So I see that you have two options both of which shouldn’t happen before first taking a small break: 1. Continue to work in the industry and reduce your emotional investment. Hint: great places for that are big corporates. 2. Continue to work while upskilling in another field or your current field depending on what you prefer.

Depression often comes with the temptation to catastrophise the situation, avoid that urge. Seek out others who can be objective and talk you through it, be prepared to hear their answers.

I started out front-end, did a lot of my own side projects to get backend stuff. PHP is pretty good despite the hate because not many people want to do it these days but a legit and easy way to get some backend experience.

I suspect the "hate" is rather localized.

I find the "Fishtank Graph"[0] to be a fairly good way to get my feet firmly planted back on the ground.

That said, I don't like PHP, and avoid it, if possible. I use it for my backend work, and it does a great job, there. I just prefer writing apps in Swift.

The "game-changer," for me, was retiring, and working on the stuff I want to work on, at my pace, and using my methodologies. No more insecure middle managers, pissing on my work, and no more insecure co-workers, fighting over every detail, and deliberately sabotaging team dynamics (to be fair, I spent a good part of my career, as a manager, which I hated, but it paid the bills).

I know that retiring is not an option for a lot of folks, and realize how fortunate I am (I didn't feel that way, at first, though. My retirement was not by choice).

But it's not work, if you love what you do.

These days (and for the last five years), I actually get more done, every day, by 10AM, than I used to get done, all day, in the office. My GH activity graph is solid green (no exaggeration), and it isn't "gamed," like so many of them. I do two things, every day:

1) I walk three miles, and

2) I write Swift code.

Life is good.

[0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin...

I had one excerpt of that, did part time manual labour gig, coding during night and mornings on a side project. It was quite blissful. No negative emotion only pure intrinsic motivation. The manual labour gig acted as a good time constraint (30min to make a clean patch, 1h to think of how to add this feat) and gave a good balance of creativity and productivity. No bad colleague, no friction, no unwanted feature.

Most people who had burn outs in my life had it while working for corporates, where actually there was hardly any pressure outwardly, but they all put it on themselves inwardly.

Outwardly there was hardly anything going on, but I think the internal politics & having a personality being sensitive to social pressure played a role. But not fully sure.

Sometimes I'm more tired when there is hardly anything to do, or when there is no real possibility to add any value because there is so many stiff ideas floating around. I prefer hard work but with real results then corporate cushions. Maybe that also plays a role for certain people.

The best places are in my experience team with a reasonable goal, people who care for the goal and each other and there is pressure but also understanding.

I'd just like to emphasize your point about being prepared to hear their answers. But really hear it. Don't let the brain demons (depression warps perception) get to the words before you do!

Also, people often don't know how to have difficulty conversations, so this is another thing that can just make hearing the message harder. Eg, they often try to encourage as a way of showing compassion, instead of just showing compassion. They're stills being supportive, but it might not be the support you need. And just encouragement, without a good framework and a healthy mindset—which could have has been compromised by burnout—won't be enough.

I wholeheartedly also recommend going to therapy (and people often think this takes years, but it can just be a couple of sessions).

But I agree with @jaitaiwan, you look you're burnt-out rather than depressed. It's too easy for us to focus on our skill and less about our emotion & other things. Then over time, we see less light on our career because what we left is only the skill which probably already obsolete.

Skill is tradable but a person is not. You're who you're. If you like what you do, then it's fine. But if tech genuinely doesn't excite you, then looking for what you like now is not too late.

This!

thanks, this is what i've been doing. but it's really impacting my mental health.

I've managed to learn React and Next enough to build stuff in them, but I'm not especially passionate about React - it seems like it's ridiculously hard to do very basic stuff in it and the workarounds all seem like they were designed by the criminally insane.

I'm a good coder but not a great one, and I'd love to just find a gig that pays the bills without having to deal with all the masochistic "work is life, I piss in a bottle so I don't have to get up so I can maximize my productivity" bullshit. I just want to write code and make a decent living. I don't even wanna be rich. I just want to not have to stress as much about taking care of my wife and myself.

Maybe we should all start our own consultancy - we don't charge you rock star rates but we get the job done. :-D

* DevOps: If people find value in releasing software in an organized manner to avoid breaking websites / "testing in production" and losing a lot of revenue, why do you strongly hate or care at all? You don't have to work on devops.

* Learning new frameworks: Did someone force you to learn every new JS framework released in the past 10 years? React is the main framework people have been using since ~2015-2016, and other frameworks are either not super important (latest CSS framework someone came up with) or worth the cost of learning (Gatsby, Next). Continuous learning is an important skill in all jobs.

