I feel the same as the author about software jobs. I love CS, coding, architecture, and UX design more than just about anything. I spend at least 60 hours coding most weeks, and mostly for the love of it. But I dearly hope that I never have to go to work at a company, any company, ever again. I've happily accepted a very minimal standard of living to help ensure that.
There are a lot of top comments here already that sound like "keep quiet and stop being ungrateful." Well, being grateful for what you have is good for your mental health in general, but it isn't the answer to everything. Otherwise, why have any preferences?
Obviously, I feel this way because of my experiences in the workplace, and you feel differently because of yours. Sorry, but ditch-digging is not universally a worse deal than a software job. I put in 4 years at Walmart, during which I cleaned a lot of shit and vomit off floors and walls, pushed carts through snow in the northeast winters, and physically exerted myself to exhaustion regularly. Yet I was never very unhappy. I never got anywhere close to the raw misery and near mental breakdowns I experienced in several of my developer jobs.
I would have expected more of us to understand all too well why dev jobs can be truly terrible, stressful, unrewarding, and dis-empowering. If you feel lucky to be in this line of work, maybe you are lucky, but not every software engineer is lucky to have their job.
"""Sorry, but ditch-digging is not universally a worse deal than a software job. I put in 4 years at Walmart, during which I cleaned a lot of shit and vomit off floors and walls, pushed carts through snow in the northeast winters, and physically exerted myself to exhaustion regularly. Yet I was never very unhappy. I never got anywhere close to the raw misery and near mental breakdowns I experienced in several of my developer jobs."""
So True, money is good in our industry, but sometimes the stress that comes with it is nowhere worth it. We spend our health earning money and once we are rich, spend our money trying to regain our health lol.
I think there is really something to be said for the simple satisfaction of doing almost the same thing everyday and never having expectations change. You leave your job when you clock out.
Constant deadlines can and will wear on you over time. Pressure to meet those deadlines while solving problems in which the completion time has been guessed and the people setting the deadlines don’t seem to get that creates a lot of stress.
It’s honestly made me want to get into dev management just because I feel like I could to more to help dev teams run smoothly than I can as a single developer.
There are a lot of top comments here already that sound like "keep quiet and stop being ungrateful." Well, being grateful for what you have is good for your mental health in general, but it isn't the answer to everything. Otherwise, why have any preferences?
Obviously, I feel this way because of my experiences in the workplace, and you feel differently because of yours. Sorry, but ditch-digging is not universally a worse deal than a software job. I put in 4 years at Walmart, during which I cleaned a lot of shit and vomit off floors and walls, pushed carts through snow in the northeast winters, and physically exerted myself to exhaustion regularly. Yet I was never very unhappy. I never got anywhere close to the raw misery and near mental breakdowns I experienced in several of my developer jobs.
I would have expected more of us to understand all too well why dev jobs can be truly terrible, stressful, unrewarding, and dis-empowering. If you feel lucky to be in this line of work, maybe you are lucky, but not every software engineer is lucky to have their job.