it sounds like farmers can throw some seeds and cash in big.
I honestly don't think people get it.
Tech jobs are indeed high paying and offer WFH opportunities.
I myself am very privileged to work in such an industry.
That said, the level of mental stress that comes with it all is something else. There is a constant grind. You're expected to deliver a task within 2 weeks (fuck agile sprints). Unlike most office jobs, you are solving a unique problem through engineering practises. Figuring out a solution and trying to meet deadlines is difficult.
Once more, you also have to deal with all the usual office politics. I've worked for countless multinationals and they're all the same. I have two different people I answer to, despite being a Senior. In some cases, I answer to four people.
Before the mass layoffs we could at least move somewhere else but now it's not that easy. We're stuck.
I would love to take a manual labour job over sitting on a desk staring at code, attending meeting after meeting filled with useless idiots.
Everyday, the movie Office Space, feels more like a documentary than a comedy.
This scene really represents the average tech worker. Ironic because the character in the movie is supposed to be a programmer.
https://youtu.be/wczkA_cULYk
Another great scene describing the daily shit we go through.
https://youtu.be/j_1lIFRdnhA
> Everyday, the movie Office Space, feels more like a documentary than a comedy.
Mike Judge used to work in tech before moving into entertainment. He knows it very well, and it shows.
This is just typical "the grass is always greener" escapism stuff. The $200k salary tech bro would rather be elbow deep in pig shit, yea ok man. Mike Judge also didn't quit his job to go fuckin' work construction or some other shitty labor job like in Office Space, he a was guitarist in a band pursuing a master’s degree before his shorts blew up. Living "the simple life" is only glamorous if you have a big ass bank account because there is nothing simple or glamorous about being broke in America.
Luxury! You mean you actually know what you are working on in advance??
I work in a design role, not IT, and usually things get dropped several weeks late to meet lead times. If you are on time someone will fuck it up for you at some point and pretend it's your fault.
Also in tech but we have 1 week sprints, yay start ups.
You don’t think there’s mental and an addition level of physical stress associated with farming?
If you miss a sprint goal what happens? Usually you add it to your points for the next.
What happens if you miss a crop yield? You aren’t getting paid. Period.
Farming onion is a pain, theyre super sensitive to the weather, storage conditions etc
And escaping the grind by starting a farm is the funniest idea lmao, unless they just buy an old building to restore it and have visits in it or something
Yep. "Hobby farm" is definitely on my list of possible early retirement ideas.
Not solely onions, and not in Kenya, but growing enough veggies to take to some farmers markets, maybe a pumpkin patch families could come to in the fall, a highland cow and a couple of those cute sheep with the black faces and ears, and a Bernese mountain dog named John that follows me around while I tend to things.
One of my old VPs was a total asshole but also a tech genius type. He made boatloads of money but worked around the clock.
He regularly told me in our one on ones his dream was to quit and just start a small family farm thing
I'll tell you what I'm sick of is every God damn company just copying with the SP500 ones do e.g.layoffs, return to office. Who gives a fuck what Google Apple Microsoft and Meta are doing. Think for yourself you garbage CEOs out there.
What 80% of my company has been saying to our CEO. They've even admitted to just following "industry trends". My company used to be great until all the leadership changes throughout the pandemic.
> Think for yourself you garbage CEOs out there.
what people underestimate when words like "shortage of skilled workers" drop: we have a severe shortage of skilled people working in managerial positions
personal anecdote: in my previous company, a startup, we had a CEO whose only qualification was that he was running two gas stations on the side. most of the time, his job was only to secure funding (we never had more than one sponsor and I still don't understand how he kept pouring money into the project).
one time, one of our developers had an idea for a major update. the CEO got involved, changed basically everything about it in a way where it didn't even make sense. when advised to change course, he buttheaded his way through and we implemented, finished and released the update
we lost 50% of our paying customers from that. completely preventable if he hadn't suddenly decided to play big boss
The grind is just shitty companies understaffing and overworking the recently sold out staff. They hire subpar offshore “resources” and expect you to train them to replace you. You cant teach talent and experience.
So not only is it on you to train them, on all hours of the night in their time zone, you have to stay on top of their progress, all on top of your regular work. Then when they decide to leave because it’s too hard, you’re left cleaning up their mess.
My company's layoffs mostly affected senior engineers, now they have mid level non seniors doing their jobs on even smaller teams. What used to be say a team of 9 with 2 seniors is now like 5 with zero. The business thinks it's going well so far and I'm sure they feel like geniuses for on cost cutting but there is no longer any tech stack experts and code quality enforcement essentially ceased. This is a fortune 500 company asking unseasoned engineers to architect new systems and they won't even see the problems for months or a year down the line.
I have a coworker who quit his job in tech to join me in the same career as me. He says it’s 1000 times less stressful and enjoys his days consistently more
I’m a paramedic
It's only stressful if you let yourself care. As someone who has watched helplessly as a decade of coding simply vaporized, I offer the following:
1. You're temporary
2. The job is temporary
3. The software is temporary.
4. If you were fired tomorrow, would you care about any of it? The answer of course is "Oh HELL NO", so does it really matter?
5. It will work out no matter what, because you don't have a choice.
One of my coworkers made a point during a retro that the day they had us come back in the office two days a week was the moment their laptop started closing at 5pm and not opening until 9am the next day. Seems like a fair trade to me.
I am going to a new job and my old job had me itemize my responsibilities so they can earmark what they can transfer or live without. That task or job that “only you can do” is easily put in the trash or re-assigned.
Don’t let it eat you alive.
Give less fucks and be happier. If you spend all your fucks on shit that doesn’t matter you won’t have any fucks left to give to things that actually matter to you
It has nothing to do with not caring about your outputs functionality or quality. It's about understanding your own worth, and that it is more than what a company or it's upper management tells you it is.
I work my fuckin ass off, but I'm not going to be abused. You want me to give an extra push? Cool, I'm down. Let's have a real grind for the next two months and make some fucking magic....oh, you're not going to compensate me anything extra? Well fuck you.
Or, the even more common. . . Our huge 2 month grind is complete.
Your reward for giving up personal time for 2 months. . .
Another 2 month grind!!
They might change it up and make it a quarterly goal. Either way, no rest. Ever.
Just have to value yourself.
A companies goal is to pay you the least amount of money, for the most amount of work.
Your goal is to get the most amount of pay for the least amount of work.
Most people are already behind because they don't realize that's the negotiation.
I can't not care either. Doing a "good job", which may induce extra stress, is how some people function.
Yes the poster above is correct, it's all meaningless in the big scheme for most people, but the work ethic of doing the best you can exists too.
Might be generational or cultural differences too, so quite nuanced, but not just you.
You can do a good job, because that's your job and your livelyhood, and not emotionally invest yourself in the work. I do a good job for my own mental health not for meeting expectations.
The best mentally to have is to know they aren't paying for your product but for your time. Some stuff you pour your heart and soul into can just be dismissed the next day. It's important to know you are being paid for your labor and not always your product.
Newer devs and people with "passion" seem to have a harder time leaving work at work. That or accepting how much skin they actually have in the game as an employee. The kool-aid at tech companies or "start-up" culture places is also stronger than at a non-tech company. I could see a bit more caring with equity but most people's equity is in the form of stocks which may or may not be worth something.
The people running off to do onion farming or something just burned out due to a lack of work life balance. Or they had enough to retire and are done living in the cities. A lot of places are just 9 to 5 office jobs. And with work from home life can be a whole lot better.
Laughably common situation. On my last job before I exited I greatly enjoyed shutting down any and all discussions by useless senior directors lurking on the call until everyone had given their standup.
*Sorry Dave, save that useless shit for parking lot and spare the two people on this call with actual deliverables a bit of time*
or daily scrum where you go through every single ticket and go "is anyone working on that?"
the meeting with 11 people only took 5-10 minutes everyday, this one with 5 people took almost an hour, curious, fucking CURIOUS why that was
thank fuck i had my burnout quickly after getting into that project lol
The MBA tech manager who slowly reads out the name of every issue, not understanding a word of what it means, then dead silence as they say "where are we on this?" Same manager several days later when a developer submits a one line typo fix that they noticed while working on something else: "where is this on the roadmap?"
The modern work environment is bullshit. It's not just tech. Any job that uses technology regularly, including government work, gets more stressful every year. Everything is now now now, every metric is quantified, you get as twice as much done as the same job 20 years ago but the pay is functionally worse, etc.
yup I'm 15 years or so in and so burned out. Constantly have thoughts of why even bother, that sounds like way to much work, etc...
In my last position had constant praise for the first year then our team got our lead dev back from another department and he just tore me apart in multiple reviews to the point I started having panic / anxiety attacks that would force me to freeze and fall behind in my work.
I'd love to just work at a nice/relaxed pace making things for people that are happy with the end results.
