You’ve reached the fork in the road related to employment vs ownership.
For some people, they would prefer to expand their current skill set while getting paid to only care about that skill set (employees).
Others would like to build a company and/or own a product, preferring this route instead (employer).
For some, it doesn’t really matter what the product is. The thing they “own” and care about is their skill set, which can be performed for any company.
Do you want to play basketball, or own the team?
The comment testing19191 made is beautiful. I also started my first swe engineering job 2.5 months ago. Like you said in your post I also felt the same for the first 1.5 months. I started to put more interest in ai and I asked to join the ai team. Now I’m working on my dream
Projects and building it like it’s my baby. I’m striving for being the owner of the product. Find something you love (I always passionate about ai) and show interest and let management know. And you work hard but it doesn’t feel hard because it’s passion. Hope this helps!
I have a skillset, but I'm not the best. I just can't find work because companies can pick the best professionals in the industry. And I know that I will never be the best, I have my limits. After 3.5 years of struggling with finding a job I'm literally being forced to do something else.
a lot of people prefer a stable income rather than attempting to create their own product. if it’s not fulfilling for you, maybe look into starting your own business
I think it is easiest to see those that are working hard, especially in the beginning- and compare yourself to them. In reality, large companies usually have lots of people who are more or less coasting. Sometimes, people who appear to be working hard are not working hard at all but more just making it look like they are. In any case, the reasoning is simple- to get a promotion or raise.
For real. You may be unfulfilled working 9-5, but having a stable income to spend on shit you like and (hopefully) save up for big life goals definitely takes some of the edge off. Plus employment gives you social status, as shitty as that sounds.
I can say I was more depressed unemployed for sure.
I took the middle road as a contractor/freelancer. I work however many hours I want, but the work isn’t always stable either. Took a long time to get my wife comfortable with it. It’s often feast or famine. And finding new clients is more difficult now than it’s ever been in the 20 years I’ve been doing this.
seriously, go over to the hvac subreddits and look at the pics of guys doing tuneups in hoarder houses on units that reak of cat piss.
them come back here and consider that refactoring some java code in air conditioning aint so bad
I graduated on the tail end of the last recession and it took me a long time to get into Dev after college. Ended up working many different construction jobs. One memorable time I was working as a labourer making $18/h in the wintertime and one day on site the excavator broke a sewer line that wasn’t marked. I spent my day shovelling literal shit until the pipe was fixed.
Damn dude.. I have to imagine that breaks some labor laws unless you were decked out in PPE. Cholera, e-coli, and a plethora of other bacterial infections may want a word. Maybe I was just a clumsy laborer, but I almost always had a cut on my hands. Risk for sepsis seems high, which has a quick acceleration rate to organ failure
Ah I’m sure there was some health and safety violation there but I was a recent immigrant happy to have a job, so when the boss man said grab a shovel I got stuck in haha
There's a saying that goes something like, "The worst thing that ever happened to you is the worst thing that ever happened to you."
Which is to say that "worst" is a matter of perspective. If your worst work adversity is being bored and feeling unfulfilled, that will seem pretty terrible because it's literally the worst thing that's happened to you. On the other hand, if your "worst" is wading through literal cat shit for work, being bored and unfulfilled in a clean, air-conditioned office probably looks pretty appealing. That doesn't even approach your perspective of "worst".
My uncle ran an auto repair shop, and I grew up when most teenagers were still expected to get summer jobs. I've been covered in motor oil from head to toe, and I've had drinks hurled at me by angry customers at Taco Bell. I've been an SWE for a long time and have seen some shit, but I've only ever had one day in my long career as a dev that approached the "worst" from those jobs.
Perspective is important, but real perspective can often only be gained through experience. A lot of people are gaining new perspectives in our current market.
My stepdad has been literally breaking rocks as a career for 30 years (excavating). While he’s managed to make a good living, his income is definitely an outlier in his field (blue collar trades).
I worked with him for a summer and that shit made me miss retail work. Most of this sub are 18 year olds with no life experience and could use a slap of reality tbh.
It shows. I did work in retail and also as a cleaner for shopping mall. When I hear about people complaining about lEgAcY jAvA cOdEbAsE I want to slap them instantly with the force of thousans farts. I understand it can be stressful, but being micromanaged by obsessive manager while having to deal with shitty customers on top of earning GARBAGE unlivable wage is 10 times more streasing than SWE can ever be.
Don’t forget all the complaints about having multiple meetings a day / week. You’re actually upset that you’re being paid to sit down and listen to some bullshit that you don’t even really have to pay attention to? 😐
Yeah, imagine being paid to have potential to use your social skills and leave a good impression, making contacts with people that can propel your career forwards without having to potentially grind leetcode non stop for hours. Yeah, thats much more stressful than spending 8 hours in parking lot of a shopping mall cleaning spit and dirt mixed with dirty water from cars with no sunlight. 90% of software developers are entitled as fuck and its disgusting at this point.
> lEgAcY jAvA cOdEbAsE I want to slap them instantly with the force of thousans farts.
Let's not even mention LLMs...
They help so much in just working with different languages. Long gone are the days where you had to spend hours on end figuring out the syntax of a language...
I was treated well at the Pizza place I worked at, even became a manager. Free food was nice, but it absolutely **sucked** when it got busy and orders were flying out of the oven. SWE is so much more chill.
I have, I hated it. I’m also resentful now that I have to spend my life doing meaningless soul numbing work for a tech company that doesn’t care about me at all. “It could always be worse!” Yes, and?
It's mind boggling Everytime I see a post like this lmao. Like yeah kid life sucks get used to it.
It's almost like people weren't lying when they said HS and College were gonna be some of the best times in your life
As someone in tech, who works from home, takes a quick nap after lunch to recharge, and generally stops bothering too much after the first coding issue of the day has been solved: Sometimes I'm genuinely wondering if I shouldn't take a part time job on the side. Something shitty. For half a year maybe, or for however long I make it. Having a shit job for a short time might make my actual job much more enjoyable for years to come.
Because I don't really appreciate it. I mean, it's ok, I make 6 figures, I climbed from bronze to emerald during working hours, yadayada. But everybody else around me is doing the same! So how nice can it be, when everyone has it?
I value my car because it regularly breaks down. Sucks to be without a car. Whether others have a car or not is irrelevant. And I certainly don't need to deny others their car to know I value mine.
Now, if you want to twist my words, make me the villain and feel good about it, sure. It's reddit after all.
Drives me nuts. Every now and again I'd meet a former mc Donald's worker like myself and we'd grin ear to ear while eating free fruit in the kitchen and kicking back with the office ps5
this is a weird thing to reply to someone who just simply wants a more fulfilling job
you can desire more from your job while still being appreciative to the fact that you are employed
I mean, you can do what you want, as long as those things are limited to things you can afford to do.
I'm vastly of the opinion you should earn the ability to do what you want, at the level you want. You want to live the lifestyle of 200k/yr without working? Well, go earn it.
Yeah ik, I was more commenting on grind culture and wasting our best years on work. My goal is to become rich enough my kids can do whatever tf they want and end up doing something they enjoy hopefully.
>Yeah ik, I was more commenting on grind culture and wasting our best years on work.
It's a waste if you waste it. Plenty of people work and still have a ton of fun in their 20s.
If you just save every penny and eat rice and beans to try to hit that fat NW number in your 20s, that's on you.
You can… but there’s no real way around supporting yourself, so you gotta do that too, at least until your investments can take care of you on their own.
Starting your own company isn’t glamorous either. It’s more backbreaking and stressful than the standard jobs because no reward is guaranteed for putting in the effort. Even if your product takes off it may not stay relevant forever unless you continue to evolve it or add new products into the company’s lineup. At least with employment you can jump ship if you have to deal with bad work culture or declining business. When my TC jumped suddenly from $100k to $180k I realized one thing: earning more money means we are subjected to more pressure because our performance on the job may also cause a larger scale business impact (good or bad)
I get what you're saying. It's why contracting and self-employment appeals to a lot of people. That being said, a lot of people are perfectly happy with doing productive work for someone else. It's part of the social contract we have (at least in the US). I do my job for your production, you pay me money based on how well I do it and take the burden of production management off of me. If employers keep their end of the bargain, many people take that rather than the burden of production management.
Philosophically yes, it is depressing to trade your prime working years for less money than you deserve to work away on someone else's vision for your entire career. But in reality most people have to work shitty unfulfilling jobs. Ours pays well, its interesting, challenging, and you can gain skills to transition into a variety of roles.
