I'd love to have something of my own, but I can't find motivation to do it when I know the probability of it succeeding. I consulted some friends with their startups, and know enormous amount of effort they put it, and I haven't seen single one do well.
I had done quite some opensource work, which was pretty fulfilling (mostly contributing to established projects), but it sadly doesn't pay bills.
I was thinking of swapping careers. I have CS degree (that means decent math, ability to think etc...). What other careers are there, where I could utilize some of that knowledge, and not feel so burned out?
btw I have around 7years of professional programming experience...
btw2: I lift regularly weights, I am healthy, so work isn't all life. I also tried meditation for over a month, while it wasn't bad, it didn't help me "cure" my frustration.
Switching jobs probably isn't going to fill the frustration you feel. The vast majority of jobs aren't meaningful. The ones that are don't pay particularly well or have other quality of life issues - school teachers aren't well paid, healthcare providers require vast amounts of training and work insane hours, and the overwhelming majority of artists don't make it.
The solution is to have work be the thing you do for forty hours a week that pays for the meaningful things you do in your life. Go home after eight hours. If you have a partner and kids, spend time with them. If you don't, consider getting them. Make some art in your spare time, or build side projects that have meaning for you. Go dancing. Make music. Write a blog. Write angry rants about how your work is meaningless. It really doesn't matter much.
There's no shame in quietly building a happy little life for yourself. You just don't hear about it too often because those folks are out being quietly happy.
There's a lot of truth in what you write. Thanks. Problem is, I am extremely goal oriented person. I need a carrot in front of me to chase - that's what drives me and what makes me get up at bed. I used to do sports professional when I was younger, and I was always obsessive about wining, up to putting tremendous hours into it. My self-analysis, maybe completely wrong, is that I carried it into my adult life, but can't find nothing meaningful to compete in now.
For me, it's enough money to not have to worry about finances, a tolerable working environment, a few meaningful relationships, and a couple avenues for giving back to my community in a concrete manner. I don't have nearly the competitive focus that you do, and it definitely sounds like you need an outlet for it. Speed-running super mario 64 could be a good option if you want the status points. Or if you're secure enough financially to fail at it full-time, getting into sales would be fantastic for you.
Teaching truly is a vocation; you don't (let alone can't) do it for the pay. Before you consider it, if you don't know any teachers, don't go into teaching; you need to know what it entails.
My sister gave up and started teaching in England instead.
not sure if that's what you intended.
For me, I'm moving to a role doing on-site installations of software that I used to be a developer for. Travel all over, decent pay, get to go on-site (at Amazon warehouses), and it requires technical skill without being a real coding job. This is perfect for me.
The key is two things: first, stop looking down at non-dev jobs. They aren't less, they aren't unworthy. Lots of devs I've met have a strange tendency to think that way.
Second, figure out what motivates you. Think about what parts of your job you've loved, and what made them so great. I doubt it was the part where you wrote some lines of code. Think more higher level- what specifically about that thing you were doing was it that made you want to get to work early and stay late to finish it? The customers? The team? The business goals?
Once you know that, go looking for a job that has those things instead.
(And hey, that team I mention I'm joining might be hiring still if constant travel and early mornings in the industrial end of town is up your alley :D )
We're a fast-growing startup and I was employee number 3, now of like 15-20 people.
I'm starting to build the team too but those early days where it's just you solving the problems...so much fun.
Maybe this is your problem. You should try not to be the team hero. Stick to your little part of the app, do a good job and go home early. If the rest of the team is screwing up - it isn't your job to fix.
I agree this is good advise when it's feasible, but a lot of the current management trend (collective code ownership, everyone working off a single "backlog", etc.) can make it quite hard to follow.
It really is a matter of not being able to say no and wanting to swoop in and save stuff. It's not good for you. Ultimately, it creates this terrible mentality at the workplace where you're expected by your manager to come in and save things all the time. This also means that your coworkers don't step up to learn more of the stack and troubleshoot, because they know that they will always have you to fall back on.
