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Ask HN: Love fixing bugs but don't enjoy coding anymore. Burnout?

12 points by markbg ↗ HN
So I've been a software engineer for around 20 years now, doing mostly backend (from C++ and Go to PHP; and DevOps stuff like networking or k8s). I had offers of transitioning to mgmt but tried it once and I believe I was a mediocre manager at most. I'm an introvert and like a doing technical things rather than having management meetings or 1:1s.

Anyway, I remember back in the days I could easily spend months working on a the same project 8 hours a day with the feeling of excitement. Nowadays if the ticket does not look exceptionally difficult (in a sense - you have to spend waaaaay more time thinking than coding), it can take me hours before I can even force myself to take it and start coding - and I honestly hope something breaks in a meantime so I can work on an outage instead. My productivity is still above average so nobody notices, but I struggle a lot. On the other hand whenever there is a nasty bug nobody wants to touch, I take it on the spot and feel a lot of joy tracking it down 3 days in a row, going through logs, metrics and several apps I'm not even that familiar with. And I'm really good at it.

It makes me wonder - did anyone feel the same? Is there a niche/role where you can mostly take care of bug fixing/diagnosis? I would like to believe so, on the other hand it's harder to fix bugs in a piece of software you do not work with on daily basis. Or maybe this whole thing is a clear sign of burnout and I will get bored with bugfixing in a few months/year as well so I should still think about transitioning to a non-engineering role before it gets worse?

7 comments

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tboyd47
I'm with you on bugfixing being more fun. Look at it as an advantage. There's lots of legacy software out there and everyone hates working on it but us. Don't stop coding, though.

Always consider transitioning to a non-engineering role, but perhaps, not so urgently. The job market isn't as great for seniors as it is for mid-levels, but it's still quite good.

twoquestions
That happened as I was assigned harder things, and couldn't fit the whole thing in my head right away anymore. It also happened once when I was afraid I couldn't measure up and any effort I made would get rejected.

For the former, I solved it by making something kinda like what I was assigned to make, just to get something in the text editor, then change that to the needed product. For the latter, building confidence with other activities like piano or lifting weights helped a bunch.

Maybe a good vacation is in order either way?

Here's hoping whatever's blocking you clears up.

markbg
That sounds like an issue a close friend of mine has and he refers to it as a blank page problem. He can modify existing projects but has issues starting a new one. And the approach you suggested works for him - he starts with a very rough and broken poc and then fixes it bit by bit.

I believe my problem is different. Once everything is figured out I lose interest. So if there problem requires a lot of thinking and investigation where you end up changing few lines of code, I love it. But if I see a ticket, the solutions is obvious to me and the rest of the time has to be spent coding, it just feels boring.

thebrainscanner
> But if I see a ticket, the solutions is obvious to me and the rest of the time has to be spent coding, it just feels boring.

I only have ~3 years of experience and I feel the same as well. Certain colleagues and I meet, discuss some possible small side projects, and after selecting one I usually participate in the planning and outlining or the algorithmic issues, boiler plate part is given off to a junior if interested enough to work on same.

JohnFen
> Is there a niche/role where you can mostly take care of bug fixing/diagnosis?

In my experience, large companies tend to have this -- it's called a "maintenance engineer" or "maintenance developer".

It's a hard job for the reasons that you cite, but I personally enjoy that sort of role a lot.

bibabaloo
I often feel the same way. I enjoy the hunt of tracking down an impossible bug and enjoy getting a proof of concept out for a difficult problem, but hate doing all the 'boilerplate' type stuff to take something from a PoC to a production system.

I've often wondered if I'd be more suited to working in security and doing something along the lines of reverse engineering. Or maybe doing something like SRE where the job is solely optimizing systems and tracking down issues.

cotsog
I've been there! I definitely felt the same 4-5 years ago after 15 years as a software developer. I then changed to a support engineer position on a product for software developers (i.e. Travis CI). And it was amazing! All I was doing all day was troubleshooting/debugging customer issues. Given my background as a dev, I could dive into the codebase when needed and also look at the logs and metrics to understand what was happening. I also had the chance to code some tools to help deliver a better support experience (e.g. Slack bots, admin dashboard). This is definitely my new calling and I'm currently looking for a new position on a similar product after a rewarding 4+ years at Travis. Hope this helps!