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Ask HN: Software Developers – Do you like your job?

68 points by allfou ↗ HN
On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your happiness level at work? 1=horrible and 10=awesome.

How would you explain your level in one/two sentences max?

106 comments

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morgante
10

I'm the founder of my own startup. I love being able to work on interesting technical challenges while solving tangible problems for companies.

grx
Are you the developer in the founder team or are you also filling the role for CEO and the like?
morgante
I'm the CEO. Everyone working on it is a developer.
smarinov
In my experience, this is usually the best way to go for a tech company.
aoeu345
6

I'm a junior, so my dev work is very mentally draining. However I am well supported and respected by all.

ng-user
This is nearly identical to what I would say, have an upvote.
akulbe
What kind of dev work are you doing? What languages/frameworks?
aoeu345
The usual suspects, ROR and JS/react. It's great fun.
lando2319
10 - working independently I take on clients I want, work when and where I want. Freedom is fun.
mythrwy
8.36233828377721

The explanation is that I haven't figured when to use the rounding function.

But seriously, I love what I do. Hope I can keep doing it forever.

marktangotango
It ebbs and flows. Currently about an 8. Some places and projects have been hardly bearable, others have been great. Right now I'm leading a project to modernize an old Internet explorer 6 app. This thing has all the MS specific stuff; activex controls, dhtml behaviors, .htc files, I couldn't be happier. I never worked with that stuff so it's all new to me. No one in the org thinks it can be done, bring it on, I say!
a-real-dinosaur
4

Part of it is golden handcuffs, okay income, okay workload. Everything is fine.

Fine isn't interesting though.

PhilipA
Seems like you might just be bored with your current work - perhaps a change of scenery might help?
stinos
8

Senior level, parttime independent. I'd give a 10 because when not working for a couple of weeks I really start to miss programming, but -2 because working with other developers and working with users is not always sunshine&happiness and because I mostly like to do lower level detailed stuff, debugging nasty stuff, ... but I cannot do that all of the time.

sagivo
tech 8 - working on cool things

office 4 - open office is the worst thing ever invented

people 7 - mostly good people, few bad

general happiness 6 - i need to stop working for others and choose my own path

FLUX-YOU
4

I do a lot of junk outside of actual coding, so coding skills have suffered because I write very little code (I do help desk, server maintenance, troubleshooting software outside of our code bases, project planning, tech. documentation, unnecessary meetings). Uncertainly about the technical direction of projects we may be doing and the company itself, so it's difficult to figure out what new skills would be needed and to invest in or whether I should stick around.

bluedevil2k
9 - I tend to love the first 95% of each project, where you are flying through code, learning new things, seeing nothing become a polished product. The last 5%, the obscure bug fixes, the silly "features" that the client wants added that don't add anything tends to get boring.
AncoraImparo
1 - I hate my life. Plan is to get the money together to start a non tech business. Tech is boring these days.
grx
What's your alternative? Do you already have a plan for this new business?
AncoraImparo
Yep. Work hard for 5 more years, go back to my home country and open a café where I can meet people who are less predictable than the people I am surrounded by in tech. I am studying as much as I can in my free time on the topic of coffee, and my counterpart involved is doing the same regarding cuisine :)
Traubenfuchs
I love programming and thinking about architecture.

I hate bad requirements, trade offs that lead to even more unmaintainable code written by me, outdated... everything and design choice that make me throw up.

Thus I will rate with 6/10 and part of that mediocre score comes from the relatively high income and benefits.

Pfhreak
8 - I have a huge amount of latitude in solving complex problems, I work with people who are way smarter than me so I'm learning all the time. Workload and office noise are higher than I'd prefer.
etblg
7 or an 8.

Isn't my dream job, but it pays the bills, has interesting enough work, and I don't feel like shit going in to work each day.

ollysb
10

Greenfield project, techs of my choosing(Elm + Elixir), work from home (in different country), lots of say in direction of product, so yeah, pretty darn good.

sparrish
10 - I'm so blessed to have a job with interesting work, co-workers I enjoy, working from home so I get to hang with my wife and kids, and a nice paycheck to boot! What's not to love!
raisedadead
Have two jobs, CAD and 3D R&D by Day, Open Source (maintainer) by Night. Love both. Happiness level: Day = 9, Night = 10. The work environment in R&D is pretty much cool, co-workers are awesome, pay is not way too great by works for me for now. And the Open Source work is what brings me peace. So yeah I f*ing love my jobs! Thanks for asking BTW.
PedroBatista
5

Early 30s, spending days staring at computer screens is a nice way to waste your life, the whole RoR to Node.js to Go and React hype cycle made me realize I'm too old for this shit.

