Possibly true. Cybikos were released in 2000, meaning he's approaching 30 or in his early 30s. Does that affect the article much? He could easily be one of the older people on the team, depending on where he works, and his career could be approaching a decade. That's more than long enough to be tired and bitter!

Third. I've only been at it for 6 years now. I'm 27. I'll correct the title for you to be "Older, Tired, and Bitter"

Did you pick these companies to work for, or did they approach you?

I picked all three. The first was a medium sized startup (90 employees, mostly sales, only 5 devs). The second was a small startup (15 employees, 5 devs). My current job is a huge hosting company with like 3000+ employees in my location.

Careful, I Googled your name and a couple keywords and figured out which company and location in about 12 seconds. Potentially someone reading this could make work less enjoyable than it is now.

Hope things improve mate.

There's something wrong with how you evaluate your potential employers, then. I understand how one can make the mistake that working at any startup would mean that it is going to be an exciting job. If you want to be excited about what you are working on, the fact that a company is a startup or a huge company isn't important; the question is always, what are they making, and are you excited about that?

They're all making glorified crud apps, stuff that I could make solo. I'm not excited by it.

No you can't write and support it yourself.

When you're dealing with load issues, ops, reporting, i18n, logging, and concurrency, you realize why the infrastructure is there and why it's a lot of work to push out a new feature.

The fact that you're not excited by it is why they're paying you, and NO, you cannot do it solo, not without a team behind you.

Before you say it's all in the cloud, most EC2 admins have to deal with unexpected outages, and it's not exciting in a good way. Fundamentally, 99% of everything is a glorified CRUD app.

Why did you pick companies that make crud apps?

If you're good, and can prove it, you ought to have the potential to work on things that excite you.

Your experiences thus far can be seen as learning experience teaching you about what you want/need in a job. You want to engage the customer. You don't like test. You don't want to be at the whim of marketing and bosses who've never programmed.

You've already discovered it's not programming you're tired of, and that's valuable to know.

Just to throw out an idea, there's B2B software companies that employ engineers as consultants to work with client companies. You probably wouldn't like doing this for mega-enterprise, but if the client companies are small they will have a human face.

Well, you seem to work with web applications. So no wonder. In my opinion, in terms of fun, interest and challenge web programming ranks slightly above Cobol, for exactly the reasons you state.

You mentioned you wrote a game. Game programming might be something you like and not every place is a sweatshop, although you have to be discerning.

Embedded/low-level programming is cool too. I used to write router firmware, and I also worked on a sql engine for a time. Neither job had anything to do with "like" buttons or CRUD.

So maybe the issue boils down to equating "programming" with "web app".

>> Well, you seem to work with web applications. So no wonder. In my opinion, in terms of fun, interest and challenge web programming ranks slightly above Cobol, for exactly the reasons you state.

Hey. Lay off the COBOL, especially if you haven't actually done it (I don't know if you have).

I've done web dev for the last four years, since graduating. I now learn mainframe development, with COBOL and JCL (and also REXX recently). It's fun. There's a lot more actual, honest-to-god, programming to do in a mainframe job than there is in web development. At least you don't spend your every waking life trying to shake the angle brackets out of your eyes (XML, right?).

Most of my web dev work was in back-endy stuff btw, primarily C# and a little bit of RoR and Java. Which means 60% configuration, 40% actual coding and even then, the actual coding is implementing some framework interface. That sucks the life right out of "programming" (because it really isn't).

You are right, I shouldn't badmouth Cobol. I've never worked with it professionally but I did have to learn it in school. And let's face it, it's a good career move to learn it as there's going to be a "Cobol crunch" soon and the opportunity for relatively low-stress, high-paying jobs is good in that area.

At my last company I had the opportunity to write some code to fetch data from an api and display messages on 15 Daktronics signs for a bus transit station. That was cool and pretty low level for me, because I had to send bytes to this sign according to a certain protocol defined by their poor documentation.

That project could have been a blast, but it was put off until the last minute and then rushed and then the signs were hung at the transit station before we had a chance to interact with them and toggle some switches inside so we had to do that on a ladder in the cold oh and by the way my test sign was not exactly like the sign that was actually installed. So as usual, another project ruined by rushed managers who didn't involve me sooner and just started buying stuff and doing things.

Did you not ask "what are you working on?"

I've been at it for 11 years now, and i wouldn't consider myself experienced enough to make the kind of judgement calls you make in your post.

I don't get why people have this mentality. While it's true that there is always more to learn, and there are always those that are better than us - people don't get to be successful, rich, and/or have a high title in their late 20s and early 30s by waiting around to hit certain experience milestones.

If Zuckerberg can be a billionaire CEO running a huge company at 30, you can make some judgement calls about your job in your mid 20s.