* "having the fundamental stuff I learned early on - objects are good, always separate presentation from logic - being totally flipped around": People realized that this is not the right approach for building web frontends. These best practices are not meant to be seen as dogma/ideology, they adapt to people's experience (and usually will only apply in some contexts)

So I think you can just relax, enjoy the parts you love, and be more open to things changing around you.

Nowadays, devops can be the process police, where they define rigid processes which make their life (releasing, version management, hotfixes etc.) easier at the cost of the developers. The processes are automatically enforced by the tools and workflows they write (which are often slow and/or flaky BTW, making things so much worse), so there's no way you could just ignore them.

That said I've never bothered to try to become an expert in any particular language or framework. I learn the general underlying concepts and end up googling for the syntax for the first few days when I start using a new library or framework.

2022, i need to setup git, setup node, setup credentials, run a bunch of npm commands, which invariably fail and lead me down various rabbit holes, then install docker, then install a bunch of docker updates, then run a build command and hope that all the magic comes to together. just so i can edit a line of copy.

it's not fun anymore. the immediacy of web development has gone for me, i feel my time is spent grappling with obscure issues unrelated to the actual work and something stakeholders are totally oblivious and uncaring about.

Second, you need to get your love for technology back. It is still there, but it manifests as hate. My theory of burnout is that it arises when the amount of effort you put in is disproportionally large compared to perceived payoffs. The brain just does a ROI calculation and refuses to put more effort in. To combat that, you need some easy successes. Try doing some small fun project and bring it to completion (for some definition of completion that makes you excited). This should bring back your confidence and excitement.

Third, you need to think strategically about your career. The truth is, for run-off-the-mill web development returns on experience taper off after a few years, so you are at disadvantage compared to younger folks that haven't lost their enthusiasm yet and are prepared to work long hours for less pay. So to make yourself desirable in the eyes of employers, you have to offer them something those people don't have. One option is to go into management (no need to scoff at it, it is hard, offers plenty of opportunity for growth and is exactly the area where older folks can shine). Another is to specialize and become an "expert in X" - maybe in some subject area or in distributed systems or machine learning. Think about what most suits you.

Good luck.

I've burned out a couple of times and the fix has been to stop for a while and do other things. After a few months I catch myself coming up with ideas for projects, writing code, etc - that's when it's time to go back to paid work. Obviously that's more disruptive to perm employees than to me as a contractor, but I hear rumours that such things as sabbaticals and sick leave exist.

Becoming an "expert in X" seems to be easier than it might initially appear, it's sometimes the path of least resistance to fall into a specific niche that may or may not exist a few years later - but while it does you are in demand. (I don't unreservedly recommend it!)

Just wanted to thank you for this summary. I think you're right, though it certainly doesn't feel like that. I am in a very similar situation as OP, but webdev is only a small part of what I (can) do. I literally hate all of technology right now. At least, it feels like that. Also seems to be age-related. I am 40 and I lost "my spark" about 3-4 years ago. Luckily, still able to work, but the fun is gone and I personally don't believe that I will ever get it back at this point.

Edit: May be relevant to OP: I found a small team with an employer who himself went through burnout and now approaches things a bit differently. Not sure if it helps, but I thought it might be nice to know that those exist.

Many many people say this but I think mid/low level managers are also usually young and I don't see the huge value of being old if the tech keeps changing. If anything it might be a bit easier to stay in shape technology wise if you're a developer, not a manager. This might be less of a problem if you go to high level management (director, CTO etc) but that career path is not trivial at all.

Here's what I'm aiming to do: learn systems programming on the side, accumulate enough savings to live off of for nearly a year, then go independent and continue learning systems programming "as I go". Build software products on my own and start selling them.

And because of this generic term, I see people making stupid mistakes all the time.

React is great for web apps, but then you see the static pages being built by that, and you think WTF. Next thing some of these morons move back to server side rendering, discover how much better it is for SEO etc. But the problem is that the web-app folks read this, think they now all of a sudden have to move to SSR because big company X did this for their landing page.

It's truely stupid. So I think we should split the term "web development" into proper subsections, so it becomes clear what camp you are in.

If you're a website builder who does a bit of JS for some menu popups, good luck having a team of these guys writing the next google docs (no offense here, each their own specialization) But on the same ground, having a bunch of pro front-end coders build a simple website is also stupid, because they will choose technologies way too complex for that.

You will get paid more if you are a webpack ninja than if you know how to setup a simple esbuild script.

You will get paid more if you have wizard level knowledge of k8s and docker than if you can program something that solves your problems as a simple single program running on a single server.

And it's all portable. No wonder Electron has eaten the native app scene.

But the JS ecosystem with its myriad frameworks, packers, metalanguages, each halfway between immature and deprecated, and constant churn and breakage is an absolute nightmare.