Finding a job where I'm above of all that madness would be great but middle management is even worse and it's not in me. Maybe self-sufficiency farming would be a better route.

Also, when you have a mostly physical demanding job, you can easily socialize with your friends afterwards, with dev work you're brain dead by the end of the day.

sagivo
> the whole RoR to Node.js to Go and React hype cycle made me realize I'm too old for this shit.

i think the same!

aroc
There's certainly some aspects of bullshittyness to it all, but I find it exciting. It's cool to see new ways of doing things coming into the industry and people trying to improve. I think when you start thinking that it's all or mostly all negative and "hype", then it's time to maybe look for a new role (I mean this in a very positive way - not trying to be rude here!). If you're 30+, have a ton of engineering experience and are starting to feel bored - look for maybe how you can leverage your years of skills and experience in a new role that you can really get excited about. Life works in chapters, being at the end of one (in terms of motivation/passion) isn't a bad thing. It just means you're ready for the next one.
tspike
The cynicism also comes from the fact that all these "improvements" are just well known existing techniques coming into and falling out of fashion. I do agree that finding a new chapter is a productive approach. It would be nice to find a physical job that doesn't pay peanuts and where you don't get treated like shit.
grx
> Maybe self-sufficiency farming would be a better route.

Wow, are you me? When people ask me if I feel like programming is what I want to do the rest of my life I often reply with "No, I think one day I'll just drop it all and move on the country side". Nice to know I am not the only one :)

Isamu
I grew up on a farm, and that's why I'm a programmer! (I kid! Actually it was the summers working construction that drove me to programming.)

Farming is not such fun, but rural living is pretty cool.

marktangotango
As a former poor rural farm kid myself, I recommend raising your family before, or have enough in reserve so they don't have to go without. Also go through a winter with heat from wood you cut yourself. That's a good indicator if the life is for you or not :)
punchingpeople
Former poor rural farm kid here as well. I have to admit I wouldn't go back to the corn fields, corn harvesting is hard and painful (sharp leaves). But working with the animals is something I always miss, waking up early enough to see the sunrise on the fields, the smell of fresh manure...
UK-AL
I think a lot developers drastically underestimate how hard self sufficiency farming is.

There are billions are people trying to get out of self sufficiency farming because it's suffering.

To make it bearable you need tons capital intensive machinery, and extensive skills. You have to do it on industrial scale.

acidus
> Also, when you have a mostly physical demanding job, you can easily socialize with your friends afterwards, with dev work you're brain dead by the end of the day.

This! I tend to think the same way. I can drain my brain so much that by 5pm I'll be a ghost. I've found helpful to divide my tasks into smaller composable units and if I can't reach that point then I try to think that I'm doing something wrong and I'll poke someone else in the team looking for some help. It's hard when you don't have anyone you can talk to.

My biggest challenge is stop thinking about work. It's not always like that but when it gets rainy and dark and there is something interesting going on at work I can get 100% absorbed. Not healthy at all but it's hard to overcome it. I'll wake up in the middle of the night thinking about something I'm working on. It's kind of scary but I also enjoy it. Do you feel like that at all?

PedroBatista
Yes I'm like that too and I think it's ~80% a personality thing, meaning if you get a job at the local coffee shop you'll still be obsessed or preoccupied with something.
acidus
Maybe you wouldn't had that issue if you were, say, a hockey player. Like your body is not prepared to be sitting in front of a screen ten hours a day or a whole shift poring coffee. I've been learning to get over that brain draining feeling by exercising and not just a running session at the end of the day (which really helps) but shorter intervals in the middle of the day. E.g., I had great success exercising every 5 minutes in my pomodoro technique breaks - huge difference. Not sure if that applies to everyone though.

Socializing is also really helpful for me, but it's hard to make quality friends - I am an immigrant which doesn't help at all.

acidus
On a side note, I always try to remember that happiness is a choice. Simply try. It takes some work.
onlyrealcuzzo
Are you working for start ups? Just from what you're saying, it seems like working at say Google or Amazon or Microsoft of Apple would really make you happy.

Don't mean to sound condescending or anything. It's just I know a lot of people that LOVED start ups post-college and are now feeling the exact same way as you, and kind of forget that there's super cushy jobs out there without a lot of the startup stupidity.

