Timestamps: 2:32 - How I burnt out and what it looked like 8:19 - The impact of culture and mental health 10:29 - How bad code can effect the developer experience 15:47 - What I did when I realised I had/was burning out. Please check out the description and / or the article linked that will explain in a bit more detail what you could do if you're on the path to burnout. There are some really good links to external articles about developer burnout that are a bit more well rounded than this video as well. Stay safe friends.
You are slave? Yeah buddy that's no good. Perhaps you haven't experienced a work culture where you can trust your team mates, your manager champions your personal development and you some some degree of autonomy over your work. It's pretty great - hope you get a team like that someday.
POs are funny, they will never let u do the think because something more import is always coming. The very firsts day of refactoring is never to code, it is to find what can be coded fast enough that it will have a certain logic like inside you refectory so at least what remains there have some consistency in refactoring matters. Refactory should be paid as an extra, an extra Jon instead of the main one. Or delegated to sole purpose teams. But... MONEY TALKS
What you spoke about in this video is the biggest reason why companies prefer younger devs... they don't burn out as easily working 24/7 and they put up with a lot more abuse. More senior devs demand more money and they have boundaries which many executives don't like. I' It's unfortunate but it's the reality.
This is very similar to what I went through. What you said about it seeping into your personal life is spot on. I dreaded going to work, and outside of work I could only think about having to go to work the next day. I stopped exercising because I was so tired all the time, started drinking more. Fortunately I quickly realized how self destructive that was, so I quit my job. Now I'm doing much better.
@Tom I'm still a developer, but I moved to a small company that really values it's employees and respects their personal time. I'm also only working 28 hours a week. It's a big pay cut, but I don't mind.
I've watched this video half a dozen times since the new year as I was toying with the idea of leaving my high pressure job & abusive client in engineering consulting. Just ended my last day on Wednesday. Not looking back. Thanks for the motivation!
CM Thank you so much for commenting, it’s stuff like this that makes me happy I left this one up. I was applying for jobs and numerous companies brought up this video and asked why I was still applying for engineering roles. I almost took it down after one company said they took a look at my channel and didn’t think I’d be a good culture fit. Really glad I left it up, thanks again for the comment and I hope your next role is something that has a much healthier environment. All the best, Matt
@@MattKander I'm glad you didn't take it down. I know it will be challenging for those of us disillusioned with how are careers are turning out - but it took me many years (15) to realize that no career is worth the mental & physical health detriments. I wish you the best in your journey and thank you again for sharing your courage online, which helps so many others! Cheers!
I did the same few years ago 😊 will never look back, the problem is that we work for people who think creativity is a full time job, and genius ca be produced with a lot of training
Takes a lot of courage to share what you went through sir. Aspiring dev need to hear stories like yours to prep themselves mentally and emotionally. Being a developer also has its dark side. Hard to find it in RUclips when everyone is only talking about the good stuffs of being a Dev. 5 stars for you Matt
I've been on this small team with no consistency on codebase, long story short, I quit and moved to a scale up company supposedly more organized. They weren't. It was 10x messier. What baffled me was that almost every 100 of the devs there thought dealing with this shit was part of your job and life goes on. I was let go with 3 months with no detailed reasoning except I wasn't fitted for the company culture and not on level with what they expected. I'm almost 6 months unemployed now COMPLETELY demotivated to work again because I was led to believe every place is like this. I'm really stuck with this thought on loop in my head. My idealism is crushing me :(
There are definitely companies and products out there that focus on quality - it just takes time and a fairly thorough research on your end to find them. If I can give any advice - do your research on what companies you actually want to work for. Try speak to some people in the engineering team (or people who have just left the company as they’ll give you honest feedback). Put effort into the applications and Be open minded enough that it’s going to take a while.... I put out over 120 applications in the last three months and I’ve only just managed to get a job. It’s tough out there but it’s the nature of the environment atm unfortunately. Best of luck, keep your head up and keep at it. No harm in taking a part time job at a cafe or someplace to keep food on the table and alleviate some of the financial stress
I love 90% of my job, but I've been wanting to quit for the following reasons: 1. My senior developer is super OCD, gives me the smallest criticisms. Is super condescending in the way he talks. 2. The work I've been given for the past few months are all monotonous UI tasks that have no challenge, and half the time when I submit a PR, my senior finds something to nitpick at. I'll have you know the other dev makes far more mistakes than I do, and doesn't follow my senior's conventions, but doesn't get criticized as much because that guy is far older than us 3. The raise I got this past year sucked. Just $0.33+ per hour raise 4. During the grind, it's awful. I worked like 20 hour work days. It was absolutely insane. 5. I just don't feel like I'm growing. I'm thinking about just working part time as a web dev tutor and launching my own company or doing freelance. I'm just so uninterested in living like this.
I work as a Mech Eng in consulting. Same issues as you described. Insane schedules, horrible management, and no communication. Burnt out more than once. I watch my mental health now but none of my coworkers do. The industry preys on conscientious, hard-working people. It's always "do it for the team" or "everything's changed - let's get it finished in the same time limit" even though the personal cost is unacceptable. The worst part is getting laid off with no notice - it's insulting.
It is amazing how the problems are the same no matter where you live in the world... I am in São Paulo, Brazil and you described perfectly how I am feeling at this moment. In fact, I found your video because I wanted to know if more people feel like me. I'm back-end developer and I'm stuffed... I should pulled the plug 4 years ago. my health is mess and I'm unhappy with my job. I guess that programmers are kind of artists, and put us in a factory culture, at some time will be a grave for our healthly and creative minds. I hope I could find out another way to be a programmer without burnout, cause life is a short trip and I can't waste more time in this way... I want to live not only survive.
I'm also from Brazil. Currently I'm at Piracicaba. I quit my job this month 'cause I had a burnout. It's really demotivating the pressure I was receiving everyday and it makes me think about not being at this field anymore. Unfortunately it is the only thing I have prepared for.
Hey man, I've worked 40 hour desk jobs and I've worked 70-80 hour weeks outside in 30 degree weather. I enjoyed the longer hour job over the 40 hour a week desk job. It had nothing to do with the hours, it had to do with the team, like you said. I get just as physically knackered working a 40 hour desk job that I don't like as i did working 80s a week in trenches. Good on you for quitting before it got worse. I sadly quit too late and lost everything outside of my job first. Subscribed!
Story of my life. I quit Front End Development over 2 years ago and now work partially outside as a stone masonry. I can't see myself ever going back to the tech field. I was depressed and the tech environment is so freaking toxic. I definitely didn't fit in with the whole "company culture". In a much better place now mentally and physically.
@@trafficmonsoonacademy562 Being the only minority in the workplace at multiple companies, looking at code for 8hrs a day, thinking of solutions for bugs throughout the weekend, untasteful remarks from the boss. At my first job the CTO said his office smelt like a black person. I guess his office had a strong cologne smell or something of that nature. 2nd job as a developer the boss was a nice guy but was always making race jokes that made me feel uncomfortable. I know he was joking alot but being the only black guy employee in the field was just a burden. And I have thick skin when it comes to these things. There were a lot of contributing factors that caused me stress and depression that resulted in me leaving the field.
@@P8860 thank you so much for sharing. Was it more like you felt inferior or was it because the caucasians think they are superior just because they are white? Cant believe race still matter to people in 2020.
@@trafficmonsoonacademy562 It was neither.. It had more to do with my mental health than anything. All though if you google why women and minorities leave the tech field you'll see that racist remarks,unfair pay, hostile environment is a contributing factor of the lack of diversity in the tech field. It's a very well known issue that I don't think there is a solution for. It's just is what it is. I'm sure there's a few women and minorities who have had better experience and are thriving in the field but it just left a foul taste in my mouth. I'm in a much better head space now.
