I just don’t want to be a software developer anymore

I still love coding, but I hate this industry

It’s an easy story for me to tell. When I was 10 there was nothing more exciting to me than playing around with the old broken computers my dad, who worked in tech, would give me. I became a teenage game modder and hobby web developer. After college I worked at a non-profit, not making much, when I was offered an exciting position as a web developer where I made 5x as much. I’ve been doing it ever since. It’s a story people who hire me or who promote the tech industry love to hear. But it’s not the whole story.

Passion is prized in this industry and people who come into code out of love are considered special. It is also considered the reason why certain groups of people are less represented in tech, because not as many of them are building Linux machines in their basements for fun.

But the problem with that is that hobby coding isn’t at all like coding for work. Very few coding jobs allow you to do the kind of work that hobby coders enjoy. I think in many ways the industry is becoming a lot like the programming portrayed in Snow Crash, which was written in 1992 but reads as almost an oracle:

She is an applications programmer for the Feds. In the old days, she would have written computer programs for a living. Nowadays, she writes…