Have you or anyone you know quit software engineering (without retiring) in order to do something they're more passionate about?
1. Technologies are constantly changing and I can’t keep up. I used to do .NET MVC (4.7 or whatever, the old stuff) development. Then switched to cold fusion for a different employer and recently tried to do the latest .NET web stuff. It has changed beyond recognition. I have to start studying everything from scratch. I don’t have neither time nor motivation for this. What if next years update to .NET will make all my knowledge obsolete again? Screw that.
2. Job interviews and finding jobs.
I wish I could make a living playing in a rock band.
The differences are primarily around configuration and dependency injection. Everything else is mostly the same.
Don't give up! You aren't starting from scratch, and your skills will easily translate. Once you get past the app startup stages, it's all the same patterns and paradigms.
Another thing that discouraged me was when I generated authentication template I could not find authentication related files in directory structure. I had to generate those files to be able to see them.
But your words give hope. Maybe I’ll try again when I have time. Thanks!
The big difference is the workflow for containerized deployments, but it affects all languages
[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/mvc/overview?v...
I was not able to generate old style project using newer visual studio. If it’s possible I’d love to know.
> I love programming, but the industry is very high-pressure and high-stress for me.
"The industry" is very broad and diverse with all sorts of different characteristics. Not all involve high pressure and stress. You can be a dev without having the high pressure and high stress by carefully selecting where you work.
I gotta say. It's nice to remember how good we have it. Doing a harder job for 1/10th of the pay refilled my empty gratitude bucket very quickly. :)
Today I gripe about waking up at 8am to do another useless standup meeting, but once in awhile, I remember waking up at 3:30am to meet the UPS jet and wait until they loaded my little Beech 99 so that I could fly through low clouds and ice so that the folks in roseburg, eugene, and la grande could get their amazon prime tchotchkes. Then waiting around in the bumblefrick motel for 6 hours for the UPS truck to return that afternoon with the unwanted returns of last week's amazon prime tchotchkes.
Yeah programming for others sucks. But it sucks less than a LOT of other things, and pays a whole lot better. Get while the gettin is good. When you want to run screaming in the other direction, may I suggest a pause, a walk, and a reflect first -- lest you kill the golden goose and never be able to get it back.
$0.02 :)
Now more than ever, people may be wondering if the goose has already been killed, or whether there's any good getting left to get.
Not OP, but it's pretty tough right now to see a near future where _any_ income can be derived from applying my existing skills in a web/software related discipline, and the question of switching to a trade is a scary but potentially practical one. A year or more into having zero income, and I wish I had a fallback like flying for UPS tbh.
It was already hard to get in if one wasn't already in before 2023, now it's an existential crisis.
I just checked out his LinkedIn. Looks like that didn't pan out, as he bounced around to about 9 different companies and is now at a FAANG.
I think about it a lot, but keep waiting for the company to force my hand and lay me off. We usually have a couple rounds of layoffs per year. I figured I wouldn't make it past a few years and now I'm closing in on 20 years. At this rate I'll be hoping for a well timed early retirement package.
Second careers I have witnessed include: yoga instructor, aerial-performance studio operator, author & public speaker, eco-village manager, photographer, carpenter.
Second careers I have considered include: fashion designer, boutique drum-machine manufacturer, and DJ - but while I have taken a couple of long sabbaticals over the years, software keeps drawing me back. I don't suppose I will ever really quit.
I want to stay some years to have stable house and savings situation and I consider to study something more interested and work in less stresful place.
I enjoy education as much as I enjoyed traditional software engineering.
