Big tech Software Dev. ~6 years ago I had housing problems and assumed I’d live in poverty for the rest of my life.

Tech is nice. It’s stressful work though, and harder still to convince myself I’m burning out when I used to have it so much worse. It’s not not my job’s fault (I mean everyone is doing layoffs lately…), but I also have a lot of anxiety around financial stability.

This is literally a dream job for me. I mean I used to daydream about working here, and it’s genuinely worth that praise (at least with respect to my old jobs, though recent economics have dampened the hype.)

But despite my boss’s assurance to the contrary, it seems like my default assumption is that I’m a week away from getting fired at all times. The layoffs honestly helped that some, since (without getting into details I might get in trouble for) it wasnt really about individual performance. I’d be angrier about it happening, sure, but the fact that it’s so out of my control means worrying doesn’t help.

That, and the fact that I just hit a year of tenure here. I have a resume of industry experience, and that helps. And I’m not going to say that I’m infinitely hireable. But I know I’m good at my job, and having a year of this place on my resume is enough that I know I’ll always have work.

This didn’t answer the question as well as I could have, but whatever. There you go.

Happy to answer questions about tech and industry work as best I can though.

Edit: Actually I’m annoyed that I never really answered the post.

• What’s your work like? Lot of brain power and problem solving. It’s weird to see how much it affects me at the end of the day vs the more physically demanding work I’ve done. There’s a difference between coming home tired but mentally buzzing, and the sort of whole-body exhaustion I get from thinking all day.

There’s lot of coding. Yes, lots of meetings. That’s honestly more tolerable than the documentation I keep writing, and promising to write for some reason.

• What do you do? Back end software dev.

• Do you enjoy it? So much. I know I just went on this whole diatribe, but I really do love using my brain. They aren’t world saving issues, but it’s like a million little logic puzzles I’m getting paid to solve.

• Is there something you wish you could be doing professionally instead? OS or compilers. More interesting problems. I’m thinking I’ll try to change my team once I’m comfortable with the way I’d be leaving things here.

• What are some past workplace experiences you’d like to share? My boss is great. I keep getting great bosses. The thing about any place that has a good or bad reputation, it’s going to depend on the team. There will be shitty bosses here. Same withal any workplace I think. Someone here hates their job because the boss makes it suck. Mine doesn’t, and usually dont. I’m lucky in that, Ive seen friends who have shitty bosses when I’m doing great, and it sucks.

my point there is, don’t assume your work will be great because your company is.

I’m a graphic designer at a research laboratory. It’s exactly what I want to be doing & I feel very lucky to have this job. I spend my days designing fact sheets, logos, infographics, and various corporate communications stuff. I also fill in as a photographer some days.

I’m a jeweler focusing on glass and so I spend a lot of time doodling around while my kiln runs. It’s really nice to work for myself but knowing my work relies on my ability to market it is pretty stressful.

I’m an English professor for international business and communication schools in France.

I really do like my job. I’ve been a teacher since 2006.

I’m not sure I have any super interesting stories to tell. More the experience as a whole. Meeting and working with over 200 students every year is awesome.

Only thing I would complain about is their level. Not just in my class, either. The quality of work has been steadily declining over the years and now the cheating with ChatGPT has taken things to a new level. Example, an international student who speaks neither English nor French, cannot recite the alphabet or count to 20 in English, but submits a flawless written report. Curious, no?

I’m a senior software developer at my local NHS trust. I spend my days managing a small team of junior and senior developers, and between us we maintain and expand several essential clinical systems. My personal passion is writing web apps that are used by doctors and nurses across the hospital, anything that makes their work a bit easier or simpler.

Software development is something I always wanted to do. The job is well paid, I work from home full time, and my senior management are very supportive and flexible. I consider myself incredibly lucky that I’ve managed to find near enough my perfect job!

I’m shocked at how many of y’all work in tech/computers.

I probably shouldn’t be, but I am.

I put in new production lines for an auto industry supplier. It’s stressful, especially lately with all the competition and labor issues. I like the work. I’m not a fan of the specific facility I’m currently working at.

