Being a software developer today feels like constantly dealing with a bunch of bullcrap. Honestly, how are you folks doing? Are you alright? Frankly, I feel so exhausted. Job searching is such a soul-crushing activity. Sending applications is time-consuming, needlessly cumbersome, utterly Sisyphean, and essentially feels like a complete waste of your life. You don't learn anything useful, you're not building anything practical, it doesn't improve any aspect of your life, and there seems to be no good, proven way of automating it.

I never understood why being a developer has to be so wearisome. Why is it expected that any software dev has to have encyclopedic knowledge of Java, Javascript, Python, Go, different dialects of SQL, along with scripting stuff like bash and awk; ansible, chef and terraform; has to know 50 different AWS services; tons of different database types and their implementations; need to know common vulnerability types and understand how DNS, TCP-IP, http, websockets, and other protocols work; must know how to invert a binary tree in zero-gravity; their GitHub activity graph should look like an aerial view of the Amazon forest; they must maintain a blog; speak at conferences, and once in a while write a dissertation paper. And all that still is not enough because they have to excel at interviews. At several different types of them - algorithms and data structures, language-specific, framework-specific, pair programming interview, design systems interview, product interview, company and industry-specific, take-home project interview, tech talk, and personality interview.

Why is it that even when it feels like "you've made it," and you finally have a job at some big company, you still can't feel safe? Why do you constantly have to be in "finding a job mode" instead of building stuff and fixing problems? Sigh...