The Darkside of Software Engineering
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- Опубликовано: 29 сен 2024
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The Darkside of Software Engineering is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural
Darth Prime the Wise
Life is a lie, there is only code.
Through code, I gain work.
Through work, I gain projects.
Through projects, I gain junior devs.
Through junior devs, my compilers chains are broken
The code will fuck me.
i was reading through and just about to add in my mind "code doesn't get you lai..." oh he addressed it on the last line hahaha😊😇
The price of becoming a professional is not wanting to do the job anymore but people keep asking you and you convince yourself to do it again
Plus money
Dreamberd be upon ye
i used to work in a place where i do the same thing over and over and over again, which i absolutely hate. Not only that, im also doing this like 12++ work hr per day. The overtime demand was so bad, i worked 450ish hrs per month. It was pure suffering, but i persevered. I came in as a boy, and came out as a man. Looking back, im so glad i kept suffering and become the man i currently am; i can see the positivity because i've been in bad places.
What this guy doesn't realize is that your situation is the norm for many devs. He's the 1% saying that the other 99% should just git good.
Awesome video, and your take is spot on. I'm on the tail end of recovering from burnout myself, and I definitely felt a lot of what this person was feeling. It was also almost entirely my own fault for exactly the reasons you mentioned.
I willingly allowed work to take over too much of my life, and I won't even claim I'm anything more than an average performer in my field (if even). It doesn't really matter, because once you enter that spiral you end up in the same place, because the only direction is down. The moment you decide to start sacrificing energy from other areas of your life without a strict time limit, you're hosed. Then when you inevitably see your performance drop you try even harder, sacrifice even more, and that only adds more gasoline to the dumpsterfire that is your productivity and state of mind.
I loved my job, loved the people I worked with, and was never pressured into overworking. Whenever I explain to people why I've not been working for months they seem to default to "it must have been an awful place to work", and I have to correct them. It's hard to explain how this happens, but you can see how if you just assume the perspective of this author.
I absolutely love learning new things, but in my burnout I just couldn't do it because I felt the weight of how behind I was on projects because I was just not productive. The prospect of truly exploring and learning a new technology was daunting, and the pain is real when you see your colleagues doing these things while you're stuck. And attempts to help just make the problem worse, because nothing stings more than to become a burden to other people.
I definitely say most of the blame lies with us, because we are still rare enough that no employer can afford to explicitly create a toxic work environment with extreme hours. We do it to ourselves and to each other by working extra hours, taking work home, and constantly trying to get ahead. I know there can be good reasons to compete and prove yourself, but I think for most people that kind of sacrifice is not warranted.
I can tell you that having plenty of pretty numbers in your bank account won't mean much to you when you're burned out, your relationships are failing, and you have nothing going in your life other than binging TV or videogames by yourself because you feel too exhausted after working to do anything else. Even in a positive and friendly workplace you can put the weight of the world on your own shoulders, and you can easily create the toxic environment in your own mind.
I think a lot of this does boil down to culture, though. Imagine the reaction you'd get as an assembly-line or retail worker if you took work home with you, or worked overtime for free. Sure, a salaried position does warrant *some* additional stake, but IMHO it should probably be bad form to do it without being directly asked to (and a balance of 40 hours really ought to be maintained). Constantly going above and beyond should be seen as a positive quality, but also as a problem that needs to be corrected for the good of the employee, their coworkers, and the corpany. Burning through bright-eyed recent grads who don't know what they're sacrificing (or who think they're the exception) cannot possibly be the most profitable system unless you have a shortsighted view of things.
Not sure where I was going with this other than just ranting, lol. Oh, the bit about being momentum-driven makes me wonder if Primeagen might have ADHD.
Just push these nerds around and take their lunch from the fridge
Darth Primeagen
Was this article written by a 20-something who doesn't understand that they're still young and dumb and that life requires WORK and that it isn't supposed to be easy?
As an unemployed software engineer, I'm glad that I'm back at the farm
My most fulfilling work is stuff I do on my own initiative. The stuff that people ask me to make tends to be boring and frustrating shit.
Stardew Valley?
Maggies Farm?
ignoring sarcasm assume its not then good for you
Software industry is weird because there are these cool fang influencers who tell everyone how the industry is, but they have jobs/work in enviroments that arent the reality for 99,x % of people.
The only other industry similiar to that is finance, where influencers talk about their cool wall street jobs while 99% of their audience end up in a district savings bank where they permit loans for car port extensions or a new bath room.
For many people, the path to unhappiness is predetermined from the very beginning!
💯 these major tech company devs live in a relatively cushy bubble. ample in-house resources and benefits. it's all become too trendy and I can't believe that those in these large companies can be maintaining the same level of skill that those in smaller companies HAVE to maintain just to stay employed. I wish software dev didn't become so popular cuz it's been flooded with "cool people" larping as devs in big tech thanks to their social status and network
About burnout, for me it's the opposite, doing backend is the fastest way to burnout. But maybe it's like that because most of my time with backend is with Java (not because the language per se, but architecture of the majority of apps built with it), doing the simples change require an insane amount of files, connections, binders, configs. You spend more time debugging and tryind to understand what's going on and where you can put your code than actually coding
yeah, that stuff kills me
Nothing gets me burned out faster than wasting time on debugging environment issues. I recently worked on a web service that was split PHP 5 and 7 that made API calls to a python back end service. Thousands of random php files that were just building string of html/css/jquery while calling out to a python API to get data. I burned days just figuring out WTF was going on while having people breathing down my neck asking why stuff was taking so long. I have never felt so drained in my life working on that project.
I would argue your system hasn’t enough clear easy to use documentation. The process of ‘trying to find out where to put my code’ is suggesting this at least. There should not BE such a process. All that should be in the docs and should be easy to find (not understand necessarily). It’s like blaming an application for being shit but you never read the manual (or there isn’t one). Anyway if this is the case: time to move on! Never (almost never) work in an environment with poor documentation. It’s a huge sign of bad priorities.
@@paulholsters7932 I totally agree with you, sadly not every company force a policy of good documentation, features, MVP and deadlines takes over good documentation. I sadly worked with very big apps for a pretty large company. For example, the last Java project I worked with was a monolith with 100+ devs working on it. And not only had a massive large source code but also most of the flow was controlled by real production session, so it wasn't easy to debug and try things, all of that with pretty basic documentation.
