Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

I wish I was one of those people who could just forget the problems at home, etc. when they sit in front of the computer and start coding, but I can't, and as a result my ability to focused work has gone down a lot, and nowadays I do more "people work" simply because that's easier to do when my head is not in it 100%.

After looking at my current manager and previous managers in my previous jobs I decided to never become a manager.

Being a manager means that I'll have to fill my day with nothing but meetings I cannot skip, keep talking on and on and on, deal with delivery headaches, respond to requests even while on PTO, do a lot of context switching between Slack, email, calendar, documentation, and other things. I used to like that level of being "busy" but now it seems that having my focus time is the best thing ever.

However, I see a constant push from people around me to focus on creating a pipeline of ideas and let others implement them. Unfortunately, I do not see the same level of enthusiasm I have in implementing some of those ideas - could be due to lack of recognition since it is not their original idea.

Once I retire, I will just go back to where it all started. Come up with an idea followed by implementation. The sheer pleasure of seeing your idea working in a reasonable timeframe is exhilarating!

I want to earn enough money from my business ideas to spend the rest of my time on hacking on niche languages, distributed/anonymous networks, etc. and as I grow older, to use computer and programming just to maintain a modern off-the-grid life (so working on my smart grid, automating my cabin-in-the-woods life)

Computers and the Internet have gone from being a lifestyle, to just a tool.

When I’m done coding all day I want to do other things like exercise, climb mountains, learn instruments, etc. My motivation to do other things isn’t due to a lack of curiosity, but curiosity channeled into other activities.

I pose that such people shouldn’t be devs or managers, but “manager” is a role that tends to be forgiving of under-qualification… because ultimately the good devs don’t need to be “managed.”

Anyway in IT there are loads of different jobs other than programming. There's QA, application support, databases, project management, team leads, all sorts and it's pretty easy to switch tracks once you're on the inside.

Ah, the foundational myth of middle management.

I have a friend at our company who is a gifted programmer. He was moved into a management position. He discovered that he hated working in a leadership position. He tried to get them to move him back to an individual contributor position. They refused. He said, move me back or I quit. It took them more than a year to transition him back to an individual contributor role. That was a few years ago and he has been happily plugging along ever since. He says that even after he transitioned back, they kept coming to him to get his opinion on issues, the only way he got them to stop was to completely refuse to respond.

It is important though to not compensate for the humiliation with smugness to those who are good at their job.

If every developer moved "up" to management after a few years, only mediocre programmers would be actually writing code (which is partly true). I've become chief engineer recently, but I had already been leading other developers for a while... but I keep writing lots of code, despite frequent interruptions to assist others... I can see how others often go in undesired directions if not guided back to focus on what is important. I am very glad my company has recognized that I can do that but knows me well enough to understand my strong point is coding, not managing. I am sure Apple and many other companies are also aware that a very experienced developer still writing code with others is worth a lot more than in some miserable (for them) management position.

That experience was very eye opening to me. As a result, despite being offered lead positions several times, I’ve always declined. I know where my talents and interests are, and they most certainly aren’t in “people problems” or managing someone else’s career. Thankfully my employer still has a very robust career track for people like me.

What out of reach concepts do you have? I've found that, with time, I could code almost anything (barring ultraspecialized programs like FEA analysis etc.). The only thing between me and the finished program is hundreds or thousands of hours of work. I don't see magic in that.

I don't know what's sadder: That this kind of programming is becoming a lost art, or that nobody seems to care. I got my first job out of college partially because in the interview when I was asked to implement some algorithm XYZ in "any language I choose" I went with X86 assembly and nailed it. Well-performing code was highly valued at that company. Knowing how to ensure your code fit into the cache and your memory accesses stayed on one page were considered critical programming skills.

Now, outside of a few rare embedded or game engine jobs, nobody seems to give a shit about any of this. It's just "glue these APIs and libraries together and ship the resulting crap as soon as it barely runs." Nobody cares about the size of the resulting executable. Nobody cares about or even knows their code's runtime heap footprint. Nobody cares or even measures how many cache misses they're encountering. I feel like an old grandpa even typing this stuff out.

The worst part is that end users are the ones that end up losing. It's their system resources that are ultimately being wasted.

That’s actually what I love most about things today. Hard components I might want to use probably already have a ready to made library I can start with. Time from inception to prototype to production is so short that it really removes a lot of the tedium. I wish it could be even shorter but a lot of the time I’m writing code is because there isn’t something that meets my specific requirements. I wish AI could fill that gap but it feels like we’re an extremely long way away from that. In other words, the part I enjoy most is the high level problem solving or even coming up with what new requirements might be to solve a problem. The mechanical aspect of realizing the vision can be fun but it can also be quite frustrating / repetitively tedious.

