It sounds like this person has a hobby that they want to get paid to do.
Which is fine, if you can find a way to make it happen.
But for the majority of us, work means work. It's not always aligned with your own interests, it can feel like drudgery, and we accept the uncomfortable reality that our labor is probably making somebody else richer than it's making us.
I'm a fan of cooperatives, where at least you know that you have part ownership over your endeavors. But even then, you often need to work to satisfy clients and customers, rather than to satisfy your own interests.
Ultimately, I've learned to separate my hobby interest in programming and my work. I accept that work will always feel like work, but a few things (like good coworkers) can make a big difference. I try to make the experience tolerable for myself and my coworkers, and then I do what I really love on the side.
My interpretation was slightly different than yours. I read it as if they have no issue going to work and being paid to be a developer. However, they didn’t want to feel like they needed to constantly be leveling up and working towards the next rung on the ladder. Many companies have written or unwritten rules about leveling up or being pushed out and they screen for people hungry to grow. The author doesn’t seem interested in that trajectory.
I suppose in other industries this isn’t always expected. For example, you can easily be a mid-level accountant for your entire career without the company or industry expecting you to be on track to be their next CFO.
Maybe the author should be looking at medium/big non-tech companies that have been around a long time, have aging codebases, and aren’t innovating in the same way as as big tech or startup. I suspect they might find developers who have been there for many years and are pretty complacent.
I find the author's paragraph about small companies weird: other pages on their site indicate they are at a small 60 person professional services company. Their boss probably doesn't have a yacht. My boss doesn't at a large corporation, and I'm pretty sure his boss and his boss don't either.
Their resume indicates they have 1 year of experience. The unwritten rules about leveling up I think generally amount to reaching a first level "senior" (~5 YoE) where you can be expected to do things like figure out how to do a task and coordinate with others on your own instead of needing a mentor/lead to guide you all the time. Like it's more learning how to work with some technical stuff thrown in. I've been pretty direct with my managers throughout my 30s that I've got other priorities in life now (kids), and I'm not looking to grow and be more ambitious and all that, and I haven't found that to be an issue. Your manager is a person (for now. Good luck to gen alpha). They get it. Caveat: you still need to care, understand what you're doing at work, and do a good job. Don't phone it in, but you don't need to be chasing promotions either once you have some basic competence. I still get good performance reviews. We just have an understanding that I'm not looking at "the next step" or working toward any career goal.
Maybe the author's problem is that their workplace is basically a small body shop and isn't helping them grow? I don't know; never heard of them. They may want to find a more product development oriented company/team (so not just short term projects/contracts), perhaps like you say medium or large so there's more room for mentorship.
I see one of the projects was working on some thing used by a bunch of bike shops. That sounds like serving a direct need some small business had? One way to be both happier and better in your work is to understand why you're doing it. Why did a customer spend a not insignificant amount of money to have this thing developed? Why would someone spend their money to pay you to help them? Try to always have a good understanding of that wherever you are.
> My boss doesn't at a large corporation, and I'm pretty sure his boss and his boss don't either.
Don't have is pretty different from could not possibly afford though
Unless your company is extremely weird, I doubt that many layers of management could not afford a yacht if they wanted one
Then again, the bar for that is actually pretty low.
Source: My dad is a tool salesman, and also was the president of the local yacht club a couple of years ago. Actually thinking about it, that yacht club is surprisingly blue collar
I wouldn't ve surprised if white collar people hold off buying yachts unless they can also afford staff to pilot and manage them
There are tons of devs in same bracket, just not the most vocal ones. I could be described as one of them. In most corporations big enough, this is the only way to keep doing development instead of management, unless they have the grow-or-get-fired mentality.
As soon as I would step up one more level, I would be often responsible for team deliveries. Another step and team may not get bigger but various political pressures grow immensely, its much easier to get fired there, dealing with various types of sociopaths is semi-constant. While compensation not that much. And most work time would be spent on meetings and working in MS Office products, not that much development, hardly any creative work.
