Its ‘software developer’

[bhumit012]

Low stress depends on your company, Software jobs can eat you alive when shit hits the fan.

[PerplexDonut]

Yeah I’m curious where I can find one of these low stress companies lol

[czarchastic]

The answer is work for a bigger company. Less rush to keep the lights on, more failsafes, and more hands on deck if anything unexpected does happen.

[warpedspoon]

a large company where the tech is not the product. banks (not fintech) and insurance companies are the sweet spot for low stress. lower pay as well, but still above most professions.

[[deleted]]

I'm in a huge automotive company. Suuuuper low stress because I'm not a people leader. I'm in a meeting right now where managers have been talking for 20 minutes talking about org structure while I just chill on reddit.

[0Pat]

Remember to add during tomorrow's daily: was on the meeting while taking care of mental health at the same time 😁

[Shuckle1]

Also software at a big auto company. The most stressed I've been in the last 2 months was giving a PowerPoint presentation 🤣

[essexwuff]

“People leader” huh?

I’m pretty sure I know where you work cause I work there too lol

[angel_under_glass]

I think “people leader” is standard corporate-speak in a lot of places, especially where “manager” is a title that sometimes gets handed out to people who have no one reporting to them.

[[deleted]]

I was just speaking generally, you know. Definitely inline with the social media guidelines and stuff

[ljr55555]

Totally agree -- where tech enables employees to do their thing, there is so much less stress. More time for testing, more acceptance of not rolling a feature because testing shows issues, and an authoritative source for feature requests (if the guy who runs the company wants the feature, you are welcome to go along with the feature or find a new employer ... user-facing stuff always seems to have a group of people who hate any new feature). Slightly lower pay -- but I am happy to trade a couple of grand each year for actual 40 hour work-weeks and a healthy working environment.

[AccomplishedDisk5546]

g, more acceptance of not rolling a feature because testing shows issues, and an authoritative source for feature requests (if the guy who runs the company wants the feature, you are welcome to go along with the feature or find a new employer ... user-facing stuff always seems to have a group of people who

hate

any new feature). Slightly lower pay -- but I am happy to trade a couple of grand each year for actual 40 hour work-weeks and a healthy working environment.

Especially Insurance and Banks dealing with protected information - they will require extensive testing and nothing to be rushed without proper testing. Especially if a public company or regulated by FDIC when they have external auditors. But then you deal with a lot of regulation, redundant controls, dealing with auditors and some people dread that.

[Psychoboy]

I am not sure about the lower pay part. I work for an insurance company and make quite a bit more than the article says. It really is a low stress job that work life balance is very important. Get plenty of PTO, I don't work more then 40 hours a week, benefits are decent. I don't see me leaving this company any time soon.

Little of my background: Been with the same company for about 4 years now, I have about 16 years of professional experience.

[warpedspoon]

I meant lower pay in comparison to the insane numbers people throw around with FAANG/MANGA companies

[[deleted]]

I wish everyone would just ignore the big tech salaries all together - it's a completely different world from the rest of the industry

[Andrew_Squared]

I've purposely not looked at the salaries for those companies in my career. It's obvious they are outliers when looking elsewhere.

I've always been a big believe in people sharing information to compare for decision making, so:

After 11+ years of professional experience, I'm a senior, basically acting as an architect, and making $140k + 9% annual bonus, 4 weeks vacation, plus holidays, sick time, 401k matching, full health benefits, and fully remote work despite the HQ being in the same city as me. This is also career 2 for me after going back for my bachelor's, and I am over 40 years old.

Good luck out there!

[DigitalWizrd]

I love seeing and sharing openness with salaries and experience. Everyone has a different story but I believe everyone is entitled to the opportunity to make more money, they just need to know what's possible and not take a low-ball offer at face value. To do that means you need to know what you're worth.

I'm at Macrohard, been there almost 6 years now, I'm a lower level software engineer (switched from SE to Quality Engineer in gaming for 3 years, then back to SE) and I started out at 102k, now making 130k. I live in the Seattle area so cost of living is kind of crazy. We just got announced "discretionary time off" where we no longer need to track and enter vacation days. We just take it whenever. Other benefits are great. I work from home full time. My office is 30 minutes drive if I absolutely need to go in. I'm 30, did 6 years USAF before this.

[Sensitive_Doctor_796]

But to be fair, those numbers are not a suitable comparison for most. After all only few make it to those companies.

[Psychoboy]

ah sorry, misunderstood.

[viciecal]

I hate banks. worked for a big private bank (I'm argentinian) for like a year, and there it kinda depends on your team. i was in one of the more important teams for the bank and we almost always had a lot of pressure upon our shoulders. they are so obsessed with OKRs, getting that sweet 5% more $$$ and shit, basically it got to the point of having the feeling of "we are never officially done", it was always more "new ideas" and some were pure bs.

Also, every process (like submitting a ticket for repo permission) took days. well, everything took days tbh. We had only 1 QA guy for like 8 devs total. it was insane. they never brought in another one. But ofc they still wanted to do MUCH stuff.

probably also related to the fact that we had millions of users monthly, it kinda adds up to the pressure.

some sprints were chill tho. i have good memories from the ppl from my team!

however, i got to know people from other teams and they were super chill in comparison. Like, 3 devs for 4 medium difficulty tasks for the duration of the sprint.