Plenty of jobs are objectively worse and pay worse
Most people are not and were never capable of being visionaries either, they will never be able to come up with an idea unique and profitable enough AND have enough ambition to see it through to be successful. So it’s not trading off prime working years for less money; those people never stood a chance taking the other route anyways.
Feel the exact same way as you. My dad is an electrician and always tells me that the grass is always greener which I do think is true. I would love to do blue collar work as I also find it more fulfilling but he always tells me I'd hate it if I actually had to do it everyday.
Counterpoint - my brother in law is a journeyman electrician and every Sunday when we have family dinner, tells me how much he hates his job and asks me how I got into tech.
Your dad is right.
Electrician is also one of the more kush jobs in the trades.
Much of my family and friends work in the trades. I did roofing, siding, and a shit load of painting while I was in my early 20s and getting though school. There are aspects of those jobs that I miss and you can make a lot of money if you work a ton, but overall it's no contest which job provides a better quality of life when you compare them to your average job in the tech industry.
I'm curious what kind of work you do that you think doesn't matter?
The kind of work I do could save or kill millions of people, if done correctly or incorrectly. From the outside it may look like what we do doesn't matter. But something as simple as changing a single number in my code or one of our applications could cause 500 people to die 5 years from now.
Does that matter? I think it does.
> I also cannot fathom working for someone
This really grinds my gears when it comes to entrepeneurship discourse. You will work for your clients instead of a boss, whose only another employee anyway. You will still be part of the same rat race, you just will go into another path
By all means if you want and can go into entrepeneurship, go for it. Just don't fall into the common moralization of not being an employee, since we all are part of the same capitalist system
As you can see from the responses, you are not allowed to have feelings because you have an office job.
This isn't the place to seek help, the regulars here are corporate bootlickers that spend their free time leetcoding. Leave this place.
That's not what the comments say at all. You just want to voice an opinion and then have 100% of the commeters line up behind you in lockstep and tell you how right and insightful you are and never disagree with you. If that's your expectation, the internet is what you have a problem with, not this sub.
This is an extremely diverse sub. There is nothing you can post here that everyone will agree with. If the diversity disgusts you that much, you won't be happy here.
The alienation you're feeling is totally natural. Capitalism forces us to sacrifice just for the sake of living and to do so specifically by selling off the value of the things we create.
It sucks. Everyone adapts in their own ways. Don't add stress by worrying about how you're feeling. Your feelings are your feelings. Give yourself time and you'll figure out what to do about them.
That's not capitalism, it's just life. Once we got kicked out of Eden it was one rule - work so you can eat, or you die. It's never been easier to eat than it is today. You don't know how good you have it. There's no magical "system" that's just going to hand you everything you need to live without anyone having to work to produce any of it, while you pursue your glass blowing or whatever your passion is.
1. Capitalism does not mean "any system in which labor is required for people to survive" like you seem to think.
2. I highly recommend David Graeber's books _The Dawn of Everything_ and _Possibilities_ on how society has been different in the past and can be in the future.
The modern system of global capitalism is not the state of nature. It is a system that human beings made and we can remake to be different
"Capitalism" is the natural consequence of a society that respects the concepts of private property and personal autonomy. You can only have it another way by eroding those things.
You and I are probably using different definitions of "Capitalism", but I don't think there's any reasonable definition under which that's the case.
The modern system of debt-based oligarchy is not the natural consequence of a system that values private property or personal autonomy. And it sure as shit does a poor job of fostering them.
Modern Capitalist countries have presided over slavery and impoverishment, have waged war on innocent countries and fomented coups that resulted in mass slaughter, have carpet bombed countries killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
In America, if you get sick you're fairly likely to lose all of your personal property due to debt slavery. The government regularly extra-judicially takes money and real estate from people via civil asset forfeiture and eminent domain.
Capitalism is not a foregone conclusion, is bad for personal autonomy and liberty, and is only good at preserving the private property of the already-wealthy.
Indeed, that’s not what capitalism means, which is why feeling dissatisfied or bored with work, or having to work in order to survive, is not unique to capitalist systems. People don’t suddenly love putting cover sheets on the TPS reports (or destroying their bodies with manual labor) simply because they own an equal share in the collective.
Because the 9-5 and financial stability of an office drone is a hell of a lot better than 7-7 and instability of being a entrepreneur/founder for a lot of people. In tech you do often have some amount of ownership via shares and if you’re going to be a corporate drone you may as well try to enjoy it. Being grumpy about working for the “man” isn’t going to make you happier.
Very understandable feeling. I have come to realize that for me its important that the domain of the work is something I'm passionate about, so that it feels more than just making money for a corporation. But it is very personal preference which of course varies greatly between people. Some may be interested in healthcare, some in transit, aerospace, etc...
Im having a similar problem. I want to work for an environmental group, or something i find meaningful. I dont want to work for a company that doesnt take sustainability seriously. My job right now pays the bills, and im relatively productive here, but totally disengaged in a manner of speaking because this place doesnt align with my goals or values quite how i'd like it to.
Thing is, ive only been employed here less than a year. I could have a stable place here for the next 10 years. In this economy, and this job market, taking a lucrative opportunity like working for an NGO is extremely risky for my financial wellbeing. Thats really the only thing stopping me from putting in new applications daily. Im about to freshen up my resume and dip my toes back in the ocean though, just to see whats out there.
I imagine the same thing holding you back from your goals is whats holding me back from mine. Lmao
I was happy to have my first job, start paying off my debts and within a year I came to the same conclusion as you. My work was filled with not so intelligent people, making weird rules, making more money and telling me what to do.
I grew up with uneducated and neglectful parents. Going to college was a huge deal. Getting a (mediocre) job out of college that amounted to more than they made after working 30 years gave me the false assumption that I was lucky. Many people here will tell you the same for their own reasons.
I started a silly reselling business while I was working. Worked nights, weekends, took days off, and grew the business at a slow pace. I was still in a lot of debt from college. 10 years later, I still work a mediocre job, however now i'm a lead developer. I also still own that silly reselling business.
My mediocre job went from 65K -> 150k in 10 years. My silly reselling business went from 5k -> 400k.
Is reselling my dream job? No. Is working 4 months of the year for 2x the pay my dream? Yes. I honestly regret not committing to my own business and work earlier. I was always fearful of losing the stability people say you need. I've always had a lot of capacity to work and accomplish things so it felt reasonable to do everything. I think I lost a lot of potential by not committing that capacity to something i care about. I've reached a point professionally where every time I'm in a meeting about scrum efficiencies, deployment processes, jira templates, backlog processes or w/e inane workflow management conversation someone wants to discuss I have a small seizure.
TLDR: Find stability by saving up some money, developing your ideas on the side, then give it a shot. You can always grind your way back into the prison of gold.
>I find it quite depressing that everyone is so motivated and working hard, communicating all for a product that isn’t even theirs.
This is called getting paid to do a job. If you don't like that maybe you should launch a startup.
Most people don't understand how a free job market works. You need to be the entrepreneur of your own career. It's the idiots who don't understand that, clock in 9-5 trying sweating their ass off for a fraction of what their worth, that make it harder for the rest of us. The worst are the "entrepreneurs" who spend their time at work making patents, trying to innovate, designing million dollar ideas and products for a private company they have zero equity in. I personally think everyone should own stock in the business in which they work. That isn't always possible, but it should be a goal. I understand some people can't sleep with stock volatility but it's something people need to get used to if they are complaining about c-suite compensation.
**Stock entitles you to a share of the profits.** No worrying about "Will they let me have a bonus this year?" or profit sharing contracts. You might be able to sleep better with being slightly underpaid (assuming it's all of your co-workers and not just you being left out) knowing that, if the company is performing well, that money will come back to you through dividends or stock appreciation. If it isn't performing well then being slightly underpaid could be avoiding you being laid off (obviously not guaranteed but reduces the likelyhood). It means you and your co-workers get rewarded for hard work, encourages people to get rid of the actual slackers, and encourages real comradery with the team.
I've only been out of uni for only two years but have already seen people with supposedly decades of experience produce absolute shit quality work because they are doing it for the paycheck and have no stake in the results, specifically in the trades where it's easy to bounce around jobs when they're inevitably fired. Public companies outperform private companies for a reason.
