Development and hating it?
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It usually takes both the people and the job together for me to hate the job. If the job is great but the people aren't, I can work with that. If the people are great but the job sucks, then I find value in that. But both? Ugh. I left a job after one week recently because of that combination (mind you, two of the three people were great, but the important person, the PM, was awful, and he's the one that counted.) Marc
I started at a new company 3 weeks ago and I'm considering leaving. They're too busy to give me something to sink my teeth into, and not being productive makes me utterly miserable. Even a bad project is better than being forced to try and look busy because you're new at the job :sigh:
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I started at a new company 3 weeks ago and I'm considering leaving. They're too busy to give me something to sink my teeth into, and not being productive makes me utterly miserable. Even a bad project is better than being forced to try and look busy because you're new at the job :sigh:
Ri_ wrote:
Even a bad project is better than being forced to try and look busy because you're new at the job
That's one of the reasons why I left the job after a week. I was told to bill 40 hours a week. There wasn't the work to support that. I don't mind fudging a little (after all, one ends up putting in 70+ hours sometimes) but this was absolutely ridiculous. Still, gift horse and all that. I just couldn't ethically do it though. :sigh: Marc
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Yep, last place I worked. I turned me into a right miserable, whiny bleeder, but I was reluctant to move because I was well paid and worked 5 minutes from home. It took a job to come looking for me before I left and realised I should have done it much, much earlier. You spend a lot of your life at work, you shouldn't spend that time being miserable if you can do anything about it.
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
Similar here. My first job out of college. I'm just old enough that I'm on the tail end of the generation where you went to work, worked for a company for 30ish years, took a pension, and retired. Thus, it didn't occur to me that even though the job was making me miserable, it was ok to go somewhere else. I stayed at least 2 or 3 years too long. Of course, like any situation, there's good and bad. I have some friends from there I still keep in touch with almost 20 years after I left; so, not all the people were bad. Another thing to keep in mind is that if a place is bad for you, that doesn't necessarily make it a bad place to work. Some of the people I worked with back there are still there. Even though it became a horrible place for me to work, it's apparently working out for them. If your co-workers/bosses/whatever tried to get you to stay, extra money/vacation/perks they offer still might not be worth it for you specifically. If you're miserable and hate to get out of bed each morning, it's just not worth the hassle. When you recognize that, time to move on.
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Has anybody ever worked in a development position and the people you work with actually made you hate your job or is it just me?
I hate my job but not because of the people I work with. I hate it because of the totally asinine coding rules that I am forced to comply with. Team lead is a nice person but bullheaded and claims the customer we work for will not permit any changes to the rules for us but yet the customer regularly ignore their own rules.
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I thought development starts with writing documentation...:~
I'm not questioning your powers of observation; I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is. (V)
Someone once told me "first make it work and THEN do the maths". Maybe that works for documentation too.
I may not last forever but the mess I leave behind certainly will.
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Has anybody ever worked in a development position and the people you work with actually made you hate your job or is it just me?
It's not just you - some people who work alone feel the same way.
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Yes I hate my jobsometimes. Its when they make me do some boring and uninteresting stuff like making a documentation. I blame my boss.
Microsoft ... the only place where VARIANT_TRUE != true
To me, documentation can be boring and so can test plans, but a lot has to do with what you're documenting. If it's a sick mess of spaghetti, yeah, it's going to be a pain to document, but good code/architecture can be documented fairly painlessly although it's always tedious. On the other hand, I have come into a company, been asked to fix a bug or add a feature, been told that there is no documentation and no one knows exactly where the source code is, and had to figure out which of the installations of this code on the various servers is actually the one that is being used and not just left behind on a deprecated server or a previous version of the code, then get those assemblies and decompile it (thank you .NET), set up a source control server because they aren't using source control, put the code in source control, then figure out what the code is doing, come up with a regression testing plan, come up with a test plan document template because they don't have one, write up that test plan, ask managers to approve it (approve what? a test plan?), test it on my own machine because they don't have a dedicated test server for that production server and then explain to the web admin how to set up a asmx service on "his" server. So, sometimes it's nice to come into a place and find a little documentation as well as all of those other non-coding necessities.
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chriselst wrote:
but I was reluctant to move because I was well paid and worked 5 minutes from home.
I call this a golden prison situation. With kids and mortgage a.s.o., the decision of changing jobs for your own better self-being is very hard to make. It would make me feel very guilty.
~RaGE();
I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus Entropy isn't what it used to.
Rage wrote:
It would make me feel very guilty
Having a job you hate has a negative impact on your mental health, and yes, your family is negatively affected by it too. All in all, it's all tradeoffs. Will you feel more guilty over having that better self-being job, or the golden prison one?
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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Yes, but you can't have fun the whole time. Some things that need doing are boring. As long as no one gets singled out to do all the bad stuff, or all the good stuff.
Regards, Rob Philpott.
Rob Philpott wrote:
Yes, but you can't have fun the whole time.
I agree with you, but lately it seems there are developers around who don't. When I was a teenager I got a 9:00 to 9:30 job 6 days a week. Got pretty good at eating lunch in 5 minutes, napping 20, and not having to be nudged awake. That was around 4AM. Documentation? I'll be happy to do it.
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Has anybody ever worked in a development position and the people you work with actually made you hate your job or is it just me?
Sometimes I felt bored of my workplace. Programmer is only me and other people are sales and management. I'm younger in my team and sometimes my worker is too old. It's hard to communicate with them. I have been worked for 3 years in window programming.. Thesedays, I got slump and lose interest.
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In my case we started with no documentation at all only few bad written specifications. Then we wrote some of the code(around 80 %) and start changing things because the specification writers didn't think of everything carefully enough. After we "finished" my boss told me to make documentation on how things work o.O with no requirements, no examples it was said: Make documentation with graphics. The task was for me alone and instead of only doing documentation i also did code review and found few bugs, guess who gonna fix them.
Microsoft ... the only place where VARIANT_TRUE != true
Argonia wrote:
the specification writers didn't think of everything carefully enough
I was told that once by a manager when I complained that writing specifications two months before writing the program was an exercise in Fantasyland. I told her if I was thinking it through to that much, then I was programming it, not writing specifications.
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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Ri_ wrote:
Even a bad project is better than being forced to try and look busy because you're new at the job
That's one of the reasons why I left the job after a week. I was told to bill 40 hours a week. There wasn't the work to support that. I don't mind fudging a little (after all, one ends up putting in 70+ hours sometimes) but this was absolutely ridiculous. Still, gift horse and all that. I just couldn't ethically do it though. :sigh: Marc
