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Comment by pjdemers | Hacker News Reader

People are realizing that even though coding pays well, it's not a job for everyone. We hired 4 people out of boot camps. All had a decent level of skill (of course they did, we choose the 4 we liked out of dozens available). However after a few weeks, two of them left, saying: "there is no f'en way I can do this 40 hours a week for the next few decades". And they went back to their old jobs and old pay.

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> "there is no f'en way I can do this 40 hours a week for the next few decades"

Not a bootcamp grad, but I just hit my two year mark a couple weeks ago and want to blow my brains out.

Writing internal web applications is the most mind numbing thing ever. It's gotten to the point where I have so much trouble keeping focused at work.

The real issue is that I have no idea what field I'd pivot into.

If it's mind-numbing, can it be automated? Can you use higher-level tools to build them and reduce the repetitive parts?

If only there were the right high-level tool -- an android with an engineers face! It could attend the pointless meetings, and answer QA's trivial questions, the same over and over. Then I could have stayed on at FANGcorp.

You may enjoy a product manager, technical program manager, or business analyst role more. Not sure what city you're in, but there are plenty of courses at Galvanize! Good luck and please do not blow your brains out!

Have you considered a different company? I worked at a large company for a few years building internal tools and I wanted to kill myself. I couldn't imagine working there for the rest of my life. But I enjoyed writing code in my free time and knew it was what I wanted to do. I've been at a smaller company for ~5 years and I couldn't be happier.

It's gotten to the point where I have so much trouble keeping focused at work.

Are you sure you're not expecting too much of yourself? Keeping focused is pretty difficult for programmers in general, we often need breaks to recharge. Famous Joel Spolsky essay related to this called Fire & Motion:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

[But if you're not enjoying the work, that's different. Life's too short for that, find something that you enjoy.]

First, with the caveat of obviously not knowing you or your job, it's my experience that it's rarely the case that an area as broad as "writing internal web applications" is actually inherently boring to a person. The parable of the stonecutters come to mind, are you cutting stone or are you building a cathedral? Find out what energises you. Think back, what were good days and what did you do? Try to do more of that, try to make the work you do more like that kind of work.

Of course, there are plenty of jobs that aren't remotely in the cathedral building business, and if that's the case, start networking. Get on Meetup and attend some meetings or hackathons or startup weekends or whatever. Your skills are generally in demand, so focus on getting inspiration for what might interest you, or meeting people that you think you'd enjoy working with, and let that guide your job search.

And don't let internal webapps scare you. Building a "boring" app for a team that does good things with it and appreciates your work can be very satisfying.

Have you tried seeing a doctor or therapist? I have the same feelings as you and I'm giving SSRIs another go. There's a difference between hating your job without being able to cope and hating your job while being able to cope. Have you considered that you're depressed? Are you able to enjoy things and be productive outside of work or do you feel the same way you do as when you're at work?

It can be a hard road to travel and there might not be a single good answer (only multiple possible answers with varying probabilities).

>There's a difference between hating your job without being able to cope and hating your job while being able to cope.

The difference being in the latter case you've given up all hope and just keep at it?

Look, writing software is a trade. If you're not getting satisfaction from the act of creating something and doing a good job of it, even if that something is less "amazing" than you were hoping it would be, you probably need a different career. In any skilled trade the majority of the projects you do will be of the more mundane sort, but a skilled practitioner derives satisfaction from the doing and the mastery. You wouldn't work for years as a watchmaker, hunched over a bench 8 hours a day, if you didn't get satisfaction from making watches. Programming is more analogous to that than not, imo.

>Look, writing software is a trade. If you're not getting satisfaction from the act of creating something and doing a good job of it, even if that something is less "amazing" than you were hoping it would be, you probably need a different career.

Maybe. I've been doing this for about 12 years now and, if I were writing typical IT/web dev stuff, I'd move to a different field. Most software is just boring and unrewarding, the money wouldn't keep me if the interest fell away (though I have a family to consider at this point, but that's beside the point.)

Fifty percent of people you hired who came with experience of different industries told you that working conditions (be that the work itself, or your particular environment) were so bad that they'd rather go back to what they were doing before.

Did you take a look at the working conditions?

That sounds to me like a resounding success. 50% of your hires from a 12 week program worked out? Do you realize what that would mean for the country if we could put people back to work that cheaply?

thats the graduation rate of some high schools

I think the best bootcamps do a pretty good job of having students answer that question during admissions or during the class itself. If you aren't getting some fulfillment during class, you probably won't during work either. For what it's worth, my company has hired half a dozen developers out of bootcamps (Fullstack and App Academy) and none of them have left or expressed interest in leaving the field.

I don't know. I could easily see myself being the type of person who would have a lot of fun (and get a lot of fulfillment) during a bootcamp, but be bored out of my mind shortly into my first real job. I get a lot more enjoyment out of learning new things than I do from pure programming. I've been lucky that through my career I've gotten to work on some amazing projects at top of the line companies, so there's a decent amount of learning happening day-to-day -- far more than I am sure happens at run of the mill in-house developer jobs. But even then, I found that I dislike jobs that involve programming all day long, so I gradually transitioned into other roles where I can still use my technical skills but don't spend most of my time writing code. I definitely didn't have that clarity of preferences until I'd actually been doing the real job for a little bit, because it's way different from class.

I suppose. For New Economy jobs, they are at least an option. I had a friend who was toiling away at a thankless PR job, communications major. Did coding bootcamp and she is much much happier working at a financial/web services startup

Any specific feedback? What is it that they didn't like?

Perhaps a rather cruel take on the issue, but I think the only thing worse than mercenaries, is in-experienced mercenaries.

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