Maybe I had bad luck with the few companies I worked with. I still haven't seen a enterprise level Java which doesn't suffer from the overcomplex and oververbosity of it's architecture.
Sorry to tell you that your applications are difficult to change.
You can employ a clean architecture approach that makes your work easier.
As someone who’s been in software and hardware professionally for 30. I can honestly say that I’m fed up with software engineering. You do the same crap over and over again with different languages and the challenge gets less and less. Ironically the hardware gets faster and the code gets bulkier and slower because of stupid choices like Rest APIs 😂 we code worse! I’ve seen software life cycles go from decades to on average 3 to 5 years.
It’s sheer stupidity and that’s also what I see with most developers that graduates after 2000.
The whole engineering part is gone it’s become software hacking, trial and error, patch in production. Something that’s just foreign to us old folks.
My dad build online testing systems (hard- and software) for bespoke ball bearings. Some is still running in nuclear power plants’ crane that exchanges fuel rods. And tunnel boring machines.
Some stuff he found out recently ran literally from the year I was born! That is a 50 year lifecycle!
Even the hardware is still running in most cases - DEC PDP-11 is indestructible 😂He recently was invited to check out the new offices and they showed their old colleagues what was still around from their labour; As a token of appreciation for what these now 80+ year olds did.
My dad was so proud to see that some stuff was still running on old hardware but even more proud that for newer hardware they’d recompiled his FORTAN code or ram in a PDP-11 emulator when it was the early assembly language stuff. The biggest challenge was creating new interface boards to connect the existing (often also bespoke) transducers to.
Now that is rewarding.
All my projects start or with “oh this just needs to last 4 years”. It’s not firing you up to do good engineering with that attitude.
its wild. and this is such a great reminder of where we came from and where we are at
@@ThePrimeTimeagen I guess you are right mate. And although I’ve had it, I do realize that it’s a blessed job compared to 90% of the people out there. It’s just normal I guess that when you turn 50, that you get fed up with everything 🤣
Ye ye but who's the ones designing curricula for the youngins
@@rusi6219 I know got a fact that in my country (the Netherlands) most influence comes from back crap companies that live management and processes more than engineering like IBM, Cap Gemini, Vodafone, TMobile. As they provide a lot of internship spaces. We as a small company registered as a “accredited learning company” by the government complained about the terrible syllabus because its all presentation, write a report, what is ITIL that sort of paper rubbish. And the school explained that this is what those companies request.
I've definitely felt the "fear of being left behind" before. In a previous position we weren't using anything "modern," and I was only keeping up with newer things because I was sacrificing home life to learn. It was exhausting!
I think this is an important point. Sometimes there's a fear of falling behind because you're not growing in your job. Fear of not being on the front lines
there are some things that will just never die. Wordpress developers don't need to learn anything new. If you want to not have to learn every other day, just go do that. Similar pay too.
The real question, are those things worth to keep up with them? Maybe some new fancy stuff pops up and dies 2 years later, but it was a big hype at that time. Learn principles and you will be able to use any technology.
@@BusinessWolf1 It's pretty flexible, too. For example, if you do want to upskill a little then going headless using the Wordpress rest api allows for a more modern approach to your front end.
That’s exactly why i left my previous Job. It was 10 years old tech. And I felt sooo stuck. Especially in front end devs
As a new software engineer back in the day I looked forward to learning new things with bright eyes. It was great. Slowly, slowly it downed on me I had spent two or three decades basically learning how to do the same things but in a different way. For a long time it seemed every project I joined used a different language: Algol, PL/M, Coral, Ada, Pascal, C, C++... that is great, they all have their sweet features, but it seemed to me they were all conceptually the same. I was not really learning anything new. I was just using new syntax, new libraries, etc for the same old, same old. Depression set in. I lost my will to even look at the new shiny things as they came along.
I could say much the same about operating systems and other things.
Having said that my career in software has been great. It has gotten me into places and industries I would never have imagined getting into. It has taken me to many countries. Perhaps I have been lucky but I have always worked with wonderful and smart, helpful people in great companies.
Eventually a programming language came along that grabbed my attention. Finally a language that offered something conceptually new. A language that prioritised the value of correctness and robustness that was in my first love ALGOL. That language is Rust. Now I run my own little company, work at my own pace, using tools that I choose. Software Engineering is great again.
Amazing story man, props to you, what is the name of your company?
If it’s on Medium I just know he’s going to read the worst takes ever.
This is true
I've been programming since 1983 as a kid. I programmed professionally since 1991. I burnt out every 5-7 years, and I didn't know why. I had to take a break for 4 months and then re-engage into employment which is not easy to to do or to explain to prospective employers. In 2015 I retired from programming professionally and started a business to pay the bills. Now, I still spend +30 hours per week programming on my own terms and I love it! I wished I had said NO, NO, NO to all those extra hours I spent working TO MAKE SOMEONE ELSE RICH. It is as simple as that.
I wish I could do this but I don’t have any good business ideas worth dedicating my full time to.
@@DevinWeaver Start something small, maybe a side hustle that you’re interested in, you can’t grow overnight it takes time. I’m sure you have something and some ideas that could bring in a little extra money on the side. A simple idea could lead onto other bigger things in different parts of your life. Please, please, never, ever give up!
@@0runny Never give up
Your comment about Hurry is something I realized in my own life recently. An example that clicked for me a while ago was someone describing koi fish swimming in a muddy river or pond. Those who swim too fast kick up the dirt and cloud the water, they are swimming fast but aimless. You need to go slow enough to not kick up the silt and dirt. And in the end if you do this by being intentional, you will get to where you want to go much faster worker a lot less hard/stressed. HUGE. Love the content!!
A similar idea can be found in racing, especially rally. "Going fast" is not about hyper optimizing the braking, turning, and gear-shifts. Its about having a consistent pace, so you dont wreck the car.
80 hour weeks is comparable to taking the highest risk on every corner to save a few milliseconds, it is not sustainable and you will find yourself in a wreck before the finish. the guy behind you will ultimately be more successful.
I love being in software, because of what it allows me to do, but I also hate it, because it really is only truly good for people at the very top. It's always the whole Steve Jobs vs Steve Wozniak situation. You do all the work, but people only remember your marketing partner. At a vast majority of companies, you'll be treated as a human resource, and you'll be forgotten as fast as you were introduced
You're explicitly hired to automate something. That's literally the entire job, have a machine do all the computation for you. If your company is not project-based but instead in a transition from Manual to Automated, expect that to be finished at some point.
