Ask HN: Who else has a crummy developer career?

In 1982 I started my otherwise fine career a complete jagoff failure with a boringly bad honours degree given in charity. I was stupid and missed the hiring fair, failed an interview at the IBM chocolate factory (truly: this was york) and was despondent. My database lecturer (the only one at the department who wore 3 piece suits) hooked me up with a sole trader nearby. I was launched. Junior programmer.

He hired me to be a clean room, and reverse engineer a competitors protocol to buy his way into a hospital data management gig: he needed somebody naive enough not to know the issues with the role, handed me the reverse compile dump of the binary and set me cracking.

He was also a three prayers a day fundamentalist Christian who insisted I broke bread with him and his lovely wife every day, and somehow my athiest principles swallowed this whole for a living.

I moved on as quickly as possible. I still regard this as a blot on my escutcheon 40 years later.

> I literally can’t remember certain details as if I suffered from trauma.

Toxic workplaces can literally be trauma. I went for therapy at one point, and got a formal diagnosis of PTSD, traced back to my work environment. It is an area of our industry that I feel needs more recognition, as there are a ton of miserable software people in this world. Not all of us, to be sure - some places are terrific, successful, and people really do love it. But that is nowhere near universal, or in my experience even common.

I do feel we need to step up and be more demanding for healthy environments. We get healthy salaries and perks, but wads of cash don't fix trauma. Bad management is not just harmful to the business, it harms us as people. And we need to set boundaries on what is/not acceptable.

Since I've started being downright harsh with my boundaries at work, I've been happier. It also has forced my employer to recognize that they cannot just run me into the ground. I do less. I drop things. Stuff doesn't go as well as it used to - but I'm healthier, and the leadership is actually talking about how to make the environment sustainable. And ironically, I'm getting just as much if not more respect now than I did when I was getting more done.

My career

Graduated top college in 2012.

2014 First software job at a startup. 6 months.

2015 Second software job at a startup. 5 months.

2016 Third job. 2 months.

2017 Started my own company using inheritance. Didn't make anything or get any clients.

2018 Fourth job. 3 months.

2020 Latest job 1 year and counting!

(The ultimate irony is my current job is not a programming job but giving career advice to programmers and people who want to be programmers.)

My jobs finish either because I am too overwhelmed by them so I quit or I feel like I'm wasting my time working for someone else so I quit to start my own company.

It's shit. I feel suicidal a lot. I've been to doctors and they tell me I'm fine, that I'm not depressed etc. I don't think I'm going to go out and kill myself tomorrow, but my life is devoid of hope.

I just want a boring job writing boring code. Read something from a database. Generate a few tables. Output some PDFs. I've given up on trying to get into FAANG although the envy I feel for all my friends from college who did that is enormous.

Yep. I hate my job and I'm also making under $100k.

I can't even explain all the issues as it would be come a book. The condensed version (if you can believe it) is that I thought the company was good in the beginning, but the policies on paper were not the policies that they followed. I became an intermediate developer. Then I was picked for a development needed rating because I was the most junior person and you have to pick a low rating to balance out a higher rating for someone else. Then I filled the role of tech lead for a year and then senior developer the next. I didn't get a raise, promotion, or even the high rating. I was told by my team manager the year I was a tech lead that she wanted to give me the highest rating but politics prevented it. The year I was a senior developer they told me that if I wanted a promotion I would have to take a 13% increase in hours for a 7% raise - a rate cut. This is not consistent with the written policy. Then my manager said he was going to give me the highest rating that year but didn't because he thought I slacked off one month - the month I was on PTO for 2.5 weeks for my wedding and honeymoon and put in extra hours the other weeks to get stuff done. Then this obsure technology that I spent over 5 years becoming an expert on was outsourced, which when I was hired they said they don't do (and some political stuff behind the scenes forced a team switch). They also said they don't lay people off, and now they do that too.

