Programmer here, working 8 years in the industry. The mental toll is real, so please EXERCISE PHYSICALLY. Go run, cycling, gym, anything that gets you in shape. It will be your way out. That devil on your shoulder that says you should continue with the algorithm goes away. Please listen to me, coding bros...
@@Maztergyl666 oh thank God! 🤣I love to walk. And I wish I could still row but the last 5 years my heart start to atrium fib which is annoying. So it’s now either walking or swimming- if the Dutch weather permits 🤣
I agree i work in the kitchen industry as a line cook i'm 26 years old. I want to get out of this hell hole because i'm sick of it! my pay is 24/hr when i come here on YT and i see these engineers complaining about their job mind you they have great income and benefits it's interesting to see, i'd take their position at any time, you guys should be grateful because there are some people like me who dream to take your spot i'm working hard to get out of my situation be grateful people!
@@briandarwin7297 Yeah it's pretty bad working as a line cook but if you think that sitting at work is an improvement because you don't get *physically* tired, you are in for a world of hurt. Also for people saying that working dealing with customers is bad. Do you think programming is an isolated activity? There are clients everywhere that you have to appease, be they your team leader, product owner and so on. For people thinking that the pay is good enough to ignore that, just consider the fact that the number of developers above 40 years old is very low. Many people leave the job way before retirement age and many times with several physical and mental health problems. If you think nothing can go wrong from sitting down for long you are *very* mistaken.
The dark side of being a programmer is that we often live in poverty. You study like crazy for several years and still find out that your tech knowledge is simply insufficient. You have several projects that you’re proud of, but when you try to apply for a job at a company, they tell you that you don’t know the technology they want for that project. So, you learn new things again, and then those skills end up being useless because you still don’t get hired. I’ve given up on looking for a job with companies, so I became an open-source developer, treating it more as a hobby.
@@szerednik.laszlo I work occasional manual jobs, such as home repairs. Sometimes I get hired for projects where customers want a web application, but those opportunities are quite rare.
I realized that as well. Maybe that's why I decided to learn math as to combine it with programming and try to create new things and experiment with ideas and stuff, I don't think this will serve for a living tho. (Excuse me for my bad english, I am just learning the language as well).
Started in 2013, liked it because of the creativity. Brought me to depression last year and suicidal thoughts. Almost ended my 9y relationship cause of all the pressure and crap. I took a 6 months break after years of saying "I need to resist". Now I am doing all I can to start a bagel shop asap. In the main time I am still programming but with a "I don't care anymore" attitude. This is because I know I am done with this and it's a matter of months before I will be free.
Fight on! No words I can say can encourage you probably, but please stay alive and struggle with all your might for a good life!! I hope you a happier life!
Been a developer for 35 years, biggest thing, and please listen: Do not tie your self worth to your ability to program. Get married, get a hobby, get some pets, explore history, build relationships with people, HAVE KIDS. When you drop dead, if you were a shit father, and were a pain in the ass to deal with, and were super boring, no one will say "That's ok, he was an amazing computer programmer." No brother, be a great father, be a great husband, be an amazing artist, be funny, be dependable, and I guarantee the day you drop dead, nobody will say "He was a great amazing person, but his programming skills were stale.". Programming is something you do, it's not who you are.
I would also add don't get obsessed about learning every new thing. Learn something if you are going to use it or are interested for a project but no need to try to know it all as you won't. Better to learn stuff outside programming as the conceptual knowledge transfers and help reduce burnout.
I would've fallen into the depression and burn out rabbit hole if I didn't start learning music and art outside of programming, they literally saved my mental health
Can confirm that art helps! I'm trying to do art whenever I want to do something productive but feel like I'm too tired to code. Then I don't feel bad for doing nothing and I don't burn myself out since I don't care if I'm good at art I just do it for fun.
Tried web development for a while. It wasn't all it's cracked up to be. This video covers a lot of the issues I found. I also found that the developers themselves, want to build the best, most efficient and flexible system in the world, using all the best practices. However, that takes time. The management, on the other hand, want to get the project completed as quickly as possible, to get it out the door and money in the kitty. With that pressure, corners start to be cut. That's where hard-coding, duplication of code, etc creep in. The sad reality is things are never as good as they should be. I also went home feeling mentally exhausted, as I was trying to see as big a picture as possible, to make my code as flexible as possible. That seldom worked.
Been kinda forced to move from IT to pizza delivery and recently managed to "upgrade" to industry welder working 3 shifts with a mobbing leader. Having almost no time to rest, not to mention self-development, work-life balance or other things - just grinding to survive, using scraps of time to be with my 5 year old or do some very small fixes around the house. Trust me, it's better to be burned off software engineer (which I also experienced) than having virtually no option to improve.
Lot of good advice here. I have to mention though that this is not reality of being a programmer. It's the reality of any competitive profession with high earning potential in a fast moving industry.
Been a professional game programmer for 10+ years (and even more if you count hobby development); you will never be as good as "that other guy" and that other guy thinks that about you too! I've met Principal programmers that admit they make mistakes- and that was not only refreshing but helped me be more kind to myself. Take breaks, drink plenty of water, get exercise (I do 10-20 minutes of yoga each night to combat the back issues I'm developing from sitting in a chair all day), stretch and don't forget to get out into nature: your brain _needs_ it. Remember: You are your own worst critic, if you don't use it for a week or more you will forget the 'basics' and don't feel bad if you don't understand something your colleagues do immediately: Everyone brings a different skill-set to the team. Nobody is perfect and those people that pretend they're better than you normally have something else going on they're trying to hide so they make you feel inferior- do your best to ignore it because they make mistakes too and also cannot do it all by themselves else they wouldn't be working on a team right? Be well my friends. Remember it is fun else you wouldn't be doing it.
I think the passion towards coding and maintaining the curiosity is the right way to build a bright career as a programmer, plus maintaining mental and physical health.There should be imagination in the mind.
I've been working for 17 years. I vastly underestimated the amount of time spent on old projects and legacy code. I've spent like 20% of that time on stuff I liked: New projects using recent technologies, where you can actually create and learn interesting things (for me at least) and are not slowed down to a crawl by technical debt and legacy code, or debugging obscure issues in a project you don't understand because those who wrote it left 10 years ago.
