191–200 of 210 posts
1) Change the way you feel about the situation. Is this a me issue?
2) Change the situation externally. Talk to management, etc.
3) Leave
It sounds like you've tried #1 and #2 to some extent. I was in a similar situation. I left the company, and found a much healthier environment where I can actually use #1 and #2.
I felt obliged to comment because I feel I know what you are talking about and I also worry that much of the advice posted so far is wrong at best, dangerous at worst. I am 42-year-old very successful programmer who has been through a lot of situations in my career so far, many of them highly demotivating. And the best advice I have for you is to get out of what you are doing. Really. Even though you state that you a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are presuming a lot about what my early career looks like. Really I never worked any jobs as bad as what you describe. Well, maybe the time I did data entry during my first year of college. The longest I ever worked in a highly corporate environment was 7-8 months, but at least at that time I was doing something at least slightly cool (a port of Doom 2 back when that was a new game, and with which I had full auto…
I'm someone graduating from college in a few months, and this is one of the most striking things to me about a programmer's expected outlook on jobs. The career path of going and getting an internship, then becoming a junior developer, etc etc at some corporation is something that seems like it would suck the soul out of anyone that is even moderately creative. During my first internship at a "normal" corporation, I…
My first job was a 16 person company doing industrial automation. I was a first-year CS student. They let me write their TCP/IP stack. Second job, TA at the mechanical engineering dept. They needed visualization software for their work on the European space project. Third one, 10-person company writing one of the very first CD recording tools, with prototype hardware.
I was lucky. Each of them was willing to take what in retrospective looks like a huge risk on me. I was crazy and just said "sure, I can do this" to those jobs. I was learning a lot, fast.
But the beauty was, I had no career to consider. Had I failed, it would've been OK - when you're new in the field, that can happen. You'll have to find a new job, but nobody will be surprised if you have quite a few jobs when you start out.
That's when you take the risks, go for the crazy things.
When you're a decade or two (or almost three. Jeebus!) into your career, it's a different proposition. At that point, you get hired for the experience you bring. Taking crazy risks is something that most companies would like you to avoid. (I'm blessed. My current employer still lets me take risks. I just spent 4 weeks in a code base I never touched before and have things in production now :)
Did I love working on the things I started out with? Not really. But I loved being pushed to my limit. I still do. So how do you skip the "corporate" phase?
By taking a job that's outside your comfort zone. Your own startup or smaller employers are your best bet for that. But there are big companies that let you take risks, too.
Ultimately, it's a balancing act. How much safety in your income do you need, and how much risk are you willing to take? If you can push the risk side, it'll lead to more interesting jobs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm someone graduating from college in a few months, and this is one of the most striking things to me about a programmer's expected outlook on jobs. The career path of going and getting an internship, then becoming a junior developer, etc etc at some corporation is something that seems like it would suck the soul out of anyone that is even moderately creative. During my first internship at a "normal" corporation, I…
For me, it came from understanding what I did not know, and that to do high-level creative work you need a large base of background knowledge. I just took every job as an opportunity to learn and fill in the gaps in my knowledge, so that I'd be better prepared when I did strike out on my own. I have gaps in between every job I've ever held, but those gaps are strategic. In them, I figure out what I really want to do,…
It reminds me of my favorite quote from one of the best books about building any type of "Professional Services" company:
"The health of your career is not dependent so much on the volume of business you do, but the type of work you do (whether or not it helps you learn, grow and develop), and who you do it for (whether or not you are increasingly earning the trust of some key clients). In any profession, the pattern of assignments you work on is the professional development process - you just have to learn how to manage it."
"My managers don't fire me". Perhaps show managers the post written here? I dare you! But they pay your wage.
Put headphones on and listen to the right music or something to encourage focus. Yep!
I think everyone is in the same boat as you in some way or another. "wasting considerable amounts of time" could be a worry though.
"Seriously affects the quality of my life"... surely the quality of your life is not a consequence of "unnecessary complexity in the codebase"? Good luck anyway :)
Edited - I'd had some wines
I wouldn't say that my, "entire being opposes the task at hand". I would reserve that sort of language for ethical reservations about a task. I do not do things I consider unethical. But I do encounter many chores in my work that are boring, that are bad ideas, that are for difficult customers, or often all three. I can have the same problems getting those tasks done, just like you describe. Actually, you seem to be…
But when I get tasks that lend themselves to it, I often find myself skipping the breaks and starting another session straight after, which is great.
I stand up when the timer goes off to try to combat the effects of sitting for long periods.
I felt obliged to comment because I feel I know what you are talking about and I also worry that much of the advice posted so far is wrong at best, dangerous at worst. I am 42-year-old very successful programmer who has been through a lot of situations in my career so far, many of them highly demotivating. And the best advice I have for you is to get out of what you are doing. Really. Even though you state that you a…
I think this advice, while well intentioned and not exactly wrong , isn't helpful. The problem is young programmers tend to be hot headed and emotional about their work. This is anti-professional. While being motivated is great, and important for big projects, every job is going to involve tasks you disagree with or think are a "waste of time." Part of being a professional is doing them anyway, and doing them without…
Soul crushed programmer: The project I work on right now is a multi-year monstrosity, many bad decisions outside my control were taken, that I now must clean up… Except I can't, because next release ASAP, and budget, so I must rely on kludges. We also lose time to manual overhead (little automated testing, no automated installs, manual paperwork…). And by the way, much of my job right now is not programming any more. It's more like dispatching issues, customer support, and plan for the next release. I don't like nor am I good at this: I'm a programmer, not a manager or a tech lead.
Manager: I can't pull you out of the project. I honestly don't understand why you're under-performing right now, so it could be just as bad on the new project. Besides, it would be unfair to reward you, since you're under-performing.
Recruiter: You know, any job will require you to perform a few boring tasks here and there. Will you do those when they come up?
Wise old advice giver: You need to grow up and accept the world as it is (and maybe give up on changing the world, or your own situation).
(In case you didn't notice, this was a real situation with real people, and near-real dialogues. I was one of them.)
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I think you get the idea: when someone complain about their "unrewarding nightmare" of a job that makes them "miserable", many people will either blame the victim, say it's not so bad, tell them to give up hope already, or use a subtler mixture of the three.
I wish it didn't happen so often.
I felt obliged to comment because I feel I know what you are talking about and I also worry that much of the advice posted so far is wrong at best, dangerous at worst. I am 42-year-old very successful programmer who has been through a lot of situations in my career so far, many of them highly demotivating. And the best advice I have for you is to get out of what you are doing. Really. Even though you state that you a…
This is dead on. Very much reminded me of a slightly sensationalized article I read a number of years ago:
http://cyberstentialism.blogspot.com/2012/08/ten-percent-of-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I felt obliged to comment because 1) I agree with you 2) I feel like I'm doing what you wished you did when you were younger and 3) OP needs to read this. I've been in jobs similar to OP. Sometimes I didn't agree with what I was asked to do and other times I knew I was being asked to do something simply to keep me busy. Fortunately for me, I had one good job to compare against my shitty jobs so I had a little more pe…
> ...I wouldn’t be able to get a job ... but > I haven’t felt that... it won’t matter - especially > to the people who matter. Be extremely careful with that! Expectations change, fast, as you age. I keep getting asked about my foolish/unstable years, even a decade+ after. It is expected of a young professional to hop around a bit... it could be argued that you cannot truly mature until you have seen a couple of diff…