I had to switch to another obscure technology. The hiring manager literally said she couldn't believe any internal people would actually apply to the position - big red flag, but I had no other options. The good news is they gave me a market adjustment in salary that was bigger than the raise I asked for on the prior team, which means I had been underpaid by about 10% for at least a couple years. The first year they were amazed with me quickly getting certifications, learning the new system, etc. The second year they gave me a very small bonus, which is bad news under a pay for performance structure. They gave me an average overall rating but a needs improvement for leadership. Now I am only an intermediate developer, but I was filling the ASC role along with my regular role. The ASC role is supposed to be for senior developers or higher, and I was getting excellent feedback in that role. The feedback my manager gave me is that I'm too slow in my developer role. Basically, they were point counting in that department even though the official policy doesn't allow it. When I left this team, my coworkers couldn't believe that I was only an intermediate and was basically forced to take a lateral (can't get promoted with a lower leadership score). This included a few tech leads from across the two departments and six teams that I worked with as an ASC. I found out they were cutting the budget in half, so I guess they wanted to push out the newer people so they could keep the more experienced ones.

Now I'm on a boring team and again being told I'm slow. That definitely makes things stressful since my wife and kid have both developed medical issues of the past year. Plus there's no growth opportunity on this team due to the constant context switching and the politics. I'm not the only one who noticed this since we had about 25% of the team leave for other opportunities. I'm close to it as well. Of course I got an off-track rating at mid year so now I have to try to get back to a good rating by year end so that another team will take me.

So for years I have been screwed over, hate my job, been bored, and am just miserable. With my experience in obscure tech and the medical needs of my family, I'm too much of a chickenshit to switch companies. I'll just wait until I get fired.

Inflation adjusted, my salary when I started in this industry was just under 100K. 25 years later, it's not too much more than that. I've really enjoyed my career and have no regrets. I still code and I expect to continue to code until I retire.

Here are some things I've experienced: - every team and job is dysfunctional in some way - no company has ever rewarded me for loyalty (I've worked for 7 companies from 3 to 100,000 employees) - I'm an average coder and yet I've always managed to contribute to a team - I've never had any legitimate mentor - I've never worked on a team that had a consistent functional process

I'm sorry your career hasn't gone the way you wanted so far. You might benefit from some conversations with a therapist. I don't mean so you can get a diagnosis and medications, just so you can get a different perspective.

If you're not happy, a (relationship|job|move to a new city) isn't going to make you happy.

Yes.

It's difficult to be part of a group where the expectation generally is that you're well compensated, in high demand, companies competing for you with multiple great offers etc. - and you're experiencing none of this yourself. Especially over the last few months there's been a lot of talk about how hot the job market is right now - going through an unsuccessful job search at the same time has been tough (several months, zero offers).

Another part of it is your own expectations of yourself. If you were doing great earlier in life (e.g. school/university), it's a very humbling experience to find yourself on the low end of the distribution.

I feel this. One of the big things I’ve learned over the past 5 years is that an organization must be ripe to use software developers productively; many organizations seem to hire developers but keep them under bad management. You can’t develop yourself out of a bad environment.

My advice - roll the dice again, with a bit more wisdom this time. Eventually you might see some patterns allowing you to select better employers.

Personally, I have a better time in smaller businesses with fewer management layers.

Too many bubble-products, too many companies, too much brittle ground to stand on for a career that requires deep learning and bearing the total cost of that. It's not worth it after ~12 years. I'm exiting and would recommend the career path to very few, even with interest.

There was one year where I got three raises to double my income. I came into that corporate employment as a design before I was involuntarily transferred to a developer role without a raise. A year later I was selected for a military deployment to Afghanistan, where I continued developing by starting a personal project. When I came back to my corporate employer I got a raise for being off the low end of the pay scale. A few months later I was promoted to senior which came with another raise. Shortly after that another group made me an offer and my current employer gave me a third raise to stay put.

I sure do.

I kinda scrambled to get into the field not long after HS because my immediate plans fell flat and it was the only skill I had that paid worth anything. Mind you while I was programming a younger kid, I mostly didn’t do anything of note and just occasionally screwed around with stuff for a short time that interested me. I’m absolutely blown away by what some kids I see doing these days.

