I could use some honest advice from experienced programmers and engineers.

Old person programmer checking in.

if you sat me down and asked me about algorithms or anything else I did to get my job in the first place I would be clueless.

Don’t sweat it. No one knows how the fuck computers work.

Anyone who thinks they actually know, isnt educated enough to understand about the bits they don’t understand.

I can solve problems and always get my work done, but I don’t even know the language/framework I use daily well enough to explain what’s going on, I can just do things.

Nice. You’ve got the important part. Ride that until the end.

I don’t think I have imposter syndrome, I think I really might have let any skill I had atrophy.

It’s not impostor syndrome when you’re only 2 years into your career.

If you feel like you don’t know jack shit compared to what I know, after decades… that’s because you don’t know jack shit compared to what I know. There’s nothing wrong with that. Someday I’ll be pissing myself in a nursing home run by automation you maintain. We all get our turn.

I’m the meantime, lucky for you, I can’t be arsed to work more than 40 hours in a week, so there’s plenty of work left to do while you learn.

And I’ll retire soon, and I’l promise I’ll do you a solid and leave decades of my own mistakes and missteps out there for you to earn $$$$ cleaning up after. You’re welcome… I guess.

I used to enjoy programming as a hobby in my spare time, but in two years I’ve opened the IDE on my personal machine no more than twice.

This is very normal. Welcome to the big leagues. If you do something you love for your job, eventually it’s still just a job.

People talk about all the side projects they have, but I have none. I feel too stressed out from the job to do any programming outside of work, even though I love it.

This is very normal for your current stage of your career.

If you stick with it, it gets better when you get to someday become a self-important slob like me who only works on really interesting problems.

And how do I only work on really interesting problems? I make my boss hire a few junior developers and I delegate all the boring stuff to them.

It’s a pretty sweet deal for at least one of us. (Who for, varies by the day, really.)

I feel like I can’t level up from a Junior to Senior because I either don’t have the headspace or the will to do so.

I guarantee that you’ve learned way more than you think. If you stick with it, you’ll have a random moment sometime soon when someone else just can’t wrap their head around a concept you take for granted.

It doesn’t help that the job I’ve had has taught me very little and my dev team has been a shitshow from the beginning.

That sucks, sorry. There are more shitty developer teams than good ones. If you stick with it, and do some strategic job hopping, you can find the good ones.

This is a tough time to switch jobs in tech, I wouldn’t blame you for not wanting to mess with it.

At the moment I have an offer on the table to do a job that isn’t engineering (but still tech) and it surprisingly pays more.

Hell yes! Fuck your current employer for underpaying you!

And you already admitted your current team is shit.

Go take that money!

but I fear I might go down this route and never be able to come back to engineering. Not that I’m sure I want to.

Your developer skills won’t vanish. Trust your future self.

If someone asks why you spent time as a non-developer “those assholes weren’t paying a fair wage” is a fine answer.

It might sound defeatist but I don’t think I’ll ever be a top 5% or even 25% engineer.

As a top 5% engineer (with a trophy for humility), it’s not all they promised.

It turns out there’s still plenty I don’t know, and I spend much more of my time confused and frustrated than I did before. The cool part is that I’m now confused and frustrated by really interesting problems.

I could be average with a lot of work, but not great.

I pay top dollar for average programmers. I’m not hiring right now, but let’s stay in touch.

There’s a lot of coders out there without the self awareness to realize what they don’t know. Those programmers never get any better, and never reach average.

(Contrasted with myself, who, as I said, have several awards for excessive humility in spite of my undeniable genius. /s)

I could potentially be great in the new field I’m being recruited for, but that’s also hard to say without being in the job.

Go find out!

Beware though, when they find out you can code, they will find a way to add that to your job duties.

I know that some people just aren’t cut out for being engineers.

True. Some people’s ego or laziness blinds them to what they need to learn.

I have a huge ego, and I am deeply lazy, but I occasionally put both in check for just long enough to learn.

Maybe I have the aptitude but not the mentality to do this for 30+ years.

Take it a year at a time. Once in awhile, take out some cash and spread it on the ground and sort of roll in it.

Hopefully you’ve noticed, but while this job is usually a pain in the ass, it also pays really fucking well.

I want to know if that’s what it sounds like to people who’ve seen that before.

I’ve had this conversation with all of my very top people, if that’s any consolation.

If you were in my position, would you walk away and just be a hobbyist programmer or stick it out and hope to be a mediocre engineer one day?

If you told my younger self how much money I could make as a mediocre engineer, I would be all over that deal.

I would’ve agonized about the trade-off if I knew I would stop loving my hobby, but taken comfort that I would later love it again.

Everything happens in seasons. Some seasons I code for fun. Some I don’t.

A cool side effect of being paid to code is that when I do find the mind space to hobby code, I am a fucking badass hobby coder.

I think you should take this job because your current employer is running a shitty team, and underpaying you. Then take another programming job later when the next opportunity arrives (and it will…it really will.)

You have imposter syndrome so bad you don’t even think you’re a real imposter!

