I'm writing this while drunk, and only editing sober for grammar, spelling, and clarity. The sentiments I express herein are entirely my own, possibly offensive, and not representative of any views my employer (which I will not name) might hold. Caveat lector, suckers!
I first read “Yellow Brick Road” by Simone at Minutes to Midnight when he dropped it on the 20th of July, and it’s been percolating a while. I’ve wanted to respond to it, but didn’t know what to say besides an expression of sympathy. There’s a lot to unpack here…
- past choices limiting present options
- the need for proficiency
- a desire for recognition of expertise
- uncertainty as to how best to adapt to changing circumstances
- fear of irrelevance due to distaste for popular technologies
- regret for a road not taken
I share much of Simone’s discontent, but for different reasons. He’s trying to get back into an industry he left twenty years ago. I, however, would like to get out of the industry in which I’ve worked for almost twenty-five years.
I have come to regard software development as thankless work that I would rather not do any longer. This is for a variety of reasons:
- The mental effort required is physically tiring.
- Overtime is routinely expected and routinely uncompensated.
- Meetings get scheduled with no consideration for anybody’s convenience but that of management.
- When asked to give estimates as to how much time a given task will take, my answers are routinely dismissed by management because they have already decided in advance on deadlines they have not yet communicated to me.
- I don’t have nearly as much autonomy concerning my working conditions, hours, or methods as non-developers think I possess.
- I rarely achieve a sense of mastery because the endless churn and trend-chasing:
- You just figured out JQuery? Fuck you; it’s all about Angular now.
- You just figured out Angular? Fuck you; we just rewrote Angular, and in any case React is the new hotness.
- Oh, you want on-the-job training to stay current? Fuck you; study on your own time, on which we’re gonna encroach because our deadlines matter more than your life, and if you don’t like it you should be grateful you even have a job.
- I receive no credit for my work when I succeed in solving a problem for others, but when something goes wrong it’s always my fault even if I had faithfully implemented a bad design after questioning it and being told to shut up and code.
- Nothing I do is tangible or in any sense permanent.
When I tell people that I build cathedrals on quicksand from blueprints sketched on bar napkins, they often think I’m joking. I’m not. I honestly wish I was.
I’ve been doing this sort of work for almost twenty-five years. Could I retrain and do something else? Maybe, but it would be costly in terms of both time and money. My current employer isn’t going to train me to work as a business analyst instead. For Hell’s sake, they won’t even consider me for a Java or Python project because they have me typecast as a .NET developer. Never mind that I’ve had to learn JavaScript, React, and Angular to work on projects that used .NET in the backend.
And college? Right. I dropped out college as a young man because it was a fucking miserable experience and I had no support. Why would I go back? Why would I spend tens of thousands of dollars and at least four years taking classes after work to get a degree that might well turn out to be less useful than a roll of toilet paper that I got at Costco for roughly fifty cents, and be miserable in the bargain? I’m already burned out, and the solution to burnout is to take on even more thankless work as a student?
So, yeah. I’m almost forty-five and I feel stuck “in my career”. Why the scare quotes? I don’t see it as a career. This was just supposed to be my day job, a way to earn a living and support myself as a writer. Well, I picked the wrong day job. Don’t become a developer in order to support doing something that actually matters to you but isn’t commercially viable. All you’re likely to get out of it is an intimate understanding of why computers were a mistake.
What brought this on? I recently got rolled off a project at the consulting firm where I work. So now I’ve got to find a new project, pretty much on my own, because personnel management at this firm is overworked, underpaid, and doesn’t actually manage personnel. Instead of being assigned work, I have to network and talk to managers and do interviews as if I was looking for a new position at a different company, and the internal project listings are so uninformative and uninspiring that they make the ones on LinkedIn look good.
They call this bullshit “owning your career”. First off, this is my day job, not a career. Second, if I was serious about owning this career that I never wanted in the first place, I’d be on LinkedIn applying for jobs at other firms and dealing with ghost listings, nonexistent or nonsensical salary ranges, and multiple rounds of interviews because managers can’t manage to make a fucking decision.
I swear to all the gods that never were, if being a janitor paid as much as being a developer I’d go back to sweeping floors and scrubbing toilets. Either way I’m dealing with other people’s shit, but at least a janitor can look at a polished floor or gleaming tile after a thorough cleaning and say, “I did this.”
Sanitation actually saves lives, too. Code just seems to immiserate them. Maybe I should have become an electrician instead, or tried being a rent boy in Manhattan while I was still young, slim, and pretty. Is renting out my ass to rich old men looking to bust a nut really worse than renting out my intellect to rich old men who don’t think they’re rich enough? Either way I’m nothing but a whore.
Time to find another cathedral to work on, I guess. Just once I would like to not outlive my work or see it sink in a quagmire of vague, ever-changing requirements, but I’m sure I’ll eventally get that wish, good and hard.
The problem isn’t that I don’t know what I want to do instead of software development. The problem is that I don’t want to do anything. None of the alternatives appeal to me, just as none of the options allegedly available to me when I was eighteen appealed. I just said, “Fuck it; I’ll learn to code”. Am I now, at almost forty-five, supposed to say, “Fuck it; I’ll learn ${FIELD}
”?
It’s not that I can’t, but that I don’t see the point. It’ll just be a different way of making rich assholes even richer, and I’m sick of it. However, I’ve got to suck it up and deal. I might talk big about my masculinity being my property, but as a man I don’t get to fall apart. I don’t get to have a nervous breakdown, or be burned out by my work. I’ve got to keep going until Death herself comes to relieve me from duty.