PedroBatista
Yeah, all my life was spent in start-ups and I don't know nothing about big corps. It would be nice to start getting a decent pay but then there is the personality side where I'm not 9to5 material, the whole reporting to the manager thing etc. I understand and respect all that but I have a hard time putting up with it and I'm sure "they" would have a hard time putting up with me.

That's why they are always hiring and firing :)

samsonradu
> Also, when you have a mostly physical demanding job, you can easily socialize with your friends afterwards, with dev work you're brain dead by the end of the day.

This worries me, happens to me lately also. It's probably a pattern that our brain learns from programming, to optimise and simplify everything and actually ignore what does not matter. Probably this translates into our behaviour outside work, where your socialisation skills suffer. What I noticed is that the brain can be resurrected (partially) by exercising. Perhaps we could use the experience of more socialising jobs every once in a while but ... we have our golden-handcuffs.

RossM
I think it's down to open-offices - when you condition yourself to ignore and blank out the conversations and noise 3 feet away, it's no wonder it's difficult to snap out of it (it certainly is for me). That said, my experience of open offices has been of the condensed, touching-elbows variety.
dozzie
> [...] the whole RoR to Node.js to Go and React hype cycle made me realize I'm too old for this shit.

> Finding a job where I'm above of all that madness would be great [...]

I think the problem is your assuming that programming is limited to cranking out dynamic websites ("web applications" they call them nowadays) all day. There are plenty of problems out there -- even internal ones! IT tools that are missing -- that need solving that don't even come close to have web interface or where web interface is only a superficial part.

sotojuan
This is what I'm thinking. I'm also getting tired of web dev already... and I'm only 22.

I spend part of my free time learning math, distributed systems, and other subjects in hopes of moving to another area one day.

jasonkester
spending days staring at computer screens is a nice way to waste your life

Keep in mind that companies are happy to pay you more than twice as much to do that than they'd pay somebody to do anything else. Than means you can spend less than half your life staring at that screen each year and still come out ahead compared to the average joe.

Save your money and you can take 6 months vacation each year, or a 2 year sabbatical every 4. Certainly that would improve your quality of life a bit, no?

Compare to "self-sufficiency farming" where instead of a screen, you're staring at potato plants all day every day. Plants, I might add, that don't give you the opportunity to take half the year off each year and the money to travel the world while doing so. To an outsider, it would seem that trading one for the other is kind of a silly idea. At least I'm sure you could find no shortage of farm hands who would happily hold on to your seat in front of that screen if you wanted to switch places.

jotato
>>Early 30s, spending days staring at computer screens is a nice way to waste your life, the whole RoR to Node.js to Go and React hype cycle made me realize I'm too old for this shit. Finding a job where I'm above of all that madness would be great but middle management is even worse and it's not in me. Maybe self-sufficiency farming would be a better route. Also, when you have a mostly physical demanding job, you can easily socialize with your friends afterwards, with dev work you're brain dead by the end of the day.

I was going to reply to the parent, but I couldn't have said it better myself. I am not unhappy, but the constant switch from framework to framework that my coworkers push has jaded me. Maybe I am just getting too old (relative to them)

I too dream of homesteading, but I don't think it is a valid option.

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jazoom
No. That's why I develop software.
zachsnow
10. Run the engineering side of a company that I cofounded. I work on fun problems, help real people run their businesses (which ended up being more important to me than I expected), and keep track of the so-called work/life balance. I still get to write code, too.
fernandotakai
8

Late 20s, working remotely for an american company. work is not that stressful, i earn good money, i have unlimited vacation time (that i 100% use. just spent a week in london with my wife because we found cheap tickets).

all in all, would recommend :)

yigitozkavci
Junior software developer & cs student here. I love programming so much that my part-time job sometimes gets ahead of school. With a big rails codebase, there are so much to learn for a junior and that's exciting. It's been 6 months since I started, and I still feel awesome at work, so it's 10/10.
jkmcf
6 mostly-love my job, but hate my company and its disorganization and poor communication.
morinted
7. I do love what I do, but I think a few things would push me over into ideal territory:

- A high pay

- Working with open source

- Option to work less: either 4 day weeks or <8 hour days

The only downside to always working with my brain is that I get less enjoyment out of puzzle games and critical thinking in my free time. I'd rather have it this way than the other way around, though.