Tech Burnout | The Tech Job Market is Terrible and I'm Sick of Leetcoding
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- Опубликовано: 17 май 2024
- In this video I talk about the things in tech that cause burnout and frustration for both job seekers and tech workers
TOC:
Introduction: 00:00
Agile methodology : 01:35
High Barrier To Entry : 06:10
Tech Interviews: 07:33
2020 and Tech Layoffs: 10:51
Work life balance: 14:55
Work is mundane: 16:06
Conclusion: 17:27 
Наука
I'm a burnout designer -> frontend developer with almost 20 years of experience and here are things that make this industry horrible
- Cheesy company culture
- You have to learn the newest tech at home
- Layoffs after being told we are all family for years
- Your job requirement keeps changing every 3-5 years
- Your manager keeps pointing out stuff you need to improve no matter how hard you work
- Very few companies have a real onboarding to new workers
- A lot of insecure coworkers
- Ridiculously hard coding interviews put together by people who can't finish the challenge themselves
- Treating long hours like a badge of honor
- Seeing 40+ year-old people being lied to about getting a six-figure salary if they finish a boot camp program that only costs $499
I'm getting ready to retire and have been writing C firmware for embedded systems for 35 years, many times in the medical industry. I remember buying books when the PC revolution started and at that time I had a big house. I bought book shelves and they started filling up and I was proud of my collection and skills. Well after about 10 years I realized that the majority of my book collection was worthless. My core skills were still the C Language and some assembly. ARM arrives and all my embedded x86 / 68k / 8051 skills were useless. I did some M$ Windows development and my Win32/MFC skills were useless after a few years. RTOS's come and go, tools come and go, Repo's come and go and all the skills are now useless because of git and the front end tools. It was easier for me starting out because there was a smaller amount tech to understand. Now engineers need to know a enormous amount of tech just to blink a dam LED. Linux is not a easy thing to master, you have to spend 1000's of hours to just get comfortable. I've been lucky, I haven't had to go back to Linux embedded systems but a friend has had to learn it cold for Goggle and said it was brutal and he has a wife and kids. He paid 1.5 Million at 6.5 % interest and I can't wrap my mind around that. Well there is a point in life you can't afford to burnout so keep that in mind.
@@rockpadstudioswhat do you mean 1.5 million at 6.5%? What is that?
@@jonasbaine3538his home?
@@jonasbaine3538 he's referring to mortgage I suppose.
i'm guessing a house@@jonasbaine3538
As a tech worker in my 50s...the cycle of boom/bust will not end. Save your money. Switch stacks. Change industries. Take up gardening. Never fully deny or believe that a meritocracy exists within the market. Understand that you will repeatedly find yourself competing with your younger self.
Thanks John... I thought I was starting to go crazy (at 28) but it really resonates with me the way you say "competing with your younger self"
@@gangstaberry2496 Glad it helped. I spent 30 years in consulting and startups within and adjacent to Silicon Valley. Now I work in IT in healthcare as I plan toward retirement. However, tech culture will always be derived from the capital that funds it. As long as the VC and disruption culture dominates, tech will be an ongoing turnover factory. The best skills I can suggest is to start reading the Economist, follow global trends in markets and industries, and recognize that sometimes you just have to walk away from things before the culling begins. The hot cycle might slow down slightly for the next couple of years, but it will fire back up again "shortly" after that. US manufacturing certainly is having a renaissance...but then they will obscenely lowball any tech salary. Pharma remains the overpaid sector that is non-tech, but it is also a ticking timebomb. Mainly, just know that nothing in tech lasts forever, so take what you can while you can and move on the moment you recognize you aren't in the fast-moving water any longer. Or when you no longer feel like there being zero stability in your career.
Maybe I just haven't hit the wall yet (barely 50), but I don't find myself *competing* with my younger self... I'm collaborating, sometimes leading/mentoring, and often learning from colleagues who are versions of my younger self. That's always been one of the rewarding parts of the job... maybe I've just been lucky.
"Change industries"
@@InfinityDzMy degree is in Economics. I have been doing software dev since gradeschool. I follow the markets as much as I follow the technologies. Watching people in their 50s and even 60s try to hang onto their careers inside dying companies in a dying industry is extremely painful to watch.
The daily meeting is "what did you do for me yesterday?" and "what are you doing today for me?"
If only there was software available that allowed engineers to input their tasks, estimate time, put notes on progress and so on. Oh wait....:D
This is true about most professions/jobs. No matter how amazing you have been in the past, if you don’t do amazing work today right now, you are on the list of the next people to be fired.
@@CoronaryArteryDisease. As it should be.
Tech workers are so naive about labour relations. If it's not a union job with seniority based layoff, you don't have a leg to stand on.Don't even waste your time applying.
@@shodanxx Yeah, it's awful making $300-$500k/yr and just hopping to another similar or better gig if you get laid off, can't figure out why we do it, we must all be naive. :D
Tech was exciting and new in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Now it’s billions of lines of code nobody knows what they do anymore and everyone’s knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep
Better than if the knowledge was mile deep but inch wide.
Jack of all trades, master of none, is still better than master of one.
its all been divorced and abstracted away from the tech itself, mostly.
@@vadim6385 are you sure about that? 😂
@@vadim6385 Depends on the size of your team and the problems you are tackling. A team of 1-2, you need a large spread of good-enough knowledge. A team of 300+, having a few subject matter experts in key positions can really make a difference.
it's also not fun or exciting anymore as everyone and their grandma is doing the same thing.. or you have to compete with third world coders who work for peanuts
“Burnt out of working in tech” Here ✋ A former DevOps / SRE / Platform Engineer too. I quit the rat race about a couple of months ago and it is like I was born again: no more anxiety, no more stress, no more depression - fuck IT 🔥🔥🔥
What did you switch to? What job doing now?
Same here , I did quite quitting , company put me on pip and I got fired 😂😂😂. Now feeling reborn 😂
Same I built a cabin in the woods😊
Curious what you transitioned into? I'm a tech worker for 10 years now and I'm considering moving into doing some kinda social services instead. The salary hasn't been worth the layoffs and burnout.
Also interested in what you guys transition to, other jobs, freelance, creating a business, using savings...
My favorite is that a lot of tech interviews ask nity questions which are difficult and depend on what you "know right now". There are lots of things that I once knew, but hey, I forgot since then.
