I was once turned down by a prospective employer because the solution that I devised for a problem was too simple and “not elegant”. I was pretty baffled but deemed it pointless to argue. Generally, in recent years web development has gotten weirdly complex, where it would take a few hundred steps to actually start writing code and trivial things would just break because of stupid dependencies, too fragile for my taste, things like composer made life better though. It’s a world, where the developers also need to act as sysadmins from time to time to deal with botched deployments. Where, if you are stuck with a windows machine for development, you wont be doing anything useful for a few hours. Keeping up whatever was happening in dev world was close to impossible and meant spending even your free time trying out new libraries. I got to a point where I was actually dreaming about code and project architectures. On the other hand, I found myself constantly battling the “nephew” problem and trying to convince the customers to stop being pound fool and penny wise or how nine women can’t make a baby in a month. On the flip side keeping things profitable for the company was always stressful. This all was just consuming my life and yet I was not entirely sure if it was worth it. My life was passing me by while I was just burning through way too much emotional and mental energy on things other than solving the actual problem. It was time to stop.

I moved into a slightly laid back job dealing with data, working for a not-for-profit that I found pretty darn cool. No job is without its problems but I started to see some changes in myself. At the end of the day I wasn’t completely burnt out anymore and I actually found time to care about my health and join a gym. I was sleeping better and eating better, I was waking up in a better mood. I was spending more quality time with my family since I stopped bringing my work home. I am not saying that the transition was easy, it was like detoxing. After a while though, I started to feel human again which was a new and pleasant-ish experience.