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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

How do you solve the problem where you love coding but not the problems you have to solve at work?

Where I live, every place is the same, Jira sweatshop mentality, just put out a fire or solve as many stories as quickly as possible to maintain velocity, with whatever tools someone higher than you imposed because it was convenient at the time.

When I come home I'm done with coding for the day and I have no time to code stuff I like as I'm investing it in taking care of myself physically and socially to counteract the negative effects of being on a chair at work in front of a monitor with headphones on 8 hours a day.

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> Every place is the same

this is false.

look into smaller businesses who only need 1-5 coders. you will get paid well, do interesting stuff and have a lot of say in your stack and tools. usually these companies do not produce software as their deliverable but need good internal software.

e.g. i work for < 50M/yr e-commerce company that manufactures in the DIY/home remodeling industry. i report directly to the CEO, code our full stack and admin our VPS linode server. we have internal voip systems that get integrated, physical production hardware (scales, scanners, etc), inventory tracking, fulfillment, amazon integration and a whole lot more. i get to touch it all.

or at the opposite extreme the FAANG companies have a ton of opportunities for this

I live in Europe, there not much FANG here apart from maybe Lindon or Berlin but anyway, at this point of my life, the relationships I have with the people around me are more valuable than chasing some FAANG job or hip startup in some other country, hoping that would give me more satisfaction.

At the end of the day it's just a salary I need to support my other hobbies. After 7 years in the trenches I lost hope in the do what you love coding for fun mantra as I never found it and i feel that chasing it any longer will waste precious years of our limited time on this Earth I could use enjoying other things life has to offer or new experiences.

> not much FANG here apart from maybe Lindon or Berlin

Zürich and Munich as well.

plus a ton of corporate bullshit & politics. i can count on 0 hands thr number of times someone at a large corp felt they were special and uniquely valuable to the company as a whole. invariably they're just replaceable cogs that have a very narrow set of responsibilities. of course they don't always see it that way ;) stockholm syndrome, perhaps.

Every coder likes to think they're the next Jeff Dean but there's only one Jeff Dean and his job is taken.

The truth is most of us are replaceable cogs regardless of our titles and salaries if we're willing to look past our egos.

if that's the only position you're willing to settle for, then i'm afraid your concerns are well-founded D:

It seems he really did lose hope. Perhaps stuck in a lousy job for too long. Over the course of my life, I've changed jobs whenever I felt I needed a change. I've done databases, Java, embedded, mobile, etc. It kept me happy.

You don’t need hope if you are pragmatic. Know your own weaknesses, and have a system for failing. It seems like that guy is maybe going through something in a shitty career, but it becomes a vicious cycle. You end up traumatized and gravitate toward similar abusive workplaces. Have seen that happen to many friends in this industry. Everyone has an upper limit of the political bs they can take at their workplace. That’s why I personally refuse to work at a place with too many h1b. IME management tend to be literal slavedrivers and suck all the fun out of SWE in those places.

My system for failing is currently pretty one-dimensional; i.e. fall back on considerable savings. Good advice about spotting slavedriver management.

Everyone is replaceable. Feeling valued is a separate cultural issue, but no company should have a major dependence on a single individual for survival.

Mitigating risk and ensuring continuity is a core tenant of good business.

it's true that very few people are truly irreplaceable and it's a good hedge for knowledge to be well distributed. at the same time, small companies rarely have the luxury of employing (and keeping busy) multiple senior architects. unless you're at a very large company, there's always going to be a bus factor somewhere - it's just the reality for 90% of small businesses. either that or you have lock-in to outside consulting companies and services and no one with deep technical insight - just someone who's a consultant coordinator.

i'm not saying it's good to be that bus factor (you're on-call basically 24/7), but it also has undeniable perks for the employee (not the employer).

in reality my bus factor is not that high. the nice thing about well-designed systems is that they seldomly need attention, and there's another dev here who's more than capable of bug fixing and maintaining what's already in place.

There are two types of bus factors though. It’s true that at a small company, you can’t share all your responsibilities with someone else, but you can make sure that if they need to you can be replaced by someone else (ie. if you get hit by a bus) by doing things like documenting your work. Alternatively, if you want to make sure your job is secure, don’t do that, but make sure you’re doing it knowingly.

Where I live(Germany), the business who only need 2 developers already have them. All the job ads are only from big/medium companies and it's not worth working for the medium sized ones as you have all the downside of the big corps with none of the perks.

> business who only need 2 developers already have them

it takes time, but you have to search continuously. people leave and get replaced all the time.

Well job ads are already the wrong approach. Go meet your local business in meetups, social gatherings, etc.

This is a medium sized EU city, not SV. There are no tech meetups here. Those may be a thing in big metro areas.

Start a tech meetup? That’s hard, but it’s also incredibly good for your visibility.

Even a medium size EU city should have a critical mass of developers by now.

Of course, it would be nicer if we just had decent employers in the first place.

agreed. I was visiting Bucharest last November and was surprised that there were multiple tech meetups on meetup.com. Perhaps I shouldn't have been, but ... I was just... pleasantly surprised. I wasn't there for work, but found a couple evenings where I ended up having the night to myself and stumbled on the idea of checking my meetup app and... bam - multiple places to go meet up with tech folks. More than I had time for actually...