Yes, exactly.. I fear that it is counted against you when it shouldn't be. Particularly in the tech field where the knowledgebase can be so broad.
I can relate to this. Interviewing causes me bad anxiety, and makes it so I have a hard time with the pop quiz questions. My work history and the multiple recommendations on LinkedIn from past managers and coworkers should speak for themselves.
These questions certainly feel like they need to find a reason NOT to hire you.
Agree, to succeed on an interview you have to be lucky enough to be asked the exact question you studied a couple of days ago, otherwise, it is very difficult to remember te details.
For some reason tech interviews are geared towards recent CS graduates. Why the hell I should remember how to implement a PQ tree (there's google for that if I ever need this), especially if it has absolutely nothing to do with my daily job duties? If you want to hire someone who remembers everything in Algorithms course, hire a recently graduated student and stop wasting my time.
Agile as implemented by most companies is an absolute joke, just another form of micromanagement.
They really found out a way to capitalize on it too. There's certifications for it ugh total BS. I believe the process can be efficient by just applying flexible management skills. But they're really strict with it. There's even one called Lean. All BS.
Beyond micromanagement, agile has also given terrible managers ways to fill their calendars with meetings to make them "look busy". Often flooding people they manage with weekly meetings
I personally hate SCRUM. Kanban is fine. I feel like SCRUM + sprints is just always a way to fail to make a sustainable piece of software. I'm old, been doing this a long time - I don't know why but this exact timeframe but I feel like around after 3 years any system made under scrum becomes unmaintainable. The reasoning is doing random bits of the product that some PM thinks is important every 2 weeks is a terrible way to architect a system. The architecture starts looking suspiciously a lot like the order you did the cards in.
Like no one designs software anymore, they just start slamming code in and it always becomes a mess. I worked at a place where me and the CTO would sit down before a project for like a week straight and really try to outline how the entire system would work. We would do our best to predict the data models, stub out functions, write UML diagrams, etc. This is for some reason considered "waterfall" but it should really just have been considered a necessary pre-planning for the project.
And I need to say it was actually extremely mentally taxing to do that. It was very hard - I dreaded doing these sessions. Obviously we never got everything 100% correct but the result was, by and large, quite maintainable systems.
That's if Agile isn't implemented correctly, which most places don't.
21 years in tech in 6 companies and I am yet to see Agile implemented "correctly"
Tech interviews are nuts. I tried to change my current company, sent out CVs to several companies for a senior position. Before each interview I have asked how many stages it has. Some had 8(!) stages. Sorry, but I am not going to bother to waste 8 days for an "unspecified salary" and "the salary depends on your interview".
I will not go beyond 4
It almost sounds like a conspiracy in Big Tech to discourage workers from job hopping.
it's cause they want to indoctrinate you
@@emilyau8023 one is enought
if they have 8 stages they will go bankrupt, good thing you didn't join, it's 100% sinking ship, nobody bothers with 8 stages, alot of companies are optimizing hiring process and there are much better choices
Coding tests at the job interview are nuts. I especially hate having to do the same brain teaser coding tests over and over with every company. Are accountants given a column of numbers to add? Do news reporters have to color in a map of countries in the world? In most professions where a sufficient skill level needs to be guaranteed, there's a license or certification or some such thing. Why not have such for programming languages, software architecture, C++, system design (I'd flunk that) and whatever other skills many employees look for? Be tested once and just once.
I agree the interviews have gotten out of control
There was a study that was done that found that the traditional leet-code style interview really just measures anxiety.
If I’m presented with a coding challenge, I tell the interview team that I don’t write code for free. Also, I don’t want to work for a company that discounts my many years of experience.
With current salaries a lot of people are faking experience
Well. One of those certifications used to be a university degree. But then they decided that didn’t mean anything for this industry. So now they’re happy hiring people that have done nothing more than have maybe attended a six week boot camp. Because all that matters now is that you can pass the leetcode style coding challenges. No one cares about your degree(s) or certifications or years of practical experience.
Yes, this is exactly why I don't want to work in tech anymore. I have over 20 years of experience primarily on the backend, and I also have zero interest in learning what appears to be a dumpster-fire combination of frameworks and technologies for the "new" frontend stacks. Everyone wants "full stack" developers now, and everyone seems to be doing these worthless anti-pattern lazy management-style daily standups that I cannot stand. Why do we have to report on task status when we have a TASK MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR THAT?!
Because they want you to feel shame for not estimating the story points accurately
Yeah, that's what retrospectives are about too, shame for something not making into a release this sprint, etc. I feel like those ceremonies are not good for morale either, even if you praise someone, it makes someone else feel bad for not getting praise that retrospective, it's just not good for moral and will just burn people out eventually.@@smthngsmthngsmthngdarkside
@@smthngsmthngsmthngdarkside can't feel shame if I don't care.
MY EXACT THOUGHT. I'm glad I'm not the only sane one!
also QAing our own work and doing devops prod support now. They are shrinking other roles and having full stack devs do them instead.
As to interviews, the biggest issue in the industry is these stupid low level algorithm solving tests. No one with an real job sits around and writes a Lists, Dictionaries, or sorting algorithms from scratch - literally every language I've ever used has already solved that "problem". Showing that you go solve for any type of esoteric challenge has almost no practical application in 95% of the industry. Many developers that we interview that can pass those tests, cannot function in a team setting because they are not team players, don't write good code, have zero idea of what basic architecture is, don't know the first thing about SOLID, cannot effectively communicate, waste entire sprints on a single card that anyone else would complete in half a day, the list goes on and on.
I totally agree. I kind of suspect that the introduction of those algorithmic tests was originally intended for fresh CS graduates, since the companies knew that they wouldn't have any real-world dev experience and couldn't answer architectural/design questions, but then other companies started standardizing all of their interviews like that regardless of experience level and now we're in this terrible state of tech interviews. Just speculation.
It's almost as if the people who spend all their time memorizing solutions to these low level algorithm problems having actually built anything worth mentioning that actual people use as their daily driver and don't have the fundamentals of Software Development because they never put in the work to do so like those "losers" who went to school and actually put in the work.
@@gppsoftware You aren't wrong. If the screener can't tell that you know what you are talking about after 5-10 minutes of fairly deep conversation involving what you have done, what you are working on now, and general IT/SWEN topics and current events....then they basically just admitted that they don't have enough experience to be tech screening anyone.
