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Comment by lainga | Hacker News Reader

Seems like the problem is that "programming as a career" often means "waiting". All the process stuff he mentions is (personally) fine with me, it's just that you often have no agency over when it happens. Everything requires permission. Or there's "no budget for it".

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This resonates with me a lot. During our most recent sprint planning, our team was given a task that's much larger than we've gotten before and I was asked if I thought we'd have the time for all this extra development work. My answer was yes, we have the time. We've always had the time. Not once have I been bottlenecked by a lack of my own time for writing code, it's always been because we need wait days to get permission and support to do anything.

The lack of agency is what drove me away from my last job.

Id be fine with process, if I had some say over the work I do.

That's easily one of the worst aspects of the worst jobs I've had. It's rather insulting that these employers refer to you as a sort of "engineer" but don't allow you to engineer anything. Instead, your role is to execute orders while being gaslit that you have the freedom to make the code better. This is a joke when only a select few programmers are given ownership of things. I've heard the word "ownership" thrown around my whole career as a buzz term, but it seems almost no one gets to own anything. Maybe I should have based my career around nepotism instead of skill.

I experienced this a lot doing mainstream programming, but when I switched to niche things (Clojure), I never experienced that anymore. Companies trusted me, gave me (and other engineers) autonomy. Maybe try to look into some niche thing? I was pretty burned out of programming before, but it definitely lit the candle once more.

I’m trying to figure out to find a niche. There a very few interesting niche roles that aren’t either looking for already established domain experts.

How did you get a job in a world like that?

I love Elixir and would love to work in a erlang/elixir shops.

Every job I see is JavaScript, python, or Go.

Lots of Clojure companies hire people without previous Clojure experience (how I got started). List of companies that do that can be found in this blog post: https://jobs-blog.braveclojure.com/2022/03/24/long-term-cloj...

Also, lots of jobs get posted in the Clojurians Slack channel, as opposed to job boards. Perhaps try to find where the jobs get posted with Elixir, because at least with Clojure it certainly is not LinkedIn or other mainstream job boards. And then, once you find the jobs, don't be afraid to reach out to companies even if you don't have experience. They might just give you a chance! Remember, you no longer have a massive amount of competition with niche languages, so it's highly likely they actually read every CV.

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