I’m a database administrator. I was lucky enough to work my way up into that position at my current employer. My main duty is to keep the databases up and accessible, which allows the company to function. The most interesting thing I have been doing lately is migrating our onprem (virtual) databases up to AWS and Azure (although we are now going all in on AWS). We have migrated a few major systems that only allow for minimal downtime (15 - 30 minutes tops) so we have to replicate the data from onprem up to the cloud and keep the data in sync at the transactional level, until its time to switch application traffic over to the new database, and there has to be a plan in place to rollback to the old database with no data loss. Lots of moving parts and planning to make this successful. I really do enjoy the work. Of all the IT positions I feel like database is right for me and I just survived the second IT layoff of the year so others probably agree too.

The one thing I feel we need to do is get off of microsoft sql server and move to aurora mysql so we can save costs on licensing and take advantage of more AWS serverless features, such as auto scaling. Unfortunately the engineers need to be on board and so far the people that make the decisions are not.

I started at the company in phone technical support, moved to the Network Operations Center, moved to DBA, moved to senior DBA, and now I have the title of IT DevOps Engineer II, although I still feel more like a DBA than my current title.

I’m a custodian at the HQ for a large international organization. It definitely isn’t what I’d like to be doing since I’ve had a 4 year degree for several years, but for now the pay is not terrible and the benefits are incredible. It’s definitely the easiest job I’ve had for the pay I’m getting and it’s a great environment. Beats all previous employment I’ve had the last decade. Other downside is that I have a two hour round trip commute and I start super early. But hey, basically no traffic both directions since it’s weird hours.

Ideally, I’d be doing A/V work or some design work since that’s what my education is in. With the market not being the best I don’t see those positions being open to me for at last a year or two. I’d also like to just transfer into that kind of position within this organization since I do like it.

A past experience: Fast Food.

It was my first job and I was generally well liked by everyone. One night a supervisor really got on me for making a small mistake and people thought I would quit because the supervisor’s reaction was so bad. I showed up for another shift and that supervisor apologized after being reamed by our boss. That same night I found them doing heroin in the bathroom. Yeah. Puzzle pieces fit together and they got fired. I got employee of the month.

I’m a programmer. Just wanted to pop in and say that we shifted last year to a 32-hour 4-day workweek after we were bleeding good staff.

It’s life-changing. My work-life balance got an instant upgrade. What used to be a hard week is now so much more bearable. I can look forward to my weekend and actually take a full day to relax without worrying about losing half my weekend.

I work with a very old ERP system (released in 2013) and each day it finds a new way to mess with us two developers working with it.

Spent the last 2 days trying to add new data to a report, glad that we finally got it to work this morning

I run the lawn care department at a non-profit landscaping company by day, and bartend by night.

I’m an electrical engineer at a public utility company. I mostly do distribution planning and project management. Really like what I do and I really love the company. I recently changed jobs to this one because I wanted to be a part of this.

The board of directors are elected by the customers, most the employees are in a union, and our rates are cheaper than private utilities. I don’t think many Americans understand this structure exist in our country.

I’m currently an operations supervisor in a regional distribution center. I started out on the floor, promoted up through the training program available, and now work in the shipping department. I honestly enjoy most parts of my job, particularly helping to problem solve in time critical situations. I did work in a more support related function before promoting, and I honestly preferred the workflow there. Operations can be kind of intense, and requires me to focus a lot more on the “accountability” piece of things than I would rather do sometimes. We recently got a new general manager whose focus is most definitely more on securing profits than managing retention and employee engagement, so you can guess what the main pressure on me generally is from my direct supervisors. Production, production, and more production. On top of that we have a slew of admin tasks stacked up weekly. We’re required to complete coaching sessions, audits, performance reviews, checks for missing product to reduce shrink, etc. All in all, I had a pretty good idea of what I was signing up for before I did it, but I really don’t feel like we get paid enough for what we do. I also genuinely feel like the associates don’t get paid enough for what we’re asking of them, but that isn’t necessarily something I can truly fight for being new in my role. On the plus side I only work three days a week, though they’re roughly 14 hour days. Then I have the whole rest of the week off!

I’m a sr software developer at a consultancy firm where I now build software for different companies. It’s a pretty sweet gig, good pay, company has been full time remote since the late 90’s. Not the most exciting work in the world but it’s work.

My previous position I was a director of engineering of a tech startup. I was actually in line to become CTO. I was employee number 1 on this company and had been there for 7 years. I got removed from my position due to being a good communist and being betrayed by one of my workers.