And after all of this you end up being a YAML farmer nowadays
The hardest part of software development isn't usually writing the code - it's working as a team effectively. I'll take someone easy to work with that's slower than some super fast hacker hotshot who plays by his own rules and everyone thinks is a disruptive asshole.
Yep. This is exactly how it is.
7+ years of experience as a software engineer.
- jobs interviews is like a completely another job.
- every year they get harder
- interviewers (who are also programmers) often treat people like wikipedias, pretending that you have to know keywords or concepts nobody uses in real life regularly and if you had you would search. That's exactly what the interviewer would do. But interviewers rarely like saying "hey, can I google that?". I did say that in an interview, they didn't particularly like it as I didn't get the job.
- 1-2 week tasks, COMPLETE disrespect for the candidate's time. As if my time is worth nothing and pretending that after I'm going to complete that task you're ... going to hire me? Sure? You've also got like 30-300 candidates.
- Leetcode interviews that themselves can't solve and never solve IRL.
- Leetcode interviews getting harder and harder because they get leaked.
- Recruiters and interviewers treating tools like .... something you should know from top to bottom. Like, guys, there are 10000 tools in Software engineering, Kafka, RabbitMQ, ReactJS, Postgresql, MariaDB (vs Mysql), MongoDB, Cassandra, Docker, Kubernetes, Websockets, gRPC, and the list goes on that I can't even fill them in my resume anymore!
I DONT HAVE TO KNOW ALL THOSE TOOLS inside out. Especially keywords that may come from a specific tool. I can ... Search them out! Like a lawyer, or a doctor would, if they don't know what a pill does and its active ingredient, or how to treat the case in the court based on previous cases.
Like it's massive hypocrisy that we're treated so much harder than .... Doctors ... and Lawyers. People that other people literally in all the sense of the word depend their lives on.
I never heard a lawyer say "Oh, I had a 2 week court test for my interview" or a doctor having to solve bunch of problems from leetmedical. You get the degree, and you're easily hireable.
In Software engineering, after you get your CS degree, you have to spend another 2-3 years alone of figuring out what you even wanna become, a backend engineer, frontend, mobile, low level, etc. what technologies you gonna use, that tools exist. Nobody teaches you that! We teach that ourselves! edit: For people just to tell you "Nah, you don't have much experience" when they ask for Junior Engineers!
Gets even worse too. You now have interview coaches (operating out of India, at least from what I heard) giving out prompters in real time for (Indian based) developers. The say all the right buzzwords and do everything right (from the point of view of the interviewer) only to discover the dev is pretty incompetent. These tests test the wrong thing
For me the major factors are:
* Layoffs
* Disorganization: I'm not going to say that other professions are perfect. But i feel that civil engineers have been building bridges for thousands of years. Software engineering as a profession has basically been shaped by kids who start companies and Venture Capitalists
* We have a lot fewer options for employers now than in the past. If you want a well-paying job, we're reaching a point where Google, Facebook, and Amazon are the only games in town
* Lack of fulfillment. I've spent my career adding 0.0001% to a couple of billionares' balance sheets rather doing anything good for the world (like I was promised id have an opportunity to do).
Also, the most efficient use of circular buffers are to optimize coding interviews
I gave up 2 years ago. It's not worth it. Truck driver after 2months of training earns more than most programmers with a few years of experience. And the requirements to get that job are insane. You do 2-3 truck deliveries in London per day. Stress free, no effort and you get paid like a dev who knows a few programming languages + math. Yes with programming you will have more opportunities but in most cases, it's not worth it. Most programming jobs are insanely boring and repetitive.
I love working in the tech industry and have over two years of experience. Recently, I lost my job as an embedded Linux software engineer in the automotive industry but was able to find a new position that I really enjoy. Of course, I struggled and it took at least three months to find a new job. Currently, my position is a software engineer in a medical technology company. So, my suggestion is that if you really enjoy working in tech and engineering, don't focus on the negatives because there is always some bad stuff in any industry. Instead, focus on doing what you love.
This resonates so much with myself. World is falling apart and the companies expect you to be productive. Like damn man, I keep finding myself wondering which event will finally trigger the WW3 in between my attempts to optimize that goddamn sql query.
Same bro😅 shit never stops
This is as hilarious as it as frightening
You know if your unoptimised SQL query triggers WW3, you are going to look pretty silly now.
@@robsutcliffe2030Ooh don't jinx it. 🤣😭
Dude - we're already in WW3. What do you think the lockdowns were? You look at what happened in the first year of WW2 in England and France? They called it the phoney war. Phoney war started March 2020. February 2022 was the war going "hot" into open conflict in Europe in Ukraine in the same fashion as Germany invading France. Now it has spread to the middle east with Israel and now the Houthis closing the red sea. The war will escalate there for sure and it will continue to spread probably to a conflict with China in the South China sea. We will likely see civil conflicts break out and escalate into nation state conflicts. Europe is on the verge of civil war and even America could see low level civil conflict.
Don't think it will be so obvious or that the lying good for nothing media would tell you we are at war.
I'll let you in on a little secret. You could make the case that there have been 7 world wars. You look at the 30 years war which was also in many respects a "world war" and in retrospect you might well see some similarities.
I graduated in 2022. Found school incredibly interesting and fun. After 7 months and sending 3,000 applications just to get 4 interviews, I landed a job with an annual salary BELOW $50,000/year, no bonuses, and almost zero chance of promotions. I made more in sales. I took the job anyway so that I could get the experience. Now with 10 months in, I sent out 500 applications, got one recorded leetcode interview before deciding to pivot to a different industry. Got an offer that's an over 30% raise, bonuses, and promotions are nearly a sure thing with 24 months.
Not to mention a lot of listings are fake! A solid number of job listings are only put up for PR/HR reasons, to meet certain quotas for the year. It's a lot cheaper to outsource contracts, rather than pay for a full-timer with benefits.
im working in tech and you've hit the nail on the head. the entire interview process is broken, so much so that i explicitly stated in my resume that i will NOT do anymore leetcode. i had 9 interviews after applying for maybe 30 or so companies. and each interview i had to go through 2 rounds of leetcode which is just ridiculous. i got so sick of it till i put it in my resume. my current company gave me a case study, with a short technical interview just to test my understanding.. close to what im working on right now, and i am so happy working in my current company. if we all band together and stop this stupid culture from continuing, they will have to stop it eventually.