Bucharest is capital, not 'just' an EU city, but it's by no means the largest nor would I think it has the most tech folks compared to other areas. (maybe that's wrong assumption though?)

Healthy ecosystem exists even in rather small cities. Up here in Vilnius, Lithuania, small-sized backwater EU city, we've quite a few meetups with a decent amount of networking opportunities. Sure it's not as SV scale. But even < 1million metro area can sustain that.

I agree, actually. It's so hard to find a good job that doesn't pay like crap in Germany (I used to live in Cologne and Berlin). Try contracting with UK companies if you can find a remote gig, my QoL went significantly up after I stopped working with German companies.

define "pay like crap". My experience in Berlin is different, depending on your experience 60-90K EUR is possible. Combined with the relatively low cost of living in Berlin, you can live comfortably. I don't see London paying significantly more, while being a lot more expensive.

That's exactly what I meant by that. I've been in a few companies and I don't think the compensation structure for SWEs is fair for most of the German market. I do agree that Berlin is still fairly cheap.

> Where I live(Germany), the business who only need 2 developers already have them.

No new businesses get created in Germany and no people retire? Sounds like a bleak place.

Do you realize that you have taken on a defeatist conviction? People give you tips and you tell them it's impossible.

The facts however, are that these tips work for the people giving them.

What’s paid well in your case? And how do you handle going to vacation? Who takes over your responsibility.

without getting too specific, 100k-250k. a bit less than i'd expect to make at FAANG but i live in a chicago suburb where the buying power more than offsets the difference. my drive to work is a traffic-free 10min, as is my wife's.

there's another dev that can handle any emergencies or critical bug fixes while i'm out. still i have to be available by phone in case there are questions, but even then it rarely requires more than a lazy login/check at the end of the day.

These kind of salaries, except fintech in London, don't exist in Europe for developers.

i'm not saying that's what he'll get, just that it will be much better than if he's 1/100 devs in a single company.

I think this is probably what most of us have to deal with. IMHO I think trying to see everything as a challenge is one of the keys. For no particular reason here is my story: I was sick of programming at some point in my career, the way I found it exciting/fun again was to learn a new paradigm, most of my career I had only worked with OOP (java/php) I decided to move on to another company and I was lucky? I guess, to learn to program in a functional language which was totally new for me, this experience sort of `opened my eyes` and gave that satisfaction/excitement for programming again and I believe that part of that was due to the fact that I pretty much had to learn to program again coming from OOP to FP. I guess sometimes change is the key.

Indeed. In the past I moved from business software to embedded. Great fun, it made me a noob again. Now I changed back and am still happy.

Ask yourself - do you need to take care of yourself physically and socially every day of the week? How about allocating 2 evenings in the week to tech stuff that you like? I started https://news.kindandgreenworld.com/ as a result of spending an evening or two on it every week. It's still not where I want it to be but the fact that it exists is a good reminder to me that its nice to accomplish things, and urges me to do more.

Maybe it's just me but yes, I do. I'm a very social person and coding is a solitary activity and I can't stand having spent my whole day without any meaningful human interaction. I feel and sleep better after having a meaningfull human interaction or having had a portion of exercise. If I do more coding after the coding at work I can't sleep well, my brain can't unwind before bed as it keeps crunching away at the problems.

Get a job in technical sales or PM or some other part of tech! Tons of tech jobs that desperately need social people. As a solo founder I had to spend a lot of time talking to customers etc until we grew a fair bit.

First you say you "love coding", and I'm with you, but then you say this, and I'm not with you at all, and I think the difference might be your ticket out of your predicament. There are some foods I "love" but would quickly grow sick of if I had to eat them every day. I love them as treats but would hate them as staples. There are other foods that I merely like but have no problem eating every day. I wouldn't want to keep eating anything after I'm full, but I'm not sick of the food, just full. Tomorrow when I'm not full, I'll feel like eating it again. A staple for me.

You may have to reconsider the difference between treat and staple, coding and "meaningful human interaction". Coding remains a staple for me even though I'm often "overfed" with poorly prepared fare. I'll still want more tomorrow. So when you say you "love coding", I think, well, me too, although maybe not as much as you do--but it turns out that we're not actually the same at all. You're more "normal".

You may have to switch to a job where human interaction (the meaningful part--well, maybe sometimes) provides your staple and the coding is a special treat you indulge in on days when you feel like it.

Learn to love solving problems instead. Accomplishing goals and seeing a finished delivered product is more fulfilling than a single fun coding component.

Seeing a finished (or more specifically delivered) product is a challenge in itself in a large corporation.

Not every place is the same

They all present challenges, but they could be acceptable for you.

Jira and stories are not the norm, especially if you have been doing it for a long time, most of the time your role is improving the process through experience.

8 hours a day is not given, if you already know how to do it in 5.

I solved it by not being a software developer at work, and doing projects that interest me at home.

Working a place without other developers fixes those issues.

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