How software engineering has ruined my life

I have been working as a software engineer for almost 6 years now. I started working as an intern before finished my college degree that first experience taught a lot about what I didn't know and about the lie the current school system really is. In today's world the universities don't care about your learning they only care about how they should make up the broke system they're selling to you.

When I was in my teenagerhood they only thing I could think about was how I would spend the rest of my life what would I study when I went to college and the only career that seems to be a fit for me were the ones related to engineering. Like most teenagers I was under pressure about choosing a career that would warranty a bright future for me but not like most teenagers I didn't have adult figures that could instruct me on how to choose or avoid the indecisions that were going through my mind. Even with that I knew that choose the worst path in my life was better than not choosing anything, so I choose study engineering.

I choose study engineering in a university near my hometown thinking that it was a good university, the career overall wasn't difficult but that's because I didn't know that I was in the easy part of a professional career and that the universities in general do not care about teaching you or even giving you the necessary tools to at least defend yourself in a professional environment nor soft skills or technical skills they only care about how are you going to pay for their "quality" education. I was an insecure teenager with no tutor that could help me and desperately begging for knowledge that could help me in my life.

It was on the last years of college that I notice that I didn't know anything about life and that I didn't have any real skill from which I could make a profit to live. That's how I started to learn English by myself, and it was a real hard mountain to climb but I succeed on this. Feeling betrayal by the scholar system without knowing something really useful it was real milestone for me.

After this first approach about learning something by myself I started to seek in me what was something that I really wanted to learn and like most people remembering its childhood I remember playing videogames all the time, spending 8 hours in front of a screen seeing how the villagers in Age of Empires II built a second town center was magical for me so I fell on the cliché about learning how to develop videogames and after I did some research my laziness won and dropped that but even if my career didn't teach me everything I need it tough me what the software was and the basics about programming.

I have to be fair in this even though my career didn't help in almost nothing in my life it put me on the right track to learn the skills that I really wanted.

I started to learn javascript and NodeJs by myself and thanks to this I got my first real job as an intern in another city, so I had to move out. In this first experience I learn that even though I had learned much by myself I needed to practice more and learn more about programming in general but again my laziness was the enemy I didn't know I had, my desire for learning wasn't bigger than my mental monsters.

For some reason after the period of internship the company decided to hire me as a junior software engineer. My boss was an asshole, every day I felt like I was nothing, every day was a marathon against my own thoughts, all the time I had this child running around my head screaming that I knew nothing and that I didn't deserve the job but hey! I had a real job in a shit company what more could I ask for.

After this first job I was hired at a startup, I thought that this could be a real beginning in the software engineering world but guess what I learned that if it wasn't my head telling me that I was worthless it would be someone else older, dumber and with an inheritance believing that he could play to the successful entrepreneur.

At this part of my story, I'm really thankful for the company that hired me after the crash in the startup, they were really nice people, they treat me right like if I was a person that deserve respect for been who I am, unfortunately this company entered in a financial downhill due to their lack of clients and the software engineering bubble exploding so I had to find a job before they fire me.

That's how I land in my current job working in a really big fintech in my country, it has been a job that has frustrate me a lot with a toxic environment that always seems to tell you that even that you could be the best programmer in the world it won't never be enough and that always you could be replaced for a 10xProgrammer working for half you salary.

Now to this story you could add the AI threat, the 500 appliers per job publication on LinkedIn, the constant evolution of the software engineering field and the impostor syndrome to the reasons that I wish I would have chosen another career path.

Please don't let you guide by my sad words on this post, this is just random thoughts that I really need to share to let every programmer out there feeling it useless that they are not alone and that they are not the only ones struggling in the software engineering field.

GG's <3.