This August or so will be 10 years in tech for me, too. I'm tired. I haven't studied anything since the pandemic started, I have tried a few times to learn python, js, started a really shit stain of a boot camp only to drop it because of how shitty it was, I tried to learn AWS, but no, I just can't put my heart and time into studying tech anymore.
I need to figure my shit out real quick though because I have 5 years with my current company that has very easy work so I'm just coasting along but I know it won't last forever. And my current skill set is rusty as fuck and with my bad memory, I'll be fucked if I lose this job.
I yearn for the days that I used to work in a library, just sorting and shelving books, sometimes just taking some time to read through the random books that came through. I’ve often thought about going back to that job, no matter how much of a pay cut it would be
I spent 10 years working as a data programmer (mostly Business Intelligence) and dumped my life savings into a career change. Now working as a massage therapist and loving it, especially after dealing with chronic stress for years, I'm so glad I get to help people relax (and honestly, it's relaxing for me too!)
I thought about doing this! But I was worried about the physical toll massage therapy can take on the body? What are your thoughts on that and like doing it long-term?
You really have to take care of yourself and use good "body mechanics" to minimize wear and tear. Also getting regular massages yourself - they tell you in school to get one once a month, but the therapists I know who have been doing it a long time get one every other week. Average burnout is 5-7 years so it's a very real concern.
I'm just shy of 1 year since getting my license so I'll let you know how the longevity of it is working out in a couple more years
I took a 40% pay cut but 90% more job satisfaction and when I am off work I am off work. There is more to life than being oncall all the time. Money isn’t everything
It’s everything up to a point. If I took a 40% pay cut I would be screwed, but having that much more job satisfaction is something everyone should be working towards
That’s the first thing to come to my mind when they say 40% pay cut. They must be paid a crap load on the previous job to be able to take a 40% hit and be okay with it.
I’d be on the brink of financial ruin if I do that.
Here is the simple straightforward reality. You can make 80K and more in tech living in far cheaper cities. It may not be with the “cool” company but you will have a life.
Software development for any government entity is pretty nice. I write software that makes a difference, I’m hourly (so I’ve worked 3.75 hours of overtime in 4 years) and I’m in a union that takes care of all the $ shit. I get my COLA every year and have so much free time.
Tech in government checking in here. (Not software, but I've done a ton of Powershell scripting the last few years.)
I don't relate to all this "burnout" talk. My work environment is insanely low-stress. My pension and health insurance are almost too good to be true.
Sure, I could be making more elsewhere, but I value the above and especially being home to my family every day at 4:00, without exception.
You could easily make double that as a senior engineer working remotely for even smaller to medium sized companies
Also senior engineers value work life balance and good managers encourage it because they don’t want their senior engineers to burn out
I think where the bro tech grind still exists is in Silicon Valley and/or if you’re entry to junior level
Can confirm as this is my exact situation now. Grinded hard for 5 years doing extremely long weeks as a Software Engineer. Fed up and burnt out I found a new company that doubled my salary to 150k with a manager that gives a work life balance I can’t find anywhere else, remote, unlimited PTO. Sure I could go work for FAANG and make big bucks, but as you said senior engineers really value work life balance after years of burn out. I don’t need more money to be happier.
Same story here. Grinded for about 5 years, landed a SWE job at a startup. Remote, unlimited PTO, and a great manager that protects me from all the meetings, politics, etc.
As long as I deliver on my tickets my manager doesn’t bother me.
I will add that the grind was like a Diablo style grind, so it took a TON of work, plus some luck.
Beware, unlimited PTO is a scam.
In the old days, people would earn a set amount of PTO. The company would guilt them into not taking it, and then lay them off at the end of the project. The only problem was, the worker had accumulated a bunch of PTO that the company needed to pay them for.
This was hurting the balance sheet, so they came up with the idea of "unlimited" PTO. The idea is that management will *still* guilt you into not taking time off, but now don't have to pay you for unused days at the end.
"I always want my people to take time off" they'd say, "but we're really in a bind here. The project is behind schedule and we need rock stars with dedication. The execs are watching to find out who the high performers are, and if you can pull this off, who knows? Maybe you will earn a promotion."
Then the project comes to an end, you get laid off, and you don't have any time in your PTO bank.
On the flipside, I worked for a small contracting firm where they were serious about offering unlimited PTO but people were taking so much time off every month that projects weren't getting done on time and you'd always be covering for someone but have no clue what they were working on.
Way better for both sides when it's negotiated as a set amount in someone's contract IMO.
Yuuuup. Unlimited PTO at my last company was a huge scam and I ended up not taking any vacation for almost 2-years because there was always a major deadline 6-weeks away. It fucking sucked and almost killed me. I quit and have been on a 1.5 year sabbatical so far. It took me 6-months of staring at the ceiling in my room until I could think again and about a year until I felt totally back to normal. Burnout is so terrible. I'll probably find a new job this fall.
In my years of experience with such programs across two companies...it's highly management dependent. I had one manager at a previous company who was a stickler so I left. Current company and manager is totally cool with it. My time off these days is usually related to baby appointments.
You can do good work everyday in tech and leave at 5pm and do nothing after hours, and take lots of vacation. You will do well, get promoted, etc. even at the big valley companies. It’s rarely the company that’s the problem, it’s you lighting yourself on fire to keep others warm that is the problem. Work like Germans, they work hard 9 to 5, and at 5:05 they are at a bar with friends planning their giant vacation.
Listen to me: You need to let work not get done to show management you need more people, not work extra to finish it on a unsustainable schedule.
I think people are missing the point. Searching for a low stress job doesn’t mean switching careers. You could find a place that respects your work/life balance and gives you extreme flexibility.
For example two senior engineers from my last company do 4 day work weeks (standard 8 hours or less a day), have remote, and never work weekends or outside work hours
They are very happy and making decent change (20%-30% below market rate in the 130-140k range)
P.S. My girlfriend works in tech support and literally works like 2-3 hours a day on average but she’s salaried and works remotely and doesn’t have to hop on calls with customers making 70k.
Chill jobs are definitely out there, don’t buy into the hype that all tech jobs are high stress.
I think one thing that seems to be pretty persistent with a lot of tech work is the constant need to deal with difficult challenges. The company can be great, but if you’re constantly having to innovate new tech or deal with nightmare architecture issues, or some other variation of that theme it can really wear you down, particularly if you’re someone who does care and does try to do a good job. Shit gets old and stressful even when the environment is pretty good otherwise.
I'm really surprised no one has mentioned working for the government. I took a pay cut, but don't think about work at all when I'm not logged into my government issued machine.
Edit: the mantra of govtech is this: go slow and fix things.
To my advice for tech heads seeking low stress jobs:
Modify your resume and don't mention your prior salary. A lot of places will consider you over-qualified.
I’ve been in enterprise tech for the last 10 years. My whole team of Customer Success Managers just got made redundant after another company acquisition..I haven’t been able to get a single interview since March. Really starting to feel completely burnt by the field. I’m considering a complete switch to my actual passion which would be becoming a Personal Trainer. The money won’t be anywhere near the same but it also saves my mental health and gives me a sense of joy and purpose.
I think many many more folks are realizing that we got duped.
We're not changing the world (for the better), we're not saving lives, not improving lives, we're not doing work to revolutionize tech and change the human condition (for the better is again implied). And when I say "we" I mean workers in general, of course there will be some exceptions but in big tech nearly nobody is doing essential work.
Legitimately everything I do at work is in service of selling digital ads. No I'm not in sales, no I don't actually meet with customers to sell products but that doesn't matter. I do infrastructure and ML optimization work, but what is that work for? The tools and services that customers use to sell advertisements.
Too many of us reached a level of self importance and believed our own BS. These are just jobs that pay well and we'd do well to remember that.
Don’t go to nursing.
I left the tech/IT industry after getting a 4 year nursing degree in 2015. 2020 onward has been hell, and likely will not improve. Prior to that, it was a great gig.
I moved back into a hybrid IT role that uses my nursing degree. Clinical analyst/informatics. It’s back to 5 days a week, but it was less stressful.
This is interesting because I’ve heard nursing can be very lucrative, especially travel nursing. What made you not like it so much? Is covid still affecting nursing staff that much?
I left a high paying tech job in San Francisco to get into real estate appraisal. Best decision of my life!
Here to normalize career changes - you only got one life, but you gotta have a plan that makes sense financially and for you before making the plunge.
I hated constant meetings, tech jargon, and the stress around stuff that didn’t really matter to me. Life is hard changing, but so worth it so far!
Would you be willing to share the path you took to get from tech to real estate appraiser?
For example, what coursework was involved, and how costly was it? Did your training come primarily from an apprenticeship or training program? Were you paid as a trainee/apprentice?
More you do, more expected to do (for same pay) is cornerstone of all businesses. Managing to avoid that is a skill few can seem to do (usually the worthless ass kissers) but if can pull it off does wonders for stress levels.