The main reason I hate coding with other people is that they worry too much about the webpack bundle and try to make bootleg versions of great packages which end up worse and nobody understands. Drives me nuts when other people look at the issue and cannot understand because someone wanted to make redux #2 without any documentation and garbage code.
Hey Matt, thank you so much for sharing this. Over the course of 9 years, react's syntax has transformed THREE times. It has been a lot better since hooks came out, but before that .... render props, hoc (all churn). But on one in JS land talks about it. I think we are really undermining the consequence of using these tools. Once a great feature, becomes a churn 6 months later. I think this JavaScript community and as well as npm community should this issue seriously.
Thank you for this video. What you described is exactly what I have been/am going through. It creeps up on you before you know it. It should be talked about more. My circumstances are different, I have children and a mortgage but what has helped is putting a clear plan in place to work myself out of it. If anyone else is going through the same I would recommend it, as the worst feeling that wasn't touched in in the video is the feeling of being trapped and the helplessness that can come with it. Make a plan to get out of the situation, see it through and you will soon start feeling better. Good luck all 👍
I am seeing this video just now. Nice words about burnout. I have been there twice and I can say that the best way to recorver yourself, is to take off some time 1-2 months and start to enjoy the life again. Gym and patience also helped me to get back on the right track.
Sometimes it helps to just take a step back and get away from technology for a bit. It’s been about two to three months since I’ve stopped doing React. I still feel much the same way but I’m getting more and more excited to pick up ios and deep dive into a totally different field. Enjoy your holiday break Artur!
Partly because JS is a terrible, terrible language, then you have monsters like Webpack and React. I can't wait for the day when JS get replaced with something normal. Might take a while though. Till then, remember, if you can't take your money and start something for yourself.
mmmmmm im also feeling like this. also a react dev. I just do as little as possible. the devs on my team are well aware im burned so they leave me be, and im not the only dev, unless we are all burned lol. no one really cares about how much gets done or not. the fact that im able to get away with doing as little as i am just shows the culture
I’m in a similar position. I recognised serious issues in this company from the first week, and I’m still there a year later because the pay is good, but I’m going to quit soon and pursue something I’m passionate about, learning a (human) language. I literally do about 1 hour of work a day and the rest I just check on emails, slack etc. But it makes me feel super shit because it feels like I’m being dishonest, so I can’t keep doing that anymore.
Front end development is particularly bad I think, rapidly changing frameworks, new devs who don't know what they're doing, and generally most developers just suck and management sucks even more. I finally ditched my career in career in software development to pursue photography. It has its challenges too but it's not completely insane like software development these days. I would never go back, it's not worth the mental and physical toll, not even for a significant pay rise.
Burnout takes years to actually recover, so try not get that far. I'm still recovering for years. If just quiting your job solves it, you don't have burnout, though it can lead to burnout in the long run.
I went through this as well ... These problems are most often caused by the companies themselves: They pressure people into quick results by cutting corners which leads to a horrible amount of technical debt. People start copy pasting code, rolling their own minimal case stuff, just commenting out stuff and so on.. Seen this at almost all companies I worked at.
Agreed, the majority of the code bases I was working on were proof of concepts that turned into long term projects - lead by developers who didn't care for the developer experience at all. I approached one about refactoring and tidying up a segment to make it easier to read and maintain, his response was "It's a waste of time, the customer doesn't see the code so why should we care?". When he said that I knew this wasn't the right place for me. Should have left then but I stuck around for another 9 months because i didn't want to 'give up' so soon. In hindsight, I should have left then - staying the extra 9 months wasn't worth the unhealthy work environment and toll on my mental health.
@@MattKander The worst thing is those people are often seen as 'high' performers and get to take charge on all new projects. While if you're the 'new' guy and get stuck in maintenance and expansion on older projects,you would often get frowned on because it took you so long to fix or change something and that you were always 'complaining' about the stuff done by the 'high performers'. The guy I replaced just copy pasted everything, he didn't bother even changing variable names. When I said a bunch of pages had broken javascript because of changes throughout the years in the backend he just told me he 'stayed as far away as possible from java (sic)' . IT is the new gold rush so you get all kinds of characters coming in: sociopaths, narcissists, people just interested in the money and uninterested in everything else, people who hate what they're doing and so on. I hope the 'fad' will pass and people will start to realize it's not a good career choice just for the 'money' and there's more to be had elsewhere anyway so the industry regains it sanity and its professionalism.
The story is almost the same as mine, but I changed jobs constantly hoping to find a decent company and work culture. I ended up burnt out and disappointed in web development. On my last interview product manager asked me directly if I can write shit code. That was the moment I realized, that there is no self-fulfillment for me in this industry.
There definitely is. My first team at Spark was amazing, really good culture where my personal development was a priority, managers who listened and we had a great product owner who trusted the dev team. Obviously it wasn’t perfect, there were still issues but as a team we were open about them, had discussions and worked past them. There’s definitely good places to work out there, we just need to find em!
Sorry to hear that. Yeah it sucks, took me a long time to get over it and change my mindset. Probably wasn't the best move to get burnt out and quit my job just before a pandemic struck either lol
I quit my job a couple of months ago. Total shit show of a team. Too much work, terrible management which poisoned the team inside and out. I’ve just been chilling and decompressing for the last few months. Trying to feel human again. It’s poisoned me for working in corporations. I will start freelancing. So tired of useless product managers and the politicking. There were tones of managers who just couldn’t do anything and tried to to get in front of anything that was working.
Props to you for doing that, as someone who was/is in a similar situation but cannot get out so easily, I can attest it only gets worse, much much worse :\
Ha! Yeah... bit of a roller coaster. Wondering if it would be worth going through some of the cvs I’ve made and show the one that got shot down for being too creative. Thanks a lot for checking out the video though!!
Web development is inherently broken, but not because of what you think you experienced. There is no fundamental difference in deciding to delegate tasks to existing libraries or splitting up the development areas between people. Both will result in dependency hell whether this means dependencies on code or people. You do not want either, but if nothing changes in the general approach in web development, either one will still be true. What seems to be the current and flawed solution is to wrap around those problems with even more convolution resulting in websites and apps that are unreasonably taxing and slow. The NPM fiasco a couple of years back demonstrated how the entire ecosystem was just a house of cards and that devs did not know what code they were using. Complaining about a codebase that you are not familiar with is one thing, being satisfied with a codebase of which you have no clue what the dependencies are is terrifying. The bigger responsibility for a dev is to KNOW what code is run on the device of the end user. Is roll-your-own makes that better, then that is the superior solution, even if it means some other dev has to put in a bit more effort at some point in the project. Part of the problem perhaps was brute forcing the MVC model on the web, which is insane.
Hi Matt. I really liked your video. I'm sad that you had to go through this. I've been there myself and I keep seeing ppl talking abt similar experiences. Though I'm not familiar with the specifics of your situation I'm going to tell you what did the trick for me. I think as developers we should really change the metrics that we use to define a successful day. The way we are feeling is basically is more dependent on how we frame a situation rather than external factors. Im a strong believer of the fact that one can find pleasure where they least expect (I'm addressing the bug fixing and the issues with the project as a whole) I also believe that is healthier if we do not tie our success with the success of the project, the metrics by which we measure our success should concern only things that are in our control. As an example a successful day might be one in which despite the technical and contextual challenges of the project I did my best and it did not consume all the energy I have. Being honest with the "my best" part is important here. Now I'm not saying the quiting or changing jobs is not the right decision in your case or others. What I'm saying is there are more jobs out there like the one you are describing than the one we all dream about. Because of that I think it is a valuable skill/feature to be able to do those kinds of jobs without having the life sucked out of you or reaching burnout. Here are a few tools that are helping me in my everyday life. 1. Books: - Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. - Peak performance by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness - Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Atomic Habbits by James Clear 2. Striving for mindfulness through meditation and introspection. I recommend the Waking Up app from Sam Harris Thanks for putting the time in to make this video. I wish you all the best.
