Ask HN: How did you like your job in 2017?

I was at Amazon in the past but I am not currently there. That's as much as I'll narrow things down :)

-Edit- I used this acct as a throwaway in the past to respond to an Amazon-related topic and then just kept using it!

For me, at least, the problem is something else. I never expected it to be "special" at any of these places...I'd likely be exactly this unhappy doing the same meaningless work I'm doing here, elsewhere. I just took the jobs because they paid well and, at least at the beginning, I was going to be doing things that were of reasonable interest.

I tried the "take time off route" once, and while it was alright, I was consumed with thoughts of whether or not I'd ever be able to get a job again, to the point where I couldn't enjoy it simply because I worried about the future (and it wasn't because I only had a few months of runway - living frugally I could have likely stretched my savings to two years or so, but the panic got to me after half a year).

I, quite frankly and totally honestly, don't see any way out at this point. I live life in an aimless fog, with no drive towards anything any more (which also makes it very difficult to do things like study for whiteboard-hazing).

I would recommend trying to find an internal transfer. That way you don't have to do another round of whiteboard interviews, but you might find a better / more interesting project to work on. Any change of scenery might help.

I spent 3/4 of 2017 trying to land a job. I've been at the company for a quarter. Its a big corporate monstrosity and they literally made me "train" for a month on how to do sales, customer service, and technician roles... Yeah I sat on a phone for 2 straight days taking phone calls with an engineering degree from the best school in the SE USA. Just trying to put that in perspective. I overlooked it because the opportunity brought me into a place with a lot of job opportunities.

Its hard to describe without spilling the beans on who I work for. I was hired to do embedded programming work but I do nothing of the sort and just fix/cleanup code in C. My team is being broken up and I have a chance to work with someone who has a project that actually needs embedded work.

He is abrasive as hell and corrects me all the time. I have tried to engage with him as much as possible over the last week. I am afraid even though his behavior is exactly what I envisioned as my best fit (I have worked with such a man before and I grew alot). I am also afraid because the CEO is moving to our building and the project is directly linked to whether or not the business is viable after the next 3 years. I know I can do the work as I have literally done the same kind of project before with a different standard (Project is a proof of concept), and I want to do this work as opposed to playing Barney's cleanup game with half assed projects. I liked doing Barneys cleanup song with that at my old job, but that was new frontier for me (CUDA).

I have done all I can to make sure this man understands exactly what I am capable of doing on my own, what I will need to bug him about, and things I have no experience in. Trying to cover all my bases to make sure I am a good fit for him. Yet I cannot shake this feeling of whether it is a good fit for me. Its like trying to sleep before the first round of engineering exams but constant.

In the end I decided to join his team because he used to subscribe to "embedded system design" magazine which is a resource I used to prepare for interviews. (Can someone point me to a company that will actually test me on embedded principles in a interview for an embedded position? Literally every interview asks things I learned in first year or a thought puzzle.)

Maybe I feel to paranoid about all this because I went from producing 50x more at a startup to here where a simple change can get deadlocked for a week. Believe me I work frantically. I spend 80% of my time researching and taking notes since all the domain experts have quit (terrible benefits) and nobody seems to want and be able to assist me in a proper training rampup period (y'know instead of having me work a fucking call center).

Everyone seems to barely know the part of the code they live in and honestly as I walk around productivity/attention is literally the lowest I have ever seen in my life. To this I try and convince myself its just the change of employer type and that other people are literally watching movies at work so I should not fret so much.

Sorry for the wall of text, but the first thing I learned is that at corporate you have to cover your own ass. So it is cathartic to be able to express myself here. Any input would be greatly appreciated. I have no idea what I am doing.

7/10, defense contractor doing projects no one cares about until I get my security clearance. Tired of "rudimentary python scripts", want to work on a real code base and with other people (I'm the only one on my project). First job out of college.