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| *Ostroff, Fair and Company>>>Technology |
Anyone else experiencing programmer burnout? Career advice? |
I started a new job and thought that I could keep writing code for the right pay, but I just can't do this anymore. I was hired as an engineering manager, but every position seems to be hands on no matter what your employer says when trying to recruit you. Anyone else experiencing the same feelings or experience? Any advice for more social careers which involve being around people more and computers less? I have a strong consulting background, excellent interpersonal skills, and am fast on my feet. If you are attempting to stay in the IT industry, my suggestion is to either move toward business analyst type of positions; or to move away from development roles and go into implementation roles. Business or functional analysts has more customer facing time, gathering requirements etc. Implementation or support roles also has lots of customer interaction but probably more unhappy customers. In a lot of smaller development team environment, companies do not make clear distinction across the whole development cycle. For example, there wouldn't be a support team and a development team (rather one person/group does all). Large true software development companies usually make such distinction; smaller firms or non-software houses (i.e. IT team of a hospital) generally do not. Say an engineering manager for a hospital probably get stuck doing a lot more than s/he has bargained for. If you are at one of these types of places, maybe you need to look for a true software development company. Another suggestion is to apply your technical skills in package implementation. There, even in development roles you will still get a lot of customer interaction time; and even more so in consulting environment. Best wishes. Maybe you need some more challenges. This month I was bug fixing two lots of 68k assembler, one C without any comments, one C++, and a whole heap of PHP. The month before was VHDL. I'm always wondering what will fall my way next. It's like doing new puzzles all the time. I say leave the people stuff to the non-techies but if you really have had enough then remember that a good manager should be dumping all the code bashing on his minions and keeping an eye on the bigger picture. |
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