amatxn

I’ve cut out anything extra on Mondays. I’ve kept my exercise routine in the morning because it keeps me sane.

I’d quit tomorrow if my company offered a decent severance package. I’m super burned out and with attrition and hiring freezes, I’m stuck with double the workload. I wake up in the middle of the night stressing and full of anxiety about going to work. I despise going to work on Mondays due to the slog of meetings all day long. Writing software used to be fun and I’d do it after hours as a hobby. Now, I can’t stand the thought and just hope I can get 3-5 more years in the industry before I bail out for good.

I’m struggling with a similar situation where I’m at. I’ve experienced significant growth opportunities over the last 5 years, the company I work for is good and growing quickly. I work with friendly and nice folks. I have great benefits, awesome work life balance, and I have basically free autonomy to steer and do what I want.

There is just something missing. I feel like I’ve reached a peak and am not actively learning and growing. However, the last thing I want to do is go to a toxic environment that expects long hours and treats employees terribly.

Hi btown, thanks for the Spreedly plug!! I’m Director of Engineering at Spreedly and helped to launch routing capabilities as a engineer and leader. If the OP already has an existing relationship with a gateway(s), we definitely make it easy to integrate with a single API to multiple payment gateways. I’d highly recommend they look at a solution like ours or another provider to work reduce risk in the future.

I've been working remotely for 18 months, married with a toddler and 10 year old daughter. I classify myself as an introvert, but vary widely from needing to be outgoing to extremely isolating myself. The previous job I left required me to be at the peak of personal extroversion professionally as a director of engineering. I worked with my team, business dev, and IT. I was also involved with sales calls and on-boarding customers. It pushed my boundaries but it forced me to grow. I started to enjoy being more extroverted.

I went from that position to working remotely for a start-up that had only 3 remote team members. At first I enjoyed the break from interactions with others but still had lots of communication with at least one other remote team member. About a year ago, I was moved to a different team, one with 2 local team members and myself. It has been a real struggle as I have gone days without interacting with team members or anyone besides my wife and son. I do leave the house daily to take my son to day care, but that is the extent of daily interaction outside the home with the exception of the grocery store on the weekends.

Limited social interactions has been and is becoming more of a problem for me working remote. Working in the office I developed friendships existed outside of the office as well. Those relationships are hard to maintain, and the same level of social life no longer exists when working remotely. We've instituted daily standup video calls and it helps a little.

I didn't have a huge social life before but it is now two extremes - either I crave the need to chit chat and interact with others or I withdraw completely from social situations. For example, I try to go to the coffee at least once a week just to be around other people. However, when I travel to the office quarterly, I cannot make it through the week of dinners and other events without leaving early to be alone.

Going days without meaningful technical and social interactions has caused me to be depressed and I've already considered leaving my current employer for a remote team that has more deliberate communication. Overall I'm glad with going 100% remote, but I have to work hard to not completely isolate myself.

Age: 37, Location: TX, NW: $585K

Director of Engineering, $98K, 0 equity, $0 bonus.

Amarillo, TX

@alex-yo Your post is almost a mirror of my situation - senior generalist dev with 15 years experience Ruby/Java/SQL and numerous other languages and frameworks too many to list, looking for something more challenging and unable to relocate due to family situation.

I've tried unsuccessfully to apply via the main remote work channels and rarely get a response back. The one time I did, the position was cancelled by the company after I made it to the 2nd round.

Hope you have better luck than me and a commenter can unlock the secret. There are lots of great people like us not able to work in the office.

I've been trying to learn Elixir in my spare time, feels a lot like the breath of fresh air Ruby/Rails was when it came out.

Also, been toying with data science/machine learning w/ Python.

Gardening is very enjoyable as is working on my home. Something very gratifying about seeing your hard work in physical form versus virtual work.

I've been programming for 15 years, since I was 21. It used to be my passion, work, and hobby. Over the last 3 years I've gradually shifted from development to managing projects and product development, and recently moved to the team leader/manager.

Right now I really like the product and management side of the work, but the technical / programmer side I am very burned out on. I used to spend my free time consulting, coding, researching, and had dreams of starting my own company. Now I want to go home and relax, work with my hands out in the yard/garden.

I've been at the same company for 7 years now, we typically have enough freedom and project variation to learn new skills and keep from being bored. There are simply to many frameworks/languages to keep up with to stay relevant. I don't see myself finding another development job after this one, at least not without time off/a break. The money is great, and I've been fortunate to save well, and we live will below our means.