After about a dozen years as a programmer, I quit my job because of the burnout, pay lower than industry standard, and being treated so bad it was destroying my mental health. But after taking a break to do delivery and "recover" I can't get a job as a programmer again because so much time was spent on old and custom projects that I have no experience with the dozens of libraries every job now requires to get hired.
Today was one of those days where all I could think about was everything I hate about developing software. The constant pressure to progress, the socially inept leads questioning every variable name and bit of white space in your pull request, the "quick calls" that turn into 2 hours of "brainstorming" because your project is completely disorganized and failing causing you to work into the night to get actual work done. The late nights spent solving a problem only to find out the next day your requirements were not defined enough so you have to go back and completely rework your code. Your work follows you everywhere and everyone is a workaholic expecting you to give up all your time to slave away making your clients and stakeholders more money. It's a soulless profession full of toxic know-it-alls or people who have literally faked their way through who don't even understand programming basics. 90% of software development isn't even development. It's call after call, meeting after meeting, drowning in corporate bullshit and 3-4 letter acronyms while you argue about jira tickets. If you want to be good, you have to spend night and day learning, constantly grinding only to feel like you never really know what you're doing. This shit sucks. Alright back to work. (it's 9PM on a friday)
But u got the 6 figure bag right? Right??? I feel like there should be a tradeoff for your hard work. And from this post, I can see a lot of it, so GL with everything man!
The trick is to not really think about it as a challange. You're just doing ur job, same as people at Starbucks or McDonalds, just do what you're told, not an inch more or less, and take comfort in that you've done enough.
So true, the conditions and nature of coding today. So wise, the tips for battling the negative feelings. Thanks, CodeMunk, for sharing these tips! After 20 years as a professional programmer I sometimes still feel the spark.
I live paycheck to paycheck as a full stack software engineer. I remember getting this job and thinking I had made it. 5 years later and still barely scraping by...
@@TVDaJa Not really. If you have loans, you corner yourself with bad finances etc. even $20k a month might not be enough. I know some people that are spending x5 more on food than me "just because they can" and "they make more than me" but then it turns out they spend the entire paycheck each month on random stuff and they cornered themselves into this lifestyle and cant quit because humans will get a heavy mental hit while reducing quality of life. Ofc, they are bright red when they hear that I can buy other stuff that they cant, because I actually saved up the money instead of buying randoms.
This basically described every job/career that exists. Do not misunderstand, this video describes exactly what everyone should do to avoid burn out. Great video.
This is just SO real. When you cant find the bug,, give up, go for a walk, stop thinking about the code, go to bed. Next morning you will wake up and go straight to the error in the code. That has worked for me so many times.
I'm glad I went into DevOps. I still get to program fun projects, but my job is basically just setting up containers in the cloud which rarely has issues and the true problems are not my resonsibility.
I'm the opposite, I just recently got moved out of the ops team in my company so I can finally focus on programming. The only snag being that I'm also part of the QA team and spend much of my time just doing peer reviews. No end in sight until I find a better job.
Devops is nice, but the headcount for the devops is not like devs, once the pipelines are set correctly with the automation, then what else is left to do?
You're not using regex correctly if you're not googling it constanlty. I mean really, I have yet to meet a person who can write complex regex correctly from memory.
I was such person for a few months after reading Friedl's "Mastering regular expressions" =P. But yes, since you don't use complex/niche features often, and you inevitably forget things you don't use - you'll have to check the docs once you eventually need it. Applies to everything really, not just regex
The features also vary widely depending on implementation so especially if you don't have fancy ide support it's best to double-check you're doing it correctly anyway.
I think there's a good case that if the regex is that complex, you shouldn't be using a regex. They are absolutely hell to debug because of how counterintuitive they get, and there are alternatives to them that end up being much clearer.
For me the worst thing is the isolation. When I'm working on a project, it's the only thing I can think about, no matter where or with who I am. I just always feel alone in my head.
Burnout can happen with every job. At least you're making bigger bucks until it happens to you. Leaving you with some money so you actually can take the time off work to recover from the burnout. Until you find a new job, hopefully less stressful. But any job can be either fulfilling or makes you want to quit (choosing nice words)
@@ishkool8664 People will whine about anything because any job can be made arbitrarily arduous, even if it's just mopping the floor or adding single digit numbers together. If you were paid a trillion dollars if you jumped up and down 10,000 times in 1 hour, you would start crying after trying saying it's impossible and change jobs. Same would apply if you were told to calculate 1st grade math exercises by hand for 16 hours a day for 7 days a week 10 years straight without any lunch or coffee breaks
The reality is: "everything is broken" if it's not your code, it's someone else's code you depend on. This is the depressing reality you're living in as a programmer.
Here's another scenario. I've been working for 4 years in a company with a lot of legacy code and almost no of modern technologies involved. I learned to do my job very quickly and efficiently. Then i got tired of it, started to burn out. I left that company and started to look for something else... Only to find out that all of my knowledge isn't required anywhere else and i basically threw 4 years of my life in a trash bin. How's that for programming?
Not great. It's honestly a huge problem in current hiring practices I think, a lot of programming knowledge and skills transfer more or less smoothly across technologies yet recruiters don't seem to understand that. I once had an interview go south upon the interviewers hearing I had mainly C# experience (with dabbles in Java) and they needed someone for their Java-based tech stack lol
I had the same issue, after being at the same company off and on for 15 years. (I took a couple breaks to do some other things that didn't work out.) So much work on legacy and custom systems that I'm not hirable for anything else. I almost wish I stayed at the old company, until I remember what it had done to my mental health.
Fixing defects and imposter syndrome are real but I think they're exaggerated. I understand personal experience is anecdotal but I and my companions have never felt it to a point that it affects our wellbeing. One thing I rarely see talked about in videos and discussions is to maintain a mentality of limit. There are bugs to fix - work until you feel like you've done enough for the day and then sign off. A feature is due tomorrow but you're nowhere near complete - stop for the day and communicate the unreal timeline. There's a difference between being a slacker or poor at your job and setting boundaries. Setting boundaries will not result in your termination and if it does, it's probably not a good place to be at. 10 years in the industry here.
A little bit of impostor syndrome is just... normal, there is no syndrome there. Some people legitimately have this syndrome and it cripples them. Me personally havent experienced this and I probably should doubt myself more since I oftentimes overestimate my skill and it backfires.