Hey Victor! Thanks so much for the reply, really appreciate you taking the time to provide something constructive in the comment section! I’ve just put Atomic Habits on my goodreads list as my next book!
Thank you for sharing this! Same situation I’m going through right now. The code base is a mess, no consistency, typos every where, no DRY rule applied. It’s a react native app and I have to spin off a similar app. Oh but wait, the project owner just like to pressure me till I’m constantly feeling in fight or flight mode without any conscious of what it does to my health. She likes to says that I’m confused and that I’m late but the reality she poorly managed the previous team and now I have to bear with it. She has no clue what I’m missing and the inconsistencies in the resources like APIs etc. 😭
Argh i wish you would make more developer vids, its so refreshing to hear from a fellow nz developer. Some of your experiences are really helpful. I would like to learn more about your issues with client/agency work as I only have experience working for product companies (about 2 years now) and I am looking to move to an agency soon so I can get more experience working on more products.
Thanks lad. This is exactly my scenario. Been coding since the ages of vanilla HTML/JS. Webdevelopment is my passion, my way to express myself. But recently was forced to redo a project from Vue (which i loved working with) to React. At first, in my mind, it was fine and dandy, react is similar in logic with Vue. BUT, they were actually adding ReduxSaga in the mix and on top of that their own inhouse (totally unmatured and unstable and poorly documented) framework on top of React. After 2-3 months of self-pushed effort and extra-hours to learn the stuff, I started experiencing first in my life exactly what you described; word for word: high level of stress , anxiety and counting hours until next workday. Literally hating the point in life where I am at. Unfortunately I am income dependent and the job pays fairly well ...
React and JavaScript is actually one of my least favorite languages. It's not strongly typed, bugs are all over the place, and it is a monster to test and debug.
React I can agree on, there's a lot of bugs you can get with certain hooks like useEffect(() => { }, []) if you don't had that [], it will loop and rerun the function inside useeffect infinitely, and if you add the [] to mimic componentdidmount to run it once, it gives a bug
he mentions a clean code base as a part of a healthy work feeling -- feeling good about the work that you're contributing towards. so, could we blame react for burnout? seems some reasonable :P
I absolutely HAAAAATEEE javascript. I cant believe after 30 years of internet, that crappy language is still the only language for client side coding. If we had a proper language to work with, we wouldn't need all these frameworks build on top of it.
@@Mr.x.187 I've been working on a desktop intranet system for 10 years. Best time in my carreer. But now we've decided to move to a web based platform, which is in angular. I see in the 10 years i've been out of web development, they discovered how to make it even more frustrating and cumbersome. Its a good company Im working for, so I dont really want to leave, and desktop applications are as rare as chicken teeth nowadays, so what option do I have? I just have to pull through.
PSA: For anyone feeling the JavaScript/React fatigue, try Angular (not AngularJS). I'm serious. Great article. Great video. Shared both with some close friends that are (me included) feeling everything you described. I just can't stand the feeling of working for another person anymore. The thought of learning another codebase, new patterns, architectures and stuff all while stacking tech debt just because "ReAcT iS a LiB tHaT GiVeS AuToNoMy To yOuR TeAm" give me the chills. See, giving full autonomy to people hasn't worked in our society. Shouldn't work with code either. I could write a wall of text about how React is literally destroying the front-end market (alongside the startups boom), but you already sumarized almost every point in your video and article. I feel represented, but sadly it is in a bad occasion. Thank you nonetheless.
Rofl I am still looking for a software job but, I wrote a huge program that worked. I came back to it a year later and was like "wtf did i just fkin write"... what I thought was cool and edgy was just a huge code mess of trash. I deleted my github that code was NOT me...(ok it was me but not me professionally) Now I am going to organize it better for everybody to understand.
The sad truth is that you have to work with trash code once you get a job. From a managerial perspective there is no benefit in refactoring, they'd rather spend that time implementing features which impacts KPIs and their bonuses.
This was a great video. It also sheds light on why companies shouldn’t overlook the importance of project planning, style guides, streamlining, effective leadership, and organization.
Sounds like you need to work for yourself, or make your income stream more directly sourced from your own work. That's currently what I'm trying to do, build up enough FU money, get some land and freelance, unless I can find a good corporate org that makes me want to stay around. There's a reason why people get out of this field eventually. A lot of the problem we're experiencing isnt programming, it's corporate culture, its trying to turn into an assembly line what is fundamentally craftsmanship in an ever changing technical landscape, which causes things not to work together as often as they should. I wonder how various other countries experience programming. What I've begun to realize is that, at least here, its the people who do actual work, who are closer to the source of revenue that will always get the whip.
Front-end is hell. Do yourself a favor, do not work front-end jobs. If you do, ask a for a lot of money. I would only work front-end if it paid double of my back-end salary.
Front-end indeed is really hard, I have been working for 6 years and it's driving me crazy, I do like to solve problems though, perhaps I have to put more efforts and go into the back-end side, but sometimes I have thoughts to give up the coding entirely and become a truck driver or something, lol :)
I’d ask for triple due to the condescension from other devs and team members which leads to no one wanting to do it thus making it extremely high demand for it
I always end up with managers that have no experience with technical problems or in some cases don't even know how to manage a team or project in the first place. I care about my work and therefore I try to improve the situation. Right now I have quit 4 companies in my 6 year career. I am about to quit the 5th. The last one had me doubting if I even wanted to continue being a developer. I have seen entire development teams quit on the spot 2 times now. I don't know what to do at this point. So far I have had only one project with a manager that understood all these things and he was not just the manager. He was "one of us".
Is this a good way to implement the Single Responsibility Principle? -> Each class has one public method (except for accessor methods) that serves as the core function for that class, but can have multiple private methods used to break down the logic of that public method. But if other classes need access to some private method, then make that private method public as well
I related a lot to your story, but in 2 differnet companies. In one, where the codebase was so awful, cause there were no procedures, that it became unmaintainable whilst having to deliver new features to the client. holy damn... On the other one, I started to feel completely isolated in the company, the management would do some very bad decisions as well that would break the trust (e.g. having me work night in because they wanted to know if I would work hard if needed,even though it was absolutely not needed at that time), and at the same point, realizing (why the hell am I doing this? led me to quit) Thank you so much for you story! One thing though, I've been considering freelancing options, as I'm mainly a front end developer myself. Could you host a video where you talk about your process into it or recommendations on it? Best regards!
These tools and languages are not designed for rapid and often changes. The industry is due for a complete disruption of how products are built in order to keep up with the demand of constant change and standardization Html and css and JavaScript and all the tooling around it is not the answer It's a huge hacky mess
Thanks for your vídeo, you helped me a lot. I am Data Analyst and I have the same bornout issue, I was thinking to became front end developer to run way of this unhappy cicle, but I will think twice before start invest my money and time on it.
Mano Draw Development is a fantastic career to get into. I’d highly encourage you to try a few different things and see if anything works for you! Lots of free resources out there on RUclips to check out :-)
As a cs student im learning web dev for almost one year or more, because of my classes i cant get a full time job so i keep learning more and more..but now i feel imposter syndrome and burnout at the same time...
Tech is really good. There are engineers who are hungry. But the problem is, people somehow end up stuffing in more that what engineers can enjoy the taste, or digest even and end up giving an IBS. Eventually, engineers start hating such crap management and end up switching, a lot. Weak spine, rotor cuff, tiny wrists, rusty joints and unusually low voice..... Some day every software engineer is going to look back, what just happend ? It's been 10years, and the time just slipped by??? How come the same 10 years in school was soooooo long? What is it? What just happend???