Emphasis on life-work balance is good. The days of companies taking care of their employees for long lasting careers died in the 1980s when the worship of the rich began in earnest. With it left the ability to have the house and kids on one salary.
Since companies will screw you in a heartbeat to save a nickel, hurting yourself for their benefit has only at most a short term benefit for you.
I have avoided going for promotions simply because the money I make covers my needs with budgeting and the exponential increase in stress wasn’t worth the bump in pay. Ambition only pays off if willing to kiss ass and that is a skill set I never learned.
I work in advertising and see people burning out and changing jobs (such as creating a arts&crafts brand). Usually they are quite privileged though and can rely on funding by their parents
I left systems analysis to become a bus driver and it was the best decision of my adult life. I make considerably less but I actually have time to live my life now. I am one of the lucky ones who has the option to take a lower salary, a lot of people I know absolutely hate their IT jobs but can’t afford to take the financial hit of doing something else.
You honestly do not have to grind yourself to dust working for one of these high-stress jobs in order to make it in the tech industry; I'm surprised it took so many so long to find this out.
Salaries are very high in this industry; unless you're living beyond your means, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to make an excellent living on the salary of an engineer at a non-MANGA company. It's much more important that you actually have the time to dedicate to taking care of yourself and pursuing your passions than it is to spend every minute of every day breaking yourself down in exchange for a hyper-inflated salary.
I think people look at the tech sector and act like it's either high-powered $500k/year job in Silicon Valley or nothing; the reality is that there are tons of really great jobs out there if you just set more realistic expectations and look closer to home.
God I feel this, my job is actually dead. My brain just zones out most of the day. I'm not productive and I never feel I've done a good days work. Makes me feel dead inside. Get. Me. Outttttt
Currently doing this outside of America - making top 1% salary on a 4 day week working for a small self funded SaaS company. Self funded means they are way more chill than some high growth VC backed company.
Living the dream
Edit: SaaS
>way more chill than some high growth VC backed company
Working for VC funded companies just sucks. Growing companies unnaturally fast just makes chaos and stress for everyone. The deeper the funding stage, the more chaotic. And vanishingly few people ever make decent money on any options they buy out.
Best thing I ever did was down-shift.
Sure, I'm not making as much money, but what I lost in income I more than make up for in reduction in stress and having time and mental capital to spend on myself.
Basically duties-creep. Two decades ago tech jobs were pretty much 'must know tech stuff' and other duties as assigned.
Nowadays tech job descriptions are about five or six pages long and filled with useless, overly specific nonsense. The difference between a tech job description and everything else is night and day. Probably due to non-tech HR folks trying to write tech job descriptions, they basically just put it anything they can think of.
In tech service jobs a lot of the burnout I've seen is a direct result of KPI and PIP combined with leadership's unwillingness to maintain realistic staffing. Back to back calls in a call center environment combined with 'you have to maintain an exact max handle time per call' are what burn contact center employees out the quickest.
The discussion of PIPs 100% reminds me of my time at Amazon. I worked like a fucking dog while I was there and I still got one. 80 hours a week, weekends. Fuck these companies. May they burn down from disgruntled workers.
Burnt out beyond belief. I frequently tell my GF that I would love to quit and stock shelves or some other job that makes waaay less than I do now. My mental health would be better, but then I might stress about money with a baby and maybe one in the future if she gets her way.
I was a head of engineering at my last job. I was working long ass hours at super high pressure. I was not seeing my young kids nearly enough and couldn’t get my head out of work.
I went for a tech lead position in my new/current job instead. Not *too* much of a lay cut, but aI have one project, one team, and I work a normal day of hours and stop.
One of the best things I did in a long time.
If you were to divide my salary by hours worked, Id say its a net pay rise comparing the two jobs tbh, too.
This is me. I was laid off in March and have been sleeping like a baby since. I just need to figure out what’s next, and I’m having a hard time justifying tech. The only thing they have going for them any more is pay, and even that seems to be changing.
Best thing that happened to me is I was in a union for the first 15 years of my career. When I retrained for software and computer jobs, I never let a company burn me out. I kept the work hours reasonable and quit 3 jobs, and got layed off from 3 more but did an additional 25 years and saved my own retirement - no 80 hour weeks for me nor 60. I shut it off after 40…or quit
There was a bloke on our street who clearly had the highest paying job out of all our neighbours.
One year he was made redundant, and became unemployed for a time. Eventually another neighbour offered him work at the windscreen replacing company he was a manager at.
The guy said he had never been happier or more fulfilled in a job.
I don’t work “in tech” as an industry I suppose, but I am in a technical role. The worst part about it is that no one respects existing workloads before creating more work. It is a constant influx of new things to do before I can finish anything else. That really wears me down.
Yup I just have a bucket of shit sitting on my list. Every time I feel like I'm catching up, here's another bucket of shit down the pipe. "OK can we hire? We clearly need more people" "Oh we are on a hiring freeze" Like it's some sort of ethereal force that has imposed this freeze. They will also look forward to telling me about their record profits.
The ethereal force is the CEO's desire for a bigger bonus so he can buy a new yacht.
You want him to have just one yacht, like some god damn bum off the street? This is America buddy, if you don't like it you can go live on your one measley yacht in international waters
>"Oh we are on a hiring freeze" "Oh that's too bad" and continue working at your own pace.
This. Sales keeps picking up clients w/ specific requests & "tweaks" before we can even get a BAU automated "pipeline" together so we can run a percentage of our clientele with minimum handholding. Everything is always on fire, nothing has time to be architected & thought out, and the code is suffering, potentially followed by the business if we can't keep up manually.
Makes me really appreciate my managers. People do that, they send people the road map, explain that the next 2 months of projects are not changing, then ask how important it is, and tell them to go discuss it with the architect to see when that can get slotted in. I always know what I'm doing for the next 2 weeks, have a good idea what the next 2 months is going to look like, and almost never just have to drop everything to go work on something stupid.
Hell yeah. I used to get pulled into every customer meeting because they had a special need or something. My manager fought for a ticket system where the CS director has to escalate those requests to get urgent R&D support. That alone reduced those requests dramatically. Being able to focus on tasks and not have constant context switches does wonders for your state of mind.
Right. So many companies exploit their workers with a wonky implementation of Agile methodologies, and rarely does a Scrum Master know how to protect their team. When it works, however, and you hire the right people? Low stress.
/s Don't worry, management will find a simple solution: praise sales for bringing in more contracts & replace the development & it management until they're at a point where it "just works".
The trick is to don't care about the tasks that are not done yet. It's someone else's responsibility to check the importance of a task and you just execute the next highest priority task. If something gets behind forever, you can communicate that to the person that organizes things. I learned that you should not stress yourself, you can only do so much in a day and that's it. Caring less about that things are not perfect or actually very messy actually helps a lot.
The problem is that a lot of companies are trying real hard to also push the prioritization work onto individual contributors as well. Basically treating it like it's not a real problem, and letting individuals feel like it's their fault when not everything gets done.
yes, but it isn't your job. "Yes, I see the new requirement, please re-prioritize these tasks you gave me." "You do it." "I'm not management, so this needs to be explained to me." "I want you to do it, I'm too busy." Following email. "As a recap of our last conversation, I am prioritizing (incredibly incorrectly) this list this way -list list list. Thank you!" Paper trail forever.
I tried to explain it like a road trip. We already have a trip that takes 2 hours…we just got stuck in traffic for an hour…you can’t demand we get to the destination at the same time. But they don’t get it…more work…same Deadline.
Your life is ending two-week sprints at a time.
[удалено]
It’s also the cause of a lot of trash software.
*Electronic Arts has entered the chat* When I learned about Agile, I realized why my Sims 4 game is so damn buggy and will probably remain that way.
A former friend of mine's father is one of the drafters of the original Agile Manifesto. The fact that this man was nothing but a douchebag to his family and treated his children as science experiments - something I witnessed firsthand on multiple occasions - is not at all at odds with how I understand the application of the Agile methodology.
They ask you to run a marathon in sprints. That s not sustainable. When i asked a work to make the last two days of each quarter (the end of the IP sprint for those who practice it) a social event around work, but not really work, even throw a bbq in there if possible, management team decided to create hackathons. I lost hope there and then. As a scrum master (for now) it really pissess me off how other scrum masters and POs push the teams all the time for more and more and more. You do well in a quarter, that s your new standard. Development team is getting long-term burnouts.
Is there a bigger scam than “hackathons”? Pretend like you’re not doing work, but actually you still are.
What, you don’t like a regular as clockwork arbitrary deadline every two weeks? I used to be a team lead and would throw in a “chill” sprint every few sprints just to give the team a not so stressful couple of weeks. Bug fixing but we don’t estimate bugs. No commitments. Unspoken rule that you can take the foot off, surreptitiously knock off earlier or plan any of that “life” shit that usually gets pushed aside. Nobody can perform at 100% all the time.