I burned myself out while grinding to get to a point where I'd have a job in this industry. After getting a job it was a new chapter which fixed my burnout for a while, but now I've been feeling it quite a bit after a couple years in my job. Burnout is a very real thing in this job. It honestly gets worse if you don't address it because you need to grind so much to level up since you can't always "level up" with just your normal work tasks. Honestly staying up to speed in this industry is a brutal grind.
I wanted to be a programer or software developer. My life took a turn resulting me not being one, but maybe for the better. Programers and the majority of workers in the IT sector let it be UI desingers, website developers or programers, you name it, are the equialent of blue collar wage slaves, with the exception of the majority of blue collar workers don't bring work home with themselves and the workers in IT sector usually study for years. To all of you tired, exhausted IT workers, I raise my virtual hat for you, hang in there. Some of you keep our world running.
Holy moly. I have always thought that I am the only one who haven’t succeeded anything even though I have tried my best over the last few years but only developed panic/anxiety attack. 😅
That's just half of it. You are missing the grinding work of doing leetcode just to get a job as they ignore any degree you have. I mean I have wasted years of my life at university because now it's just about how you solve leetcode problems. Add system design even if you might not design a system on the job. Only our domain has books and courses for knowledge specific for interviews. That's a lot of pain for a job that makes you feel bad with a fixed salary. Starting your own store or SaaS sure looks like paradise.
It is not only the nature of work. We as devs need to start talking about the environment we are operating in and do something to make it better. No one (project manager, product manager...) will do it for us.
For me as a dev, burn out sneaks up on you until you really don't even feel like programming anymore, and you don't feel interested in the challenges at work, just frustrated.
I love it though. I've always loved problem solving. Especially difficult to solve problems. You need good guidance, a good team around you, and understanding leaders. Also, you need so many tools to rely on. Checklists of things to try. This is what I live for.
I once spent days to fix a bug. I fixed it, then came another series of bug, and I fixed them too. I celebrated until they told me that there’s a “change in requirement” and I had to revert every change. Phew!!! Sometimes even the ‘celebration’ we do at fixing the bugs proves to be pointless, and all the work before it too.
I’m a photographer but I write code almost everyday. I use it to solve problems in my photography business and my personal life. I also write bespoke apps or automations for other people or companies from time to time. I’ve been doing this for 25+ years. The only thing that keeps me from losing my mind about it is the fact that I’m not a programmer. I’m a photographer.
I think being a programmer and a true crack needs special people because of the aforementioned points.. i was such a cellar dwellar since i was a child and my wish is to never leave the house again and meet no fucking people ever except my family and girlfriend. Imposter syndrome is real but what really sucks off my energy is not fixing bugs till 3 a.m. (i don't mind, i love the night) but the people and politics, the fucking going to the office discussion and all of this shit
In a way, I do do clean code from day one. At least when it comes when it comes to naming. Thinking about it, I could get my single responsibilities defined earlier. I feel at a stage where I'm more able to do (and more in need of) that kind of process. Thanks for accidentally giving me a compliment.
Another thing I'm learning is to build things you enjoy building, normalize taking breaks without feeling guilty, have hobbies and set limits on your work schedule and socialize with your loved ones, find a physical activity you enjoy and if you're like me, keep your spirit alive by praying and reading your Bible daily 😊
Whenever I face a bug that I cannot solve after hours of debugging I take a break and do something that doesn’t involve my computer but I think about a solution while I’m away. 95% of the time I come up with a solution and if the solution doesn’t work I repeat the process.
Burnout is real, but the better your codebase, the more enjoyable coding is. Learn about the principles of writing good code, and implement them every chance you get.
Physichal Theraphist here on my way to carrer change to be a programmer,after pandemic times being a front liner of it,nothing more scares me out. At least machine tells you when some code is missing,human being complains It even If you do the right or wrong treatment.
Personally, I think all my practice debugging has helped me enormously in troubleshooting everything else in life. That said: never try to write as complex a program as you can, because you'll never be able to debug it. It'll all collapse eventually and you'll have to start over with a simpler plan. Also, I think of myself as an indie game dev first and a programmer second even though I'm 10 times better at the latter.
I fixed trucks for living so its very hard to complain at all when I landed my dream role as DevOps Consultant, working 7 hours a day, where I wantwhenever I want and literally have no on call shit or stress att all.
Ah yes, the flashbacks of me using C# for Unity, only to end up with programming the wrong syntax. Now I went to Ren'Py and just learn it whenever I want to... but also to try and create interactive scenarios.
What a weird thing to get hung up on. Syntax is the last thing in programming you should ever worry about when using a language. It's so easy to just look up or ask chatgpt
A bug is an opportunity to expanded knowledge and wisdom. If you are a programmer, you have to practice patience and eliminate frustration from your dictionary. All problems can be solved. They just need time and thoughtfulness.
Googling stuff you don't know is not the issue. Not finding it is. And overlooking the missing user name in your path for hours to have a colleague finally point it out to you in a heartbeat and dealing with the humiliation is. Saying the same issue number in the daily for weeks because you can't get it done. Or constantly having to deal with bew stuff you have no clue about when you just want to code down nice features you're already 80-90% sure how to do them. At least that's what it is for me.
You can’t “code” 9-5 for more than a few months at a time before getting mightily burned out and depressed. Especially in modern corporate environments with factory style assembly line work processes that are completely soul crushing 😅
Everything is true, BUT we forgot that part of that is...well, our fault. Some programmers think that they already studied and learnt everything, when in fact, they have a loooot to learn. When you do things right, when you ACTUALLY KNOW what you are doing, suddenly bugs are trivial, and the workload is manageable. Remember clean code => less burnout ;)
you forgot to mention that 90% of bugs are those tiny fuckers that you dont notice, till few hours later ik cuz i once did that. wrote a script that placed text inside a box, adding a new line every time the current line was out of space. added a space for each word, but forgot to also check if there was space for that space. resulted in the text at some point getting new line for every damn word, and i couldnt find why
My company does devops on client-owned servers, and in the last few months we've had more than one tool cause the servers to go down due to logging continuously with no upper limit when dormant in the background.
Only in the US can a coder make six figures. Anywhere else the ceiling is roughly at 50,000-70,000$/year. You have to change role to make more than that. Yup, a manager. Also 30 years of coding have gotten me chronic lower back pain, thumb arthritis and mCNV (distorted vision) in one eye.
