Title: I spoke to a lot of software engineers around me and the feeling seems common.<p>I remember the days I started coding, and how much I enjoyed that. I was able to create things with just the power of my thoughts, and it felt like a superpower.<p>Nowadays, I feel like I have to jump so many hoops and spend so much mental bandwidth just to get the permission to code. It would be fair to say that on avg I spend less than 20% of my time coding or solving problems.<p>Any project I work on is connected to a million different tools, workflows and services, that all do things their own way, and everything lives in a totally different place, where it’s hard to monitor what’s going on.<p>I feel like anything can break at any moment and ruin my day. I don’t understand any of the tools well enough to be confident that it’s stable, and the worst problems are the silent ones. This is giving me anxiety.<p>I work mostly with Javascript — and that doesn’t help. All the frameworks&#x2F;libs I use insist on being too flexible, to the point where I don’t know where to start and how to do things. Just show me the “right” way, and let me figure out how to opt out if I want to. Oh and every 10 minutes there is a new tool that pops up that does things differently.<p>I wish I could go back to the days where I spent most of my day in the IDE and at the end produce something that was (to me) amazing. My most challenging moments were when I had a tough logic problem to solve — but I enjoyed those immensely. I’d rather fight with my brain than with the tools I use.<p>I wish I could just use an IDE that takes care of all the crap for me and just lets me code and write business logic.<p>I now understand why there’s a trend of developers who want to go live in a farm or take up woodworking: tough(er) problems, but with less variables &amp; easier to reason about. If the wood breaks, you can see where and can probably guess why. Making a table is a mostly linear set of steps, and the basic tools you use don’t change much throughout the years. There is no invisible ghost that lives in a separate realm (dev environment) that can ruin your work at any time and leave no trace.<p>Any insights? Should I just switch careers?
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