Why are so many people in IT unhappy with their jobs?

Question

Career in IT

I sincerely do not want to breed holivar here, but this is really a topic that I would like to touch on a long time ago.

I often read Habr Q&A, especially the career-related tag. I myself have been working in the IT field for 2 years already in Full time 'and I perfectly understand many of the pitfalls that are here. Not everything is as rosy as they show in these courses that you are sitting in a cafe drinking coffee and writing a couple of lines of code. Often these are hours spent debugging, fixing bugs, etc.
BUT I am amazed by people who, having extensive experience in IT, dissuade everyone from coming here, while advising other professions. Here are 2 real examples that I just recently saw here.

Taxi drivers just spin the steering wheel and earn as an IT specialist
There is truth in this, but why does no one specify that he does it 12 hours 6 days a week. Or for days as my friend worked. Why does no one specify that often the money earned needs to be used to fix the car. And is it so easy every day to spend so many hours in traffic jams, try to get from point A to point B faster every day. Why does no one specify that in this case, prospects can be forgotten. You work, you get paid, that's all. And camon guys, they get like an average programmer with little experience. The salaries that IT workers receive with 5+ summer jobs are far from them.

It would be better if I went to the builders or the police, but I'm already 38 years old and these roads are closed to me
To be honest, when I read it, I was a little surprised. Has this person ever worked in construction? In the summer, because it is the majority of construction projects that take place in the summer. They worked in the sun for hours with only a cap on their arm, and then the pain from the tan? And they are aware that it is very difficult for builders to find work in cold weather. Or the cops? I can't say how things are in other countries, but I think everyone understands how things are with RFP in the CIS countries. (Well, if you think to pull it out at the expense of bribes, then always live with the fear that they can be caught, you are not a deputy, you have no immunity)

I didn’t want to offend anyone with this post, I just really wonder why people like with a lot of experience think like that? I work myself and I know that sometimes you get so tired that you just don’t want to write a single line. That sometimes there are thoughts of quitting and finding another job, but this is common to all professions.

I would be glad if you tell me your opinion, and I hope I'm not violating Toster's rules for such a question.

Answer 1

In IT, as elsewhere, there are people who were brought into the specialty by accident, and just whiners. The former suffer because they are not in their place, they are engaged in work that is too heavy for them and cannot achieve success. The second is because they simply cannot help but suffer.

Answer 2

dissuade everyone to come here,

and what to do? Go out to the city center and shout " everyone, go to IT here, salary from 100,000!! "? Breed competitors?

but why does no one specify what he does 12 hours 6 days a week. Or for days as my friend worked. Why does no one specify that often the money earned needs to be used to fix the car. And is it so easy every day to spend so many hours in traffic jams, try to get from point A to point B faster every day. Why does no one specify that in this case, prospects can be forgotten. You work, you get paid, that's all. And camon guys, they get like an average programmer with little experience. The salaries that IT workers receive with 5+ summer jobs are far from them.

why don’t YOU specify that:
- 90% of programmers with 5+ years of experience have quite the average salary in the industry , no one is mad with fat and doesn’t drive around in Mercedes (contrary to the stories of some about salaries of 200/300/400 "without straining" ). I don’t know and didn’t know a single programmer who, at the age of 30/35/40, would drive a cool car or would have already bought housing.
- that they work on a fucking 5/2 schedule, in which if a day is spent from 2 to 4 hours on the road to work, then in total they belong to themselves only TWO days a week. Unlike a cop or a taxi driver with a shift schedule.
- that all life is enclosed in a box of a 30x40 monitor, and apart from the fucking code in life you don't see anything. Groundhog Day is a career long one.
- that occupational deformation affects the character, the ability to communicate with people, sociability, etc.
- that a sedentary lifestyle simply negatively affects the body. The most harmless is obesity. Look at fellow IT people, in most cases any security guard / cop looks like a physical. plan is better. Sitting in a chair for 10+ years is not without consequences. And no sport will help here, just a sedentary lifestyle is a priori unnatural for any living being.
- that, unlike a cop or a taxi driver who can start work right away, a programmer needs to constantly cram and study something. The taxi driver does not have a lot of nuances in his head, like many other specialists and performers.
- that the prospects for an ordinary programmer are about the same as for any full-time office unit. You can become a little taller, or you can not become. Either way, you're as easily replaceable as a taxi driver. Stayed at work for N years longer and did not have time to learn another framework? You fly into the cold. Awesome perspectives!
- that your main skills in life are "to quickly get into the project" and write code that any monkey can write. There is nothing difficult in programming. You don’t know anything more and you don’t know how in life, especially to do something with your hands, unlike others from specialists.

