this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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Lost the sauce. What should I do/think about? (lemm.ee)
submitted 11 hours ago by deaf_fish@lemm.ee to c/cs_career_questions@programming.dev
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I have been a software engineer of off highway farm equipment for most of my life. I have like 15 years of it. I have just lost the ability to care about it anymore.

I have explored all the things that interest me and now it seems like everything is just turning the crank to completion. A very boring/slow turning with deadline pressure. I am doing less development and more code reviews because I have become a more senor developer.

My position in the company is pretty good and I could probably ride it out until I die or the company picks up on the fact that my output has dropped due to the lack of caring. But that eats at my soul and it isn't fair to my coworkers.

If money wasn't an issue, I would jump to game development but I hear that doesn't pay well or treat their employees well either. I suppose I could start my own company...

I have a wife and we plan to have one kid if that is possible for us.

Burnout is a possibility, but if that is what this is, I am not sure what to do about it.

So here is what I think my options are. I am open to other suggestions:

  1. Stay where I am.
  2. Pivot hard to management where I am.
  3. Try to find a new job within Embedded Systems
  4. Try to do Game Development.
  5. Drop everything, become a philosopher like Diogenes of Sinope

Thanks for your consideration.

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[–] Guttural@jlai.lu 2 points 3 hours ago

Gamedev does not necessarily pay badly, depending on your location. But getting hired to do it might be tough.

I got in by getting hired in a game company doing something related but it wasn't directly gamedev. After a while, I was able to transfer to actual gamedev and I'm now on my third big game project, having shipped two.

I tried getting into gamedev directly, and that was honestly pretty soul-crushing.