Same (41). In my experience, most of the money seems to be in paying down the technical debt acquired by projects when they were in the startup phase. So I spend most of my days deciphering antipatterns in order to get down to the abstract logic, then fixing issues using as few transformations as possible since there is no budget for a full rewrite.
So most of the issues I fix are due to mistakes I never would have made, because I already made them 10 or 20 years ago.
The worst part is that I no longer think in code, I think in piping data around and working functionally or declaratively because my brain is so apprehensive of side effects. I've found that younger programmers don't tend to realize how dangerous imperative programming (especially object-oriented programming) can be in the long term.
So what I really struggle with is motivation, because it can be so disheartening to not be listened to, or to work hard on an implementation only to have the elegance of its abstractions muddied beyond recognition by developers who don't take the time to understand them.
It's probably too late for me. I cling to a fantasy though of saving enough money that I can take a step back from programming and work on some of my own demo languages/frameworks that illustrate the flaws with the status quo. Because of handwaving and cargo culting, today's apps and websites encode so little core logic in proportion to lines of code that I'm hopeful I can make a niche for myself working at a higher level of abstraction and bidding less money on contracts someday. But it might just be a fantasy.
> So what I really struggle with is motivation, because it can be so disheartening to not be listened to, or to work hard on an implementation only to have the elegance of its abstractions muddied beyond recognition by developers who don't take the time to understand them.
This post hit really close to home for me. It's especially depressing to be caught between these "pearls before swine" moments and Impostor Syndrome and for a while this made it very difficult for me to work up the courage to go to job interviews.
I am currently working somewhere that I genuinely love, as one of two senior engineers on a team of 7. I think I love it so much because I work with people who care about the quality of their work and respect the experience I bring to the table. They've been around long enough to see the cost of making the same mistakes I made 5 years ago, and have outgrown the "just ship it" mentality so many startups are born with and rewarded for. When you're trying to build a 100-year company, you value good engineering.
Most software jobs in California are at startups that are not trying to build a 100-year company, more like 100-week companies. In fact, most venture-funded startups are trying to have as short a lifespan as possible, because they exist to generate short-term returns through big-money exits instead of creating reliable revenue streams. This often actively disincentivizes high-quality engineering, and I think is a big reason why it can be so depressing to work with startups.
So most of the issues I fix are due to mistakes I never would have made, because I already made them 10 or 20 years ago.
The worst part is that I no longer think in code, I think in piping data around and working functionally or declaratively because my brain is so apprehensive of side effects. I've found that younger programmers don't tend to realize how dangerous imperative programming (especially object-oriented programming) can be in the long term.
So what I really struggle with is motivation, because it can be so disheartening to not be listened to, or to work hard on an implementation only to have the elegance of its abstractions muddied beyond recognition by developers who don't take the time to understand them.
It's probably too late for me. I cling to a fantasy though of saving enough money that I can take a step back from programming and work on some of my own demo languages/frameworks that illustrate the flaws with the status quo. Because of handwaving and cargo culting, today's apps and websites encode so little core logic in proportion to lines of code that I'm hopeful I can make a niche for myself working at a higher level of abstraction and bidding less money on contracts someday. But it might just be a fantasy.