I have been a software engineer of off highway farm equipment for most of my life. I have like 15 years of it. I have just lost the ability to care about it anymore.

I have explored all the things that interest me and now it seems like everything is just turning the crank to completion. A very boring/slow turning with deadline pressure. I am doing less development and more code reviews because I have become a more senor developer.

My position in the company is pretty good and I could probably ride it out until I die or the company picks up on the fact that my output has dropped due to the lack of caring. But that eats at my soul and it isn’t fair to my coworkers.

If money wasn’t an issue, I would jump to game development but I hear that doesn’t pay well or treat their employees well either. I suppose I could start my own company…

I have a wife and we plan to have one kid if that is possible for us.

Burnout is a possibility, but if that is what this is, I am not sure what to do about it.

So here is what I think my options are. I am open to other suggestions:

  1. Stay where I am.
  2. Pivot hard to management where I am.
  3. Try to find a new job within Embedded Systems
  4. Try to do Game Development.
  5. Drop everything, become a philosopher like Diogenes of Sinope

Thanks for your consideration.

  • heavydust@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    16 hours ago

    My experience may not be relevant because I always quit when I had toxic managers who were killing me every day, and it may be different from yours, but anyway here are random stupid thoughts:

    • “off highway farm equipment”: what it this? what language are you using?
    • you want a kid and your “position in the company is pretty good”: don’t quit now!
    • game dev: it seems to be awful unless you have a lot of money and write indie games like the Stardew Valley guy (Ubisoft in France is famous for being a burnout machine)
    • embedded systems: I would shun embedded dev who uses C and is focused too much on electronics, I would focus on higher-level stuff like C++17/20 or Rust
    • I would focus for some time on reading books and papers, and trying new solutions, improving my work in a way that could be applied to another company, like CI/CD, use new languages, find ways do check the code or improve it, fix or change stuff here and there and take notes that can I could reuse…

    Anyway, what is your current job right now? What are you doing daily?

    • deaf_fish@lemm.eeOP
      3·
      14 hours ago

      Unfortunately, I can’t really talk about it too much other than I do C but have recently been ramping up on a C++ part of the code. To be frank, I am currently not a big fan of C++. Seems overly complicated and the people I work with seem to write overcomplicated templated code for what seems to me to be either for fun or job security. Either way seems to make the code hard to read with no benefit.

      Edit: I think would much rather work with a language like Rust or Go. Zig looks interesting for a C like.

      • heavydust@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        13 hours ago

        Some more explanation that I forgot to add about embedded applications: I wrote a few embedded applications but it’s not my main job and I have little experience with that. It seems to be polarized somehow: either you write old spaghetti-like C code tied very closed to the hardware and you won’t have a good time, or you can write higher-level code which can be more fun (modern C++, Rust, or Zig).

        I’ve been writing C++ for more than 20 years and I hate it, but I hate other languages more. It’s very complicated though and I do not recommend it. Modern C++ can still be easy and simple, but you have to know all the rules and it takes a lot of time and experience.

        Your conclusion about Rust or Zig is good IMHO. Both could be very good languages for embedded systems. I would not use Go though for that since it is more of a competitor to Python, it is too high-level, and Python is more professional nowadays thanks to new tools like “uv.” Even if Google tries to sell Go as a systems’ language, I still see it as a “compiled” scripting language that has less libraries than Python, which is why I don’t make the switch yet.