Isn’t computer science mostly math? Figure people in computer science would be more at home with the abstract stuff like Haskell where you can’t even see the underlying hardware and your programs are expressed as a bunch of (declarative) functions where sequential execution of instructions is a very small part of your programs.

I have a project that only builds in one version of Visual Studio on my machine. I know it's bad, I know I should get to the bottom of it before it becomes a real problem, but it's soul crushing work.

I say that to contrast with 'application' languages like java, nodejs, or whatever. I'm not saying hobbiest stuff doesn't get written in those but you're a lot less likely to see an OSS spring or react app on someone's github than you're likely to see some cool little command line program that does one small thing.

To me, the draw of programming being that it is both a logical puzzle and a constructive endeavor, brings me a lot of joy to be able to see my stuff work. Whether that's manipulating memory bytes or using a package someone else wrote to do something I want, there's little difference in terms of satisfaction.

Or maybe today's CS grads speak a different language too.

But my immediate post high school plans fell through I spent a year working crappy jobs until I eventually figured “you know I bet I could get a job as a software developer if I tried”. It surely would do a lot better for paying the bills.

Nowadays I mostly tell people: I didn’t get into programming for the money, but that’s sure as hell why I entered the industry.

Of course, it looks like my little stint is over, but I don’t know what to do now. On paper it’s the only thing I’m qualified for that’s not unskilled labor.

I wonder though if you can develop a superb product and company with just money alone. In a way you probably need evangelists rather than just hired guns.

In my experience as a product manager, the evangelists are much more creative than the hired guns. You can throw lots of money toward the development of a product but that doesn’t mean you’ll get innovative solutions from your team.

You need a mix of believers as well as hired guns.

I'm always curious about people's willingness to uproot their lives, and move away from family and friends for a job. Especially at older ages where one has 'made it' and money is no longer the top priority.

There's only one organization that's on that list for me, and that's JPL, especially if I got a chance to work on their sat / rover stuff.

A few students of mine would show me little games they were working on, or websites they were building. Sure, they might be doing this a bit for resume-fuel, but it was abundantly obvious to me that they were doing these things largely because they thought it was cool.

And you know what? It is cool! I tried my best to encourage them to keep at it.

Above and beyond that, I love software, but I don't love Zoom calls, on-call shifts, unnecessarily annoying processes that I'm not allowed to automate, Slack messages, KPIs, objectives that combine vagueness about what we're doing with strict rules about what we're not allowed to touch, horrific dynamically typed JS code where half the arguments to a function are obscure mashed-together objects, over-specified tickets that leave no room for creativity, trying to jam my code into a service where it doesn't fit because leadership wants to encourage code reuse but doesn't understand DRY, or anything else that makes up the actual profession of software engineering.

My interest in computers and programming hasn’t waned. But with every passing year, I have become more invested in my relationships, obligations, health, and other hobbies. So programming is a much smaller slice of the pie these days.

I still think of myself as an interested and enthusiastic programmer, but I will admit that my interest and enthusiasm pales in comparison to my hobbyist coworkers.

I started as a software engineer who was "passionate about software" and could see my life revolving around it. The change in my mindset towards this, that gradually happened few years ago, i.e. the "clock-in and clock-out mentality" is one of the best changes in my life!

It always shocks me to see such sentiments from people. I mean how difficult is it for people to comprehend that that are too many kinds of people out there and hence too many kinds of software engineers out there!

Clock-in, clock-out doesn't mean these software engineers don't like the work they do, or do not write software that is good, or that they do not take pride in, or they do not feel responsible for it. Anyway that doesn't mean every other free hour, or any free hour in their lives, away from that day job (which is software engineering) have to be about software or code, or hell even an hour have to be about software.

Your job, your profession doesn't have to be your passion! Not everybody needs to be an artist, or a software artist (if I can say so)! There is a work that needs to be done and there are people who can do this and they do this and it can be just that, nothing more.

Did you every think about yourself, how you got into software engineering? Did you really always want this trade - truly? Was this genetic in some way? Or some kind of divine intervention? I mean I know I am getting facetious here with this analogy but just look at it before pointing a finger to a whole new generation of people who are maybe just different.