Projects are the way to go, so either choose a big enough company with lots of internal transfer or something like games where it's inherently making small products over and over.
@@alexnoman1498 this is very real, thats why coding for hobby vs coding for work is like heaven and hell
Try to be a software tester for a year and you will feel king again as a software engineer. You guys don’t know what ‘getting no credit’ actually feels like
@@paulholsters7932 software tester is paid end-user
@@tonyhart2744 software testers have to be incredibly efficient at searching out potential bugs, it doesn't seem fun or relaxing in the slightest.
I've been programming since I was a teenager, it's my passion, and I'm 40 now but you couldn't pay me enough to program for 80 hours a week. Maybe when I was in my 20s but that would kill me now. If they're making people spend that much time at the computer then no wonder they hate their career.
Yeah, 80h would be too much for, but doing 40h actual work + 20h own projects / reading books on the subject is doable
Same here. I’m 39 and been in software engineering for around 20 years and I cannot physically do that kind of thing anymore. If I do a week like that I will be completely useless the following week and overall I will have been less productive over that two weeks.
Partly it’s because I’m older but partly it’s because I did do it when I was younger. I couldn’t say no and wrecked myself.
Now I’m realistic about things and don’t find it hard to say no.
Most things people are working overtime for aren’t really important enough to warrant overtime.
I still do plenty of reading and tinkering in addition to my day job but that carries zero stress and I enjoy doing it.
I could probably work on an exciting personal project for 80 hours a week if I had no other work, but I won’t do it for someone else.
I'm currently reducing my paid hours at my job to 30, because I want to keep working on my private projects without taking all the time from things I need to stay healthy and happy (like sleep, time with my partners, sport).
So yeah, while 60h is doable, I don't think it's sustainable - and 80h would burn me out very soon.
I had a lot of 80 hour weeks the last year. But since I'm now a "senior manager", I don't even qualify for overtime pay so I resent every single second of it since my family suffers.
@@JP-hr3xqdamn
The "man of momentum" hit home, saw the same burnout when im back from a vacation
I lost interest to quite an extent even on things that i was super excited to work on before vacation
its wild how it works
Honestly this is one of your best takes yet. The amount of support, understanding and overall good advice that you provide here is amazing. Thank you.
Prime is like that funny, friendly and extremely loving senior we all lack in our professional lives.
You make me believe in the fact that programming indeed is a happy career if you're into it, I mean you have been in it for over a decade and yet you're never bored of it.
A true inspiration.
It's bad because developer lose their eye sight in 5 years so definitely bad career
@@dudedude6690dudedude come on dudedudedude
@@dudedude6690most careers nowadays are based on staring at a screen 8 hours a day, so this is not only for developers, but then again, I'd to see a research about this.
Also, people stare at screens most of the day, cellphone, RUclips, tv
Yeah, I often wonder: if people on Netflix is like this, I think I'd like to work at Netflix.
@lpls big tech is cushy let's be honest
I feel like a lot of the pressure and stress this guy or girl is talking about is self induced. They deep down feel like they need to prove themselves to themselves or others so they work more. It's hard to overcome especially if your family put pressure on you growing up, but you have to learn how to stop working so much if you want to survive.
This is tough, sometimes it’s a loop where you can’t do better because you’re overwhelmed but you’re overwhelmed because you can’t do better
people forget that SWE doesn't paid more by working more vs working less. Unless you're actually enjoying it I suppose you should start to say NO to overtime etc.
A lot of people literally don't know how to handle stability because their entire life is stressing and cramming for tests in school.
The sword of Damocles is from a story where the king of Syracuse (I think) let a guy sit on his throne for a day but he hung a sword over his head to simulate the experience of being king
“Tons of rejection, tons of hardship, it’s all nostalgia at this point” -CHAD
While I think Prime is a great influence for sofware folks, I respectfully disagree with his takes here.
I feel it's important to acknowledge that a huge proportion of jobs actually look like what the article is describing and people feel genuine and, sometimes profound, dissatisfaction affecting their lives. I'm sure advices come from good intention but I'm also sure that hearing "learn to say no to people", "do more and be excited about it", "find a better job", "it's your fault for not doing enough for making things better" will not resonate well with many. If you read this and and fall in this category - my heart goes to you, the world can be a real tough place but you're doing great and take it easy on you ❤
Agism and tech bullet lists mean 10 years of experience from 20 years ago is effectively useless; even legacy shops fancy themselves as on the cusp of upgrading and will pass you over.
I personally love that there's always something new and shiny to play with, but I also get how it isn't really 'optional'. If you want to sit on your sweet vb6 or ROR skills, you'll eventually be stuck in a very poorly managed gig you hate with very few options.
Is it really ageism or just boomers being too lazy to adapt and grow bitter about it?
The Damocles' Sword story is a very useful tale...
Loved this episode, prime. I agree with many things you said. I also have the 3 foundations I try to keep by: eat well (no sugars, no fast/junk food, take it easy on the heavy meats), sleep consistently, exercise regularly. Community is also huge, but I also try to meditate every day.
Stay healthy my friends.
I recently worked as a backend developer intern at a company and my experience there can vouch for everything this article has said.
The boss once told me during a 7 PM standup that I can only leave after fixing a bug caused by some code written by the previous intern, even though I told him that my mom is calling and it's urgent. My mom fell sick the very next day and I quit the job after 30 more days torture known as notice period.
After quitting the job with 4 months of experience, I can't find any other internship and I can understand why many people can't afford to say no to their boss. Some even develop Stockholm syndrome towards this behaviour just to survive because there aren't many jobs left and the market is very competitive.
Good advice. I've worked on both sides of this fence - pressure cookers and non-pressure cookers - and within the pressure cookers it really is on you to be your own advocate - sometimes you only get what you're willing to ask for, or even what you're willing to walk away for.
GPT shouldn't make you feel left behind. It doesn't write secure code at all, even when you tell it that it missed buffer overflow or SQL injection, it won't fix it. Without experienced engineers that know what they're doing, it could become like hacking in the 90s again.