Itself already 2 years as a job in the IT field in Full time

When you have an anniversary of 10 years - come and tell us how your opinion will change. 2 years is nothing. The average time an experienced programmer has worked in one of the jobs.

why do people with a lot of experience think like that

because they have a lot of experience, yes. And having worked in 10/15 companies in their life, they have already seen enough of everything and do not experience puppy delight from the monitor box and code. They saw that everything is generally similar, understand the essence of this work and, in general, look at the world without rose-colored glasses.

Answer 3

Because they go to IT, as a rule, young and playful, for whom everything is easy. There are exceptions, but in any case, at first it is a new, mysterious and mysterious world in which he wrote hello world and is already almost happy. This is if the direction attracts in itself. If you are not attracted, then you will be almost happy, having received a salary 2 times higher than your salary as a cashier in the Euroset.
And at first everything seems to be fine, but then the euphoria passes, and processing begins - because you, especially if you are not a ninja from the programming world, will not be able to constantly fit into the estimate, especially if you are driven by the desire to do well. At home, you will have to devote time not to yourself and your loved ones, but to learning or development, and given that programming is not English (you need to think here), you won’t be able to devote an hour a day. We'll have to tear the fifth point, even in a simple web, where there are also a lot of subtleties. You will have to communicate with idiots, convince idiots, follow the instructions of idiots, all this will burn so that you really start to envy taxi drivers. It’s even worse when you realize that you yourself are an idiot, and that the years during which your eyesight has dramatically fallen have not brought you closer to Zuckerberg or Durov, that you are an ordinary monkey, which will not create its own bitcoin. And here you are sitting, squandering another empty startup that will die in a couple of years, and you don’t understand what you are spending your life on. You just work so that you have money, because you don’t hate it (yet), but the pay is already really good, above the national average, and you don’t want to leave, and where? Not in taxi drivers, in fact, especially since you need to do this in Moscow time and on a suitable car in order to take orders of a comfort level and higher, and not a rogue economy.
IT is CRUD and a routine that will get boring sooner or later. And no one will ever give you interesting and cool projects 24/7. You will reach a point where it will be more interesting for you to shuffle cards for middlemen in jira than to develop something. And at this point, it's definitely time to leave.

Answer 4

Why does no one specify that often the money earned needs to be used to fix the car

Well, yes, IT people don’t have health problems and they don’t spend the money they earn on treatment.

I am amazed by people who, having extensive experience in IT, dissuade everyone from coming here, while advising other professions

Immediately make a reservation that this is my subjective vision and does not pretend to be an absolutely correct answer. Working in IT (development, since I did not work in another area related to IT) suggests that you are "burning" with it. You came to the construction site at 9, left at 18 (figuratively) and went to drink beer in a bar with a friend. And you don't think about work until 9 a.m. the next day.
In development, this is not the case (for me personally). Here I am officially working remotely, from 10 to 19. 5/2, vacation, holidays, weekends, everything. BUT! I can't just get up at 7 pm and switch to family business. Well, it doesn't work. Especially if you failed to complete some task and tomorrow you have to continue.
Sometimes you sit, talk with your wife / friend, and in your thoughts you decide how to write a component more cleverly, so that there is less copy-paste (an exaggerated example). And so almost constantly.
If there is no craving for this, then I think that there is no need to start. It’s not worth going into IT only after being flattered by a salary. In addition to money, work and pleasure should bring.

Answer 5

1) IT is the Internet - so all the whining is very easy to see (therefore divide it by 10)
2) in IT there is a larger percentage of infantile people - I studied at the university doing what I like, got a job at a salary that 90% of other hard workers do not shine, read all the newfangled " psychology" and began to whine that he "does not change the world" / "everything is meaningless", and after working for a month as a taxi driver / builder, he would quickly run back to IT, because his life did not prepare him for such shit.
3) Burnt-out people - who did not feel sorry for themselves for just a salary and not for a percentage of profits, and then realized that only physical / psychological health is already shaky

Answer 6

You need to master not only your main profession, but also related areas.
Let's say we work in technical support - we study, as far as possible, programming, administration, and electronics. Depending on the needs at the current job, or the opportunity to change jobs, we use certain knowledge and acquire skills, and adjust our study in one direction or another.
I was originally a iron worker, well, I liked tinkering with iron with a soldering iron in my hands . But I had to work with databases and a service engineer, where knowledge of hardware is also needed, and work in two jobs at once, one purely repairing hardware.
And here's what I'll say - sooner or later any area will get bored in its purest form. There were periods when the eyes hurt from working with small details on laptop circuit boards, and unfinished work was dreamed of in a dream. Changing activities helps a lot. You need to achieve the ability to regulate your workload in all areas - either change jobs, or even stupidly take a vacation (even at your own expense) and do something else for a while.
I made websites for myself and friends, but I realized (yeah, 10 years have passed, I'm tired) that it's not mine. I wrote asm code for microcontrollers, but not for long. I kept a game server at home, hence the need for administration, setting up the OS, firewall, fixing new bugs, etc. - also 8 years old, then just tired.
Yes, even in the same electronics repair, you constantly need to develop and embrace new technologies and learn how to repair new devices - this helps both to expand your knowledge and skills and diversify your activities (every day repairing the same monitors, or different devices - is perceived differently; monotony will lead to burnout and will simply become uninteresting).
Now I'm 38, and I'm tired of almost everything. There is only the thought of returning to development, I have been programming for a very long time, and now, apart from scripting languages ​​(powershell, bash, vbs / wsh / cmd), I have simply forgotten the rest, because did not use.

