I've been working in IT (software developer, architect, devops) for around 20 years now. I've dabbled in pretty much everything. I actually had a passion for it all - I enjoyed every second of what I did. The excitement of learning all that new technology and building something was amazing.
Fast forward to present day - I feel like I've lost that passion I had for technology. I don't feel like working in the industry anymore. Has anyone else gone through this?
I'm thinking of what else I can do with my life. I could focus on my current hobbies and start a business based on those. Not because of money, but because I'm looking for that excitement again.
I wrote a Greenhouse bookmarklet for our Head of People a while back. All it did was click buttons, poll the page for content, and copy/paste some text. It took me two hours. It was such a magical experience hopping on a call, demoing the bookmarklet, and being told I'd saved someone tens of hours.
In contrast, I spent the last few months building out a greenfield, microservice architecture that product wanted in anticipation of a new feature that was going to need to scale to the moon. It was a real technical challenge but, in the end, business needs changed and it never saw the light of day.
I know that when I first got into programming - I didn't know all the complex stuff. I just saw things in the world I wanted to affect with programming - and then did. Over time, I learned to tolerate all the BS that gets in the way of making magic happen in exchange for an ever-growing paycheck. Each step along the way made sense, but, upon reflection, the magic has been incrementally bled out from my passion all in an attempt to best utilize my abilities.
Consider building something simple for a non-techy friend who needs some help. You might be able to catch sight of the magic you feel you've lost by looking into their eyes as you deliver what you've made.
I mean, I don't want to completely dismiss testing, but it was a big part of the reason I started moving away from development, and more into the DevOps realm. The other big problem is working for medium/large companies, which require so much administrative overhead to get anything done.
Wow, its like you just wrote the intro to a chapter in my life!
- How is your happiness and your energy levels outside of work?
- How is your cognitive performance at work? (Can you focus, are your thoughts 'foggy', do you have any issues working out complex tasks/solutions that you used to solve without issue etc....)
- Are you empowered in your job/role/team to make changes / improvements as you see fit, without being significantly limited or blocked by others?
--
I'm someone whose always gained a large portion of their energy from their work. When work wasn't going well it massively impacted my personal space / energy.
When my cognitive ability was impaired I found that all the rewards that technical work used to afford me disappeared, I was considering looking for options outside of engineering - or at least pivoting to less hands-on work, however I managed to completely fix my cognition and as soon as I did so - work was enjoyable again, and as such - my personal time as well.
I went and saw a new psychiatrist and he wondered if it was perhaps a dopamine regulation issue. As such he prescribed Bupropion - which is only prescribed in Australia as a smoking cessation aid - but off label / in other countries it can be prescribed as an atypical anti-depressant.
Almost all antidepressants work on serotonin and norepinephrine - however, bupropion works on dopamine, hints being known as an atypical anti-depressant.
Within about five days, it felt like I'd been swimming underwater and surfaced to the clear air for the first time in five or so years. And within, perhaps a month or two, my is completely back to where I was say eight or nine years ago, perhaps even slightly better.
A few other things changed such as ever since I was little child. I was a chronic nail biter - at within two months that was completely gone and hasn't come back over a year later.
So that fixed my cognition, and I now know that it's a dopamine regulation issue, and is completely treatable.
I believe a significant part of my problem is that all those things I'm not a fan of come with the seniority I have. I'd be happier, work-wise, as a junior dev without those responsibilities. My lifestyle, unfortunately, doesn't support such a move.
Deleted Comment
I almost immediately started thinking about tech projects I wanted to do. I realized I had all this tech experience and everywhere I looked I found things that tech could improve.
For me, in my case, it turns out I was just tired of technology for technology's sake. And instead I needed a different cause, and different ways to apply it and solve things.
Fast forward to now, and I love my tech job, but now my passion and excitement is not for the tech itself, but instead it is in the way the problems it is being applied to are approached and solved with the tech.
I don't know if I would have re-found this passion without the couple years off outside of tech, so maybe it was a required part of my journey to get to this point.
So here I am; Ive been working for several companies, the last two being a "flat hierarchy" / Holacracy. Sound great right? Well no.. not if you want to grow to management to give that entrepreneurial mind a go again. Im stuck and it has been weighing me down for a while now. Ive applied for several CTO positions but because I've had "roles" instead of actual "job titles" companies wont take everything seiously. Im in a perdicament; On one side I'm tired of being rejected for work Im certainly qualified for, on the other side I dont want to be the loner freelancer (been there already) and on even another side I don't want to stay in that cubicle anymore. Im tired.. And im only 33.
I don't get it. Entrepreneurs don't want to be a cog in somebody else's machine, they want to start their own thing.
This is to say, you'll probably need to hunt for hobbies and find something that gives you meaning, now that the IT-shine is gone.
Now everything is reduced to ticking off tasks and almost zero room for creativity. Meetings after meetings. Overcomplicated development workflows, or really just everything is overcomplicated. Twenty people to do the job of two, checkups, check-ins, checkouts, checkboxes. Gratuitous positivity makes any genuine gratitude hollow and meaningless.
I've taken the last two years off aside from a little bit of contracting to pay the bills and serves to remind me of how awful it's become. The only times I'm happy is when I can work on weekends or holidays and no one will be pinging me haha.