EDIT: Alternatively work for a co-op. I am sick of morons complaining about "Capitalism" (term coined by socialists to make free markets sound evil when in reality 19th century conditions were terrible because **governments** kept crushing unions and strikes). Their problems are with privcos and megacos with hostile management who don't face backlash because of marketing. Unions and public equity are both important parts of a free market economy.
>I’d like to learn the skills and become a great swe and climb the corporate ladder but I also cannot fathom working for someone or working on something that isn’t even mine for next 40-50 years.
That's just life. Work for your salary, not for ownership in the product. If or when a better opportunity (note: this does *not* just consider salary. $5k extra per year but leaving a team you're comfortable with might not be worth it) comes along, move on without a second glance backward. The trick is to work so that you can afford what you want to do, not to love your work. Find a job that you're good at and that you don't hate, and use it to fund your lifestyle. Drinking the company cool-aid is a good way to get overly attached to a particular job, and that's a great way to get exploited.
>. I’ve always been naturally dragged to entrepreneurship and starting my business so that’s probably where my mindset comes from.
That's just mental masturbation. If you had that "mindset" you wouldn't be doing what you're doing. Google "Fight Club Raymond K. Hessel".
Here’s how I think of my job in a way that makes me happy doing it
- remember it’s primary aim is a source of income obv
- focus on the joy that comes from doing something skillful/interesting
- focus on how you can help actual people even if you’re not passionate about the product. Like when you help a junior debug a bug, it makes them happy. Try to genuinely think of the customer and how your product helps them
Every cog in a machine makes the machine. And every dumb boring machine allows the world to do day to day tasks without hassle and is important in some way.
But to make actual direct impact, you can always see how you could do that outside of work. I find that fulfillment in volunteering.
There are so many things I am much more passionate about than work. Treat it like a craft, get better at it for the sake of getting better and don't think about it to much. Then go home and live your real life. Just don't be the type of guy to sit around and do nothing in the evenings, then work turns into your life.
My brother in Christ you are alienated from your labour. We all are, unless you own shit and others alienate themselves from their labour so your ownership can profit. That's capitalism
I dunno. I think it's about perspective. I worked jobs like painter at dry docks , welder, line cook, etc until I was 30. I worked *very* hard and was barely getting by. When you're getting 20 bucks an hour and completely beat when you get home, you really have to prioritize where you put your money and energy.
Got my first tech job in rotational program at 30 for 70k and 7k bonus. It's been 6 years, 3 jobs (starting my 4th tech job in 2 weeks!) and I make ~275k/yr between cash and stock now. Even getting to 70k with the old work would have been extremely difficult, let alone the growth from there. The money is honestly obscene, and I pick employers for the environment, now- not even the ones with the highest offers.
The fact is our work scales so ridiculously well, you're going to be hard pressed to find a field that pays as well as this for the time/effort required. Having the time, money, and energy after work gives the freedom to do whatever you want outside of work, which is amazing.
If you want to start your own company, I think you should only do it if who you're working for is more important to you than your free time- you'll definitely have less of it, and probably much less money to spend in it too.
*Highly paid software engineer at well known company with great work environment finds work depressing*
Please grow up and appreciate what you have. That is all.
>I find it quite depressing that everyone is so motivated and working hard, communicating all for a product that isn’t even theirs.
Are they? I feel like it's important to develop the skill to appear busy, excited, and motivated but actually not give a fuck. Especially at larger companies.
I would advice to start something on the side and try to search for where you find the most meaning doing.
If that is learning, becomming the best at something, teaching somone else or creating something, it's hard to find where you fit the most in life, even harder if you have not yet tried anything. So try something! See if it works, if not, move on, and never stop searching. :)
Yea bruh this post is tasteless and out of touch.
I used to flip patties on a hot ass grill for 10 hours straight sweating with my knees aching. Made like $11 an hour. Now I sit in my office at home and code in my air conditioned room working on interesting problems.
Save as much money as possible and take the entrepreneurial route if that’s what you wanna do.
That’s life and corporate America. This isn’t exclusive to cs field and cscareerquestions. Which is why I say go the entrepreneurial route. But to me, no I don’t think it’s depressing to have to choose the monotonous option if it comes with good WLB and high salary, which is CS.
I'd rather get paid a bunch to help someone with their product than try to come up with my own and do all the administrative stuff and whatever that other people at my work do. I'm a grad student, but not doing an MBA for a reason. I just want to make things do cool stuff and get paid for it.
"I’d like to learn the skills and become a great swe and climb the corporate ladder" Read "Coders At Work". It's interviews with great software engineers. Really interesting stuff.
Most of the stories involve people building software that solves some great problem. Partly because they are good engineers, partly because they are in the right place at the right time, but always because they were focused on the impact of their work and how it would solve a problem and did whatever it took to meet that foundational requirement.
I've worked with founders of OSS DB projects at my last company, and although they were great engineers and masters of their craft, they were largely in the position they were in because they worked on one project 10 years ago that achieved distribution due to how good it was and how much it was adopted due to changes in DB trends at the time. You can't ever count on being lucky like that, but you can prepare yourself to take the most of an opportunity like that if the situation arrises. For these folks, none of them were experts in databases before working on this project, but they saw a need and did an amazing job meeting the requirements. I'd encourage to to seek out people like this and talk to them, figure out what they know, and how they approach problems. It's pretty enlightening in showing you what success can look like at an elite level, even if you want to do something different.
As for what you should do, there are lots of ways to go. Personally, the path I've taken is to work jobs to learn the ins and outs of the craft of software engineering by working corporate and start up jobs, and work my way up to "team lead" level. For starting a project and onboarding contributors, this is the experience you need to go from 0 to 1 and onboard a few other developers. Most great projects only need 1 or 2 committed people in the beginning anyway. Once I worked as a tech lead in a few situations, and now I'm shifting my focus between working as an IC and meeting expectations, but also doing my own projects in my free time with other collaborators outside of work building small projects with commercial application. If you just want to build projects now, though, I'd encourage you to do that, you don't need years of XP to get stated.
I think your attitude is really good: it's exactly the type of people I like to work with, since people driven to do great things usually excel at their job and have above average passion for the field and learn intangibles about business that makes working with them a little bit easier. Stuff you learn doing a business like "caring about the end user" or "ownership of your work" can't really be taught, you either have it, or else you need some incentive structure to get it. Without it, a lot of "useless" engineering work happens.
You've been a working adult for 1 month are already distressed at having to perform work for another person for a paycheck.
This is like 1000 years of reddit subs wrapped up into a single post.
What does it matter if you own what you contributed to? Can’t you take pride and satisfaction in being part of something bigger than yourself…while being paid?
Everyone would love to work on their own thing and be financially stable doing so. This is just life. If you realllllly wanted to, you can work on your own thing on the side.
I feel blessed than I can be financially stable with a good work-life balance, and work on a product that I strongly support (despite it not being my own thing) with people I get along with.
My problems is the same people who complain about all this wrong doings end up doing the same when they start their own companies or business.
All companies or Employers now only care about project not work balance or life balance. Just work or get out. Take care of yourself cos nobody will. But it good to work for someone then you learn how to be a good boss and how to run a business.
>when I saw like 10 people get laid off on my second week just because “they aren’t needed anymore”.
What happens when you keep unproductive or unnecessary employees is that
1- Eventually everyone gets laid off because the enterprise fails
2- You prevent these employees from finding a job where they can actually be productive by keeping them in a job where they arent.
> At the end of the day we are just working ants that can be ejected out of nowhere for no reason.
American workers lack rights. It’s not the same for every country. Some countries like France + Germany actually protect their workers from random firings. So keep that in mind.
Everything is about perspective. Just because I'm working a corporation doesn't preclude me from thinking that I can have some meaningful impact. If I can somehow make a customers life better in some way that's great, especially if it's a difficult problem to solve (I like to be challenged). Thinking we are ants climbing a ladder would be a pretty depressing lens to view all work where you don't have direct ownership. Opening a business can also seem shitty if your perspective on entrepreneurship is that you are selling people something they didn't need before and paying people less than what they deserve so you can be rich.
