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Comment by UglyToad | Hacker News Reader

I hadn't seen this before but my god it's bang on every problem I experienced in my jobs and pretty much exactly what caused my burnout.

I keep saying to people who ask what I'm doing next (currently taking a break) that my problem is I love coding but hate doing it as a job and this article has every reason why.

Just to call attention to the first point about being a short order cook, this is precisely why scrum sucks and makes me so unhappy. You can't just give us work shorn of all context and use us as assembly line workers. Unless you're giving your developers full domain knowledge and involving them at every stage of the process you're wasting talent and money and your company probably sucks to work at.

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> I keep saying to people who ask what I'm doing next (currently taking a break) that my problem is I love coding but hate doing it as a job and this article has every reason why.

I used to feel this way, but then I realized it's not useful. You're not going to change anything, and nobody's going to feel sorry for you because most people spend their whole day at work doing things they don't want to do. And I mean in general, not just software jobs.

Work to pay the bills, and if you want to write code for fun do it outside of work on your own terms.

If you want to enjoy work then start your own company. If you're working for somebody else it's always going to mean doing things you don't want to do sometimes.

>If you're working for somebody else it's always going to mean doing things you don't want to do sometimes.

Horrible things, things you're ashamed of, with horrible, antique tools.

Try to change what you can (it's hard not to try), but otherwise play the detached mercenary and vote for the administration likeliest to implement UBI.

Is the administration most like to implement UBI also the administration most likely to reduce regulations that dictate how you must conduct your business?

>>If you're working for somebody else it's always going to mean doing things you don't want to do sometimes.

> Horrible things, things you're ashamed of, with horrible, antique tools.

And when you own your own company, you use horrible tools and create ugly technical debt... But now the shame is personal because you can't easily blame someone else.

I don’t see why you would ever do that. It’s not like the horrible antiquated tools work any better than the modern ones.

Holup. I run my own company and there's loads of shit I have to do and I hate it. There is not a perfect job out there. Really I don't know if it's anymore/less enjoyable than other things - just different.

As a cog in a big machine some idiots tell me what to do.

As the owner of a small business 100s of folks tell me what to do. And I get the added joy of paperwork, legal crap, buying healthcare for my employees, all stuff that takes away from the fun of creating cool stuff.

Maybe it's a bad idea to have work be fun? Work is work 100% - then my fun can be fun 100%

I don’t think there’s any reason to think this. There’s absolutely people that enjoy their jobs because it’s just a good place to work.

Yeah. Your not wrong. But you do have a choice. I'm not going to put up with it. Software dev has driven me to the edge of suicide because it has reduced me to a coder. And I'm a terrible coder, I'm a very good big thinker, but thinking in the small scale, logic problems of coding? Terrible and yet this is my job as a coder. I can't take it anymore and I am out. I've quit my job and am trying my hardest to get a business analyst role. No luck within the first 2 weeks of looking. I'm not sure I'm going to get anything. But I'm never going back, doing so would probably kill me sooner or later. 14 years into a career :( but I'd rather work construction than this shit.

I am sorry to hear that you bear resentment agains coding, and I wish you all the luck in business analyst (or any other actually) role! The thing is... people do lots of stuff to get by. I'm sure you will find something that you will enjoy in.

For me it didn't go that far, and I managed to bounce back to the point where I actively seek jobs that will keep me in development (coding!) instead of steering me towards just management. What helped me was to get some vacation time, then switch the jobs. But most importantly, I started carefully looking for signs of burnout ("Do I enjoy waking up in the morning? Do I look forward to going to work? Am I getting there later and later?"). When you notice the problem in time, it is much easier finding the cause and dealing with it, even if it means changing the job.

Also, having a side project where I can get really creative helps. :)

Thanks for your help.

Although I would like to say that everyone I have spoken to about this, throughout my career, has assumed that I'm just going through a period of burn out. I've been unhappy with my career for 10 years and the resentment and discontent has only grown.

In fact it was people telling me that I just needed to regroup and watch for burnout that kept me in the job. I listened to people when they assumed the problem was manageable and would go away.

But you see, when there is a fundamental disconnect between you and your career, you cant just wish it away. It grows and grows and eats away at you.

For me coding is an irritating, depressing, meaningless activity. The only thing that makes it worthwhile is the thing that is being created. But when you are employed as a coder making something worthwhile is not an everyday occurrence. And tbh even if I was building the most meaningful product I could imagine, it's not enough to keep me engaged. Writing code it just too unpleasant.

I would have been much better to quit when I first realised that this wasn't for me, rather than wasting a decade of my life trying to convince myself that I could make it work.

Ah, well said, that will teach me to give unsolicited advice to strangers! :)

You give very good reasons for quitting and if there is such a basic disconnect between you and the activity of coding, it absolutely makes sense to pursue other career options.

I wish you best of luck on your future endeavours, wherever the future might take you!

Scrum is a way for managers to think they are doing a good job managing, but in fact are micromanaging. For every project, my manager wants a daily scrum. No really efficient

I never dictate process to my teams, but then when i see them floundering around. "Maybe you should have a daily?" Then 2 weeks later "We had this great idea! We are going to meet daily!". If a manager is involved in Scrum its not really scrum...

I kinda hate dailies.

Same. I've never seen a daily that didn't devolve into busyness reports. Sure, with proper scrum master I'm sure it works well but that's not my average experience.

i really hate scrum. Makes me feel like a shoe production line worker. With many fallacies... like any team member can/should be able to work on any ticket. And dont get me started on all the meetings !

Scrum is not about context. You might or might not have context with or without scrum.

Agile development doesn't work without context anyway.

Consider:

- Stories in the backlog are unassigned and should be executable by anyone.

- If you finish your assigned stories early, you’re expected to pick off the top of the team’s stack rank, not your own agenda.

There are project management approaches that involve making individuals responsible for large, coherent wholes. I’m fortunate to be on this kind of team now. But despite daily standup and biweekly sprint planning, it is not Scrum. Scrum explicitly trades off context and domain expertise for fungibility and cross-pollination.

The solution is to have the engineers make the engineering plan. It leads to a more effective and enjoyable plan and execution.

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