This career turned out to be something I never signed up for, and I’m out.
I will preface this by saying that, I still love programming and I do intent to work on both my own personal ideas, contribute to open source projects, and strive to be a positive force to other people’s lives. This post is about how I decided to quit the deliberate pursue of software development as a career, and my completely opinionated and unscientific motivations behind it.
I really wish to brief you on the relevant parts of my life’s story, but if it bores you, skip ahead and know this: I loved computers computers since I was a kid, and loved programming since I was a teen.
When I was 4 years old, I fell in love with computers when I visited a neighbor’s house who happened to own one (pic below). In spite of the fact that my father was a successful musician who made enough to not just "survive day by day," we couldn't afford our own computer. We're talking about an age where computers would start from 200k drachmas (yes, I am from Greece!), and loading simple software would take up to 25 minutes because they used cassettes. But it wouldn't matter to me, because I was willing to wait for the game to load only to get bored of it 10 minutes later (the guy must've loved me for that).
Our neighbor owned a Spectrum, with a green monitor. Can you imagine staring at a bright large Game boy all day? That was close enough.
At school, I'd use my lunch money to purchase computer magazines like PC Master and Pixel. I had no idea what half of the things they were talking about were, but I was easily impressed and fascinated with their ideas. I once remember 8 pages dedicated to a program to make a mouse button do something different than normal. I wish I remembered the exact details, but the sheer volume of pages was mind-blowing. Then I remember them showing reviews of new hardware stating "1 MB RAM!" You get the idea.
Fast forward a decade later, and well after my parents got divorced, I owned a console but no computer. However, I was determined to find a high school that specialized in programming. I had no idea how easy or hard it would be, but I was driven and determined to become good at it. And boy, did I deliver. My courses were in languages of yesteryear like Turbo Pascal and COBOL, and I still didn't own my own personal computer. But the school had labs where we shared computers, and I loved it. While I spent 70% of my time writing code using pen and paper, getting a problem correct or a program to run made my heart flutter. If I had to rank myself, I was in the top 5 of my school, but I honestly never aimed for the top. All I was aiming for was to learn more and understand more.
At this point, you might be thinking that I continued to university and got a bachelor's degree. If only! My ignorant young self had no idea how the educational system in Greece worked and never considered the following: Because I opted for a vocational high school to get my hands dirty with programming as soon as possible, entry to an AEI (the classic university) was not possible — only to TEI, which was perceived as lesser. That would all be fair for me because I didn't care as long as I could get programming, except that there were only a handful of TEIs offering programming as a path. While I scored high in COBOL programming, I had glaring gaps of knowledge in math that resulted in just good performance, and I eventually gave up trying for a TEI. I attended the equivalent of a community college for 2 years that promised more programming. While they kept that promise with Borland C++ and Java, their degree was simply not enough for me to get a job as a programmer.
After mandatory military service, I realized that we had accrued debt that needed to get paid, so any dreams of keeping up with my studies or being picky about where to work had to be left aside. I ended up working mostly IT jobs, but even as a gamer in my free time, I always enjoyed finding ways to automate things. I made a website for a local business and even for a local metal band ("make the design as black and red as possible, think Cradle of Filth").
Super-fast forward to the COVID lockdown era, and I found myself twiddling my thumbs with nothing to do. During Steam sales, I bought a game called Shenzhen I/O by Zachtronics. And it all came back to me. I may obviously be older, but that was enough to fan the flames hidden within me. Afterwards, all I wanted to do was learn and become good. CS50, Free Code Camp, Fullstackopen, and the list goes on. Practice, practice, practice.
Since the hotel I worked at as a waiter was still closed, and members of the staff were being laid off, the owner had no clue how long this would take. So I decided to go hard and pursue software development as a career! "It would be difficult at first," I thought, "but I can make it."
After landing my first job during 2022, I worked from home for a small company (think ~15 members) on multiple projects, using mostly React with Next.js and some Python with FastAPI, and with coworkers who were much better at this than me. They were younger than me, but not only was I expecting that, it also didn't matter. I'm someone who responds well to merit, and all I cared about was how good they were both as developers and as people.
And then, something happened. Since the company was consulting/contracting, they had no control over the volume of work we received. As a result, I found myself doing labeling to train models to recognize objects in crime scenes, like bullets, knives, and corpses. Labeling and computer vision are really engaging and interesting, but it was not something that I signed up for. I wanted to build software. The weeks turned to months, and I was being paid developer money to not be a developer. As I approached my supervisor, we ran into an impasse. "You agreed that developers wear many hats," he said, "and labeling is on the menu." Hearing this from someone I admired was like being stabbed with a spoon. A month later, finally there was development work to be done. I felt such huge joy that I could finally work on products. However, something was off. I started having doubts about whether my good work would be appreciated or met again with "here's some labeling to do." My heart was crushed, my motivation deleted. I fell into what people usually call "burnout" but in hindsight, it felt more like a "boreout." I consider myself a misguided extrovert, and I love feeling valued and appreciated for what I do, and this place was tainted. To this day, I have no idea if it was my performance that led them to push me to labeling or because they genuinely had a drought of workload.
I decided to quit and spent my summer the way Greeks tend to spend it. Just kidding, I don't have anywhere to go for vacations — I spent most of my summer indoors learning backend development. It was the first time I ran into the diversity of technologies in my job market: C# and Java dominant, with the occasional PHP. I found myself turning into a ping-pong ball again, but this time it was because I was trying to cover all bases to find a job fast.