I don’t miss it.

There was a time that it didn’t seem like I ever could. It was all I did. Coding, designing, architecting, playing with new languages and frameworks – it was great. I spent hours upon hours getting good at things that were, in the end, just passing fads.

Passing fads with ‘benefits’, really. The ‘benefit’ being the ability to find work maintaining someone else’s crappy code. Maintenance.

No one looks forward to a career in software engineering maintenance.

But that’s the majority of the industry, and if you’re good at maintenance, they’ll pick someone else to do the new development no matter your experience level. They need you there with your finger in the dyke as you watch them do it all over again – making similar mistakes.

No, I don’t miss it.

I don’t miss sitting in meetings to watch other people beat their chests and claim credit for things that they didn’t do as political necessity. I don’t miss reading emails written by people more interested in trying to impress each other rather than actually communicate what they need to.

I don’t miss being told I should be at my desk more often when I was one of the few people meeting deadlines, milestones, yardsticks and tombstones. I don’t miss the tiresome code-jockeys who don’t know a thing about process and were graced with writing them. I don’t miss going through undocumented code and figuring things out to rewrite a new iteration that will never be used. Oh, and if you were ever on call…

There’s really a lot not to miss.

And as software engineering goes, that’s pretty much the way it is. That’s a pretty average career, since most work in software engineering is maintenance – and maintenance, after a certain period, shows you everything that was done wrong. But since you’re doing maintenance, you don’t ever get to use it at work. Maybe you do it at home, but honestly, after a few decades you may not want to stare at a computer when you get home.

No, I’m playing these days. I finally got back to why I started it all in the first place.

Except I have a lot more experience. And I can walk away from my desk, I can eat what I want when I want, I can wear what I want…

Cubicles? Offices? That’s for managers.