My advice is to try to recognize when one's career is no longer fulfilling; save a little money along the way, and pivot hard in search of work/life satisfaction even if it means a big downgrade in income.

Is exactly my plan in 2021. I’m leaving SWE and going back to school for finance and accounting. I’ve always enjoyed and been skilled at the numbers game and have done bookkeeping for a Local community outreach group for many years, I’ve found a very tangible calm doing something more quantitative than building CI/CD pipelines and roadmaps and oncall and feature standups and andnand and and and. I am so thoroughly burned out, disaffected and otherwise sick of my career and some of the doing this after 17 years that I’ve begun having legitimate anxiety attacks.

I had two sitting at my desk last week. When I turned around to get up and get a glass of water I saw the dog cowering in the corner. He had never seen me like that.

That’s when I knew it was time to go. Well, actually no I knew several years ago but the golden handcuffs were clamped tight and I was too scared to go.

Not anymore.

Bye.

This is not to dissuade your choice. Rather, I'm looking for similarities between myself and others, and potential pitfalls to avoid.

Generally speaking: I just don't have the energy for the amounts of bullshit that comes with being in this career anymore. No job is immune from bullshit, this much is true--but I kind of hate this cop out because it strips agency from people in minimizing the amount of bullshit they are subjected to on a daily basis.

For me, that means to hell with this career. I very much want to do something different, so that's what's going to happen.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25251029

Good luck on whatever voyage and path you end up taking, I genuinely hope you find a spot of zen for you and yours.

EDIT: BY THE WAY--I will probably never stop coding, as there are always opportunities to be efficient in bookkeeping and do some low level automation (in fact I do this already). I've also got a home lab running a few local services and I enjoy tinkering. I'm just not at all interested in writing and maintaining feature/production code for another SaaS platform or "tech company". Not at all. Never again. The idea of even interviewing for one of these jobs has the heart rate ticking up and the jaw to clinch up.

It seems most people still hold their love for coding or what spawns from that coding. It is the environment in which they code, that creates most of the frustration (and doesn't seem to be stopping anytime soon).

I wish you the same luck.

Wholeheartedly agreed

Yeah, I am a little salty about the state of things. I'd prefer programming in "my basement", and can understand why communication is important. Yet I can't help but feel we've thrown out the baby along with the bathwater.

Reason I emphasize agency is that as long as it gives the best result and meets the requirements (including ethical ones), I don't care how it is done. Result being very broad: features, maintainability of the code, enjoyment of the team, etc.. Anything else that is pushed from the management layers without good reason is needless overhead.

Now what do software devs usually do when we see needless overhead? Ah right, we remove it. If only it were that simple outside software.

I don’t necessarily believe all of the points above are negative but scrum can be an exhausting way to work.

There shouldn’t be deadlines every two weeks, instead you should be working towards a sprint goal. If the goal is not achieved then you can use that knowledge in the next sprint to reduce the amount of scope you try to complete. There are no deadlines per se, because deadlines try to fix scope and time, whereas a sprint only fixes time. The process of estimation and story pointing is where things become more art than science, but provided you are consistent in your approaches this mechanism prevents our inherent lack of foresight from becoming a catastrophic prediction failure.

Meetings like stand ups, retros, and backlog refinement can be super effective tools but they have to be run properly and tightly, otherwise they become worse than nothing.

I guess in this hypothetical team the thing to do would be to raise with the Scrum Master that you’re exhausted, raise in the retro that there are deficiencies in the process etc. and get back to a more sane baseline.

Additionally, many others have already argued against both the common implementation of Scrum, and its "ideal, perfect, theoretical" version. Just the idea of preserving asynchronous communication while introducing fixed, synchronous communication strikes me as an idea by someone who does not understand how people work.

Scrum as a set of process rules should not be particularly difficult for an engineering team to learn. I submit that if a team cannot operate under such a set of rules, it will be unable to adopt any set of process rules, and in addition to that, it will perform especially poorly under a system of no rules (i.e. direct rule by edicts from kings and queens).

Good lord it is exactly this kind religiosity that has me running for the exit.

I guess my question to you is, where are you exiting to? If you know of a process or methodology that is better and can articulate the reasons why, then I will gladly follow you!

This is in my OP that began the comment thread.

I guess I won’t be following you through that exit, but all the best and good luck for the future. I admire your courage in the pursuit of happiness.

Like, sure, you can make a team decision about what goes into this sprint, and what goes into the next one. But the management makes the decision what must be done in three or six months, and there is no negotiation about that.

I tried to start multiple companies right out of college and failed at all of them, all while taking any other work I could to pay the bills. Working in a call center was by far the worst of the “other” work I did and it led me to consider getting a “real” job based on my skills and degree.

I ended up convincing an advertising agency to hire me and decided to give it my all, despite my misgivings about the industry in general. I worked hard and even enjoyed some of it, and my title/pay/prestige all followed an upward trend as a result. After the first raise I said it would only be another year. Then I got promoted and I decided it would be another year after that. Then I got another raise and a promotion, then we were acquired, then a few more significant yearly raises after that. At some point I tried to convince myself that this was the right path, but I knew it wasn’t. I still wanted to be my own boss and run my own business.

Seven years later and it was incredibly difficult to justify leaving all that money. I also hadn’t saved particularly well as I instead grew my lifestyle to match the money. None of it made me happy or gave me satisfaction, and I felt tied down to the job. As a solution my wife and I decided to move back to my hometown and start our own business together, even though we had tried to start another business together right after school.

Thankfully this time it worked out, although we still have our disagreements about what the future of the business looks like. My advice to everyone is slightly different: chase the money if the opportunity arises, but don’t change your lifestyle. And keep working on other things on the side if you can. Maybe I wouldn’t have progressed as much in my “real” career had I had other side hustles, but I’m sure it would have been a less painful path than the one I took.

However, pivoting to something you think brings happiness is not always a great advice. It's worth mentioning the "So Good They Can't Ignore You" book by Cal Newport, which basically argues (I give you my simplified interpretation, I might be botching it) that happiness comes when you become very good at something, and changing careers in the pursuit of happiness will make you be less good in something and in extension, also less happy.

my own two cents is consider work as only an income stream for you (and your family if you have one). Making your passion your career just turns what you love into the daily grind of your job. I like my job but I sure as shit will not do it for free. My passions in life I will gladly do for free