** just to add, i do not think leetcode is bad entirely, you can learn some stuff, but using it to test someone's capability is downright silly.
I absolutely hated Agile. It quickly became an enormous waste of time, ceremonies taking hours to finish and dailies soon bloated to multi-hour status meetings with code reviews on a project I personally was not working on.
You had a shit scrum master then if you were lucky enough to have one. Many companies skimp on paying for quality scrum masters and coaches or even worse, try to merge roles.
100% truth. Default hour long daily high pressure scrum status with 3 to 1 ratio of overlords to Devs ruined tech life for me!
I'm a hardware engineer. All is good.
I refuses to do anything related to software.
The Scrum Framework claims it was created on the foundation of the Agile philosophy. But what they did was just pick and choose whatever they wanted and ended up with some slightly toxic level of micro managing. There is nothing more annoying than having to go to a meeting to say, every 24 hours, yesterday I did this and today I will do that. What about that 5th Agile principle that states: "Build projects around motivated people. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done"
We are not kids, we know our responsibilities, we have a Sprint backlog to complete and unless my current Sprint work depends on what my colleagues are building right now, I don't care about what they did yesterday and what they are going to do today.
I friend of mine says: "If you have that mindset is because you are not committed with the project". Well maybe I'm just little bit more committed with doing my part the best I can, which in the end will benefit the most our project.
I'm convinced SCRUM leads to unmaintainable software. The way to architect a large codebase is not to work on whatever random thing a PM thinks is "important to the stakeholders" that week. Your architecture ends up looking suspiciously like the order you did the cards in.
@@Weaver_Games it will look exactly like a Jira board, until the project is finished and it goes into maintenance stage. Of course, all that could be avoided by having a good PM, with soft skills to let the Product Owner what is the best for both parties
Show me a developer that's motivated to write boring ass accounting software, let alone an entire team or team of teams. Sometimes it's just not in the cards my boi. I think it's important to point out that a lot of the original content, such as the agile principles, still exists in its original form and has not been revisited. It all needs to be refreshed with lessons learned. Isn't that part of scrum, to retro? The founders of agile basically are saying they coded it right the first time lulz
Well, if what you are building has no one waiting for you, you are in a cave for weeks building and one day you say tadah~ then it must not be very business critical.
If there are many integration points and is a large project, there are always people waiting on your update and when you would be ready, so others can plan accordingly. And not just that, you have to explain what you built and how others can use it the way you intended it to. Go through cycles of integration testing. Blahblahblah. SDLCSDLCSDLCSDLCSDLCSDLCSDLCSDLC around and around it goes.
I worked in tech in a non tech role, and all this applies too. Great jobs, high salaries...but layoffs were BRUTAL
Standups have begun to feel like a "No true Scotsman" argument to me. I always here, "Well, you're just not doing them correctly," but it seems like no company ever is. At what point do we recognize that maybe the motivation behind the ceremony, while good, is too tempting to become anything but a status meeting?
I like the analogy. I've definitely heard people say the same.
Agile is a main reason for burnout, I seriously tired of everybody telling we are not doing it right. It can't be done right.
What is insane in the job market that even for a senior position interview, you are asked to do junior gotcha codes and that's it. As a medior/senior dev, you should add so much more value that's not coding, like mentoring ability and a big picture look, being active in reviews and suggestions... but those are harder to measure so they are just sticking with a useless test.
Software dev for 18 years, pretty spot on take. I’d also add, at some point (at least in my industry) a lot of people I’d describe as being “non-technical” have been getting “lead-dev” roles…. And OMFG it has been an unmitigated disaster as far as keeping junior staff engaged, productive, and learning stuff…. But lots and lots of orgs seem to keep doing it anyway.
Agree.... somehow as a intern I'm actually more proficient in the framework we're using and managing a new team than my tech lead.... it's kinda scuffed
Agile has mutated into something which simply is NOT "agile". Commitments and accountability killed it. It's no better here in the UK. I'm thinking of becoming a professional carpet cleaner. Great video by the way. You touch on all the issues and frustrations I have with this awful industry!
Yep, many companies are routinely violating some of the core principles of Agile and are still calling it "Agile."
I guess no agile coach will go in and say that. They want to stay employed by the company.
DevOps is the most unispiring, tedious and demotivating work I've ever done. It is very important to balance it with "fun" work, otherwise it can burn you out very quickly, specially in teams with high operational loads.
Regarding interviews, it is ridiculous how they keep asking same puzzly questions for engineers that have several years on experience and a couple of big tech companies in their resume. We all know that it is just a choreographic excercise were you have to be lucky to be asked te right question at te right moment (the one you studied the night before)
If you think devOps is the most boring, you never worked with SAP.
@@ThaisSilva-vk1bv Thankfully 😅
Is it worth the $?
Thanks for your candor and honesty. I'm sure this will resonate with a lot of people in tech, if not most these days.
as a burnt-out tech worker, listening to you is just therapeutic. but nothing will change for now, and I still have to return to work tomorrow.
i got my degree in December 2023. I spent the entirety of the fall semester applying to jobs and I got 1 offer out of hundreds of applications. I am grateful I have a job, but there is something fundamentally broken. Especially when companies, like spotify, lay off a shit ton of employees and their stock price goes up. In many cases the share holders force companies to perform layoffs. I think things will get worse before it gets better. I am still leetcoding, still working on projects so that I will be ready IF things change.
I'm technically in the same position just I haven't had the chance. Got a few offers outside of my location and even then I must have applied 4k times and I'm not even exaggerating, it's gotten to the point of broadening my skills just to be able to put more search words to find more applications.
With everything going on plus being location bound it feels like being dead on the water.
Any tips? How did you perfect your resume, where did you apply? What do you do?
Laying ppl off & having stock prices go up is just the current capitalist system.
Just to give perspective. There are over 500,000 Tech companies in the US. So just a few hundred applications is a very small sample size of what demand is out there for your skill set and knowledge. If you are unhappy I would keep applying and reach out to companies that interest you and whatever your passion in tech is (cyber, devops, web dev, sales, solutions architect, networking, virt, data, etc). Consider using AI to find companies that match those interests in your area and send them a resume even if they don't have a job posted. Good luck to you 😎
I worked in one job role where I was part of a project and part of a team. Both had Agile meetings... two daily stand ups, 2 biweekly sprint planning, 2 biweekly sprint reviews... plus all the additional meetings. Out of 35 hours I was in meetings for 20 hours a week.
