“Oh, you work with computers that must pay alright and be a great job“, as a developer or anyone who works in the I.T industry you’ll get this response a lot when you tell people you’re a developer and to a degree it’s somewhat true but being a developer isn’t the walk in the park those unaware of what a developer actually does it seems.
You spend 9 til <insert variable time here> working for an employer and although you were hired to work 9 am to 5.30 pm Monday to Friday it’s a known thing in the industry that you’re not always guaranteed to leave on-time nor even start at the time you would like. Some places basically make you feel as though you’re not a team player if you try and leave on time too.
You come home from your sometimes long day and spend time with your family, but you’ve got a freelance project you need to finish and an impatient client who forgets you work full-time and can’t respond to their emails, text messages, telegrams or phone calls during the day, so you head to your computer and do some coding until about 11 pm. Your partner and family try and understand but all they see is; you come home, have dinner, make a beverage and head straight for the computer, it can sometimes make you feel pretty bad like you’re neglecting your family but you’re only trying to help pay the bills.
You are always checking your work and personal email accounts, you’re trying to work on your own personal projects and or contribute to open source projects and you like to visit Hacker News more than a couple of times a day (even though you’re knee deep in work). Unless you’re a developer who specialises in one of the trending, hip languages and frameworks like; Rails, Go, Haskell or Python you’re probably not getting paid as much as your family and friends think you are.
You’re doing things and not always getting the credit and accolades you deserve, higher ups are taking credit for their teams work all while you’re trying to climb the ladder and make more money for your family. You’re hitting your head against your desk for 6 or 7 hours out of your day fixing bugs with solutions that are so simple you get even more frustrated. You’re eating lunch at your desk because a project manager gave an unrealistic timeline to a client that didn’t factor in testing and changes.
So next time you meet a developer don’t ask them to fix your computer, don’t assume they’re loaded and don’t assume just because you’re outside working and they’re inside that they’re working any less hard than you or anyone else are.
