Be a developer or support engineer?
Never been happy being a developer despite being one for years.
- Project milestones are tied to project funding cycle, rather than how much time is actually needed for performing the necessary work or tasks.
- Users frequently change their mind every week or month about what they want, and they treat software as vanity projects. Each time a developer gives them something, they would say it's not something they want. Requirements are always worded in some vague terms.
- Developers are forced to work overtime 4 to 5 days of 12 hours workdays every week to meet crunch time, but whatever gets built get trashed the following week or month.
- Then the final output is a white elephant system full of buggy fancy features for demo that users refuse to accept. Then the project/product manager would again force developers to debug or rewrite the codes to stabilize the system in order to meet project delivery deadline and get paid. Developers are not allowed to go home and are confined in office until the work is done. If this isn't modern day slavery, I dunno what else to call it.
Would taking a paycut and retraining to be a support engineer of some kind be better? I only vaguely know support engineers are required to deploy software updates, test them, provide user trainings etc. But would the BS be less than those for developers who are bullied by users and managers who only know how to demand unlimited rework and unconditional overtime?