You 100% have imposter syndrome. If you’re getting your work done then you’re fine.

Don’t confuse a bad work environment with not liking or being suitable for your job.

If you liked programming, do your work in the way that made you originally liked programming. People will put pressure on you to just “do things”. Don’t. Ensure you start understanding, slowly get more insight into what’s going on. Ask the people around you any and all questions you need to get more understanding. Allow yourself to learn. That is the only way to start feeling in control, and the only way to become ‘more senior’.

That being said. If you want to move on, there’s no harm, and no shame. Just do it because you’ll be doing something you know you will like better.

Gonna be the 100th person to chime in:

Hobby dev with a different main profession for 20 yrs here. Its the same everywhere, in any profession. I know, I‘ve had a couple.

In a bad environment, you‘ll never flourish. You wont even know your actual strengths. Please quit, try something else. Not necessarily a different profession but definitely a different team/company.

Most of what you mentioned tells me that you‘re currently in a bad place. If the team is bad, everything else gets spoiled. Sadly, you need experience to tell the difference. It might be great for someone else even, just not for you.

What you could use is some hard evidence to your strengths, your passions and your specific personality. Most likely this is achieved by taking a break. Either a long nice vacation or moving on. But time off is very important. Reflection is the key and it needs time and space.

All the best and dont worry about not being enough or doing badly. You‘re doing allright.

Some people are passionate about their jobs and some people just do it as a means to an end. There is nothing wrong with being in the later group and I say that as someone with ~20 years in the software space and never opens an ide at home.

I’ve always thought the best way to kill a hobby was to turn it into a job. I won’t speak to if you should or shouldn’t change roles, there are a huge amount of factors to consider there, I’ll just say that not everyone who is successful in development is a guru, ninja, in it for the love, kind of person.

I say take the job that pays more and rediscovery your joy. The world needs more people who understand how to code but do something other than code as their full time job.

I can solve problems and always get my work done, but I don’t even know the language/framework I use daily well enough to explain what’s going on, I can just do things.

Solving problems and getting a result that someone else is happy with is 90% of engineering. No one knows everything, your job is to use what you DO know to figure something new out.

The last 10% is what you need to work on - being able to confidently explain to a boss what you do in way that they understand while sounding complex enough to justify your pay and subsequent raises.

In time you will learn whatever system your using.

However, on the flip side, if the current job isn’t getting you anywhere and everyone there sucks. Leave, take the better paying job for a little while, continue working on your skills and look for a engineering job elsewhere.

I am called a srnior developer and I haven’t done a project in my spare time in many years. Not because I don’t want to, but because I do enough of that at work and I lack the energy. Most people I know are in the same boat.

It seems like you are stuck in a bad environment at the moment and that does not help with your own progression.

Having a good team culture makes a lot of difference. When you get support and help from your lead and other devs, it makes life a lot better, and you learn much more from one another.

Go. Go see what else is out there and find a better place for you.

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I haven’t used big 0 or algorithms in my 15 years of professional coding. It’s just not important unless you work for a Google and even then you’d have support.

I’ve been a developer for about 15 years.

Nothing you’ve said makes me feel like you should quit.
Wanting more money is a perfectly respectable reason to want to quit, and if you think it would make you happier, go for it. Get paid.

It’s not better to be an engineer or anything. No one will mind or hold it against you if you come back and say that you were a jr dev, took a position as otherntech job, but it wasn’t for you so now your back with a new perspective and set of experiences.

Programming was once my passion. I got a lot of joy from it. I still do, and I would say that it still is a passion. But I’ve stopped really doing side projects unless it’s particularly interesting. There’s more to life than career development, and that’s okay.

Without seeing your code, I can’t know how good you actually are. Like most people, you’re probably average. Don’t beat yourself up over not knowing algorithms. No one knows those, they know the keywords and how to describe a problem and then how to pick the right one or tweak something to make it right.

The road from jr to senior is also less about technical proficiency than you would expect.
Technical competency is a must, but you’ll go further as a competent technical leader who can breakdown work, describe it, and help their teammates than as a lone high performer.

You honestly sound like your stressed out and in fight/flight mode. The first step is just acknowledging where you are mentally and how it’s going to make everything seem worse than it really is.

Over the 16 years since graduating, I learned that defining yourself by your career is often a trap. At least it doesn’t sound like you’re getting deep satisfaction from your work.

I burnt myself pretty bad going into the field thinking I was perusing a passion career and just kept getting kicked down for 5 years chasing a passion career until I found a work environment that paid decent and valued work/home life balance. In school I thought I’d never sell my soul, but now I’ve been working with the same people for a decade now and pretty happy about it, even with if the actual work is utterly boring.

Unless you’re a fortunate few that are truly passionate, driven, and lucky enough to land a career that fills your entire bucket, look for a job you can tolerate BUT with group of people that support you and your growth. In the end 2 years in is a drop in the bucket and you’ll see your career change directions over and over. You can always learn new skills or relearn them, so if this new job is something different to get you out of a slump, I say go for it. No one can answer for yourself but you.