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Comment by cactus2093 | Hacker News Reader

cactus2093

> it's such a draining profession

I truly can't understand thinking this. I've worked in software engineering for over 10 years now, at a wide range of companies from tiny startups to large tech cos. We easily make 2 - 5x more than the median wage, work indoors in a comfortable environment sitting (or standing, for anybody who prefers) all day with high end ergonomic equipment, often get unlimited vacation time, can often choose not to work more than 8 hours a day if we don't want to, and all while doing something that many of us got into simply because it was a fun and engaging thing to do. And just in the past year millions of software engineers have gotten the option of doing this fully remotely, freeing them up to live anywhere they want and never have to commute. What a time to be alive!

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Read some of the comments in this past thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27821392 to understand this better. I've also been working at this for well over 10 years and I do agree that overall this profession is draining. I often need 'hard resets' between jobs, it's hard to compartmentalize work and regular life when you brain is constantly thinking about 'the system'. I have experienced burnout a bunch of times. It's not pretty. Add the new trends of making devs do oncall because frankly everything is online, tech interviews becoming the coding Olympics, the incentive structure in an organization making people cut corners or backstab coworkers to get ahead, it's not hard to understand how someone would consider the profession draining. This is from the perspective of someone who worked both in small and big corps on the west coast.

Comfort doesn't have a lot to do with burnout or job satisfaction unless you're coming from a blue collar mostly manual job.

> many of us got into simply because it was a fun and engaging thing to do

That's one of the problems. For a lot of folks, it was exactly that 'was a fun and engaging thing to do' and then you get do it in the context of office politics, tight deadlines, need to sacrifice professional ethics and ship something half-assed because that's what the business needs, etc.. These things, repeatedly chip away at your happiness. Would you be more unhappy without the ergonomic equipment and all of that? Most likely yes. But ping-pong tables and the unlimited vacation (which is at the discretion of your manager anyway) doesn't always compensate for shit work or the nervous breakdown from having to sit on an incident bridge for 4 hours...

I need to admit, I love my job and I love this profession. But I do understand when people say it's draining.

Most of this is true of any office job though.

Oncall is somewhat unique, and that can be tough, but if it's particularly rough and there is nothing you can do to improve it that's a good sign to find another company (or perhaps another specialization within programming) because it doesn't need to be that way. Incident response is mostly a self-imposed stress, and I've found it to be something that you can learn to manage better and not let it affect you so much, by being prepared with good playbooks, as well as accepting that it's not the end of the world and that all you can do is try your best.

I'm not denying that life itself can be draining. Working any type of office job can be draining. I just don't see how programming is particularly more draining than all the other jobs people do.

Well, not to be reductive, but what have you done in that time, and for who? You said a lot about conditions of work, and that's great stuff, but often times a McDonald's employee has more visibility into where their work goes than a developer making stupid widgets to increase their numbers for the week. A construction worker can point to a house and say "I built that foundation, it'll be there for 20 years, during which someone will live in it"

Sounds like you need to quit your job. I hear they’re paying new hires a lot.

Thankfully I burnt out, in part because I didn't quit soon enough, and haven't found another yet in a very long time. Heres hoping that if I do find one before I quit looking entirely, it will pay well :)

I've done lots of things over the years, sometimes grown sales by millions of dollars, sometimes taken a brand new thing from 0 to 1 and get it out to the first users, and I've experienced the satisfaction of solving a problem for happy customers. Not always, mind you, I've also seen companies have to downsize or shut down when their lofty goals didn't quite pan out. But that's the beauty of being in this field these days, there are so many different kinds of companies out there to choose from.

It sounds like you've been very lucky in a few respects, and that certainly wouldn't lead you question whether or not it's a good career choice. Supposing those things that you've done are true, would you feel the same way if you were part of the downsizing, or you never found yourself in the position to affect sales in such a way, or you weren't compensated for it, or you never got to know who the work actually impacted directly?

But today there would be no McDonald’s or little new construction going on had we not written the software their insurance companies are using.

True, though I suppose we could also do without it :)

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