I kinda disliked it, at the beginning of my career, when I saw my engineering peers moving into finance, MBAs and what not, but slowly I have started to appreciate it as I am getting this idea sunk into me deeper - work is work, nothing else. There is whole lot of rest of the life out there. Go where you want, how you want to, immerse yourself into something only as much you want, there doesn't have to be a scale of "passion" you have to conform to.

It is so tiring and frustrating to keep encountering this mindset so often. Luckily my generation is genuinely starting to stop giving a fuck about this and the newer generation is more vigorous in rejecting of "your work has to be your passion" regressive mindset.

If you're passionate about the mission/coding you will just produce a lot of impotent anger, because there's no way an IC is going to restructure the program given the layers of bureaucracy in the way. Maybe if you went management and then spent a decade or two climbing the corporate ladder, and even then you'll run into brand new managerial constraints. So if you're going to stick around, you learn to detach. It's one of the many reasons I plan to have a new job by Christmas :)

A surprising number of acquaintances of mine have failed at retirement[1]. That has never been my problem :-). That said, I still do consulting because it lets me play with equipment that I might not otherwise decide to buy (like million $ RF labs :-)) However I've structured it to take a back seat to my own projects and the opportunities as they present to go camping or on other adventures.

I also know a bunch of people who never wanted to see a computer again after they didn't need to work, one of whom actually went back and got a degree in creative writing because they really wanted to be a writer all along.

It is also super helpful to have a spouse or partner you like to hang out with. One friend of mine opened an office so that he could be out of the house sometimes when things got too hectic.

All good problems to have.

[1] To fail at retirement is to have the resources to pay all the bills and do fun things without "working" but getting bored from the lack of interesting challenges and so going back into the workforce anyway.

How can a child fall into programming when the computer yells at you, with cryptic messages, uncomprehensible for a child, moreso since I was French-speaking only. “ERROR!” It even accuses you: “YOU are about to reformat this DISK. Do you want to proceed?” (7-year-old me looking up “proceed” in the dictionary, missing “reformat”. Ah, fdisk, so many nights crying that I had lost my computer).

But, speaking from experience: At least it’s your fault. You can do something about it.

Now compare to the sand pit at school: You play marbles with a girl, if she loses she goes crying to the teacher. It’s not your fault, you followed the rules, teacher tells you off, ah, gotta learn the rules of life. “Girls have cooties” is the most funny self-reflection on my childhood. There was no way as a child to learn navigating that complex rules of social precedence, implicit expectations, social cues, untold obvious rules. Even today: I’m bad at office politics, so I’m a CEO and make a million a year.

At least, with computers, when it doesn’t work: It’s my fault. I can do something about it. Same with business. It’s my fault. A provider defects? Still my fault. Economic crisis? Still more my fault than playing by the rules in the sandpit and being told off.

But people? I need five times my IQ.

When people didn't know what to do in the 90's, they went into e.g. advertising or banking. They just wanted a job, advertising was big, seems fun, let's do that. Now those kinds of people "get into tech because you can earn a lot". So you get people who focus more on what they can extract rather than the craft. They arrive, do a job, pretend to be value adders because it's good for bonuses, go home to do what they really want to do.

I guess that's ok, it takes all kinds and it's a big world. But the passionate, the people who love to create and love to refine and want to contribute and make a mark, those are my people. I think they're more likely to be there when you're in the first part of a company's life, before the extractors arrive. Right now I work with many of the builders and it's just wonderful.

I also think that as companies change, get more sluggish and require more paperwork, passion goes out the window and the organisational imperative drives the experience.

There have been plenty of times where I have felt that utilizing formal methods would benefit some problematic patch of code, but when I suggest something like TLA+ or Isabelle, every engineer in the room will wince at me and act like I asked them to solve the wave equation. It'll usually be dismissed in some form of "we don't want to force every engineer to learn all that math".

It's frustrating to me because, I mean, we're engineers. Any high school kid can learn to program for free on YouTube these days. If we're not utilizing theory, then what exactly are we doing to earn our ridiculous salaries?

While I like software I'm beginning to see it as a rather bad career. While you make more money early in the career, you stop doing so rather fast and other jobs catch up quite quickly and surpass you.

I guess there's always the exception company, etc. but as a non-US career, it can get taxing to see de-growth.

https://whoisnnamdi.com/never-enough-developers/ was a neat read along the same lines.

But canceled projects, inept managers and deadend startups led by brain dead CEOs knocked it all out of me. I’m heading into my 40s and I’m officially a clock puncher. Could not care less who knows it.