Also, the browser does not have an out-of-the box set of standard UI widgets, which makes every browser-based (Electron) app redefine them in its unique way.

Because it's really difficult.

I find I can keep a big-picture, this is what the customer wants mindset, or I can have a detail-oriented this is the code that I want to improve mindset, but having both and/or switching between them is amazingly difficult. As I write the code I lose sight of what 'normal' people (non-programmers) want. I don't even know how to pitch to their level any more, or what isn't obvious to people who haven't spent 20+ years using and thinking about computers every day.

tl;dr: programming changes the way I think in a way that's unhelpful to build a product.

Next there's promotion and marketing... which is another skillset that depending how hard you want to push the product may/may not sit well with your ethics.

Thirdly and this is a personal one, I have an ADD brain and staying focused on one idea long enough to take it to market is very difficult. I have a list of ideas I dreamed up and started work on and never finished that someone else later launched successfully. As does everyone I suspect (execution >> ideas) but it's a neverending pattern (as I look at the 30+ OS projects on the go)

What I have trouble with is marketing and sales. I've never sold anything directly to consumers, so that will be the most challenging thing when going independent: selling to people.

Let's say I sell the product for $50, I would have to sell to 2000 people in one year to make $100k, which means I have to sell to at least 6 people per day. Now it would be great if people just found the product and bought it on their own, but at least the first 1000 costumers must be acquired "manually" so to speak for the business to even take off.

Writing a good and "personalized" cover letter gets me a really decent interview rate I think.

I'd be up to read yours and make suggestions. Just let me know here.

My usual receipt:

- start with a custom paragraph. Why are you a match and why do you like this company.

- 1-2 copy+paste paragraphs about relevant skills (at most a buzzword or two added)

- ending with a curious question to discuss in the possible interview that shows you thinking along and grasped their situation (or at least made the effort). This might be more important for the product roles I aim at though :).

.

For preparation (I do this quickly for the letter, a bit more if I get an interview):

- save the job ad (it's useful for interview prep and might get taken down)

- read any blog that hints at upcoming projects you might be hired for

- try to find out their tech stack, highlight if you have relevant experience (https://www.wappalyzer.com/ makes it easy)

With all that: brace yourself for rejections. It's still a numbers game (and you'll get better with every interview you get). If you happen to find something you can actually get behind it also elevates your chances. People feel that.

it's really demoralising to be totally ignored after carefully writing a cover letter.

It took me quite an effort (money, time, psychotherapists) to understand that I am not my job, and more importantly other people being not very happy with what I do is not a reason for me to feel bad about myself. It was very easy for me to start scolding myself after getting not-so-positive or not getting the feedback I expected at work.

Anyway, I think it's a process - my attitude towards my work is never final, I used to think that vespene gas here will get depleted over time, but it's probably not how it works. Some day it's worse, some day it's much better.

Good luck!

I'm hoping to turn this into a second income for "spending money" and then into a real business.

I haven't felt this good in years.

Quick bio: 20+ years as a bartender, around 10 years as a web developer, next career...?? Who knows? As long as life feels like it's worth living. Probably a low bar for many, but that's a decent start for me.

Good luck!!

Find a therapist you like. Not because of any mental heath issues, but because I guarantee you that they will save you more money than they cost you by a long way. The right therapist will be able to ask you the right questions to help you figure out what to do next, and even make helpful suggestions.

This is absolutely not the same as talking to a friend or partner. It is their job to use their experience help and advise you. They are entirely in your corner with you, just like you would expect from any professional.

Part 2

Perhaps a different perspective – I've been freelancing/contracting since I was about 22, and I'm now 37. Full stack, but leaning heavily towards backend given the chance. My latest contracting role is actually as a network engineer (which I gained the knowledge for because I started an ISP during the pandemic).

I've not encountered any issue with nearing my 40s. I think the three key things are: be a good communicator, be comfortable talking about money, and doing your job well. All three are equally important, and you can probably get by with only two.

I've always worked in either small companies, or in very small (or solo) teams within a larger company. I know that I excel in that environment, so that is what I stick to.

But if you really do hate technology, then perhaps it is time to find something else. Again, the therapist will really help so much with this.

Happy to talk more about any of this.

During the pandemic I altered my career slightly, I went into Developer Relations. I still write code, but I also do so many other things. However, if you are suffering burn-out, moving into different roles/careers could further worsen the burn-out.

Personally, I'd take a step back and if you haven't already start introducing a very strict work-life balance. Work 9-5 and no other, take up a hobby that gets you doing something completely unrelated. If you're in a better state mentally, then you would be able to see your work life in a clearer healthier manner.