Man We need a Co-operative sector for CodeBros Public & Private sectors don't want to give Devs sustenance, so it's time Devs took matters into their own hands You guys DO know what a Co-Operative sector is right ?
Nearly every one of the problems mentioned in this video is caused or amplified by scrum sprints. If you enjoy bureaucracy and being manipulated like a lab rat, seek out companies that manage software development using scrum sprints. On the other hand, if you love coding and are motivated by the creative process of building something great, seek out a company the uses a kanban process.
8 and more years in this industry, dark side of working in project based companies they blown up once you ask are those projects will be from scratch or maintenance and bug fixing and here is dark truth at best you get new project from scratch where it all fun and nice, but you will have deliver ASAP within ~2 months, otherside of this you get project which is already 10+ years old with non existant architecture and you go to maintain it and you eventually become invisible corporate person and there is no fix for that money talks first so your opinion does not matter no matter how good you use facts
My current company I'd be more likely to die of boredom than burnout, and im not a superstar programmer, I'm barely average imo. The only reason I stay is because of the good pay. Maybe this is more reality for startup companies, I havent worked at one before.
@@Mankepanke Yeah, whenever I watch videos where someone talks about ridiculous expectations or standards, I just have to remind myself it's probably just an American thing
Fighting bugs is not the biggest problem at all. I actually enjoy it, and I'm good at it! The biggest problem is... other people! Other developers, the management or even the clients!
Being a programmer is great if you are very good at and you love it. As in you still ‘code stuff in your free time’ love it. If this is true it’s a fantastic thing and you earn a lot of money. If however you are doing it because you think it’s a relatively easy way to earn a good salary and you don’t really love computing then yes, it will be very hard - and possibly - ultimately unrewarding. Part of the problem is that in the boom years people were led to believe that it’s a cushy a way to get free snacks and a six figure salary. However in reality - if you look at top engineers - they are hardcore people in terms of intellect and work ethic - which has always been the case.
@@nicktreleaven4119 Don't worry about it, just work around it to the best of your ability and over time the unfixable code becomes a feature instead of a bug
The real dark side of being a programmer is that you abstract and think logically about the world too, not only the code. I consider this bad, because you lose part of yourself in this process, and it's easier to get depressed. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but who knows.
And - there is always a tunnel at the end of the light. A whiff of black humor helps a lot. And good colleagues. They can be worth more than top salary.
It's true. 100%. Although I love programming, sometimes I feel like it would be awesome to have a more social job outside. In my free time I think alot about programming own projects and stuff even besides my 35 hour job. I really do love programming and creating things but I feel like my mind wants more than my body can handle over time. And in the past 1 1/2 years I've had a lot of breaks, I have been to 13 different countries in Europe! But you need a constant balance between work and free time. Not only on weekends/vacation. If you work for 5-6 days and shut off only on the weekends or vacation, you will likely be f'ed
I would suggest not to jump over and over and stick to one or two languages to master it and seek a job opportunity with that niche. That way you will not have to go into that race of gaining skills you will never be good with, to have a high quality, secured code and code management requires experience with that language and the design pattern for that language.
It’s kind of a controversial take, but I agree with jblow that imposter syndrome is a form of self awareness in your lacking in the skills needed for excellence and the daunting reality of needed personal growth and challenge to be confident. I also absolutely hate the meme of senior developers not understanding things. Insulting and bad for the craft
![*Next-door 10x Software Engineer* [FULL]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kKAue9DiHc0/mqdefault.jpg)
Programmer here, working 8 years in the industry. The mental toll is real, so please EXERCISE PHYSICALLY. Go run, cycling, gym, anything that gets you in shape. It will be your way out. That devil on your shoulder that says you should continue with the algorithm goes away. Please listen to me, coding bros...
yea gym is the cope. It also helps with back pain.
By the time you're my age you don't even want to do the gym anymore. It's all fucking useless and simply not enjoyable like it was in the 80s and 90s.
@@CallousCoder But that's the thing: It doesn't has to be gymming. It can also be just walking in the park. Anything physically to clear your mind
@@Maztergyl666 oh thank God! 🤣I love to walk. And I wish I could still row but the last 5 years my heart start to atrium fib which is annoying. So it’s now either walking or swimming- if the Dutch weather permits 🤣
@@CallousCoder Yeah better so! Just whatever keeps you moving! (En van regen smelt je niet, gozer ;) )
As a coder who worked in gas stations and taco bell when younger I am very careful to complain about sitting in an air-conditioned room all day
Lmaooo yea. They like to complain but they forget how good they have it. I've had much worse jobs. Working from home? Sign me up
I am an Android programmer in a company but because I am in a 3rd world country I actually make 350$ a month. Not all coding jobs are the same tho
I agree i work in the kitchen industry as a line cook i'm 26 years old. I want to get out of this hell hole because i'm sick of it! my pay is 24/hr when i come here on YT and i see these engineers complaining about their job mind you they have great income and benefits it's interesting to see, i'd take their position at any time, you guys should be grateful because there are some people like me who dream to take your spot i'm working hard to get out of my situation be grateful people!
@@briandarwin7297 Yeah it's pretty bad working as a line cook but if you think that sitting at work is an improvement because you don't get *physically* tired, you are in for a world of hurt.
Also for people saying that working dealing with customers is bad. Do you think programming is an isolated activity? There are clients everywhere that you have to appease, be they your team leader, product owner and so on.
For people thinking that the pay is good enough to ignore that, just consider the fact that the number of developers above 40 years old is very low. Many people leave the job way before retirement age and many times with several physical and mental health problems. If you think nothing can go wrong from sitting down for long you are *very* mistaken.
@@Asterx5 the fact that my work is remote opens it up to people in the 3rd world to do same thing so its not good news for me
The dark side of being a programmer is that we often live in poverty. You study like crazy for several years and still find out that your tech knowledge is simply insufficient. You have several projects that you’re proud of, but when you try to apply for a job at a company, they tell you that you don’t know the technology they want for that project. So, you learn new things again, and then those skills end up being useless because you still don’t get hired.
I’ve given up on looking for a job with companies, so I became an open-source developer, treating it more as a hobby.
May I ask what do you do for a living?
