Ask HN: Career Change Confusion
I’m not great at being an engineer either, I’m good enough to do my work but it’s not fulfilling and it leaves me feeling drained at the end of the day. I’m technically a senior engineer so along with doing my mind numbing programming work for the day, I’m also supposed to be actively and passionately discussing hot topics like micro frontends, micro services, graphQL, and other things that I could not care less about. The more complicated we can make the solution, the better because there will be more work for us all to do.
All of this despite actually liking programming on personal projects makes me think this isn’t the right career choice for me, but I’m not sure what else to do. I have tried to do something less involved in engineering but still close enough that I can use my technical skills and not really enjoyed it because it turned into me making google slides explaining how to integrate x customer system with y API over and over again, then presenting that.
I would like to do more creative things like make video games or something but I also need to pay rent and I’m worried that if I make something I enjoy doing my career again I will end up in the same spot of not enjoying it anymore.
Even before I got into the industry I was making video games on the side. The only time I wasn't making games on the side was when I was in the industry itself, as it seemed like a conflict of interest (and the contracts I signed reinforced that).
1. Full autonomy and creative freedom (ie my own thing whith no stakeholders to convince, no egghead managers to leak asses, no humiliating performance reviews etc)
2. Highly technically challenging product in a relatively small team (think building postges db vs cobbling up apis and plow through layers of legacy shit to serve another marketing agency nobody will remember in 10 years).
The 2nd is a weaker answer (doesn’t last long either, because companies like cars tend to degrade over time).
The main theme for me is having a deep connection to meaning. Having this magic “why” answered with both my mind and my soul.
It’s like telling someone with depression to go to war and then be shamed that he had depression. Like it’s a privilege.
If it was easy for OP we wouldn’t seen this post. Intellectual burn out and stress is much more severe than a stress from manual labor
Manual labour can be quite fulfilling compared to white collar work, as progress is much clearer and it can be a nice mental break compared to an office job.
Of course it’s not for everyone, but at the very least it makes you appreciate the privilege of working in an office
Office work can be just as good/bad/meaningful/useless/hard/easy etc. as manual or almost any type of work these days.
It's very ignorant (and outdated by 50 years in a first world country) to look down on software engineers like they are spoiled children whining about their little naive problems.
(I'm exaggerating to illustrate the point).
Intellectual burnout won't fracture your spine.
That's not to say that depression and burnout don't matter.
But complaining about them is a privilege.
How many people killed themselves because of the broken leg?
Also how often severe traumas happen to residentual plumbers? Vs every second software engineer I know had multiple episodes of burnout or depression or other types pf breakdowns sometimes severely affecting their personal and professional life.
Like approximately everyone else, you have to have a day job.
The nature of day jobs is that even when your day job is doing something you love, you still resent it to some degree because it is a day job...the touring musician still has to ride in rented vans and stay in cheap hotels.
Which is to say that all a day job needs to do is pay for rent and ramen and a good day job allows you to do the things that feed your soul in your time away from it. That's it. Good luck.