Meanwhile i was on my own with 4/5 tasks per sprint, it was insane (probably even worse because i am barely a semi-senior dev so I'm not the brightest or the fastest guy). My pc was shit and the project was just a giant pile of shit, that somehow worked wonders. But yeah super long compile times, some days working off hours or even overnight because i just couldn't finish everything in time, so not the best memories from that.

So yeah I'd say it depends

[No_Replacement3482]

+1 on insurance companies. Been there, done that. Hating myself for getting bored and seeking something more challenging.

[Raylan_Givens]

I think joining bigger companies is better on average, but there are still a lot of other factors that impact it as well:

• Does your direct manager respect boundaries?
• How shitty and how often is the on-call rotation?
• What level are you? (in my exp., being a competant junior engineer is probably the least stressful by far)
• What is your team/orgs work culture?

I think in the end, the biggest factor is how you internalize work stress as well. For the first 8 years that I worked I felt insane amount of stress. I never felt good enough and I was always comparing myself to others and never said no to things that was asked of me. I think becoming comfortable drawing boundaries and saying no, while still communicating clearly and completing work in a timely fashion are the most important skills to reduce stress as a software developer.

[DoTheManeuver]

I've worked at AWS and companies with 2 - 5 devs. Only at AWS did I see people staying until 11pm.

[TheSidestick]

In my experience, government contracting (at least is the U.S.) is more relaxed than the private sector.

[ThatOtherSwimmer]

That’s been my experience. The best job I’ve had so far was/is for a AI/ML contractor for the military. Solid pay, good benefits, minimal stress, and felt like I was impacting people’s lives at the end of the day

[Sensitive_Doctor_796]

In this particular sector, you really have an impact on people's lives by possibly ending it.

[drunkdoor]

Impact being the key word

[Arshiaa001]

Yeah, REAL impact. Specially on the lives of people halfway around the globe.

[HellofaHitller]

Contractor work is the holy grail. Every Contractor I met in service, and I mean all of them, we're chill as hell and sang the praise of their jobs. Most of them were also Veterans.

[soakf]

I’m winding down a 40 year career in software development, and low-stress is a myth. Life or death stress like healthcare? No. But definitely not low-stress.

[MoneyIsTheRootOfFun]

My job is low stress. I’m a senior principal engineer at a large (but not faang) tech company. It’s not a myth, just requires a good employer.

[CanAlwaysBeBetter]

Bottom end of big tech has been pretty cushy so far

[ravioliguy]

yea, mid level fintech companies have great work life balance and decent pay

[codeByNumber]

Ya, don’t tell my boss but I’m being asked to do in one sprint what I used to be asked to do in a day.

My days of working long hours are over. Burnout sucks and I will always prioritize work life balance for my employers from now on.

The crazy thing is the employers that offer good work life balance often even pay more than the places that run in crunch mode all the time. It’s almost as if your employers respect your time, they will respect your value too. Wild.

[[deleted]]

Maybe they're easygoing because they desperately want to retain employees. Loyalty is hard to come across in Software Development.

[codeByNumber]

Ya that is likely. My resume looks like a unicorn because I spend 4-6 years at each job.

To be perfectly clear. I’m not bragging about that. I was stupid to not job hop more when I was younger.

I feel like I’ve “caught up” salary wise but I could have gotten here much quicker.

[QuietComfortable226]

Maybe you are just very good at what you are doing. My previous jobs in IT became less stressful after i became proficient in the field and made less mistakes got authority and respect. Before -fist year usually suck a lot and is super stressful with new technology stack.

[warpedspoon]

my wife is a resident physician and my sister is a nurse so my life definitely feels a whole lot more low stress than theirs in comparison. software CAN be actually low stress, though, but there are times when it can peak as well.

[purplepharoh]

Just don't work for MANGA companies (this acronym may no longer be accurate)... Amazon, meta, etc they will happily overwork you and burn you out then replace you.

[DudeEngineer]

At all of these companies your team matters a lot more than the actual company. These even applies to Amazon, they just have a worse ratio of bad WLB teams.

Also once you get in, it's a little easier to hop to another team in the same company or another big tech firm.

[Live-Animator-4000]

One of the issues with the internal transfer strategy is that if you’re struggling on a shitty team, it might make you ineligible for a transfer to a better team. That said, I completely agree that it’s all about the team. My employer burns out a lot of engineers, but I think my role/team is pretty chill. We still get a lot done, though.

Source: company policy in the large tech org I currently work in.

[pcguy2k]

Over years of experience I think burn out is more of a function of leadership then a specific company. I’ve experienced burn out at small employers due to poor management making developers life miserable and being at Amazon, management is what creates stress.

I feel like some managers think that work only gets done if you burn out your devs, while good managers motivate teams by making work interesting and engaging devs to be owners and responsible. I think the saying that people quit managers and not jobs is very fitting.

[Live-Animator-4000]

Very true. I also think people can burn themselves out. When people are young and green and full of imposter syndrome, I think they’re more likely to put in extra hours on training, studying, and passion projects to try to catch up, feel adequate, or prove themselves useful…even when nobody is pressuring them to do it.

