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Does anyone else question their career in programming from time to time?

I've been around this line of work for almost 7 years now and I still get these doubts once or twice a year.
Be it unreasonable deadlines, horrible people that I'm forced to work with or just outright incompetence.

My latest occurence of doubt was when getting assigned a task that initially didn't seem like a big deal, but it turned out to be months and months of custom work instead of going along with the standard components and design guidelines.

This was somehow missed in the estimate phase and once I got assigned to it a hard deadline was already set, to top it off the features was non-negotiable.

These kind of things really makes me feel helpless and really depressed. My work is all I have, and I don't really know what I would do if I'd change career path today.

Comments
  • 5
    That shouldn't make you question your career, it should make you up and leave to pastures new.

    There's plenty of decent employers when it comes to devs. You'll find crappy bosses and good bosses whatever industry you work in - the only difference is that if you move outside of your current skillset, you'll have to retrain and take a huge salary hit until you do.
  • 0
    That feeling is relatable and tragic :/
    I suggest you check out this book by Basecamp. It helped quite a lot on how to deal with such environments at work. :)
  • 1
    Sounds familiar, I’ve been there. The wrong company doesn’t mean the wrong career. If you know what you value most I’d focus on finding a company that offers it.

    The only time I’ve ever questioned my career is when my interests have changed over time, or my skills have adapted to something else (before I became a dev I was actually an architect, the bricks-and-mortar kind).

    I’ll never let a company take the joy of programming away from me, and hopefully you’ll find yours again.
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