When does a developer life turn into a nightmare?
I’m still an intern, senior in school.
All the work I had to do so far was easy, I would get a task to work on for a week and finish it in a day.
When does work really get challenging ?

What kind of task did they assign to you?

When you are ask to meet the unreasonable deadline while being force the fix other people mistake.

@mr-user design and print a single layer PCB, slightly change a github repo, write a function or two in the main project code.

@Vast-Razzmatazz

It's not too bad. Do they ask you to think of a solution instead of making you code a solution.

Unreasonable deadlines.
E.g. “build a fully-featured user verification and risk engine in two weeks.”

Dealing with legacy spaghetti.
E.g. the equivalent of eight War and Peace’s worth of code, all tangled and full of hacky workarounds.

Changing requirements and scope creep.
E.g. The project manager / client wants a horse, then changes it to a mule, and finally settles on a car that seats two people, can haul things in the back, but isn’t a station wagon or pickup. A week before release, they mention that it needs to haul things to the ISS, so what they really wanted was a rocket. You’ve already built a mechanical, wheeled, four-legged pickup/mule monstrosity, and don’t have time to do anything but strap a rocket to the back and hope for the best.

That call in the middle of the night saying production is down and the company is losing thousands of dollars every minute, and management is blaming you/your team.

That giant feature that Sales requested, management prioritized ahead of everything else, and demanded you finish within a week despite your estimate coming in closer to three months. You somehow manage to cobble it together and get it working just in time for release. And then, a month later, it’s seen five users, three of which found it by accident and left, one bailed, and the fifth cancelled their purchase.

Those critical features that your bosses insist need to be finished/fixed by tomorrow, so you spend 13 hours scrambling, only to come in the next morning to find that nobody cares or even remembers.

Those meetings where the boss gets pissy about something and takes it out on you in front of the entire company/department.

Those times where your boss requests information from you, and then never bothers to read it, and makes decisions based entirely on marketing/sales bullshit, and now you’re stuck maintaining his screwup While he’s blissfully unaware.

Others taking credit for your efforts and getting a raise/bonus.

Need I go on?

@Root

Please do since I couldn't put it better myself.

What piss me the most is that not using those "urgent feature" they forget about it when I finish implementing them.

Building features that never see the light of production. Or even staging. Or even demos.

Not being able to shut your mind off at night or over the weekend because you’re still struggling to figure out some stupid bug.

Seeing flaws in other people’s software, and being able to identify what is happening and likely ways of fixing it without ever seeing the code. And knowing that you suddenly care more about their code than they ever will.

Management insisting on doing literally everything quickly, and completely ignoring the devs’ cries of mounting technical debt.

Management insisting that tests are a waste of time and money. And then blaming developers when things break, and oh my god, why didn’t you write tests? This is all your fault.

Having to hack your way around poorly-implemented features because you simply don’t have the time to refactor and clean up the code.

Passing the point of no return on technical debt — where it is cheaper and easier to rewrite the entire project from scratch than to fix the mess. And realizing that management will *never* agree. At this point, most devs just stop trying to fix things, so it accelerates.

Clients and sales and managers saying “It’s just a small change/feature” about literally everything.

Getting passed over for bonuses/promotions because you didn’t build x feature fast enough.

Getting passed over for bonuses/promotions because a coworker didn’t pull their weight and never finished the blockers on your feature.

Coworkers who write atrocious code, and never comment anything.

Coworkers who nitpick bloody everything in code reviews, way past the point of being constructive or relevant.

Coworkers always pushing the merge conflicts onto you to resolve.

Resolving breaking package changes.

Fighting your way out of dependency hell.

Ripping out and replacing deprecated/abandoned dependencies.

Fixing / maintaining intern code.

Being responsible for training those who simply do not care.

@Root
being the only one in two teams, who actually knows whats going on, who does what, and almost all the devs depend on to find screwups and fix them.

Never allow them to walk over you. There are always other companies and they’re hungry for developers. They’ll hire you.

If you remember that, it’s all fun and games, except maybe some hard concepts like CRDT to which our mind just doesn’t respond well.

If anything can really stop you, it’s a mental disorder. If you get one, you’re fucked. It’s better to have some savings just in case and some people to care for you because when you’re affected by mental illness you can’t think about yourself, you can’t fight it alone and you can’t make decisions – they’re all be horrible.

Wait until you meet these people:
1. The one that thinks he knows everything
2. The one that only knows how throw orders and afraid to stand for his own mess.
3. That one that doesn't like anything and whatever is done he says let's change this and that
4. The one that has every request as urgent and pretends he's solving first world problems
5. The one that doesn't care

Or you work at one of those companies:
1. Clients can get your personal number
2. A family business
3. Company that cares about looks and doesn't give a damn about quality
4. A company that doesn't know how to say no
5. A company that wants it all