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Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career

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Re: Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career

#71

Post by scarface74 »

projektir wrote: post #61
scarface74 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m much more cynical now. I don’t get my “inspiration” from my job. The only reason I went to work up until my current job was to get a paycheck and learn skills to get a larger paycheck. As long as that was happening, I was happy. Now, things are different. I’ve come close to maxing our as an individual contributor in my local market, I have no desire to be a manager, and a dev lead position doesn’t pay enough more…

I think that's generally the part I don't like about most jobs. It seems everyone is checked out and is just there to collect a paycheck and build their resume. My job is fine in terms of paycheck and learning, but it feels like I'd have an easier time if I just ignored issues but that's not really the kind of person I want to become.

I wish I could say that attitude was in me and that’s the advice I would give others. But, I’m at the point where either I either want to be a team lead at a large company, be an architect by responsible if not title at a small company where there isn’t too much red tape, or just a consultant.

Re: Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career

#72

Post by burnit »

diminoten wrote: post #18
vinylkey wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think licensure is part of the definition of "engineer"

I didn't get a chance to see the comment before he edited it out, but in some countries (Canada I think?) "engineer" is actually a protected title, requiring licensure. I don't know what his point was, but as a "software engineer", I sometimes wonder if I should be called a "developer" and let my PE friend keep the "engineer" title, just for clarity's sake.

Oh wow, I thought it was being downvoted as an initialism for autism spectrum disorder.

Re: Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career

#73

Post by isodude »

kilroy123 wrote: post #46
guhcampos wrote: post #10

I don't want to sound an asshole, but I will sound an assholle nevertheless. I was damn happy as one can be at 3.5 years in my career. 10 years in, I feel like my happiness and awesomeness has been slowly consumed by corporate politics, unfair promotions and layoffs, bad work ethics and the such. I still like my work. I really really enjoy it when it's productive, and I still feel amazed to see the green checkmark on…

I feel exactly the same way and also just hit the 10-year mark. I'm literally working at the worst place I have ever worked at in my career. Next Friday will be my last day. I'm seriously considering trying to get out of tech forever after this last gig. I'm moving to Asia in a few weeks to try to work on bootstrapping a small company.

It's quite funny how many IT persons I face when dancing (in my case Argentine Tango). But I start to believe that it's because it gives you another dimension/mindfulness of life than putting bits in the right order does, but at the same time is quite nerdy. I do recommend it immensively though, especially if you get of a gig and have a bit of spare to learn the dance intensively for a few weeks. Game changer.

Re: Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career

#74

Post by isodude »

fallingfrog wrote: post #33

They wouldn't call it work/life balance if work was really part of your life. It's dead time, lost time. I've always felt that way anyhow. You can convince yourself otherwise maybe, if you're a musician or something. For most people though that's the truth of it.

Time is not wasted if you enjoy wasting it. The life part can be dull for some as well. If all your work time is lost time, it's time to change routines or perspective, don't be satisfied with less.

Re: Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career

#75

Post by nathan_f77 »

I think I'd be happy in a job if I could have self-direction and work on whatever I find interesting or important. That's a lot more important to me than working remotely or having a flexible schedule. I really don't like being told exactly what to work on and having all my ideas shot down.

I'm a solo founder of a small startup, and I really enjoy the freedom to work on whatever I want. I'm making lots of mistakes and not growing as fast as I could be, but I'm learning a lot and I enjoy almost everything that I'm working on. I'm even enjoying the marketing, sales, and support, because it's fun to talk to people and personally solve their problems.

I'm not sure if I ever want to bring on a co-founder or hire some people, but I think it could be interesting to work with a small group of generalists where everyone just works on whatever they think is important. There's a famous quote from Steve Jobs: "It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do." I don't think it's a very radical idea, but I don't know if many companies actually put it into practice. I think that kind of decision-making is usually reserved for cofounders or C-level executives, and it probably breaks down after 10+ employees. But would be fun to try with a small team.

Re: Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career

#77

Post by talonx »

fukuwata wrote: post #26
patejam wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about OP's environment, but the larger the codebase, the less feasible running every test locally as you go becomes. You run relevant tests locally as you go, but depending on the change it might take a long while to run ALL tests that could possibly be impacted.

I'm still surprised that there'd be an element of uncertainty. Wouldn't you want to be sure that your code would pass before pushing it out for others to see? What if you pushed and the CI gave you a red X, wouldn't you then feel bad when your coworkers see that and think you are a poor coder? Seems to me it'd be best to be absolutely sure everything would pass before letting anyone else read the code...

I think you are missing the whole point of CI. It has nothing to do with detecting if you are a poor coder (though it will do that too). CI catches issues in the working of multiple components together in your app, presumably coded by different people, possibly but not necessarily geographically apart, as fast as possible - hence the continuous. The key point is integration - there might be issues that your unit tests that you run before pushing the code won't catch, which CI will.

I would go out on a limb and say that the dev teams you have worked with have cultural issues about openness and saving face, and/or you have not worked on big enough (in terms of devs, LOC, distributed-ness) codebases. I might be wrong.

Re: Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career

#78

Post by emmanuel_1234 »

scarface74 wrote: post #55
projektir wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over the next 10 years, I can honestly say I never hated my job for more than a month. Once I started hating my job and I learned all I could, I had the skill set and the optionally to jump ship. Even if I didn’t leave immediately, I never felt “stuck”. How often did this happen? Did you have problems with being perceived as a job hopper?

Four. It’s about having a story to tell and yes you do have to be able to have a good explanation without sounding negative. It also helps that I have the CTO of the first company as a reference and the hiring manager of the third company as a reference who had the same issues I had. 1. The company went out of business - that was an easy one. 2. Large company hired fast to develop a new .net project but two years in…

That is one of the benefit of working for startups. It's easy to spin the story as "well, it's a startup, those things fail all the time. In the meantime, I learned $SO_MANY_THINGS because I had to wear so many caps.

Re: Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career

#79

Post by hndamien »

brokenmachine wrote: post #51
erobbins wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the same way. I took a year off once, and it was awesome. I regret not being a lucky trust fund kid.

I did the exact same thing. It was great. I don't understand these people who can't find things to keep them occupied outside work. I don't have enough hours in the day to do all the things I want to do. Work is just 8 hours per day that I can't do those things.

Its not the hours that is lacking as much as the money.

Re: Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career

#80

Post by madjackwalker »

burnit wrote: post #72
diminoten wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't get a chance to see the comment before he edited it out, but in some countries (Canada I think?) "engineer" is actually a protected title, requiring licensure. I don't know what his point was, but as a "software engineer", I sometimes wonder if I should be called a "developer" and let my PE friend keep the "engineer" title, just for clarity's sake.

Oh wow, I thought it was being downvoted as an initialism for autism spectrum disorder .

Me too lol, thinking "here's another way of calling me an autistic data geek"
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