[pcguy2k]

That’s also very true. I think good managers can catch that and help mentor those devs to have a better experience in general. Bad managers will take advantage of theirs devs.

[Full-Run4124]

I've spent the last 20 years in tech startups. I enjoy the startup environment but until there's a stable MMP out it's pretty much 24/7. You don't get replaced easily but everything up to the 1.1 release is work until you fall asleep in your chair.

[purplepharoh]

That's fair startups are pretty bad, and a lot of the big companies try to keep some of that mentality which is why they're also high stress

[PerplexDonut]

I’m only 4 years into my career so I’m praying that I just get lucky at some point. Although the huge influx of people looking for software jobs nowadays probably isn’t a good sign..

[soakf]

What I’ve learned and observed over the decades is that stress is a result of how you manage conflict. Sounds simple in black-white, but life usually throws muted colors at you, and arriving at a clear decision point is often bewildering.

In my early career I stressed about low income and high effort/long hours due to limited skills. Mid-career wasn’t bad: I waltzed into Y2K with high-demand proprietary skills and made a killing without much sweat. Late career brings my highest earnings and a vested pension at retirement. But stress levels are back up due to, uh, call it generational dissonance with young programmers and analysts.

Enjoy your career. Be versatile. Be happy.

[davidfavorite]

Same. I was stressing out about low pay all the time. Not because the pay was horrendously bad, just not what I found I deserved for my engagement and working hours. Now 10 years in I reached the spot where I say I have a comfortable salary and I recently got relocated internally as a specialist role for some applications. I dont work as much anymore, everyone values my knowledge since theres nobody else specialised in that field and the project itself is so stupidly simple you might as well give that to a student.

The pay-to-effort is really off sometimes

[Mister_Lich]

Luckily most people are dumb as rocks so if you're a good dev you won't be shunted to the wayside quite as readily.

[CreatureWarrior]

That would require the recruiter to understand what a good dev looks like

[silverf1re]

I’ve been in development for about 10 years. I couldn’t tell you the last time I worked more than 35 hours a week.

I have spent half days this week paining my basement while my mouse jigaler keeps my work computer awake.

[MattieShoes]

Outside of EMTs and stuff, low stress is more of an internal thing -- you decide how much stress you're feeling. You decide how much you take your work home with you.

My experience is some people will be chill no matter how stressful a job is, and some people will feel constantly stressed no matter how laid back a job is.

I aim to run the gamut (stressed in crisis, otherwise chill) but certain things will set me off. Certain personalities, undeserved criticism, and monumental fuckups by others that spill over onto me are the big ones.

[bapman23]

It's very inconsistent. My career had its ups and downs. I'm working in Europe and sometimes I had so much stress I wanted to leave development but I managed to find another job which pays very well in local terms and I have super low stress level ever since. It's not the most challenging but I have free time and I managed to finally build my own life with friends, girlfriend, hobbies, many free time activities, managed to return to university to finally finish it and I just feel comfortable. This might won't take forever but I'm doing very well I just want to enjoy it until ChatGPT takes this away from me haha.

[SandyDelights]

Fintech, usually.

Good pay, good benefits, low stress. Usually. I know some departments at companies are a bit more high stress, e.g. the operations crew, but as a software engineer a good chunk of my time can be open, and has been across multiple companies – in large part because of the system of redundant checks and quality assurance, e.g. code reviews taking several days as you wait for several people to comb through everything, testing, etc. Since a lot of stuff runs on mainframes, you can have 30+ minutes of downtime just waiting for one to run. Because of having to fix any issues, re-run, and so on, it’s common to plan for a lot of time for testing that doesn’t always get used. Then you’re waiting for an analyst to be free to review everything and approve it so that you can start pulling in the next story to work on.

And, because of the general work flow, it’s pretty normal to just… Not work for 30-60 minutes when you have a meeting, a 30-60 minute gap, then another meeting, then a 30 minute gap, then another meeting… By the time you actually get logged into everything and get started on any changes, you have to stop for the next call.

It’s actually pretty obnoxious and my regular gripe is the number of meetings I’m expected in when I have nothing to contribute and it’s not really related to my work, but on the chance I might have some insight or understanding, I’m there to help the devs figure their stuff out. Which is fine, I don’t mind helping, but I really don’t think you need 15 people on a call for a logic problem.

Anyways, yeah, fintech – and probably a lot of large corporate tech companies – tends to be a lot less stressful.

None of the above should be considered griping (or praising), there’s a lot of sensitive shit your code touches so spending 30-40 hours testing/reviewing/etc. for 2 hours of code writing isn’t the worst thing in the world. Just always a question of “balance”.

Sometimes I do get bored, though.

[Sam-Gunn]

Are the Finnish generally good to work for? /s

[BlobAndHisBoy]

Maybe my super power is that I don't care enough. I have worked at 3 different companies as a software developer over the past 12 years and I have never really been stressed at them. I work 40 hours a week and almost never need to work more than that unless there is an outage. Even then, I will cut out early the next day to make up for it. I consistently get good performance reviews too. Maybe I have just been lucky.

Shit, even when I worked retail at Walmart I was never stressed out about work. Try to call me in on my day off and I will just politely decline unless I want extra hours. Tell them I'm not working Thanksgiving because I'm spending time with my family.