Now, I am 37 transitioned and while still write A LOT of code ( mostly back-end, high performance APIs, DB stuff ), review a lot of code, but bareley touch front-end work. I grok it, can make the changes, but I am too old for front-end work.

At my role ( 1 level away from C-Level executives) it's not expected to code at all - just power point, diagrams and general corporate lingo, but I can't let myself down that path.

So, my suggestion - start transioning ASAP from just coding - move to managing people who code, then to managing people who manage other people who manage the people that code.

More money, more recognition - less stress in general.

Let's say there is a big project in your company called DigiRefresh - the projects aims to consolidate all data sources, standartize them and in the future extract correlated value via AI/ML - one of the most common projects in modern-day IT.

Now, someone at the TOP has secured N million dollars for this project, but he has also 5-6 other N million dollar projects. Such big projects are more or less the soldiers/power point slides of the C-level executive by which he justifies his existence to the board of the company.

All these projects on high-level sound like a must-do. Your job most probably will be to make the vision of the big guys into reality - deliver it. Which is a messsy process. Big guys don't care about the technology that much, they don't care how it will be done - they just want it done, because somebody commited to someone else for a date that makes somebody look good :)

So, your job 99% of the time is to deliver and deal with the small details like what techology will be used, how many people are needed for the tasks, orchestrate it and give yellow-green-red style reports to the top management.

The more you take away from their worry and the more time they have to play golf and the more seamless delivery you provide - the more you will raise in the corporate ladder.

But how? In my woods, that's nearly impossible unless your boss has that planned for you and has the blessings of his bosses. They're the positions with the most gatekeeping therefore the nost difficult to get.

And less stress is not always guaranteed since you'll be taking shit from above and from below now.

Prove that you can be trusted with deadlines, build a reputation for relentless on time delivery and take responsibility.

You will be suprised - that if you start taking OWNERSHIP of what you do - how fast people will come to you and literally beg you to be in their projects.

Is that a healthy advice for someone struggling with Burnout/depression like OP?

And I beg to differ. Taking on lots of work is by no means a guarantee to management promotion everywhere. Often management positions go by means of connections, and are awarded subjectively to the favorable people management likes most, not to the most productive people. That's why so many managers are clueless and nearly incompetent. Because it's not always a meritocracy.

Yeah, depression/burnout is not real. It's just how a person decides to deal with high levels of stress. Stress will not go away. Better deal with it by pushing through it either by working more, going on vacations, sex trips, donations to charity causes, etc.

In the industry I am in - I didn't know anyone, before I started, hell, I even didn't know anyone in the city I moved to. It's all a struggle, endless struggle, like life is supposed to be.

Of course, you need to have conversational skills, soft skills, be able to hold a conversation in different topics, be funny, witty, smart and charming in order to be promoted.

You definetly can get promoted based on your own merrits WITHOUT relying on connections that you had before the job.

The trick is to build your conenctions on the basis of your work, soft skills and charisma WITHIN the company you want to grow.

I am sorry, but with most things in life - climbing the ladder is a competition - success is not guaruanteed, and being good at programming is not the only requirement.

I should have stopped reading your comment here.

so i'm a bit of a loss how to make that transition.

As for web dev, it's a very broad field. You can try backend if you're sick of front end. I'm a full stacker and I'm considering a move to something more low level or algorithmic...we'll see how it goes. Your satisfaction in work also depends a lot on your boss, colleagues and the amount of stress you're experiencing...the actual tools and tasks you work on matter but not that much imo.

"Since its first publication, The Artist's Way has inspired the genius of Elizabeth Gilbert, Tim Ferriss, Reese Witherspoon, Kerry Washington and millions of readers to embark on a creative journey and find a deeper connection to process and purpose. Julia Cameron guides audiences in uncovering problems and pressure points that may be restricting their creative flow and offers techniques to open up opportunities for growth and self-discovery.

A revolutionary programme for personal renewal, The Artist's Way will help get you back on track, rediscover your passions and take the steps you need to change your life."

The book helps you reconnect with parts of yourself you may have forgotten. These could end up being avenues you end up exploring as possible career paths.

First, don't give up and pick up areas in the industry that require people to actually be innovative and not be cogs in the machine. To me those areas are machine learning and blockchain development. I've dabbled in both, and figured I like the latter better. It's got a ton of hype and bullshit (machine learning has that too), but you are nowhere being a fungible developer.

> Nearing my 40s, so my profile is less appealing to employers, this field is very oriented to young people.

That applies only to webpack/react/graphql bullshit jobs. You should have figured out by now not to do those.

Another important advice - get your physical body in order. That should be your number one priority. Give up addictions (alcohol, drugs), get in shape, get strong!

It's not easy, but it gets better. Remember, when you are going through hell, keep going!

