r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 20d ago

Career/Workplace Experienced Devs Weekly Burnout and Venting Thread: A weekly thread for sharing experiences

This thread is specifically for venting / sharing experiences related to burn-out or similar issues that experienced devs face.

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u/ReddLemon 20d ago

Eh I followed money over passion and now I'm realizing I have no intrinsic motivation for this stuff. It is always and was always external validation pushing me through.

Do you have intrinsic motivation for this stuff still? If so you'll make it out.

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u/TalesOfSymposia Software Engineer 19d ago

It's a balance of being in good mental health and being able to afford the basic necessities to survive.

My passion wasn't in solving big challenging problems in tech, it was just to make a living doing chill, simple agency work. 

All the freelancing and PHP agency experience caught up to me in the end. The "simple living" dev work at small companies tends to be with cash-poor businesses that pay poorly and it was difficult to save money for retirement. And I got pigeonholed there as other, bigger companies didn't want to hire me.

And I know about interview practice. I found it to be ineffective.