Agile has been really screwed up in some organisations.
And sometimes the meetings don't align with when the work/questions come up. My company is going to institute a Monday morning one. Even though there is a trend of issues popping up late Monday/early Tuesday. Meeting should be late Tuesday. So yeah, we're going to design it so no one looks busy in the meeting - then they'll get super busy after the meeting but have no meeting to discuss it in.
Same. For about a year, I kid you not, I literally sat in meetings for 8-10 hours a day with expectation to also lead a team and get work done. Unbelievable.
keep it up guys! is hard times for us because money has been cut and companies have stopped investing in digitalization and focused on the core of their business. Manual work.Digitalization is a luxury for many of them but not their core. But times will come back, fountains of money will open and they will take everything available in the market again.Just hold on there, make personal projects that can become a company in the future, and probably you will never need to go through this shit any more. If you give up there will be lack of engineers again and salaries will grow up.
I'm tired of this. I'm burnt out.
Same bro
Great synopsis of really bad agile practices. 100% spot on
I am a software engineer and I have a small software company. I started it fresh out of university, and had barely had a couple years' experience doing odd IT jobs while I studied.
I've made almost every mistake in the book, but interviewing people like this wasn't one of them. These are a few questions of what I ask:
- Tell me about 3 design patterns you've used, each with an example of how you've used them.
- Do you know what TDD is? Have you ever done it? Why? Or why not?
- Do you prefer DevOps or Continuous Integration? Why?
- Tell me about a couple of programming books you've read and really liked, and why.
- Tell me about a couple of mistakes you've made, or a crisis you've had in a past project, and how it ended.
And that's mostly it. Single, 1-hour interview. Zero code involved. This tells me all I need to know. I also pick up on the vibe they give off along the way. Less than 1% of the professional work we do here involves any algorithm/leetcode stuff at all - it's all mostly about layering stuff properly, knowing where to use what pattern, clean code, pair programming, and being communicative.
I don't get why people ask you to do leetcode stuff. Why the _fuck_ would I need you to know how to program a quicksort? Has anyone above age 21 EVER programmed a quicksort? Just copy and paste that shit from Stack Overflow, thank you.
You can only do TDD though if you already know the overall functionality of the project, most of the time you do the testing after the development. Sometimes you will find something unexpected bug or feature that needs to be develop while doing the task.
As for design patterns that is not really used most of the time in Java Spring Boot community in my experience, although dont know about other programming community. Yes the framework itself does have design patterns underneath but most of the time you don't use it.
Well design apps usually implement: layared architecture, single responsibility principle, dependency injection, solid principles. Which is commonly done in Java Spring apps. Then there is also composition over inheritance that's it.
If you make the app build on a layered architecture, response agnostic to the programming language meaning if ever if it we change or upgrade the language and framework then it can easily be done. You can also then easily switch framework, or example library, or ORM of the project
I switched to tech from a blue collar job and was amazed by the level of disorganization and wasted time. I have days where I have 4 1 hour length meetings at 1 hour intervals. I call them 'zebra days' in my head. Absolute wastes of time. The moment you are on the rails and making progress, the next meeting starts. Been at tech for 2 years and I hate it so much. Would go back to my blue collar job but my certification expired for being unused 😂.
I recently went through 4 rounds of technical interviews for a position and passed all of them with flying colors.
I was even interviewed by an engineer who worked at Apple and generally had a stellar resume.
Every interviewer was very happy with my answers.
Needless to say, this process took many hours of my time and the time of all of these engineers.
When I got to the interview with the CTO he asked me what had gone wrong on a project I was recently a part of.
I told him nothing had gone particularly wrong on our team, but a different team had some problems which I briefly described.
He found my answer showed a "lack of self-reflection" and for that reason I was not hired.
Such a monumental waste of time reflects the current state of the industry quite well IMO.
You forgot that salaries are plummeting (while inflation soars). The increase of remote work means that there's greater variance of compensation requirements and employers just pick from the lower half. This is having downward pressure on compensation.
I've legit skipped applying to jobs when I go on glassdoor and see people outlining their insane interview process. Being employed I obviously have that luxury, but I think these companies need to realize they're scaring away potentially good candidates. Especially the seniors and staff/principal level people who have been doing this for 10+ years because they probably have a lot of demands and responsibilities from their current roles and families.
You can thank Google and that clown Joel Spoelsky for the "leet code" kick. Also LOL at these companies that want a Google Level senior technical fellow but aren't paying Google money and all they do is build CRUD apps using frameworks.
The goal is to scare you away. The jobs are posted for strategic reasons not related finding employees.
@@AmericanDiscord Goddanmed Right !!! I am quick to tell a recruiter that I don't do coding tests. I earned a Bachelors in CS and a Masters in Software Engineering.....that and being able to have an in-depth 5 minute conversation with lead devs should be more than enough to prove my competency. I don't work for free, and I damn sure not going to waste my time with your silly "leet code" challenges.
@@thecollector6746 This is so true. I used to work on a popular web-based educational game. The hiring team were adamant they wanted "the best people" but I kept telling them for a lot of work we do on the game (which was very UI heavy) we could have juniors / intermediates doing the bulk of the work. Even if they could hypothetically get an interview with someone super high level they wouldn't pay commensurate wages, nor would the day to day work really be challenging enough for such a person.
Im still new to the whole cybersecurity/ tech space and haven’t even gotten my first job yet, but to hear and see all the negative sides to even getting your first job. It’s just to much. And I see how so many ppl hype up Tech like it’s the only thing in the world just because of the money,,, is not fair. Im just gonna learn Cloud and pivot into the Healthcare space.
Im currently an employee at a college. I thought about getting a second bachelors in CS (Even though the college pays for it just for being in employee) I’m pretty sure CS in a great career. However, with the economic downturn and massive tech layoffs, is something that’s need to be taken into account. Also, AI has been disrupting jobs left and right. There’s a video about “The end programming” by Dr. Matt Welsh. It raises a lot questions about the future of CS.