I wonder if this explains why I'm seeing more injection Vulnerabilities lately. 🤔 🤔 🤔 I didn't even think about it.
Disclaimer since the audience of Prime is mostly Software Engineers, I am a Pentester who likes coding. (CS degree as well) my day job isn't coding it's breaking things.
Also, an alarming number of hackers can't code, which is wild to me.
@@littlered6340 I'm blue team that likes to code. We've caught a few devs using GPT and had major vulns in their code.
I don't think this is an issue with software engineering, I think it's an issue with bad management. Being a dev sucks when none of the people who are foisting their bad decisions upon you are devs themselves... When product dictates the expectations, and devs dictate the implementation, being a dev is pretty awesome! It's when the lines start to blur that things get frustrating.
Prime is absolutely right, the hell in my head forced me to start looking at things with blind positivity or indifference. Its not easy but you can do it, trust me on that.
The world is on fire, but atleast it means you arent gonna freeze to death.
* This doesnt mean you shouldnt address the sources of negativity btw, but you can do alot by seeing the brightside.
The Sword of Damocles that’s based on Greek mythology. He was the executioner at the court of Syracuse. His sword was the method for execution. It’s a very famous European saying.
I don't understand why working from home blurs the line between work and home. I was warned about this when I started working from home. But when the work day ends I have family commitments that stop me from working? Why is anyone checking work emails after logging off?
There is not only the beautiful world of Netflix-culture, Mr. Streamberry, in big enterprises the blog article exactly describes the working environment. Complex legacy systems were you first debug the application before adding a new feature. Again, you rarely build new a application normally or cool new features on a green field in enterprise companies, you have to deal with old and worst designed existing software. Period. Everybody who isn't ready for this could find themselves very quickly in that exact very uncomfortable situation. So be aware when applying for a new job at an enterprise company.
software engineering ain't the problem, CAPITALISM is the problem
Prime a lot of your takes here, is because of your ADHD, that is not a bad thing, but we without that, no matter how good we are really get burnout, that is the normal, you are in a good place but that is not the fact for 80% of the jobs out in the world.
In summary he isn't entirely wrong. Yes there are worse environments than others. But they are for the most part all somewhere along the road to what was described here.
The trick is you have to really love the work. You have to be the sort of person that would be doing it in your free time even if you weren't getting paid to do it.
That is most probably true for all careers and unfortunately what a lot of people trying to get into this dont realise.
This isn't a job that pays well, it is going to be your life for most of your life. Inside and outside of work hours. Especially at the start of your career you will be spending a lot of time fighting against your personal redundancy and learning.
Its inescapable and if you dont love it. That will chew you up and spit you out and there is no amount of realistic money that will offset that.
I wonder if Prime would have gotten to where he is now had he NOT been one of the people who didn't say no early in his career. Easier to let off the gas when you've already established yourself. At many of the companies I've worked at there has been a strong culture of "put in your 80 hour weeks when you're young and reap the reward later."
This sounds exactly like my time at university studying biotech.
I ended up falling deep into apathy and escapism, which lead me to my expulsion at last year of study.
I just can’t relate to these stories, early on my career I was very overworked but one day I decided to say no more often and negotiate more, after that I never worked outside business hours and it didn’t affect my career, it helped me a lot, I naturally was more productive and had more time to study what I was interested. Most opportunities that I had came from side projects, usually dumb ones like telegram bots
it takes time to get to that point and i think some people don't have spines so its hard
@@ThePrimeTimeagen Its hard to say no when you're trying to prove yourself
@@jel1951 Yes, it is, but I really think saying yes to everything isn’t the way to prove yourself. Being able to negotiate a reasonable amount of work and doing that very well is probably the best way. Of course there are places where this isn’t possible, but if you’re stuck in this situation try to find a way get the hell out of this place as soon as possible.
Software engineering is one of the few professions where we have that kind of power, so we better take advantage of it.
Dude I'm literally two years in, but I'm already completely with you on the tools development. I've been working with Terraform to automate generic infrastructure deployments on as many cloud providers as possible so that anybody who has written anything for the web can deploy it anywhere they want with the click of a button if they package it correctly. And the package is containers. That's it. Just containers.
Regarding the origins of the word Utopia, it derives from two Greek words: Eu-Topos (The good place) and Ou-Topos (The place that cannot be.)
0:41 you are mistaken the meaning is inherent in its construction. Utopia means "not a place". i.e. there is no such thing as a perfect place because everyone's ideals are different (so in a sense yes someones utopia could theoretically be dystopic for everyone else). There is word that is similar in actual greek eutopos which "good place" and it was a play on that.
4:09 It sounds like you have never really done UI development.
Most UI development comes from a poorly thought-out image where as most UIs are dynamic. i.e. there are dynamic in at least 5 dimensions.X, Y, Z-Depth, Time (animations etc), any numerous interactions and states most of which are not documented, often derived or improvised and if not iterated on or documented in entirely inconsistent ways.
No, GUI by nature of who is involved and the "expertise" everyone believes they have of design and aesthetics is a clusterfuck. Give me a loose technical spec for backend over a design spec any day of the week (because for a lot of UI devs design is an inherent and expected part of their job description).
I don't understand how anyone can enjoy working. I only program because I hate it the least, but I still hate it.
Not so sure - Programming is simply wonderful, and being able to do it for 80 hours a week for 40 years straight would be a joy for anyone. If that wasn't even slightly true, then open source projects would never exist.
Its all the other rubbish they have added to the mix that makes working in the industry such a grind -
"Agile"
"HR"
"Standards"
"Configuration Management"
"Containers"
"the latest framework"
"BootCamp graduates" evangelising the latest thing
"Unit and Integration Tests" that only test whether the test outputs match the expected test outputs, and are decoupled from external reality
All those people that joined the industry for the money, and are asking "What language should I learn to get the best jobs"
"Linkedin" and "building your network" by clicking LIKE on every virtue signalling post by anyone with more "followers" than you
"Big Tech" making all the decisions
"The Cloud"
Reddit, Medium, HackerNews, Twitter ... and all the other "tech community" BS grandstanding platforms that have nothing to do with programming
"The Rust Community" ... etc.