At the end its just an empty label that is up to you to consider for its worth, to join the rat race or not. Even with my lower position I've managed (rather successfully) teams when needed. I get cca same compensation as 2 levels above with less tenure at the company, way more than any peers and in highest paid region in Europe. I get 10 weeks of paid leave by company due to working on 90% contract. So what is there to strive for - much higher daily stress? Having after-work or weekend calls? Unpaid overtime/weekend work that come with higher positions, although required rarely? Work moving into boring endless calls and discussions, 0 creativity unless you consider churning out excel spreadsheet or powerpoints a creative endeavor? Hardly achievements, rather destructive failures.
No thank you, if I can make the choice. Quality of life, happiness and all that.
The vast majority of the world population, and the vast majority of all people throughout history have not made their choices of job based on the same criteria some of us who are more privileged do today such as wanting to work on something they value.
A job is and always has been a means to live for the majority of people on this Earth. Feigning a mentality of always wanting to grow is part of the act when it comes to corporate life. But even that in itself (corporate life) is a privilege compared to the grueling work most people throughout history have done.
As a person that likes programming but doesn't like some parts of the job it helps me to think about this:
"You are paid for the parts of the work you don't like".
The parts you like are the things you do after work for free as a hobby (think personal projects, playing with a new language, dabbling in microcontrollers...)
It is possible for a business to pay someone for the parts they don't like even when the parts they don't like do not contribute to profit or financial success in some way. This is not only demoralizing, it is usually boring, and usually not a good caraeer strategy because it is not sustainable.
I feel like "My Head Count" is more important than outcomes at many companies.
Shameless plug, but I just wrote up an article about very similar issues, seems like me and OP are also around the same age. For me this realization was really freeing - bashing my head against "the market" for years, fighting with inconsistent values and expectations. Since I have accepted programming to be a hobby and looking for vocations without all the corporate shingles I am so much happier.
This is true, however, I think that software engineering is an exception there. There are very few professions other than software development (maybe the arts?) where a growth mindset and tinkering on stuff in your free time seems to be mandatory. You don't see accountants or roofers skilling up in their free time. Furthermore, upskilling is less about pursuing one's interests than pursuing the interests of the market and I think this may be the issue for OP.
To gently push back, there are absolutely accountants and roofers who dedicate their free time upskilling or in adjacent hobbies. Many (perhaps most?) other fields have are conferences and journals, certifications, prestige jobs and grindhouse jobs, side hustles, and all the other trappings that feel unique to us. I'm not saying the distribution curve is the same, but it's easy to think this field is more unique than it really is.
And to the counterexample, the country is full of developers who just want to do their 40 hours and go home to their entirely unrelated life and hobbies. Incidentally, I have a friend who just got a job like this. He's the only developer in a regional materials company, and he loves being done with work at 5 (usually closer to 4) so he can go hang out with his kid.
Sounds like the author is experiencing disillusion with the working world. (Not surprised to see that happening soon after their graduation. I had a similar experience myself.)
Here’s a parable that seems to illustrate what it looks like to find fulfillment in one’s work.[1] It helped me see the world differently.
> Three bricklayers are asked: “What are you doing?” The first says, “I am laying bricks.” The second says, “I am building a church.” And the third says, “I am building the house of God.” The first bricklayer has a job. The second has a career. The third has a calling.
And the trick is - from the outside, each performs the same work. But how each person views their work determines how much fulfillment they derive from it (and whether they succeed at reaching their long term goals).
Rather than searching for some magical job that fulfills you in all the ways you're not now, I would suggest focusing on how to make your current job more fulfilling first. Craft your role around the pieces of the work that move you.
If you can’t do that, no new role will fill that yearning, that emptiness, for you. You’ll just be searching your whole life for something that doesn’t exist, until you eventually give up.
Sure, a new job might be more interesting to you and might fit you better - for a little while - but all jobs, no matter how exciting they sound, are still jobs. They still have sucky parts that drain you and disillusion you and will make you miserable if you let them. And you need to learn how to persevere through that to find something to pull you out of it.
What I’m saying is: it might not be a job problem… it might be a you problem.
Three software engineers are asked: "What are you doing?" The first says, "I am writing software." The second says, "I am building a yoga instruction application." And the third says, "I'm making the world a better place through canonical data models to communicate between endpoints."
OP provided details that make the analogy feel distant.