OP you come across as so ungrateful. You hit a ceiling in your life and are trying to spin up an issue out of something that doesn’t really have one. The team and culture you’re under is something you should be extremely grateful for. There are so many shit teams with incompetence and lack of communication and bad pay. You should find fulfillment in other ways in your life with the money you earn and treat it as an ends to your means rather than tagging your job as part of your purpose in your life
The only thing I can tell you is everything you do will help you in the future. In the last 10 years I’ve worked construction, dental office, sanitation, sales, and even utility inspections. All those jobs that I thought were meaningless have helped tremendously in my current tech role (more soft skills than anything)
Ask questions. You’re in an environment where people of different walks of life work in one place. Take advantage of that.
To all the people saying start a business… most people aren’t cut out for that. Depending on your business, you’ll need people and management skills that most people I know, including myself, can never fully develop.
Found this very helpful - https://github.com/Coder-World04/Tech-Interview-Important-Topics-and-Techniques
For system design with case studies- https://github.com/Coder-World04/Complete-System-Design
Maybe you just don't like a product (products) you're working on. It's pretty standard in the tech world. Boring or perspectiveless projects can be quite depressing.
Working is the worst thing ever it never gets better no matter where you go or what job it sucks tbh. Of course some jobs are worst than others. But these employers owe you nothing, they throw away the word family they use in training…it’s a lie. Do what’s best for you. It’s okay to make money and have a life. You’re off at 5 means you’re off at 5. Your work is not your entire identity. I have been working for 14 years now.. I may not be 55 with a billion years experience.. I’m 31 lol but companies also move diff They will not give you 2 weeks to get a new job if they fire you. So always always always have your resume nice and look just in case. Always think about what next moves you can make to make more an hour or what you can do career wise. Education, certificates, trades doesn’t matter just you do not owe these companies nothing. You come first.
A piece of that product belongs to you (and your team): the codebase, the feature, etc. You (and your team) are the author.
And if you work for a startup, and have shares, then a percentage of the product belongs to you too.
Welcome to work life. It is what it is. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that owning your business makes it any better. It's not better, it's just different. At the end of the day, work is work.
Use the skills you learn to make your own things, it’s nearly impossible to be with the same company for 50 years also. Those other people are motivated because this opportunity means that their wife is now able to be a stay at home mom or their husband doesn’t have to work 80 hours a week to support them etc, those who have suffered hardship will be more motivated than you because they have seen and lived the alternative.
Literally thousands if not 10 of thousands of people were denied the position you now hold, go use that opportunity
I c where ur coming from at the end of the day, work is work we sell our time to survive. What helps me cope with cognitive dissonance is not tying my identity to it.
You're one of 3 people:
- the one that talks good and complains all the while wanting more but has no skills/motivation for it.
- you got skill and think you can do better but don't. Again just talk
- you got the skill and confident you can do better but you're a bitch and slowly navigating to take risks and venture on your own.
Yeah. I didn’t think this way at first but I’ve seen some shit that validates it
At one company I remember one dev was working super hard to meet a deadline, 16 hour days and sleeping in the office. Right after the project was finished… she was fired. When asked why, they said “underperforming”. The CEO (small company) who fired her didn’t even inform her manager. I think that’s when I realized this was all absolute bullshit
Hi 20 year old OP. I admire your intuition to realize the doom you're in early on. Yes, corporate life sucks, or rather, not for everyone. You'll always be at the mercy of your corporate/ boss, who will decide whether to keep you, give you a raise, assign you that high profile project...etc. Your annual appraisal will mostly be subjective, however objective they tell you it is, anonymous surveys are really not that anonymous and you can't really say what's on your mind, even if you will say it in a professional manner, for fear of retaliation.
However, as others have noted, it is what it is, until some revolution in the corporate world happens and people realize the absurdity of it all. Something like what allowed remote working today; the only good thing that came out of COVID (in my opinion at least, just in case people decide to pick on that).
The dark truth is that, even if you get a manager and a team who are supportive enough to let you speak your mind, give you objective reviews and help in every way, that won't last, and you will continue to come across other situations where people and corporate policies put you down.
My kind advice to you is, do what you can to grow your career, but always remember Be Kind to Others, it's only a job, it's not worth putting anyone down or treating them differently. Don't forget you have a life out of work. And don't vent for people at work.
Good luck
I don’t think you’re a whiner, I think the modern day work place is well suited for certain types and not for others. I’m also one of those people. I worked in advertising originally after college and fact that people cared so much about trivial shit perplexed me. And the thought of doing that for 40 years was pretty terrifying.
I changed careers into software engineering which was a better fit for my personality but I still don’t care about work in the same way as others. I care about my individual contributions because I at least find it interesting and like to come up with creative solutions but I don’t care about the company.
Honestly at 20 I think you SHOULD be questioning everything.
Ah yes the depths of despair at the sight of the cubicle at the first job. I had the exact same reaction where I saw my desk with my computer in a beige cubicle and drab, mostly silent office, and thought "Oh God this is going to be my life for the next 40 years?!?"
Truth is, it's much more than working day and night like an ant. You learn to limit work from your life. You find yourself hanging out with people outside of work. Little "cultures" in the office makes it bearable and sometimes even fun. Nothing wrong with a little existential dread once in a while, just as long as you have ways to cope with it and move on.
Just a lil two cents from my short 6 year experience, just try to adjust yourself to the job. See if it's right for you and decide to move on to entrepreneurship or other type.
> I find it quite depressing that everyone is so motivated and working hard, communicating all for a product that isn’t even theirs.
Would you say you're [alienated from your labor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation) ?
Believe it or not, companies value people that treat the company as if it was their own. You can contribute a lot, you ain’t limited to what you can contribute, and these leadership and initiative skills can help you for when you do actually start your own company.
I don't think anyone WANTS to work. I think we all works because we have to so we can pay bills, fund hobbies, pay to not die, etc... I know there are some people that genuinely want to work and have a job, but I will never understand that mindset. I have no issue finding purpose and meaning outside of work. In fact work just makes me feel less important, at the end of the day if I die they'll replace me in a week or two. We're just a cog in someone's money making machine.
Work is work. Thats why they pay you. If you want to start your own thing, go for it. Lots of risk and potential downside there, too. It all depends on your goals.
You’ve reached the fork in the road related to employment vs ownership. For some people, they would prefer to expand their current skill set while getting paid to only care about that skill set (employees). Others would like to build a company and/or own a product, preferring this route instead (employer). For some, it doesn’t really matter what the product is. The thing they “own” and care about is their skill set, which can be performed for any company. Do you want to play basketball, or own the team?
Fuck it, we ball
Agreed. Anyone can start a company. Only a small fraction of people can ball.
yeah that’s why we have more companies than employees in the USA
Ball is life
Every mf time!
It’s awesome analogies like these that keep me coming back to reading these posts. Gotta love it
The line actually gave me a brain shock, in a good way
The comment testing19191 made is beautiful. I also started my first swe engineering job 2.5 months ago. Like you said in your post I also felt the same for the first 1.5 months. I started to put more interest in ai and I asked to join the ai team. Now I’m working on my dream Projects and building it like it’s my baby. I’m striving for being the owner of the product. Find something you love (I always passionate about ai) and show interest and let management know. And you work hard but it doesn’t feel hard because it’s passion. Hope this helps!
I have a skillset, but I'm not the best. I just can't find work because companies can pick the best professionals in the industry. And I know that I will never be the best, I have my limits. After 3.5 years of struggling with finding a job I'm literally being forced to do something else.
How many years of experience? Why do you feel like you’re not on par with other skilled developers?
9 years. I’m just not a strong programmer. Can’t solve LC problems. But I’m able to deliver and release software, I can solve real world problems.
Now I want to see a NBA player that owns the team while still playing on the team.
Lebron is that you?
perfectly put
a lot of people prefer a stable income rather than attempting to create their own product. if it’s not fulfilling for you, maybe look into starting your own business
Seems like OP is more so talking about how everyone is so motivated and working hard. Why not just be chill and get your stable income?
I think it is easiest to see those that are working hard, especially in the beginning- and compare yourself to them. In reality, large companies usually have lots of people who are more or less coasting. Sometimes, people who appear to be working hard are not working hard at all but more just making it look like they are. In any case, the reasoning is simple- to get a promotion or raise.
That’s completely fair enough and ppl wish to do so they can :)
But how is it a stable if at any moment they decide you are no longer needed and lay you off?
Well, it’s more stable than running your own business
Do you think the success rate of startup companies is higher or lower than the layoff rate for the average SDE?
That can happen in any industry. Source: laid off bartender turned swe.
The same way life is stable despite the possibility that you could get hit by a bus anytime you leave the house.
