This is probably my 10th (or 100th) blog project that I start, but at least this one will be the first entirely written in English, so it should be interesting, I'll give it a try, I'm sorry anticipatedly for the grammar mistakes, please help me Chrome.
So, my name is Felipe, and I am, like the bio says, a Brazilian software engineer, I can't say that financially speaking I'm mad, or worried, no, even in an economically disaster country like Brazil software engineers earn pretty well to have a comfortable life, and I also cannot complain that for the last 1.5 years I have worked full time remotely, and even being in the tech industry for 10 years sometimes I still don't believe that I work full remote, it is sad that this happened exclusively first due to COVID, but later I guess the company just accepted and they for sure are also profiting of this work modality.
So, as I said, I can't complain much regarding the career that I have and what the tech industry allowed me to have and experience, but even so there's been some problems, and at first I didn't give much attention to these problems because, to be honest, I am not, unlike many people think for developers, very logical and practical regarding my emotions, so I just thought that maybe those weren't really, really problems and just another existential questioning (to not mention crisis) about my life and what I was doing.
But, I'm paying more attention to this now, and yes, I know there are a lot of emotions there, a lot of it very irrational, that will not make much sense and maybe I just have to accept those and live with it, but mixed with this I know, for sure, that certain things make sense and I am right of worry and think about them, so for this reason I'm creating this blog, to make a little more of sense in my head for all those thoughts and in this process I want to achieve one goal: Heal my relationship with the technology.
Heal my relationship with technology
As I said in terms of career I cannot complain, 3 years ago I made a decision that changed my life for good, I accepted an offer from a USA company with an office in Brazil basically to work as a Oracle database programmer, for me at that time was an amazing officer because my annual income (in Brazil we are more adept to consider the monthly income) more than doubled and for the first time in my life I was earning an adult salary, left my parent's home and moved to the company's city here in Brazil.
The first months were hard, a bit due to work but a lot due to all the novelty, a lot of things happened since then, good moments, bad moments, good and horrible feelings, COVID hitting us all and today I'm a Senior dev close to become a tech lead, I'm earning a very good salary for my age even by Brazil standards, working in my home town fully remote, everything seems good.
But yes, there are problems, and now I notice that my concerns may be comprehensible:
-> I'm dealing with old legacy tech, and while I may be progressing in the company especially with titles (developer, senior developer, maybe tech lead), those progressions are much more due to salary than due to different experiences and projects, because the tech we work haven't really changed, honestly, I'm still working with good ol PL/SQL;
-> The amount of work just increases, but nothing is really challenging OR really worth to accept the challenge, what do I mean? Even when I face a hard problem, I don't see how this problem makes me really evolve in my programming career, it is just a big headache to identify some changes in old legacy code (or new code under legacy tech!!), also the normal difficulty problems are not challenging me at all, changes in Excel spreadsheet 1, in another Excel spreadsheet 2, small scripts for configuration, and some form of "consulting" for our clients;
-> I'm applying for other companies especially in LinkedIn but I haven' been accepted by most of them, due to first item and also the salary;
I know that till now I have been telling most about the bad things at my job, but I believe that all this happened due to a reason that I'll mention below, and thanks if you read till here, the other posts will be shorter, I'm trying to report my career status so you can have a big picture and maybe continue following here and take my experience as a perspective for your own career.
And by the way, my company doesn't have only bad things, I've learned a lot in the first months there and also learned a lot of "soft skills" that I sure wouldn't have learned at other places, I'm trying to accept the fact that in our lives there is a time for everything, and maybe my time is over there, doesn't mean everything sucks thou.
Anyway, it looks till now much more of "just leave your job man, no need for a career healing", but I believe there is, and I think I probably got to this point due to the below.
After being a professional software engineer, most of my relationship with technology just sucked
A lot of times I got myself thinking if I really like tech and programming, there was a point, I think one year ago, that I just decided that I would follow my career in tech even if I was not completely sure if it was "my call", or what I am most proficient at, I just told myself that this is what pays the bills and regarding this there is not much to complain.
But I remember when I was 12 years old and started to learn C programming, yeah, I sucked, yeah, I didn't learn even the basics to start a job (yes, 12 years old this wouldn't happen, I know) (sorry, another parenthesis, but I really have a problem to start courses/books and go till the end of it), but with all the problems I enjoyed that, then some years later I remember picking a copy from Head First HTML/CSS and, again, I didn't become the front-end mage but, yes, I was enjoying the process of learning, of creating website drafts, they sucked, but I enjoyed, and yes, that book I finished.
But after becoming a software engineer, especially after going to my current company, the enjoyment stopped, I know a job is a job, but it is like nothing from that past time exists anymore, and my mind was just focused on the paycheck, and I know it is somehow a suicide in the IT but, for the most time, I stopped to learn.
I don't know exactly what died inside, and this blog, my reflections (and boy, I do a lot of reflections about life and about my career!), the possible new experiences I'll try now, all of this is what I call my process of healing the relationship with technology, to again enjoy the process of learn and experiment and be excited for new projects and new jobs, I really want that, or at least I think but one way or the other I'll try to get back to that feeling.
This post is enormous but I have an idea, I'll stop for there and I think I'll create a series of posts of the main reasons that I think I don't feel that joy anymore, I think I must have the bigger picture and clearly know the reasons before I start tackling them.
I do have 2 hopes/goals for this blog:
-> To really heal the relationship with tech and be a happier person in this process, or at least an unloaded person
-> That you might find something useful here for your own life and career experiences.
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Thank you for reading.
Felipe