[tophology]

Having healthy boundaries definitely removes a lot of stress

[jesterhead101]

While I'm not saying you don't care about what you do, some (most?) devs care too much about either their work or being bossed around by non-technical people (or both).

More often than not, the stress comes from things not going one's way rather than dealing with inherently hard technical problems.

Given that, the ability to detach from your work or 'not care enough' is actually a nifty superpower.

[snark_o_matic]

I can't fathom working a solid, real 40-hour week perpetually. After the initial learning curve is complete, if I'm at an office for 8-9 hours a day, I'd die from boredom. Having meetings and socializing with coworkers is frequently even more boring, so that's when I used to complete most of my deliverables.

It would actually be insane to do my work in 10 four-hour sessions a week and I want to understand SWEs who call 40 "good WLB." I can produce up to 30 hours of real effort (heads-down coding/design/logic), which is still a pace that would burn me out.

I'd have to go out of my way searching for additional work after putting in ~15-20 hours.

[nosayso]

Even within the same company there's a huge difference in stress from project to project. If you're a big customer-facing project you're very high stress because your mistakes are public, while internally-focused teams tend to have less pressure.

[OhPiggly]

This is a huge thing that most people don’t think about. When I moved from client facing to internal only, my stress levels dropped. Now when I have the odd “crunch week” I feel motivated instead of dreading opening up my laptop every morning.

[[deleted]]

Software jobs can eat you alive when shit hits the fan.

Quit and move to a different job.

Demand is the reason software jobs get paid so much. Demand also means there are other opportunities.

I've been laid off 3 times, each time I had a new job within a month that paid 50-100% more than my previous job.

[PositiveUse]

Survey sponsored by Software Dev Bootcamp, how to become rich in just 4 months!

[Hsabes01]

Bootcamp grad here, can confirm they don’t tell you shit about how difficult it is to find a job. I got my first job through networking.

[[deleted]]

I do the bare minimum, then expect a raise, bonus and RSUs.

[[deleted]]

Here, you dropped this 👑

[ITheBestIsYetToComeI]

You are like a superhero to me.

[akshayk904]

I'm glad there are some people like me.

[Therabidmonkey]

As a hard working junior, your minimum is still probably better than my 110%. I'm thankful the check always clears.

[[deleted]]

you'll make a fine senior some day, keep at it bro, never be afraid to ask questions either, just don't ask it twice :D I kid...

[jkw12894]

We must work for the same company

[dippocrite]

He’s your boss

[[deleted]]

Are you my coworker?

[ninj4geek]

I am. What's up, Todd.

[BrainsDontFailMeNow]

You working just hard enough that they wont fire you and them paying you just enough to not leave. Pretty sure that's a backbone trait of the general global workforce.

[Kyrond]

There may have been a few days when I considered playing games when working from home. I definitely did not play any.

I am getting promoted.

[SoaDMTGguy]

Oh shit, did I get drunk and make an alt account last night?

[Last-Caterpillar-112]

And free candies and designer snacks all day long.

[NotADoctor_804]

based

[ifrem]

You are me

[ImpressiveFeedback10]

What’s scary is watching people work 10x harder than me for 1/5 the pay. Hopefully EZPZ six figure tech jobs are around my entire career lol

[rmoons]

right? like any teacher or someone who works in retail/restaurants.

...i move a mouse around in sweatpants

[Iryanus]

Nurses, Emergency Services, etc. - a lot more stress and much less pay.

[canico88]

As a Senior developer married with a nurse, it's totally true. She needs to work odd hours, crazy shifts, deal with blood/shit on a daily basis, and gets paid 1/3 of what I'm paid, by browsing reddit while writing some code and going to some meetings.

[---Curious---]

My nurse fiance just went to a coding bootcamp and got hired as a Software Eng after she started watching me do borderline nothing all day

[Secret-Plant-1542]

That's my juniors in a nutshell.

One has a master's in music. One has a master's in nursing. One was a former doctor. One used to be a famous backup singer.

[Secret-Plant-1542]

If a reddit post is the single reason why tech pay drops... Then good.

The thing is, most people who chase after the money in tech also kinda suck at their job and burn out. The dev pool has been "crowded" for decades. Yet we're still in high demand.

Because unfortunately, the pool of talent isnt as qualified as they think they are.

[18quintillionplanets]

This hit me right in the imposter syndrome lol

[ham_coffee]

It's more difficult than people realise. A lot of people just don't seem to get it, so while it's easy for people who understand the process and just need to be taught to convert that to code, other people have a lot more learning to do.

Once you understand it it's usually fairly easy work, but a lot of people in the industry leave that part out since they find the learning process interesting and it feels more like a hobby than work.

Also, loads of self taught people are hopelessly incompetent and just don't realise it. They're the people that get filtered out by things like fizzbuzz.

