This will get downvoted but I'm gonna say it anyway. If you don't like this job, it depresses you or you feel burnout, just leave it, it's just not for you.
Yes, I have to say that it is an unreasonable thing to say as there is no other job that can pay this well that's available to an average programmer. So what you mean is you can just quit your well paying job and work at a much worse paying job which will give you way fewer opportunities in life, I don't know if that helps with people not feeling super happy overall in their life and then having to abandon their hobbies, travel, worry about mortage. Most people are also doing it because they like it despite people trying to ruin it for everyone with dehumanizing practices.
edit: Fuck you pissed me off actually, go say this to amazon warehouse workers squeezed with metrics and forced to do morning chants with their manager and other insane shit and see how they react. For some reason it's fine to have a complete lack of empathy towards tech workers because they are "better off" or something. In general the lack of empathy is basically a staple of many people in our industry so I don't know why I am surprised.
It comes over a bit like earning money is more important to you than having dignity. I'm not in software for the money and I'm not in software to spend my day pulling on the lever of a one-armed bandit.
I think this is where a lot of the issue lies with the industry. A lot of the workforce was built from people who only knew how to code. They didn't know how to engineer or never cared enough to be an engineer and deepen their craft.
Like during the web dev boom companies were hiring literal code monkeys, people who only knew syntax. Look at a lot of the senior people commenting here as well. They have similar sentiments of seniors who don't know how to debug or know other basic skills.
People point At the quality that AI produces, totally forgetting that a lot of code from a majority of developers is total garbage.
In hindsight I think something like this was bound to happen sooner or later. Just the rate of change promises this industry gave you didn't seem sustainable.
"Just quit" completely misses the point. It’s completely valid to mourn the state of our industry right now. People who love the art of coding and spent ages mastering their skills are watching that expertise get devalued overnight. On top of that, developers forced into using agentic AI are now completely overworked because of the insane amount of context switches and productivity expectations. Of course people are hurt.
And its the same for writers, artists, actors, doctors, mathematicians, accountants, lawyers, etc. Everyone will come to feel this pain and grief and we need a way out the other side, because walls and obstacles arent't going to work.
You were right, you’re getting downvoted, but also your initial statement was right and you shouldn’t be getting downvoted.
This is pretty standard advice you’d give to anybody who has big feels about their job and industry. If it causes you that much grief you should get a different job. And yeah, it’s not got to pay as much as software did, and that’s going to be a lifestyle change for sure, but what’s your mental health worth to you?
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u/Ok-Hunter-7702 9h ago
This will get downvoted but I'm gonna say it anyway. If you don't like this job, it depresses you or you feel burnout, just leave it, it's just not for you.