What is it about programming that makes so many people want to quit and do something else?
Truly Sisyphean. “Hurry, roll that boulder! It’s important!” And then the boulder rolls back down the hill and everyone shrugs and starts back over. “Go, go! Important!”
And everything you have to use is probably broken and/or terrible. Even, and perhaps especially, software from major vendors staffed with “geniuses”. So very much time wasted to our tools and libraries being shit. It’s frustrating, and it’s day, after day, without end.
It grinds you down. At this point if pay were equal for all careers, programming would be pretty far down my list of preferred occupations.
It’s easy to start dreaming of throwing the fucking laptop in the trash and starting a Christmas tree farm or becoming a carpenter or some shit.
- carpal tunnel; have already had the surgery 1x on left arm and 2x on right with some persistent issues that some PT is tackling
- eye strain; have been messing with blue light glasses alongside some monitor changes and using trying to use more saline (I forget to blink all day), not perfect but it's manageable for the time being
A good friend is a mail carrier and I'm actually super jealous of her job; I went from walking several miles a day as a server in undergrad to 5hrs standing/3hrs sitting while working with an AM/PM walk to bridge the gap but it's just not the same as being active all day. Have been considering making a move into something else...but it's unlikely to actually happen tbh
You're envious of the side effects of the job, more physical activity. Bet she's jealous of the side effects of your job, more money. Probably neither of the jobs themselves are intrinsically attractive to the other.
They don't just want to do something else but something very different, everything IT/computer work is missing. The common theme is "less tech" or "outdoors". People dream about what they're missing. Farming is not at all easier on the body but all of a sudden it becomes attractive by being different.
IT work usually brings you enough money and safety which let you think about any dreams and that you'd be successful with them too. But it's also just stressful enough that the dreams look like a good alternative. Your mind melds the financial success from your current job with the spiritual happiness of the dream.
The problem isn’t the programming part.
Engineering involves requirements analysis, specification, and the mathematical analysis of families of components to demonstrate – according to the known laws of reality – that the proposed solution meets the requirements and won't kill people.
E.W.Dijkstra advocated, repeatedly, from the 1970s onwards (EWD340 – and probably earlier than that also), that software should be formally-analysed and -verified as a matter of course. He called this humility. We call him arrogant, and insane.
Nobody does this. We don't even try. As you said, everyone in programming is insane: so much so, that proposing "hey, why don't we try writing computer programs we actually understand" elicits laughter and scorn.
In every other engineering discipline, proposing a solution that you do not understand will get you fired. In software engineering, it's a Tuesday.
That freedom has advantages and disadvantages, but almost everything you do will become immediately productive.
My experience by pure software companies was the same. Insane is pretty accurate.