I can't tell the last 3 companies I worked for apart. It seems like a large percentage of companies today operate the same way. "Agile with 2 week sprints" never ending death march.
(As someone who often works for smaller orgs) It doesn't HAVE to be that way. None of the smaller orgs I've worked for use those systems. Only the big techy ones with a lot of bureaucracies do. They pay better, but you do much less, and push around a lot of paperwork instead of code. There ARE alternatives. Your average small town non-IT company probably still needs developers here and there, and they won't have the resources for the overhead of Agile bullshit. You'll typically have the keys to the kingdom and have to make shit work with very limited resources and a tiny team, but it's a heck lot more fun.
I tried a big corpo job for a bit, ugh, never again.
There's a lot of programming gigs in the public sector or in larger boring organisations. They pay less but are also have lower expectations and more structure which are both great
No PTSD but dealing with burn out I needed to find something else, and that's what I tried. So far it's paying off.
Be careful, there are also programming jobs like this that pay less and also have less structure and higher expectations.
It's not an absolute rule that "boring" companies or whatever are walks in the park.
In a lot of cases they aren't because they actually have to make a profit and so they tend to be incredibly understaffed at least by the standards I kinda got used to in the tech industry. I can only speak for finance and insurance though, maybe the government really is slow paced but people said that about insurance before I got this job and its the hardest I've ever had to work and it isn't even close.
Now if most of the stress is actually coming from fear of layoffs, that genuinely is better in my experience, there havent been any programmers laid off in the three years I've been here, but only because you are working so much harder that they literally cannot afford to lay anybody off. Checks would probably stop going out on time if they did.
Anyway, definitely people should look into it and maybe interview around, I'm just warning everyone not to take the tech industry meme about sleepy banks and insurance companies at face value without a lot of evidence. If you think about it it never made much sense but I think everyone in tech falls for it due to us having a tendency to think we are the smartest and the dude-bro-fratboys in underwriting or <other stereotypically boring job> are all hanging out having a party all day.
Especially since you're a veteran, look at government (and in particular DoD) contractors. The pace is slower and as an SME you could contribute in many areas.
I’d especially recommend the VA: they’re both generally inclined to hire veterans and specifically against writing people off, and they have a ton of modernization projects which will improve matters for millions of people.
Could it be people are choosing over-engineered solutions because AWS has bad documentation and that's what the solutions architects tell them to do?
Could it be because microservices and so-called "server-less" have been sold as cost-saving measures that increase the business' flexibility and decrease capital investment?
When... in reality a single deployed Docker container is way more manageable than a distributed system constructed with "lambdas" and requires fewer engineers in the long run?
What I'm trying to say is that FAANG cargo-culting is only part of why developers choose to build solutions that scale larger than they need. Another large part is the cloud development ecosystem writ-large and the consulting culture that has built up around it.
You sound like a very competitive person. You might want to consider that a lot of software development is actually the navigation of socio-technical systems. Heavy emphasis on the socio. Your competitive drive isn't bad, but it might lead you to local optima in your career in the long-run.
How do you get things done in a larger organization? At AWS it's solved by having APIs and documentation for everything. This leads to a janky UI, a lot of redundancy in their systems, and a pretty bad work environment from what I hear.
In a lot of technical organizations, this problem is solved instead informally through relationships between members of the organization. You want to get something done outside of your constrained contexts? You'll probably need some relationships. Getting a lot of cards done is great, but if you're pushing too hard all the time you're going to sour those relationships.
What I'm saying boils down to this: being a developer in a large organization is about 1-3 parts coding to 7-9 parts communication and relationships. Further, if you spend time communicating you can often realize that the feature you're implementing was already implemented two years ago and there's just a regression that's caused the line of code to no longer be executed.
You can say fuck it to the communications with your peers if you'd like. However, keep in mind that most of your jobs as you become senior are going to come from referrals from former colleagues. Your boss right now isn't going to help you get your next job–the people sitting around you might.
I stopped using Firefox because it was killing my battery life. Also because I noticed more and more websites stopped supporting it and I just kind of gave up. I'm using Safari these days and it's fine.
A large portion of this is due to the corporate enclosure of deep learning and machine learning that has occurred over the past 10 years. This, combined with the scale required for a lot of deep learning research, means that neither the code nor the resources required for reproduction are accessible outside of corporate labs.
You're being exploited. You've been worked to your limit. You probably share some blame in this but you're certainly not the one profiting from it so the key thing is you need to stop for a minute.
You need a break to re-evaluate. At least two weeks without work before you even bother trying to sort through important questions like who you are and what you want. Once you've relaxed, you can start to ask the heady, existential questions that it sounds like you've been putting off for a while.
Try asking for some extra vacation from your employers. If they won't give it to you, and you can afford it, ask for unpaid time off.
Have you switched jobs on a while? It sounds a little like you’re also describing being deeply embedded in your organization and having social capital there.
I’d suggest switching jobs. You’ll lose the social capital and have new tech to learn. The stress and work of reaccumulating those should distract you for a hot minute