That's not just graduates. The main difference with the gen Z if OP is even one, is that they have a much longer future than those who already worked decades. Mature workers would just accept to do the remaining legs even if meaning keeps falling. The young have bigger stakes, projecting the trajectory leads to an absolute no go, for them.
> I graduated in July 2024 from Avans with a degree in Computer Science.
But I have to confess, I'm not sure I understand your comment if you wouldn't mind clarifying.
I wouldn't suggest people (like mature workers) just accept the misery and run out the clock. But I do think it is extremely important to be able to find the meaning in your work, rather than hoping there is a magical other job out there that otherwise fulfills you.
Ok, so OP doesn't like working to make their boss rich. "Start your own company," you might say. But after the honeymoon period wanes, you might find that "I don't like working for someone" turns into "I don't like having to find all these customers myself" or "I don't like having to spend all my time doing paperwork or talking to investors or wearing a million hats or..."
My point is that there will always be reasons to be miserable at any job, so you need to be able to find the pieces that are meaningful to you.
To stretch the analogy a bit to relationships... if OP is saying, "I don't like my relationship with my current partner" I'm saying, "Sure, you can find a new partner if that's what you want. And maybe you should. But just know, there is no magic partner out there that fulfills all of your needs. You're going to have a relationship with a real, human person, and your new partner will have things you love about them and things that drive you crazy, just like the last one. You need to know how to build a meaningful relationship and find fulfillment in it, otherwise, there is no magic partner that will fill that hole in you."
From OP:
> I want to work on personal projects that I find important and help out other projects, that's it. If rent wasn't an issue I'd be working full-time on open-source
That's going to have exciting parts and miserable parts just like their current role, so they will be quite disappointed after the honeymoon period wears off if they aren't able to find meaning in the drudgery. If OP is looking at this as their magical next partner, they will certainly be disappointed when they realize that their new partner snores and leaves the toilet seat up and leaves dirty dishes in the sink.
> The young have bigger stakes, projecting the trajectory leads to an absolute no go, for them.
If you told the young graduate me where I would end up in 15 years, I wouldn't have believed it.
The young may have a long trajectory ahead of them, but they are absolutely bad at planning and predicting where they will end up (unless you have rich parents, which means you'll probably end up okay regardless)
What would the third brick layer say if in fact they were building a prison? Or something less positive? I don't really understand who is the one I'm supposed to emulate here.
Ever seen the movie OfficeSpace? It's funny as hell partly because there's a lot of truth to it. Here's the interesting part it was released in 1999 and the dot-com bubble didn't burst until March 2000. It didn't do well when it was released, probably because everyone was busy snorting toxic positivity, but it endured longer than Enron.
I’ll put in a plug for nonprofits. In the U.S. there are thousands of them and they all need tech workers of some kind. Some have digital products like web applications and mobile apps. Some just have a Wordpress site and basic IT needs. In any case it is probably not going to be cutting edge tech.
But aligning with values might be easier since that is what a nonprofit is all about. It’s an organization that is going all-in on one particular specific set of values, to the exclusion of commercial goals like making profit for owners or shareholders.
Which means that they also don’t pay as well (nearly as well) as private big tech companies. If nothing else, working at a nonprofit will help you realize how important money vs mission is to you, in a very personal way. You’ll either say “I can live on this” or “this sucks, I can’t stand being underpaid.”
Note that not all nonprofits are charities. There are thousands of trade associations, chambers of commerce, economic development councils, etc. in the U.S. And of course all sorts of political committees and orgs across the spectrum.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote that an aspiring writer should take any writing job he or she can get. A hack job will at least keep the creative wheels turning. I think the same applies to software development jobs. Take one where you can learn something, hone your chops. Doesn't have to be your passion, because turning an abstract conception into working software is intrinsically satisfying to someone who appreciates that particular form of magic.
Do your own projects on the side and keep your antenna peeled for other opportunities more in line with your own life goals.
Yeah, it's a great idea. If nothing else, taking a job that is non-ideal will expose you to real people with real problem, even if the domain you all are working on is boring/sucky/whatever. Notice when people complain about stuff, try to see the patterns, ask probing questions what could have helped them, and eventually you'll discover patterns of problems that you could potentially solve by leaving and building your own thing.
