Developers... What is it about your 9-5 that makes you want to escape it? 🧑‍💻

For me is spending most of the time in my day for adding value of someone else’s asset and not getting enough to invest into my own and overall lack of time to do things which matter to me because of 9-5.

Not so much about 9-5, but about working for an employer.

Kind of cliche, but it's about leverage.

If I create an amazing piece of code, it will continue to bring in $$$ to the company even as I sleep (and as they sleep too). But what I get in return is a monthly salary, and maybe a promotion or a bonus if I did extra well. So it feels like I'm creating lasting money-making devices, but I'm only reaping its benefits once.

The lack of freedom

Financial Freedom to do what I want when I want. I also don't want to HAVE to go to work. It'd be nice to have the choice.

Context switching.

I've got a pretty nice role and direct team. I get to make the final say on nearly all the tech decisions.

But ... Some days I get dozens and dozens of random requests that distract from my longer term goals. Each request may only take a couple minutes. Grant access to a system, answer a question about data, investigate when stuff goes wrong. Next thing you know, half the day is gone.

I like to work on my own projects :)

Want to? I already did, a year ago, and couldn't be happier. With COVID normalizing WFH, I noticed the passive aggression shot way up since people could hide behind webcams. Another nasty side effect of 9-5 that can only happen in this new WFH culture is that if you're in the west coast and your employer is in the east coast, you can be expected to be present for 6am meetings 😵.

To become truly great at a 9-5 job, you have to operate like an entrepreneur anyway.

write email. I hate write email..

I want to escape the feeling of disagreement with the management.

I don't agree with many product decisions of the growth team, but nobody asks or listens to my opinion

I'm personally tired of chasing the raise and then seeing it being eaten by inflation. I understand that if the company I work for can afford that raise and still make profits, I can make much more and finally break out of this vicious loop if I work for myself.

This Youtube video summary gives you a broad perspective of the current industry trend among workers:

Careers Have Changed Forever

tosummary.com/p/63dca1689619159bd21f1d28

I will say micromanagement and work-life balance, any dedicated individual gets sucked into the work. Which does create work-life disbalance.

I've worked for many good companies, and loved my team mates, but over a certain size companies just devolve to lazy org patterns:

• Lack of flexibility in my schedule, I love the outdoors and want to take advantage of the weather.
• Middle management - every startup I've worked for over the last 20 years goes from being naturally dynamic and innovative to bloating with unnecessary middle management and Agile paralysis/meeting hell.
• Boredom - I want to do more than be a cog, grind out another refactor, build something no one validated, or teach/train a crappy contracting team that was the lowest bidder.
• Being pigeonholed, except newest startups and small companies, most companies don't do well with people who exist outside the Salary.com job roles.
• Lack of security - There's a falsehood that big company = security. Perhaps I feel this having been through now 3ish recessions in the States. The larger the company the less likely you know when that ax is going to fall. I've seen very profitable departments get laid off because they didn't have the right manager/gadfly at the top, or just didn't align with what the Big-O CFO focused on for the stock price. I may be responsible in my own company for everything, but I KNOW what most of my risks truly are.
• Mono-culture and lack of diversity - Both encourage group think instead of innovation and intellectual curiosity. Picking who I work with now I can be deliberate and find people who'll challenge me and my assumptions.

freedom

social anxiety and lack of control over

When you care alot about the stuff you do at work, you invest a lot of effort and time which leads to less time spent on working on your projects outside of work. I'd like to take that time and put it to my passion projects.

Engineers wants to build, not treat, teach, nor think about what happens at the edge of a black hole (except if they are building the black hole 😁), and in software engineering, you will find people that have chosen the field with the lowest barrier to build. A startup is another thing for us to build, and with its possible reward, we are more than addicted to leave our 9-5. So most engineers leave their 9-5 to take on possibly the epitome of engineering (building a successful product)

It's always fascinating how much of the stuff I build (tools and utilities, besides the main apps and processes) is to make life easier for me. So work and life balance to answer your question. I believe if a task is repeated 3 times (not short of those in enterprise workplaces), it needs to be automated. So now, I'm working on that motivation to do it outside of work and help others some, while trying to monetize that philosophy.

Lack of data driven decisions and more failing upwards of management.

I have always wanted to do my own thing, had two very bad managers in the past and it's made me always want to try and do my own thing.

At the moment i'm in a company going through layoffs and we have to wait a number of weeks here in Ireland due to local laws to find out if we're affected. So that's spurring me onto want to do something myself a lot more!

I love the mission of my full time job, but it's not the type of product that I find motivating to work on. I'm working at a clean tech startup which feels good, but I love building communication/collaboration software. I probably won't act on "escaping" it for a few years.

For me at the moment with my 9-5, it's working on a project I don't really care for with a technology I don't really care for. Looking to break free soon by building my Saas.

I would say the expectation of other people that you have to be always available from 9 to 5. And sometimes not having much control over the direction of the product itself - that's why I want to invest more time on side projects and indie hacking :)

I hate receiving slack pings telling me what to do, I like sending slack pings myself :D

The 9-5 :)