Most of js libraries I have seen are just some easy examples and flashy graphics but trying to use that thing takes a lot of reading through the code. So yeah, I would do my own forms, thank you
Or the integration with typescript is shallow, and you get flaky typing as a result. Other issues include being opinionated without it being immediately apparent, which you then discover days after looking into it, sometimes even later. The result is either moving on or an ever increasing heap of hacky workarounds.
@samsong samsong in the world where frameworks change every 2 years ? You are a dinosaur. Like me, one who still uses C to make stuff work 100x faster sometimes ;)))).
Hi, I am currently going through same thing. Feels like I will loose all my career which I worked 9 years as Frontend Developer. Everyday new challange, js, react, new libraries, new frameworks. I can't really focus on 1 thing for certain no. Of months. I really want to quite my high paying job. Everyday new project, new people, new issues. I am just getting stuck. The moment I feel I can do this, there is newer version of challange. My fridays are hell. Just changing sides on bed thinking of I am going to loose it all. My mind says to quite the job, but at the same time I feel guilty, tears rolling down. I worked so hard to reach till here. And now I feel like I will be thrown out of the industry very soon. I love frontend. I love designs. I love colors and responsive. What I don't like is programming. Please help if some one can. Thanks.
It kind of felt unfair .... that front-end development from jquery, es6 , javascript and it's patterns(factory pattern and others) completely shifted to MVC and stuff like react. For me it was a horrible change, did not recover from it since...Projects are complex, lot's of dependencies, if one dependency is offline nothing works. I don't even understand git entirely, before I did not had to understand GIT, unit test, storybook, jenkins and so on. My only responsibility was to write a well organized clean code with html5/bootstrap/foundation/haml or other html prreprocessors, css3 or sass/less/stylus preprocessors and then to do the charts with jquery plugins, animations with css3 or javascript. Everything was scratched. Nowadays you programming on front-end, lot's of logic almost zero styling, animations.. even gulp or grunt faded away. Now it's react, next.js , angular, vue.js, jest unit testing, jasmine, storybook and a gigantic project with a jungle of code that is made even more complex with typescript. If I am proud of it? Yes, it's complex, it's high level. If I enjoy it? I don't think so !
Thank you for sharing. In February 2020 I joined Company A as an intern, fast forward today I'm a full time employee with a 2 years contract offer, I know I can be still new and have lots to learn since I only graduated and joined the work force fairly recently, but I'm already experiencing the emotions you described. Should I really quit the job and take time to self reflect whether or not this field is right for me? If I want to quit, is it possible to quit a contract job? The company allows the employees to request to switch departments but I'm too afraid to ask for that. What will my manager or team leader say about me etc. I'm at a lost right now.
@@swojnowski453 This absolutely! Working your ass off won't get you a promotion in most cases, they will just give you a ton more work to do. Better off just switching jobs if you want a raise.
oops, when saturdays turn into the ritual emotional recharge day lol honestly the one thing that makes it hardest to quit is feeling trapped. like there's no where to go cause the current work is so trash no real hard skills are being developed.
feeling in the same place today, my current project is not fun anymore just working because I HAVE TO, but not feeling like I'm doing any meaningful! :(
What other options we have if not the development? I am thinking to learn Electric & Gas side of things but i feel like trapped somewhere I can’t get out. Need serious help!
The mind fuck of burning out is knowing when to step away from the computer. Once you master that with the confidence you can build and solve problems you can flow smoothly
I'm having my 2nd burnout at the same company and it feels like it won't ever end... I've just applied for a new job in the hopes that this would help, but I'm afraid as heck that I'll be unemployed soon if this keeps up even after switching jobs (if my interviews go right). Any advice guys?
I'm sorry but 99% of libraries are not well tested OR well documented. Also you can home roll a library. Copying it to every repo is a novice move. Better to publish it to a private npm registry and re-use it everywhere.
I have experienced something similar recently, I did not change jobs but I did change a lot of things in my personal life to help me get out of it. I think I'm getting better. Are you still working with React?
At the moment no! I’m working with webflow and doing some freelance motion graphic work. I probably won’t dive into react again and instead pick up IOS instead. It’s a lot more structured than a lot of the JS world and I seem to take to it a bit better. Sorry to hear you’re going through similar, any tips for anyone else looking?
I ran through exactly the same way like you did. I'm really glad that I changed my work, because the thing is => if you're not well aligned with the: - product - team - business side of the company - values that you're team represents and the overall process development, you will hate your job for as long as you're there. Take a look at it this way => If you have huge struggles every day to wake up to simply sit and work, something is wrong and it's need to be changed. It doesn't mean ofc that people around you (or company) are bad, because it might not be the case. Every person have it's own personal preferences about work and if you really want to be happy doing your job => You need to find the one that is well aligned with you.
Jobs and technical challenges are not an issue. I've been programming for some 22+ years. mostly alone. Working with people sucks and drains your energy. The trouble is you have to deal with people pretty much everywhere.
![[RANT] - I just can't anymore... #webdev #coding #programming](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/XG40j-9H9qc/mqdefault.jpg)
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Timestamps:
2:32 - How I burnt out and what it looked like
8:19 - The impact of culture and mental health
10:29 - How bad code can effect the developer experience
15:47 - What I did when I realised I had/was burning out.
Please check out the description and / or the article linked that will explain in a bit more detail what you could do if you're on the path to burnout. There are some really good links to external articles about developer burnout that are a bit more well rounded than this video as well. Stay safe friends.
You are slave? Yeah buddy that's no good. Perhaps you haven't experienced a work culture where you can trust your team mates, your manager champions your personal development and you some some degree of autonomy over your work. It's pretty great - hope you get a team like that someday.
Is it better to work as a backend developer?
all starts to get down the later when u use javascript.
POs are funny, they will never let u do the think because something more import is always coming. The very firsts day of refactoring is never to code, it is to find what can be coded fast enough that it will have a certain logic like inside you refectory so at least what remains there have some consistency in refactoring matters. Refactory should be paid as an extra, an extra Jon instead of the main one. Or delegated to sole purpose teams. But... MONEY TALKS
What you spoke about in this video is the biggest reason why companies prefer younger devs... they don't burn out as easily working 24/7 and they put up with a lot more abuse. More senior devs demand more money and they have boundaries which many executives don't like. I'
It's unfortunate but it's the reality.
This is very similar to what I went through. What you said about it seeping into your personal life is spot on. I dreaded going to work, and outside of work I could only think about having to go to work the next day. I stopped exercising because I was so tired all the time, started drinking more. Fortunately I quickly realized how self destructive that was, so I quit my job. Now I'm doing much better.
@Tom I'm still a developer, but I moved to a small company that really values it's employees and respects their personal time. I'm also only working 28 hours a week. It's a big pay cut, but I don't mind.
I've watched this video half a dozen times since the new year as I was toying with the idea of leaving my high pressure job & abusive client in engineering consulting. Just ended my last day on Wednesday. Not looking back. Thanks for the motivation!
CM Thank you so much for commenting, it’s stuff like this that makes me happy I left this one up. I was applying for jobs and numerous companies brought up this video and asked why I was still applying for engineering roles. I almost took it down after one company said they took a look at my channel and didn’t think I’d be a good culture fit. Really glad I left it up, thanks again for the comment and I hope your next role is something that has a much healthier environment. All the best, Matt
@@MattKander I'm glad you didn't take it down. I know it will be challenging for those of us disillusioned with how are careers are turning out - but it took me many years (15) to realize that no career is worth the mental & physical health detriments. I wish you the best in your journey and thank you again for sharing your courage online, which helps so many others! Cheers!
I did the same few years ago 😊 will never look back, the problem is that we work for people who think creativity is a full time job, and genius ca be produced with a lot of training
Takes a lot of courage to share what you went through sir.
