try out some manual labor on your own time comrade
i know it sounds wild, i exercised to fight depression and then got into construction as it was basically being payed to work out
its likely not going to pay you much but I'd suggest heading to a temp agency that lets you just show up instead of being called in
i still hit up menial labor jobs i find even though i have two (maybe 3 if i get back into entertainment again) jobs on my free days
I suspect you're suffering from burnout. It's normal in our industry, because our industry is horseshit. You can recover.
Take time to do literally anything else, then sit down and start working through it. Ideally you can find a project you're interested in and/or that can help the world. When you hit whatever makes you start staring into space and bouncing off the task, stop for a bit and do grounding exercises (mentally check off what each of your senses is saying), set a goal for how much further into the task you want to go before taking a break, then do that. Basically treat it like it's PTSD because they're extremely similar.
A surprisingly large chunk of the industry is composed of programmers working a few years, quitting a year or two, working a few years, and repeating. Because the industry is horseshit and this is how it outsources treating the psychological damage it inflicts. If you can find a different way to support yourself then awesome. But you're stuck in here, then you can at least do union agitation when you're in and other activism when you're out.
Repeatedly quitting and coming back is particularly common at Google and Microsoft.
Quitting once and trying to escape the industry, city, and plane of existence is particularly common at Amazon.
Google lets you skip your interview if you come back within a year. Some Microsoft contractors have to routinely quit and rejoin for contract reasons. It's a thing.
I'm a little hungover so I briefly thought you were suggesting to become a waiter at the Rainforest Cafe.
Lol damn i didn't put that together till the comment below, totally thought the rainforest cafe was gonna be the start of something lol
Same boat as you, comrade. I literally have zero motivation to do anything to make anyone else rich and I'm honestly not interested in money other than just providing myself with basic necessities.
There are tons of houses just sitting there empty. If taking land for free is your game, that's still totally do-able. Go find a mansion to squat in or something.
Holy shit, you just described my past couple of months in a nutshell. My team consisted of me, another mid-level developer, and our manager, whose management style is basically controlled chaos with ADHD characteristics. I'm fairly new, and neither of them have any actual software engineering background -- they were just former backend Web guys who could "computer good" and somehow ended up handling integration development across some ungodly number of COTS software systems. I have to give the manager credit, he's at least willing to listen to suggestions and try things out, but holy hell is it irritating when we already have such a high break/fix workload that we can't get any new projects rolled out, and he's out there selling management on a massive new stream of incoming projects.
The whole codebase is full of rot, there is little to no semblance of a "process" or dev lifecycle, maintenance and testing are nonexistent, we're doing our own server admin and configuration management -- manually -- and every goddamned day for the past two weeks, there have been anywhere from three to seven meetings that for some reason I just had to be involved in. On top of this, ADHD boss (no offense intended toward any comrades here who actually have ADHD; I'm just saying the guy is easily distracted) keeps instituting new policies, like making us duplicate all of our payroll time tracking across multiple systems, or spitballing a pile of project deadlines with no basis in reality and pushing that as a schedule (complete with getting dinged on your performance review if something blows up), or suddenly having a half-cocked project requirements intake "procedure" that only fills maybe half of our actual needs, and just means more and more fucking meetings.
I've been on the verge of a mental breakdown for the past week and a half, and if not for COVID, I probably would be in the process of bailing for greener pastures. And then learning to hate wherever I end up after that. If I didn't have a mountain of debt and a family to support, I don't know that I'd stick with software dev anymore. Certainly not the platform that we're working with -- eugh.
I get that not every org is like this (shit, some are even worse), but I think the bottom line is that, if you enjoy programming and problem-solving and that little endorphin rush that trips in your brain when you run a unit test suite and get 100% passing tests and beautiful green code coverage bars, doing it for a living will eventually ruin it for you. When I started with these assholes, I would have considered myself an enthusiast. That's gone now. It's dead. And it's not coming back. I wanted to try my hand at mobile game dev, but I can't even bring myself to fire up an IDE on my off hours since about April or so, because my home PC is also my work PC, and I can't separate bad screen from good screen when they're the same fucking thing.
Anyway, if you're getting the hell out of the field, more power to you -- I understand where you're coming from, and would probably do the same if I could. It's not worth the constant stress, given how many shops have absolutely no process maturity and just want to make you work three developers' jobs for one developer's pay, and will say "fuck you" to any kind of maintenance reduction effort or codebase refactoring/cleanup that doesn't immediately reflect a return on capital value or increase profit margins.
...Sorry for the wall of text. I think I've been cooped up for too long.
I feel you, comrade. In my case, adding to the frustration of doing something this unsatisfactory is the fact that I'm constantly at war with my social anxiety to try and do even the most basic volunteering.
Try game development for a while? Do you know C#? If so then I recommend you try Unity, it is realy fun to try stuff out. I am a hobbyist myself. Learning something, having a goal is a key component of intrinsic(personal) motivation. Extrinsic motivation(money, fame, pleasing someone else, being forced out of necessity etc...) is also valid, but is much more likely to be the reason of demotivation. If you have no intrinsic motivation, then extrinsic motivation will feel meaningless and pointless, you shouldn't care about money(beyond your needs)/fame if you are unhappy and unfulfilled right?
Anyway yes yes gamers are cancerous, but the game dev space isn't that bad, if all you are consuming is Unity tutorials on YT then there isn't much room for some techbro to #FreeHK every 5 minutes in your face, in my experience the game dev YT channels and the tutorial web pages I've seen(the good ones obviously) keep it mostly clean and concise. Game jams are good too for practice depending how social you are, though I have no experience with those.
The bonus is that game dev is fairly "international" so to say, you are very likely to meet people from outside the US so even if you meet some liberals they wont be as bad.
You could try Unreal too if you fancy C++, though I am not as familiar with that space. But no I am not suggesting you'll become a successful dev or anything like that, but there is something to be said about working on something you actualy own etc... Whether you decide to take it seriously is up to you.
