I considered killing myself last night. I self-harmed for the first time in many years. My company advertised remote work. I asked if I could move far away from Tokyo and sure, no problem. I got told if RTO, then it would be close and new people only. I got permission to run a side job doing a small farm. Sure no problem.
I’ve been in this industry for 20+ years now.
Mandatory return to office (I live 4 hours each way). They pay transportation expenses per month at a level that wouldn’t cover one day. If you’re nice and apply, we MAY approve (for three months only) 2 days a week required in the office. No guarantee it will be approved. I joined a union to fight this but it’s slow. They will likely still try to fire me.
I have a mortgage. I got a subsidy to move to this small town, that many in Japan provide, but it must be paid back if leaving within 5 years. I also am a registered farmer with farm land which means I legally have to maintain it properly.
Yesterday, they said no more side job is allowed. So I’m not allowed to sell anything I grow anymore, have to close my self-proprietorship, and have to close my company (which has tax impacts on me because now nothing counts as expenses and I lose my ability to do special tax forms). They apparently want food to rot. They want me to rot. The farm was not even yet at a point to make me money. They falsely claimed I got subsidies for farming (I did not and do not) and that it’s no longer just selling extra produce (it still is) and is a full-scale farming operation (it is not). My sales were like 10k yen last year and maybe will get to that this year.
My wife does not work. There are few jobs out here. No remote jobs in the US or Canada are responding and few would even allow Japan time zone even with overlap. Remote jobs for a backend engineer (primarily golang lately with very rusty Java somewhere in my brain unused for many years) are basically non-existent. I’ve applied for jobs in the EEA but, as a non-EEA-citizen, I can basically go fuck myself. My body is way too messed up (multiple broken bones, back issues, etc.) for any really hard manual labor.
So I lose my job, I lose my income, I lose the house, I will never get another mortgage in Japan again, there’s no point to being alive. My wife’s birthday is coming up, which is basically what stopped me. She’ll have a better life without me and at least the house will get paid off so she can do whatever with it.
Living in an apartment in Tokyo would also violate the terms of my mortgage making me lose it (on top of losing a huge chunk of my paycheck) and would also make it impossible to keep up with farm maintenance, let alone the rest of the house and property.
I’m very sorry for your situation. Please do not let these fuckers decide what you are worth, and leash you.
Your wife loves you, and you are more important to everyone around you than to your company. Live for your love, and your friends. Even if your life has to change a little, that’s not the end.
make your way out of that company painful. Point fingers, humiliate them, politely. Call the media, do the drama, make them feel ashamed.
Best of luck, do not quit life, you are bigger than them.
Call the media, do the drama
Even saying 100% true things, this gets you sued in Japan. This is specifically why I don’t name the company.
If you will be fucked either way… Create a trail, try the good path first. Humanize, try sympathy.
If they don’t care, threat media exposure, Japanese are really prideful and that hurts them the most
And I assume that you (and many others) were being lied to about this RTO policy, so you’ll most likely have public sympathy on your side. Also, you can start a GoFundMe (or similar) to support you in your Situation. Be vulnerable, let the communuty pick you up. And when you’re up again, pay the compassion forward.
Capitalism. The people calling the shots and keeping the profits are not the people doing the work.
It’s bad and will continue to be bad for everyone except the top layer of rich people.
If you get the opportunity, join a union.
I don’t think I’ll ever stop working on my own projects. Even if I leave the software industry otherwise.
Sadly, I’m way more burned out than Pre-AI and I was a bit before then. (So I guess it just sped up the pace).
I have no desire to come home and work on personal software or devops projects. My Homelab sits in the same state it was since the last real vacation I had. Corporate/industry work has removed all desire for personal development work.
Yeah one of my hobbies used to be computational math, I used it to learn about complex analysis, shaders, group theory…
Now I’m like “fuck all of that”, I do tai chi, I cook carnitas, I read manga.
I’m spoiled on the whole thing, I take no pride that I used to be someone who knew a lot about computers and having worked at Google/MSFT is now a source of shame.
I guess I’m really lucky that I never had to use AI, and when I tried it on my own, I quickly realized how awful it is.
I would argue it’s normalizing.
For fucks sake, the last 30 years have been insane, especially with the dotcom boom and bust.
Suddenly every dipshit adult was telling their kids, “computers are the future, the internet is the future, and you can’t survive with just a highschool degree. You better go to college and learn programming!!”
Those parents are a bit to blame with how things got. And it seemed like they were pretty accurate too as high speed internet became huge, and lithium batteries thus mobile phones…
I always was interested in programming, since before my mom pushed me into it, because she was one of those types too. Then I went to college, and I met a bunch of teenagers who said, “uhhh I don’t know what I want to do but I want it make money so I’m doing computer science”.
The first year of college usually filtered those people out. Usually.