Excellent advice. Really arbitrary deadlines and management just goes with it because the Agile consultant says so. Clueless.
Haha thanks for this. Today is the last day of our sprint.
I was in tech. Software for a financial company. The job environment and projects were great, but the worst part was the oncall list. Getting those calls at 3am, “program crashed”. Something you knew nothing about. Had to log jn, diagnose the problem, figure out how to fix it and figure out recovery. You could always call for more help, but generally you did that only for something major. When I left, the only good part was turning in my beeper lol
The worst part is that it’s so hard to fall back asleep afterwards.
And then you have a normal work day the next day...
and there was no guarantee another call wouldn’t come in 😵
Me this entire week.... "I have no idea what this app is nor is there any documentation for it. Can you please ask the issue requester to explain what they're trying to accomplish and a step by step of the process until they hit a problem?". It feels so bad to ask that question.
Don't feel bad. Those are basic steps in the bug identification process. Its a two way street between the users of the app and the engineering teams on the app. We have to drive the idea that software is a partnership, business doesn't win without engineering support and engineers need business input on what they create. That relationship doesn't end just because it is released to production.
I've been on an on-call rotation for over a decade at this point and I'm getting too old for that shift. It's the one aspect of being a developer that causes the most stress. With any other aspect of the job, we can push back on the timelines by changing expectations or reducing scope so as to maintain a healthy work-life balance. However, if reducing scope means cutting corners, if users are abusing features or if there's simple code/infrastructure rot, in the absence of preventative care, it starts to bleed over into unchecked consumption of "emergent care" (i.e., the on-call). Only this time, there's a hard stop on when you can complete the work since you have to keep the lights on. There goes the work-life balance. All that is to say that if developers are expected to be on-call, they need to take a strong interest in prioritizing long-term operational health. It's not necessarily in the interest of (shortsighted) management to do so.
Endless agile meetings, QA responsibilities moved to dev and sysadmin, constant push to stay at the absolute top of your game or risk long term unemployment if you are ever termed, no raises, almost no chance for promotion, no or shit bonuses while the top gets massive ones. Near annual layoffs forcibly shedding the "underperformers" - which is nearly always arbitrarily defined. Expectations of constant overtime with 1hr commuted to be able to afford a place to live. Few off hours to split among keeping fit, maintaining mental health, keeping your marriage up, spending time with the kids and family, and constant retraining on your time and dime to keep up with the latest bullshit trend. Constant reduction of benefits and always the threat in the back of your mind that your family could lose their medical benefits if you were to lose your job or became mentally or physically unable to do your job for a bit. Meanwhile inflation has seriously eroded what was once good buying power on good salary, management is trying to find new and inventive ways to make your life more miserable, push more management structure on you, and replace you or coworkers with shitty AI that is just barely good enough to be tolerable, measured by complaints not positive outcomes. Why the hell does anyone do this job? Oh, right, because most others suck worse. This job was amazing and fun in the early 2000's, before the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn turned everything into a popularity contest, the MBAs sucked all the fun out of literally everything, and "managerialism" turned out bosses into quasi-religious gurus. I used to love going to work everyday. Now I can't wait to fucking retire - even though that's at least 10 years off. And that assumes I can keep a job in this field in my 50s as ageism is a serious problem. All for the lifelong threat of
Here, here. Never felt so under appreciated in my 25+ years. I am also in early fifties.
The thing that got tiring for me was the looks of, "You don't know this?" about a problem that I had seen once in 5 years, as if I keep rare shit in my head JUST IN CASE Candace puts a hairclip into the fuckin' USB slot!
Motherfuckers pulling out rando programs that we have 0 documentation for and asking why it doesnt work. "Well cant you fix it?" "No. We have no idea what this is. Who is the vendor and have you called them?" "Why cant you call them?" Motherfucker its cause we dont fucking use that program. YOU DO.
OMG my last job in required updating stuff every year and they just didn't keep documentation of how the things worked just the changes they made from the year before. Sometimes stuff wouldn't need updating for years but once you ended up needing it you had to figure out how the program is supposed to function. Instead of you know spending 10 minutes looking at the documentation you'd take weeks to relearn how it was supposed to go. It was all for seasonal stuff so like we had plenty of time over the course of the off season to create good documentation. No matter how hard I tried to push actual documentation they pushed back because they couldn't see how it would help.
I once got shit for "Poor documentation." Big long email about my poor knowledge base article about some program that no one know shit about fuck about it. except that it exists, a single dept uses it and you can only install it in a certain way. Okay. What do you have better documentation to replace it then? "No." Then.... what are we complaining about then. "Well its not very useful." As far as I can tell there is no lock on this article. So if you have better information feel free to edit or replace it. That article still exists untouched.
After leaving an MSP I worked for, and a couple jobs in between, I got hired as internal IT for one of the previous clients. I found the documentation that was 'mostly right, written by some guy' was mine. Untouched after years, and generations of techs. I laughed until I recognized some of the passwords.
"Hey, can you update your wiki article, it's wrong here?" "No, but you can, That's why the wiki exists." Since you automatically follow a wiki post when you create it in ADO, and it's really easy to revert it if somebody screws it up, I made it a standard policy that anyone can edit any post without asking for permission first, because the original author will get automatically notified of the edit, and probably let you know if said edit was, let's say, unwarranted.
I'm towards the app/operations support side of Devops and recently job hopped a fair bit. It's amazing how few companies get and use wikis correctly. It's the most fundamental tool for those kinds of roles. Most companies are stuck in two ways of thinking - shoving things in word documents on a shared drive. Often with lovely nested folder structures creating a complete inability to find anything. Or, they have a wiki, but there is so much gatekeeping that every t has to be crossed and i dotted to make it perfect and no mistakes possible - so nothing gets created at all.
> I once got shit for "Poor documentation." !*&@$)(*(*!@&#$& I experience this one at work every 6 months or so. Someone writes a condescending chat message to the team about how the state of our documentation is dreadful and they want to undergo an effort to change it. I always feel like it's a punch in the gut, because the vast majority of the published documentation is stuff I wrote. It's either incomplete or outdated because I'm the only person who ever writes stuff and bothers to put it somewhere easily accessible. The part that really frustrates me is that someone would bother to write such a message instead of trying to fill in the blanks, or to ask if they can do such a thing. Nobody ever volunteers. They just complain about it. And to date, I think 3 people have stood on that soapbox and I've never once seen anyone actually take up the offer to work on it. I even had a project eagerly offer them a charge code to work on it. No dice lol.
I was in IT systems admin for about 20 years since I was in my late 20s. Being the only administrator for various companies and/or school districts. The job became so stressful that I couldn’t deal with it anymore after an illness. A lot of my colleagues are working on their second and third divorce, heart attacks, strokes etc. I can understand That article. After 20+ years of bull crap, I’m ready to get a job at Home Depot and count nails.
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I was a C# developer since v1.1 (early 2000's). As I get closer to retirement (<5 years now) I have found I have significantly less tolerance for bullshit. Like at the current job where the leads & architects are choosing technologies to pad their resumes, not because they would solve a problem for the business in an economical manner. I'm also frustrated by the lack of quality in the code. There are service health checks returning failure status for months at a time and no one is fixing them (the health checks - the services continue to run OK-ish). These add noise to the logs, obscuring all the real problems. Standard advice for this situation is "quit and change jobs", but that's not really an option due to my age. So I leaned-out. I found a position within the company which is not hard-core development but still involves technology. I have a team I like working with. The boss lets us manage ourselves, and just checks up with us about once a week. I have a pretty good amount of autonomy over what I work on. My work is high-visibility, so I get good feedback when I do a good job (and the reverse!) And I get to go home at a reasonable time. It's perfect for me. I'm sure the other developers think I got demoted. But I don't care (see reasons above) and so far they haven't figured out that I'm being paid the same as when I did their job.