While running my team I noticed a lot of inefficiencies in the way our team operated. There was a major bottleneck in people needing my help my approval my guidance. Except I had my own work to be doing as well. I started looking into alternatives and how we could fix it when I came across something called Mob programming. Basically instead of everyone working on their own tasks everyone works on one task together. We all sit on a zoom call and take turns typing while everyone else discusses the problem and provides solutions. Every 15 minutes we switch positions and every hour we take a 15 minute break. By elevating the problem from your mind to the collectives mind we are able to make continuous progress on problems quickly. Some people were looking for bugs or optimizations while others took a first pass at solving the problem so our code we were writing was optimized and written to best practices as best as possible. I did this on a two week trial without permission of my company and it worked amazingly we never were so productive. So I told my bosses about it and got the ok to keep doing this.

What I didn’t tell my company is that this was extremely draining and tiring to do. And if I find an efficiency for the workers under me I’m not going to pass the benefit to the company I’m going to be a good communist and pass it to the workers. I instituted 6 hour days for my team. We did this for a year and my team loved it. We put in a solid work and got done early and felt true team cohesion because while we were working we were also chatting and joking and laughing. Work was fun. We called it The Dream and it was fucking good.

Until C came along. C was a sr developer who joined my team who was originally very cool and a great addition to the team and a natural leader. I had told C that when I become CTO I’d tap him to become Director of Engineering. C was a black man and so this was something I was proud of, because not only was he the most qualified but it would put a POC in one of the highest positions in the company. It honestly stings how excited and how much hope I had in C because he betrayed me hard.

My boss gave me a deadline to accomplish a task in 3 months. Realistically we would have needed 5 but I calculated that if everyone pushed hard and we temporarily changed from the 6 hour day to the 8 hour day and if I gave up all of my nights and weekends (me not my team I never once asked for overtime from my guys) I could do it. In return for making the deadline my boss said we could run a trial of a 4 day work week (as in work 32 hours instead of 40) with no pay cut.

I told the team about this and there was hesitation for sure. It was hard but I explained how I’d shoulder the overtime and that we’d just need 2 more hours a day, the original 8 we were supposed to work. Most people accepted this. But not C. He went off on me and really scared the rest of the team off from feeling like we could do it. Saying oh we are being set up to fail etc etc. I told him that next time I need him to come to me with those concerns instead of upsetting the team like that. A few days later it happened again he was telling everyone how unsafe it was to be working this hard (8 hour days of grueling… Web development?? It’s hard but unsafe? Yeah no) so once again I told him to come to me with this stuff instead of fear mongering the team.

Motherfucker reported me to the federal government saying I was union busting and stopping him from discussing working conditions with his co-workers. An investigation from the labor board was launched and now I had to come clean to my bosses about everything. The 6 hour days included.

The company removed me from leadership immediately and threatened to not offer legal resources should the labor investigation turn into a lawsuit and would leave me out to dry. Luckily that didn’t happen and I was able to move to my new position without any issue.

It really hurt a lot because A.) I put everything I had into this company for 7 years. Nights weekends and holidays. My wife missed out on so much of my time and attention. Missed and cancelled date nights because something came up. And I was left to dry. And B.) Everything I did I did to protect my workers and make their lives easier. I only took the position because the last leader (the #2 employee) was so incompetent he got himself fired and it was either I step up or someone is brought it from outside the company. I had no desire to be a manager. I’m an anarchist for gods sake. But I took to position because I knew that me as a leader would look out for my guys better than any capitalist would. Most of my team saw and appreciated that and we had a great relationship where I never had to order anyone. We worked together. I consulted their opinions and we came to agreements. I tried to run my team as egalitarian as possible. I acted more as a spokesperson than a boss. I tried to be the best boss I could since not having a boss wasn’t possible. And to have one of my guys backstab me like that and burn everything to the ground fucking hurt like hell. I almost gave up on leftism and embraced the khaki and puff vest world of startup bros. That’s why I went for my current job. I clock in I clock out. I’m not in charge of anyone.

I do miss start ups though. In my spare time I’m starting to work on various startups that can more or less run themselves once set up and would only require bug fixes and occasionally new features since B2B. The goal here is to earn enough money to switch from senior dev work to junior dev work since I can knock that out in like 2-3 hours and reclaim the rest of my day. Ideally I can make enough to survive off of those SaaS apps enough to not have to work anywhere else at all. Most ideal would be to grow large enough that I require starting a cooperative to maintain it all.