Hacker News Reader

Comment by smarkov | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to, but I don't really have a choice at the moment.

Maybe I'm just at the wrong place at the wrong time, but as a software engineer I don't feel like I'm doing any actual engineering and solving meaningful problems, just spaghetti gluing random frameworks, packages and services together. The only problems I get to solve are those caused by the quirks of all these incompatible things being forced to work together. It's draining.

View on HN

Sounds like software engineering…

This is the job most of the time, especially at large corporations. You’re mostly fixing legacy decisions and trying to patch together solutions to current problems (instead of fixing tomorrow’s problems). Hang in there.

Guys, maybe software development and government are the same: mostly boring thankless activities entirely necessary but only observed in absence.

"Hang in there" implies that the situation is going to improve. It won't. You end up ratcheting your title and pay upwards until you find yourself in the position of doing nothing useful all day for an amount of money that precludes switching to another career without a drastic pay cut. And you're probably hitting your mid-life crisis zenith right around this time too.

"Boo hoo" I know, but it is its own little Dante's Inferno.

This is exactly what I'm seeing everywhere these days. It's chaotic and exhausting.

This hits so deep, and you can't even quit, or you will starve to death.

Me too, doing all that isn’t why I signed up for this career.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com