You're definitely on to something here. This is probably also why engineers like to 1. rebuild everything from scratch (but better!) 2. can't handle staying at a company more than a few years.

I was reflecting on why I'm hating my current client's codebase so much whereas 6 months ago it was tolerable.

I think for a while you pretend to yourself it's going to get better, then it never does. Code is a always messy, confusing, etc. There's never time to really fix it.

Switching every 2 years helps you pretend that's not the case, at the new place it'll be better and you'll definitely have an impact on this code base this time.

> Dealing with all the poorly written libraries, unpredictable bugs and shitty APIs

Those things don't bother me - to me that's the fun of it (well, ok, not the shitty APIs, but the uncertainty and the whole constant exploration and discovery aspect of this profession). What does bother me is the expectation that I ought to be able to predict down to the hour how long something should take - even by people who ought to know that I'm dealing with so many poorly written libraries, unpredictable bugs and shitty APIs as to make that impossible.

But as a programmer wanting to getting into a management role of some sort. Lets be frank here, the true reason most people want to do is because, the pay as a manager is just way too good, the working hours are next to nothing. And there is a default master-slave relation ship between a manager and a programming, despite the skill, output and intellectual value of the programming being many orders of magnitude more superior.

I’ll let the parent commenter correct me but being a product manager (or project manager) does not mean you are in a management role. I have had both titles and never had people report me. I probably make much less as a project manager than I could as a software engineer.

The real money appears to be in people management which is tougher to break into.

Have you ever managed developers? It is incredibly hard and intellectually-demanding (albeit using a different part of the brain / areas of intelligence.) I tried my hand at it for a few years and went back to development which was much more intellectually satisfying and much less stressful.

It will depend on the company/team/* of course, but don't think that because your manager isn't visibly grinding through programming tasks that she/he isn't just as intellectually competent or taxed as you. You may just not be mature-enough in the industry to see it yet.

12 hours a day, WTF? I've never seen anyone in any of the several companies I've worked for work 12 hours day regularly. I'm sure it happens but that's definitely not normal for software development, so to say "for the rest of your life" is a little misguided. Perhaps you were being a bit hyperbolic.

When (and where) I was studying CS programmers were quite unglamorous and had famously long working days. I obviously didn't mean it literally but I was trying to make the point that the grind was (is?) a very real part of the job.