And i’ve always said, don’t join this career for the money. It’s not worth it, if you don’t love engineering. This is the most stressful fucking job I’ve ever had, and there are tons of meetings and social activity to go with it. You can’t just solve puzzles in a vacuum, even if you like programming, and that’s EVEN if you enjoy it. You have to start leading others at some point, act like a mentor.
You take on a fucking lot of responsibility, start giving demos, working with product managers, marketers, help teach people what is possible in the product and what isn’t. This isn’t a chill gig. It rarely is. It usually involves a fuck ton of effort and planning.
You get paid a lot… But honestly, if you’re actually doing the job well, you’re underpaid even then. Often you will be underpaid compared to the effort you put in. Especially now.
Not as many people should be in software engineering as there are. I talk to people sometimes and you can tell they hate this job. It’s okay, and I don’t blame them, but way too many people got sucked into this career for the wrong reasons, then kinda now have to keep doing it to survive.
I’m glad I still enjoy it but I see a lot of fucking burnout right now. But I have to say, the people leaving the job now, some of them, not all but some, might be some of the types that shouldn’t have jumped into it in the first place. Lots of people were told they’re smart and good with computers so should make money doing it.
Some of those smart people should’ve done other smart jobs. Biotech is huge too, but I don’t see the drive to it like there was for making fucking websites.
i think because biotech is has a small gatekeeped job market, its hard to get into, its essentially a catch-22, its also complicated by other things, , and requires upfront experience years before graduation.
they already have the situation where they dont train people for biotech out of graduation already, you are expected to have it already.
The first year of college usually filtered those people out. Usually.
Unfortunately in my country this doesn’t happen. There’s a bell curve and as long as you submit your homework and do the bare minimum for the exams, you get your degree. You’re gonna have a pretty mid GPA, but you’ll have a degree which effectively makes the degree useless as an indicator of competency. The amount of people I’ve interviewed who couldn’t answer a simple programming question is astounding.
Most of these people end up picking up jobs as project managers because that’s all they can do. And the country’s leaders wonder why we don’t have much software R&D here.
same here in some universities in the states, the harder stem classes ten dot lower thier avg grades like D,C,B,(not As though) so people can get a better grade. that tells you theses classes are quite difficult to pass.
India?
Singapore
For me it’s starting to feel very draining. I’ve worked on small teams the past several years but now my current internal-only project is picking up stream and we’ve got a product owner and manager on board.
The amount of planning, discussing, iterating, changing requirements, etc. is absolutely demanding. I’m starting to miss just programming. The overhead is what starts to make all this feel soul-sucking after a while.
I really enjoy programming, and i don’t mind all of the planning, mentorship, and working with stakeholders to formulate solutions. But for the past few weeks 90% of the work I’ve been doing had been around deployment, migrating services to new servers, and fucking with azure resources. I haven’t written a line of code for 3+ weeks. That has been draining.
Couple that with picking up work items that are poorly written with way to little information on what needs doing and it’s also frustrating as hell.
At my company, we have dozens, probably over one hundred different repos that we maintain, and no less than 30 actively worked on projects. It’s bitter sweet in that I get a good mix of work to break up the monotony of working on the same project, but at the cost of not being able to master any of them. I’ve only been in my role for 6-8 months coming from a non programming background, and it’s been tough to learn and keep up with the pace required. Being full stack is nice but shitty at the same time.
Does your current stretch have a foreseeable end? Or do you think the very little programming will continue?
I’m a computer scientist and got into it before it became popular.
I suck at programming and have never labeled myself as a programmer. I write software to solve problems and know my way around the SDLC, but there’s a LOT of CS work out there that isn’t being a code monkey.
The shame was the number of people who went to college specifically to learn how to write software that can now be generated by AI, at the quality level generated by AI. Those jobs are now gone. Being a software analyst, integrator, architect, security engineer, information systems analyst, data scientist, etc? Thise are still in high demand, as are programmers who are subject matter experts or can lead a team.
Hilarious to throw biotech out there at the end as its a similar case with a lot of smart people doing not what they want and hard to pivot out of. The filter also works similarly.
Could be STEM as a whole. Everyone glamorizes it, but it’s definitely not for everyone. Shit, my family literally got upset when I suggested I might want to be a writer.
its glamorized because some of the more popular jobs, like engineering , scientists for stem is in the media/cinema alot, and they assume its easy for people find a job in it, when a fresh graduate doesnt find one thier whole family/friends gang up on them and rag on them about it. they dont see the the actual ugliness behind it, need a competitive gpa for grad school(depends which grad school and which program), and then research/lab experience,etc and its also not easy getting these. alot of phds/MS trying to get academic jobs in our area are like in thier 30- 40s already. plus there is a demographic preference at the lower levels.
I’m thinking about getting into cyber security, or maybe get an MFT and be a shrink. Idk. Job market kinda sucks
cyber is suffering badly as IT, and tech from what ive heard.
Seems like cyber security is the new hot thing now
