i just worked from 9 am to 10:30pm trying to get this stupid fucking code to work for my job. this job is soul sucking. i barely have enough time for myself at all except on weekends. the stress prevents me from eating good, exercising, etc. my coworkers are annoying or fake corporate nice. i also feel like a slave. engineers literally generate the bulk of the value, but we’re put in the bottom of the chain… like we have managers and supervisors and product managers constantly give updates to and answer to. wtf. and then 2 week sprints? like it ends and you start planning the next one DAY OF. wtf is this bullshit man. i just want to die. i’m 26 rotting away when i could be out there adventuring. at least i saved money tho.
Try working a blue collar job for a little while and reevaluate.
Good thing you saved.
Honestly, it sounds like you just may need a shift in your life. If work genuinely affects you that bad.. it's not worth it to keep doing it.
Like said, this is a route you could take. But, look into what entails with what. Shit, you could probably take your programming knowledge to a factory if one happened to be looking for that sort of deal.
If you have PTO, I recommend taking it and actually going somewhere. You don't have to do anything lavish, but do something where you're in a completely different environment. Bring a bud if you can. Think about your options, consider alternatives and.. well, fuck around and find out.
It's not too late to change shit. Either the environment or what you do. Just know that doing anything is better than working something that will drive you insane and eventually suck starting a shotgun late at night.
I also recommend a counselour. Most will run ~$200-300 dollars a visit, shit you even have apps such as Teledoc and betterhelp? (I can't remember the name.)
Just don't wait until you get into a manic episode and decide to spend a few years of your life doing full time work and full time school trying to get welding certs. That after a mental breakdown is going to lead to failure.
How long have you had the job? It's pretty much expected that you'll leave after a year or two in your first few tech jobs. Some workplaces are fucked up and don't look after junior- and mid-level engineers well.
From I like the "take some PTO" option, and maybe the therapist. It's good to get some space and energy with burnout, otherwise you won't be able to climb out of the hole.
t. software engineer who has worked in the US before, but went back to Australia because US tech culture is sometimes nearly as fucked up as 996.
3.5 years here. Almost 4.
And what time am I supposed to go to fucking therapy? I can hardly go to doctor’s appointments. Like I said my hours are 9-6 with 1 hour for a “lunch break.”
This.
I have no time or energy to self learn. I can hardly just complete the tasks of the job and keep up with other responsibilities. The code sometimes is spaghetti so things take longer than they should.
I overall just don’t like the software world with agile and everything. Maybe I need to find a better job, but I suspect a lot of them are very similar.
200-300 bucks for counselling? Do they suck your dick and give you a full body massage while they're at it? Jeez
At most I've paid like 70 to have someone listen to me for an hour. Are 200-300 dollar counselors really worth it?
Definitely this
You think you hate life now? Try putting in the same hours but with manual labor that permanently destroys your body within 5 years.
You're not treating yourself right with a desk job? You think that's going to change with any other job?
Blue collar work is respectable because everyone knows it's bullshit work but these dead-enders get up every fucking day to do it, often for the betterment of their families. Most people who work those jobs do it because they have no other choice and so their kids don't have to follow in their footsteps.
A "corporate fake" personality is not some shit they do to piss you off, it's a side effect of compartmentalizing just to get through the day. I'll take corporate jibber jabber over "hey, Tom got arrested for meth again and Jerry is a no-show, you need to pick up the slack" any day of the week.
You have a comfortable job.
You have stable, gainful employment.
You have the emotional maturity of a teenager.
Grow the fuck up.
Idk man, my uncle seems happier ever since he dropped medschool for working in construction (illegally).
short-gains with instant gratification
he's fucked, he just doesn't know/accept it yet
>You think you hate life now? Try putting in the same hours but with manual labor that permanently destroys your body within 5 years.
People say this, but a friend of mine dropped out of chemical engineering to be a gardener and loves it. He does CAD landscape design as a subcontractor now, but he started in a completely blue-collar job.
There are specific things that make a desk job soul-crushing. Your work is close to 100% unique tasks, so you can't avoid failing on some of them, and everything requires you to pay attention to it and stops you entering a flow state. The combination of guaranteed failure + punishment, along with constant attention, can turn you into a zombie if you don't manage your workload.
Whether this is better or worse than blue-collar work depends on who you are. Certainly you're more appreciated and the company will pay you better. That's not always enough to offset the downsides if you're the kind of person who'd rather be physically not mentally exhausted.
Those two options sound depressing. I'm NTA, but I'm studying computer science and if this is what's waiting for me on the other end then I see no point in living anymore.