Now I get to pick the technology I work with and drive a lot of change. I really feel like I'm making a difference and my efforts are worth it. Before I felt the harder I tried the worse I did. Everything was out of my control and replying to. Short email could take me a couple of hours. I couldn't think, in couldn't learn, I was broken.

Switching to a small shop will make the burnout exponentially worse.

> expects you to be a superstar leetcoder, with the wherewithal to go through 6-8 interviews and IQ test.

Ignore these too. If a company is unreasonable, I see no reason why I should follow through with the interviews.

Also make sure you do work adequate to the pay. If company does not pay well, don't do overtime, don't do a great code, just something that works. Basically do bare minimum and no more.

Sadly engineers kind brought it upon themselves. I am at fault too. When I was young I would pull all-nighters at the office all the time to get features done and beating increasingly shortened deadlines. That eventually led me to depression and other issues. Also I didn't feel all that effort in my bank account.

And yet my life is way easier. Most of my meetings are fun, involve expensed dinners, some light travel to interesting places (but not all the time.) I can work remotely and live wherever I want. My colleagues are not extremely overworked, most are laid back but effective.

Tech isn't what I grew up with and never will be again. The magic is gone. Most of the shit I would work on was boring and uninteresting. And frankly, I wasn't a 10x dev. I was never going to be that one who could dictate what I worked on. I wanted to have a life outside of code. It has been one of the best decisions I've made.

Eventually i went into contracting, precisely so that i can “solo developing something”.

I would be happy making a nice little piece of app (currently working on a game), that i can prune here and there and grow a community of users that i can genuinely make happy, and get paid for it. I simply _love_ seeing happy users.

I wish, honestly. A lot of business/safety critical software is written by developers around the world that are paid less than the average web developer.

All the way up to extreme cases like https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-...

Admittedly, that's an extreme case, not the average, but you get my point.

Compared to most industrial automation, flashy and colorful stuff is overrated and overpaid.

The fact you think 300+ people are applying to the same jobs means the market might be saturated with those skills. Do you think you might have let your own skill set stagnate?

yes, definitely.

although i worked a lot with node and react, building electron apps, cli tools, browsers extensions - but i just don't enjoy it anymore. and i don't have experience building large scale production apps with the latest trendy stacks.

> The fact you think 300+ people are applying to the same jobs means the market might be saturated with those skills.

Basically front-end jobs, senior front-end also. Most jobs I see on linkedin have applications in the mid triple figures, its not even worth applying.

The only time I interview is when a company contacts me directly. I usually give up after they send the coding challenge link. i just stare at the screen, no energy or enthusiasm to tackle the problem. i enjoy html, css and vanilla js - but its usually some typescript challenge or something like that - which i refused to learn, since i already know javascript. once static type checking became a requirement in front end is like the intersection for when i became a dinosaur.

Although I am working now as a contractor for FAANG.

As you've mentioned in the title, you're depressed.

Go and see a therapist and if you can, take a break from work.

Regarding typescript, I've been writing JS on and off since '99 and I picked up TS last year. It's actually good. Not everything new is shit, just most of it!

"Coding challenge as a first-stage filter" is something I'd like to see disappear, why would I want to work for a company that shows so little respect for people's time? I guess the answer is "$$££€€", which makes sense only when there's a ton of $£€ on offer.

I generally skip those companies on principle. For better or worse...

https://www.nospec.com/

I doubt you are a dinosaur for not learning Typescript. You should be able to pickup Typescript if you are motivated, but that is hard to find when you are depressed. From your description it seems that you have all the background skills necessary, even though you have not had the energy to keep up with all the latest trends due to depression and other health issues.

As others said, you need to work on the root cause (maybe burnout or depression). You should contact a professional to help you manage this and get your energy back

Did you refuse to learn because it seems pointless, the interview excersize seems pointless or is it because it's overwhelming at this point in your career?

Why? Static type checking is a good thing to reduce errors.

I have learned and can read and write typescript, but it doesn’t click when it comes to “we’ll need it tomorrow to check our ideas fast”, the usual mode of startup operation. These stories about night and day difference also do not match my reality. All my code paths are either hot or tested. How many type-related bugs have I encountered last year? Maybe a few, but can’t remember even a single one. Maybe I’ll gradually type it after we go into maintenance mode, maybe leave it as an exercise to a maintainer if they see fit. My last few projects were successful and brought solid revenue without any type-related issues.

Show me some actual measurements that TypeScript increases time to market. I don't believe you have any.

If it takes a long blog post to find something to criticize about TypeScript then I'd say that's a sign that TypeScript is doing something right.

For people who've been dealing with JS for years it's a big improvement which I guess is why it gets so much praise. (The love for React, OTOH, must be Stockholm Syndrome!)

