For a years I’m reading and hearing a lot of encouragement from software developers community. However, truth is not all sunshine and rainbows. People are speaking about high salaries, interesting challenges, empathy on the workplace and so on. Recent survey found that 80 % of professional software developers are unhappy. If it’s all sunshine and rainbows how comes that 8 of 10 people are not happy at their workplace? Well that’s because, surprise, surprise people on the social media lie. They lie all the time, about everything, why would software development field be different?

So, what makes a software developer unhappy? False expectations are a good place to start. I’ve seen tons—and I mean tons—of “dev life” videos. They often show developers dressed nicely, sipping soy lattes, smiling, and looking content. Yeah, that’s all nonsense. It’s just a job, like any other. You have to wake up early, commute through traffic, and deal with all the usual workday hassles.

When you get to the workplace, there are a lot of people you have to work with. Some of them are nice, some not so much. But you have to deal with all of them. Unlike in normal social situations, you can’t just be rude or ignore a colleague because they’re not your kind of person. And trust me, there will be people who drive you nuts! You know they aren’t doing anything wrong, they’re just not your type of crowd. Sometimes, it’s even their job to drive you nuts (yeah, QA, I’m looking at you!).

On the bright side, you’re probably driving someone else nuts too, and they have to tolerate you. So, kudos to everyone for hanging in there! It’s not all doom and gloom, though.

Responsibility is another key factor. Developers work on important projects. For instance, at my current job, there are two medical projects. Now, imagine making a mistake there—imagine the kind of damage one small bug could cause. People could literally die because of an error. On the bright side, it might happen to someone you dislike—but no one will find that amusing, except maybe you, you little psycho reading this.

I’ve also worked in the fintech industry. If you make a mistake there, a lot of rich people could lose their money. And while it might seem fun to sing Aerosmith’s “Eat the Rich,” guess what? Rich people have rich lawyers. And those lawyers will be coming after you.

Don’t even get me started on the constant learning. While I do find it fun to learn new things, if it’s not something I’m personally interested in, I couldn’t care less. But guess what—I have to. Among my acquaintances, I’m known as the guy who hates CSS. Some assume that’s because I don’t understand CSS, but I assure you, that’s not the case. If you had to learn a new way of doing the same thing in a different language and constantly adjust your mental model—just to do the same task—you’d hate it too.

And yet, I constantly have to learn something new in the CSS space. Now we’ve got trigonometry involved. Turns out your math teacher was right—you will use sine and cosine one day… in freaking CSS. And I was hoping sine and cosine are behind me, left to rot in high school.

Do you get it now? This is why 80% of developers are unhappy. It took me about 15 minutes to write all of this, and I could easily list 15 more reasons why. Don’t be fooled by influencers—software development isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Get ready to be a coding monkey, with a decent salary, a ton of responsibility, and a job just like anyone else in this world.

At least AI will replace us all in 15 years, and we can collectively become farmers, right? Yeah, I wish. That’s just another lie people on social media like to spread. But more on that next time.

Oh, yeah… I’m as well preparing a post about mental health and how to stay sane, happy and healthy in software world. Stay tuned!!