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.

Knowing nothing else about you or the new job offer, it makes sense to take the offer. But I’d rather know more than the information you’ve presented. The good news is that you do know more and can better determine if there are mitigating circumstances that make turning down the offer make more sense.

Maybe dont take the offer and actively search for a bettrr engineering role? Heck it may get you a pay raise too.

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

Old man 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 lob 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 admitting 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.)

I also think it’s probably a good idea to try out the new career path. Doing software dev as a job, and doing it as a hobby because you like to, are very different when it comes to motivations and goals. Don’t think of it as walking away and just being a lowly hobby dev though, you can build your skills and work on what you want to as a hobby, for the problems you are trying to solve and things you like to work on, and that’s totally ok.

Not everyone wants to put in the effort to play guitar for a living, but you can definitely still enjoy guitar.

Background: 16 years programming professionally, 20+ including hacking in high school. Currently in a principal engineer role.

Immediate reactions: you do not have to program in your free time. I ferment veges, I brew kombucha, I garden, I make hot sauce, I hike, I camp, I spend time with my dog, I game, I listen to music, I make music, I work on my house. I absolutely do not fucking program in my free time. I used to love programming, now it’s “what I do”, but I don’t love it.

That said, you may have to invest some of your free time to grow your skills. But your primary learning should be during your paid hours. If your job isn’t providing growth, that’s an issue with the company. There are better junior positions out there, but it is a guessing game. I do think it’s important to mention that the jump to senior is largely an accumulation of domain knowledge, not necessarily industry knowledge. Climbing the ladder is often a matter of sticking around long enough to get that promotion, then leveraging it into another company.

I wouldn’t blame you for taking the alternative job - and honestly, the best program managers, the best team leaders, have some experience doing the actual work. I’d say do it if it seems like a better opportunity. You can always circle back if you prefer the individual contributor route.

What you’re describing sounds like burnout to me. Stepping away from coding could be a good step in recovering. New offer certainly sounds worth trying, I hope it goes well.

In my opinion you should take the opportunity and check if you will like this new job. And mind you in a lot of jobs there is room for some programming to automate some processes internally in the company if you feel like it.

But it is great that you acknowledge your weaknesses and accept them. I am also leading a team of sw devs and have a couple of juniors in my team and I try to dedicate enough time to them to explain to them more complex topics, give them recommendations on how to write better and more maintainable code, etc. And I have the feeling your lead isn’t doing much or showing interest in your work, which is a pity and very demotivating because I have been in your shoes before and know exactly the feeling.

And a bit of perspective, I have a guy in my team who is pretty smart and overall a great Dev, the problem is that it is extremely difficult to work with him, he doesn’t have a high working culture, thinks that others are stupid and doesn’t do his job well. I know how much he can but it is really a pain to work with him. Believe me I tried a lot of different approaches with him to make it work and so far with mixed results.

On the other hand I have a junior in my team who isn’t the best programmer and I believe he will never be, but he is very positive, works hard, really tries and in general has a very high work culture and it is so much more enjoyable to work with him, so you realise that skills and brain capacity aren’t everything and that sometimes work attitude is way more important.

I wish you all the best in your new endeavour and I hope you feel happier soon.

You have to do what’s best for yourself and your situation.

I was a systems administrator for a decade or so and I reached a turning point… I had a bad experience, was burning out, and I had the opportunity to take a new sysadmin gig at a credit union, or take a step down to a support role, that paid more, with less responsibility, and had IPO shares…

My kid was getting ready for college, so option 1 positioned me well if I needed to load up student loans. Option 2 maybe made it so we wouldn’t need student loans.

I went with option 2. Less stress, less responsibility, more pay, paid for kids college in cash, now through a series of IPOs and acquisitions, I’m working for a VERY large tech company.

Does “not being an engineer” look right for you? Quite possibly.

I’m a manager at a FAANG and have been involved in tech and scientific research for commercial, governmental, and military applications for about 35 years now, and have been through a lot of different careers in the course of things.

First - and I really don’t want to come off like a dick here - you’re two years in. Some people take off, and others stay at the same level for a decade or more. I am the absolute last person to argue that we live in a meritocracy - it’s a combination of the luck of landing with the right group on the right projects - but there’s also something to be said about tenacity in making yourself heard or moving on. You can’t know a whole lot with two years of experience. When I hire someone, I expect to hold their hand for six months and gradually turn more responsibility over as they develop both their technical and personal/project skills.

That said, if you really hate it, it’s probably time to move on. If you’re looking to move into a PM style role, make sure that you have an idea of what that all involves, and make sure you know the career path - even if the current offer pays more, PMs in my experience cap out at a lower level for compensation than engineers. Getting a $10k bump might seem like you’re moving up, but a) it doesn’t sound like you’re comparing it to other engineering offers and b) we’re in a down market and I’d be hesitant to advise anyone to make a jump right now if their current position is secure. Historically speaking, I’m expecting demand to start to climb back to high levels in the next 1-2 years.

Honestly, it just sounds like your job sucks. I have regularly had students, interns, and mentees in my career because that’s important to me. One thing I regularly tell people is that if there’s something that they choose to read about rather than watching Netflix on a Saturday, that’s something they should be considering doing for a living. Obviously that doesn’t cover Harry Potter, but if you’re reading about ants or neural networks or Bayesian models or software design patterns, that’s a pretty good hint as to where you should be steering. If you’d rather work on space systems, or weapons, or games, or robots, or LLMs, or whatever - you can slide over with side and hobby projects. If you’re too depressed to even do that, take the other job. I’d rather hire a person who quit their job to drive for Uber while they worked on their own AI project than someone who was a full stack engineer at a startup that went under.

Anyway, that’s my advice. Let me know if I can clarify anything.

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.

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.

Not a software engineer, but work closely with them in a different field. This is 100% common, especially for junior devs.

My honest advice is to push with it and truly spend some time in the field, and if you hate it, then leave without regrets. However, know that the initial bump is the hardest, over time it gets easier and you’ll even likely find yourself doing side projects on your own time!

Just my 2 cents.

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 why I have never taken on programming as a profession. I earn more than I would ever make as a developer (even a very senior developer) leveraging my (average) programming skills to produce a personal suite of software tools and scripts that means I can do my chosen profession better, faster and with less effort than any of my colleagues or competitors. I have also developed small apps on a private/ personal basis that I have then sold to my employer for wider use in the company.

And I still enjoy programming as a hobby as much as I ever have. Don’t underestimate how much being able to program at even an average level can boost a career in another field.