Other languages are better, but transpiling from them to JS has (arguably?) bigger downsides than using TS. WASM is the big hope for some people, of course, but it's only really good for heavy lifting at the moment.

Telling someone to use language A because it's much better than language B that the person is comfortable with is not a very good approach. You can get into the objective reasons as to why but for some it might be difficult to really understand.

I struggled with this when I was introduced to types as the entire concept was completely new to me. I had other ways I could think of to reduce errors (tests, more robust code, etc) and I wasn't sure how typescript could help me reduce errors any further or if it was worth learning a new (seemingly difficult) concept to deal with something I already felt I could deal with.

You can still do that with TypeScript and also get type checks, null checks, and just typos found for you by the compiler. Why wouldn't you want the compiler to do that for you? I don't want to do it, I want the tools to do it.

What works in the UK might not work somewhere else and vice versa.

i tried to propose this where i am, but as a contractor, there's no need for it. i'm basically just here to follow orders.

i do like mentoring junior devs.

Do I like what I'm doing? (solving problems, making software)

Do I like who I'm working with?

Do I like the company I'm working for?

If you answer yes to the first question, an no to either of the next two questions, time to make a change. If you feel like your work isn't valued, go to work for a small company or a startup where everything you do, every line of code, every time you take out the trash is valued.

> Nearing my 40s, so my profile is less appealing to employers, this field is very oriented to young people.

Not really true. Entry level is oriented to young people. Often, front-end is seen as entry-level (it should not, but it is) because junior devs come knowing the latest-greatest (and not much else). Senior developers tend to get a little prickly about learning the latest javascript libraries and css techniques. At my company, I have a great mid-career front end dev who is making the jump to full stack, and is fantastic at it because he's highly aware of the impact of back-end design decisions on front-end performance and front-end developer experience. Our APIs get better every day because of him.

A couple of weeks back the very distinct name of a former co-worker popped into my head, and I did a search. Found some info.

When I knew him he was an intranet webmaster for a state agency. Remember "webmasters"? Anyway, in the years since, he went over to the Agile side. He's done a huge amount of contract project management work since, for several state agencies, and also for Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. And at least one gig in Australia.

Looks like a success. Completely different than what he was doing way back in the 2003-2005 period. Apparently he just decided to grab it and run with it, regardless of what you, I, or anyone else thinks about "Agile". It's a thing, and he's doing it successfully, and he seems to be in control of his life, so...

I'd say stay away from being a government employee, but as one option, governments always seem to have boatloads of money to hire consultants and contractors. Back about year 2002 I was making maybe $45k and the contractor in the next cubicle was making over $200k, didn't know any more than I did, just different things, and was treated like a god, while I was expected to eat shit and smile, all day, every day.

I quit my last job, as a state government web dev, when I decided that I'd rather die than keep working there. That was July 7, 2005. As things unfolded, I haven't worked since. This was a totally stupid thing to do, but somehow I survived. If I had it all to do over, I would be a whole bunch smarter, but here I am. I made it on savings to 2011, when I was eligible for Social Security at 62, and three years later at 65 I began drawing on my state pension. Now I'm living in Cuenca, Ecuador, where my monthly spending is under $800, around a third of my income. OK so far.

SAP in the mean time did their third attempt at the cloud (BTP/Steampunk) and it seemed like the same old shit I was working on the classic ECC 6.0 buried in more layers of shit but now running in the "cloud".

Covid then came along and I got laid off which provided me with a financial cushion of a year to realize SAP is not what I wanted to do anymore , interviews to rebalance a binary tree - really ????.

Learned something new/went back to my old roots as a C developer.

Now doing Python with Pandas - less pay - less hours but far far happier.

We'll see...

The world needs their burger flippers.

Good luck

Not everyone is in such a financially advantageous situation that they are able to do so at a minimum we should preface such advice with "Ideally" or "If you are able to"

In fact, when I've faced burn out in the past, one of the major reasons for it was BECAUSE I wasn't in a situation to take such time off and my gosh do I wish it was advice I was able to action!

Plenty of 'Help Wanted' signs are up looking for people with few skills or intelligent people who can learn a skill quickly. It might be much more labor intensive than your current job, but that might be exactly what you need as a change of pace.

Few, if any of those jobs pay as well as programming, but millions of people earn a living wage doing them every day. If you don't have some good savings, then you might have to give up some luxuries that you have gotten used to, but that isn't the end of the world either.

If someone is in position of working in the field, having a lot of experience and still having issue with putting some cash aside to take few months off then it might hint that not the field but particular work place is root cause.

One medical issue or a family member with one could scupper a savings account, this is a precise reason why I hate this advice it’s tantamount to victim blaming.