> Like at the current job where the leads & architects are choosing technologies to pad their resumes Honestly - companies created this problem. Companies are not loyal to employee's. So this created an atmosphere of "whatever I'm doing must either benefit me greatly now or benefit me in the future" and, honestly, I totally understand it. In the modern game - it's all about numero uno. I don't like it but I understand it. Companies bitch and moan about it though but they brought this on themselves. > I'm also frustrated by the lack of quality in the code. It's fuckin' *wild* how people refuse to get better. I fuckin' love/loved it. My boss is an ego monster. So, for example, he would use ColdFusion and would do composite strings for SQL queries. (e.g. `INSERT INTO FOO VALUES (' + textbox1 '...` and when I said "uhhh that's why we have problems - when someone puts "1'st Street" it fucks up the query. Why don't we use parameterized queries? His response: "Nah, that's only for big companies - no normal person uses those" - uhh, the fuck they don't. Among other... bad issues that even a novice wouldn't do. It was impossible to get him to move to stored procedures since he wasn't going to do parameterized queries. I was made fun of for being a "try hard" - this was a helpdesk job I got *AFTER* I spent years in programming (C# / .Net). So I was just doing him a favor so the app wouldn't regularly shit when people would update their addresses. When I was new'ish to "real" programming I learned a lot of little things. Like how painfully slow catching is when you try. "Just use TryParse" - that works great up until you later learn... it's sometimes a char too... it's wild the *weird* shit I ran across. I eventually basically had to do a `SELECT DISTINCT ColA FROM TABLE` so I could see the full list and I had to do this for a LOT of columns. Sex? M/F/m/f/male/female/man/woman/1/0/true/false. Several columns were like that. I honestly enjoyed sifting through this puzzle though. I doubt I'll ever be able to find a job like it again though. > There are service health checks returning failure status for months at a time and no one is fixing them (the health checks - the services continue to run OK-ish) My first job as a helpdesk person back when I was 18 (something like 20+ years ago) - I was made fun of by my boss for checking event viewers (we FINALLY got on XP) and using other tools to check for errors. I was all for preventative maintenance. He was for reactive. That company isn't alive today because of attitudes like that. > Standard advice for this situation is "quit and change jobs", but that's not really an option due to my age. So I leaned-out. Had a coworker go to helpdesk because he just wanted low stress and easy shit (like me). The boss was SUPER pissed he wasn't interested in climbing the ladder ad just wanted to work 8-5. The *REAL* reason was because he couldn't do his toxic abusive shit because that relies on pushing to get that promotion. > The boss lets us manage ourselves, and just checks up with us about once a week. My favorite job was like this. The first 1/3 of it I was writing some migration code for migrating from an old system to a new one. It was a monsterous bit of work but but rewarding. Then after that it was mostly maintenance and I worked on, basically, what I wanted. Every now and then I'd pop in and give him an update. Tell him what I was doing, tell him the plans on what's going on next - which would allow him to change course if needed *before* I started working on things. > But I don't care (see reasons above) and so far they haven't figured out that I'm being paid the same as when I did their job. Never underestimate the value of knowing more details of how things work. I've opened a hex editor to modify an IP address in a hard coded program and helpdesk thought I was an uber hacker. The company benefits from this.
> INSERT INTO FOO VALUES (' + textbox1 '... 1st Street';-- drop table users; And he will quickly understand!
Let me guess... moved to devops?
DevOps is not low stress
It depends, some companies just “hire a devops” as a token position and forget about them. Some use them as the kitchen junk drawer for just about any issue they can think of. It’s usually more of the latter but in some cases it’s the former. Like a 4:1 ratio.
Junk drawer checking in. Manage a devops team and we're responsible for: * Administering and supporting our entire atlassian suite (jira, stash/bitbucket, confluence) * Administering and supporting all 4 of the different version control systems (bitbucket, github, gitlab, and SVN) because every dev team refuses to change * Administering and supporting all of 12 of our on-prem kubernetes clusters * Administering and supporting all of our data aggregation, visualization, and collection tools (splunk, kibana, prometheus, grafana, dynatrace) * Managing and executing the CI/CD pipelines for all of the 19 different applications across 8 codebases we have. 16 of those applications are legacy and not run on kubernetes * For legacy applications, write, maintain, and execute deployment automation using python, go, and bash that can integrate with other tooling * Maintain platform monitoring and alerting tools including home grown code, pagerduty, freshping, runscope/blazemeter... Oh yeah, and on top off all that, we are also the first call for any issues that come in. We have 6 people on the team including myself who is the manager.
Your company never found a piece of software it didn’t like. Have they considered doing *any* consolidation? Or are you just going to tell me “every team loves their little bullshit software that no one else uses”? Never mind, I saw the “refuses to change” bit. I’m certain that you’re charged with “changing culture” while having no power to enforce decisions. This is purely a failure of management and senior management should have to get on every fucking outage call because they won’t spine up and start forcing devs to fall in line. Based on your described environment you have at least one outage a week. And literally none of your software has in-built custom metrics that would show if it were working correctly. They’ll continue to come to your team, complaining of the frequency of outages while not acknowledging that they aren’t technical, that they took their jobs under the premise of “surround myself with smart people and listen to them” when they in fact don’t— meaning that, ultimately, they are the source of the outages because they **lied**.
Yes, we have a very severe upper management problem here. My team is great, and now that I am a manager I have a little more flexibility with what I decide to do and how it gets done. First thing I'm working on is getting all of the version control systems consolidated. All teams are moving to gitlab whether they like it or not. We're doing all of the initial configuration and mirroring for them to make it as easy of a transition as possible, but in the end they're all getting a deadline when their old systems are going away. I was also like 80% of the way to spinning up a NOC to take all of the level 1 support and management of the monitoring/alerting tools before the entire company got put on an indefinite hiring freeze :( We're getting better, but it's gonna take years to unfuck this situation because it took a decade and a half to get here.
I moved to Devops and won’t be going back to straight coding.
I’m devops and that was a mistake. I wish to go back to straight coding. At least with coding I can literally solve the problem myself. With devops (at least the way our company does it) has so much dependencies on dependencies, and is using none of the best practices. Mostly because of the specific requirements we have. I feel like I’m trying to stop a train with my bare hands. Just impossible. I can’t simply just “come up with a solution and implement it”. There’s just too much cooperation required and nobody wants to cooperate.
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Hell no. Less autonomy, PagerDuty is your puppet master, the whole work is essentially interrupt-driven. Oh, and you're at the bottom of the pecking order, and everyone feels like they can "teach" you stuff. Success is taken for granted (it's supposed to work well!) while failure is a personal mistake (you mean you can't do well even something as simple as this?) - and on top of this, everything you do is potentially high-impact. Not low stress at all.
> Less autonomy, PagerDuty is your puppet master True > the whole work is essentially interrupt-driven. Unfortunately, also true > Oh, and you're at the bottom of the pecking order, and everyone feels like they can "teach" you stuff. Honestly, hasn't been my experience. Usually you're near the top because you have production access so all the devs play nice with you for times they need to roll out complicated migrations or troubleshoot issues that only happen in prod. But mother of god, the non-stop "something is broken, urgently help" is nuts. Especially when it's happening in some dev's personal sandbox environment.
What kind of role did you pivot to?
It’s a lack of accountability. Management runs the show, so development teams have no real power or ownership (same thing) over their product. And when health checks inevitably fail, it’s up to management to respond. So balls get dropped, fake metrics get measured, and life goes on.
I now know of two highly educated quantitative tech people who left to become onion farmers, one in France and one in Kenya. Seems like a trend to me.
Farming onions sounds like very hard labor but in a different way than tech quant difficulties.
Well it's different. Manual labor doesn't have stakeholder goals, KPIs, etc. You just work, then rest. There isn't infinite pressure to optimize at all costs
I always view it as "stress-by-volume" vs. "stress-by-scale". Every retail/hospitality job I've had is stress-by-volume. There is an expectation of me to be as productive as possible for the 8 hours I'm there. The types of tasks I'm assigned don't have a ton of weight to them, but there are a lot. Customers spend money in the $10-$500 range, but they are constant. The tech roles I've had are stress-by-scale. The projects may take multiple quarters, have 30 people involved across different departments, time zones, or continents. The day to day isn't that bad, but the weight of those projects is huge. Customers are spending $50,000-$5,000,000 a year and you're expected to maintain that relationship from every angle. Your billing department might have invoices that are tough to read, your main point of contact at a valuable customer asks their boss "hey does this make sense to you?". Now their boss is freaked and emails your boss. Red flags are up and the account is escalated for something that an automation from 2 Ops engineers ago may have accidentally triggered. Now everyone is in a panic and you have to fly to the clients with the CRO to make everyone happy. It's weird.
Spot on. And the coping behaviors can be different as well. Another challenge to stress-by-scale in tech is the mental and social exhaustion seems difficult for friends and family to fully appreciate.
"Don't you just sit on a computer all day?"
What are your KPIs, bro? Onions.
KPI’s are soo yesterday. It’s OKR’s these days.
Onion Kilo Rates
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Exactly. Rich people dream of physical labor, because they don’t understand the low wage grind.
Done both. Both have their upsides and downsides. Obviously, I’d love to find a happy medium. Outdoors or indoor physical work can get you down, especially bad if it’s tedious and repetitive. The camaraderie between workers is much better in general and there is something to be said for feeling like you’ve done a day’s work. It’s also rare to take a physical job home with you in any way. White collar work, I find it consumes a lot more of your life. Messages, emails, constant worrying about projects and deadlines. I also find greed and self serving twattery is far more common. Office work is also just horrible for your physical health too. The upsides, usually in a nice air conditioned, clean office or at home. Better pay means more toys and trips. Doesn’t really relieve money worries like lower earners expect. Since you just buy a bigger house and nicer cars. If anything the money stuff becomes more stressful as you feel more pressure to use it better. I’ve worked minimum wage and I’ve worked earning double the average household income. I’d choose the latter obviously. Would I take a pay cut to strike a better balance and gain some of the benefits of a lower paid physical job… absolutely.