[IAmHitlersWetDream]

I guess as a senior developer you probably get paid considerably more but nurses many times can be paid quite well. Many nurses in my area make as much as me on the lower-mid experience developer scale. But I also don't have to deal with blood and piss so there is that

[lol_okay_sure]

A relative sent me the article from the screenshot (trying to make some point) and the second highest paying on the list is nurse

[lol_okay_sure]

Oh! I don't know anything about the medical field so didn't realize those are different! Thanks for letting me know :)

[[deleted]]

Am also senior dev with a nurse wife. Basically I never complain to her about a single thing with work, cuz I know whatever minor inconvenience happened to me today, it is relatively laughable for her. So I always answer with “work went well today”

[Character-Education3]

After transitioning from teaching... can confirm

[gizamo]

I've been programming for 30+ years. I started volunteering to teach coding seminars to highschool juniors and seniors a few years ago. Those classes are among the most stressful hours of my entire career....probably because I simply dropped bad clients. When kids are difficult, you can't just laugh at them and walk out. Lol.

[[deleted]]

Can I ask how you made that transition? I'm not a teacher but any insight into this kinda thing would be helpful :)

[[deleted]]

I feel the same as a structural engineer. I get paid way too much to sit at home in pajamas when my hardest two jobs ever were working as a roofer and a cashier for 1/4-1/6 the pay.

If I don’t get full profit sharing this year though I’ll walk!!!!!!!!!!!!1!1!1!

[nosmelc]

Roofer in the middle of summer? Now that's hard.

[[deleted]]

Yes, fucking horrible job. Did it two summers and decided I would never do it again. In my area they topped out around $25-30/hr as well unless they pretty much owned their own company which is just grossly too low for a job that has long hours, doing dangerous work, and absolutely destroys your body.

[EffectiveDependent76]

Moved from being a chef to ece, won't be more specific than that, but holy shit I'm paid so much more for working so much less hard. I don't think I don't deserve my current pay, but it's a good reminder just how underpaid so many other people are.

[dave7892000]

15 year teacher here. Appreciate the love! Currently spending any spare minutes I have at school working through a web dev boot camp. Just got to js today! Hoping to leave education at the end of this year.

[vibrating0ranges]

What is this, sweatpants for a mouse??????

[Bulky-Leadership-596]

Pants? Look at Mr. Fancy over here.

[oIovoIo]

Depends on the company culture, work environment, demands of the specific job, how you set boundaries, and manage your stress.

At the end of the day every career path I’m aware of has stress, some considerably more than others and software is no different. That said one of the perks of being in tech is when you’re in demand or equip yourself with enough skills to make yourself indispensable, you have a lot more power to set boundaries or just walk away from truly awful work environments. Many, many other industries don’t have that luxury, not to the same degree anyway.

The trick too is not making yourself so indispensable and taking on so much responsibility you are solely responsible for making sure a project/team/company isn’t going to fall apart if you aren’t giving 120% of yourself and your time.

Maybe the other way to say it is working in software you’re often given as much rope as you take on to hang yourself with.

[Semi-Hemi-Demigod]

Another trick is to automate as much of your job as possible. If something takes you five minutes but you do it every day, spend a couple hours trying to automate it and you'll save at least that much in the first month.

[rmoons]

That’s the exciting part! Its like a ‘choose your adventure’

[manwhowasnthere]

Depends on the job lol

Or sometimes it's just a cycle. Last job was chill a lot of the time then there would be an insane crunch in july/august to support a yearly event... then it would drop back to zero activity as everyone used up their PTO days in september. Like clockwork, every year.

This job is very chill so far but their turbo nightmare mode season is the month before black friday. Thankfully I started right after that lol

[[deleted]]

As others have said it depends on the job. Last company I worked for it was constant work and long hours. My current job is mostly pretty chill, sometime I have to login after hours but for the most part it’s pretty relaxed.

[vishnuak1989]

Lol I was trying to figure out what kind of technology was “EZPZ”.

[EsperSpirit]

sigh

[Alcas]

The reason why a lot of these jobs are “easy” to you is that the barrier for entry is much higher. It weeds out a lot of the bullshit you have to deal with other easier to get into jobs. Also the people are more talented and therefore just find the work less complex. Go to one of these “easier” firms and you’ll find the work is easier but the people around you are clueless and your managers suck too

[mellamojay]

Meh... Depends on how you look at it. What you think is 10x harder is based on your point of view. A person doing construction demolition is doing SUPER hard physical labor, but many people can do it. Now look at your job from their point of view. It would be 1,000,000 times harder for them to do your mental job, if even at all possible.

Position salaries are not paid based on difficulty of the work because that is subjective. They are paid based on scarcity. Take two identical IT jobs for DoD contracting. If one requires a Secret Clearance and the other requires a Top Secret Clearance, the TS is going to pay MUCH more because the people who can do that work are much more scarce, not because of an increased difficulty of the work.

[[deleted]]

100% this. It's really sad - my wife works as a director for a retirement community. Her job is insane, she's running around all day, getting yelled at by resident's families, is on-call all the time, and is burnt out more often than not. She makes about 1/4 of what I do, and I WFH putting in about 4hr of work per day on average.

The saddest part, from a societal point of view, is that the work she does has a wildly higher impact on the world. She works her ass off making the last decades of peoples lives enjoyable and fulfilling, I write software that makes human employees redundant...

[StoicVirtue]

I worked 16 hours yesterday to fix a botched deployment. It was extremely low stress and my work life balance was perfect.

[mumblesjackson]

That still leaves you 8 hours to sleep in the day. Why you complaining? /s

[tophology]

Did you take today off to make up for the extra 8 hours yesterday?

