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I’m in my late 20s, have been programming since early twenties, i have generally been considered good at it, received interview offers from top companies … And still, I regret being a software developer for multiple reasons.
Constantly having to re-learn technology (languages, frameworks, tools …) just to be able to solve the same level of problems. A lot of time is spent not on getting better, but just on keeping afloat, i.e. being able to do fundamentally the same thing with a different technology stack. My friends in medicine, chemistry, law or architecture don’t have this problem
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It’s hard to find meaningful, challenging problems. Sorry, but I don’t consider working on advertising apps, social networking sites or corporate bloatware as personally “meaningful”, and problems that I legitimately care about - e.g. bioinformatics, computational modeling and simulation, biomedical software, robotics, image processing … - tend to require a PhD and a level of mathematical aptitude that I don’t posses: unfortunately I was stupid enough in my youth that I invested most of my time into programming (building my own projects with the technologies of the day etc.) and not enough into foundations and theory, specifically math. Despite having a CS degree, I’m not at the level where I could contribute to the areas/research I find meaningful, and am thus permanently stuck in a “glorified technician/code monkey” role.
It’s a culture often filled with anti-intellectual yuppies and corporate types who see “engineers” as some kind of manual labor to be exploited and manipulated as if they’re just some naive fresh graduates. The barrier to enter software development is also so low that the industry is full of incompetent people who will often label themselves with grandiose titles such as “senior cloud computing engineer” after a couple of years of experience, despite never having worked on anything beyond CRUD level API droning, and not knowing the difference between an array and a linked list.
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Scrum. I know it’s supposed to be great on paper, but in practice I’ve always seen it degrade into micromanagement with zero space for creativity and R&D type of work. Again, my friends in scientific research and medicine with 10+ years of experience don’t have to deal with some man-child forcing them to play “scrum poker” or partake in some other asinine terminology games.
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