Are senior developers still enjoying their careers in software engineering after many years? What causes a loss of interest in this industry? #seniordevelopers #softwareengineering #career #job-satisfaction #techindustry
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I enjoy the life that it affords me and I find *some* enjoyment in completing some of the tasks, I suppose.
No. It’s all about the business. I don’t like tech anymore but I don’t know anything else. Too young to retire, too old to start over.
I like what I do.
But it’s still *work*. I wouldn’t be working 9-5, and putting up with all the BS of having a job, working with others, stakeholders, management, deadlines, scope creep, etc if they weren’t paying me.
I work so I can afford to live my life.
Maybe this is what you’re noticing in these senior engineers? They’re out of the honeymoon phase, and have settled into the “I’ll be working 9-5 for the next 20-30 years” stage.
I’ve been doing this for a **long** time (25+ years), and the only job I truly enjoyed was my first one. I was creating desktop apps for the field that was my first true passion – broadcasting. I had a connection to the project, and that made it fun.
Since then, though, everything has been just a job. I don’t have any connection to the industries I’ve worked in, and I have no real reason to personally use any of the apps I’ve worked on.
The job provides me with a much better standard of life than I had growing up, and for that I am forever grateful. I enjoy the people I work with, but the job and its responsibilities have been meh for years. Retirement can’t come soon enough. I can see the finish line, and hopefully I’ll be able to cross it in about 15 years.
I honestly look forward to my time away from work more than my time *at* work.
I’ve been in my current job for 5 years and I think I enjoy the job more now than ever before. I moved onto a new product team a year ago and the work has been difficult, but mentally stimulating, and the feeling of satisfaction when I finally get a huge feature working reminds me why I got into this field to begin with.
What job?
I was hired to work on a new project with the MERN stack. Fast forward a year and they decided to ditch the MERN project and im currently building pages with jquery which i hate so much but it pays okay so there’s that
For the most part, yes. There are annoying aspects of my job, but that applies to any job. On the whole, I get satisfaction from the work I do.
There’s always flux.
I’ve had years where I was gung-ho and very invested.
I’ve had years where I felt demotivated, invisible, or unappreciated.
I’ve had years where what I worked on was extremely interesting, and other years extremely boring.
I also entered the field because of personal enjoyment, and that has kept me attached to the career. I think with the flood of people only seeking the salaries we’ve also had a flood of people disinterested in the field itself, and often enough they end up feeling as miserable as any other person stuck in any other job they dislike but are trapped in by their income.
After experiencing and seeing all that I can say that the best advice it took me a long time to understand, and follow, is to separate your career from your life.
Enjoy it if you can but keep it at an arm’s length and don’t become emotionally attached. As my father-in-law says, when you come home you take your work shoes off and put your home shoes on. Work doesn’t enter the home, because it’s not your life.
So, yes, after ~7 YOE I still enjoy what I do, but it definitely hasn’t been a constant joy. It’s been up and down, and I put up a wall to let the enjoyment in where possible, but also to remind me it’s not my ‘family’ or purpose, and to find joy somewhere else.
7 + yrs, i do not enjoy it. I enjoy the money
My job is alright, all the extra curricular bullshit that the job demands is awful
I still enjoy Software Engineering. I never enjoyed Professional Software Engineering.
I used to and then I had a bad boss and it’s ruined it for me and I don’t know how to go back to how it was where I loved every second of it
At times. At times I’m also starting to find it extremely stressful.
I love the work. I hate the amount of work.
6 yoe. I still enjoy my side projects, but I honestly dont enjoy my job anymore, no. Too many inflated egos and too much bad decision making. It just makes it not fun, and after a while I’ve gotten sick of it.
No but where else can i be fully remote and hardly do any work?
I’m only a bit over a year in, but I can’t help noticing how I often seem to spend only about 10% of my day coding. Recently myself and another SWE (who is no doubt way more experienced than me) have been plunked on a “”hackathon”” team which is basically going to end up with us teaching some suits how to use the Office 365 booking app. But I 100% go along with this comment…
> I enjoy the life that it affords me and I find some enjoyment in completing some of the tasks, I suppose.
Couldn’t have put it better really.
I couldn’t imagine working on other roles like Business Analyst or more functional ones, I just don’t like them.
After 5 years working as a .NET Developer, I can say that I still enjoy it, but I have also switched jobs because I don’t like working on too much legacy stuff.
I prefer to keep track of the recent technologies just so if I need to change I have the right skills. Otherwise you will just end up working on stuff from 2010 and you will never learn anything new and useful in today’s market.
So my motivation comes mostly from the stuff I am working on, if I don’t like what I am doing then I want to change.
14 years into my career and I still love it. Yes there are days that suck but overall I feel very fortunate that I can get paid this well to work on problems and technologies that I find genuinely interesting.
i (2.5 YoE) occasionally enjoy my work but i don’t pretend that it’s not work at the end of the day. i enjoy the lifestyle creep
I used to love it and being complete absorbed by it. That worked for the first 5 years (Im 10 years into it now). As you mature, learn more about the world and how companies work, and get more technically capable, that happiness usually drops. Now my life objective is to leave the corporate world and I completely despise it.
It’s just a job. Git stuff done, git paid.
I’ve hit the 20 year mark and I love what I do. Still writing code and still learning and teaching with peers. This has been a very enjoyable way to make a living. That said, I can’t wait to retire because I’d rather be home with my wife all day.
Yeah, I love my job. I get to solve problems and make a livable income.
I enjoy it. Definitely prefer having a low pressure job with room to express myself to just redlining it every day, even if I make less money doing that
15.5 yoe, literally never have.
However, it beats starving, and it gives me some structure while I wait out the clock.
I have been a software engineer for 16 years and I hate it but the money is good. I absolutely hate on-call, scrum, agile ceremonies, and working with a principal engineer who refactor the entire codebase while I was on vacation to use Railway Oriented Programming.
Never did.
Over 6 years in, enjoying it more than ever
It’s *WAY* better than my last job at a factory.
It ebs and flows.
Generally greenfield projects are more interesting.
The people you work with have a huge effect on what the experience is like. The actual work can also carry me for some time, but the people are most important.
Even the loving projects can settle into monotony eventually, and then a problem/feature comes along that you love, or a problem hits that completely saps your will to hit the keys.
Generally though? There’s a lot of interesting jobs out there. There’s a lot of interesting people out there. If you can find those two at the same place, you should find some satisfaction.
Bonus points of it pays well.
Oh – one thing worth noting is that I tend to stay at a company quite long. Over time you get to the deeper problems, and those tend to be more interesting to dissect.
We only here for the money and parts of programming we enjoy. That’s it. Code Monkey 2.0.
25 YoE, I still enjoy it, pretty much, the work is interesting and I like my colleagues.
Working with decent human beings is 90% of it. Even boring work isn’t so bad if you’re working with pleasant people.
I’m 6 years in and about 40 years until retirement. I am finally at a point of my career where I’m good at things and no longer long for a day I never need to code again.
That being said, “enjoy” is a stretch. Tech pays but wow even the fabulous remote jobs can suck the life out of you.
In my 4 yoe, I can say I enjoy programming, but I don’t like my job. I’m overworked and don’t have enough space to improve in one aspect of software programming and have to learn too many things. It creates burnout. This career leads to burnout.