I definitely miss the nostalgic past. Not just programming when I was a kid, but when I became an adult as well. Not only was everything new, everything was very...visceral. You didn't have to learn to/pay for/etc 500 different services to get anything running. You downloaded programs that ran on your computer. There was no cloud to speak of. This all changed after ruby on rails took off by my estimation. It made it so the "common man" could code, and with that pandora's box open became the vast simplification of an otherwise artistic industry.
I don't really code at home anymore. At work I do the bare minimum to get by, as I always do. I hit my sprint goals to please the PHBs whose entire job it is to remind you of your failures (PMs). I no longer enjoy fixing bugs, writing new features, or anything else. I just do what I do because the pay is good enough. I'm truly only motivated to do anything, for any company, because otherwise I'd be fired. Thank you for destroying my bright eyed we-can-do-it attitude, SV.
I could've lived with cloud and a thousand frameworks. But the politicization of our industry and the micro-management culture almost every SV company exudes is toxic to anyone who believes in merit and creativity. I've been unable to find a company to work for that won't take an expedient political stance on whatever the "important social issue" is. Entire code bases are upended by entirely arbitrary sets of rules set by people who arent hackers at all. These people are simply social-science sit ins who want to elbow in on a lucrative industry.
The final nail is the coding interviews. Having been in the industry for 15 years, most of that senior, I would expect to be treated with dignity in an interview. It seems like every corp wants to treat me like a junior until proven otherwise. Yet they require me to send a resume anyway. How exhausting.
The industry is exhausting to be in. It takes bright eyed talented and creative individuals and grinds them to dust. The only benefit is it's one of the only ways to broach the upper middle class boundary now. So I can't leave to do something else and maybe find my joy in coding again someday. It's just suffering, and crying over the memory of a simpler, less political, and less vulture-capital driven hobby.
To put it bluntly I'm tired. Yet I can't rest, it's my only way to afford to retire.
I don't really code at home anymore. At work I do the bare minimum to get by, as I always do. I hit my sprint goals to please the PHBs whose entire job it is to remind you of your failures (PMs). I no longer enjoy fixing bugs, writing new features, or anything else. I just do what I do because the pay is good enough. I'm truly only motivated to do anything, for any company, because otherwise I'd be fired. Thank you for destroying my bright eyed we-can-do-it attitude, SV.
I could've lived with cloud and a thousand frameworks. But the politicization of our industry and the micro-management culture almost every SV company exudes is toxic to anyone who believes in merit and creativity. I've been unable to find a company to work for that won't take an expedient political stance on whatever the "important social issue" is. Entire code bases are upended by entirely arbitrary sets of rules set by people who arent hackers at all. These people are simply social-science sit ins who want to elbow in on a lucrative industry.
The final nail is the coding interviews. Having been in the industry for 15 years, most of that senior, I would expect to be treated with dignity in an interview. It seems like every corp wants to treat me like a junior until proven otherwise. Yet they require me to send a resume anyway. How exhausting.
The industry is exhausting to be in. It takes bright eyed talented and creative individuals and grinds them to dust. The only benefit is it's one of the only ways to broach the upper middle class boundary now. So I can't leave to do something else and maybe find my joy in coding again someday. It's just suffering, and crying over the memory of a simpler, less political, and less vulture-capital driven hobby.
To put it bluntly I'm tired. Yet I can't rest, it's my only way to afford to retire.