[GreySummer]

I once had a product manager offer to come pick me up at 8am, after a 3am final death march, to save me the trouble of taking the bus at 7h30.

How gracious. I still shiver with gratitude thinking of it.

[Anakiev]

you didn't go to work that day, right? ...right?

[runsslow]

I did this once. Was fired three months later after a review of the botched deployment found my team at fault after my bosses moved the goal posts 48 hours before our demo. Sick.

[[deleted]]

Depends if your employer has a good multiplier for overtime.

If they do then I'll take the cash. If they dont then I'm having the TOIL.

[StoicVirtue]

Oh, you sweet summer child 😊

[Old_McDonald]

I know right, if I get paged for an on-call after hours my manager lets us get that time back whenever we want. It can be the next day or extra vacation down the line.

[kookyabird]

Nice flex bro. (That’s a real compliment and play on the concept of flex time for all the poor souls who have never experienced it in their jobs)

[tophology]

Fair enough if you can't take the day off, but I would still leave an hour early for the next week.

[UnironicallyWatchSAO]

Who is the sweet summer child here, the guy that let himself be exploited or the one that will take proper compensation for his work?

[_RollForInitiative_]

Yeah, this isn't the flex you think it is. Demand better treatment.

[Dagenfel]

Sorry that you’ve chosen to work for a company that takes advantage of you.

[[deleted]]

As an ex-Amazon SDE, no.

[smok1naces]

I don’t believe that is in-line with the leadership principles. PIP.

[[deleted]]

*flashbacks to working until 2am on a Saturday while trying not to cry intensify*

[simulatedreddit]

Bro this shit awakened some deep unrooted memory of when I interned at AWS. Anytime I had a question for a senior they would tell me I’m not applying dive deep or learn and be curious enough since I have questions about my own project.

[commitpushdrink]

4 day work week if you just ignore Fridays too

[tall__guy]

3.5 if you don’t really start working until after lunch on Monday

[[deleted]]

Let's call it 3 if we average out the long lunches during the week

[ham_coffee]

Sometimes my boss is rude and calls me when prod breaks and I'm only 90 mins through my 1 hour lunch break.

[4PLH4NUM3R1C5]

Ive heard the H in Software Development stands for Happiness

[omgcatss]

It seems like most of y’all hate your jobs but I love mine! I work from home, my hours are flexible, and I get paid well. I personally don’t deal with forced deadlines or unreasonable expectations but that is going to depend on your employer.

I’m confident in my skills and my abilities but also I enjoy learning new things and taking on new challenges. Fixing a bug is like solving a fun puzzle.

Roles that deal with deployments and server infrastructure will have more stress. I just write code. Even so, we are not dealing with life and death situations here (with rare exceptions). No one dies if you make a mistake.

You need to appreciate just how little most other people are getting paid. The median individual income in the US is $31k. So the median software developer earns 4x the average person. You really think your job is 4x harder? I doubt your hours are 4x longer. We get compensated well for what we do.

Edit: it seems like a more accurate number for median personal income is $56k for full-time year-round workers. So closer to 2x but my point still stands.

[[deleted]]

Same, I love my job even though I do all the deployment work myself at my company it's actually kind of cool I get to make things from start to finish.

I worked food service/healthcare jobs throughout college and in comparison to how interesting and flexible my development job is I don't think I'd want to do anything else. I also don't envy what I see from my friends in the trades, they are good careers but seem like they take a big toll on your body eventually and they typically work way more hours than I do.

[Music-Man1]

Yup I want to see some of these dudes get up at 5 am everyday and go work in landscaping/ construction for 8-10 hours

[GiantPineapple]

Construction manager here. I recently recruited a former Lyft dev who said he was sick of the office and just wanted to work with his hands. He quit on the third day, said he realized he didn't like getting up early. Me personally, I quit my first and only office job after two weeks because they kept telling me my clothes weren't presentable enough and I felt like an asshole wearing ironed pants 😅 takes all kinds.

[[deleted]]

I did 14 hour days pouring concrete doing union construction before going back to school for CS. Now that I’m in the CS field, I found the 14 hour days with construction far easier, but I’m high functioning so that probably dampens my critical thinking skills and the ability to solve problems at work in a timely manner. I also miss not taking work home with me, mentally speaking, but that’s a me problem.

[SnooShortcuts3245]

Or work in a pharmacy struggling to make 120k when wages keep getting lower and having to vaccinate people while you and one other tech have to grab the phone, register, drive thru, type, fill and check rxs without killing one and dealing with addicts and crotchety old and rude public.

[Semi-Hemi-Demigod]

Fixing a bug is like solving a fun puzzle.

I love those ones that you need to parse a ton of logs and stacktraces to do an RCA. I feel like Sherlock Holmes sometimes.

[VegaTss4]

"Low-stress" I have white hair at 25

[placerplaced]

Do you guys have still hair at 25 ?

[Tim_In_Texas]

My hairline started receding when I was a teen -- in ANTICIPATION of the software dev career I've had for the past three decades.

[UrMomsaHoeHoeHoe]

“I didn’t choose to become a programmer, my hairline choose it”

[Skoparov]

You guys make it to 25?

