Bored People Quit

Kind of like with games. You need to balance challenge and routine in your work. Otherwise you will be bored or stressed

This is my last week at my first programming job, my new one starts next Monday. My boss has other businesses in other states, so he was away from this office most of the time, meaning I was able to do pretty much whatever I wanted with my time here. Usually, the office consisted of just my non-technical supervisor and myself. Of course, small projects beyond my control would be requested of me would and I would do them, but this couldn't sustain my interest.

I definitely got bored. But unlike most of you, I had the choice of being bored. Once I realized this I made every effort I could to work on interesting projects. First, I had to start spending about half of my time researching the industry before I would even know what needed to be done. I was then able to identify what was wrong with our systems here and exactly how to improve them. Given lots of time to play around on projects and little supervision, some people might have wasted their time or just did the bare minimum, but I identified areas that could be greatly improved, then replaced/refactored projects as necessary. I took on new projects to address problems I had wanted to fix for a long time regularly.

Being the only programmer here, I didn't get to all of them (I was not working full time). The website was a mess of outsourced crap and it didn't even use objects - I avoided working on it in favor of other projects as much as possible. Back in 2009 I made a prototype replacement website in my favorite language, earlier this year I started work on two code libraries. I'm currently refactoring the website to use a new code library I created, which is going very smoothly. I also spent countless hours (though I logged everything I did) happily working towards PCI DSS compliance, coming from a background with no security expertise. I came up and completed many more projects like these while I've been here. When I was bored it was because I wasn't working on something interesting.

Those are the days where I can work until close and be completely happy. Well, until someone tells me it's time to leave.

Great article. I'm bored, and I surprisingly I found myself doing almost everything described in the article: later arrivals, earlier departures, increased snark or even skipping lunch. I'm in the category of "I'm bored and nobody did anything about it" (perhaps my boss know, because I told my co-worker out loud that I'm BORED) and not I'm not sure what I should do next.

quit immediately.

if you have a job where you have a "lead" or "manager" title but have to ask someone else before making personnel/project decisions, you are not a lead or manager of anything, just a scapegoat.

I had a boss that took the opposite approach. Whenever I started to lose productivity, he'd put me on work he knew I'd hate, telling me I'd get to do more interesting things when I showed him I could be productive. So I started working on side projects at the office just to keep my mind from going and became less and less productive until I quit.

He was a talented engineer himself and a good friend. We ended up working together again at another company. A few months after he arrived, I had a slump and the cycle repeated itself. This time we had long meetings where he accused me of being cynical and questioned my dedication; I defended it ("I'm here making much less than I was before, aren't I?"), which was exhausting in itself. I thought the problem was all on my side, so I didn't put up much of a fight when he told me I'd be writing integration tests full-time--no more "real" coding--until I proved whatever he thought needed proving. I forced myself to ignore any side projects I had going. He called me in again later to complain that the tests weren't coming along quickly enough and that they "read like sketch comedy routines". (They did, actually. I was bored, and the tests were full of things like, e.g., Eve getting unfriended by Alice but not Bob and, wounded, trying to spy on Alice. It did tehnically test our access controls!)

Because I was convinced it was my problem, I stuck around long enough to get fired this time. I'm lucky enough right now to have very interesting work (at a big company, of all places), but this article has given me an opportunity to reconsider what happened at the old job in a different light.