:vomit-emoji:
This
When things go sideways and you're tired of being a software engineer, there's still many options out there. Of course management/leadership is an option, but you can also pursue roles like a Sales Engineer. Twenty years of developer experience primed me to be extremely successful as a Sales Engineer. I also get to talk to customers, travel, and be more social. The social aspect sounded horrible to me before but now I love it. Being able to talk to developers every day while also building one-off demos that you can later throw away sometimes makes for exciting days. Plus, the pay can be a whole lot more. So, when you're in a rut, look for some of those tangential opportunities where you can still put your skills to good use.
21:52 THANKS for the words of encouragement. The only issue is: I hate golang today. For it's interfaces, for the import cycles, for the mess that you get with absence of modules, just packages... My brain is very strained when using this POS
then choose rust :)
Prime personally i see these exact problems wide spread in my culture/region. I think the problem is you don't know much about the overall situation in the world, especially 3rd world or developing countries! So these might not be true for companies/people/regions like you... But trust me, they are very very common somewhere else!
And BTW; I am a big fan of straight-to-point honest talks that you do. Please keep it that way!
Unfortunately sometimes a bad / unhealthy work environment is the only option for many people, especially juniors
I have been in this industry for not more than 1.5 years, but I completely understand what you mean. The way I deal with burnout is by continuously learning. By expanding my knowledge, I feel less stressed and I'm more capable of solving the problems I encounter. However, some may argue that excessive learning can actually contribute to burnout. Nevertheless, I have embraced this approach because I never saw software engineering as just a job; instead, I view it as getting paid for doing what I love.
It's good to have experience in different things. Because it is exactly the same in any other job. You can be an translator, a builder, support engineer, whatever you want. If you think that you can escape this by not doing software, you just don't know life. If you don't set boundaries, the management and clients will do it for you and they always push for what they want. The irony here s that people fear that they will miss out, and be replaced, that they have to work long hours and always say yes to anything, but then they're surprised that it does not pay because that exact attitude makes them easy to abuse. If you don't do that, you'll miss the shitty jobs, sure, but maybe you'll have a shot at something better.
The online software engineering community is such a bizarre space.
Because the first generation of hackers/founders is still alive. Meanwhile hard-/software has progressed the equivalent of 800 years in just 80. That's bound to be the most interesting time humanity has ever faced!
You haven't had a dark side of software engineering..? Don't you work primarily as a JS/TS developer? 🤔
except the dark side of programming doesn't come with power, just cpu and power usage
It's not a burden to learn for prime because he even says he has no deadlines and no clients. But if you have deadlines, clients, and have to learn, it gets to be a lot. It's a hard balance. It's all about balance.
As a software engineer that took that changed career path after a burnout in another field (no regrets, I love it and am very passionate about it, and learning so much and finding very motivated people), the problem of this person is not software engineering, it's time, people and boundaries management. You can do whatever you want, if you don't know how to set boundaries and take care of yourself and prioritize yourself, nobody will do it for you and certainly not your team who first of all is not in your head and does not know how you feel, and also benefits from you overworking yourself in the short term. If this person does not reconsider how they function, they could end up in this kind of spiral with any job. I know I did.
It's not bad to mildly inconvenience your team for your own survival. If you need it, verbalize your need for clear boundaries between work and not-work, know your needs and wants of the moment and communicate them in a healthy way, I always do it and it's either well recieved or I don't want to work there anyway.
What field did you switch to
@@dipanjanghosal1662 Was a speech therapist, switched to software engineering !
It's refreshing to see a nuanced commentary on a topic that is usually treated as "this good the other thing bad". Thank you!
On the topic of fearing obsolescence and skill depreciation :
There is no magic in computer science, every new "thing" is an optimisation on a different older "thing", if you know the old thing, learning the new thing is relatively trivial: microservices is SOA but good, Go is Java but with a better GC scheme and channels, go channels are UNIX pipes, you get it.
For anybody starting out, please don't fall for the marketing BS (learn this language or whatever to stay relevant).
Knowledge never goes 'out of flavor', products do.
10:55 -- I mostly agree with this idea. If you're doing something that seems hard enough (but clearly doable) at a glance, and it will take over 2-3 weeks by your estimate, you really don't know how long it'll take. Most certainly, you'll uncover some part of the problem or process along the way that extends how long it'll take. Sometimes (rare), it could go the oppoosite way and you find that something you thought was north of 2-3 weeks is substantially less because you discover something that does the hard work for you.
One of my pet peeves as a software engineer related to deadline pressure, is managers expecting you (the engineer) to put together months long project plans telling them week to week when pieces would be done. What the actual F purpose is this? A deadline as a date is fine, but giving them a week to week playback for that long of a period of time is always a pain in my ass. It feels like double talk because they would also say "oh, its fine if things slide, and get pushed back." So then why am I writing down when I think it'll be done rather than just focusing on getting it done? Why can't my plan list what the pieces are and how they depend on each other rather than spending time an energy describing a future that has a low chance of materializing?
No one has told me if this is just a sh*ttest in the corporate world about something else. I've been hit with it way too often and I have easily proven I am a senior level engineer on long lived projects, able to meet deadlines or communicate effectively around realities no one reasonably beats.
Outopia means "no place" and eutopia means "good place."
As a reskiller from the kitchens, it does get difficult to keep up with the hype trains on what is supposed to get you hired. I basically gave up on that and decided to start rolling an MSP with my buddy using modern technologies we like for their effectiveness rather than their popularity. Still getting some details together, but the bottom line is a good system lasts as long as it's well maintained. The less it depends on, the easier it is to maintain. I think if you can effectively leverage those facts, you can carve a niche for yourself. Still testing that theory.
The fact that a guy with a CS degree, 40k hours of experience, IQ above 140, knows what a monad is, and works a netflix “got rejected from many a job” puts us all at ease about our job prospects 😊
"Sword of Damocles" is a Greek myth about the perils of Power.
But people constantly miss-use it to mean "impending doom" or something along them lines.
So don't worry about it... the author miss-used it as well.
hah! that is beautiful
This is your take. IMO the most interesting part of the story was that there was a sword above the throne and could kill you at any time, so people focused on that. After all the "perils of power" was just some BS excuse by the powerful, reality is if you are powerful and rich you are in less of a danger.
@@cherubin7th ok commie
@@cherubin7th "if you are powerful and rich you are in less of a danger" Tell that to Nero, or Hitler, or JFK, or heck, Christina Grimmie. People with influence - which naturally includes political leaders and celebrities, so yes, power and wealth can be factors - have an enormous target painted on their backs by people who don't think they should have that kind of influence. _That_ is the "sword" hanging over their heads. Why do you think they tend to have entire teams of security when they go out in public?