@@szerednik.laszlo I work occasional manual jobs, such as home repairs. Sometimes I get hired for projects where customers want a web application, but those opportunities are quite rare.
I realized that as well. Maybe that's why I decided to learn math as to combine it with programming and try to create new things and experiment with ideas and stuff, I don't think this will serve for a living tho. (Excuse me for my bad english, I am just learning the language as well).
Same...
@@TobiasCastillo-f7uplease, where are you from? Are you from a Spanish country?
Started in 2013, liked it because of the creativity. Brought me to depression last year and suicidal thoughts. Almost ended my 9y relationship cause of all the pressure and crap. I took a 6 months break after years of saying "I need to resist". Now I am doing all I can to start a bagel shop asap. In the main time I am still programming but with a "I don't care anymore" attitude. This is because I know I am done with this and it's a matter of months before I will be free.
Hope success to bagel shop !
Fight on! No words I can say can encourage you probably, but please stay alive and struggle with all your might for a good life!!
I hope you a happier life!
Way to escape before AI takes all of our livelihoods
In what field were you programming ?
Whish you a happier life with your New Shop
Exactly what happened to me. But bro a bagel shop is ten times worse on your psyche and resturant success statistics are not good
Until The Next Bug ...
you mean 5 seconds???
Been a developer for 35 years, biggest thing, and please listen: Do not tie your self worth to your ability to program. Get married, get a hobby, get some pets, explore history, build relationships with people, HAVE KIDS. When you drop dead, if you were a shit father, and were a pain in the ass to deal with, and were super boring, no one will say "That's ok, he was an amazing computer programmer." No brother, be a great father, be a great husband, be an amazing artist, be funny, be dependable, and I guarantee the day you drop dead, nobody will say "He was a great amazing person, but his programming skills were stale.". Programming is something you do, it's not who you are.
So true. Thank you.
I would also add don't get obsessed about learning every new thing. Learn something if you are going to use it or are interested for a project but no need to try to know it all as you won't. Better to learn stuff outside programming as the conceptual knowledge transfers and help reduce burnout.
Yes! This is the truth
Wholesome opinion. Thanks!
I sure do like the emphasis on bringing more little shits into this doomed world
"Coding is tough, but so are you" well said dude
I would've fallen into the depression and burn out rabbit hole if I didn't start learning music and art outside of programming, they literally saved my mental health
Can confirm that art helps! I'm trying to do art whenever I want to do something productive but feel like I'm too tired to code. Then I don't feel bad for doing nothing and I don't burn myself out since I don't care if I'm good at art I just do it for fun.
Tried web development for a while. It wasn't all it's cracked up to be. This video covers a lot of the issues I found. I also found that the developers themselves, want to build the best, most efficient and flexible system in the world, using all the best practices. However, that takes time. The management, on the other hand, want to get the project completed as quickly as possible, to get it out the door and money in the kitty. With that pressure, corners start to be cut. That's where hard-coding, duplication of code, etc creep in. The sad reality is things are never as good as they should be. I also went home feeling mentally exhausted, as I was trying to see as big a picture as possible, to make my code as flexible as possible. That seldom worked.
This is so relateable
Been kinda forced to move from IT to pizza delivery and recently managed to "upgrade" to industry welder working 3 shifts with a mobbing leader. Having almost no time to rest, not to mention self-development, work-life balance or other things - just grinding to survive, using scraps of time to be with my 5 year old or do some very small fixes around the house.
Trust me, it's better to be burned off software engineer (which I also experienced) than having virtually no option to improve.
Lot of good advice here. I have to mention though that this is not reality of being a programmer. It's the reality of any competitive profession with high earning potential in a fast moving industry.
Been a professional game programmer for 10+ years (and even more if you count hobby development); you will never be as good as "that other guy" and that other guy thinks that about you too! I've met Principal programmers that admit they make mistakes- and that was not only refreshing but helped me be more kind to myself. Take breaks, drink plenty of water, get exercise (I do 10-20 minutes of yoga each night to combat the back issues I'm developing from sitting in a chair all day), stretch and don't forget to get out into nature: your brain _needs_ it. Remember: You are your own worst critic, if you don't use it for a week or more you will forget the 'basics' and don't feel bad if you don't understand something your colleagues do immediately: Everyone brings a different skill-set to the team. Nobody is perfect and those people that pretend they're better than you normally have something else going on they're trying to hide so they make you feel inferior- do your best to ignore it because they make mistakes too and also cannot do it all by themselves else they wouldn't be working on a team right? Be well my friends. Remember it is fun else you wouldn't be doing it.
All very true. Impostor syndrome is very real, no matter the experience.
I think the passion towards coding and maintaining the curiosity is the right way to build a bright career as a programmer, plus maintaining mental and physical health.There should be imagination in the mind.
I've been working for 17 years. I vastly underestimated the amount of time spent on old projects and legacy code. I've spent like 20% of that time on stuff I liked: New projects using recent technologies, where you can actually create and learn interesting things (for me at least) and are not slowed down to a crawl by technical debt and legacy code, or debugging obscure issues in a project you don't understand because those who wrote it left 10 years ago.
After about a dozen years as a programmer, I quit my job because of the burnout, pay lower than industry standard, and being treated so bad it was destroying my mental health. But after taking a break to do delivery and "recover" I can't get a job as a programmer again because so much time was spent on old and custom projects that I have no experience with the dozens of libraries every job now requires to get hired.
Today was one of those days where all I could think about was everything I hate about developing software. The constant pressure to progress, the socially inept leads questioning every variable name and bit of white space in your pull request, the "quick calls" that turn into 2 hours of "brainstorming" because your project is completely disorganized and failing causing you to work into the night to get actual work done. The late nights spent solving a problem only to find out the next day your requirements were not defined enough so you have to go back and completely rework your code. Your work follows you everywhere and everyone is a workaholic expecting you to give up all your time to slave away making your clients and stakeholders more money. It's a soulless profession full of toxic know-it-alls or people who have literally faked their way through who don't even understand programming basics. 90% of software development isn't even development. It's call after call, meeting after meeting, drowning in corporate bullshit and 3-4 letter acronyms while you argue about jira tickets. If you want to be good, you have to spend night and day learning, constantly grinding only to feel like you never really know what you're doing.
This shit sucks.
Alright back to work. (it's 9PM on a friday)
But u got the 6 figure bag right? Right??? I feel like there should be a tradeoff for your hard work. And from this post, I can see a lot of it, so GL with everything man!
