@JohnHall
As a tech worker in my 50s...the cycle of boom/bust will not end. Save your money. Switch stacks. Change industries. Take up gardening. Never fully deny or believe that a meritocracy exists within the market. Understand that you will repeatedly find yourself competing with your younger self.
@tex346
The daily meeting is "what did you do for me yesterday?" and "what are you doing today for me?"
@sammypresents
I've been a professional programmer for thirty-nine years. I evolved and stayed current. I recently had an interview where they wanted me to code up those Leetcode problems. I couldn't believe what was happing. They were not interested in my real life coding solutions and experience. I felt really insulted and challenged them on what was the point of these problems. Well I didn't get the job. They felt that my skills was not current. Anyway I'm not ever going to work full time for an employer or consulting company. I'm going to pull my own direct clients. Doing fix price contracts and freelancing. This is where I shine. I have deep industry experience and up to date technology expertise.
@justinoleary911
Tech was exciting and new in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Now it’s billions of lines of code nobody knows what they do anymore and everyone’s knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep
@StaffyDoo
“Burnt out of working in tech” Here ✋ A former DevOps / SRE / Platform Engineer too. I quit the rat race about a couple of months ago and it is like I was born again: no more anxiety, no more stress, no more depression — fuck IT 🔥🔥🔥
@hegerwalter
My favorite is that a lot of tech interviews ask nity questions which are difficult and depend on what you "know right now". There are lots of things that I once knew, but hey, I forgot since then.
@ssgg23
Agile as implemented by most companies is an absolute joke, just another form of micromanagement.
@Rizzan8
Tech interviews are nuts. I tried to change my current company, sent out CVs to several companies for a senior position. Before each interview I have asked how many stages it has. Some had 8(!) stages. Sorry, but I am not going to bother to waste 8 days for an "unspecified salary" and "the salary depends on your interview".
@exapsy
Yep. This is exactly how it is. 7+ years of experience as a software engineer. - jobs interviews is like a completely another job. - every year they get harder - interviewers (who are also programmers) often treat people like wikipedias, pretending that you have to know keywords or concepts nobody uses in real life regularly and if you had you would search. That's exactly what the interviewer would do. But interviewers rarely like saying "hey, can I google that?". I did say that in an interview, they didn't particularly like it as I didn't get the job. - 1-2 week tasks, COMPLETE disrespect for the candidate's time. As if my time is worth nothing and pretending that after I'm going to complete that task you're ... going to hire me? Sure? You've also got like 30-300 candidates. - Leetcode interviews that themselves can't solve and never solve IRL. - Leetcode interviews getting harder and harder because they get leaked. - Recruiters and interviewers treating tools like .... something you should know from top to bottom. Like, guys, there are 10000 tools in Software engineering, Kafka, RabbitMQ, ReactJS, Postgresql, MariaDB (vs Mysql), MongoDB, Cassandra, Docker, Kubernetes, Websockets, gRPC, and the list goes on that I can't even fill them in my resume anymore! I DONT HAVE TO KNOW ALL THOSE TOOLS inside out. Especially keywords that may come from a specific tool. I can ... Search them out! Like a lawyer, or a doctor would, if they don't know what a pill does and its active ingredient, or how to treat the case in the court based on previous cases. Like it's massive hypocrisy that we're treated so much harder than .... Doctors ... and Lawyers. People that other people literally in all the sense of the word depend their lives on. I never heard a lawyer say "Oh, I had a 2 week court test for my interview" or a doctor having to solve bunch of problems from leetmedical. You get the degree, and you're easily hireable. In Software engineering, after you get your CS degree, you have to spend another 2-3 years alone of figuring out what you even wanna become, a backend engineer, frontend, mobile, low level, etc. what technologies you gonna use, that tools exist. Nobody teaches you that! We teach that ourselves! edit: For people just to tell you "Nah, you don't have much experience" when they ask for Junior Engineers!
@DrunkenUFOPilot
Coding tests at the job interview are nuts. I especially hate having to do the same brain teaser coding tests over and over with every company. Are accountants given a column of numbers to add? Do news reporters have to color in a map of countries in the world? In most professions where a sufficient skill level needs to be guaranteed, there's a license or certification or some such thing. Why not have such for programming languages, software architecture, C++, system design (I'd flunk that) and whatever other skills many employees look for? Be tested once and just once.
@stevens2806
Yes, this is exactly why I don't want to work in tech anymore. I have over 20 years of experience primarily on the backend, and I also have zero interest in learning what appears to be a dumpster-fire combination of frameworks and technologies for the "new" frontend stacks. Everyone wants "full stack" developers now, and everyone seems to be doing these worthless anti-pattern lazy management-style daily standups that I cannot stand. Why do we have to report on task status when we have a TASK MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR THAT?!