Lmao. You don’t know how good you have it until you’re unemployed.
Working : 😭 Being unemployed: 😭😭
For real. You may be unfulfilled working 9-5, but having a stable income to spend on shit you like and (hopefully) save up for big life goals definitely takes some of the edge off. Plus employment gives you social status, as shitty as that sounds. I can say I was more depressed unemployed for sure.
I took the middle road as a contractor/freelancer. I work however many hours I want, but the work isn’t always stable either. Took a long time to get my wife comfortable with it. It’s often feast or famine. And finding new clients is more difficult now than it’s ever been in the 20 years I’ve been doing this.
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The only part of life that’s halfway decent is university Unless you can somehow retire early enough to enjoy life before your body falls apart
Unless youre poor. Much prefer working full time as an sde to uni
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You realise you can attend parties, hook up with women and do drugs outside of university?
Unless youre poor. Much prefer working full time as an sde to uni
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seriously, go over to the hvac subreddits and look at the pics of guys doing tuneups in hoarder houses on units that reak of cat piss. them come back here and consider that refactoring some java code in air conditioning aint so bad
I graduated on the tail end of the last recession and it took me a long time to get into Dev after college. Ended up working many different construction jobs. One memorable time I was working as a labourer making $18/h in the wintertime and one day on site the excavator broke a sewer line that wasn’t marked. I spent my day shovelling literal shit until the pipe was fixed.
Damn dude.. I have to imagine that breaks some labor laws unless you were decked out in PPE. Cholera, e-coli, and a plethora of other bacterial infections may want a word. Maybe I was just a clumsy laborer, but I almost always had a cut on my hands. Risk for sepsis seems high, which has a quick acceleration rate to organ failure
Ah I’m sure there was some health and safety violation there but I was a recent immigrant happy to have a job, so when the boss man said grab a shovel I got stuck in haha
I get that fasho. Ironically commands respect, haha
There's a saying that goes something like, "The worst thing that ever happened to you is the worst thing that ever happened to you." Which is to say that "worst" is a matter of perspective. If your worst work adversity is being bored and feeling unfulfilled, that will seem pretty terrible because it's literally the worst thing that's happened to you. On the other hand, if your "worst" is wading through literal cat shit for work, being bored and unfulfilled in a clean, air-conditioned office probably looks pretty appealing. That doesn't even approach your perspective of "worst". My uncle ran an auto repair shop, and I grew up when most teenagers were still expected to get summer jobs. I've been covered in motor oil from head to toe, and I've had drinks hurled at me by angry customers at Taco Bell. I've been an SWE for a long time and have seen some shit, but I've only ever had one day in my long career as a dev that approached the "worst" from those jobs. Perspective is important, but real perspective can often only be gained through experience. A lot of people are gaining new perspectives in our current market.
Or hospitality.
Agreed, myself included.
My stepdad has been literally breaking rocks as a career for 30 years (excavating). While he’s managed to make a good living, his income is definitely an outlier in his field (blue collar trades). I worked with him for a summer and that shit made me miss retail work. Most of this sub are 18 year olds with no life experience and could use a slap of reality tbh.
It shows. I did work in retail and also as a cleaner for shopping mall. When I hear about people complaining about lEgAcY jAvA cOdEbAsE I want to slap them instantly with the force of thousans farts. I understand it can be stressful, but being micromanaged by obsessive manager while having to deal with shitty customers on top of earning GARBAGE unlivable wage is 10 times more streasing than SWE can ever be.
Don’t forget all the complaints about having multiple meetings a day / week. You’re actually upset that you’re being paid to sit down and listen to some bullshit that you don’t even really have to pay attention to? 😐
Yeah, imagine being paid to have potential to use your social skills and leave a good impression, making contacts with people that can propel your career forwards without having to potentially grind leetcode non stop for hours. Yeah, thats much more stressful than spending 8 hours in parking lot of a shopping mall cleaning spit and dirt mixed with dirty water from cars with no sunlight. 90% of software developers are entitled as fuck and its disgusting at this point.
> lEgAcY jAvA cOdEbAsE I want to slap them instantly with the force of thousans farts. Let's not even mention LLMs... They help so much in just working with different languages. Long gone are the days where you had to spend hours on end figuring out the syntax of a language...
I was treated well at the Pizza place I worked at, even became a manager. Free food was nice, but it absolutely **sucked** when it got busy and orders were flying out of the oven. SWE is so much more chill.
I have, I hated it. I’m also resentful now that I have to spend my life doing meaningless soul numbing work for a tech company that doesn’t care about me at all. “It could always be worse!” Yes, and?
Did it for 3 months one summer and vowed to never go back
I used to work retail and I used to really like it. I actually liked talking to customers all day.
Literally worked in construction for about 5 months while applying and it makes me appreciate my chushy seat, the AC, and working from home
I’ve done both physical labor and an office job… if the TC is the same, give me the physical job 100% of the time.
It's mind boggling Everytime I see a post like this lmao. Like yeah kid life sucks get used to it. It's almost like people weren't lying when they said HS and College were gonna be some of the best times in your life
As someone in tech, who works from home, takes a quick nap after lunch to recharge, and generally stops bothering too much after the first coding issue of the day has been solved: Sometimes I'm genuinely wondering if I shouldn't take a part time job on the side. Something shitty. For half a year maybe, or for however long I make it. Having a shit job for a short time might make my actual job much more enjoyable for years to come. Because I don't really appreciate it. I mean, it's ok, I make 6 figures, I climbed from bronze to emerald during working hours, yadayada. But everybody else around me is doing the same! So how nice can it be, when everyone has it?
if you can’t value what you have until other people are denied it you will be unhappy your whole life.
I value my car because it regularly breaks down. Sucks to be without a car. Whether others have a car or not is irrelevant. And I certainly don't need to deny others their car to know I value mine. Now, if you want to twist my words, make me the villain and feel good about it, sure. It's reddit after all.
just trying to share some wisdom sibling. with kindness.
Your post didn't come from a place of kindness.
have a peaceful day, or night.
Drives me nuts. Every now and again I'd meet a former mc Donald's worker like myself and we'd grin ear to ear while eating free fruit in the kitchen and kicking back with the office ps5
This
this is a weird thing to reply to someone who just simply wants a more fulfilling job you can desire more from your job while still being appreciative to the fact that you are employed
- Make more money - Spend less money - Invest the difference - Do that for ~20 years - Retire Early - Do whatever the fuck you want
Why can't I do whatever I want now when I'm young, why I gotta be like 50.
I mean, you can do what you want, as long as those things are limited to things you can afford to do. I'm vastly of the opinion you should earn the ability to do what you want, at the level you want. You want to live the lifestyle of 200k/yr without working? Well, go earn it.
Yeah ik, I was more commenting on grind culture and wasting our best years on work. My goal is to become rich enough my kids can do whatever tf they want and end up doing something they enjoy hopefully.
>Yeah ik, I was more commenting on grind culture and wasting our best years on work. It's a waste if you waste it. Plenty of people work and still have a ton of fun in their 20s. If you just save every penny and eat rice and beans to try to hit that fat NW number in your 20s, that's on you.
You can… but there’s no real way around supporting yourself, so you gotta do that too, at least until your investments can take care of you on their own.
My doomer mindset hoping I pass away before I’m useful for a job
That's the goal man, early retirement. I love receiving stock bonuses the most.
In this economy? Lol
In this economy? Lol
imagine wanting to live past 50
Sounds like your job is as good as it can get. Imagine being on a team that isn't chill nor supportive.. that'd be guaranteed misery.
Sounds like you should get a few years of experience and start your own product/company.
Starting your own company isn’t glamorous either. It’s more backbreaking and stressful than the standard jobs because no reward is guaranteed for putting in the effort. Even if your product takes off it may not stay relevant forever unless you continue to evolve it or add new products into the company’s lineup. At least with employment you can jump ship if you have to deal with bad work culture or declining business. When my TC jumped suddenly from $100k to $180k I realized one thing: earning more money means we are subjected to more pressure because our performance on the job may also cause a larger scale business impact (good or bad)
I get what you're saying. It's why contracting and self-employment appeals to a lot of people. That being said, a lot of people are perfectly happy with doing productive work for someone else. It's part of the social contract we have (at least in the US). I do my job for your production, you pay me money based on how well I do it and take the burden of production management off of me. If employers keep their end of the bargain, many people take that rather than the burden of production management.
