I'm starting to feel the same way.

Hi, everyone, thanks for all the advice, personal stories and jokes. Loved the responses. I was keeping an eye on the thread, but hadn’t had the proper opportunity to answer.

Since there are already so many, I won’t go into answering individual posts, but here are some more facts so that you may have a better understanding of my situation:

I’m 32 years old. I was never married, my daughter is the result of an agreement I had with my, then, latest ex-girlfriend. I visit a lot, since I like spending time with my daughter and being a proper father. While I contribute, financially, they don’t depend on me. I live alone and own the place I live at. I have no debts. All in all, one can say that I’m rather successful in life.

As I said before, the place I work at, the people I work with and the boss I have are all great, for real. I think it’s one of the things that made me finally realise that something was wrong with my career choice, because everything was so good that there wasn’t a freaking reason I should be feeling miserable and uninterested in my work.

The psychologist was a great choice I made. She helped me understand my personal problems, even the ones I didn’t knew I had, and I made a lot of progress into dealing better with them. As my current girlfriend says: “I’ve never seen someone react so quickly to therapy”.

About the aptitude/personality tests, I did two. The personality test’s result was rather reflecting of me, I think, and the careers it pointed out were: Accounting, Administration, Economy and Law. The point is that should I take any of these careers, my personality type would allow me to feel happy and fulfilled. The aptitude one was a bit less complex and the result was Language/Communication. This reflects my interest in writing fiction, I think. From this result, the following careers were pointed out: Administration, International Relations, Journalism, Law, Pedagogy, Publicity and Advertising.

I don’t know yet what choice to make. I’m not entirely concerned about “new challenges every day”, something my psychologist says my personality desires, but rather being completely interested in what I’m doing, to the point of forgetting about the clock.

Let me use a real life example: It took me an year to read through Magician Apprentice. It’s a good book, don’t get me wrong. But it didn’t quite win me over. On the other hand, I’ve already read more than half of The Robots of Dawn, and there hasn’t been a month since I started. Whenever I pick it up to read, I lose myself into it and have trouble stopping. Programming never ever did it. Not even as a hobby. I want that feeling in my job. It doesn’t have to be all the time, but frequently enough to know that my job is worth it.

Yeah, my father worked at the New York Times. Apparently they've been firing all of their talented writers and replacing them with coders. It's really brought down the quality of their product. Unless there's a miracle that whole corporation is going to crash and burn in the next decade or so.

Backup plan, join the army and runaround and shoot at stuff for a living. A war zone sounds like a breeze compared to my career.

I might also get lucky and get killed which would be great.

Part of the problem with computer sciences is that its a deceptively vast field and university tries to train a bunch of "generalists" who feel they can do anything, without knowing what they actually like.

Industry doesn't help if you don't know yourself. You'll go left to right like a monkey, adapting yourself to each employer's need, and you'll end up being a jack of many things and master of none (which ensure you'll keep getting that soulless 'generalist' work).

When I got out of university, it was like that. I didn't really know what I liked and as the technologies from job to job were drastically different, I picked it up on the go without really becoming an expert in something that I like.

Then, the best thing that could have happened to me happened: I worked under a Machiavellian asshole who decided that his boss made a mistake hiring me, that I wasn't fit for the software profession and he fired my ass.

After that, I was quite depressed and didn't look for my next job right away. I worked on a game for a few years instead. During that time, I decided I hated the overhead of having to learn how to code for many proprietary platforms natively so I decided it would be a web game as the web browser is a wonderful deployment vector.

Then, I got to pick a bunch of technologies for my stack, made correction or two along the way and became really good with those technologies. Those were technologies I picked and that I thought were promising, not technologies that were forced upon me from above. This motivated me to read many books on those technologies as well.

I also opened a Github account, posted a couple of generic libraries I developed on there and from time to time will put some general purpose tool I make which I find useful.

The game didn't fully work out. I had the technical side covered, but I discovered I'm no artist and visual design is painful for me. I didn't have the fund to pay for an artist so I put the game on hold and got back in the job market.

However, instead of picking just any jobs, I looked for jobs that were a good fit for the skills I had picked up. Sure, this meant 8 jobs out of 10 were not for me, but I was a really good fit for the 2 jobs left.

Fast forward 2 more years and I'm in relatively high demand. I went from having to send my resume 50 times for 1 interview after university to getting a handful of job offers per month without initial solicitation from me.

Also, because the job is a good fit for my skills and those are skills that I chose to hone and that I like, I'm much more motivated to do learning via reading and home projects on my own time and keep those skills up to date and sharp.

So in short, two advices from my personal experience in the industry:

- Don't let the marketplace yank your chain too much. Figure out what you like, become good at it and then focus on jobs that are a good fit.

- There are plenty of nice people in the industry, but there are also a lot of selfish egotistical jealous assholes in the industry that will try to keep you down and prevent you from realizing your full potential. Don't let them get to you. Become really good at what you do to get leverage and find the right job.

EDIT: Read your second post. If there is another field that interests you more, that is also a viable option. In the end, you'll figure out what is best for yourself.

Since this seems to have become a thread for unburdening oneself as a way of commiserating with the OP, here's my story/advice.

Clueless, somewhat demanding father whose interests (make lots of money) didn't quite align with my goals (to like what I do)? Check.

Twenty years in a field (the bowling industry, believe it or not) only to be burnt out by shifting expectations and unrealistic demands? Check.