Honestly, I'm working on a plan to be out of the industry by the time my daughter graduates high school and I'm 45.

I've been researching and looking into Elixir & Phoenix a lot lately. What are your thoughts having done this side project? I'm coming from a java, ruby perspective with experience in several other languages.

If she is special than nothing is more important than the her, fix the underlying issues - find a new job, remove the stress, etc - should have done this previously.

Having been through a divorce and remarried, I hate to say this but a real partner does not leave, they stay by your side and help you through the tough times. It hurts but you may be better off by fixing the stresses and finding another mate.

I don't advocate any of her financial mistakes, but having reached my mid 30's, I realize

1) Old age and life aren't guaranteed.

2) If you wait until retirement to start 'living', you may be unable or unwilling to take risks, travel and have adventures.

Saving all the money in the world means nothing if you are dead or too old to enjoy it. I've found there is a delicate balance of saving and exploring the world and life will I'm young enough to be able to.

Exactly this ^^^. In fact those that leave my company all end up as contractors.

@sn - no direct contact info on the profile other than co-founder info, don't want to be too stalker-ish in finding you :)

They would also expect it for dirt cheap or free :(

Company is very small ~10 people, 4 devs. I manage several of the projects and resources.

I've approached my boss several times about this, and any changes are temporary - it's a management issue (same management at both places). I have a need to be on high profile high performing projects (I've lead development on the last several at our company) but then there are low activity periods where management does not provide direction. I can work on my own but it's hard to gain traction (technology company that's doesn't understand technology).

Thanks - I did not the advice negatively. I've gone down that route and plan to pursue in the future. A lot of it is perception that I'm not good enough.

I look daily, I've had several interviews over the years but nothing has worked out. I share custody of my 8 yr old daughter and live in a somewhat isolated area of the US that has very few development jobs (like 5 employers, most of them undesirable). I've made the decision to stay here until she is older. I've looked for remote jobs but that can be intimidating, most are looking for that 'rockstar' developer. I'm just in a bad place, I'm highly educated (bs, ms,Mba) and feel like that was just wasted.

I've had one of these jobs for years. Each day I come in and expect the gig to be up. It never happens. This has been across 2 companies, for 10 years. From the outside it looks like a dream job, from the inside I'm highly depressed because the work is so unfulfilling. I have a need to be busy constantly, instead it's slowly seeing your skill set rot and dying a bit each day.

^^ This is want the business guys don't understand. Any business application with a solid foothold will need to be maintained for years into the future. My alma mater has an entire program dedicated to minting mainframe developers because there is and will be a need that everyone else is ignoring.

I have shared custody of my 7 year old daughter in an area (Amarillo, TX) that is geographically distant from metros w/ developer jobs, and Amarillo has little IT presence.

I've reached the pinnacle of technical jobs in my area (lead developer). The job is easy, I do pretty much what I want when I want, work 40 hours or less a week, the commute from home to office is 5 minutes - I can bike it in 10, and eat lunch at home each day. My quality of life is hard to beat. My job also allows me to experiment with many new technologies, so it can be somewhat challenging.

Beyond that, I make a decent salary for the area and combined with my wife's income and low cost of living, we are able to save A LOT.

I'd like to have a remote position, but the above reasons + imposter syndrome keep me from even applying.

Wholeheartedly agree about the urbanization trend, but if you look at that data, that whole section of the Plains states and central US that is 'Doing Better' is in large part rural. My county is 'Randall' in the Texas panhandle, we rank 133 on the list. The metropolitan area (if you call it that) is > 250K. My wife and I are highly educated and we live well above the county and national median income level. Quality of life is good and cost of living is low. I'd say some rural areas are doing things right, the oil boom has a lot to do with that.

Ruby, Java, Javascript, HTML, CSS, occasionally C#, VB.Net, PHP, Python, Scala.

I'm much more productive in Ruby or even C#, just able to get more done and happier developing in those languages too.

I have already forwarded the link to our team, we will be evaluating it to see if it fits for us.

We are building something very similar as an internal project to support our payment systems, wish this had been available 2 years ago!

Thanks for the help - I will keep in touch with you.

My team is a small group (3-5 devs). We have kicked around going freelance separately and as a group.

Atlanta is big in the payments industry correct? I previously worked for First Data / with a unit that was driving 50K ATMS at one point and issuing cards for 120 banks. I was on the issuing side.

thanks jSeymourATL - I had thought about using LinkedIn to extend my reach - I work in the payments industry (card issuance & processing) so my knowledge is specialized to a degree.