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Ask HN: Are you thinking of leaving SWE career?

8 points by lifeplusplus ↗ HN
Well I'm, this year might be my last. I've been a dev for 8 years, I had hoped it'd get better it never did. I have been with 5+ companies. Yet it's more or less the same. You are the helpless donkey of management, PMs, Scrum morons, and everyone else. This industry is beyond fixing now.. Not even going to talk about how tech stacks today are 30x more complex and yet do the same thing just slower.

I actually wrote an essay for this post but it's all pointless, I guess let's focus on future, where are you going?

I'm thinking of going to a smaller company as manager or become a product manager in current company somehow.

If you have moved out of programming, what advice do you have?

7 comments

[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 30.0 ms ] thread
tempxyz
I care too much about thinking about logic and systems and care almost not at all about thinking about people, which is what those other roles entail. Let me ask you this, how does changing your role change what you're experiencing?
lifeplusplus
it's faaaaaaaaaaaaar easier to do your work just by speaking and actually not be the one have to do anything, you are merely passing information along. Literally. I'm very good at remembering conversations. I too can attend 10 meetings a day, if it means I am not actually responsible for doing the actual work.
solardev
Have you ever managed people? Were you good at it and did you like it?
aintmeit
If your writing is a reflection of your thinking, then I fear for the people impacted by your "systems".
aintmeit
lifeminusminus, working on bad tech teams will literally take years off your life. You could try and ask yourself, "focus on the future, where are you going?". To me, that feels like a geographical cure if you don't understand how to break your patterns.

Imagine flying to different places to live the same dysfunctional over and over again. If you don't make a correction now, 8 years of the same patterns could easily turn into 25.

michaelcao
I tend to be a stock investor when i am older. I highly recommend that you should learn value investing. Stocks are quite cheap now because of high inflation.
chrisisbuilding
I've moved across engineering, product management, and program management. To make the move a bit less painful for others I started curating job opportunities[1] for people just like you (us). It's still a bit of a work in progress, but I'd love your feedback.

[1]https://www.developerbranch.com