So I did what amirit9037 mentioned: I started my own company, working with (of all things) small children. Every week is now a week to look forward to, even though the current economy has scaled my operation back somewhat, forcing me to get a second job again.

And Tallima's advice that sometimes you just have to work whatever's available is also true. As far as my other job goes, I never would've seen myself doing what I'm doing now (overnight retail manager), but it dovetails nicely with both my daytime business and everything else I want to do.


Then perhaps write fiction. It may start out as a hobby, but self-publishing is a fast-growing field; and if you catch the right wave, who knows where it may take you?


Based on your avatar (Wally from Dilbert) I can't tell if your statement is ironically appropriate or appropriately ironic.

No but it'll make life easier then living pay check by pay check. For example last week I had no food so had to rely on other people feeding me at work till I made it to pay day (Friday).

Mmm, lovely grumpy 12 hour day. Nearly got myself fired, or quit.

Don't intimidate the bad-fur-day. Ima happy go lucky kinda guy, your ruining my helpful and co-operative mood with this crap.

Hey, 10-15 years is way better than 40. Really. Please read on for a story very similar to yours.

I'll tell you a story that happened to me in, of all places, exactly Telefonica (but in Spain, many years ago, when we were just starting to send people to ruin your life there in Brazil... Sorry about that, but I swear it wasn't my idea).

When I first went there I was put in an office with my project manager and a bigger boss, until they found a better place for me a few weeks later. Anyway, one day this boss, 20+ years older than me, came from a meeting, and he looked devastated. He told my project manager how after the meeting this other (bigger) Telefonica boss had started crying like a baby and told everybody that he was about to retire and had just realised he had spent 40 years of his life doing something he didn't actually like...

I think my project manager was quite shocked as well, but I just thought "poor guy... but it's a good thing that I'll never feel like that because I love what I do"... And 10 years later I was thinking I hated developing software for other people, and if I kept doing it until retirement I was going to feel like that poor guy.

It so happens that I moved to another country and switched careers, to the shock of pretty much everybody who knew me, and 10 years after that I find myself again in the same predicament, but I still feel it's the right thing to do before you turn 65 and you feel you've wasted your life.

Anyway, I can't give you any advice about what to do with your life now, specially because radical solutions like mine and tinyE's don't seem very feasible with a daughter involved, but just wanted to say that if what's happening now has to happen at some point in your life, 10 years after you start working is waaaay better than 30-40. It might help you if you think of it as *only* 10 years instead of 10 *fucking* years. You've got plenty of time ahead of you. That's what I'm thinking even at 40.

It's all up to you. ^^

I hate my job mostly because I thought it is going to be an awesome start for my career in Telecom (Networking), I was wrong! From full time I went to part time and now I'm looking for another place.

Maybe I could remain in Telecom but different departement. Not the one I hate the most.

I would choose something that builds on and complements your previous education and work experience, and something that would not require many years of studying.

My suggestions would primarily be pedagogy/teaching, administration and journalism. Since they would require fewer years of study as you more or less only need to study the core subjects; you already have a specialty via your previous degrees.

In general I would look at vocationally oriented diplomas rather than university studies, since they are much shorter than a university degree and because you already have substantial university degrees behind you.

Pedagogy and teaching could be fun if you find the student level that's right for you (high-school, adults, etc ).
I have plenty of acquaintances who've had careers in IT but switched to teaching, either because they got burnt out from work or because they got unemployed, and they've all said that teaching IT has been much more fun than actually working in IT.

Journalism could be good choice if you choose the path of an IT/Tech journalist.

Accounting is very monotonous but fun if you are a meticulous and systems-oriented person.

The administration jobs I've had were all great: I've worked in logistics administration, hospital administration and police administration. These jobs have never been boring to me since they have offered a great deal of variety.

The problem with Economics and International Relations is that you will need at least a Masters degree in order to qualify for work in these areas, which would many years of studying for you. There's not much you can do with just a single Bachelors degree in one of these two subjects, unless you have contacts, like your sister perhaps.

In my country is not easy to find a new job. there are many people that don't like what they do for living, but they do it anyway because there is no choice.
there are lots of people that lose a job and they cannot find a new one even if they have years of experience and/or the right degree.

My advice are:
- Ask yourself if you really don't like software development or if you just don't like what are you doing in your job... Maybe you just want to develop videogames and you can try to find a job in that area (and if you really like it, even with a small pay, it is better than a job that you don't like). You need to understand that right now your best way to change is to find a job that you are able to do.
- Find a new job before quit the job you are in. If you quit now without an alternative you cannot know if you will find a new job at all.
- Do you really think that a new and different job will be the solution? Think about yourself as a journalist for example... Are you sure you will be happy with that job? Maybe you just don't like to do what you like as a job, but that is a different story.

Finally ask yourself if you really cannot work there. Like I said there are many people that do a job that they don't like... but job is not your life.
You still have 16 h where you can do whatever you want. Job is just a part of your life.

Have you considered actuarial science? I ask because your development experience and apparent aptitude for accounting/economics might make you a good candidate to work for a firm that writes and supports that kind of software. They might even be willing to have you work in a non-actuarial position while getting the coursework done.

Do you enjoy trying to track down particularly obscure bugs? (The stuff first-tier and second-tier support can't handle?) Is that something you could focus on for hours, driven by the challenge of figuring out whether the problem is in the slick GUI and database package programming that makes everything look nice and easy for the customer, or in the underlying mathematical formulae? Or, on the other side, would figuring out how to write that program in the first place be an interesting challenge?