* have their own niche so they don't have to fight for survival but don't have to aggressively expand either
if you know where to look.
The caveat is that they probably are not hiring many people right now, and the bar is not low at all (even though most employees are mediocre). In the current market, many people want to work at those companies.
My advice to anyone who wants to work at a place like this but who doesn't have connections is to try to find a good recruiting agency. An agency put me in a business like this, and the business hired me after 6 months.
It was one of the best places I've worked. People were kind, had families, and went home after their 40 hours. I stayed for 6 years before deciding to strike out on my own.
A mature company that makes something real, like a manufacturing business. A lot of stuff being made depends on a combination of hardware and software. The software side can't grow exponentially because the hardware can't, and because it doesn't experience the same level of investor interest as the "tech" industry. Yet it serves a useful purpose and often brings unexpected but interesting problems to solve.
I work at a company in the American Midwest that makes measurement equipment. A friend programs robots for a high tech factory. We're both musicians (and cyclists) and play in a band together.
What other industries but tech do any of us bother to talk about finding jobs that align with our values? (Outside of avoiding illegal or immoral work.) I think we were incredibly fortunate before ZIRP went away that we had much greater opportunity to choose companies that appealed to us.
I think it’s in part due to the fact that we’re expected to expend effort in these jobs thinking “big picture” about the roadmap and planning.
If you’re at a job where you get handed jira tickets and crunch bugs, you can probably ignore the big picture purpose and purpose and just be a cog that pushes code.
But if your job keeps telling you to think about why and how to improve the product, you will immediately see your values butting up against management’s values. This is a recipe for disillusionment because it causes you to think about what you value and then you get sucker punched when you see decisions being made with a different set of values by a machine that disregards your own.
I think more than you think? I like to believe that pretty much any career can have moments of “I’m proud to be part of this organization.” And “I can’t be part of this anymore.”
We’re not special in that regard. Our challenge lies in the sheer breadth of options available to us; but even that’s not unique: managing non profits, janitors, HR professionals, and lawyers also can work with a breathtaking array of companies.
Really the only folks who don’t have that issue to the same extent are tradespeople: carpenters, electricians, plumbers; but even they can say no to a job for a person or company they don’t want to support.
Normally when you plumb a building, you're probably not working on an application that performs sentiment analysis on call workers, or finding a way to become a middleman in financial transactions, or you're probably not aiding the intelligence agencies of a world power.
I choose every single job according to my values. I'd easily pick jobs where I earn less solely due to the company operating on ethical grounds. I did that throughout both of my careers (retail & tech) and will continue to do so.
Easiest choice of my life. How can one live with themselves knowing you fuck over people?
I can relate to, never cared about any of circus around job applications, unfortunely we are not expected to say we do work for money, we have to want to change the world, leave our mark in the universe.
> My first thought is to lean towards small companies that are not looking to grow. They are hard to find, and usually have no time/energy to "train" me.
If they're not looking to grow themselves then why would they invest in growing you?
But they still need to replace employees who retire and such.
EDIT: The reality behind the 'no time/energy to "train" me' is often that small companies do too little hiring for IT-type positions to support any sort of formal training, or even coherent documentation of their current stuff. (It may be quite different if you'd been hired as their junior-most bookkeeper or lathe operator.) And their tiny IT staff needs to be jack-of-all-trades problem-fixers - so if you need formal structures and training to get things done, then you're a poor fit anyway.
One is bootstrap. Do what you care about, and make a dent. If all you want is to be able to sustain a frugal life then this takes less effort, but not that much less than earning far more.
The other option is to join a (true) non profit. Some of them do seek growth, but some don't.
This seems like a very negative (and wrong?) perspective. Why do you think you’ll earn the same in 5 years? Do you think you’ve learned everything you can about software and business? Companies aren’t hiring you just to complete a specific task that they have right now.
My advice is to move out of any big cities to some place with cheap rent and get a job unrelated to programming. Be a plumber, electrician or something and work for yourself, not for some company, so you can adjust your own work hours. Do programming as a hobby.