Is your pay worth it?
The trick is to not really think about it as a challange. You're just doing ur job, same as people at Starbucks or McDonalds, just do what you're told, not an inch more or less, and take comfort in that you've done enough.
So true, the conditions and nature of coding today. So wise, the tips for battling the negative feelings. Thanks, CodeMunk, for sharing these tips! After 20 years as a professional programmer I sometimes still feel the spark.
I live paycheck to paycheck as a full stack software engineer. I remember getting this job and thinking I had made it. 5 years later and still barely scraping by...
Which country u working in
@@Emperor_famous for real, I work only part time and have money to spare each month. Country is the biggest factor here
@@TVDaJa Not really. If you have loans, you corner yourself with bad finances etc. even $20k a month might not be enough. I know some people that are spending x5 more on food than me "just because they can" and "they make more than me" but then it turns out they spend the entire paycheck each month on random stuff and they cornered themselves into this lifestyle and cant quit because humans will get a heavy mental hit while reducing quality of life. Ofc, they are bright red when they hear that I can buy other stuff that they cant, because I actually saved up the money instead of buying randoms.
@@TVDaJa right. If you're not in the US or Canada the pay gets cut quite a bit.
This basically described every job/career that exists. Do not misunderstand, this video describes exactly what everyone should do to avoid burn out. Great video.
This is just SO real. When you cant find the bug,, give up, go for a walk, stop thinking about the code, go to bed.
Next morning you will wake up and go straight to the error in the code. That has worked for me so many times.
I'm glad I went into DevOps. I still get to program fun projects, but my job is basically just setting up containers in the cloud which rarely has issues and the true problems are not my resonsibility.
I'm the opposite, I just recently got moved out of the ops team in my company so I can finally focus on programming. The only snag being that I'm also part of the QA team and spend much of my time just doing peer reviews. No end in sight until I find a better job.
I am learning AWS right now and hoping to switch from my Full Stack role into a Devops role.
Devops is nice, but the headcount for the devops is not like devs, once the pipelines are set correctly with the automation, then what else is left to do?
You're not using regex correctly if you're not googling it constanlty.
I mean really, I have yet to meet a person who can write complex regex correctly from memory.
I was such person for a few months after reading Friedl's "Mastering regular expressions" =P. But yes, since you don't use complex/niche features often, and you inevitably forget things you don't use - you'll have to check the docs once you eventually need it. Applies to everything really, not just regex
but isnt regex slower to execute than lotta conditions?
specifying its execution time, cuz its so much easier to write when you know just the basics
The features also vary widely depending on implementation so especially if you don't have fancy ide support it's best to double-check you're doing it correctly anyway.
Regex is just weird parser combinator. Nothing more. Go welding
I think there's a good case that if the regex is that complex, you shouldn't be using a regex. They are absolutely hell to debug because of how counterintuitive they get, and there are alternatives to them that end up being much clearer.
"hit pause before your brain turns into spaghetti code" - this guy
coffein ✔
6 figures ✔
algorithms ❌➡ a day in the life video
6 figures ❌ => not in my country.
Don't compare yourself to others. Your boss will.
A couple of years ago I started to avoid JS, since then, I am loving my job again
Y u avoiding it
@@Emperor_famous Because it is a painful language to work with
Blasphemy
Amen, frontend stack is a total mess.
It’s so iconic to say until the next bug😂
1:59 me watching this taking a break from my code because its just bugs upon bugs upon bugs
The worst thing about being programmer - it requires alot of social interaction.
How so? I work from home and we hardly ever even do meeting or anything.
Not really. It just depends on the company like any other office job
For me the worst thing is the isolation. When I'm working on a project, it's the only thing I can think about, no matter where or with who I am. I just always feel alone in my head.
I think most points are true for highly complex situations, especially when mixed with time pressure.
Burnout can happen with every job. At least you're making bigger bucks until it happens to you. Leaving you with some money so you actually can take the time off work to recover from the burnout. Until you find a new job, hopefully less stressful. But any job can be either fulfilling or makes you want to quit (choosing nice words)
true, people will whine about anything. Programming is the easiest cash printing machine, you are not doing physical labour but mental labour.
Yeah ask any medical professional what is burnout
@@ishkool8664 People will whine about anything because any job can be made arbitrarily arduous, even if it's just mopping the floor or adding single digit numbers together. If you were paid a trillion dollars if you jumped up and down 10,000 times in 1 hour, you would start crying after trying saying it's impossible and change jobs. Same would apply if you were told to calculate 1st grade math exercises by hand for 16 hours a day for 7 days a week 10 years straight without any lunch or coffee breaks
The reality is: "everything is broken" if it's not your code, it's someone else's code you depend on. This is the depressing reality you're living in as a programmer.
Here's another scenario.
I've been working for 4 years in a company with a lot of legacy code and almost no of modern technologies involved. I learned to do my job very quickly and efficiently. Then i got tired of it, started to burn out. I left that company and started to look for something else... Only to find out that all of my knowledge isn't required anywhere else and i basically threw 4 years of my life in a trash bin.
How's that for programming?
Not great. It's honestly a huge problem in current hiring practices I think, a lot of programming knowledge and skills transfer more or less smoothly across technologies yet recruiters don't seem to understand that. I once had an interview go south upon the interviewers hearing I had mainly C# experience (with dabbles in Java) and they needed someone for their Java-based tech stack lol
I had the same issue, after being at the same company off and on for 15 years. (I took a couple breaks to do some other things that didn't work out.) So much work on legacy and custom systems that I'm not hirable for anything else. I almost wish I stayed at the old company, until I remember what it had done to my mental health.
thank you for making this, the timing of feels divine
I remember fixing a bug for an hour just to discover that terminal was opened in another folder, thus no changes mattered
Fixing defects and imposter syndrome are real but I think they're exaggerated. I understand personal experience is anecdotal but I and my companions have never felt it to a point that it affects our wellbeing. One thing I rarely see talked about in videos and discussions is to maintain a mentality of limit. There are bugs to fix - work until you feel like you've done enough for the day and then sign off. A feature is due tomorrow but you're nowhere near complete - stop for the day and communicate the unreal timeline. There's a difference between being a slacker or poor at your job and setting boundaries. Setting boundaries will not result in your termination and if it does, it's probably not a good place to be at. 10 years in the industry here.