Answer 7

My five cents
1. "Tyzheprogramist" and other miscommunications between it-shniks and not. You can (and should) get used to this if you are already in the profession, but there are nuances. Both a complete misunderstanding of the impossibility of "Wishlist" by the customer, and the "invisibility" of the work of an average shkoder / toaster / devups or a complete misunderstanding of the expression of the value of this work in money. Krch, the costs of any specialized profession.
2. Continuous learning. For many reasons, you have to learn something non-stop. Sounds like something good, but no. Because Technologies do have an expiration date. And after the n-th rolling to another technology stack - it gets
3. Most of the staff's work is unnecessary. Nobody. And it is done because "well, it is written in our policies", "the customer wants", "Teamlead wants to use that technology because".
4. Routine. Lots of routine.
This is if about the one who got me personally.

Answer 8

Different people have a different predisposition to professions, and not everyone has it for IT - many simply go for money. And then they freak out. There are no freebies here - you have to work for money and constantly meet deadlines, and not drive teas all day long. And this is OK, as long as you like it, but after a few years of experience, everything already seems monotonous and only money and features of the profession remain (the brain is full of work around the clock, a sedentary lifestyle, the rapid obsolescence of technology is a waste of time studying what you don’t I especially want to study), which at first are leveled by interest.
You need to go where you want to go - a sensible specialist can earn normal money everywhere, but perhaps not so quickly and not without ingenuity.

Answer 9

So many opinions ... I call on the topic of those who, after 30, came to IT from another prof. area, conditionally from the "construction site". It's interesting to hear those. How many there will be "burnt out".
No one will pay someone decent money for an easy job. None. Well, except for himself. Everywhere there are pitfalls: shift geologist - 9 months away from home; the pilot of the aircraft - a broken schedule, broken biorhythms, gets an accidental injury and really flies "in the cold"; well, the programmer - sits on the priest and burns out. To each his own.
He himself rolled over from the army - 6 working days officially, they can be called at absolutely any time, also officially, you can’t just leave the city (I’m generally silent about abroad), exercises, formations, the moral debility of the authorities and other decadence. According to the activity itself, there are 100 people like you in the galley, but the feeling that you are rowing solo is one or the other oars, and sometimes you stand at the helm. And so in a circle. People capable of distinguishing the Internet from the Ethernet could be counted on the fingers of one hand as ninja turtles. No thanks, for me it's better to stick 5/2 into the monitor.

Answer 10

Because many will send here not because they wanted to, but because they took "Vasyan's courses on how to earn a thousand greens a month lying under a palm tree for a couple of hours, and mulattos in minis are bustling around with cocktails." Then, as it was already well written here, a thousand greens turn into 30-40 thousand rubles, a palm tree dries up to a ficus on a home windowsill, and a mulatto with a cocktail turns into a mother / wife with a glass of tea.
So they, poor fellows, begin to moan that they were deceived, confused, underweighted, lured, and in general everything around is a threshing floor. However, this is true for any job. A taxi driver who likes his job - he doesn't complain either :)

Answer 11

BUT I am amazed by people who, having extensive experience in IT, dissuade everyone from going here

when people see ads for courses with earnings of $1,000 or more (where does the figure come from, xs) for creating sites on WordPress, they start to think that this is true, they start studying WordPress in droves and scratching in white, and that a programmer’s son bought a car from his mother’s friend (and car on credit for 10 years). and those who answer are doing the right thing, because they have already spawned " html programmers " who sit still and do not develop, and send responses for food on freelance (on average, I observe about 20 responses to the creation of a site), in as a result, Russian-speaking freelancing has become a garbage dump. and this situation is not only in the field of programming, also in the field of targeting and in many other areas.

Answer 12

36

Answer 13

Who likes to work? People have to do boring work because of money.

Answer 14

It seems to me that you need to love your job and the company, otherwise you won’t be able to work normally

Answer 15

Well, it depends on the person. Who likes to whine will complain about any job. In general, you can even open a business in IT. Here is an example - the school of pro-Internet for creating sites https://profiinet.com conduct useless webinars for 20,000 rubles per person, although they do not teach anything. But their salary is like that of a good programmer with experience.