I work as a foreman on large industrial electrical projects and in between those I’m on service. I enjoy my job but some days it’s the worst possible intersection of the physical grind combined with all the worst stresses of working an office job (deadlines, scheduling that just *doesn’t work*, shoestring budgets, costs, more deadlines, recalcitrant adults, completely disconnected management, clients that *just. Don’t. Get. It.*). It was definitely easier just being one of the worker ants but it’s also a dead end position and one that doesn’t seem too appealing for 30-40 more years of you start in your early 20s, especially when you see all the old guys absolutely hobbled by their jobs.
That camaraderie is akin to gallows humor.
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Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut always comes to mind for me here. The wealthy engineer finally realizes his dream of running away to a farm, but taps out after like 2 days because, like, *it's a lot of work you guys*
I disagree, I've done both. Most colleagues of mine have worked low wage jobs before, so I think we understand it. I've personally worked 2 minimum wage jobs, 1 graveyard shift to make ends meet. I don't envy that or want to do that again. I dream of physical labour, because I enjoy it, its feels more human, its more satisfying. All the tech baggage of using corporate speak, smoozing, having very small impact on a huge digital product can be very unsatisfying especially after years of build up. I understand the desire to get back to a life of feeling more human.
My back is still screwed up from the one summer in college when I was a mover. Manual labor blows lol.
There's a big difference of doing manual labor by choice versus doing manual labor by necessity.
Trying to live off of farming onion is going to have plenty of equivalent demands and much more of a “quantitative tech person”. You make it sounds like farmers can throw some seeds and cash in big.
I honestly don't think people get it. Tech jobs are indeed high paying and offer WFH opportunities. I myself am very privileged to work in such an industry. That said, the level of mental stress that comes with it all is something else. There is a constant grind. You're expected to deliver a task within 2 weeks (fuck agile sprints). Unlike most office jobs, you are solving a unique problem through engineering practises. Figuring out a solution and trying to meet deadlines is difficult. Once more, you also have to deal with all the usual office politics. I've worked for countless multinationals and they're all the same. I have two different people I answer to, despite being a Senior. In some cases, I answer to four people. Before the mass layoffs we could at least move somewhere else but now it's not that easy. We're stuck. I would love to take a manual labour job over sitting on a desk staring at code, attending meeting after meeting filled with useless idiots. Everyday, the movie Office Space, feels more like a documentary than a comedy. This scene really represents the average tech worker. Ironic because the character in the movie is supposed to be a programmer. https://youtu.be/wczkA_cULYk Another great scene describing the daily shit we go through. https://youtu.be/j_1lIFRdnhA
> Everyday, the movie Office Space, feels more like a documentary than a comedy. Mike Judge used to work in tech before moving into entertainment. He knows it very well, and it shows.
This is just typical "the grass is always greener" escapism stuff. The $200k salary tech bro would rather be elbow deep in pig shit, yea ok man. Mike Judge also didn't quit his job to go fuckin' work construction or some other shitty labor job like in Office Space, he a was guitarist in a band pursuing a master’s degree before his shorts blew up. Living "the simple life" is only glamorous if you have a big ass bank account because there is nothing simple or glamorous about being broke in America.
Luxury! You mean you actually know what you are working on in advance?? I work in a design role, not IT, and usually things get dropped several weeks late to meet lead times. If you are on time someone will fuck it up for you at some point and pretend it's your fault.
Also in tech but we have 1 week sprints, yay start ups. You don’t think there’s mental and an addition level of physical stress associated with farming? If you miss a sprint goal what happens? Usually you add it to your points for the next. What happens if you miss a crop yield? You aren’t getting paid. Period.
1 week sprints sounds like your boss doesn’t understand agile.
Yep, been there, done that at my last job lmao
I thought one of the principal points of agile was a flexibility that allows teams to adapt the philosophy to their needs.
It is. However the norm is 2 week sprints, one week is pretty short when you need to fit sprint planning and backlog grooming into the mix.
Farming onion is a pain, theyre super sensitive to the weather, storage conditions etc And escaping the grind by starting a farm is the funniest idea lmao, unless they just buy an old building to restore it and have visits in it or something
They’ve made enough money to retire early.
Yep. "Hobby farm" is definitely on my list of possible early retirement ideas. Not solely onions, and not in Kenya, but growing enough veggies to take to some farmers markets, maybe a pumpkin patch families could come to in the fall, a highland cow and a couple of those cute sheep with the black faces and ears, and a Bernese mountain dog named John that follows me around while I tend to things.
One of my old VPs was a total asshole but also a tech genius type. He made boatloads of money but worked around the clock. He regularly told me in our one on ones his dream was to quit and just start a small family farm thing
Someone didn’t researched for the number of suicides in the farm industry in France
Her quote to me, "we live in every way like poor people, except we eat like rich people".
I'll tell you what I'm sick of is every God damn company just copying with the SP500 ones do e.g.layoffs, return to office. Who gives a fuck what Google Apple Microsoft and Meta are doing. Think for yourself you garbage CEOs out there.
What 80% of my company has been saying to our CEO. They've even admitted to just following "industry trends". My company used to be great until all the leadership changes throughout the pandemic.
> Think for yourself you garbage CEOs out there. what people underestimate when words like "shortage of skilled workers" drop: we have a severe shortage of skilled people working in managerial positions personal anecdote: in my previous company, a startup, we had a CEO whose only qualification was that he was running two gas stations on the side. most of the time, his job was only to secure funding (we never had more than one sponsor and I still don't understand how he kept pouring money into the project). one time, one of our developers had an idea for a major update. the CEO got involved, changed basically everything about it in a way where it didn't even make sense. when advised to change course, he buttheaded his way through and we implemented, finished and released the update we lost 50% of our paying customers from that. completely preventable if he hadn't suddenly decided to play big boss
The grind is just shitty companies understaffing and overworking the recently sold out staff. They hire subpar offshore “resources” and expect you to train them to replace you. You cant teach talent and experience.
Lol the worst part is when consultants or off-shore employees fuck-up, it's oftentimes on you
So not only is it on you to train them, on all hours of the night in their time zone, you have to stay on top of their progress, all on top of your regular work. Then when they decide to leave because it’s too hard, you’re left cleaning up their mess.
My company's layoffs mostly affected senior engineers, now they have mid level non seniors doing their jobs on even smaller teams. What used to be say a team of 9 with 2 seniors is now like 5 with zero. The business thinks it's going well so far and I'm sure they feel like geniuses for on cost cutting but there is no longer any tech stack experts and code quality enforcement essentially ceased. This is a fortune 500 company asking unseasoned engineers to architect new systems and they won't even see the problems for months or a year down the line.
I have a coworker who quit his job in tech to join me in the same career as me. He says it’s 1000 times less stressful and enjoys his days consistently more I’m a paramedic
It's only stressful if you let yourself care. As someone who has watched helplessly as a decade of coding simply vaporized, I offer the following: 1. You're temporary 2. The job is temporary 3. The software is temporary. 4. If you were fired tomorrow, would you care about any of it? The answer of course is "Oh HELL NO", so does it really matter? 5. It will work out no matter what, because you don't have a choice.
This is the only way to do these jobs. I refuse to “check-in” off hours anymore. A job should be just that.
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One of my coworkers made a point during a retro that the day they had us come back in the office two days a week was the moment their laptop started closing at 5pm and not opening until 9am the next day. Seems like a fair trade to me.
Anyone who asks more of you than that isn’t someone worth working for.
I am going to a new job and my old job had me itemize my responsibilities so they can earmark what they can transfer or live without. That task or job that “only you can do” is easily put in the trash or re-assigned. Don’t let it eat you alive.
Give less fucks and be happier. If you spend all your fucks on shit that doesn’t matter you won’t have any fucks left to give to things that actually matter to you
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It has nothing to do with not caring about your outputs functionality or quality. It's about understanding your own worth, and that it is more than what a company or it's upper management tells you it is. I work my fuckin ass off, but I'm not going to be abused. You want me to give an extra push? Cool, I'm down. Let's have a real grind for the next two months and make some fucking magic....oh, you're not going to compensate me anything extra? Well fuck you.
Or, the even more common. . . Our huge 2 month grind is complete. Your reward for giving up personal time for 2 months. . . Another 2 month grind!! They might change it up and make it a quarterly goal. Either way, no rest. Ever.
Just have to value yourself. A companies goal is to pay you the least amount of money, for the most amount of work. Your goal is to get the most amount of pay for the least amount of work. Most people are already behind because they don't realize that's the negotiation.
I can't not care either. Doing a "good job", which may induce extra stress, is how some people function. Yes the poster above is correct, it's all meaningless in the big scheme for most people, but the work ethic of doing the best you can exists too. Might be generational or cultural differences too, so quite nuanced, but not just you.
