Ask HN: Starting to feel like a coding monkey
I have been working at a FAANG company on a team that has a pretty interesting product. I feel that most of my time, however, is sucked up doing things that no longer about coding or building a successful product. Every new feature we want to release takes so much time, and I'm starting to feel like I have limited impact on the overall outlook of the product. The unfulfilled-ness is starting to get to me and I am losing ideas for a creative outlet. I have tried coding in my free-time, but have just run out of projects that interest me. Sorry about the complaining, but I am reaching out to see if anyone else has been in a similar rut and has suggestions for getting out of it. You are not hired to have fun, coding new cool exciting stuff. You are probably getting paid to maintain a product and keeping it running, stable and bug free, to keep customers happy thus earning the company money. Just a guess of course. But that's the reality for most developers. First and foremost, software is not the be-all-end-all of your life and frankly everything else in the world. Find something you enjoy that's not software and then apply software to it. Model rocketry? Juggling? Etc. Well if you hate it so much, why not take a pay cut and join a startup? There are lots of opportunities for a person with your FAANG experience.