Aspiring dev need to hear stories like yours to prep themselves mentally and emotionally.
Being a developer also has its dark side.
Hard to find it in RUclips when everyone is only talking about the good stuffs of being a Dev.
5 stars for you Matt
Thank you! Really appreciate the comment
I've been on this small team with no consistency on codebase, long story short, I quit and moved to a scale up company supposedly more organized. They weren't. It was 10x messier. What baffled me was that almost every 100 of the devs there thought dealing with this shit was part of your job and life goes on. I was let go with 3 months with no detailed reasoning except I wasn't fitted for the company culture and not on level with what they expected. I'm almost 6 months unemployed now COMPLETELY demotivated to work again because I was led to believe every place is like this. I'm really stuck with this thought on loop in my head. My idealism is crushing me :(
There are definitely companies and products out there that focus on quality - it just takes time and a fairly thorough research on your end to find them. If I can give any advice - do your research on what companies you actually want to work for. Try speak to some people in the engineering team (or people who have just left the company as they’ll give you honest feedback). Put effort into the applications and Be open minded enough that it’s going to take a while.... I put out over 120 applications in the last three months and I’ve only just managed to get a job. It’s tough out there but it’s the nature of the environment atm unfortunately. Best of luck, keep your head up and keep at it. No harm in taking a part time job at a cafe or someplace to keep food on the table and alleviate some of the financial stress
@@MattKander how is the new company?
This just happened to me and I'm a very experienced dev. I hope you kept applying and moving forward, it's all part of the journey.
I love 90% of my job, but I've been wanting to quit for the following reasons:
1. My senior developer is super OCD, gives me the smallest criticisms. Is super condescending in the way he talks.
2. The work I've been given for the past few months are all monotonous UI tasks that have no challenge, and half the time when I submit a PR, my senior finds something to nitpick at. I'll have you know the other dev makes far more mistakes than I do, and doesn't follow my senior's conventions, but doesn't get criticized as much because that guy is far older than us
3. The raise I got this past year sucked. Just $0.33+ per hour raise
4. During the grind, it's awful. I worked like 20 hour work days. It was absolutely insane.
5. I just don't feel like I'm growing. I'm thinking about just working part time as a web dev tutor and launching my own company or doing freelance. I'm just so uninterested in living like this.
I work as a Mech Eng in consulting. Same issues as you described. Insane schedules, horrible management, and no communication. Burnt out more than once. I watch my mental health now but none of my coworkers do. The industry preys on conscientious, hard-working people. It's always "do it for the team" or "everything's changed - let's get it finished in the same time limit" even though the personal cost is unacceptable. The worst part is getting laid off with no notice - it's insulting.
It is amazing how the problems are the same no matter where you live in the world... I am in São Paulo, Brazil and you described perfectly how I am feeling at this moment. In fact, I found your video because I wanted to know if more people feel like me. I'm back-end developer and I'm stuffed... I should pulled the plug 4 years ago. my health is mess and I'm unhappy with my job. I guess that programmers are kind of artists, and put us in a factory culture, at some time will be a grave for our healthly and creative minds. I hope I could find out another way to be a programmer without burnout, cause life is a short trip and I can't waste more time in this way... I want to live not only survive.
I'm also from Brazil. Currently I'm at Piracicaba. I quit my job this month 'cause I had a burnout. It's really demotivating the pressure I was receiving everyday and it makes me think about not being at this field anymore. Unfortunately it is the only thing I have prepared for.
Yep, same here in the US.
@@devvaneio me too, maybe we should team up? :D
@@devvaneio Same dude... I'm actually starting to think about switching to a random logistics job or something like that at this point.
it is the industry that is the same everywhere. Hence the problem.
Hey man, I've worked 40 hour desk jobs and I've worked 70-80 hour weeks outside in 30 degree weather. I enjoyed the longer hour job over the 40 hour a week desk job. It had nothing to do with the hours, it had to do with the team, like you said. I get just as physically knackered working a 40 hour desk job that I don't like as i did working 80s a week in trenches. Good on you for quitting before it got worse. I sadly quit too late and lost everything outside of my job first. Subscribed!
Story of my life. I quit Front End Development over 2 years ago and now work partially outside as a stone masonry. I can't see myself ever going back to the tech field. I was depressed and the tech environment is so freaking toxic. I definitely didn't fit in with the whole "company culture". In a much better place now mentally and physically.
@@P8860 Thank you for sharing bro.
Could you elaborate more on the reason for being stress and depress? Lot of work with unhelpful colleagues?
@@trafficmonsoonacademy562 Being the only minority in the workplace at multiple companies, looking at code for 8hrs a day, thinking of solutions for bugs throughout the weekend, untasteful remarks from the boss. At my first job the CTO said his office smelt like a black person. I guess his office had a strong cologne smell or something of that nature. 2nd job as a developer the boss was a nice guy but was always making race jokes that made me feel uncomfortable. I know he was joking alot but being the only black guy employee in the field was just a burden. And I have thick skin when it comes to these things. There were a lot of contributing factors that caused me stress and depression that resulted in me leaving the field.
@@P8860 thank you so much for sharing.
Was it more like you felt inferior or was it because the caucasians think they are superior just because they are white?
Cant believe race still matter to people in 2020.
@@trafficmonsoonacademy562 It was neither.. It had more to do with my mental health than anything. All though if you google why women and minorities leave the tech field you'll see that racist remarks,unfair pay, hostile environment is a contributing factor of the lack of diversity in the tech field. It's a very well known issue that I don't think there is a solution for. It's just is what it is. I'm sure there's a few women and minorities who have had better experience and are thriving in the field but it just left a foul taste in my mouth. I'm in a much better head space now.
The main reason I hate coding with other people is that they worry too much about the webpack bundle and try to make bootleg versions of great packages which end up worse and nobody understands. Drives me nuts when other people look at the issue and cannot understand because someone wanted to make redux #2 without any documentation and garbage code.
Hey Matt, thank you so much for sharing this. Over the course of 9 years, react's syntax has transformed THREE times. It has been a lot better since hooks came out, but before that .... render props, hoc (all churn). But on one in JS land talks about it. I think we are really undermining the consequence of using these tools. Once a great feature, becomes a churn 6 months later. I think this JavaScript community and as well as npm community should this issue seriously.
I also have a video on the syntax transformation of react. I think you will like it
Yeah that's totally true.
Thank you for this video. What you described is exactly what I have been/am going through. It creeps up on you before you know it.
It should be talked about more. My circumstances are different, I have children and a mortgage but what has helped is putting a clear plan in place to work myself out of it. If anyone else is going through the same I would recommend it, as the worst feeling that wasn't touched in in the video is the feeling of being trapped and the helplessness that can come with it. Make a plan to get out of the situation, see it through and you will soon start feeling better. Good luck all 👍
Thank you for your openness. It was nice to hear this and do some personal deep reflection inspired by it,
Really appreciate your comment, thank you :)
I am seeing this video just now. Nice words about burnout. I have been there twice and I can say that the best way to recorver yourself, is to take off some time 1-2 months and start to enjoy the life again. Gym and patience also helped me to get back on the right track.
I'm back at work as a full time dev, gymming 4/5 times a week. Hoping at least one of the comments in the next video is 'yo this guy got jacked' lol
I wish you to reignite. At the moment I think I'm experiencing something similar (the difference is - I'm not even working). Happy coding.
Sometimes it helps to just take a step back and get away from technology for a bit. It’s been about two to three months since I’ve stopped doing React. I still feel much the same way but I’m getting more and more excited to pick up ios and deep dive into a totally different field. Enjoy your holiday break Artur!
Just found this video today and it's definitely relatable. Unfortunately, this is all too common in frontend roles and in the js world.