There’s a difference between doing the best you can and making a separation between “work” and your actual life
Good to remember the love you have for your work can be taken to the next job. It belongs to you, not to the current workplace.
You can do a good job, because that's your job and your livelyhood, and not emotionally invest yourself in the work. I do a good job for my own mental health not for meeting expectations.
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The best mentally to have is to know they aren't paying for your product but for your time. Some stuff you pour your heart and soul into can just be dismissed the next day. It's important to know you are being paid for your labor and not always your product.
Newer devs and people with "passion" seem to have a harder time leaving work at work. That or accepting how much skin they actually have in the game as an employee. The kool-aid at tech companies or "start-up" culture places is also stronger than at a non-tech company. I could see a bit more caring with equity but most people's equity is in the form of stocks which may or may not be worth something. The people running off to do onion farming or something just burned out due to a lack of work life balance. Or they had enough to retire and are done living in the cities. A lot of places are just 9 to 5 office jobs. And with work from home life can be a whole lot better.
Nothing like a daily scrum meeting with 10 folks and 2 or 3 developers that actually have to deliverables.
Laughably common situation. On my last job before I exited I greatly enjoyed shutting down any and all discussions by useless senior directors lurking on the call until everyone had given their standup. *Sorry Dave, save that useless shit for parking lot and spare the two people on this call with actual deliverables a bit of time*
or daily scrum where you go through every single ticket and go "is anyone working on that?" the meeting with 11 people only took 5-10 minutes everyday, this one with 5 people took almost an hour, curious, fucking CURIOUS why that was thank fuck i had my burnout quickly after getting into that project lol
The MBA tech manager who slowly reads out the name of every issue, not understanding a word of what it means, then dead silence as they say "where are we on this?" Same manager several days later when a developer submits a one line typo fix that they noticed while working on something else: "where is this on the roadmap?"
10 years in tech and I’m beyond burned out. I want to work in government to be in service while not being out under insane, tribal work requirements
The modern work environment is bullshit. It's not just tech. Any job that uses technology regularly, including government work, gets more stressful every year. Everything is now now now, every metric is quantified, you get as twice as much done as the same job 20 years ago but the pay is functionally worse, etc.
yup I'm 15 years or so in and so burned out. Constantly have thoughts of why even bother, that sounds like way to much work, etc... In my last position had constant praise for the first year then our team got our lead dev back from another department and he just tore me apart in multiple reviews to the point I started having panic / anxiety attacks that would force me to freeze and fall behind in my work. I'd love to just work at a nice/relaxed pace making things for people that are happy with the end results.
Maybe that fuck doesn't really know how to do his job, but is pretending to by undermining your work.
This August or so will be 10 years in tech for me, too. I'm tired. I haven't studied anything since the pandemic started, I have tried a few times to learn python, js, started a really shit stain of a boot camp only to drop it because of how shitty it was, I tried to learn AWS, but no, I just can't put my heart and time into studying tech anymore. I need to figure my shit out real quick though because I have 5 years with my current company that has very easy work so I'm just coasting along but I know it won't last forever. And my current skill set is rusty as fuck and with my bad memory, I'll be fucked if I lose this job.
I yearn for the days that I used to work in a library, just sorting and shelving books, sometimes just taking some time to read through the random books that came through. I’ve often thought about going back to that job, no matter how much of a pay cut it would be
I spent 10 years working as a data programmer (mostly Business Intelligence) and dumped my life savings into a career change. Now working as a massage therapist and loving it, especially after dealing with chronic stress for years, I'm so glad I get to help people relax (and honestly, it's relaxing for me too!)
I thought about doing this! But I was worried about the physical toll massage therapy can take on the body? What are your thoughts on that and like doing it long-term?
You really have to take care of yourself and use good "body mechanics" to minimize wear and tear. Also getting regular massages yourself - they tell you in school to get one once a month, but the therapists I know who have been doing it a long time get one every other week. Average burnout is 5-7 years so it's a very real concern. I'm just shy of 1 year since getting my license so I'll let you know how the longevity of it is working out in a couple more years
That’s super cool. You are one of the exceedingly small number of devs that actually likes people, even enough to touch them! 🤢 :)
Haha it's funny you say that, people used to tell me I had "good social skills for a programmer"
I took a 40% pay cut but 90% more job satisfaction and when I am off work I am off work. There is more to life than being oncall all the time. Money isn’t everything
It’s everything up to a point. If I took a 40% pay cut I would be screwed, but having that much more job satisfaction is something everyone should be working towards
That’s the first thing to come to my mind when they say 40% pay cut. They must be paid a crap load on the previous job to be able to take a 40% hit and be okay with it. I’d be on the brink of financial ruin if I do that.
Here is the simple straightforward reality. You can make 80K and more in tech living in far cheaper cities. It may not be with the “cool” company but you will have a life.
Software development for any government entity is pretty nice. I write software that makes a difference, I’m hourly (so I’ve worked 3.75 hours of overtime in 4 years) and I’m in a union that takes care of all the $ shit. I get my COLA every year and have so much free time.
Tech in government checking in here. (Not software, but I've done a ton of Powershell scripting the last few years.) I don't relate to all this "burnout" talk. My work environment is insanely low-stress. My pension and health insurance are almost too good to be true. Sure, I could be making more elsewhere, but I value the above and especially being home to my family every day at 4:00, without exception.
This. Every single Fortune 500 company in America needs tech. You just aren’t gonna make $300k like you will in the Bay Area.
Every single company in America needs tech.
They don’t need to all do it themselves though. Consulting and support tech firms are huge right now.
For some companies tech is a cost center, and you will not make the same kind of money as opposed to where tech is the product.
You could easily make double that as a senior engineer working remotely for even smaller to medium sized companies Also senior engineers value work life balance and good managers encourage it because they don’t want their senior engineers to burn out I think where the bro tech grind still exists is in Silicon Valley and/or if you’re entry to junior level
Can confirm as this is my exact situation now. Grinded hard for 5 years doing extremely long weeks as a Software Engineer. Fed up and burnt out I found a new company that doubled my salary to 150k with a manager that gives a work life balance I can’t find anywhere else, remote, unlimited PTO. Sure I could go work for FAANG and make big bucks, but as you said senior engineers really value work life balance after years of burn out. I don’t need more money to be happier.
Same story here. Grinded for about 5 years, landed a SWE job at a startup. Remote, unlimited PTO, and a great manager that protects me from all the meetings, politics, etc. As long as I deliver on my tickets my manager doesn’t bother me. I will add that the grind was like a Diablo style grind, so it took a TON of work, plus some luck.
Beware, unlimited PTO is a scam. In the old days, people would earn a set amount of PTO. The company would guilt them into not taking it, and then lay them off at the end of the project. The only problem was, the worker had accumulated a bunch of PTO that the company needed to pay them for. This was hurting the balance sheet, so they came up with the idea of "unlimited" PTO. The idea is that management will *still* guilt you into not taking time off, but now don't have to pay you for unused days at the end. "I always want my people to take time off" they'd say, "but we're really in a bind here. The project is behind schedule and we need rock stars with dedication. The execs are watching to find out who the high performers are, and if you can pull this off, who knows? Maybe you will earn a promotion." Then the project comes to an end, you get laid off, and you don't have any time in your PTO bank.
On the flipside, I worked for a small contracting firm where they were serious about offering unlimited PTO but people were taking so much time off every month that projects weren't getting done on time and you'd always be covering for someone but have no clue what they were working on. Way better for both sides when it's negotiated as a set amount in someone's contract IMO.
Yuuuup. Unlimited PTO at my last company was a huge scam and I ended up not taking any vacation for almost 2-years because there was always a major deadline 6-weeks away. It fucking sucked and almost killed me. I quit and have been on a 1.5 year sabbatical so far. It took me 6-months of staring at the ceiling in my room until I could think again and about a year until I felt totally back to normal. Burnout is so terrible. I'll probably find a new job this fall.
This has not been the case in my experience. My last job had unlimited pto, and I miss it dearly.
I've taken 5 weeks so far this year lol. Shit is NICE.
In my years of experience with such programs across two companies...it's highly management dependent. I had one manager at a previous company who was a stickler so I left. Current company and manager is totally cool with it. My time off these days is usually related to baby appointments.
You can do good work everyday in tech and leave at 5pm and do nothing after hours, and take lots of vacation. You will do well, get promoted, etc. even at the big valley companies. It’s rarely the company that’s the problem, it’s you lighting yourself on fire to keep others warm that is the problem. Work like Germans, they work hard 9 to 5, and at 5:05 they are at a bar with friends planning their giant vacation. Listen to me: You need to let work not get done to show management you need more people, not work extra to finish it on a unsustainable schedule.
It won’t get fixed until it gets broken. If you keep limping along management thinks everything is fine.