I think it's very difficult to judge the rate of growth in AI. Has it plateaued, is it linear, it exponential growth? I'm not really sure. I don't think in the short-term there is any risk to developer jobs being lost to AI. I often use it to increase my productivity, but I absolutely can't give it a high-level feature request and expect it to deliver it. To be honest, I don't think that will be possible for a while. I could be wrong.
The layoffs are definitely a valid point. I think we will continue to see this trend in tech.
If I were in your situation I'd look at doing a degree in electrical engineering. Given the move towards electrifying everything it'll probably be a better career in the long term.
All the A.I. hype is just that. "Hype". A.I. is a term that is more often than not misused. A.I. in it's most pursest sense doesn't exist. What people generally call A.I. is nothing more than the same old statistical models that we have been using since forever.
@@thecollector6746 I agree I been saying this for a long while
The layoffs are after the COVID bubble that is bursting. During COVID tech firms hired a huge number of developers, now i's getting back to normal. Given no black swan event happens, I don't expect layoffs to be that brutal in the 2nd half of 2024 and onwards. I also don't think AI will replace SWEs, maybe it will hurt coders who just implement same simple stuff repeatedly, because instead of 4 you'd now need 1 or 2.
If you’re working on the well known products it’s a house of cards style maneuvering alliances to get your ideas through.
watching your videos is always time well spent! ⏰
Thank you I appreciate the kind words
Not in software, but tier 3 deskside support for a large automation firm. Long story short, I left the office at noon on a Monday and checked myself into a psych hospital because I was that burnt out. That queue of 70+ tickets, plus the barrage of end users harassing me on Teams, and my remote boss in my inbox at 7am asking why I haven't addressed the "VIP users tickets" when they were assigned to me overnight and I didn't start work until 8a pushed me over the edge when I was already beyond burnt out. I also had no windows in my office, so I would never get to see outside or any natural light.
Fast-forward 9 months and I'm much happier working part time as a personal trainer in a physical therapy clinic and part time working the front end at Costco. I get to be on my feet and help people feel better physically instead of sit in a depressing cubicle for 9 hours a day, getting bitched at by people who think they know your job better than you.
I'm happy to hear that you are now in a satisfying role. That helpdesk role sounds like it was an extremely toxic environment. Probably worse than the average helpdesk role but it is a difficult role no matter what.
I spent the last 20 years as a senior applications developer. The last 15 years I’ve either been a team lead, or the architect of whatever company or project I was working on. I finally got so fed up I left check and started my own business. Just hearing the word agile makes me want to throw up
I want to chime in and say the interview process is the most ludicrously difficult of any industry. What other job that doesn't require a doctorate has candidates run a gauntlet spanning up to multiple weeks with a huge investment of time and energy.
This video is so on point and eases my anxiety that others feel the same way. I left my QA engineering job about six months ago. My biggest gripes: the interview process where they pull out leetcode, and then lots of insecure, socially awkward coworkers. Otherwise, I had a great time in my roles...lot's of flexibility, only working 25-30 hours a week, great work-life balance, and great pay overall. But mannnnn...I met some HORRIBLE people along the way LOL
What are you doing today. I am in the same boat
@@Pingsmingu I'm exploring different career paths since I have a pretty varied work history, so I'm in the job hunt with millions of others. I also set myself up to do freelance QA work so I can pick and choose who I work with...
You quit without having another job lined up?! 😂
@@cw5948 that is what I did last year
It took way too long for me to find a comment about the socially impaired and awkward coworkers in tech. There's bad people everywhere, but tech is another beast 💀
I got my first software engineer role in mid 2022 at the first company I applied to. My team was let go in May 2023. As of posting this in January 2024, I have applied to over 1000 entry level positions without a single interview. None of my former coworkers have found work, either. I deigned to apply for roles in my previous industry and got interview requests immediately.
The tea leaves aren’t hard to read here. I immensely enjoy programming professionally, but I’m cutting my losses and leaving.
I'm sorry to hear how difficult it's been over the last few months. I've always felt that we go where we are needed most. At least this has been true in my career. I wish you all the best in the new direction your taking.
If you enjoy programming it might be worth continuing to do projects on the side and later on when the job market is better you can bolster your resume with projects that you've worked on.
How’s it going 2 weeks later?
Just tell them you're gay and claim native ancestry on those diversity forms they claim are optional. You'll be rolling in offers.
@@Weaver_Games😂😂😂😂😂
What direction did you take getting out of tech?
"Doesn't align with what they had in their head"
Yep, one of my classmates dropped out after the first term as he expected computer science to be more "creative". He was expecting it to be a BA in graphic design, despite the fact the he signed up for a BS in computer science.
...huh? That was not an expectation I thought people would have. 😅 Design industry is in ruins after DALL E anyway
I'm a software engineer with 16 years of coding experience, and I say: It's all about perspective. The fact that you've chosen to be a RUclipsr with 19K subscribers (so far) already tells about your perspective. It's not all bad here in the tech realm, nor is it super rosy in your influencing business. Yes, daily scrums may make you feel like a slave, but a slight change in RUclips algorithm could put you out of business altogether. It's never perfect.
I agree. At my 9-5 I'm at the mercy of my company. Here on RUclips I'm at the mercy of the platform and its policies. But yes there are still plenty of positive aspects to tech jobs.
I hope many see this comment. Every industry sucks, but some suck less than others. I'd rather deal with the suck from the tech industry than other industries. And at least with tech there's a lot you can do to pivot your career. Tired of accounting? You have to basically pick a whole new field.
@@tech_with_moss I prefer to be at mercy of my company that is subject to (quite strict due to socialist past) labor laws of my country, than to be at mercy of some platform (like RUclips/Uber/Fiverr) that changes its policies on a whim, and you can't do anything about.
At least, if my employer shorts my pay, makes my work conditions significantly worse or unlawfully terminates me, I can sue them.
But to each their own I guess.
Best comment and best advice. thank you @@alexbellury
Agile is just basically milking money from a client without doing any rigorous planning and ending up with a sub-par product and burned-out workers.
I don’t mind the scrum meetings and the code reviews go much better at my new company. It’s nice that I don’t have to deal with huge egos most of the time. Some of the architects at my last job were insufferable and I had to fix a lot of buggy code because they couldn’t debug it.
Thanks Moss! I've built a career in web management in nonprofits (museums, higher ed) after college, and then had tried to pivot to web development, doing a bootcamp and all. I quickly hit the wall that is the tech interview gauntlet. I was applying to jobs that would have had me do some menial coding projects, all the while asking me to learn these insane algorithm problems...