Your experience is entirely anecdotal and you should have just ended the comment there
A little bit of impostor syndrome is just... normal, there is no syndrome there.
Some people legitimately have this syndrome and it cripples them.
Me personally havent experienced this and I probably should doubt myself more since I oftentimes overestimate my skill and it backfires.
I'd love to find a place to work where setting boundaries didn't just make other people mad and have them tell you to deal with it.
I burned myself out while grinding to get to a point where I'd have a job in this industry. After getting a job it was a new chapter which fixed my burnout for a while, but now I've been feeling it quite a bit after a couple years in my job. Burnout is a very real thing in this job. It honestly gets worse if you don't address it because you need to grind so much to level up since you can't always "level up" with just your normal work tasks. Honestly staying up to speed in this industry is a brutal grind.
That's awesome, man. Thanks
I wanted to be a programer or software developer. My life took a turn resulting me not being one, but maybe for the better. Programers and the majority of workers in the IT sector let it be UI desingers, website developers or programers, you name it, are the equialent of blue collar wage slaves, with the exception of the majority of blue collar workers don't bring work home with themselves and the workers in IT sector usually study for years.
To all of you tired, exhausted IT workers, I raise my virtual hat for you, hang in there. Some of you keep our world running.
Only for the next decade and a half haha
hell no. i'm almost out of this shit. feeling really tired
Holy moly. I have always thought that I am the only one who haven’t succeeded anything even though I have tried my best over the last few years but only developed panic/anxiety attack. 😅
Love this, really found myself a few times
That's just half of it. You are missing the grinding work of doing leetcode just to get a job as they ignore any degree you have. I mean I have wasted years of my life at university because now it's just about how you solve leetcode problems. Add system design even if you might not design a system on the job. Only our domain has books and courses for knowledge specific for interviews. That's a lot of pain for a job that makes you feel bad with a fixed salary. Starting your own store or SaaS sure looks like paradise.
If I wasn't pressured by my mortgage I would work much more on my project instead of doing those useless tests
It is not only the nature of work. We as devs need to start talking about the environment we are operating in and do something to make it better. No one (project manager, product manager...) will do it for us.
For me as a dev, burn out sneaks up on you until you really don't even feel like programming anymore, and you don't feel interested in the challenges at work, just frustrated.
Some days: "I am a programmer!"
Other days: *"sigh* I'm a programmer..."
This is how i felt now
I'm not even in the industry right now
I thought that i was alone
Been there, done that. I am 15 years developing now and I’m sick of it. Don’t enjoy it anymore like I used too. Time for something new.
I love it though. I've always loved problem solving. Especially difficult to solve problems. You need good guidance, a good team around you, and understanding leaders. Also, you need so many tools to rely on. Checklists of things to try. This is what I live for.
I once spent days to fix a bug. I fixed it, then came another series of bug, and I fixed them too. I celebrated until they told me that there’s a “change in requirement” and I had to revert every change. Phew!!! Sometimes even the ‘celebration’ we do at fixing the bugs proves to be pointless, and all the work before it too.
I’m a photographer but I write code almost everyday. I use it to solve problems in my photography business and my personal life. I also write bespoke apps or automations for other people or companies from time to time. I’ve been doing this for 25+ years. The only thing that keeps me from losing my mind about it is the fact that I’m not a programmer. I’m a photographer.
I think being a programmer and a true crack needs special people because of the aforementioned points.. i was such a cellar dwellar since i was a child and my wish is to never leave the house again and meet no fucking people ever except my family and girlfriend. Imposter syndrome is real but what really sucks off my energy is not fixing bugs till 3 a.m. (i don't mind, i love the night) but the people and politics, the fucking going to the office discussion and all of this shit
In the end, it all comes down into one thing: balance. Find balance. Work for living, do not live for working.
In a way, I do do clean code from day one. At least when it comes when it comes to naming. Thinking about it, I could get my single responsibilities defined earlier. I feel at a stage where I'm more able to do (and more in need of) that kind of process.
Thanks for accidentally giving me a compliment.
Another thing I'm learning is to build things you enjoy building, normalize taking breaks without feeling guilty, have hobbies and set limits on your work schedule and socialize with your loved ones, find a physical activity you enjoy and if you're like me, keep your spirit alive by praying and reading your Bible daily 😊
Whenever I face a bug that I cannot solve after hours of debugging I take a break and do something that doesn’t involve my computer but I think about a solution while I’m away. 95% of the time I come up with a solution and if the solution doesn’t work I repeat the process.
Burnout is real, but the better your codebase, the more enjoyable coding is. Learn about the principles of writing good code, and implement them every chance you get.
Physichal Theraphist here on my way to carrer change to be a programmer,after pandemic times being a front liner of it,nothing more scares me out.
At least machine tells you when some code is missing,human being complains It even If you do the right or wrong treatment.
Personally, I think all my practice debugging has helped me enormously in troubleshooting everything else in life. That said: never try to write as complex a program as you can, because you'll never be able to debug it. It'll all collapse eventually and you'll have to start over with a simpler plan. Also, I think of myself as an indie game dev first and a programmer second even though I'm 10 times better at the latter.
Even senior devs will ask StackOverflow how to center a div 🚀
I fixed trucks for living so its very hard to complain at all when I landed my dream role as DevOps Consultant, working 7 hours a day, where I wantwhenever I want and literally have no on call shit or stress att all.
Ah yes, the flashbacks of me using C# for Unity, only to end up with programming the wrong syntax.
Now I went to Ren'Py and just learn it whenever I want to... but also to try and create interactive scenarios.
What a weird thing to get hung up on. Syntax is the last thing in programming you should ever worry about when using a language. It's so easy to just look up or ask chatgpt
A bug is an opportunity to expanded knowledge and wisdom. If you are a programmer, you have to practice patience and eliminate frustration from your dictionary. All problems can be solved. They just need time and thoughtfulness.
Love your video format
Googling stuff you don't know is not the issue. Not finding it is. And overlooking the missing user name in your path for hours to have a colleague finally point it out to you in a heartbeat and dealing with the humiliation is. Saying the same issue number in the daily for weeks because you can't get it done. Or constantly having to deal with bew stuff you have no clue about when you just want to code down nice features you're already 80-90% sure how to do them. At least that's what it is for me.