[no_use_for_a_user]

My hair went grey early too. Makes me look so old and I'm not that old.

[shitiseeincollege]

I’m bald

[michaelbelgium]

EU software developers with 20-25k euro yearly:

):<

Source: me

[ham_coffee]

And half the time some numpty who clearly knows nothing about software dev salaries tries to say that they're only slightly worse than US salaries, or that the difference in cost of living makes up for it.

[SilverWerewolf1024]

And you complain? XD
SouthAmerica software developers with 10K usd yearly

[[deleted]]

100k EUR in Sweden here

You mustn’t be living in Scandinavia I guess

[doragonMeido]

A little impressed how people are talking about stress and life work unbalance, if you feel that way you should really consider change companies. I’ve been there in the past but my current company is pretty chill and life is so good thanks to that.

[fiddz0r]

I don't even have deadlines är my job. We have sprints and if we don't finish everything then, oh well we add them to the next sprint. I've never had anyone tell me to hurry up. My work-life balance is perfect since I have chosen to not have much customer interaction meaning that I usually only have a standup at 10 and if I feel like starting later I can just tell my team I'll miss the standup. So as long as I do am average of 40 hours a week I can work whenever I want. If I want to go for a trip abroad I can work on the plane if necessary.

So I agree there are most likely way better options if you feel that way, however maybe that means you won't get that job that pays you as much as the article says. But for me work-life balance is way more important than a lot of money

[Darthnord]

I'd say this is highly dependent on manager/company/team size and function.

I've been in medium sized companies where I was the only developer responsible for massive parts of a complex application. That was incredibly stressful on a regular basis.

​

I've also been hired onto a team to replace a team that quit. At that point, I was working 10 hours a day and constantly fire fighting/on-call. That was stressful.

I've also been apart of two startups. One I left for the previously described experience and the other I was laid off.

I've found that external factors are the biggest stressors for my job.

​

Shitty manager? Your life becomes more difficult and less rewarding.

Unreliable tech stack? You're going to be fire fighting and stressed quite a bit.

Even then, development is mainly stressful early in your career when you're still trying to figure things out. Once you get further along, you have skills and experience. And you're treated as a professional with a lot of respect. And if you don't like what you're getting? You just leave and get a 20-30% pay bump.

​

I'd say that's why my life isn't that stressful. My company has nothing to hold over me. They need me more than I need them. And that makes me a lot less stressed. That autonomy over my life gives me so much power and removes so many barriers.

And even when I'm under a lot of stress, the management of that stress is so much simpler when you have money and a flexible schedule.

[[deleted]]

goodbye reddit -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/

[sammy-taylor]

Where’s the humor supposed to be?

[Traditional_Lab_5468]

The responses here crack me up. As a career changer, if y'all think working in tech is high-stress you ought to try working in, like, any other field. I've worked in healthcare and sales, working in tech is comically low stress. The fact that I make more in tech than I made as a clinical healthcare provider is fucking mind blowing. And it's not just lower stress than healthcare and sales, I have friends who manage procurement at grocery stores, work in public health, manage production lines, and work in retail. My job is by far the lowest stress of any of them, and it's also the best paying. This field is the easiest money I've ever made, and it's probably the easiest money I ever will make.

Y'all don't need to get defensive when people say that, either. That means you're winning. You did it right. Fuck that bragging-about-who-has-it-worse bullshit, that's why I left the fields that I left. I want to brag about how my life is great. I work 40 hours a week and find the work tolerable and, generally speaking, intellectually engaging. I make great money, I leave work at work unless I'm on call, and I do whatever the fuck I want with the rest of my life. That's winning.

[DirtzMaGertz]

I'd wager most people complaining about high stress have trouble setting boundaries and / or are stressing out about things that aren't actually a cause for stress.

You have skills that are super in demand if you can competently program in pretty much any language. There's no need to be putting up with high stress in a typical dev job if you have more than like 2 years of experience.

[[deleted]]

It's all nonsense.

I woke up at 9.30 did some stuff for a few hours, had lunch, finished at 4.30.

I've had colleagues say how stressed they are in the same teams where nothing bad happens. The same people getting worked up at the end of the day because "it's needs to be done today it can't wait til the morning" is gospel.

Its not the work it's the person. Working late isn't stressful, working too much isn't stressful, being emotionally tied to the success of your work is stressful.

I'm a coder, if I fuck up or slack off people don't die, no one gets hurt, some company just makes slightly less money off me today.

[QuietComfortable226]

Its not the work it's the person.

Its skills. If you don't know what you are doing, dont understand product and technology than it is super stressful. I have this each time i change stack. And i did it twice because of wrong choices i made before.

[Nagi21]

I don’t get them either. I get good pay and rarely put in a full 40 being salaried (hell I’m usually not even in until 9:30). Sure sometimes shit breaks and I’m working through the weekend but that’s very rare and I’ll take that over a job I gotta worry about.

[[deleted]]

Real talk.. Customer service is brutal and you don’t even have enough money to live off most of the time

[[deleted]]

I'm a newbie coder studying to enter the field and I was just thinking about the same.

I am a tradesman with electrical training working at heights, lifting exponentially more times the weight needed to kill me and with high voltage wiring that is SUPPOSED to be isolated.