Spent a while kinda just spamming resumes and really stretching my “freelance work” (in reality this was mostly just begrudgingly updating and removing malware from WP sites and occasionally a mostly plain static site for some local org). Felt like it wasn’t going anywhere. Got a ton of calls mostly from body shops paying nothing, but never could get a call back afterwards. Eventually landed a job paying about what you could expect from a better low skilled type job, but it was a short contract and sort time. Actually the work I was doing was mildly more interesting than anything I’ve done in my career to date so it had that going for it. FWIW I was in a garbage market and had limited mobility. Notably I had also fallen into a moderate depressive slump at the time that had killed all interest I had in the field.

Obviously I still wanted a “real” job so I kept trying places. Eventually picked one up, paying about the same, but it was a full time job. It was government… state government… in a red state so raises, mobility, etc. we’re out of the question and I knew it. The market I was in was still terrible. I knew I had to get out, but just didn’t have the motivation. Two thing would end up pushing me to finally jump after two years. I first started getting back into retro stuff (I had a mild interest in some things years ago) and other things and would end up reignited my passion after desperately trying to figure out why my WiFi adapter wasn’t working on a FreeBSD machine. I ended up making my only “open source contribution” and wanted to do something cool. Simultaneously a ended up in a new depressive slump for unrelated reasons and spent myself broke.

And so I ended up in my current role, which was supposed to be a temporary thing till I could get my shit together and come up with a plan to get where I wanted. Current place is a pretty typical “non tech large company”: slow bureaucracy, lots of legacy stuff, but never in a interesting context and tons of sitting around. I haven’t actually written much code at all during my tenure here. Market and pay is a bit better, but still surprisingly bad and I’m now paid around what you’d expect an entry level guy in a weak, non-tech metro to make.

I feel pigeonholed into part of the industry I’d kill to get out of and kinda just stuck trying to figure out “what next” at this point. I suppose I’m still young, but not enough so that anything I do is impressive anymore, so I lost that. I still have an interest in software development, but increasingly in areas I could never find employment. It eventually dawned on me just how bad at it I am, despite having been at it for long. I’ve wondered about saying duck it, and trying to get into some domain that interests me or even just trying to strong-arm into FAANG, but the reality is I couldn’t do that. Former won’t happen because the openings are rare and always senior and my previous experience doesn’t match up and the latter won’t happen because I can’t do the interviews. In fact I’m absolute trash at most of the “CS” type stuff and too jaded/bad at the business or “software engineering” side. I would say I’m a decent hacker, but too slow to ever be competitive for the elusive roles where someone like that is warranted. I’ve also failed to get into a lot of niche interests thanks to a deficient math education. And sadly it feels like nothing clicks anymore. I can already see the comments telling me this doesn’t matter, but it does when they’re used in the areas you still have interest in or to achieve unheard of incomes. And frankly outside...

I am using a throwaway to prevent recognition. Please excuse my poor language, it has been a long day..

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Honestly, I will never consider any software engineering positions again.

And most of the reason I despise that title comes from the following story.

I was approached by a client that was running a company in the energy sector, they had a failed product and needed assistance. The product was a joke, and their internal team was not capable of producing software worth selling, so I went into the company with another programmer and a UX designer that had experience in building products.

After some back and forth we found a alternative niche for them to enter, we built out various semi-functioning demos to show customers, letting us probe what they actually needed. And bit-by-bit we built out an actual product that had a decent market fit, raised a few rounds, and grew the company. Five years later, the company had gone from being worthless to being valued at several hundred million dollars.

However, my problem was with the management, even after serving them a unicorn on a silver platter while they had been asleep at the wheel. They only ever considered us as "programmers", we werent "worthy" of them.

We brought all their customers, did all their sales, all the design, positioning, strategy, pitching, machine learning, development and even organized their god damn company events. Meanwhile they kept having fancy dinners with leads that never went anywhere, hired a bunch of project managers that did nothing but slow us down, played ping-pong, and promoted their friends to executive level positions.

Near the end, they invited us to a special event, saying they where going to give us a reward for all the hard work. We travelled an entire day to meet up at the location, and the only thing that met us was a stage with a drunk executive babbling about one of the trips he and his friend did to meet a potential customer, and about how that was the defining moment for their success. (It was not, they didn't even last three meetings.)

And that was pretty much the moment I snapped, not visibly, but it made me finally decide to withdraw from the project.

