11–20 of 25 posts
Send them an email introducing yourself. Explain why you are interested in what they are doing. Explain what your skills are. Offer to help.
1. Left the job. 2. Got involved in other teams' projects. 3. Colluded with other employees to break off and form our own company. 4. Accepted it and collected the paychecks (that dwarfed the combined amount of what my parents made at their peak salaries).
You're not going to get what you want out of your job unless you ask for it. If it isn't feasible or possible for your workplace to accommodate you, then that leads you to finding it outside of work. Like mentioned in other comments - there's open source and charity organizations that might need something. If you don't have ideas of your own, you might want to find a business type person and help solve his problems. However, that will likely be quite similar to what you're doing now.
Consider doing something other than programming as well, or something where the programming is secondary. I, frankly, have lost a lot of interest in programming itself because I've been programming since I was 6 (>30 years) and I've learned over a dozen programming languages since then. It's lost its lustre for me. Changing the focus to the non-programming part helped.
The last thing to consider is getting involved in a university project. Those generally have enough difficult programs without the time crunch involved in industry.
You already kind of seem to know the solution: Work on your social skills.
Read this http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/06...
Sign up for internet dating and go on dates with strangers. You will soon discover everyone is awkward and it is all okay.
Or go to tech meetups. Ask people about themselves and just listen to what people have to say. People love to talk about themselves and you can learn a lot about them and yourself.
It will be hard It will be awkward It will feel really strange at first
But being really good at connecting with other people is vital to getting the jobs you want. Having hard skills is important too, but you seem to already have those.
Good luck.
In the meantime, start trying to think up ideas and write them down, even half baked ones. Idea generation is a muscle. At my peak I write down a new idea every few days. Sometimes that slips to once a month. Regardless, you'll find that if you start doing this, you start getting excited about those ideas which leads to....
...moving forward. Either to a new job, an open source project, learning a new skill set, approaching your boss with an idea, or a new geekup meeting or whatever.
I don't know if you can ask your management, but as a total outlier solution, you could try to spend some time listening to CS calls that come in. You didn't even have to participate on the call, just listen.
Ive found this greatly increases motivation as you actually start to see the need of why you're doing what you're doing. Most products / businesses are not really going to change the world that much, but hearing how something you built is actually helping someone's life can be very rewarding.
1) Take a deep breath and relax. What you are going through is normal. Your whole life up to a few months ago has basically been spent working towards this ultimate goal of getting a college degree. It is normal to feel a bit of a let down coming off this achievement high.
2) Realize that developing an elite skill set is the key to finding exciting and meaningful work. For more on this check out this book: http://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/145550912...
3) Get to work honing your craft.
I would suggest finding an open source project you are passionate about. There are some really cool open source software applications popping up that need passionate developers like you to get involved.
That's how you make an impact - get involved and do something that benefits the community, and that you can be proud to have put your name on!
It might not help so much with your day job, but it will certainly open up new opportunities for you, improve your skills and look great on your CV. Plus it's a lot of fun!
Do a search in GitHub, or if you program in C# come take a look at what we're doing (yes, you can change the world!): https://github.com/Warewolf-ESB/Warewolf-ESB