"It doesn't work ... why?" "It works ... why?" Pretty much it.
DAMNNNNN that is Huuge messege
Thank you
I have luckily never felt this way after like 5 years. Bugs are fun when you are just getting paid to fix them.
You can’t “code” 9-5 for more than a few months at a time before getting mightily burned out and depressed. Especially in modern corporate environments with factory style assembly line work processes that are completely soul crushing 😅
Everything is true, BUT we forgot that part of that is...well, our fault.
Some programmers think that they already studied and learnt everything, when in fact, they have a loooot to learn.
When you do things right, when you ACTUALLY KNOW what you are doing, suddenly bugs are trivial, and the workload is manageable.
Remember clean code => less burnout ;)
you forgot to mention that 90% of bugs are those tiny fuckers that you dont notice, till few hours later
ik cuz i once did that. wrote a script that placed text inside a box, adding a new line every time the current line was out of space. added a space for each word, but forgot to also check if there was space for that space. resulted in the text at some point getting new line for every damn word, and i couldnt find why
My company does devops on client-owned servers, and in the last few months we've had more than one tool cause the servers to go down due to logging continuously with no upper limit when dormant in the background.
until the next bug hits different
Thank you for this video. I needed this. Earned yourself 1 subscriber.
Only in the US can a coder make six figures. Anywhere else the ceiling is roughly at 50,000-70,000$/year. You have to change role to make more than that. Yup, a manager.
Also 30 years of coding have gotten me chronic lower back pain, thumb arthritis and mCNV (distorted vision) in one eye.
Man We need a Co-operative sector for CodeBros
Public & Private sectors don't want to give Devs sustenance, so it's time Devs took matters into their own hands
You guys DO know what a Co-Operative sector is right ?
idk coding gets me out of depression only positive stuff for me its my biggest passion since 2012
i love the improvement grind
No one asked 😂
so true, that's why I don't have a job anymore..
Nearly every one of the problems mentioned in this video is caused or amplified by scrum sprints. If you enjoy bureaucracy and being manipulated like a lab rat, seek out companies that manage software development using scrum sprints. On the other hand, if you love coding and are motivated by the creative process of building something great, seek out a company the uses a kanban process.
8 and more years in this industry, dark side of working in project based companies they blown up once you ask are those projects will be from scratch or maintenance and bug fixing and here is dark truth at best you get new project from scratch where it all fun and nice, but you will have deliver ASAP within ~2 months, otherside of this you get project which is already 10+ years old with non existant architecture and you go to maintain it and you eventually become invisible corporate person and there is no fix for that money talks first so your opinion does not matter no matter how good you use facts
Make a nice DX for yourself and ffs write tests. And keep learning.
Do these things and it'll be fine.
8 years experience. everything is true 😢
Let's not forget the endless meetings and tps reports (is this what I signed up for?)
If you find yourself working on bugs late at night often, your are either new in the profession or maybe that Impostor Syndrome is real for you.
My current company I'd be more likely to die of boredom than burnout, and im not a superstar programmer, I'm barely average imo. The only reason I stay is because of the good pay.
Maybe this is more reality for startup companies, I havent worked at one before.
It's not. I have no idea what this video is talking about. 16 years working as a developer.
Maybe it's a USA thing? Sounds more like that to me.
@@Mankepanke Yeah, whenever I watch videos where someone talks about ridiculous expectations or standards, I just have to remind myself it's probably just an American thing
Fighting bugs is not the biggest problem at all. I actually enjoy it, and I'm good at it! The biggest problem is... other people! Other developers, the management or even the clients!
Being a programmer is great if you are very good at and you love it. As in you still ‘code stuff in your free time’ love it. If this is true it’s a fantastic thing and you earn a lot of money. If however you are doing it because you think it’s a relatively easy way to earn a good salary and you don’t really love computing then yes, it will be very hard - and possibly - ultimately unrewarding. Part of the problem is that in the boom years people were led to believe that it’s a cushy a way to get free snacks and a six figure salary. However in reality - if you look at top engineers - they are hardcore people in terms of intellect and work ethic - which has always been the case.
Changed jobs to Data science, now the imposter syndrome is even worse.
Thx you,
I thought I was the only one thinking that
I thought I was going to get instruction on how to force-choke the scrum master.
Well not really. Just write tests, take your time making it good and dont take it too seriously. I love my job.
And don't use dynamically typed programming languages
Aren't jobs mainly about maintaining existing code rather than writing from scratch? So you're stuck with unfixable code sometimes
@@nicktreleaven4119it's never unfixable. You just need grit and time.
Keep adding tests, then fix the code.
@@nicktreleaven4119 Don't worry about it, just work around it to the best of your ability and over time the unfixable code becomes a feature instead of a bug
The real dark side of being a programmer is that you abstract and think logically about the world too, not only the code. I consider this bad, because you lose part of yourself in this process, and it's easier to get depressed. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but who knows.
And - there is always a tunnel at the end of the light. A whiff of black humor helps a lot. And good colleagues. They can be worth more than top salary.
It's true. 100%. Although I love programming, sometimes I feel like it would be awesome to have a more social job outside. In my free time I think alot about programming own projects and stuff even besides my 35 hour job. I really do love programming and creating things but I feel like my mind wants more than my body can handle over time.
And in the past 1 1/2 years I've had a lot of breaks, I have been to 13 different countries in Europe! But you need a constant balance between work and free time. Not only on weekends/vacation. If you work for 5-6 days and shut off only on the weekends or vacation, you will likely be f'ed
Stopped being a programmer professionally. Life’s good now
I would suggest not to jump over and over and stick to one or two languages to master it and seek a job opportunity with that niche. That way you will not have to go into that race of gaining skills you will never be good with, to have a high quality, secured code and code management requires experience with that language and the design pattern for that language.
It’s kind of a controversial take, but I agree with jblow that imposter syndrome is a form of self awareness in your lacking in the skills needed for excellence and the daunting reality of needed personal growth and challenge to be confident. I also absolutely hate the meme of senior developers not understanding things. Insulting and bad for the craft
Also I’m cutting back on the caffeine, I agree with you it wont help solve any of your problems.
being a programmer is like being a caffeine addict in broad daylight - while being an alcoholic at midnight.
Amazing video!
Thank you!