@finleybaker6008
For me the major factors are: * Layoffs * Disorganization: I'm not going to say that other professions are perfect. But i feel that civil engineers have been building bridges for thousands of years. Software engineering as a profession has basically been shaped by kids who start companies and Venture Capitalists * We have a lot fewer options for employers now than in the past. If you want a well-paying job, we're reaching a point where Google, Facebook, and Amazon are the only games in town * Lack of fulfillment. I've spent my career adding 0.0001% to a couple of billionares' balance sheets rather doing anything good for the world (like I was promised id have an opportunity to do). Also, the most efficient use of circular buffers are to optimize coding interviews
@strandedpirate6346
As to interviews, the biggest issue in the industry is these stupid low level algorithm solving tests. No one with an real job sits around and writes a Lists, Dictionaries, or sorting algorithms from scratch - literally every language I've ever used has already solved that "problem". Showing that you go solve for any type of esoteric challenge has almost no practical application in 95% of the industry. Many developers that we interview that can pass those tests, cannot function in a team setting because they are not team players, don't write good code, have zero idea of what basic architecture is, don't know the first thing about SOLID, cannot effectively communicate, waste entire sprints on a single card that anyone else would complete in half a day, the list goes on and on.
@malekith6522
I love working in the tech industry and have over two years of experience. Recently, I lost my job as an embedded Linux software engineer in the automotive industry but was able to find a new position that I really enjoy. Of course, I struggled and it took at least three months to find a new job. Currently, my position is a software engineer in a medical technology company. So, my suggestion is that if you really enjoy working in tech and engineering, don't focus on the negatives because there is always some bad stuff in any industry. Instead, focus on doing what you love.
@wdmeister
I gave up 2 years ago. It's not worth it. Truck driver after 2months of training earns more than most programmers with a few years of experience. And the requirements to get that job are insane. You do 2-3 truck deliveries in London per day. Stress free, no effort and you get paid like a dev who knows a few programming languages + math. Yes with programming you will have more opportunities but in most cases, it's not worth it. Most programming jobs are insanely boring and repetitive.
@sourdurian2839
im working in tech and you've hit the nail on the head. the entire interview process is broken, so much so that i explicitly stated in my resume that i will NOT do anymore leetcode. i had 9 interviews after applying for maybe 30 or so companies. and each interview i had to go through 2 rounds of leetcode which is just ridiculous. i got so sick of it till i put it in my resume. my current company gave me a case study, with a short technical interview just to test my understanding.. close to what im working on right now, and i am so happy working in my current company. if we all band together and stop this stupid culture from continuing, they will have to stop it eventually. ** just to add, i do not think leetcode is bad entirely, you can learn some stuff, but using it to test someone's capability is downright silly.
@RobertHastings12
Not in software, but tier 3 deskside support for a large automation firm. Long story short, I left the office at noon on a Monday and checked myself into a psych hospital because I was that burnt out. That queue of 70+ tickets, plus the barrage of end users harassing me on Teams, and my remote boss in my inbox at 7am asking why I haven't addressed the "VIP users tickets" when they were assigned to me overnight and I didn't start work until 8a pushed me over the edge when I was already beyond burnt out. I also had no windows in my office, so I would never get to see outside or any natural light. Fast-forward 9 months and I'm much happier working part time as a personal trainer in a physical therapy clinic and part time working the front end at Costco. I get to be on my feet and help people feel better physically instead of sit in a depressing cubicle for 9 hours a day, getting bitched at by people who think they know your job better than you.
@spencershipley4349
I graduated in 2022. Found school incredibly interesting and fun. After 7 months and sending 3,000 applications just to get 4 interviews, I landed a job with an annual salary BELOW $50,000/year, no bonuses, and almost zero chance of promotions. I made more in sales. I took the job anyway so that I could get the experience. Now with 10 months in, I sent out 500 applications, got one recorded leetcode interview before deciding to pivot to a different industry. Got an offer that's an over 30% raise, bonuses, and promotions are nearly a sure thing with 24 months.
@DudeWatIsThis
I am a software engineer and I have a small software company. I started it fresh out of university, and had barely had a couple years' experience doing odd IT jobs while I studied. I've made almost every mistake in the book, but interviewing people like this wasn't one of them. These are a few questions of what I ask: - Tell me about 3 design patterns you've used, each with an example of how you've used them. - Do you know what TDD is? Have you ever done it? Why? Or why not? - Do you prefer DevOps or Continuous Integration? Why? - Tell me about a couple of programming books you've read and really liked, and why. - Tell me about a couple of mistakes you've made, or a crisis you've had in a past project, and how it ended. And that's mostly it. Single, 1-hour interview. Zero code involved. This tells me all I need to know. I also pick up on the vibe they give off along the way. Less than 1% of the professional work we do here involves any algorithm/leetcode stuff at all - it's all mostly about layering stuff properly, knowing where to use what pattern, clean code, pair programming, and being communicative. I don't get why people ask you to do leetcode stuff. Why the fuck would I need you to know how to program a quicksort? Has anyone above age 21 EVER programmed a quicksort? Just copy and paste that shit from Stack Overflow, thank you.
@m-ok-6379