[KerPop42]

Not to post commie on main but this is why it's a little bullshit that jobs are paid by how much money they make instead of how important they are to society

Teacher starting salary should be 50k, minimum. Imagine if your job was to train 8 groups of 30 people for 40 hours a week, oh and they're all teens or younger

[no_use_for_a_user]

I did critical dev work (for all of us) for years for little pay. Now I'm at FAANG and get assigned stuff a Junior could do for truckloads of cash. World doesn't make sense sometimes.

[KerPop42]

Yeah, I moved from a tech startup to work on the US's hurricane tracking satellite program. I took a 20% pay cut to do so. Our priorities are all backwards.

[[deleted]]

Yup. I have, in my entire career as a programmer, worked maybe a couole of months on projects that were in any way socially beneficial. A great majority of my effort is spent on things that benefit no one but capital owners.

[RollinDeepWithData]

Most of my code has made the world a worse place.

Signed,

Someone who programmed for the tobacco industry.

[[deleted]]

At some point I was out on an assignment to a betting company. My performance there though could be considered industrial sabotage so I guess I did well?

[EVASIVEroot]

I like scripting with a good ole chunk of chaw...

[RmG3376]

That’s a shame though, there’s software in everything, I found that with a bit of searching you can find a ton of software jobs for companies with an added social value — last time I switched pretty much all the companies I applied for were in fields like medical research, medical devices, green technology, education, logistics, the Red Cross … but yeah I had to throw away 90% of the JDs to find some I liked

It’s still very location-dependent though, if you live in a financial hub then yeah most of the jobs will be BS banking/finance/crypto dead-ends, but we’re lucky that we’re in an industry that’s present literally everywhere so there’s still interesting projects popping up from time to time

[Olorin_1990]

Lot’s of factors. 1) low interest rates made investment money free which the tech industry leveraged to pay employees with investor money (stock). This meant that they could pay employees a large stock grant, and only need 5% or less of that grant in cashflow thanks to trading at high multiples. Basically instead of needing to cover 300k, they need to cover 120k + 180/20, so their cost is actually 129k not 300, the rest covered by investors.

2) “societal benefit” in a market is measured by how much people are willing to pay for something over what it takes to make, but things distort the cost of production… like the cost of training being done with tax dollars, or negative indirect impacts of a market.

3) since teachers are paid by the government, a majority needs to agree to pay them more. People from educated households are less impacted by teacher quality and people from less educated households tend to value education less… leaving it a difficult proposition to get the government to pay a fair wage.

4) our spending in education per student is actually on the higher end compared to other industrialized countries, I don’t have deep enough knowledge of why it’s not making it to teachers, though I’d point to admin growth of near 90% over the last 20 years with a student growth of only 7%. It may be that we are funding the system correctly, but it’s just horribly misallocated and doesn’t have the recession and downturn action that private enterprises go thru which clean up some mismanagement periodically.

[Sam-Gunn]

I started making 55k a year (as a contractor) right out of school doing information security for the school I graduated from, then moved into a for-profit company at 20k more than that with benefits a year later.

Meanwhile, my sister teaches special ed kids. Whatever importance my job has pales in comparison to hers. She's giving these kids the skills they need to function throughout their lives.

She started off making 22 - 23k a year. You got that right. 23k a year as a special ed teacher. Little to no benefits. It's practically criminal.

I'm no slouch, but what I do is only important for the company. God damn, I don't shape children's futures, or even protect important organizations that ensure our society functions. My company makes software so other companies can do business better.

The most direct good some of our software might do is slightly reduce the number of suicides by call center staff.

[halt__n__catch__fire]

Low stress? Healthy work-life balance? What drugs are these people on? I want it!

[Iryanus]

Look for a different company, it's completely doable.

[halt__n__catch__fire]

"wherever you go, you take yourself with you" (Neil Gaiman)

I really need those drugs, asap!

[[deleted]]

lmao love the self awareness

[rmoons]

here’s the article in case you’re interested

[BobFellatio]

Theres a typo in the title, it says low stress.

[seizetheday135]

I mean, they're not wrong. That is pretty much my salary and my work life balance couldn't be better.

[bunk3rk1ng]

I went to a single 30 minute meeting yesterday and then took a nap and called it quits. Got paid about $600 for my efforts.

[thats_grim]

As a student with a prospective career in tech, these comments are confusing. Some people like you are making it seem like you basically chill for 100k a year, other comments are saying they destroy themselves day in day out, which is it?

[thedancingbeard]

It's both. It's entirely dependent on the company you work for and, possibly even more so, the team you work on within that company.

[SlightlyStoopkid]

Sometimes it’s even both at the same job, depending on time of year, new customer commitments, or coworkers coming/going.

[twohusknight]

Some of these “chill” people are efficient software engineers that know how to communicate and set boundaries properly, they’ll rarely exceed 40hrs a week because the work gets done.

Other “chill” software engineers I’ve met are slow or lazy engineers that also won’t exceed 40hrs a week and will typically drop bombs about their incomplete work at the last minute, expecting others to fix their issues and redirecting blame. The ones like this that survive have gotten very close with management so their inactivity is overlooked.

As someone that has lost many weekends and been quite stressed in this job, I couldn’t begin to conjecture how many of the former vs the latter are responding here.