Avoid the hype trains. There is too much out there to think that you need to learn every new thing.
That being said, I work at a company that is not a "tech company" and has only really started having software developers in the last 6~7 years. We don't have a lot of people with diverse experiences or people with lots of experience. We don't have a lot of support to adopt things like cloud, containers, canary, working with IT to improve deployments. It does worry me that I'm not learning enough new things that I'd be able to thrive and hit the ground running at a tech company. Working at Netflix you may not feel that as much as us at smaller companies where tech is not as central to the business.
I'm doing what I can to help move our company forward and try not to complain too much about the above issues. In the past I haven't always been as proactive about this but I'm trying to move beyond that.
But, yea, I definitely I agree with this, it's on you to fight for yourself and most places there's so much room for you to be in control of your experience. I recently had a coworker replying on tickets on his day off. I've never done that, he wasn't expected to do that. It was in his control to not do that.
Its been 5 years since i start developing. Your last speech exactly true, grow as an orphan in poverty. I can't even remember 3 days in a row that i didn't code 15-16 hours a day. What we lose from birthright we will take ourselves. Rn im miles away from where i start coding but still cant drop overworking habit.
My extensive overtime and learning at home stopped when I went freelance. I work less hours now than ever and earn more than ever. Then again like I said I’ve done it all it’s just a different language or framework or even environment. But all my overtime was on me, because I was the tech lead and I found I had to come up with solutions. Now I realize if I’d done less they’d added another person into the team. When there’s no necessary to add people because work gets down, why add them?
In my opinion Rust is very powerful and versatile thanks to its novel approach to memory management at compile time. But it is the first iteration of that idea in the wild, and I suspect we'll get a better approach on a future language. That, combined with a lot of features such as operator overloading, macros, traits rather than simpler interfaces, makes the language very difficult to learn.
I think or hope we will get a language that a let's you do what Rust does, but feels and learns like Go. Imagine, for instance, optional GC except when you don't want it or prefer not to have it. Imagine optional goroutine like concurrency with optional runtime for that, only when needed and no async/await (colored functions).
That's cause you making tools. Try making something that directly used by end user. It's a midnight debugging almost every release...
i use to wait until 2 am to do things... it was the WORST
@@ThePrimeTimeagen I work for a logistics company spanning 11 different time zones. Last time we were making software update to out portable data terminal was the worst experience in my 12 years career... Not only we couldn't afford a big downtime window, most of those terminals were used in a places where internet is not always present(when you have huge warehouse in the middle of nowhere it is not wise to have 100% coverage with high speed internet), meaning we couldn't live trace performance/bugs and(the worst part) we could always roll out a new software update/patch OTA. If something would go wrong the only way is stoping the warehouse(all warehouses where update already has been rolled out) and asking all employees to wait for an update in the main office(or other places with internet available). 2 sleepless nights until everything was fixed... We got pretty big bonuses, but the amount of stress totally not worth it.
The simple solution - to change jobs. But the reality is that there are areas where this sh*t happens very often. And someone still has to do it.
I've been in data science for 7 years now, and I have never had the opportunity to work with neural networks, and it feels like every company and their mom wants their own neural network guru, and I am stuck unable to find a job because I've never been given the raw resources to be able to experiment with NNs in an actual, real environment - the biggest company I've worked in is Coca-Cola, and the most powerful machine i've had there was my work laptop with an integrated GPU. I've worked for one of the biggest forex brockers in the world, and all the resources they dedicated to me for NN experiments were a server with 4 cores and 8 GB RAM which were also shared with some other services.
I have no idea what to do, it just feels like my years of expertise building ML models are a bloody waste because I don't have the experience in my Resume.
I think the last line settles the problem: sometimes it is an issue of just surviving, you don’t have to thrive all the time. Just be ok with being human. Strive to thrive when you want and when you can afford to.
With all due respect you are constantly learning new things and then telling people they don't need to do that. I think there needs to be more nuance.
Dark Side of Software Engineering is probably the weakest album in Pink Floyd's discography
If you're worried about deadlines, you're either absent from the estimation process of which is very-very bad, or you're estimating too optimistically. You have to multiply your deadlines AT LEAST by 2, because there can be many unknowns along the way during development. Chief O'Brien and Scottie knew that.
Going through this video, you've only seen the ideal scenario - Reminds me of the kid being offered a thousand dollar an hour salary out of college. Great for them, but that's often not how the world works.
Have you ever been given a project at 4PM on a weekday that needs to be done by 7AM the next morning?
Have you ever lived in a place with unemployment so bad, there are a thousand people willing to replace you for half your salary should you slip up - And that's just the CV's from that morning?
Have you ever had to be the front-end dev, back-end dev, DBA, and network admin all at once?
Have you ever seen people sleep at work because driving home and back wastes too much time?
Have you ever considered $6 / hour to be "Well paid"?
Have you ever worked somewhere where unpaid overtime was expected, and anyone who didn't put in the hours was "Let go" for not being"For the company"?
Have you ever had to pull 120+ hours a week? You mentioned that you once did 80. For many, only 80 hours a week would be the dream!
Have you ever worked at a company where being PAID for overtime was a laughable concept? Overtime is "paid for" in bonus vacation time (Which you'll never have time to take).
Have you ever worked at a company doing an obsolete language in 20XX whilst all the other positions required Y years of experience in a language you've never had the opportunity to work with?
For millions of devs, many of those are the norm. It's this, or working at McDonalds, unemployment, or finding a new career.
Most devs don't just jump into the life of a high-paid dev working at a Fortune 500 company for a salary that 99% of devs will never get paid.
You are the 1%.
Consider yourself lucky.
Hot take: if you're doing regular OT in software, it may not be your choice initially but it eventually becomes your choice. Once you're mid-level, there are jobs everywhere you could get that don't do OT.
Irregular OT in software is not your choice. ALL companies will have an OT spike here and there. That is just engineering. Sometimes that spike is a 45hr week. Sometimes it's an 80hr week. Game development is known to have regular OT, so if you do game development that was your choice.
