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I’ve been a full-time software developer for 5 months now. After graduating with decent grades in Computer Engineering (A poor-man’s version of Computer Science in Hong Kong), I started looking for work and got a job at a big international corporation within the week. They were desperate for a new hire, so they gave me an offer the DAY after my interview. The interview itself was pretty simple - a few questions about my work in university, talking to HR ghouls (Easily impressed with the buzzwords I purposefully sprinkled in), and a simple written “test” about C# and SQL that I was allowed to Google my way through.

And 5 months later, the truth is simple: I’m in fucking hell, and I’m DEEPLY bored.

To prevent this from turning into a mildly-leftist rambling on work, I’ll skip over the excruciating details of office work, since you already understand the main points: Commute that’s far too long, low pay, long hours, unfulfilling and alienating work, the end of you as a freely existing human, and so on. What I want to talk about in this post is the experience of working in software OUTSIDE of the West, where the pay is absurdly high and the processes are usually a bit more mature (but still bad).

Let’s talk about why it’s HELL.

There is no process in development. No one, and I really mean no one, has ever checked my code, there is no test suite, all of my changes are pushed directly to main after a brief local test, and pull requests are entirely a foreign concept to my entire team. In fact, the use of git wasn’t even mandatory, my first project at work for about 2 months was entirely transferred between portable drives, and it wasn’t until our newly hired system analyst (Who quit within 2 months, I wonder why?) essentially forced us to use it.

This means that: whether or not my (or anyone on the team’s) code works, can only be determined once the system is in production. And this is just accepted as fact, as how software development really works. Things really did break in production, and we just told the client “Yeah we will fix this next update”.

Development goals are also decided upon on an ad-hoc basis, some of what I have written has yet to be used months after finishing them, but since it was “decided” that it was needed, weeks of development time was devoted to writing up simple WinForm apps that will never see any use. Or alternatively, everyone is SO lost that I get to decide on the development targets for the month, which is nice sometimes, but when my boss, my boss’s boss, or even the CEO of the company have no idea where the project is headed to, this is a huge responsibility that I have to take, as any hiccups with the project will be on me.

Also, documentation? Forget it. Nothing is written down and therefore I currently have multiple great career-saving knowledge silos. Did I also mention that somehow as a junior dev I am the only person working on the codebase with no supervision? I’m currently working on a mobile application where I am the sole developer, no UI/UX, no QA, no backend developer, nothing. They put this project all in the hands of a fresh graduate with no experience. While this is a great learning opportunity for me, the end-product would be well… Let’s say not up to industry standard. (Things do work! But it lacks that polish that one expects out of an enterprise-level application.)

These aren’t the most depressing parts of work, however, what really kills me is knowing full well that the project I’m working on WILL fail, and it will provide ZERO value to society. Within almost a half year of work, I can say with confidence that the most useful thing I have ever done was hardcoding files into generating an image so it can be printed onto a luggage tag. That’s it. Other things range from less visible, but important (backend sites for sysadmins), to unused (Those aforementioned WinForm apps), to Dead-on-Arrival (The mobile application mentioned above is a blatant AI grift, everyone at work knows it will fail, but I have to continue development.)

I am also, deeply, unimaginably bored.

Before I started working, I never understood why my friend who was making GOOD money (3 times of my salary) was complaining about work sucks, as in my eyes he was getting paid for otherwise 1-2 hours of work per day. But now, I understand: It really does suck.

On a daily basis, about 70% of my time is not spent on development, since I am merely a junior developer, I also don’t need to attend any of the meetings that my coworkers have to, which is one of the few benefits of my current position - I don’t envy them, for those meetings are entirely useless, hosted by managers who otherwise would not be able to justify their own wages (which they don’t deserve in the first place). That means everyday is the same, I clock in, sit down at my desk, and maybe work 2 hours. Fixing small bugs, implementing a feature, and boom. All done. Nothing left for the entire day.

And that would be a “normal” day. I have had days where I clock in and have legitimately nothing to do, rotting in my chair for 8 and a half hours, doom-scrolling on my phone (My screen time has legitimately increased by multiple hours every day compared to when I was unemployed), to reading r/programming, when I don’t even like programming THAT much.

To make things worse, thanks to the great invention of the open office, I can’t just put on some youtube videos and do whatever I want, I must pretend that I am somehow working. The open office design really is evil - I am working in a literal panopticon, where I am constantly under surveillance by my coworkers, my boss, or other people in general, and similarly I’m watching them and seeing what they are doing.

But, at this point I scarcely could care less. I am, in fact, writing this blog post at work, 3:30 in the afternoon. Other things I’ve done to try passing the time include reading books (in PDF form, multiple books finished at this point), doom-scrolling wiki pages, attempting to learn Rust, and in a fit of TRUE despair, I even completed a few leetcode puzzles.

Don’t get me wrong, I never expected work to be all sunshine and rainbows - I knew it would be boring sometimes, I knew my bosses will eventually say something PROFOUNDLY stupid, I knew I wouldn’t be making bank unlike people in the West, but sitting here, fully knowing that 6+ hours of my daily life is WASTED is one of the worst feelings I’ve ever experienced in my life. I could be working on my own projects, developing as a person, relaxing, or doing ANYTHING else, and that would have NO impact on my productivity as a developer, it is this waste of human potential that eats away at my soul.

Right now, I’m already very burnt out, and the spiritual damage I’ve taken doing this has already made me a worse person - I’m much more jaded towards everything, tired all the time, and the amount of my life wasted has made me much more depressed compared to when I was in school. (Where I was also depressed, but not as much, and for worse reasons… Let’s not talk about it.)

I don’t know what’s in store for me in the future, if nothing changes in the next 1-2 years, I will quit my job, and hopefully look for something better (Another dev gig, or getting somewhere in gaming). One good thing from my job is that I have been learning quite a bit with these projects, so landing another software developer job would not be too difficult.

Either way, I’m done for now, and it’s only 4PM, another hour of my life to waste and I get to go home.

Written 02.01.2024