I wish I could work somewhere that would just get the fuck out of my way and let me build, fix and make, but tech is full of people riding on the coat tails of engineers now, pretending we’re all on equal footing. We’re not. We don’t need the middle managers and HRs and dozen VPs. We just need some good designers and some good engineers and we can blow peoples’ minds.

But makers making things makes people who can’t make anything uncomfortable.

It might be different if they have some other personal/skill issue, but I've seen anyone doing a decent job for a few years get a path to either management, PM or something more "businessy", and in effect many PMs around me started as programmers. That's where I see the natural filtration of those who actualy saw it as a career and not just as a starting job (pay is usually not that different, or better when you go to a businessy path).

Now, that doesn't mean they (we) don't have a clock-in/clock-out mentality. E.g. I want to have multiple hobbies, and programming is only one of them. I deeply respect people who breath programming day-in day-out, but don't see it as an ideal or something to long for everyone. That's where I'm a bit sad it actively disappoints or drains your energy. I hope you'll find a happy place with people you enjoy working with !

Only when I got into those meeting rooms, did I have a rude awakening. I realized the value of shipping software. I rolled up my sleeves and started getting back into building software, reluctantly initially but then I fell in love with the craft eventually.

Today if I find anyone who is getting disillusioned as I was, I try to educate them and help them find the joy in shipping software. Am not sure if it has really helped anyone, but I think it's the right thing to do.

The reality is that this industry operates with a factory worker mentality. It is no surprise to me that young people don't care about programming. It just isn't valued.

The past few years have seen salaries climb to what could even be claimed as crazy levels, when compared to what other professionals make, esp non CS engineers. Compounded even more by the portrayal of the software dev lifestyle. Working from home, or being in an office with lots of free perks.

This naturally led to lots of people wanting in.

I like you, originally got into programming as a career as it was what I loved doing, it was a given I would go that route. This was at a time where engineers made far less than they do today.

Personally, I like learning how things work and doing things at my own pace. Expecting passion for integrating SaaS apis and working with legacy code is not the tech that got me interested, I want to clock out of that ASAP.

> Bootcamps have just become farms for people who need a job, but not those who really want this job.

This isn't exclusive to bootcamps - they just happen to be the most expedient way to act on particular desire. The real problem is how LOUD money has become in 'tech' in the last several decades. When I started undergrad ~10 years ago, at a small school not known for anything Math or CS, there were still a lot of students who entered the CS program because they heard, from their family the internet or the world at large, that it was "a good job". (This also stems from college being seen as 'job prospect' improvement as opposed to something for learning, but that discussion lies elsewhere.)

I got lucky that I liked it. Most of them would drop out of the program / transfer to a different area of focus within a year or so. There were probably somewhere around 50-60 people in my low level CS courses. My graduating CS cohort was 9.

Despite liking it, I still find little desire to tinker on things outside of work. A large part of it is that it _is_ my job. I don't want to work, then go home and 'work' for 'fun'.

The other part of it is, as mentioned by others here, the parts of software a lot of us enjoy the most aren't usually what we get to focus on, in one way or another.

> I want to work with more people who LOVE software and find the development of machines and the code that runs on them as fascinating as I do. Unfortunately, its less and less these days.

I get the impression most of this is going to be exclusive to small projects, teams, and in particular startups. Bigger operations are going to prefer prioritizing the more 'stable' or boring sides of software.

You can't expect to work with people who LOVE their work. That's just not how the world is set up. People gotta eat, so they take the least bad path to that. I can entirely understand why someone would pragmatically choose this career regardless of their lack of enthusiasm for it.

Especially if you're overweight, spending more time sitting behind a desk is just a poor life choice.

Luckily for me, before I got too far down the road into choosing a major, it became clear to me that I would never love getting paid to program. Writing code as a career was not going to appeal to me. Being able to keep it as a hobby, where I can choose how much time I put into it, has kept me happy.

I will always wonder about "the road not taken", but I do think others are coming to that realization.

People aren't always passionate about the projects we work on at work, but most are passionate about things like software craftmanship, quality, or maybe just technology itself, or the problem solving aspect, or some are perpetually in love with how software allows you to create almost anything out of nothing.

In my experience people who treat programming as a job rather than a passion often build better apps (note that this is different to saying they write better code..). They don't try all the latest shiny things, they treat things like tests and docs as a boring necessessity rather than something they can ignore, they go for simple solutions they can think about less over complex abstractions that require lots of time. They're also happy to stick with something a bit dull like maintaining an old app so long as their pay keeps coming.