While maybe not obtainable for individual taking time off is still sound general piece of advice.

If you have bad tooth going to dentist is a a good advice. If you can’t afford dentist than it doesn’t make such advice bad.

For burnout recovery one has to get time off. There are some drugs that can help but they come with a lot of side effects and can actually worsen situation (depending on class of medication there is heightened risk of suicidal behavior or fired on the spot kind of).

Other than that, I'm afraid I'm not of much help as I'm in a kind-of similar situation myself. Might be worth looking at what else is out there, not just related to dev but literally anything, even if it does mean less pay.

[1] They use niche and difficult technology (Scala HP Haskel-style approach) and reject people who are not at least already ok at it.

i have 15 years across 5 companies, two of them faang. albeit the latest one as a contractor.

this is why i felt its an ageism issue, or perhaps the market is so over-saturated that i'm just being filtered by some automated system. but i don't want to play the keyword game, i feel it's kind of undignified.

Training is (if your understand the content) not so stressful as working in consulting or developing, and you meet a lot of interesting people.

It comes with its own burden, of course, but it may work as a way to find time to better understand what you want to do in the future.

Also, the salary is pretty good.

I believe the successful hackers went on to start their own consultancy firms. Same job, totally different culture and treatment. Threshold is a major skill upgrade in self-marketing though.

some others i worked with will just change careers every 10 years, go and study and try something different.

It may make sense to take a break from work, but it could also be destabilizing, and create the fear of ending up broke. So try to find a way to reduce stress and things that cause you anxiety, whatever it may be. A therapist can help with that too.

[1] https://stevenwaterman.uk/opening-up-burnout/

You are, but you don't mention the nr.1 reason in your article: your youth. Unlike you the author is 40 in a commodity IT position where agism is far more than endemic.

I do agree with you on the main premise of the burnaout/depression cause though. I have written the same here in the past.

Typically you would aim for team leadership or architect roles before 40, unless you prefer the option of being an embedded IT technical role in a non-IT industry, usually specialized in 'legacy' technology.

Of course everyone's carreer is different and there are exceptions, but for the median person that is the trend.

Look into therapy/counciling of some sort. No matter what what the actual problem is, having space to talk and vent about it is important. Judging by your post you've got a lot of thoughts and feelings locked up right now, having a professional to work through it with would be really helpful.

None of that is to say it's "your fault" or "your problem", but it might help you to figure out your next move. That may be getting out of the industry and into something else, or it might be finding a new job where the issues aren't as pronounced.

I have similar thoughts, but when I think about life and jobs and reality, logically my gut feelings do not make sense. Plenty of people around who seem okay but do not express any significant “depth”. It shouldn’t be that hard, so what is my true concern and what are the goals?

Take a break, rest and review these problems with a clear mind. Consulting a professional helps for mind and career.

Good luck.

If you are on the applying side rather than on the job offering side, how can you know these numbers?

average is between 150-300 - and the ads tend to be either outsourcing shops, or companies who just keep the same ad up for months and months - while totally ignoring me.

but i will look into it thanks, i like that sql is fairly evergreen and less trend driven.

> Anyone managed to move from front-end to another role

Changing roles isn't necessarily the answer. It could be, depending on how different the new role is; but for example going from frontend to backend dev is just a matter of fine details really (so it likely won't make you happier).

I hit the point you're at repeatedly over the last decade. And worse, I have fond memories of the glory days of the 90s when you could fax (haha) your resume to a recruiter, and within a week you had a job if you wished. Interviews were typically 1-2 hours in person, where you would talk to 1-3 people at the client site. Within a day or two, you had an initial offer or a rejection. I actually don't remember getting any rejections back then. Those glory days took a nosedive at the unfortunate intersection of the dotcom bust and the surge of offshore sourcing (and recruiting "firms" who replaced all their reasonably skilled recruiters with mindless drones who wouldn't even read your resume before calling you about a job).

But I digress...

At this moment I'm jobless and SO MUCH HAPPIER. I even have the enthusiasm and energy to start building some of my own projects. I don't have much savings, but I have enough to get me through a few months. Maybe one of the things I'm working on has the potential to generate some income, but that's not my focus. Almost my entire career has been focused on financial benefits (within reason... I still easily reject cube farm jobs in big banks), so now I'm trying an alternate approach. After all, if you're in poor mental and physical health while having a job and fat paycheck, it's not really living.

very true, this how i feel right now.

I'm not sure I'd agree with this advice. If the mental problems OP has originate from his circumstances, a psychiatrist is unlikely to be able to help him. But psychiatrists are usually in no hurry to admit that, so the experience is usually even more frustrating and demeaning than skipping the whole shebang.

