Warning: Some posts on this platform may contain adult material intended for mature audiences only. Viewer discretion is advised. By clicking ‘Continue’, you confirm that you are 18 years or older and consent to viewing explicit content.
An analysis of the 2024 StackOverflow survey results where only 20% of programmers reported being happy at their software engineering jobs. Let's look at 6 r...
I first worked in construction, then I worked in electrical engineering, now I do software, and there’s things about software that I find inherently dissatisfying. There’s little physical movement or location variety, your code is published quickly but often deleted quickly, there’s little interaction with coworkers outside of your very specific domain, and the entire field of software has more money than they actually deserve to have based on how hard they work or actual value your code provides to society. Some companies produce very necessary products that do very necessary things for all of society to function, most of the software jobs are instead working on bullshit marketing apps that waste people’s time or just enrich some financial services company or other societal middle man that doesn’t actually need to be any better or richer.
The main upsides are the immediate return (some buildings take like a decade to build, most code is published that month), the remote work / hours flexibility, and the aforementioned undeserved pay and benefits.
Not even just bullshit marketing, rather on making someone rich a smidge richer. For weeks and weeks of figuring out how to solve a problem that the client could solve by just not insisting they can export every single view to excel and re-import from excel “because that’s what I’m used to”.
There’s little physical movement or location variety
That’s the main reason I switched from computer science to electrical engineering with a focus on embedded software. Programming microcontrollers to achieve something tangible is a lot more satisfying for me than writing some application that only runs on my pc to shuffle some bits around
Yeah, it was a great feeling when I had it for the first year and a bit of my career working on architecture software. I had it again recently when working on back end auth systems for a major automotive company but then we lost the contract and I had to rotate off. Now I work building software that is necessary, but the parts that are prioritized for development aren’t the parts that make the average workers’ life easier (which would increase overall efficiency when measured on a time basis) but the parts that enrich management because that’s easier to sell.
I first worked in construction, then I worked in electrical engineering, now I do software, and there’s things about software that I find inherently dissatisfying. There’s little physical movement or location variety, your code is published quickly but often deleted quickly, there’s little interaction with coworkers outside of your very specific domain, and the entire field of software has more money than they actually deserve to have based on how hard they work or actual value your code provides to society. Some companies produce very necessary products that do very necessary things for all of society to function, most of the software jobs are instead working on bullshit marketing apps that waste people’s time or just enrich some financial services company or other societal middle man that doesn’t actually need to be any better or richer.
The main upsides are the immediate return (some buildings take like a decade to build, most code is published that month), the remote work / hours flexibility, and the aforementioned undeserved pay and benefits.
Not even just bullshit marketing, rather on making someone rich a smidge richer. For weeks and weeks of figuring out how to solve a problem that the client could solve by just not insisting they can export every single view to excel and re-import from excel “because that’s what I’m used to”.
That’s the main reason I switched from computer science to electrical engineering with a focus on embedded software. Programming microcontrollers to achieve something tangible is a lot more satisfying for me than writing some application that only runs on my pc to shuffle some bits around
I’m glad I work on software that has value, where I control the entire ecosystem, and where my contributions are significant.
Yeah, it was a great feeling when I had it for the first year and a bit of my career working on architecture software. I had it again recently when working on back end auth systems for a major automotive company but then we lost the contract and I had to rotate off. Now I work building software that is necessary, but the parts that are prioritized for development aren’t the parts that make the average workers’ life easier (which would increase overall efficiency when measured on a time basis) but the parts that enrich management because that’s easier to sell.