I'm wondering in which was you feel like the job has gotten worse over the last 3-4 years or so.
Even if you think things are better overall, there are probably ways it is worse.
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Mostly the growing wear and tear of not correctly balancing my own needs and the needs of my various jobs. I find it takes fewer stressors to slip into depression/anxiety/irritability than it used to and I don't bounce back as quickly after mild crunches.
You are not alone Drew. Theres so much happening on our computers and technology is changing so fast that its easy to get absorbed and its easy to get frustrated or overwhelmed and feel defeated.
Its easy to slip into a bad space when you dont have enough of a good space. I started gym this week and already that has perked my mood. Make sure you get up in the morning and get out the house, get some fresh air, walk your dog, go to a local cafe and people watch - a good routine is proven to have major benefits. Small steps and soon you will get your balance back. Prioritize calmness and peace in your life.
My previous employer was affected for the worse. Pre-COVID, people were pretty laid back. Then a lot of people started throwing themselves into work to avoid their problems. Fun conversations turned super negative, and people were generally in a bad mood for no apparent reason.
After a while, the office was just depressing and working from home made it harder to communicate. There was a serious lack of passion and joy.
Wondering if some of these instant collaboration tools take the fun out of work for some people? Like it's super easy to become addicted to work nowadays, and, hard to get away from work when it's all tech based?
Man I feel this one! Its been a tough few years of adjusting. Swinging too much one way and now maybe slightly correcting.
We also have Netflix and other tech which i feel seriously introverts and depresses people, there's some really dark stuff on netflix which makes it easy to get in a negative headspace and sit at home and do nothing which propels that negative head space.
I feel like if covid happened in 2006 we would have been fine mentally, but it happened at a time where technology was just ready enough to try 'support' us and we used that to our own demise, it was stressful.
I guess every generation has learnings and ours was that technology shouldnt be used for everything and that some things are meant to be 'traditional' cause it makes us happy.
Also that healthcare should cover free/discounted life coaches and therapy lessons, not diagnose people as sick or depressed and cover them up with pills.
At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, I found developer, especially young ones, don't know what is developing anymore.
I mean, they don't know what is a data structure, what is an algorithm and generally just pile up technologies on top of others.
Ok, you can stack up ElasticSearch with KeyCloak microservice running on k8s, with Angular front end, kafka messaging queue, swagger API and so one. But when I ask you to design a Tree structure, you answer that's too complicated, that's a C++ concept and you don't need that anymore for web development... True story...
I'm a new developer just recently written a DFS for file system tree to delete some files with specific extensions and exclude some folders which are need to be protected.
But yeah I work in these stacks too ES, KeyCloak, K8s etc.
Glad to hear this 😊
In 10 years of web dev I’ve never had to design or traverse a tree from first principles. There’s no reason for me to keep that in working memory other than as the world’s most boring parlor trick.
Any frontend framework is tree base. DOM is a tree. File system is a tree. GoogleMap is a Tree. You are working with trees for 10 years. I find very sad that you consider this concept as useless.
How often are you actively writing novel algorithms to traverse any of these that this is important to you and needs to remain in working memory?
A few examples of when I had to implement tree or graph structure in 10 years:
Different projects, different domains, but the same way to address them. So I had to manipulate graph and tree structure at least once a year.
The point is not to know by heart how to implement a traversal, a deep search or whatever. I've implemented maybe a dozen of deep search in my career, but I'm still unable to do it properly at first try.
The point is to recognize that the problem you have to address can be modeled with a tree, a graph, or any other classical structure or design pattern.
We are working on very different projects my friend. I've primarily worked on forms-over-data business software, content management, and a little bit of streaming audio/video.
I agree with you here 100%.
Mostly it's what didn't change that bothers me.
I think overall there is more fragmentation. Hard to feel grounded when too many different paths are competing to be "right".
But also fragmentation in IRL community. Pandemic is biggest factor here, but other factors definitely make in-person meetups harder to find and maintain.
For one, expectations have risen quite dramatically over the years. The tech stack has dramatically expanded. That is sort of allright, it has always been a "study whole life" job.
The problem is working on a big team or mature projects has become a nightmare, because your chosen stack will mismatch to big extent. So even if you are person who spends a lot of time upskilling, it's sort of shit, because you are somehow expected to upskill on things you don't care about, on your personal time. Which not only is lot's of unpaid work, it also quite actively might screw up your professional development.
On the same note, tech recruitment has become much much worse somehow, despite so much better tools. I feel the "broad stack" is the issue there as well, much more difficult to overlap the required skill set and developer skill set.
Last and not least, the business side of SW development seems to become more and more inept, and try shift responsibility to development. Lots of ideas are poorly thought, would never be profitable etc. So as a developer you are somehow expected to make miracles, even though - if you could durn around every idea to be hit success - you would probably not be working on a salary - but swimming in money running your own sw house...
Also you need to do HR job, and make sure you are hired for job which matches, because you'll pay the price if things don't work out, not the inept person who hired you and did not know the requirements of the position.
And yes hybrid sucks, it's neither here nor there. Do either remote so you don't have to live "near" the offices, or fully office - so you are not the idiot who commute 2hr/day just to have bunch of online meetings.
Change is too fast and no standardisation. There used to be a new version of .net every 30 months. Now it is every 30 weeks.
Microsoft are the very worst for this. PowerBI is on a 3 week release cycle as far as I can tell. This means any blog post or training video is out of date almost as soon as it is released. Not only does this make it more difficult to pick up or do as a side process, but it also means Devs spend more and more time polishing or refactoring existing solutions as the functionality they wanted 3 months ago now exists
It's the same is JavaScript land. Just when we had got our heads around graphQL, along comes tRPC and the front end world has a new stack. We have gone from webpack, to parcel and snowpack and now turbopack and create-react-app to Vite and now create-t3-app in under a year (it feels)
Not to mention Svelte, Astro, redwood, bun, deno....
Rant over. I need a lie down.
I blame COVID here.
Well, not COVID itself, but the level of isolation raised a lot.
I definitely suffer from it.
And I believe nothing has really changed with the work itself.
I am a dev of 10 years, i primarily do frontend but i do backend and db as well.
I find I get overwhelmed with programming these days, I used to understand and grasp everything and it used to be fun but now everything is changing and there's always new tools and peoples opinions and it feels like nothing is as easy as it should be for this day and age. Like theres this 'rush' culture.
I find front end development extremely tedious and time consuming, with the number of browsers, os's, devices and screen-sizes increasing. Features available and not available on certain browsers. I would have thought by this day and age we would have streamlined the development process but its just getting more tedious and complicated.
I feel like we are ahead and behind at the same time, in this weird space and its annoying. Of all possibilities and ways of doing things, we are on this one track that im sure if someone really challenged, we could better it. Its like we have invested so much time in javascript frameworks and other crap that no one wants to move on.