Partly because JS is a terrible, terrible language, then you have monsters like Webpack and React. I can't wait for the day when JS get replaced with something normal. Might take a while though. Till then, remember, if you can't take your money and start something for yourself.
mmmmmm im also feeling like this. also a react dev.
I just do as little as possible.
the devs on my team are well aware im burned so they leave me be, and im not the only dev, unless we are all burned lol.
no one really cares about how much gets done or not.
the fact that im able to get away with doing as little as i am just shows the culture
I’m in a similar position. I recognised serious issues in this company from the first week, and I’m still there a year later because the pay is good, but I’m going to quit soon and pursue something I’m passionate about, learning a (human) language. I literally do about 1 hour of work a day and the rest I just check on emails, slack etc. But it makes me feel super shit because it feels like I’m being dishonest, so I can’t keep doing that anymore.
@@danielh7678 in the same boat, but i am no longer at that company, thank god
Front end development is particularly bad I think, rapidly changing frameworks, new devs who don't know what they're doing, and generally most developers just suck and management sucks even more. I finally ditched my career in career in software development to pursue photography. It has its challenges too but it's not completely insane like software development these days. I would never go back, it's not worth the mental and physical toll, not even for a significant pay rise.
Burnout takes years to actually recover, so try not get that far. I'm still recovering for years. If just quiting your job solves it, you don't have burnout, though it can lead to burnout in the long run.
I went through this as well ...
These problems are most often caused by the companies themselves:
They pressure people into quick results by cutting corners which leads to a horrible amount of technical debt.
People start copy pasting code, rolling their own minimal case stuff, just commenting out stuff and so on..
Seen this at almost all companies I worked at.
Agreed, the majority of the code bases I was working on were proof of concepts that turned into long term projects - lead by developers who didn't care for the developer experience at all. I approached one about refactoring and tidying up a segment to make it easier to read and maintain, his response was "It's a waste of time, the customer doesn't see the code so why should we care?". When he said that I knew this wasn't the right place for me.
Should have left then but I stuck around for another 9 months because i didn't want to 'give up' so soon. In hindsight, I should have left then - staying the extra 9 months wasn't worth the unhealthy work environment and toll on my mental health.
@@MattKander The worst thing is those people are often seen as 'high' performers and get to take charge on all new projects.
While if you're the 'new' guy and get stuck in maintenance and expansion on older projects,you would often get frowned on because it took you so long to fix or change something and that you were always 'complaining' about the stuff done by the 'high performers'.
The guy I replaced just copy pasted everything, he didn't bother even changing variable names. When I said a bunch of pages had broken javascript because of changes throughout the years in the backend he just told me he 'stayed as far away as possible from java (sic)'
.
IT is the new gold rush so you get all kinds of characters coming in: sociopaths, narcissists, people just interested in the money and uninterested in everything else, people who hate what they're doing and so on.
I hope the 'fad' will pass and people will start to realize it's not a good career choice just for the 'money' and there's more to be had elsewhere anyway so the industry regains it sanity and its professionalism.
The story is almost the same as mine, but I changed jobs constantly hoping to find a decent company and work culture. I ended up burnt out and disappointed in web development. On my last interview product manager asked me directly if I can write shit code. That was the moment I realized, that there is no self-fulfillment for me in this industry.
There definitely is. My first team at Spark was amazing, really good culture where my personal development was a priority, managers who listened and we had a great product owner who trusted the dev team. Obviously it wasn’t perfect, there were still issues but as a team we were open about them, had discussions and worked past them. There’s definitely good places to work out there, we just need to find em!
Thanks for that comment Matt, so there’s hope
3:23 I've been there. Burned myself out hard that way. Took me months to recover from that.
Sorry to hear that. Yeah it sucks, took me a long time to get over it and change my mindset. Probably wasn't the best move to get burnt out and quit my job just before a pandemic struck either lol
I quit my job a couple of months ago. Total shit show of a team. Too much work, terrible management which poisoned the team inside and out. I’ve just been chilling and decompressing for the last few months. Trying to feel human again. It’s poisoned me for working in corporations. I will start freelancing. So tired of useless product managers and the politicking. There were tones of managers who just couldn’t do anything and tried to to get in front of anything that was working.
Props to you for doing that, as someone who was/is in a similar situation but cannot get out so easily, I can attest it only gets worse, much much worse :\
Was just reading your tweet about how you got turned down for a job because your cv was too creative And now I’ve come across your video
Ha! Yeah... bit of a roller coaster. Wondering if it would be worth going through some of the cvs I’ve made and show the one that got shot down for being too creative. Thanks a lot for checking out the video though!!
@@MattKander would love to see that video
Web development is inherently broken, but not because of what you think you experienced. There is no fundamental difference in deciding to delegate tasks to existing libraries or splitting up the development areas between people. Both will result in dependency hell whether this means dependencies on code or people. You do not want either, but if nothing changes in the general approach in web development, either one will still be true.
What seems to be the current and flawed solution is to wrap around those problems with even more convolution resulting in websites and apps that are unreasonably taxing and slow. The NPM fiasco a couple of years back demonstrated how the entire ecosystem was just a house of cards and that devs did not know what code they were using. Complaining about a codebase that you are not familiar with is one thing, being satisfied with a codebase of which you have no clue what the dependencies are is terrifying.
The bigger responsibility for a dev is to KNOW what code is run on the device of the end user. Is roll-your-own makes that better, then that is the superior solution, even if it means some other dev has to put in a bit more effort at some point in the project. Part of the problem perhaps was brute forcing the MVC model on the web, which is insane.
Hi Matt.
I really liked your video.
I'm sad that you had to go through this.
I've been there myself and I keep seeing ppl talking abt similar experiences.
Though I'm not familiar with the specifics of your situation I'm going to tell you what did the trick for me.
I think as developers we should really change the metrics that we use to define a successful day.
The way we are feeling is basically is more dependent on how we frame a situation rather than external factors.
Im a strong believer of the fact that one can find pleasure where they least expect (I'm addressing the bug fixing and the issues with the project as a whole)
I also believe that is healthier if we do not tie our success with the success of the project, the metrics by which we measure our success should concern only things that are in our control.
As an example a successful day might be one in which despite the technical and contextual challenges of the project I did my best and it did not consume all the energy I have. Being honest with the "my best" part is important here.
Now I'm not saying the quiting or changing jobs is not the right decision in your case or others.
What I'm saying is there are more jobs out there like the one you are describing than the one we all dream about.
Because of that I think it is a valuable skill/feature to be able to do those kinds of jobs without having the life sucked out of you or reaching burnout.
Here are a few tools that are helping me in my everyday life.
1. Books:
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
- Peak performance by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness
- Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- Atomic Habbits by James Clear
2. Striving for mindfulness through meditation and introspection.
I recommend the Waking Up app from Sam Harris
Thanks for putting the time in to make this video.
I wish you all the best.
Hey Victor! Thanks so much for the reply, really appreciate you taking the time to provide something constructive in the comment section! I’ve just put Atomic Habits on my goodreads list as my next book!
Great post!
What you are saying is exactly what I am going through. I too am worried about how things will look on my resume if I quit soon.
Oh my goodness dude I am so sorry you had to go through that but happy to hear you managed to survive.
Me coming across this video cant be a coincidence!!!
been ignoring my burnout for about 6months now. it feels like walking on a broken leg and pretending its fine. i'm tired now
Thank you for sharing this! Same situation I’m going through right now. The code base is a mess, no consistency, typos every where, no DRY rule applied. It’s a react native app and I have to spin off a similar app. Oh but wait, the project owner just like to pressure me till I’m constantly feeling in fight or flight mode without any conscious of what it does to my health. She likes to says that I’m confused and that I’m late but the reality she poorly managed the previous team and now I have to bear with it. She has no clue what I’m missing and the inconsistencies in the resources like APIs etc. 😭
Argh i wish you would make more developer vids, its so refreshing to hear from a fellow nz developer. Some of your experiences are really helpful. I would like to learn more about your issues with client/agency work as I only have experience working for product companies (about 2 years now) and I am looking to move to an agency soon so I can get more experience working on more products.
