Comment by stutsmansoft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stutsmansoft | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely yes.

I've been developing professionally for almost 30 years. I still love making software and I'm good at it.

When I started in this industry, being able to do it at all was the barrier to entry. The processes were light; "here's what we need it to do, go figure it out." Responsibility (and impact) were both high.

Somewhere along the line that changed. Teams blew up to be dozens of people. Process fads weighed things down with tons of meetings, silly ceremonies and other things that actively slow down productive developers.

Add to the mix the hell that is tech interviewing now. If you're interviewing for anyone that will pay well, you're going to be subjected to "leetcode" style puzzles under pressure and stress scrutiny. If that's not how you best think and solve problems, tough!

So yeah...I can absolutely relate. I still love building software and I hate the industry.

The only escape is entrepreneurship or possibly consulting, both of which I am actively looking to do.

Yeah, I entered the industry a decade after you but I share the same views. Back then teams were so much smaller and management actually took care of the bureaucracy.

I remember at one time I ended up as the sole developer at a university, serving about 30k students and >500 faculty. We needed to migrate to another software due to end of support in the previous, which would go down in a matter of weeks. I had to code an interim replacement by myself in the meantime. It ended up being simple looking, but it did only what was needed, and I was able to finish. Teachers added grades, students could see them and enroll on courses. No social features, notifications, no gamification, no material design, looked as simple as it could. Worked fine for 2 years until the permanent system was installed (and students had to suffer because the multi-million system that costed thousands of billable hours to setup was riddled with bugs).

Contrast with today: at my previous company we had 500 devs to make an e commerce website whose homepage “couldn’t” be changed for two years. With scrum we supposedly have “self managed teams” but there was so much micromanagement. Sometimes I felt as if I had 20 different bosses, controlling my time and my tasks: POs, PMs, designers, management, upper management, support. There was no time to dogfood the app, to do maintenance, to study, to have ideas.

Unlike most people I don’t really blame Scrum or Agile. The people making it suck are the ones not following it: designers have a “dual track” where they plan months ahead of work (aka waterfall). POs and PMs absolutely hate iterative work, so we gotta refine during PR reviews. Management is too worried about catering to them to listen to us. At least we make money to make terrible software.

Like a lot of people recommended above I also joined a smaller company where things are saner than anything else.

All the best man. I hope you get the freedom you deserve one day.

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