I hate being in software

you’ve been click-baited! Trust me, I don’t hate software, I freaking love building stuff. It’s been more than a hobby, more than a way to earn me food, it’s kind of what I do for more than 15+ hrs almost every day! So I don’t hate software. But I do hate everything else around it. I’ll explain myself below.

Let’s take a short walk back in time, not too far, only a few years. It’s me in 2018, trying to build an e-commerce web page for an institution we called our own company. It’s dead now, what did you expect lol. Anyway, When I was trying to figure it out, the only outside help I got was from one senior, who also did the same thing for the same purpose some 2 years back. I had to figure out most of the stuff and make it work somehow. But we never had anyone visiting or buying anything from that site. It was my first go at building stuff on the web and learned a ton. I loved it, for real.

Fast forward to today, I’m working at a nice place. Great company and team, good leadership and we’re kinda killin’ it in the market. But I don’t seem to have the same fun and happiness I had a long time back when I was starting. Why?

Don’t get me wrong, but it has nothing to do with my workplace or me not doing enough to learn stuff. I’ve learned an explosive amount of stuff and gone above and beyond in exploring tech and building meaningful things out of it. It’s been great in terms of getting my work done and growing alongside. But I’m not happy, it feels like something is missing. What is it?

Let’s take a slight detour. People who are reading this right now are probably working in software. Let me ask you this question. When was the last time you felt content about a piece of software and that feeling stayed with you for a long time? Did it motivate you to do more? If yes, after you went ahead and started spending more time on it, how did you feel after?

For me, it’s almost every week. I get to work on whatever I want and It’s a dream come true. I feel proud and motivated, I spend more and more time but I feel like I’ve achieved nothing.

You see, in software, most problems are fixed. Look at stackoverflow. When was the last time you looked for an answer and after doing your best in finding it, you’re unable to get a hold of it? rarely. There’s no everlasting sense of greatness or ownership of a solution in software. Everything is so intangible, that you’ll never really own something that you’ve built. Nothing is original.

At work, I get to work on many adventurous problems. It may take me a day, a couple of days, or a week to find a solution. I’ll keep hitting my head against the wall until I can get it done. I do ask and get help, but when it’s done, the sense of pride fades away too fast.

Now you must be thinking, this is just too dramatic or childish. Just get your freaking work done and don’t whine about it. Yes, sir, I understand. I also understand building tech doesn’t earn you money, maintaining it does. But here’s another problem.

Even if you feel proud of what you’ve built, to make it available to people or consumers, you need to put it on the internet. And my friend, the internet is just messed up. You’re at the mercy of another one like you whose service you end up using for your tech. And what comes with that you ask? Problems, Problems, A lot of problems, and more problems.

Your beautiful piece of software may be tagged as unreliable based on who’s carrying it to your customers. The same goes for writing code. There are a thousand + 1 ways of fixing a problem and you’re mostly going to use a library (a dependency) to get it done. Now this library may not work with some other library you used earlier. So welcome to new problems, do you see where it’s going?

I’ve seen a lot of YouTube videos and blog articles where people rant about how forked up the JS ecosystem is. But I think this goes for the entire software industry in general.

I don’t have a way to fix this for me or for anyone who’s reading this. I’ve been going through this for the last few months, and don’t know what I can do about it. I genuinely feel taking up building software as a hobby is the way to go. But you need to earn to feed yourself and hobby software won’t earn you crap. Should I take up farming? Maybe I should.

I’ve tried my best to not rant but think I’ve failed miserably. It was not worth your time but thanks if you’re chosen to do so. Hope it gets better for us. Thank you.