A few years later, I'm back in web management and have started to focus on analytics, marketing, and greater content creation. Now I just build personal projects with React, NextJS and all the other skills I learned, the same way I spend an evening sketching.
I think it took me giving it a shot to learn what I needed, but I've realized now that I already had a good "tech" career going and was just looking for the prestige that is being a "software engineer." I just didn't want it that badly, and I didn't want to play that grinding game with those interviews...
That's awesome. Thanks so much for sharing your journey. I'm really glad that you've found what you truly want to do! I believe the world pulls us to where we are needed most.
There's simply too many people trying to get into the industry
The pandemic environment misled a lot of people.
It's a tech bubble.
I've been a financial operations application engineer at various companies. Only been in the industry for 6 years and already been laid off twice. It's a pretty unstable career path that I wish I was better prepared for. Thankfully I work in a relatively 'stable' area in tech but there's still the constant worry that I can lose my job at any second and with no warning. The whole 'zero employee protections' culture is ridiculous and a recipe for killing all motivation and loyalty to a company. I'm hoping this will change once these old school, brick and mortar generations finally retire, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
I got into tech a little over 5 years ago and worked my way up from Geek Squad to network engineer. Honestly, I am pretty burned out. I just want to do this another 5 years, save enough money to buy a house and then switch industries.
Starting from the bottom like that is really tough, so I understand how you feel. It does sound like you've come a long way though.
I have been on burn out mode for the last two years. To the point it is crippling my ability to live. I’ve been moved up into to many different positions to wear to many hats. Went from level 1 tech to 2 to 3 now doing project management while also have to do the work as an installer and sell the projects. Im also the team lead and sudo operations manager since we don’t have one. The straw that broke the camels back is when they tried to bump me up to account management when I’ve already been doing that the last two years but now they want me to clean up the books and do a true up on the inventory and software of all of the companies we manage. I’m at a point of quitting. Oh yea I was given a raise to accommodate for this extra work and come to find out my raise never kicked in. I bring this up and the fault was put on me saying I should’ve checked and let them know. I make 80k by the way. Never work for an MSP it’s horrible and soul sucking.
WTF. That's just abuse. You're doing like 5 people's jobs.
I've been a full time contract worker for years now because my niche maxes out at like 130k and I can pull 200-250ish with a good contract.
Markets gone to shit the last few years though. Good rates are harder to get. Less long term contracts. Things not getting renewed or started due to budget. Less opportunities.
I've had to work more and more shitty messy projects and have had to put out a lot more fires. I'm getting sick of it. My saving grace is that I follow the FIRE movement and have saved up a shit ton so far. I just need to hold on for a few more years and then I plan on leaving this space entirely to do something else. I don't know if I could mentally make it to 40 in this space.
A lot of days are chill, but when it is stressful, it really sucks.
I learned some coding languages and I couldn't imagine doing that for a living. When I was attending UCSB I had a friend who was majoring in computer science. He was designing websites as a part time business and he told me to never get into that because the customers are never happy and keep calling back wasting your time trying to get the website changed.
I don't mind many interviews. My issue is when they're designed to trip you up. Like, IMO, you start with easy questions so I get an idea of how you verbalize questions, then we work to more complicated questions. There've been a few times where I "couldn't" answer something because the person asked about it in a weird way.
Man this is spot on...
I just got a job as a tech lead and my hope is to be able to land something in management or some other non coding position and its all because i can't take the interview processes any longer. Developer interviews are totally not worth it
One of my biggest frustrations with tech is that it’s very hard to break above a certain salary unless perhaps you’ve been somewhere 10+ years. I’m making roughly what I was making back in 2014 give or take. I’m currently a product owner and previously was a QA specialist, business, analyst, and project manager. I’ve struggled to try to learn coding, but it feels like that’s what I need to do to get a five or 10 K bump plus I would need years of experience once I learned it.
You’re making less. Inflation is a btch
I've given up on the tech industry and I'm bringing my skills to the electrical instrumentation industry, and I love software dev
Isn't electrical instrumentation part of a SIEM or tech industry?
Doing Instrumentation and Controls? I did a couple of semesters on it but quit due to mental health.
I went through 3 interviews for a software engineering position which involved building a piece of software. I was given the impression that i've pretty much got the job but HR needed to see if I would fit in. After I was rejected by HR It impacted my mental health and I lost motivation to look for a new job and i've stayed at a workplace that I haven't really been happy at for years.
I'm a Technical Product Manager with 15+ years of high-tech experience. I completely agree with this man on most of what he is saying especially the Agile part. When I go to a company that does those things, I do my level best to change the culture back to what Agile was really all about.
How's that working out for you? There are transformation coaches with 30+ years of experience that can't change the culture in large businesses. You may have an influence with a company that only has a few agile teams but you're not changing big fortuane level companies.
I am desperate to leave my tech job. I have a huge stress and all symptoms of burn out, maybe mild depression too. Even I can't say I am overworked. And work conditions are nice. But it just doesn't make sense to focus on work till end of career. I am still far from it, but years are flying. I know by 65 I am homeless on streets of LA or quite live by that time.
Need real profession and source of income for life beyond retirement.
Problem here maybe that human just not up to the speed of the technology. And we trying to compete to be more and more efficient. Not yet a stage where tech replacing humans, but close to it?
Yeah same for me. I used to be an IT Project manager. Not sure what to do know i have 5 years of experience. Working as an assistant now which doesnt pay as much
10:04 But for that there are bootcamps: if you are just finished your highschool and want to have a hands-on experience to be able to enter the tech workforce you go to a bootcamp.
On the other hand what you learn in university is algorithms and data structures, which are the base for the leetcode questions, so in some way companies in some way unintentionally adapted the interviews for the ones with degrees actually.
But overall I agree on the burnout in Tech.
Ah man, the hopelessness is real. The ai revolution was my final nail in the coffin, i literally have 0 damn clue what im gonna do with my life. Quit everything ive ever tried, only got a hs diploma to my name
Not to mention, the massive influx of people in the last decade and the introduction of AI solutions like ChatGPT. I always knew this industry was doomed, I just didn't think it was going to be so quick. Especially, when you see hundreds of yt videos "how I became a software engineer in 3 months", "a day in the life of a SE", etc. This was an okay industry, pay was good, but it was always exhausting and you're just a code monkey at the end of the day. Now it's not even that. It's unironically over, and I do mean over for the vast majority. Thankfully I only viewed my skills only as a means to an end - namely, to expand my businesses. I suggest people to stop treating this as a career, because it's not.