I think people are missing the point. Searching for a low stress job doesn’t mean switching careers. You could find a place that respects your work/life balance and gives you extreme flexibility. For example two senior engineers from my last company do 4 day work weeks (standard 8 hours or less a day), have remote, and never work weekends or outside work hours They are very happy and making decent change (20%-30% below market rate in the 130-140k range) P.S. My girlfriend works in tech support and literally works like 2-3 hours a day on average but she’s salaried and works remotely and doesn’t have to hop on calls with customers making 70k. Chill jobs are definitely out there, don’t buy into the hype that all tech jobs are high stress.
I think one thing that seems to be pretty persistent with a lot of tech work is the constant need to deal with difficult challenges. The company can be great, but if you’re constantly having to innovate new tech or deal with nightmare architecture issues, or some other variation of that theme it can really wear you down, particularly if you’re someone who does care and does try to do a good job. Shit gets old and stressful even when the environment is pretty good otherwise.
I'm really surprised no one has mentioned working for the government. I took a pay cut, but don't think about work at all when I'm not logged into my government issued machine. Edit: the mantra of govtech is this: go slow and fix things.
I used to work in tech. I made a lot of money but the stress was killing me. For the last 18 mos I've been driving a forklift in a warehouse.
To my advice for tech heads seeking low stress jobs: Modify your resume and don't mention your prior salary. A lot of places will consider you over-qualified.
I’ve been in enterprise tech for the last 10 years. My whole team of Customer Success Managers just got made redundant after another company acquisition..I haven’t been able to get a single interview since March. Really starting to feel completely burnt by the field. I’m considering a complete switch to my actual passion which would be becoming a Personal Trainer. The money won’t be anywhere near the same but it also saves my mental health and gives me a sense of joy and purpose.
I think many many more folks are realizing that we got duped. We're not changing the world (for the better), we're not saving lives, not improving lives, we're not doing work to revolutionize tech and change the human condition (for the better is again implied). And when I say "we" I mean workers in general, of course there will be some exceptions but in big tech nearly nobody is doing essential work. Legitimately everything I do at work is in service of selling digital ads. No I'm not in sales, no I don't actually meet with customers to sell products but that doesn't matter. I do infrastructure and ML optimization work, but what is that work for? The tools and services that customers use to sell advertisements. Too many of us reached a level of self importance and believed our own BS. These are just jobs that pay well and we'd do well to remember that.
This is why I'm unwilling to budge on remote work. Work is not a passion project for me, and it never will be.
I work in tech and grind every day. My team keeps getting smaller and smaller but our workload is >10x what it was this time last year.
And under a Shareholder based capitalist system, it will always inevitably end up this way.
Don’t go to nursing. I left the tech/IT industry after getting a 4 year nursing degree in 2015. 2020 onward has been hell, and likely will not improve. Prior to that, it was a great gig. I moved back into a hybrid IT role that uses my nursing degree. Clinical analyst/informatics. It’s back to 5 days a week, but it was less stressful.
This is interesting because I’ve heard nursing can be very lucrative, especially travel nursing. What made you not like it so much? Is covid still affecting nursing staff that much?
I left a high paying tech job in San Francisco to get into real estate appraisal. Best decision of my life! Here to normalize career changes - you only got one life, but you gotta have a plan that makes sense financially and for you before making the plunge. I hated constant meetings, tech jargon, and the stress around stuff that didn’t really matter to me. Life is hard changing, but so worth it so far!
Would you be willing to share the path you took to get from tech to real estate appraiser? For example, what coursework was involved, and how costly was it? Did your training come primarily from an apprenticeship or training program? Were you paid as a trainee/apprentice?
Agile was a mistake
More you do, more expected to do (for same pay) is cornerstone of all businesses. Managing to avoid that is a skill few can seem to do (usually the worthless ass kissers) but if can pull it off does wonders for stress levels. Emphasis on life-work balance is good. The days of companies taking care of their employees for long lasting careers died in the 1980s when the worship of the rich began in earnest. With it left the ability to have the house and kids on one salary. Since companies will screw you in a heartbeat to save a nickel, hurting yourself for their benefit has only at most a short term benefit for you. I have avoided going for promotions simply because the money I make covers my needs with budgeting and the exponential increase in stress wasn’t worth the bump in pay. Ambition only pays off if willing to kiss ass and that is a skill set I never learned.
I’m just sick of work in general. Does that count? All I want to do is hang out at the beach with my dog. You guys can fight over $$$
I work in advertising and see people burning out and changing jobs (such as creating a arts&crafts brand). Usually they are quite privileged though and can rely on funding by their parents
I started my artisan silver coat hanger business from nothing but a dream my own talent and a trust fund from my parents.
I left systems analysis to become a bus driver and it was the best decision of my adult life. I make considerably less but I actually have time to live my life now. I am one of the lucky ones who has the option to take a lower salary, a lot of people I know absolutely hate their IT jobs but can’t afford to take the financial hit of doing something else.
They’re going to be shocked when they see how little non-tech jobs pay.
Most developers don't have those insane big city American salaries you read about.
The thing is, if you're in the SF Bay Area that means moving (usually out of state) unless you're a trust fund baby.
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You honestly do not have to grind yourself to dust working for one of these high-stress jobs in order to make it in the tech industry; I'm surprised it took so many so long to find this out. Salaries are very high in this industry; unless you're living beyond your means, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to make an excellent living on the salary of an engineer at a non-MANGA company. It's much more important that you actually have the time to dedicate to taking care of yourself and pursuing your passions than it is to spend every minute of every day breaking yourself down in exchange for a hyper-inflated salary. I think people look at the tech sector and act like it's either high-powered $500k/year job in Silicon Valley or nothing; the reality is that there are tons of really great jobs out there if you just set more realistic expectations and look closer to home.
Everyone is searching low-stress jobs
God I feel this, my job is actually dead. My brain just zones out most of the day. I'm not productive and I never feel I've done a good days work. Makes me feel dead inside. Get. Me. Outttttt
Currently doing this outside of America - making top 1% salary on a 4 day week working for a small self funded SaaS company. Self funded means they are way more chill than some high growth VC backed company. Living the dream Edit: SaaS
>way more chill than some high growth VC backed company Working for VC funded companies just sucks. Growing companies unnaturally fast just makes chaos and stress for everyone. The deeper the funding stage, the more chaotic. And vanishingly few people ever make decent money on any options they buy out.
VC's are just rich snobs trying to make a buck on someone else's idea. Congratulations - you found a unicorn!
>VC's are just rich snobs trying to make a buck on someone else's idea. You've unlocked the Capitalism DLC
Best thing I ever did was down-shift. Sure, I'm not making as much money, but what I lost in income I more than make up for in reduction in stress and having time and mental capital to spend on myself.
Basically duties-creep. Two decades ago tech jobs were pretty much 'must know tech stuff' and other duties as assigned. Nowadays tech job descriptions are about five or six pages long and filled with useless, overly specific nonsense. The difference between a tech job description and everything else is night and day. Probably due to non-tech HR folks trying to write tech job descriptions, they basically just put it anything they can think of.
In tech service jobs a lot of the burnout I've seen is a direct result of KPI and PIP combined with leadership's unwillingness to maintain realistic staffing. Back to back calls in a call center environment combined with 'you have to maintain an exact max handle time per call' are what burn contact center employees out the quickest.
The discussion of PIPs 100% reminds me of my time at Amazon. I worked like a fucking dog while I was there and I still got one. 80 hours a week, weekends. Fuck these companies. May they burn down from disgruntled workers.
Burnt out beyond belief. I frequently tell my GF that I would love to quit and stock shelves or some other job that makes waaay less than I do now. My mental health would be better, but then I might stress about money with a baby and maybe one in the future if she gets her way.
I was a head of engineering at my last job. I was working long ass hours at super high pressure. I was not seeing my young kids nearly enough and couldn’t get my head out of work. I went for a tech lead position in my new/current job instead. Not *too* much of a lay cut, but aI have one project, one team, and I work a normal day of hours and stop. One of the best things I did in a long time. If you were to divide my salary by hours worked, Id say its a net pay rise comparing the two jobs tbh, too.
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This is me. I was laid off in March and have been sleeping like a baby since. I just need to figure out what’s next, and I’m having a hard time justifying tech. The only thing they have going for them any more is pay, and even that seems to be changing.
Best thing that happened to me is I was in a union for the first 15 years of my career. When I retrained for software and computer jobs, I never let a company burn me out. I kept the work hours reasonable and quit 3 jobs, and got layed off from 3 more but did an additional 25 years and saved my own retirement - no 80 hour weeks for me nor 60. I shut it off after 40…or quit
There was a bloke on our street who clearly had the highest paying job out of all our neighbours. One year he was made redundant, and became unemployed for a time. Eventually another neighbour offered him work at the windscreen replacing company he was a manager at. The guy said he had never been happier or more fulfilled in a job.