I'm
, and yes it's no fun. I don't know how I've managed to make it this far. Follow your dreams, is my recommendation. I didn't do that.
my dude if you are frequently stuck on coding problems, you owe it to yourself to minimize that as much as possible by learning more and maybe looking into debugging/testing, which should help eliminate a lot of headaches.
not that i think you're a retard or anything i am just saying from personal experience.
Feel the same way, I just keep counting the days till my RSUs vest.
Debugging and testing only work in a team setting as long as the rest of your team adopts it as well. Same with learning more, which only works if your team puts effort into knowledge sharing and CRs/PRs. Otherwise, you're just left with masses of constantly changing, poorly tested spaghetti code from other team members that you have to read and partially refactor each sprint before you can actually get anything done.
Even if your team is good at all of that, when you're making changes across multiple microservices or a change that interfaces with a different team's API, nothing ever works as intended and you lose hours to edge cases. I just spent the better part of a day debugging a new API call to a sister team, only to learn that the docs they gave me were incorrect and the reason I wasn't getting the expected result was because they added a new parameter and 'forgot' to tell anyone.
I code in medical research
I basically fucked off from home half the day and will face zero repercussions as what little work was expected of me I completed.
Have a nice day.
Meanwhile I'm day 2 of a 10 days sprint and I'm already starting to have nothing to do and writing documentation.
are you new?
Yea it was awful. I dumped tech shit after most companies started requiring us to come back to the office. It’s such a soulless existence. Money was nice but what the fuck is the point. Now I teach English in Portugal making less than $25k a year. I also work less than 30 hours a week and can enjoy exploring a new country while I’m relatively young (30).
I'm a welder. I wish I was a coder that sounds so fucking easy lol. Same hours but with air conditioning and typing on a computer
I'd rather be a tradesman. Making something with your hands and having a real physical impact in the world is a lot more meaningful. Wow I finished some shitty enhancement today that some shitty business user wanted, who cares. This software means nothing to me.
t. developer
No matter what you'll do, you will wish you were doing something else. I coded for quite a few years, now getting into EE because it's gotten old.
Nobody cares about what you feel, just do it. Stop being a pussy
I’ve been in software development for 10 years. I was like you for a while but I put up with the bullshit for a long time and everyone around me quit. So now I’m by far the most senior person on my team and I can slack off a lot. I only have to work off hours for emergency production issues which aren’t that common, and when I do my boss gives me extra days off to compensate.
If your job sucks then quit and find a different software engineering position. There are plenty that are way better
Please respond. I'm not OP, but I thought jobs in this field were being overrun by indians, AI and very intelligent individuals? I know a little bit of Python and concepts, could I get a job in a few months if I able to excel in C++? I heard it was a real enterprise weapon, but I really, really don't want to end up like OP. One of the main reasons I avoided pursuing this job field in the first place.
It's one of the*
I cant type today
There are a few indian people at my company. They're fine and normal. Mostly white people though. People don't really use C++ much in the industry. C# is what most people use. Most people I know are of average intelligence, maybe slightly above. There are some really smart people but most people are just average.
I can't tell you what it's like applying for jobs now unfortunately. 10 years ago when I started it was piss easy to find an entry level job but I've heard it's much harder now.
Similar boat, but it's gotten better lately. In my early 20s I stressed out so much. I was afraid of failing to complete the Sprint's tickets. As time went by I proved myself as pretty good, often completing work super quickly, and helping out junior coworkers.
Now that I'd proved myself (I'm 30 now) I didn't feel like I had to prove anything. So if I'm in danger of not completing some work during the sprint, I just don't care. I don't let anyone bully me into working overtime or anything. The scrum master will ask "anon, do you still think you can complete X story before the end of the sprint?" And I just say "no" with no apology. I'll just complete it later. Refuse to sacrifice my personal time. I can do this because they realize that no one else could do it as well as me, so there's a limit to how much they can complain.
And I'll bite back. That one scrum master was pressuring me hard a couple weeks ago, and now I get to write feedback on her, and you can bet I'm going to tear her to pieces.
Still, I don't want to keep doing this. I'm always fantasizing about quitting this career, it's just I have no fallback.
All told, it's gotten less unbearable, but it does still suck. I make about 105K, which for my city is kind of low. I just haven't had the stones to job search lately.
Did you go to college?
Yes, degree was info sys. Parents paid for degree
The only way to beat a rigged game is by not participating in it.
Do you want to be a slave the rest of your life?
Quit your job, start developing your OWN material. Whether that is a game, website, app, anything. Otherwise dont fucking complain about how much you hate a thing that you voluntarily signed up for.