If I can ask, what business, how did you start?
I'm honestly lost and any and all advice would be greatly appreciated, what services did you or do you still offer?
Finding info, guidance and actual business direction or any mentoring is hard ( probably I'm just bad but trying)
Nope, don't see it as a career. I also had the same target as you. AI was coming and managers are cheapskates, plus with so many software engineer videos there was bound to be a influx of people looking for a quick buck. Sadly some of the influx of people are higher up on the rung than me.
Is the potential for remote work increasing or decreasing?
Everytime I had a coding as a part of an interview, I failed it because I was so fxxxing hating it.
You have a bad scrum master if they allow the team to troubleshoot during the standup. Also, the standup is only 15 minutes so I don't think it is a huge time away from coding. A good scrum master can make sure the team completes it on time and devs only discuss major stories or ones that are blocked
Totally agree if standup is kept to 15 minutes it's not a distraction from coding and it is beneficial for the team members.
The standard "you're just doing it wrong" comment from a scrum fan. We know it's being done incorrectly, but have no power to change it because no one will listen.
@@tech_with_mosswe have a standard for minimum 30 minutes standup no matter what.
It is still such a weird time - would love it if everything would just get back to normal
this is the new normal.
To add, it's the decision-making fatigue we experience especially when orgs have no clear set of rules to follow. Sure orgs need to keep up with the demand of the market and there are documentations but for some reason, they are too complex that you'd get different answers based on who you ask and then you end up making your own version of the rules.
On the other hand, orgs rely heavily on people than processes and this is very risky knowing how quickly people come and go in tech.
Here’s an idea. Stop applying jobs that do leetcode and/or refuse to do the interviews if they include leetcode.
This really resonated with me, especially my job hunting experience in 2022;
Yes absolutely. Job searching in 2022 was nearly impossible.
@@tech_with_mossI feel like it hasn’t changed much.
Yes the Agile Industrial complex has ruined development - the current form of agile kills innovation, disempowers devs and put self-interested non-technical bureaucrats into delivery "leadership" roles. An utter tragedy but people saw a chance to make money that required no genuine skills (Aka a scrum master course that only takes 2 weeks to "master") and they don't care about outcomes.
I love corporate "fail fast", where the fastest way to get to the answer is to not fail to begin with but in half the time.
Lol sad but true in a lot of cases.
I'm not even in Tech currently but I'm burnt out on just trying to find a cloud computing job for entry level. Have my degree, portfolio, and certs and still can't get a call back on a job. I feel like I wasted my time busting my ass in school for this career path.
With specialization, teams are actually loosing its purpose. The specialist is then gone or gets promoted or even goes to vacation, and it is game over. It would be better then to brake the team into individuals, but then POs and scrum masters and leads would loose their jobs. And the problem is that managers that become managers for the wrong reasons or come from wrong industries (like banking), actually support this. Cause they have no actual idea how software should be developed.
Or better yet. U were hired to be the specialist but become the everything guy just to have job security
@@RUclipsProgrammingI thought it was only my workplace. So this is everywhere huh. It's so scuffed.
@@applepie9806 It’s a very insidious process. It always starts off with you being a ‘professional’ and a ‘team player’. It’s like do all this extra adhoc work you weren’t originally hired for and document it for us so we can pay someone with 5 less years of experience half your salary.
@5:15 this is actually a feature rather than a bug of our stands ups. We purposefully use the time to help teammates get unblocked if anything is blocking them
My team does as well, but we will save this for the end of stand up after everyone has given updates.
@@tech_with_moss good point and an important distinction.
I doubled downed on learning and pursuing software development. I hit the point of no return a while back, so even if I have to scrape by on freelance sites, it will happen.
Have fun with that lmfao. Easier to just get a normal job
After my experience with Agile at a Boeing subsidiary, I refuse to take an Agile job...unless it's a short term contract. Seeing "Agile" in the job description gives me pause.
Hey nice video!
I'm an experienced QA engineer and yes these interviews are crazy!
I can relate all what said in this video... I am from India and experience same here
If you are self driven and have something to prove, I’d recommend people to self learn at home for 5-6 months with a considerable intensity. My motivation was running out of money after 6 months. If you have this opportunity you will require just enough for an internship and there you will learn what a company really wants from you, and skills will be learned at a lightening pace.
I happen to love working as a devops engineer. I fell into it and am so grateful. When interviewing I could hire some people on the spot if HR would allow because it’s plain as day what work ethic/knowledge they have
Another burnout trigger is being oncall. Especially after normal business hours. Or trying to get help from someone that is unavailable because they are dealing with an oncall. I used to work for companies that had dedicated support people. Now that’s apparently me. If you bring it up you are attacked for not being a team player.
On-call can be absolutely brutal depending on the company. Generally it's stressful regardless but with some companies it can be miserable.
On-call totally ruins work-life balance. On top of that once you get a whole night call that ruins the sleep schedule for the week. On-call can work if you are dedicated whole week just for this but if you need to show up at work between those calls then good luck.
Well the answer is to have additional standups to discuss what should be discussed in standups.
What is the alternative for assessing skill? And don’t say lengthy take-home assignments where you may be working on it over the course of multiple days and never hear back after submitting. Junior devs need some way to distinguish themselves from their peers. Much rather do time-boxed assessments; that way I don’t waste a ton of time if not selected and I have some way of distinguishing myself from the crowd.
@@gppsoftware Certifications are nice for getting the interview; they are not sufficient for passing the interview. When I'm interviewing you, I don't care about a piece of paper, I want to be able to assess what you actually know and how good of a problem solver you are.
You nailed it
I fully agree with you.
I gave up on tech in 2001, when the market crashed the first time! i switched to real estate, then to the legal field in 2008 when real estate crashed! I have been a paralegal for 16 years, and I am taking the California Bar Exam in July!
Standups are momentum killers.
Twice a week is the maximum.
I have a simple policy: if I am required to do more than two round of interviews, I am not interested.
Point perfect listing of the most aggravating aspects of "modern" tech development teams!