There are a lot of articles like this around and I always read them with a grain of salt. People always complain how everything nowadays is split into smaller pieces and you're required to learn everything there is. You don't, but you have to do the splitting in order to gain the scalability and performance for an application, like Facebook or Amazon. If you work in a company like that and expect to build the whole car, it's gonna be a massive car and it's gonna run really slow if you're the one expected to do everything. That's why you have teams of developers, who work on multiple parts of that car, and there should be communication between those teams as to what they're building together. You can't be expected to do everything by yourself. Communication is often an issue in various companies I've worked with, and when it doesn't work it creates friction in teams. COVID has made that worse.
Reading these articles I can only come to the following conclusions:
- You're tired of development and want a change. That's fine and good for you!
- You expect too much of yourself, or the company you work for expects too much from you. If you are required to learn a new skill, ask them to pay you a compensation for learning it, or ask them time to learn it. This can, however, result in something of a burn out as full stack development these days feels so overwhelming with the amount of tech available.
- You lack the motivation or skill to learn new things like front-end development vs. back-end development. I myself can work both and yes, it can be overwhelming, but I usually establish my role in a project. I can do full stack development or simply front- or back-end.
I've seen a lot of people in this industry become overwhelmed with the amount of tech that's simply been established in the last five years. People who are close to their 50's often can't keep up and they drop out, or move on. Younger people, like myself (closer to 30 than 40), can keep up and we're excited when there's new things to play around with. You can still work in tech even when you feel like you can't keep up anymore. There are other roles besides coding. Some people start doing more architecture work, some become consultants, managers, PO's.. However, most often what I've seen is that people don't even start thinking these things before it's too late and they just throw in the towel.
