re: ::scr programming/$job burnout

[matt jones <jonah@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Simon Wistow wrote:
> Is this just normal mid 20's breakdown?  Or something more? Have we come
> to expect more out of life - because so much is on offer, far more than
> our parents probably did, and far more money (again probably) - that
> even if we have a steady job that pays well, we're still not happy
> because their seems to be so much out there. Or the opposite i.e that
> precisely because we are in a well paying job and fairly secure whilst 
> still young that we feel burnout because there's nothing left to achieve.

Could you not just put that down to general 21st century angst,
though? You keep hearing reports about how people work longer and harder
for less money and job security these days. People are generally
unhappier, apparently. I'm not sure I buy into that fully, but I certainly
know many, *many*, non-programmers who are well cynical, disapponted and
just plain sick of their jobs. I'd c hallenge the assertation that
widespread job-dissatisfaction is purely a hacker thing.

> 2 years ago the internet industry was thriving and there were plentiful
> jobs for everybody in company's that seemed like they could do no wrong
> - the money flowed like wine (or Vodka Red Bull) and the jobs were
> interesting, you could get all the equipment - now it's all gone to shit
> and nothing's fun any more and there doesn't seem to be much future in
> it.

Well, no offence Muttley, but boo hoo. :) I would imagine almost every
industry ever has gone through the same problem of a sudden drop in demand
and widespread loss of jobs that seemed secure 18 months ago. It was just
a bit more marked around dotbomb time because a) the timescale was much
smaller and b) the *ridiculous* amount of hype and erroneous expectation
that cause clueless VCs to spooge money around like they did. Try
eliciting sympathy about the state of our jobs market from the Liverpool
dockers, shipworkers in Newcastle or similar group. 

ISTR some libertarian telling me that it was laughable to suggest that a
programmer could benefit from union membership. I would speculate about
that now, but this is an OT *tech* list, and I don't wish to pollute it
with politics[0].

> Something interesting came up on this walk - how many of you (I'm
> thinking especially of the programmers but it's a valid question for
> all) would be doing their job if it wasn't for the Net 'revolution' -
> and I don't just mean working for their current employer - I mean how
> many of you would be working as, say, a programmer if they hadn't
> started off doing web stuff?

Possibly ... because I came to programming/scripting during the lasst
great revolution that was going to change the way we lived forever:
multimedia CD-ROMs :) . Yes, I know that makes me credibility-challenged.
But seriously, I probably wouldn't be working as a programmer now if it
wasn't for the internet because it was more fun doing web work than
CD-ROM.

Reasons why web work was more fun for me. Since I had a good teacher, I
learned to write HTML by hand, so where CD-ROM authoring was a sort of a
hybrid of GUI-based dran'n'drop drooling and scratching together simple
scripts in the World's Crappiest "Language", with HTML I could see how the
changes in my markup directly affected the rendered page. I gained a much
better understanding as a result. Then I came to Javascript, and from
there to perl because I wanted to do server-side stuff. So no, I probably
wouldn't be a perl programmer if I hadn't got web work.

-- 
jonah
[0] My apologies to anyone who thinks that I already have.