Thanks lad. This is exactly my scenario.
Been coding since the ages of vanilla HTML/JS. Webdevelopment is my passion, my way to express myself.
But recently was forced to redo a project from Vue (which i loved working with) to React. At first, in my mind, it was fine and dandy, react is similar in logic with Vue. BUT, they were actually adding ReduxSaga in the mix and on top of that their own inhouse (totally unmatured and unstable and poorly documented) framework on top of React.
After 2-3 months of self-pushed effort and extra-hours to learn the stuff, I started experiencing first in my life exactly what you described; word for word: high level of stress , anxiety and counting hours until next workday. Literally hating the point in life where I am at. Unfortunately I am income dependent and the job pays fairly well ...
React and JavaScript is actually one of my least favorite languages. It's not strongly typed, bugs are all over the place, and it is a monster to test and debug.
React I can agree on, there's a lot of bugs you can get with certain hooks like useEffect(() => {
}, [])
if you don't had that [], it will loop and rerun the function inside useeffect infinitely, and if you add the [] to mimic componentdidmount to run it once, it gives a bug
he mentions a clean code base as a part of a healthy work feeling -- feeling good about the work that you're contributing towards. so, could we blame react for burnout? seems some reasonable :P
I absolutely HAAAAATEEE javascript. I cant believe after 30 years of internet, that crappy language is still the only language for client side coding. If we had a proper language to work with, we wouldn't need all these frameworks build on top of it.
@@Hannodb1961 agreed, are you still coding? If so what? I think I am officially done with JS
@@Mr.x.187 I've been working on a desktop intranet system for 10 years. Best time in my carreer. But now we've decided to move to a web based platform, which is in angular. I see in the 10 years i've been out of web development, they discovered how to make it even more frustrating and cumbersome. Its a good company Im working for, so I dont really want to leave, and desktop applications are as rare as chicken teeth nowadays, so what option do I have? I just have to pull through.
PSA: For anyone feeling the JavaScript/React fatigue, try Angular (not AngularJS). I'm serious.
Great article. Great video. Shared both with some close friends that are (me included) feeling everything you described.
I just can't stand the feeling of working for another person anymore. The thought of learning another codebase, new patterns, architectures and stuff all while stacking tech debt just because "ReAcT iS a LiB tHaT GiVeS AuToNoMy To yOuR TeAm" give me the chills.
See, giving full autonomy to people hasn't worked in our society. Shouldn't work with code either.
I could write a wall of text about how React is literally destroying the front-end market (alongside the startups boom), but you already sumarized almost every point in your video and article. I feel represented, but sadly it is in a bad occasion. Thank you nonetheless.
But i cant understand angular.. very confusing..
thank you for sharing. Exactly what I am going thru but I felt mine is worse
Thanks for this.. I, too is also burned out and stressed as a software developer.. And I can super relate to you!
@Dr3w 97 that’s exactly what I’m doing right now
Unfortunately I identify myself 100%, including the "I quit" part. Thanks for sharing 🙏
Still burning, undecided on what to do.
Ended up deciding to leave
@@MoeletjiSemenya for me, healing was move to mechanical engineering, where I'm chasis architect for tracktor company :)
hi I have been Front-End Dev. for 2 years. But I really hate it. Which field is demand after FE Dev.. anyone suggest me. Thank you.
Rofl I am still looking for a software job but, I wrote a huge program that worked. I came back to it a year later and was like "wtf did i just fkin write"... what I thought was cool and edgy was just a huge code mess of trash. I deleted my github that code was NOT me...(ok it was me but not me professionally) Now I am going to organize it better for everybody to understand.
lol I do that with stuff that I wrote yesterday.
The sad truth is that you have to work with trash code once you get a job. From a managerial perspective there is no benefit in refactoring, they'd rather spend that time implementing features which impacts KPIs and their bonuses.
All code is trash. Does not matter how bad it is if it works. There is always time to make it better. Write your tests, it will look better.
This was a great video. It also sheds light on why companies shouldn’t overlook the importance of project planning, style guides, streamlining, effective leadership, and organization.
found this really valuable. thank you very much
Sounds like you need to work for yourself, or make your income stream more directly sourced from your own work. That's currently what I'm trying to do, build up enough FU money, get some land and freelance, unless I can find a good corporate org that makes me want to stay around. There's a reason why people get out of this field eventually.
A lot of the problem we're experiencing isnt programming, it's corporate culture, its trying to turn into an assembly line what is fundamentally craftsmanship in an ever changing technical landscape, which causes things not to work together as often as they should. I wonder how various other countries experience programming. What I've begun to realize is that, at least here, its the people who do actual work, who are closer to the source of revenue that will always get the whip.
Front-end is hell. Do yourself a favor, do not work front-end jobs. If you do, ask a for a lot of money. I would only work front-end if it paid double of my back-end salary.
Front-end indeed is really hard, I have been working for 6 years and it's driving me crazy, I do like to solve problems though, perhaps I have to put more efforts and go into the back-end side, but sometimes I have thoughts to give up the coding entirely and become a truck driver or something, lol :)
I’d ask for triple due to the condescension from other devs and team members which leads to no one wanting to do it thus making it extremely high demand for it
Tech is hard overall
I always end up with managers that have no experience with technical problems or in some cases don't even know how to manage a team or project in the first place. I care about my work and therefore I try to improve the situation. Right now I have quit 4 companies in my 6 year career. I am about to quit the 5th. The last one had me doubting if I even wanted to continue being a developer. I have seen entire development teams quit on the spot 2 times now. I don't know what to do at this point. So far I have had only one project with a manager that understood all these things and he was not just the manager. He was "one of us".
Omg this video really hit home and I am feeling all the feels right now 😭
Is this a good way to implement the Single Responsibility Principle? -> Each class has one public method (except for accessor methods) that serves as the core function for that class, but can have multiple private methods used to break down the logic of that public method. But if other classes need access to some private method, then make that private method public as well
I related a lot to your story, but in 2 differnet companies.
In one, where the codebase was so awful, cause there were no procedures, that it became unmaintainable whilst having to deliver new features to the client. holy damn...
On the other one, I started to feel completely isolated in the company, the management would do some very bad decisions as well that would break the trust (e.g. having me work night in because they wanted to know if I would work hard if needed,even though it was absolutely not needed at that time), and at the same point, realizing (why the hell am I doing this? led me to quit)
Thank you so much for you story! One thing though, I've been considering freelancing options, as I'm mainly a front end developer myself. Could you host a video where you talk about your process into it or recommendations on it?
Best regards!
These tools and languages are not designed for rapid and often changes. The industry is due for a complete disruption of how products are built in order to keep up with the demand of constant change and standardization
Html and css and JavaScript and all the tooling around it is not the answer
It's a huge hacky mess
Thanks for your vídeo, you helped me a lot. I am Data Analyst and I have the same bornout issue, I was thinking to became front end developer to run way of this unhappy cicle, but I will think twice before start invest my money and time on it.
Mano Draw Development is a fantastic career to get into. I’d highly encourage you to try a few different things and see if anything works for you! Lots of free resources out there on RUclips to check out :-)
As a cs student im learning web dev for almost one year or more, because of my classes i cant get a full time job so i keep learning more and more..but now i feel imposter syndrome and burnout at the same time...
im having the same issues where i work at, after4 years of front end, i kind of had enough, i might do some design instead. thanks for this video
Tech is really good. There are engineers who are hungry. But the problem is, people somehow end up stuffing in more that what engineers can enjoy the taste, or digest even and end up giving an IBS.