I would say anything more than 80hrs of OT across the year is not good. That allows for 4 weeks of an extra hour a day in 2 quarters (March and November crunch, if you will), and a catastrophic 6-days & 13hrs/day crunch (or production down), and an additional 24 days a year having an extra 10-minutes because of an end of day or sprint meeting going over time... this assumes there is no flex time and it's an extra 80hrs of OT, not "thanks for coming in 8hrs more last week, take this Friday off" situation.
If you're doing more than that, it's just simply your choice for staying with a bad work-life balance.
If you are constantly facing a looming deadline WITHOUT any overtime, then your deadlines are WRONG. The deadline should include a healthy margin for unexpected issues. We do 30%. That means, the quote we give you, both in time billed and in time, period, we can exceed by 30% if something bad happens and the client doesn't say shit. It's in the contract. Now, if you are the only one unable to keep up in your team, then that's probably a you problem... You should be able to do your job by logging in at 8AM and logging out at 5PM, with a 1 hour uninterrupted lunch break in the middle... I work on ERP software for corporate clients, and have been developing professionally for 17 years.. IF anything comes up outside of normal business hours, then it's MY choice to address it immediately, or the next morning.
Wow... hold up a second! I need to reiterate what I just heard.
The 3 important things that make all the difference:
- Sleep
- Exercise
- Diet
(For me, in that order.)
It took me until I was 40 for them to click. When you're young you might not feel them one way or the other, but looking back I can now see how they have ALWAYS played their part.
If you get these 3 right for you, every week, you're going to be a beast at whatever you do.
I hate myself, I hate computers, I hate programming, but I still do it. And, like my woman and my kids, I love it at the same time. I love and hate it at a systems level. I do it at a Linux kernel level. I do it in x86 assembly, I do it in C. I do it in my dreams, I do it in my nightmares. It's me, it's a hobby, it's a career, it's an unending slavery. I've been doing it since i was age 12 in the year 1996, when Garbage and Sneaker Pimps were on the radio, the movie Hackers was released just a year before, the Slackware Linux distro was release 3.0, Redhat 4.x, the Linux kernel 2.0.x and the teardrop crashing all kinds of OS kernels. But I don't bitch. I don't moan. It's not a grave. It's the life I chose. It's the life I have to love.
The guy that wrote this article should've found satisfaction in doing anything else. Maybe he should work at Denny's, where he won't have to deal with pre-emptive tasks commanding his attention.. oh wait.
I really hate whiners.
I actually really enjoyed this post. It was quite pessimistic, but I think it is someone really feeling it at the moment - they are almost writing this to themselves. I've been through this "dark side" as I had a toxic manager that slowly turned me into a pessimistic person, but now that I've been away for several years I've gotten through it. Sleep, exercise, eating healthily, and social interaction can be the base of the "light side" 💯. It didn't help that my "dark side" coincided with Covid, so my habits were thrown off. Best of luck to anyone going through this - just focus on those good things and take charge - for me it was holding out a little longer until I found a better job opportunity, and relying on my spouse.
Use cost of delay instead of estimating time. Tell your manager how much money the software is going to make / save. It'll easily justify most budgets. Otherwise you should work on some other task.
Make sure you get enough sleep, eat nice food and attend some hobbies. It recharges your creativity which is crucial to write good software.
And btw, your creativity span is definitely not longer than 8h per day, probably only like 3h. It's ok to do the complex task tomorrow with a fresh mind. No one will enjoy a half-baked feature on a Friday release.
Switch to an easy task if things go wrong to regain some confidence. Deliver something every day. It'll create trust between you and your clients that you can deliver value.
Hope this motivated someone who's struggling.
When the cost of living is above the average family income and your only choice is writing software so you can earn 5 times the average but still barely survive is a stress factor in itself. Sure, if you are making $70,000 a year or more with the prospect of always finding a new job then you don't have to worry all the much. But if the average is 1000 euros and you need 3000 just to live a barebone life and landing a job paying 36,000 euros per year is damn next to impossible, then things are getting more serious.
I mean people can live with 1000 euros per month here, but that means a small apartment and public transport. No house, no yard, no vacations, nothing, just food, soap/detergent, and if you have to go to the dentist you start to worry. And the food is just the cheapest you can find. With the interest rate increases the normal monthly payment went up from 250 euros to 500 euros for a one-bedroom apartment and the prices for one such apartment went from 70,000 euros to 150,000. Imagine buying a one-bedroom apartment that costs you 150,000 euros when you are making 12,000 a year. Even at 3,000 euros per month it's very difficult. And if you have kids and you earn the average or more then the State doesn't offer you a kindergarten place for your kid so you have to pay 300 - 500 euros for a private one.
And then you go to work, writing software. People don't understand what you are doing, you try to explain but they still have no clue. They start giving you estimates on how much should your work take but they have no idea what you are doing. And sometimes they ask you why are you doing what they requested, it takes too long. And they start giving you shortcuts on how to do your work. You know those shortcuts will only create issues down the line, but what can you do? You need the job because otherwise you are dead. You can't pay your mortgage, your kid cannot go to kindergarten and the next job will pay you less, you'll have to work longer hours and the deadlines and intrusiveness of the non-technical people will be even bigger.
Also imagine you have worked 20 years as a software developer by the time you managed to get a well-paying job at that 36,000 euros per year level. And everything before that was paying less and you have no savings. And now, in 2023, the State is increasing taxes. So you managed to get out of "the poverty line" just to be thrown back in with increased banking rates and increased taxes.
IIRC: Utopia was coined by Sir Thomas More (for his book), based on Greek 'eu' meaning 'good' and 'topos' meaning "place". Dystopia was then coined off of utopia to mean the opposite
Utopia was about an apparently perfect, but ultimately flawed world. A dystopia instead is outright bad, it doesn't even appear to be good.
About the downside of software engineering - I feel some that, especially how it consumes all your mental energy, but on the other hand I can't deny the luxury and privilege of being a (relatively) well paid office worker. And I don't think I could do anything else.
Unhealthy work environments are not created deliberately or with malicious intent. What does management want but a functioning and succesful team that builds what they need with as little detour as possible? Explain how working differently will be more successful. In my experience, people will welcome the ideas and the input of a team or individuals that exude confidence, maturity, can self-organize, intelligently prioritizes work, communicates well, and requires little guidance. If that's what they see in you, they'll let you do whatever you want.