An analogy I like to use is that I enjoy painting - I've become pretty good at landscapes, portraits, still life... and what most employers are looking for is someone who can paint walls, because that's what they or their customers need. Computers to us are a hobby - for most others they are a tool; if you're going to earn money this way then you need to focus more on delivering value to the people who pay you, and try to find someone who will reward you in line with the value you provide. That usually means first and foremost delivering the required functionality within the required time frame; technical excellence takes (usually a distant) second place, unless you're lucky enough to work on something really interesting.
So what do you do, as an enthusiast? The way I have survived is to make the work interesting in small ways - try different techniques, libraries, algorithms; it depends how much time pressure you're under, as to how much leeway you have. Take advantage of training opportunities - there is always a lot to learn, even if you think you're pretty good already, and more skills improves your chances of landing better jobs in the future. Take pride in your work, even if no-one else notices.
Yes, the corporate life is a grind, but so are most jobs, and at least you get a comfortable chair. Make the best of it or do something else.
I work for a non-profit, and have found a very good place where we are treated well and where I can work on mostly interesting stuff mostly in the ways that seem best to me (not all non-profits are like this, for sure) -- and also make probably 1/2 to 1/3rd (or less?) what some of you make.
I worked for non-profits my whole career, and the hiring scene is completely fucked right now.
I've never, in nearly 20 years in the sector, been unemployed for more than a few months at a time. It's been a year, half my LinkedIn contacts are also looking for work.
I took a 66% pay cut to work at a nonprofit once, and it was hell.
The problem is that not many folks are willing to take a pay cut like that, so the level of employee talent was abysmal.
Years and years of the “Dead Sea” effect made it a thoroughly incompetent work environment where they were oblivious to how bad it was because the managers had never seen what’s real job was like before
Yeah, I've experienced a couple different kinds of non-profit hell, but been lucky enough to find a good place. So maybe it's no easier to find a good place in nonprofits than anywhere else, I dunno!
Of all the soul-sucking jobs out there, software dev is one of the better ones I would say. You're getting paid to think, to tell machines what to do. There's a huge portion of the workforce that are paid to become machine-like themselves.
I really want to adopt the world view of this developer, but the more I read it, the more this comes across as someone relatively new to a particular industry who really doesn’t care about his job. I can empathize with part of this - who doesn’t want to live in the rat race, but this feels entitled more then questioning. That said, if his boss has a yacht, maybe there is a more money at this company then I assumed.
So where do you go, if you don’t care about growth? it feels like a government job (especially in Europe), a academic, or a factory line worker in Southeast Asia might be a better fit then software developer.
>I'm in a position where I don't have enough years of experience to comfortably choose where I work. I'm basically forced to join a company as a junior and "climb the ladder". I still don't know why I would care to.
To earn more?
>In 5 years I will still earn the same and my boss will be sitting comfortably in his (already bought) yacht.
If you have no earnings progression in 5 years as someone who graduated in 2024 you must be doing something VERY wrong, no matter the field.
The author will be embarrassed to recall this 10 years from now.
Anyway, to me it seems that the best strategy is to gather 2-3 years of experience and only then start job hunting for real. Yes, the current situation sucks, but so does the job market. I wouldn't have advised hopping after just a year even back in the ZIRP days, much less nowadays.
Also bold move to publish such a post and publicly advertise who one is working for. That's going to result in snarky comments about yachts from whoever is up there at the very least.
I see people grow in two directions. Some grow upward, becoming manager, director, VP, etc. Others grow outward, branching into new technologies and disciplines, while remaining an IC.
Regardless of which direction you grow, I think give. enough time, the quality of your work will speak for itself.
I've watched too many people try to run the rat race of moving up the later. Staying at a job/role for only 18 months just to hop to the next thing. They lack depth in their area and eventually bottom out completely.
I understand that the author is struggling in the current job market. I can't even imagine how hard it is right now with entry-level positions.
However, dismissing the overhead associated with such positions is a very simplistic view. It isn't about writing "bad code" or "good code". Rather, it is about solving complex tasks and maintaining huge systems – that's the real challenge. Hands-on experience or proper guidance can save you a lot of time.
So: OP wants to grow, but at his own pace and in his own way. He values transparency and autonomy. He doesn't mention salary as being particularly important, but does want a good work/life balance.
I wonder if he's considered a job as a developer in the Dutch government?
Sounds like you have no motivation and want to coast along. You can only do that in software with the right skills. You have to develop skill - you know, “grow.”
