131–140 of 418 posts
Don't strive to do what you love, do what you take pride in. When you are working towards a goal which resonates with you personally, all the tedious, unpleasant, painful moments and all the other obstacles in your way just make your eventual triumph sweeter.
In a post-scarcity world that is how work should be. People should for pleasure, comfort or luxury, not for survival or dignity.
So Francesco says they refuse to do technical interviews and says their CV and Github are proof enough. The CV shows experience as a freelance engineer at Apple for a bit, then an engineer for Samsung which they were made redundant from. Their GitHub is 3 projects, a python script, a breakout board and then a beta libary. They argue that's fine though because they'd work for £1/hr, but the real cost of an upfront hir…
I completely understand your point of view and I would think the same if I were you, but that's probably the kind of work I'm trying to avoid. I only have one life, and I just don't want to be paid to "stay around and do the boring bits", or at least not full-time and in an office. Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. I might b…
Many people find it very difficult to understand that money is not always a motivator. This is a particularly difficult concept for managers to deal with.
If an employee is not motivated by additional remuneration, or in the case where they do not require an income, the relationship between employee and employer is fundamentally different.
I have nice boring job. Few years ago I was upset with the boring part. But with kids and mortgage I don’t really care anymore. I am very happy to be paid more than a manager in a small company being only individual contributor in big Corp. I also have approval to sell my hardware from big Corp. So I can explore new things with commercial potential without a fear. Life is good.
After kids and mortage, you will be upset with the boring part again :(
As for the job itself, let me concern myself with the how and let me have enough leeway to do some wool-gathering.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely understand your point of view and I would think the same if I were you, but that's probably the kind of work I'm trying to avoid. I only have one life, and I just don't want to be paid to "stay around and do the boring bits", or at least not full-time and in an office. Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. I might b…
Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. That should literally never be the case for a developer though. You can always be improving the documentation, increasing the test coverage, optimizing for speed/bandwidth/complexity/some other metric you've measured, working out how to measure something, learning new tools or tech that coul…
> If you see those things as "the boring bits" that you don't want to do then you're not a developer.
Don't we already have enough gatekeeping in software development? I don't particularly enjoy writing documentation, despite how important I know it to be. That doesn't make me "not a developer." If I were lazy and simply chose not to do the things that bored me (despite their importance), it might make me a bad developer (or more accurately a developer of bad software).
I design and implement software. That makes me a software developer. The pieces of that process that I find boring or exciting are tangentially related at best.
If a member of a team says that what they do is boring that's often a sign of poor leadership.
I imagine they are not supporting a family or a mortgage, or if they are they must have a significant alternate source of financial or housing security, and that's not a bad thing.
I wish more people had the ability to put out such terms for their employment without worrying about keeping the roof over their head.
They would likely have to drop some of their more naive requirements though (i.e. no Java or PHP, only "interesting" work). The road to interesting work is paved with the mundane, no matter how cool the job or technology is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely understand your point of view and I would think the same if I were you, but that's probably the kind of work I'm trying to avoid. I only have one life, and I just don't want to be paid to "stay around and do the boring bits", or at least not full-time and in an office. Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. I might b…
Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. That should literally never be the case for a developer though. You can always be improving the documentation, increasing the test coverage, optimizing for speed/bandwidth/complexity/some other metric you've measured, working out how to measure something, learning new tools or tech that coul…
Well put. Professional software is only a mean for business not an end by itself. I recommend not deriving your satisfaction from code only if you work for a company otherwise you risk to both spoil your hobby and always be unhappy at work.