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@terranoid@lemmy.cafe
2026-10-07 00:24 UTC
I would argue it’s normalizing.
For fucks sake, the last 30 years have been insane, especially with the dotcom boom and bust.
Suddenly every dipshit adult was telling their kids, “computers are the future, the internet is the future, and you can’t survive with just a highschool degree. You better go to college and learn programming!!”
Those parents are a bit to blame with how things got. And it seemed like they were pretty accurate too as high speed internet became huge, and lithium batteries thus mobile phones…
I always was interested in programming, since before my mom pushed me into it, because she was one of those types too. Then I went to college, and I met a bunch of teenagers who said, “uhhh I don’t know what I want to do but I want it make money so I’m doing computer science”.
The first year of college usually filtered those people out. Usually.
And i’ve always said, don’t join this career for the money. It’s not worth it, if you don’t love engineering. This is the most stressful fucking job I’ve ever had, and there are tons of meetings and social activity to go with it. You can’t just solve puzzles in a vacuum, even if you like programming, and that’s EVEN if you enjoy it. You have to start leading others at some point, act like a mentor.
You take on a fucking lot of responsibility, start giving demos, working with product managers, marketers, help teach people what is possible in the product and what isn’t. This isn’t a chill gig. It rarely is. It usually involves a fuck ton of effort and planning.
You get paid a lot… But honestly, if you’re actually doing the job well, you’re underpaid even then. Often you will be underpaid compared to the effort you put in. Especially now.
Not as many people should be in software engineering as there are. I talk to people sometimes and you can tell they hate this job. It’s okay, and I don’t blame them, but way too many people got sucked into this career for the wrong reasons, then kinda now have to keep doing it to survive.
I’m glad I still enjoy it but I see a lot of fucking burnout right now. But I have to say, the people leaving the job now, some of them, not all but some, might be some of the types that shouldn’t have jumped into it in the first place. Lots of people were told they’re smart and good with computers so should make money doing it.
Some of those smart people should’ve done other smart jobs. Biotech is huge too, but I don’t see the drive to it like there was for making fucking websites.
Replies (4)
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i think because biotech is has a small gatekeep job market, its hard to get into, its essentially a catch-22, its also complicated by other things, , and requires upfront experience years before graduation.
Open ##5030744
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Hilarious to throw biotech out there at the end as its a similar case with a lot of smart people doing not what they want and hard to pivot out of. The filter also works similarly.
Open ##5031056
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The first year of college usually filtered those people out. Usually.
Unfortunately in my country this doesn’t happen. There’s a bell curve and as long as you submit your homework and do the bare minimum for the exams, you get your degree. You’re gonna have a pretty mid GPA, but you’ll have a degree which effectively makes the degree useless as an indicator of competency. The amount of people I’ve interviewed who couldn’t answer a simple programming question is astounding.
Most of these people end up picking up jobs as project managers because that’s all they can do. And the country’s leaders wonder why we don’t have much software R&D here.
Open ##5031118
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I really enjoy programming, and i don’t mind all of the planning, mentorship, and working with stakeholders to formulate solutions. But for the past few weeks 90% of the work I’ve been doing had been around deployment, migrating services to new servers, and fucking with azure resources. I haven’t written a line of code for 3+ weeks. That has been draining.
Couple that with picking up work items that are poorly written with way to little information on what needs doing and it’s also frustrating as hell.
At my company, we have dozens, probably over one hundred different repos that we maintain, and no less than 30 actively worked on projects. It’s bitter sweet in that I get a good mix of work to break up the monotony of working on the same project, but at the cost of not being able to master any of them. I’ve only been in my role for 6-8 months coming from a non programming background, and it’s been tough to learn and keep up with the pace required. Being full stack is nice but shitty at the same time.
Open ##5031698