If you like stagnant work, you have to find a company requiring that kind of work. Probably not in the software industry.
You're saying the quiet part out loud. It's fine to believe such things, but you have to pretend not to, while using growth for your own interests: demanding more money for some work, or completing the work faster and using the free time for other purposes (entertainment, working another job, etc).
> If rent wasn't an issue I'd be working full-time on open-source and spend my spare time cycling.
I feel like this is a really detached piece on the realities of work and capitalism. Did a decade of prosperity in software industry made people forget what work is?
In capitalism (I mean in a job) you are paid to build what others want you to build. You are selling your time and effort. Either that or you build your own thing and monetize it. If "rent wasn't an issue" most people would paint, dance make art, explore, play, create. But for most people, rent, food and healthcare are the issue...
My recommendation: find and cultivate vision, then view the $JOB not as separate from _your_ work towards _your_ vision, but part of it. Its the part that funds you enough to continue to progress on your own plan.
Here's how I think of it: If I were a painter, I would paint, explore and experiment in my free time because its what I want to do. Maybe, as a painter, my vision is to improve the state of the art of some kind of dye or brush or canvas and that is my vision. But! That does not mean that I cannot be commissioned to work on a mural or put on a retainer for a museum or something else. The only difference is that in the latter you are being explicitly payed by a patron to produce something they want. And furthermore I need that work, I work for myself but still need projects to bring in money to do the work I care about.
I view my software dev as the same thing. I have a vision of where I want to be, what I want to do, and how I want to contribute to advance the state of the art of the things I care about. I do not care, and am unconcerned about the corporate needs of the thing I care about, its for me and for people like me. My $JOB is just one part of that larger goal and the path I walk towards that goal. Its an important part, sure, and I show up and give a good faith effort and my expert opinion, but its not the part that enriches me as much as my personal stuff. The distinction is that the $JOB is not separate, its a necessary and important part of my plan to execute on my vision.
Once you have vision I think you'll find its much easier to find similar people who want to work on the same things you want to work on. And I think you'll find it much easier to tolerate capitalist minutiae because you will reduce the things you need from $JOB.
government jobs or at state-owned companies might be your only choice.
Or maybe landing on a lucky spot of a run of the mill consultancy company where you're left at god's will until you retire. Their attrition is so high layoffs are rare, at least where I live (YMMV)
It's easy to have strong feelings about this post because, well, we all have to pay bills and often times aren't the biggest fans of the means (work) we have to do that. My immediate reaction, like many here, is to just go "well tough luck kid".
But I'd like to offer some sympathy. I certainly have grappled with thoughts like these and have also been guilty of posting a rant on HN at a moment when I've been down!
I do wonder if part of this is influenced by the AI craze that has companies substituting junior engineers for LLMs and how hard it is to get hired fresh out of university these days. I do feel for those who genuinely want to grow and become better engineers since it does seem like companies are betting less and less on developing young talent.
Then there's the whole philosophical discussion about work and meaning and everything. Thoughts around this are certainly very present in our minds during our 20s (P.S. I'm still in this decade of my life too). There are many alternative paths, but they often aren't for everyone. I know people who live with very little, and don't consider steady work a high priority at all. Many of them are happy, but most of us couldn't cope with the lifestyle. You then have the path of starting your own thing, but that path is usually more painful and terrible for your finances too.
It's all tradeoffs. It sucks, it hurts. And I'm sorry that the market is terrible right now for those starting out. Good luck.
Working on in-house software can be satisfying: no marketing BS, work closely with users in developing software that helps them perform their job, rarely have unrealistic schedules or demands.
Its lies all the way up the chain and its just part of the game.
The hiring manager is lying to you
Your boss is lying to you
The CEO is lying to you
All everyone cares about is money 99% of the time. Anything else is just a lie. We are not family, and most people give a rats ass about any companies "goal". We just want a paycheck and most of us want a bigger paycheck than last time all the way up the chain.
Sure, but one could imagine that there are people working at the supermarket who would also rather do personal stuff or go cycling. But there they are, serving you.
I've just spent the last 15 years working in academia—not as an academic myself, but supporting them as, essentially, a satellite IT department of one within the Psychology department at my small university.