Eventually, engineers start hating such crap management and end up switching, a lot.
Weak spine, rotor cuff, tiny wrists, rusty joints and unusually low voice.....
Some day every software engineer is going to look back, what just happend ?
It's been 10years, and the time just slipped by??? How come the same 10 years in school was soooooo long?
What is it?
What just happend???
i cant reflect on my self more! :( how sad it is to be in these positions.
Great content as always! Did you get your glasses from warby parker? Thx
Thanks for sharing man, appreciate it. I'm done with React and "modern" JS.
I just realized I got the some problem, sadly it took many years to get over it
This is so relatable to how I have been feeling in the last couple of weeks
Most of js libraries I have seen are just some easy examples and flashy graphics but trying to use that thing takes a lot of reading through the code. So yeah, I would do my own forms, thank you
Or the integration with typescript is shallow, and you get flaky typing as a result. Other issues include being opinionated without it being immediately apparent, which you then discover days after looking into it, sometimes even later. The result is either moving on or an ever increasing heap of hacky workarounds.
what is it with frontend and degrading so incredibly quickly
A year you say. Now imagine being in such unhealthy place for 5 years and the feeling when you realize how much time you have lost...
@samsong samsong in the world where frameworks change every 2 years ? You are a dinosaur. Like me, one who still uses C to make stuff work 100x faster sometimes ;)))).
Amazing how many people identify themselves with you.
Almost like companies don’t care about anyone
Hi,
I am currently going through same thing. Feels like I will loose all my career which I worked 9 years as Frontend Developer. Everyday new challange, js, react, new libraries, new frameworks. I can't really focus on 1 thing for certain no. Of months.
I really want to quite my high paying job.
Everyday new project, new people, new issues. I am just getting stuck. The moment I feel I can do this, there is newer version of challange. My fridays are hell. Just changing sides on bed thinking of I am going to loose it all. My mind says to quite the job, but at the same time I feel guilty, tears rolling down. I worked so hard to reach till here. And now I feel like I will be thrown out of the industry very soon.
I love frontend. I love designs. I love colors and responsive. What I don't like is programming.
Please help if some one can.
Thanks.
It kind of felt unfair .... that front-end development from jquery, es6 , javascript and it's patterns(factory pattern and others) completely shifted to MVC and stuff like react. For me it was a horrible change, did not recover from it since...Projects are complex, lot's of dependencies, if one dependency is offline nothing works. I don't even understand git entirely, before I did not had to understand GIT, unit test, storybook, jenkins and so on. My only responsibility was to write a well organized clean code with html5/bootstrap/foundation/haml or other html prreprocessors, css3 or sass/less/stylus preprocessors and then to do the charts with jquery plugins, animations with css3 or javascript. Everything was scratched. Nowadays you programming on front-end, lot's of logic almost zero styling, animations.. even gulp or grunt faded away. Now it's react, next.js , angular, vue.js, jest unit testing, jasmine, storybook and a gigantic project with a jungle of code that is made even more complex with typescript.
If I am proud of it? Yes, it's complex, it's high level. If I enjoy it? I don't think so !
I feel your pain. Fully agree.
Thank you for sharing. In February 2020 I joined Company A as an intern, fast forward today I'm a full time employee with a 2 years contract offer, I know I can be still new and have lots to learn since I only graduated and joined the work force fairly recently, but I'm already experiencing the emotions you described. Should I really quit the job and take time to self reflect whether or not this field is right for me? If I want to quit, is it possible to quit a contract job? The company allows the employees to request to switch departments but I'm too afraid to ask for that. What will my manager or team leader say about me etc. I'm at a lost right now.
Do not worry about your job, they underpay you anyway. Look at yourself first. It is not them who does you a favour but the other way round.
@@swojnowski453 This absolutely! Working your ass off won't get you a promotion in most cases, they will just give you a ton more work to do. Better off just switching jobs if you want a raise.
Thanks for sharing this! Such an important topic
oops, when saturdays turn into the ritual emotional recharge day lol honestly the one thing that makes it hardest to quit is feeling trapped. like there's no where to go cause the current work is so trash no real hard skills are being developed.
feeling in the same place today, my current project is not fun anymore just working because I HAVE TO, but not feeling like I'm doing any meaningful! :(
I wish you get the work you truly enjoys good luck.
What other options we have if not the development? I am thinking to learn Electric & Gas side of things but i feel like trapped somewhere I can’t get out. Need serious help!
If it's not worth fighting for just let it go ... so many jobs out there ✌
This seem to be a really poor work environment, glad you are out.
So am i lol
Your speech relieved me bro thanks.
Burnout exists as a device to have you reflect on everything you've said about it up until you've experienced it.
The mind fuck of burning out is knowing when to step away from the computer. Once you master that with the confidence you can build and solve problems you can flow smoothly
I'm having my 2nd burnout at the same company and it feels like it won't ever end... I've just applied for a new job in the hopes that this would help, but I'm afraid as heck that I'll be unemployed soon if this keeps up even after switching jobs (if my interviews go right). Any advice guys?
Thank you for being transparent.
I. Am. The. Person. You. Are. Describing.
This is actually my issue right now. its hectic
I am terrified right now...
Thank you for sharing your thoughts
I have a gap of 4 years since the burnout and I'm looking forward to get back into the business.
I think I'm crazy, what you reckon?
I am there also, I don’t know what to do, I just hate my job
Thank you for sharing, I hear you brother
I appreciate that
I don't like comparing but watching this video and your reactions remind me a lot of my favourite you tuber Joshua Fluke 😂
I watch quite a bit of his stuff, thanks!
That `Driv[er|ers|ing]` is maddening
good ol technical debt. It's terrible :(
What do you do now ? Backend ?
I hate my web developer due to poor communication. Tech people are nerds without social skills.
thanks for sharing
react.js job is stressful after one year experience too ?
I'm sorry but 99% of libraries are not well tested OR well documented. Also you can home roll a library. Copying it to every repo is a novice move. Better to publish it to a private npm registry and re-use it everywhere.
I have quit writing code fore money too, amen brother
I haven’t even gotten a job yet and I’m sick of it lol. I’m not sure I will truly ever care about the work I do
Thank you
I have experienced something similar recently, I did not change jobs but I did change a lot of things in my personal life to help me get out of it. I think I'm getting better. Are you still working with React?
At the moment no! I’m working with webflow and doing some freelance motion graphic work. I probably won’t dive into react again and instead pick up IOS instead. It’s a lot more structured than a lot of the JS world and I seem to take to it a bit better.
Sorry to hear you’re going through similar, any tips for anyone else looking?
@@MattKander would you say people who want to work in IT to go for cloud engineering or devops ? as I see in those the future and high pay
Sound like you had an issue with legacy code, not so much the front end. I notice the front end tends to be turned into spagettit code very quickly
Thanks for sharing.
I ran through exactly the same way like you did. I'm really glad that I changed my work, because the thing is => if you're not well aligned with the:
- product
- team
- business side of the company
- values that you're team represents
and the overall process development, you will hate your job for as long as you're there. Take a look at it this way => If you have huge struggles every day to wake up to simply sit and work, something is wrong and it's need to be changed. It doesn't mean ofc that people around you (or company) are bad, because it might not be the case. Every person have it's own personal preferences about work and if you really want to be happy doing your job => You need to find the one that is well aligned with you.
Jobs and technical challenges are not an issue. I've been programming for some 22+ years. mostly alone. Working with people sucks and drains your energy. The trouble is you have to deal with people pretty much everywhere.
Wise words.
Which camera you used for crisp vedio
Sony a7iii - you can check out all the gear I’m using in the bio kit link :-)