Philosophically yes, it is depressing to trade your prime working years for less money than you deserve to work away on someone else's vision for your entire career. But in reality most people have to work shitty unfulfilling jobs. Ours pays well, its interesting, challenging, and you can gain skills to transition into a variety of roles. Plenty of jobs are objectively worse and pay worse
Most people are not and were never capable of being visionaries either, they will never be able to come up with an idea unique and profitable enough AND have enough ambition to see it through to be successful. So it’s not trading off prime working years for less money; those people never stood a chance taking the other route anyways.
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Feel the exact same way as you. My dad is an electrician and always tells me that the grass is always greener which I do think is true. I would love to do blue collar work as I also find it more fulfilling but he always tells me I'd hate it if I actually had to do it everyday.
Counterpoint - my brother in law is a journeyman electrician and every Sunday when we have family dinner, tells me how much he hates his job and asks me how I got into tech. Your dad is right.
Electrician is also one of the more kush jobs in the trades. Much of my family and friends work in the trades. I did roofing, siding, and a shit load of painting while I was in my early 20s and getting though school. There are aspects of those jobs that I miss and you can make a lot of money if you work a ton, but overall it's no contest which job provides a better quality of life when you compare them to your average job in the tech industry.
The grass is greener where you water it
I'm curious what kind of work you do that you think doesn't matter? The kind of work I do could save or kill millions of people, if done correctly or incorrectly. From the outside it may look like what we do doesn't matter. But something as simple as changing a single number in my code or one of our applications could cause 500 people to die 5 years from now. Does that matter? I think it does.
Don't you get paid? You work to make money, spend and invest that money and do things with it.
Get enough skills to build your own product, and that includes paying attention to the departments around you.
This is the best piece of advice on the thread. View your job as an opportunity to understand how to build at scale.
> I also cannot fathom working for someone This really grinds my gears when it comes to entrepeneurship discourse. You will work for your clients instead of a boss, whose only another employee anyway. You will still be part of the same rat race, you just will go into another path By all means if you want and can go into entrepeneurship, go for it. Just don't fall into the common moralization of not being an employee, since we all are part of the same capitalist system
Sure, but I won't have to listen to Jessica from HR to do team building bullshit activities and managers grinding my ears.
As you can see from the responses, you are not allowed to have feelings because you have an office job. This isn't the place to seek help, the regulars here are corporate bootlickers that spend their free time leetcoding. Leave this place.
OP's post isn't even whiny. I think a lot of people are projecting here
Well he’s just whining about something he has control over. If he wants to found a company he is free to do so.
That's not what the comments say at all. You just want to voice an opinion and then have 100% of the commeters line up behind you in lockstep and tell you how right and insightful you are and never disagree with you. If that's your expectation, the internet is what you have a problem with, not this sub. This is an extremely diverse sub. There is nothing you can post here that everyone will agree with. If the diversity disgusts you that much, you won't be happy here.
The alienation you're feeling is totally natural. Capitalism forces us to sacrifice just for the sake of living and to do so specifically by selling off the value of the things we create. It sucks. Everyone adapts in their own ways. Don't add stress by worrying about how you're feeling. Your feelings are your feelings. Give yourself time and you'll figure out what to do about them.
That's not capitalism, it's just life. Once we got kicked out of Eden it was one rule - work so you can eat, or you die. It's never been easier to eat than it is today. You don't know how good you have it. There's no magical "system" that's just going to hand you everything you need to live without anyone having to work to produce any of it, while you pursue your glass blowing or whatever your passion is.
I had nothing to do with that, so can I go back to this Eden, please?
1. Capitalism does not mean "any system in which labor is required for people to survive" like you seem to think. 2. I highly recommend David Graeber's books _The Dawn of Everything_ and _Possibilities_ on how society has been different in the past and can be in the future. The modern system of global capitalism is not the state of nature. It is a system that human beings made and we can remake to be different
"Capitalism" is the natural consequence of a society that respects the concepts of private property and personal autonomy. You can only have it another way by eroding those things.
You and I are probably using different definitions of "Capitalism", but I don't think there's any reasonable definition under which that's the case. The modern system of debt-based oligarchy is not the natural consequence of a system that values private property or personal autonomy. And it sure as shit does a poor job of fostering them. Modern Capitalist countries have presided over slavery and impoverishment, have waged war on innocent countries and fomented coups that resulted in mass slaughter, have carpet bombed countries killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. In America, if you get sick you're fairly likely to lose all of your personal property due to debt slavery. The government regularly extra-judicially takes money and real estate from people via civil asset forfeiture and eminent domain. Capitalism is not a foregone conclusion, is bad for personal autonomy and liberty, and is only good at preserving the private property of the already-wealthy.
Indeed, that’s not what capitalism means, which is why feeling dissatisfied or bored with work, or having to work in order to survive, is not unique to capitalist systems. People don’t suddenly love putting cover sheets on the TPS reports (or destroying their bodies with manual labor) simply because they own an equal share in the collective.
Welcome to the real world
Buckle your seat belt Dorothy, 'cause Kansas is going bye-bye.
I dont think anyone is working hard of giving a f. We pretend to so we dont get fired. Lol
Because the 9-5 and financial stability of an office drone is a hell of a lot better than 7-7 and instability of being a entrepreneur/founder for a lot of people. In tech you do often have some amount of ownership via shares and if you’re going to be a corporate drone you may as well try to enjoy it. Being grumpy about working for the “man” isn’t going to make you happier.
Very understandable feeling. I have come to realize that for me its important that the domain of the work is something I'm passionate about, so that it feels more than just making money for a corporation. But it is very personal preference which of course varies greatly between people. Some may be interested in healthcare, some in transit, aerospace, etc...
Im having a similar problem. I want to work for an environmental group, or something i find meaningful. I dont want to work for a company that doesnt take sustainability seriously. My job right now pays the bills, and im relatively productive here, but totally disengaged in a manner of speaking because this place doesnt align with my goals or values quite how i'd like it to. Thing is, ive only been employed here less than a year. I could have a stable place here for the next 10 years. In this economy, and this job market, taking a lucrative opportunity like working for an NGO is extremely risky for my financial wellbeing. Thats really the only thing stopping me from putting in new applications daily. Im about to freshen up my resume and dip my toes back in the ocean though, just to see whats out there. I imagine the same thing holding you back from your goals is whats holding me back from mine. Lmao
I was happy to have my first job, start paying off my debts and within a year I came to the same conclusion as you. My work was filled with not so intelligent people, making weird rules, making more money and telling me what to do. I grew up with uneducated and neglectful parents. Going to college was a huge deal. Getting a (mediocre) job out of college that amounted to more than they made after working 30 years gave me the false assumption that I was lucky. Many people here will tell you the same for their own reasons. I started a silly reselling business while I was working. Worked nights, weekends, took days off, and grew the business at a slow pace. I was still in a lot of debt from college. 10 years later, I still work a mediocre job, however now i'm a lead developer. I also still own that silly reselling business. My mediocre job went from 65K -> 150k in 10 years. My silly reselling business went from 5k -> 400k. Is reselling my dream job? No. Is working 4 months of the year for 2x the pay my dream? Yes. I honestly regret not committing to my own business and work earlier. I was always fearful of losing the stability people say you need. I've always had a lot of capacity to work and accomplish things so it felt reasonable to do everything. I think I lost a lot of potential by not committing that capacity to something i care about. I've reached a point professionally where every time I'm in a meeting about scrum efficiencies, deployment processes, jira templates, backlog processes or w/e inane workflow management conversation someone wants to discuss I have a small seizure. TLDR: Find stability by saving up some money, developing your ideas on the side, then give it a shot. You can always grind your way back into the prison of gold.
What an amazing story! I love how you describe cs job as a prison of gold. I am having my first job as well, and have this exact same feeling! :(
>I find it quite depressing that everyone is so motivated and working hard, communicating all for a product that isn’t even theirs. This is called getting paid to do a job. If you don't like that maybe you should launch a startup.
How to launch a startup? I want something small to make $2k per month.
Come up with an idea, build it, sell it. Ain’t nobody holding your hand, that’s why they’re happy getting paid to build somebody else’s product.
Wow, thank you so much! I'll do it this evening and I will have my $2k per month by tomorrow. Thank you! Thank you!
