Jeremiah Cornelius's Journal: F*@k computer programming as a career

"I'm sick and tired of it. I've been programming now for well over a decade and I simply can not write another god damned line of code. It's the same shit over and over again. Make it faster, make it cheaper, make it faster, make it cheaper is all you fucking hear at work and all you see in job postings.

Why in the fuck does any of it matter? Let's run on a treadmill our entire lives so people can have a fucking faster smartphone. Fuck them.

Let's spend hundreds of billions of dollars so algorithms can trade a few microseconds faster. Fuck it.

Let's waste countless man years so the corners of windows are curved and semi-transparent because that shit really matters. Fuck it all.

Let's rewrite the same website infrastrucure in a the latest fad language every couple of years so we all can pretend to be busy bees. Fuck that.

Is there any way out of this treadmill of a life? I highly doubt it. Mankind won't stop in this path to exponential insanity until we are left with nothing but a smouldering pile of ruins we once called civilization.

People can barely keep up with their workload at the office and all the chores at home yet every day you get to work and it's MOAR MOAR MOAR.

And you know what? It's the 0.1% at the top that are *demanding* that every single thing below them cut costs, increase efficiency all so they can see a little MOAR money that they did the month before. Can they even spend the money they make? No, but they still need MOAR and it will come out of your SOUL!"

Sounds like an opportunity

[smittyoneeach]

It's great to realize that materialism, in and of itself, doesn't help you peak out on Maslow's Hierarchy.
The next step is to see if the person in question is mature enough to pursue wisdom.

There is a reason...

[GeckoFood]

...that the only code I write now, is for myself on my own personal projects. I have more interesting ways to spend my life than writing code for someone else.

The only philosophical purpose in code

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Is to make money to raise your family and give to charity.

I once thought like you did, that code could change the world. 17 years in the industry, I have no loyalty or purpose left at work. So I find my purpose elsewhere.

Re:

[jawtheshark]

Didn't take me 17 years... Took me 5 years tops... I'm not sure if it's only this industry, but it truly is depressing.

Re:

[Marxist Hacker 42]

It actually took me about 7 years, that's when I had my first *big scary* layoff and realized that the management considers code just a commodity. I became much happier when I started considering code to be a commodity as well.

Re:

[jawtheshark]

I've never been laid of, or had to supper through a "purging". However, I had seen enough of corporate-mentality to understand that people don't matter. Well, that any my father got brutally laid off after nearly (but not quite) 20 years of faithful, hard working service at big bank. They threw him away like a dirty sock, and he worked hard and long hours, to the point I often didn't even get to see my father.

I vowed not to make that mistake, but I have to admit, I do put in too many hours.

The corporat

ATTRIBUTION:

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message2141011/pg1 [godlikeproductions.com]

Sorry! "Smart" Phone ate my HTML, when posting.

13 pages of comments on that one...

Don't know what you guys are on about

[rk]

I write code to make maps of other worlds. I could make a lot more money doing that shit, I suppose, but I make enough to keep the family fed nutritious meals with a decent roof over our head. Our office is quite dysfunctional in many ways, but it's still pretty cool.