They expect me to generally keep up with my skills, and learn new things as the needs of their research dictate, but not to be constantly upskilling, constantly pushing for promotions, because...there aren't any. It's a singular position with zero logical progression from or to it.
The pay is definitely substandard (and I've told them, now that I'm moving to Ireland, that they will need to fix that to attract anyone remotely near my calibre), and the rural location means there's not a lot to do in the vicinity, but the benefits are good, the job security is fantastic, the faculty are wonderful people, and the environment is, overall, very chill and friendly.
In a world of lead actors, there’s nothing wrong with being a career supporting actor.
Same is true for software. There’s so many smaller, rural companies that lack the knowledge. There’s so many out of the box opportunities to add a little IoT into the field. There’s so many little wins to be had NOT following the boomer path of career servitude to an omnipotent leader Boss. You don’t have to go down the that road, you can always pivot or be supporting those efforts.
Setting aside that it's a continent with widely varied tech scenes (UK vs Sweden vs Netherlands vs Greece vs France vs Bulgaria; the startup scenes in some of those are pretty impressive and if they had the same amount of capital thrown at them, they would rivaling SF), even the most legaciest of legacy companies (think 200 year old insurance companies or similarly aged industrial concerns) are modernising everything. Yes, there is more employment stability on average, and you won't get fired from a big bank for being slightly behind the bleeding edge, but if you refuse to learn and there is no static niche you're already good at (e.g. mainframes), you won't have a good time.
Ok as you say yourself, you need work to pay the bills. That’s fine. Now what you want to look for is not what a company does, but who your teammates are. You’re going to spend a lot of time working, so the most important is that you like the people and people like you, especially if you don’t want to play the corporate game.
If you’re working with people who are fun to be with, it doesn’t matter if your work consists in circling numbers like they do at Lumon.
Work is not fun in itself, that’s why they’re different words. As my boss used to say: if you enjoy it, it’s not work. But if you can have fun while doing the work, it’s a lot better.
So yes go find nice people who are fun to be around, avoid the assholes and big corp and you’ll be fine.
Usually smaller companies are better, ones that have focus on good stuff, like a company that makes toys, or medical things.
What I chose to do is go to small finance firms. I get much much less than the CEO, but much more than I would anywhere else. That allows me to free up some time to do other stuff. There are a lot of nice people in finance (mostly cause everyone is well paid so noone really complains). 2 problems: sometimes people in finance are too money-driven, and that can be annoying, and the learning curve is steep.
That isn't realistic at all. Customers change and their needs change with them. Sometimes customers die. Products that stay the same change their fit over time and eventually fall away. A business that is not growing is dying. That is okay. It can be fine to let things fall away when they have run their course, but some prefer to endure. But the absolute fact remains that a business that is not growing is dying.
It seems like what you are perceiving is a common market delusion. An unfortunate fact of hiring is those workers who are not employed and satisfied are often less experienced and skilled than those who are well placed and not looking. The same logic applies the other way around to companies. Those who are looking to hire juniors who haven't yet found their way are often companies that lack a solid center and just want to squeeze some money out of whatever customers they can find using whatever tool is at hand.
With the current state of things if your needs are truly modest then there is a good chance that you can get by with some independent offering. Find something you are interested in and make it work for someone willing to pay for it. Make sure to lean more into sales and actually making things work for customers than the engineer tendency to envision mechanisms and focus entirely on that. This way you can set the balance for yourself, and I can absolutely guarantee that you will experience the realities of growth or death up close, though in a more personal way that you can take control of and manage for yourself using criteria that have meaning for you.
Which is fine, if you can find a way to make it happen.
But for the majority of us, work means work. It's not always aligned with your own interests, it can feel like drudgery, and we accept the uncomfortable reality that our labor is probably making somebody else richer than it's making us.
I'm a fan of cooperatives, where at least you know that you have part ownership over your endeavors. But even then, you often need to work to satisfy clients and customers, rather than to satisfy your own interests.
Ultimately, I've learned to separate my hobby interest in programming and my work. I accept that work will always feel like work, but a few things (like good coworkers) can make a big difference. I try to make the experience tolerable for myself and my coworkers, and then I do what I really love on the side.
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