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After that, I tried doing projects for a few other clients, but I was no longer really capable of functioning in a professional setting, so I ended up withdrawing from all of them.

I get that I was naive, and honestly, I didnt even expect a reward, I was simply too obsessed with the project to think about that.

But the sheer lack of respect from the management and project managers, treating us like "code-monkeys". We built out the entire company, the vision, the strategy, and the product, and then they decide to hire a bunch of project managers to somehow "manage" or "control" us, treating us like we where unable to understand the strategy of the "higher ups", leaving us out of important meetings, and started micro-managing us. In the end, something inside me broke, I ended up hating project managers (and most other people that think if you know how to write code, you are mentally unable to do anything else) with a passion, and I can't really function in a professional setting anymore, atleast not when other people have authority over me.

As a bit of karma to close up this rant, when we left, they lost pretty much all their momemtum, and now they are stuck with a ton of funding, but without being able to further develop their company. What was once a rocketship is now losing traction, and customers. They have contacted us several times in the past year, trying various tactics to get us to come back, unsuccessfully.

And now they are burning up their funding by buying a bunch of other companies, as if that will solve their problem, lol.

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In the end I started a new company together with my SO, it has shown moderate success, but is by no means any unicorn, however, we have no project managers, no investors, and no worthless man...

I went to college for art, but had to drop out due to high expenses. I became a self taught programmer, starting with game development. That didn’t pay off, of course, but it was intrinsically interesting which allowed me to learn useful tech in my own way.

I did some work creating Wordpress sites for a branding company. Then I got an internship at a south CA game dev company. It was clear that I had a lot to learn still, but I wasn’t discouraged yet. I found a full time software job at a small educational software company, which I enjoyed but started to feel fatigued with learning about modern front end dev.

I had to leave due to money issues. I was barely paying rent and Amazon offered twice my salary for a support eng position. I was mislead into thinking that I’d be creating tools, but instead I was spending all day and night on tickets, alerts, and deployments. This is when I burned out, and I couldn’t force myself to learn any more. It was a scary thing because my ability to learn new things was the only thing I could depend on. I was on a PIP and eventually left.

SDE recruiters don’t contact me now that I had “support” in my title. I got a couple I interviews which I bombed due to not being able to study for the position.

I’m on a support role at another FAANG now. It’s cushy and pays well but I’m struggling every day due to trouble focusing and how repetitive things are. My memory isn’t good, which makes remembering teams, names, and processes difficult. It has been an overall very difficult period.

I’m likely going to be let go in the next couple months because I won’t go back into the office. I’m worried about what will happen and don’t have any real plans. I can live on savings for a couple years but it would be stupid to do so.

I’ll likely have to find another tech job soon. I haven’t been studying so it will be difficult to interview and do the job. I’ve been coasting on what I learned during my early years. Hopefully I can find something remote.

Hope my story helped. Best of luck to you and anyone reading this.

I'm humbled by the response. I was honestly afraid to open this, as I wrote this while entrenched in my emotions. I was really upset having spent a weekend on a take-home project who's feedback was basically "we're disappointed."

One of the must hurtful aspects my career was being competent enough to be left alone, hence why I never had senior mentorship. That's only partly true though, as we had a senior developer hire for myself who ended up being a total con. I don't want to go into it. I was lucky he once told me to shut up to my face so I eventually had something to go to HR with. I had to comb through code reviews, code commits, etc. and build a case have him fired. Then I was alone again.

In third-world countries there are developers earning less than $500 per month and they're generally stuck with it (fresh grads, or experienced yet low-skilled).

"Shitty" is very subjective, could be compensation-wise, or ethics-wise, even trajectory-wise.

> I was really upset having spent a weekend on a take-home project who's feedback was basically "we're disappointed."

Man I had my fair share of these, for example: that time when I laid out the technical limitations we'll encounter, and all response that I got is "you're over-complicating this". That's the time I realized I need to just be doing the bare minimum to survive, and that I should start considering working on my own projects towards having my own company someday, so I don't put myself in that situation again.

Seems like it's just ebb and flow of the career, learning lessons along the way, and of course having a thicker skin in the game.