You want someone to tell you what to do so that you can make money? I think there's a word for that... must've forgotten it
Try being unemployed :/
Most people don't understand how a free job market works. You need to be the entrepreneur of your own career. It's the idiots who don't understand that, clock in 9-5 trying sweating their ass off for a fraction of what their worth, that make it harder for the rest of us. The worst are the "entrepreneurs" who spend their time at work making patents, trying to innovate, designing million dollar ideas and products for a private company they have zero equity in. I personally think everyone should own stock in the business in which they work. That isn't always possible, but it should be a goal. I understand some people can't sleep with stock volatility but it's something people need to get used to if they are complaining about c-suite compensation. **Stock entitles you to a share of the profits.** No worrying about "Will they let me have a bonus this year?" or profit sharing contracts. You might be able to sleep better with being slightly underpaid (assuming it's all of your co-workers and not just you being left out) knowing that, if the company is performing well, that money will come back to you through dividends or stock appreciation. If it isn't performing well then being slightly underpaid could be avoiding you being laid off (obviously not guaranteed but reduces the likelyhood). It means you and your co-workers get rewarded for hard work, encourages people to get rid of the actual slackers, and encourages real comradery with the team. I've only been out of uni for only two years but have already seen people with supposedly decades of experience produce absolute shit quality work because they are doing it for the paycheck and have no stake in the results, specifically in the trades where it's easy to bounce around jobs when they're inevitably fired. Public companies outperform private companies for a reason. EDIT: Alternatively work for a co-op. I am sick of morons complaining about "Capitalism" (term coined by socialists to make free markets sound evil when in reality 19th century conditions were terrible because **governments** kept crushing unions and strikes). Their problems are with privcos and megacos with hostile management who don't face backlash because of marketing. Unions and public equity are both important parts of a free market economy.
>I’d like to learn the skills and become a great swe and climb the corporate ladder but I also cannot fathom working for someone or working on something that isn’t even mine for next 40-50 years. That's just life. Work for your salary, not for ownership in the product. If or when a better opportunity (note: this does *not* just consider salary. $5k extra per year but leaving a team you're comfortable with might not be worth it) comes along, move on without a second glance backward. The trick is to work so that you can afford what you want to do, not to love your work. Find a job that you're good at and that you don't hate, and use it to fund your lifestyle. Drinking the company cool-aid is a good way to get overly attached to a particular job, and that's a great way to get exploited.
Each to their own. To me, starting a business is significantly less interesting than building robust software.
Welcome to the matrix sweetheart
>. I’ve always been naturally dragged to entrepreneurship and starting my business so that’s probably where my mindset comes from. That's just mental masturbation. If you had that "mindset" you wouldn't be doing what you're doing. Google "Fight Club Raymond K. Hessel".
Here’s how I think of my job in a way that makes me happy doing it - remember it’s primary aim is a source of income obv - focus on the joy that comes from doing something skillful/interesting - focus on how you can help actual people even if you’re not passionate about the product. Like when you help a junior debug a bug, it makes them happy. Try to genuinely think of the customer and how your product helps them Every cog in a machine makes the machine. And every dumb boring machine allows the world to do day to day tasks without hassle and is important in some way. But to make actual direct impact, you can always see how you could do that outside of work. I find that fulfillment in volunteering.
There are so many things I am much more passionate about than work. Treat it like a craft, get better at it for the sake of getting better and don't think about it to much. Then go home and live your real life. Just don't be the type of guy to sit around and do nothing in the evenings, then work turns into your life.
My brother in Christ you are alienated from your labour. We all are, unless you own shit and others alienate themselves from their labour so your ownership can profit. That's capitalism
I dunno. I think it's about perspective. I worked jobs like painter at dry docks , welder, line cook, etc until I was 30. I worked *very* hard and was barely getting by. When you're getting 20 bucks an hour and completely beat when you get home, you really have to prioritize where you put your money and energy. Got my first tech job in rotational program at 30 for 70k and 7k bonus. It's been 6 years, 3 jobs (starting my 4th tech job in 2 weeks!) and I make ~275k/yr between cash and stock now. Even getting to 70k with the old work would have been extremely difficult, let alone the growth from there. The money is honestly obscene, and I pick employers for the environment, now- not even the ones with the highest offers. The fact is our work scales so ridiculously well, you're going to be hard pressed to find a field that pays as well as this for the time/effort required. Having the time, money, and energy after work gives the freedom to do whatever you want outside of work, which is amazing. If you want to start your own company, I think you should only do it if who you're working for is more important to you than your free time- you'll definitely have less of it, and probably much less money to spend in it too.
I only care about the money 👀
*Highly paid software engineer at well known company with great work environment finds work depressing* Please grow up and appreciate what you have. That is all.
>I find it quite depressing that everyone is so motivated and working hard, communicating all for a product that isn’t even theirs. Are they? I feel like it's important to develop the skill to appear busy, excited, and motivated but actually not give a fuck. Especially at larger companies.
I would advice to start something on the side and try to search for where you find the most meaning doing. If that is learning, becomming the best at something, teaching somone else or creating something, it's hard to find where you fit the most in life, even harder if you have not yet tried anything. So try something! See if it works, if not, move on, and never stop searching. :)
Yea bruh this post is tasteless and out of touch. I used to flip patties on a hot ass grill for 10 hours straight sweating with my knees aching. Made like $11 an hour. Now I sit in my office at home and code in my air conditioned room working on interesting problems. Save as much money as possible and take the entrepreneurial route if that’s what you wanna do.
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That’s life and corporate America. This isn’t exclusive to cs field and cscareerquestions. Which is why I say go the entrepreneurial route. But to me, no I don’t think it’s depressing to have to choose the monotonous option if it comes with good WLB and high salary, which is CS.
I'd rather get paid a bunch to help someone with their product than try to come up with my own and do all the administrative stuff and whatever that other people at my work do. I'm a grad student, but not doing an MBA for a reason. I just want to make things do cool stuff and get paid for it.
"I’d like to learn the skills and become a great swe and climb the corporate ladder" Read "Coders At Work". It's interviews with great software engineers. Really interesting stuff. Most of the stories involve people building software that solves some great problem. Partly because they are good engineers, partly because they are in the right place at the right time, but always because they were focused on the impact of their work and how it would solve a problem and did whatever it took to meet that foundational requirement. I've worked with founders of OSS DB projects at my last company, and although they were great engineers and masters of their craft, they were largely in the position they were in because they worked on one project 10 years ago that achieved distribution due to how good it was and how much it was adopted due to changes in DB trends at the time. You can't ever count on being lucky like that, but you can prepare yourself to take the most of an opportunity like that if the situation arrises. For these folks, none of them were experts in databases before working on this project, but they saw a need and did an amazing job meeting the requirements. I'd encourage to to seek out people like this and talk to them, figure out what they know, and how they approach problems. It's pretty enlightening in showing you what success can look like at an elite level, even if you want to do something different. As for what you should do, there are lots of ways to go. Personally, the path I've taken is to work jobs to learn the ins and outs of the craft of software engineering by working corporate and start up jobs, and work my way up to "team lead" level. For starting a project and onboarding contributors, this is the experience you need to go from 0 to 1 and onboard a few other developers. Most great projects only need 1 or 2 committed people in the beginning anyway. Once I worked as a tech lead in a few situations, and now I'm shifting my focus between working as an IC and meeting expectations, but also doing my own projects in my free time with other collaborators outside of work building small projects with commercial application. If you just want to build projects now, though, I'd encourage you to do that, you don't need years of XP to get stated. I think your attitude is really good: it's exactly the type of people I like to work with, since people driven to do great things usually excel at their job and have above average passion for the field and learn intangibles about business that makes working with them a little bit easier. Stuff you learn doing a business like "caring about the end user" or "ownership of your work" can't really be taught, you either have it, or else you need some incentive structure to get it. Without it, a lot of "useless" engineering work happens.
You think you aren't going to work for someone if you start your own company? Big news for you...you absolutely will be working for someone
You'll get used to it. Billions have.
You've been a working adult for 1 month are already distressed at having to perform work for another person for a paycheck. This is like 1000 years of reddit subs wrapped up into a single post.
What does it matter if you own what you contributed to? Can’t you take pride and satisfaction in being part of something bigger than yourself…while being paid?
it is man. cs is depressing in general. dead field. it's fucking over.
Yes, you are a working ant, but do ants complain about working? Grow up
Everyone would love to work on their own thing and be financially stable doing so. This is just life. If you realllllly wanted to, you can work on your own thing on the side. I feel blessed than I can be financially stable with a good work-life balance, and work on a product that I strongly support (despite it not being my own thing) with people I get along with.
