I'm having an dilemma about my career. I'm very fortunate to be in the position I'm in, I have a very secure and well paying job. I write APIs/web services/websites for a big company. It's not something I'd call particularly challenging, it's fairly CRUDdy but there has been some interesting challenges here and there. I've manged to work my way into a more senior position in the company expecting the challenges to be greater, but it's pretty much more of the same. And to be honest, I'm feeling burnt out and bored to death.
I don't know if it just means I should move companies and it's not the high level dev that's burnt me out. Or whether it is that I want a different/harder challenge.
If you've felt this as a developer:
Have you moved internally to another team and felt reinvigorated?
Did moving companies reinvigorate you even if the work is mostly the same (e.g. writing micro services)?
Has anyone moved to lower level programming to face a different challenge (e.g. embedded, game engines, etc.)? How did you do it?
Has anyone worked in a company that employs both high level and low level developers (e.g. game developer with online services and a game engine, company with web services and robot firmware, etc.) and successfully moved internally to lower level development?
Last discovery i made was DDD/Microservices and it passed by now.. took a ~6 months making it my own ( even refactoring my e-commerce webapp in it, but in a monolith since i don't want the DevOps overhead associated with Microservices).
Next up, i'm a bit exploring ML in multiple languages. I'd prefer ML.net but there aren't a lot of challenges in it found online. Reomimplemented the model 'Samsung Lama' in pytorch and planning to do some iterations on that.
And next up probably using ML5.js
After that, I'll probably be bored again.
What i want to say is that the feeling of ( lack) challenges will always stay a bit.
I'm with a large company and will do some internal tech talks about what i learned and i hope to have some more challenges internally. Since I'm at a pretty good company at the moment and not really planning to change employer.
The feeling won't go away and luckily I occupy myself a lot with additional projects, perhaps too much sometimes.
Yup! better more interesting work really helped.
> Has anyone moved to lower level programming to face a different challenge (e.g. embedded, game engines, etc.)?
I haven't moved this low, but a good friend did. The procedure was:
1. Learn low level skills
2. Join a company with a low level team on an adjacent high level team (a slower approach would be to join any team then transfer to this adjacent team).
3. Befriend people on the low level team, fix a few small tickets for them unasked, pitch them on letting him join
He's working on a microkernel now.
After that I had a mental breakdown, and left the work force for good.
There's quite a lot of these posts lately - I'm not sure that moving yourselves around the Titanic is going to do any lasting good, nor that in general, individuals can expect to escape systemic issues.
I know plenty of people who've been out of work and can't land interviews who'd gladly take the job off your hands.