Utopia means an imagined place; the Greek origin (the word 'outopos') involves many concepts but ultimately it's a place / something that cannot exist. Which is funny right off the bat that the author says "Imagine being...". He was taking the piss on the whole concept immediately.
As a software engineer of 7.5 years, this article is describing a completely alien world to me. I've never had a hard deadline. I've never had crunch at all, let alone for months. I've never felt a dire need to upskill besides a singular shift from web to mobile (which I got paid to learn on company time, was great). My job has almost never been terribly stressful and most the time it was had nothing to do with coding, but garbage people/situations like getting screwed out of a promotion to another team by my management. Recently the tide has shifted some, but generally software is an in demand field and that's why wages are so relatively high and perks so relatively good compared to most careers out there. Truly baffled by OP not just quitting and finding somewhere that wasn't a trash heap.
Lovely video but i find disheartening the poll part....How about people are scared of being left behind, not because FOMO as they don't know the whatever flashy hyper-hyped thing, but just because they won't find a job in case of layoffs? people need to pay bills, it's not always about being excited to be part of ....so you kinda have to know it today or tomorrow tops or it'll just get harder trying to chase a faster target. Not everyone can be a rockstar even with hard work...i personally feel for all those people and that is indeed part of this dark side the author is talking about, in my personal opinion
For a while I was tempted to say to the OP "quit yer whining and pay your dues kid," but I've been where he or she is, and it does suck, especially if you're dealing with poor physical and/or mental health. We're in a society-wide crisis of both and we've either lost or never learned how to deal with it, and the truth is that is the precondition to everything, including dealing with what is otherwise ordinary work stress. When you're unhealthy, even that can feel insurmountable and can even break you.
At my most depressed, ordinary deadlines I used to be able to meet became unachievable, to the point where I lost more than one job because I couldn't keep my commitments. From the outside this looked like lazy irresponsibility, and that's not even untrue in a sense--but the very meaning of being ill is that you can't do well what you know you can (which makes you feel even worse). It really, really sucks. You have to be well in order to do well!
The only thing I'd add to what Primagen is saying about sleep/diet/exercise--which is the first thing any therapist will tell you to work on--is to find a healthy community to belong to. The root of "toxic positivity" is the lie that we can do it all by ourselves and it's ultimately all our effort (read: all our fault individually if we fail). We need others in order to be happy and succeed.
hah! did you see that my 4th point was community?
we are social creatures, we require others
Ya got me, I don’t know why I missed that, must have slipped my attention while listening…but great react with a lot of compassion and good advice. Thanks.
22:10 I think you're gonna like the book "Learned Optimism", by Martin Seligman.
It could be worse
You could be programming specialized machines where you are dependent on the hardware working correctly, but the hardware itself is a prototype too. Some parts of the machine may not work as thought out by the mechanical gods of architecture, and have to go back to the drawing board. This takes time and until the new parts arrive the deadline is still crawling closer. And suddenly you only have a week to implement and test a complex and complicated process of high speed image capturing and processing of cosmetic defects in a pharmaceutical product made by a well known customer starting with P at production speeds of 600 per minute.
And the customer understands why mechanical stuff takes longer, because he can see it, but the software stuff? Its somehwere in a cloud.....
When asked about deadlines, I usually just tell people the project could take years. I never give an actual number.
If I end up finishing the project in a week, then they will just think I'm just really good at programming.
The lack of reference for the Damoclese Sword might come from the fact that this became a expression in some languages / cultures. It's from a greek myth. A sword will fall and kill you if you do what you've been forbidden to do.
RE: People feeling like they need to learn everything new immediately
No. You need to make things people find valuable. It doesn't matter watch features you know about / use so long as you are "doing the thing that you need to do when you need to do it". Your code is not going to care if you're not running the latest nightly build of DreamBerd, and your customers even less so. I only dip my head into the new versions of various tech I use every so often, because I don't need to be on the bleeding edge in order to serve my customers.
It's always nice to know about things that make it easier to do what I've already been doing. But that's the thing, I don't really know the value of these new features / tools-and hence the time and effort that I should invest into them-until I know what problems I have or will have that they solve. This requires having such problems or at least a scope with some knowledge of what problems I will have. Read up on things you're using from time-to-time and/or pivot when the thing your doing is becoming too painful or too slow for your tastes would be my advice.
Help me become like you, Mr. DisresPrimagen. I'm more in the "darkness video club" than your relaxing 1 sec rollercoster elite club, damn
I understand this guy, even if I do not share a lot of the experiences. I think the only thing I dislike are people with a mindset that tries to push the coders to their limits, which leads to such horrible environments. You have to research narcissism if you want to work in Tech, and know how to survive or cope with the situation if you have someone in your company who was hired to find the weakness.
Also, it never works out, it will always be random people being fired.
Toxic work environment never really saved a business, but it for sure killed them.
The guy may be Indian talking about the development culture here (hits pretty close). We are conditioned to just keep on running and be afraid to be left behind and is pretty hard to get out of. And sometimes even if you do you it's frowned upon. Don't get me wrong the competition and the community is awesome but the feeling of the never ending race was engraved in schools/exams/colleges which did(and is doing) more worse than good
I'm watching this while taking a break from the all nighter I just pulled to meet a project deadline. Fading in and out of consciousness while watching, I feel targeted. 😅
...but at least I pushed code.
Required reading for every software engineer: "The Mythical Man-Month" by Frederick Brooks, Jr.
I didn't like you very much till this video. Our outlook on life is similar, mostly positive, learning the new tech is very exciting and never feels like a burden, I don't fear being left behind but doing the same thing over and over sounds terrifying and I never hurry and I'm always intentional. I also struggled early to say no but no longer. Thanks for covering interesting topics.
This article is silly and really it just sounds like he's working for a bunch of agile companies. Every job has its "dark side" and It's less about the profession itself and more about the companies that you work for. I get the feeling that if this guy went and did open source software and wrote stuff on his own terms he would still be miserable, that he got into software engineering for the wrong reasons; the paycheck.
The poll was a lie. The most people watching your stream are some kind of troll. The article is a very good example of our lives. I am impressed that you dont feel like that and that is mostly because you have a job where you seem to be someone, after a decade and where the people seem to be good. But this doesnt apply to 90% of the other companies.
I always wish, that some topics would be taken seriously by the people in the chat.