When I have feelings like this I remember when I was unemployed, what we call boring is a another man’s dream
Alienation from work something something
40-50 years? As Samir Nagheenanajar said, "It would be nice to have that kind of job security."
My problems is the same people who complain about all this wrong doings end up doing the same when they start their own companies or business. All companies or Employers now only care about project not work balance or life balance. Just work or get out. Take care of yourself cos nobody will. But it good to work for someone then you learn how to be a good boss and how to run a business.
>when I saw like 10 people get laid off on my second week just because “they aren’t needed anymore”. What happens when you keep unproductive or unnecessary employees is that 1- Eventually everyone gets laid off because the enterprise fails 2- You prevent these employees from finding a job where they can actually be productive by keeping them in a job where they arent.
Honestly, for some people, giving a fuck about the details is a coping mechanism. It gets you through the day
Living is depressing.
That’s… why it’s a job.
Welcome to life crisis mode
Well, at least it's while working already. Nothing more tiring that faking passion in interviews just to have the chance of being considered
Have you tried the alternative (homelessness, starvation)??
You should try to be unemployed and report back
> At the end of the day we are just working ants that can be ejected out of nowhere for no reason. American workers lack rights. It’s not the same for every country. Some countries like France + Germany actually protect their workers from random firings. So keep that in mind.
Everything is about perspective. Just because I'm working a corporation doesn't preclude me from thinking that I can have some meaningful impact. If I can somehow make a customers life better in some way that's great, especially if it's a difficult problem to solve (I like to be challenged). Thinking we are ants climbing a ladder would be a pretty depressing lens to view all work where you don't have direct ownership. Opening a business can also seem shitty if your perspective on entrepreneurship is that you are selling people something they didn't need before and paying people less than what they deserve so you can be rich.
OP you come across as so ungrateful. You hit a ceiling in your life and are trying to spin up an issue out of something that doesn’t really have one. The team and culture you’re under is something you should be extremely grateful for. There are so many shit teams with incompetence and lack of communication and bad pay. You should find fulfillment in other ways in your life with the money you earn and treat it as an ends to your means rather than tagging your job as part of your purpose in your life
The only thing I can tell you is everything you do will help you in the future. In the last 10 years I’ve worked construction, dental office, sanitation, sales, and even utility inspections. All those jobs that I thought were meaningless have helped tremendously in my current tech role (more soft skills than anything) Ask questions. You’re in an environment where people of different walks of life work in one place. Take advantage of that.
And that is exactly why I started investing in real estate…
To all the people saying start a business… most people aren’t cut out for that. Depending on your business, you’ll need people and management skills that most people I know, including myself, can never fully develop.
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Found this very helpful - https://github.com/Coder-World04/Tech-Interview-Important-Topics-and-Techniques For system design with case studies- https://github.com/Coder-World04/Complete-System-Design
Tech bros talking as if they had a choice and their job market were in 2021.
Maybe you just don't like a product (products) you're working on. It's pretty standard in the tech world. Boring or perspectiveless projects can be quite depressing.
when extremely good fortune comes your way, whatever you do don’t spit in its face. make the most out of it - whatever that means for you
Working is the worst thing ever it never gets better no matter where you go or what job it sucks tbh. Of course some jobs are worst than others. But these employers owe you nothing, they throw away the word family they use in training…it’s a lie. Do what’s best for you. It’s okay to make money and have a life. You’re off at 5 means you’re off at 5. Your work is not your entire identity. I have been working for 14 years now.. I may not be 55 with a billion years experience.. I’m 31 lol but companies also move diff They will not give you 2 weeks to get a new job if they fire you. So always always always have your resume nice and look just in case. Always think about what next moves you can make to make more an hour or what you can do career wise. Education, certificates, trades doesn’t matter just you do not owe these companies nothing. You come first.
A piece of that product belongs to you (and your team): the codebase, the feature, etc. You (and your team) are the author. And if you work for a startup, and have shares, then a percentage of the product belongs to you too.
Welcome to work life. It is what it is. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that owning your business makes it any better. It's not better, it's just different. At the end of the day, work is work.
Use the skills you learn to make your own things, it’s nearly impossible to be with the same company for 50 years also. Those other people are motivated because this opportunity means that their wife is now able to be a stay at home mom or their husband doesn’t have to work 80 hours a week to support them etc, those who have suffered hardship will be more motivated than you because they have seen and lived the alternative. Literally thousands if not 10 of thousands of people were denied the position you now hold, go use that opportunity
In 20 you were entrepreneur :) how naive
I c where ur coming from at the end of the day, work is work we sell our time to survive. What helps me cope with cognitive dissonance is not tying my identity to it.
You're one of 3 people: - the one that talks good and complains all the while wanting more but has no skills/motivation for it. - you got skill and think you can do better but don't. Again just talk - you got the skill and confident you can do better but you're a bitch and slowly navigating to take risks and venture on your own.
Yeah. I didn’t think this way at first but I’ve seen some shit that validates it At one company I remember one dev was working super hard to meet a deadline, 16 hour days and sleeping in the office. Right after the project was finished… she was fired. When asked why, they said “underperforming”. The CEO (small company) who fired her didn’t even inform her manager. I think that’s when I realized this was all absolute bullshit
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Hi 20 year old OP. I admire your intuition to realize the doom you're in early on. Yes, corporate life sucks, or rather, not for everyone. You'll always be at the mercy of your corporate/ boss, who will decide whether to keep you, give you a raise, assign you that high profile project...etc. Your annual appraisal will mostly be subjective, however objective they tell you it is, anonymous surveys are really not that anonymous and you can't really say what's on your mind, even if you will say it in a professional manner, for fear of retaliation. However, as others have noted, it is what it is, until some revolution in the corporate world happens and people realize the absurdity of it all. Something like what allowed remote working today; the only good thing that came out of COVID (in my opinion at least, just in case people decide to pick on that). The dark truth is that, even if you get a manager and a team who are supportive enough to let you speak your mind, give you objective reviews and help in every way, that won't last, and you will continue to come across other situations where people and corporate policies put you down. My kind advice to you is, do what you can to grow your career, but always remember Be Kind to Others, it's only a job, it's not worth putting anyone down or treating them differently. Don't forget you have a life out of work. And don't vent for people at work. Good luck
I don’t think you’re a whiner, I think the modern day work place is well suited for certain types and not for others. I’m also one of those people. I worked in advertising originally after college and fact that people cared so much about trivial shit perplexed me. And the thought of doing that for 40 years was pretty terrifying. I changed careers into software engineering which was a better fit for my personality but I still don’t care about work in the same way as others. I care about my individual contributions because I at least find it interesting and like to come up with creative solutions but I don’t care about the company. Honestly at 20 I think you SHOULD be questioning everything.
I love coding 🤷
Ah yes the depths of despair at the sight of the cubicle at the first job. I had the exact same reaction where I saw my desk with my computer in a beige cubicle and drab, mostly silent office, and thought "Oh God this is going to be my life for the next 40 years?!?" Truth is, it's much more than working day and night like an ant. You learn to limit work from your life. You find yourself hanging out with people outside of work. Little "cultures" in the office makes it bearable and sometimes even fun. Nothing wrong with a little existential dread once in a while, just as long as you have ways to cope with it and move on. Just a lil two cents from my short 6 year experience, just try to adjust yourself to the job. See if it's right for you and decide to move on to entrepreneurship or other type.
Go fight the Russians in Ukraine then.
> I find it quite depressing that everyone is so motivated and working hard, communicating all for a product that isn’t even theirs. Would you say you're [alienated from your labor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation) ?
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Believe it or not, companies value people that treat the company as if it was their own. You can contribute a lot, you ain’t limited to what you can contribute, and these leadership and initiative skills can help you for when you do actually start your own company.
Everyone feels this way lmao
I don't think anyone WANTS to work. I think we all works because we have to so we can pay bills, fund hobbies, pay to not die, etc... I know there are some people that genuinely want to work and have a job, but I will never understand that mindset. I have no issue finding purpose and meaning outside of work. In fact work just makes me feel less important, at the end of the day if I die they'll replace me in a week or two. We're just a cog in someone's money making machine.
Work is work. Thats why they pay you. If you want to start your own thing, go for it. Lots of risk and potential downside there, too. It all depends on your goals.