Yes I am speaking from experience.

The same goes for our minds.

After all I could make up some arbitrary argument like: "How can you be sure wearing a traffic cone on your head doesn't help? Have you tried it?"

This has always been the case. In the 1980s, when I was in my 20s, this was the deal, and very well known to all of us in university. Nothing new. One was too old after 35-years-old, UNLESS you were some amazingly great programmer, of course. Obviously. I remember having many conversations about this topic. And this was the case way back then, when the whole industry was young.

That being said, there's always room for older programmers. Maybe it is not quite as easy, but there's a lot of room. Maybe you won't get the Google, Facebook type of jobs, but the government sewer district, or an auto parts store with 20 stores would hire you. So it might not be the glamor of a high-end company.

I'm a lot older than you but I can move from company to company pretty easily, because I guess I have more experience - not on the technical side, but on the political savvy side. Office politics. Knowing how to find the back doors.

However, this is not about that. You hate the tech field, so none of that matters.

I personally have gone from industry to industry, different types of jobs. I have a huge and massive source of skill sets.

I know that many say that being a "jack-of-all-trades, master of none" is bad but I've never felt that way. Sure, I won't make the huge bucks by being a neurosurgeon making $2 million per year, but then again, even if I did try to do that, I still would never be able to be a neurosurgeon (or leetcoder) anyways. So the point is moot. And I'm not really a jack-of-all-trades, more like a "near master of a shitload of trades." That's how I see it, anyways. And, I LIKE being a "jack/near-master-of-all-trades" so why does it matter if I am not a superstar master? I don't want to do that.

So what I am saying is that it is possible to move from one industry, from one trade, to another.

I've done programming, sales, insurance, ran a sports school, worked as a high-level bookkeeper/financial person, ran multiple companies of my own, worked in retail (I really like it and dealing with the public, unlike most people). I've also worked in a number of other specialized niche fields that I don't want to say as it might doxx me. Over the last year I learned a boatload about SEO/SEM/Social media/digital marketing. I did this for others, but now I'm going to start creating websites of my own and use that knowledge to create my own websites.

I do what I want to do. Sometimes it takes me 3 or 6 months to figure out my next move when it is time to move on.

I am just showing you that it is more than possible. I've done it tons of times. And what one man, or woman, can do, so can another.

But the question is, what do you want to do?

As far as your existing work history, of course you have to include it. But you always want to skew your resume to the job you are applying to, as much as possible.

So if you are going to do technical writing as your next thing, you then change your resume to say how you wrote reports, or manuals, or instructions and that was the favorite part of what you are doing as a front end web designer, and other things like that. If you decide to, oh, work in a hotel industry in the administrative department, maybe you created a website for a hotel and were intrigued by it and want to work in that industry now. Just make it link up, that's easy to do. It's totall random association.

.

If you can go to any kind of meetings in person, if you can find any, that is the best case. You never know who you will meet. I went to a computer security even earlier this year and met the CIO of a Fortune 100 company and spent 3 hours talking with him. He had 10,000 technical people working for him, and here I was talking to him. He offered me a job, but I didn't want one.

I've been to so many in-person meetings and if you put yourself out there and talk to people, you will find commonalities. So maybe you decide to work in commercial real estate and want to get into landscaping. So you just start attending commercial real estate assocation meetings and boom, you have a job without having to jump through hoops by applying through their website if you impress them. Maybe still apply through a website but it is a formality.

>Appreciate any guidance, thanks.

What do you want to do? Can't help you until you know that.

but i think you're right, it's worth just trying to force your way into things, being more creative then just applying for the same jobs and getting ignored, the definition of madness...

However, if you are talking about experience being your credentials, you have to start at the ground floor like anyone else and work your way up.

Experience never stopped me ever. I just read like hell to get all the top quality knowledge that I can, and then move forward. Unless there is formal licensing restrictions, I doubt there's a single arena I can't get a job in.

As an example, I did insurance and has zero experience. I got a job with an agency doing non-licensing work, and after 3 months I talked to the person in charge, spent 4 months studying, and passed 2 licensing exams. I studied hard. There's a 60% fail rate, and you only need to get 60% correct answers, and I passed on my first try. There are others at my office that took 8 and 10 times to pass that licensing exam.

You are letting false walls block you. Don't worry about credentials. Figure out what you want to do, then make it happen.

But I have for sure built up a LOT of experience by doing different things, because I just went out and did them and didn't let anything stop me. I'm 60-years-old and have no problems learning and getting a job in anything. I have zero experience in, oh, supply chains. But if I set my mind to it, I'll get a job in supply chains in 3 to 6 months time. Name anything that doesn't require a license, like a dentist or whatever, and I'll get a job in it.