I’m a senior software engineer with a little over five years of experience and I am starting to lose interest. I feel bored by the work I do. I’ve changed jobs twice in the last year and that hasn’t made a difference. Has anyone else experienced this and found a more fulfilling role?
I’ve worked with Rails, many JS frameworks, Docker, native and React Native mobile development, PHP, and some other random things scattered in over the years. All I can conclude is that I’m tired of writing code. What can I do with my skill set? I’d hate to start over from scratch.
Thanks for reading.
You should experiment more and find out what tasks or activities you find fulfilling so you can look for roles that allow you to do them more. For instance, if you enjoy investigating issues or incidents, then there are roles that allow you to spend majority of your time doing that.
Looking back helps. Why did you get into programming in the first place? Perhaps you like working from scratch. So go back and do that. This is a good way to reevaluate whether you still like programming like you once did.
If you don't care about low level details and don't enjoy programming, that's fine too. You can explore management roles, where majority of time goes in managing people, processes, and/or products.
If you feel you still want to be on the tech side, there are plenty of roles that are worth exploring: platform engineer, data engineer, network engineer, compiler engineer, research engineer, database engineer, etc.
The field is vast; you can just keep expanding your breath. It's okay not to find a niche.
You can teach, or study more, then teach. Presuming you still like learning more about computer science.
You can write about tech, instead of writing code. Still be in tech industry, but write words instead of code. Communicate with humans, instead of computers.
You can go further away and still be in tech I suppose, get into math modelling roles or quant roles.
Also worth ruling out is burnout. If you are burned out, you probably won't find anything interesting. So take a break, and contemplate what sort of things interest you. Whatever piques your curiosity, just follow that, and see where that takes you.
If you've been working at very large corporations that simply give you Jira tickets that you have to close, then I can see why you're bored. In that case, maybe try a startup or smaller company where you're writing code but also believe in the product vision and are closer to the leadership team?
Others are mentioning different roles (product management, etc.) but definitely make sure you've explored different types of companies, too.
If you need broader support for thinking about your life, I recommend an essay by Peter Drucker: "Managing Oneself". It covers different types of career decisions that are worth exploring (small vs big companies, company cultures etc) without focusing on specific roles.
~~~
Worst case scenario, are you willing sell Hacker News user names? Because yours is perfect. :)
I personally really like the embedded space or any other role where I can lay hands on hardware, even if that's servers or networking equipment. I've worked in a data center, on gunshot detection systems, and also computer or network-controlled lighting, vehicles, and herbicide sprayers.
Try exploring another side of the field, like systems programming, or a language like Haskell. Maybe play around with Python ML libraries.
I realize this doesn't really answer your question, but for me personally, passion for messing around with computers has been a constant in my life.
Other things come and go, but there is always something interesting to be done with computers. If one area starts feeling boring or uninteresting, there is a staggering fractcal of interesting problem areas in computing, that seem to spiral out infinitely.
If Web/JS/React/etc feels boring and uninteresting, maybe look at some other space in that fractal.
Product Manager • Ops/devops/sysadmin • Become a developer advocate • Start a consulting business and try to grow it, so you can hire people • Learn design/UI/UX • Learn appsec
Also, you might find inspiration in this article: https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/09/30/some-possible-career-goals/
Best of luck!
First there are the languages, coding, "inventing" hot water, forward, reverse and re-engieering, having fun and what not. Then after 3-5-10y, this wears out.
Next, there is architecture, design-of-software, blocks, communication-diagrams, all that. You do this with one hand while doing the above with the other hand.
Next, there is the team as a structure to program.. who does what, is good on what, should be taught what, etc. Again, do it with one hand while doing the above two with the other hand..
Next, there is the culture of people and of a group/team/dept/company, methodology and all that.
Next, mentoring...
Probably i am missing some step.. sure you can figure it out. They come in 3-5 year periods. And are not exclusive to each-other.
Like an uphill training, first you do the first 10 meters, up and down until sick of it, then enhance to 20, up and down to 0 and again, then 30 ...
i've been doing these for last 30 years, never stopped any of them. Just this year moved to actual management. Guess what, the only thing i've never done was hiring and firing. Ah, and meetings-in-calendar-shaping-life.
so.. it's not deadend. If you want, you can find what to apply your skills to. and Enhance them.. while doing some/all of the above with your other hand..
have fun