It might be easier to say no when you reframe things with this perspective. If you never say no, no one else will ever learn, and therefore you will ALWAYS be stuck in this position.
It might be a few years of grinding it out as a developer, but if you focus on it then it could come pretty quickly.
Having a large cushion of savings makes it much easier to find fulfilling work. You can experiment with a startup if you want (and not worry so much about it failing). You can try a lower-pay but high-impact career. You can travel.
I'm nowhere near FI myself, but even the savings I do have made me feel much more free.
Otherwise, look into adjacent careers. Product management, sales engineering, and engineering management are all potential tracks to try.
You could also be technical lead/CTO, however since you are big fan of functional programming you will more likely push your preferences onto other workers and they will hate you.
I like to help, explain, prototype. Help understand frameworks etc.
I think you need to get over that feeling somehow. You're obviously too smart to do the work you're doing, because you're unhappy with it and it sounds like you're not being challenged enough. Other people around you also say things indicating that you are smart. Yet you seem to doubt your own smartness. What's going on there?
I should note that I'm not talking about founding something based on your passion. One of my friends works at a bike shop and absolutely loves it. He's had to adjust his living situation and lifestyle to match his income, but the result is a happier human.
This certainly doesn't help you figure out a specific career, but my point is that the possibilities are endless just trust your gut feelings!
I always say that if I wasn't so good with computers I'd be a surgeon, haha. That was my #nr2 plan, if I fail in CS.
I'm not in US, but Europe. Akka everywhere. If I have to debug one more akka spaghetti system I might as well switch to Node.js.
edit: I know/follow you and your work. Kudos for everything and doing functional Scala :)
edit2: I don't mean to insult Akka, it's great tool. It's just easy to misuse (like anything), and people misuse it a lot. At least from my experience.
Our team is not perfect, we have a lot of the same issues you find at most companies(some good code, some bad, large company red tape, etc.) but, we also have a lot of good things: many people who either know FP or want to learn, good infrastructure support, freedom to innovate, lots of open source, etc.
It's enough of the good stuff that I'm much happier here than I was at my previous job. I don't agree that all coding jobs are the same. Most days I'm working hard but working on fun and interesting problems.
It's not the language. Or the purity. No amount of changing the language you code in will increase your happiness, past a month or two.
You either find fulfillment as a code monkey, or you don't. I don't find it fulfilling, but I find starting a startup to be so. You have to pick for yourself what makes you happy.
Brian
Pain is a tower, climb it. Wanting things is easy. Understanding is a luxury.
I expect to suffer but you may find a path without the darkness :)
I think reward boils down to the things you actually pursue and do, both in the academia or the industry.
Just because you don't think you'd succeed in ${world_renowned_and_highly_pressured_university} doesn't mean you can't do amazing things at ${other_university}.
Seriously - if you have an original thought in your head, can write, and can justify your point of view, you can do a PhD.
If you have years of development experience helping younger developers learn how to write secure code is a worthwhile endeavour.
Frustrations, I dont think you can detach that from CS!
I only hear of these 20yrs olds catching awesome bugs, and thinking that it's awesome for them, but it feels like I missed out on it a bit.
But it is good idea. To be honest I considered DBA... it seemed to be more sensible lol... I actually enjoyed working with Posgres, tuning it etc...
As someone coming from the business world and getting into tech I gotta say its hard to take any non CS or engineering roles seriously. They just aren't of the same calibre.
I don't have a degree even.
Mike Covel Trend Following, 5th Edition: How to Make a Fortune in Bull, Bear and Black Swan Markets
If I see some OOP madness, in statically typed lang, I remember how bad it can be in dynamic one.
Dont take it the wrong way. I know a lot of programmers, personally, which are dynamic programming fans, are and kickass coders. But it doesn't work for me.