Passionate and enthusiastic devs are definitely more fun to work with, but if I'm going to be on a team with 6 or 7 others for a couple of years I would rather not come in to work to be faced with someone's 'clever' idea that they opened a PR for at 2am every day.

Think esports pros, playing games used to be a break, but after working 8+ hours a day. It's no longer that relaxing fun activity.

There's nothing incompatible about those two things.

I think it's totally reasonable to be disillusioned with the "retire early" part of FIRE, but the "financial independence"? That part is golden for everyone.

Being financially independent means you're not scared of being laid off. It means you can walk away from bad bosses or bad companies. It means you can try out a startup if your heart tells you it's the one, but the money they're offering is too far below market.

Of course, getting there through austerity isn't for everyone. I get that. But quite a lot of people think the juice is worth the squeeze.

It's really easy for companies to just look at programmers as people working on a car assembly line (no disrespect meant). I.e. you just sit at your station and put the wheels on as the next car body comes by. Skill and passion are not in sync with that reality. The number of projects where success depends on skill and passion, and this is actually understood/realized by anyone, isn't large. Starting your own company/business is hard for people that are more of the maker type and less of the business type (not to mention the other risks).

Going to work for a startup isn't necessarily a fix. Lots of startups where you are still a product line worker. That's partly because it's also risky for a startup to rely on being able to find skilled and passionate people.

EDIT: Also happy to read the author has re-kindled his love of programming. I tend to worry that my industry "PTSD" is going to make it such that I can't have fun programming again. As a kid I used to spend endless nights coding with nobody paying me. Somehow money makes it a lot less fun.

Now that I’m more than a decade removed from my undergraduate years, I find myself disillusioned with the state of computing and research these days. Neither Apple nor Microsoft seem to care about pushing personal computing further anymore; it’s about maintaining and strengthening their cash cows. Google, Meta, and Amazon don’t impress me like they did a decade ago, when I used to joyfully study the research papers describing the interesting infrastructure they built. The days of places like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC where researchers generally had free reign to pursue their ideas are long gone; industrial research today is very business-focused, where researchers are required to put the interests of the company ahead of their personal research interests. Academia is no better; the competition is high (especially at research universities), the pay is low (especially at teaching universities), and there are pressures not only to publish regularly, but to raise grant money, which naturally curbs research freedom. This is the world I find myself navigating; I found myself training and striving for a career that no longer exists.

I’m still thinking about long-term plans for me to pursue the type of career that I want despite today’s environment. America’s high cost of living makes FIRE difficult for me unless I decide to “grind Leetcode” and join a FAANG to optimize my compensation, and even that strategy may be obsolete in 2023 due to layoffs and hiring freezes. Alternatively, I’m thinking about one day starting a bootstrapped business, one that is profitable enough to be able to fund my living expenses and to provide healthy wages and benefits for my staff. One day I’ll make enough money to where I can enough savings to be able to pursue my own research projects without having to worry about publish-or-perish pressures or about business matters. I’d like to also teach on the side, though due to low adjunct wages I don’t want to pursue that as my main job.

This coming age of AI is really going to displace a lot of jobs, and make a lot of people unhappy- those who found meaning in their work. But, I feel we need to keep our joy of doing our work, and have that be the driving force, even if a computer can do something better. And this is what they say will be the "artisanal" things that will exist, and be popular to buy.

In the end, I think we just need to enjoy what we do. That's all this life is about.

That’s really hard to find. Especially if you still want to work regular hours

s/work in a small team/lead a company

That's the ideal for me.

I suspect one issue is that this kind of thing is more common in smaller organizations that haven’t evolved a bureaucracy.

The catch is that they also aren’t paying high salaries and just finding their way…

Maybe the RE part, but definitely not the FI part. In fact if I achieve the FI part I may not even have to go through the RE part and I can keep working for as long as I want at my own pace, conditions, and comfort.

The place I left gave ICs a high degree of agency, and you run projects yourself, get the resources you need yourself. So the issue was never too much red tape or process. So now doing all that stuff just feels like work again. The programming is ok (just ok) but seriously building something involves all that project stuff. Coordination, setting timelines and milestones, design, testing and on and on.

I think it’s ok to acknowledge that there are other things in life besides programming and software projects, and to therefore move on. I love lots of things!

Sometimes the gum loses flavor. But there’s lots of flavors to try.

early morning coding fresh after sleep is good for bug-hunting