Re:Software and burnout, how to get gratification?
by shoo on Monday November 06, 2017 @05:18AM
(#15634500)
> Went on to do more "complex" things
Have you considered moving in the other direction? There's lots of work -- and value -- in bog-standard software with no mathematical/statistical/computational cleverness. Occasionally you can see an opportunity to fruitfully apply a mildly clever quantitative technique and see it actually get used -- but >95% of the time there's usually necessary grunt work to do.
How about trying contract work on enterprise software projects? E.g. pick a huge boring-sounding enterprise that has some weird legacy* software systems built for internal use. If you find the right one, they will have (1) users who use the system every day to do their job, and (2) lashings of technical debt, and they may be quite excited to have anyone on board to push forward efforts in "unit testing" or "continuous integration" or "implementing exception handling correctly".
* legacy doesn't necessarily mean old -- maybe the system uses some trendy new tech stack, but no one wrote any tests, and the first wave of contractors already left
Have you considered moving in the other direction? There's lots of work -- and value -- in bog-standard software with no mathematical/statistical/computational cleverness. Occasionally you can see an opportunity to fruitfully apply a mildly clever quantitative technique and see it actually get used -- but >95% of the time there's usually necessary grunt work to do.
How about trying contract work on enterprise software projects? E.g. pick a huge boring-sounding enterprise that has some weird legacy* software systems built for internal use. If you find the right one, they will have (1) users who use the system every day to do their job, and (2) lashings of technical debt, and they may be quite excited to have anyone on board to push forward efforts in "unit testing" or "continuous integration" or "implementing exception handling correctly".
inspiration:
https://www.butternotes.com/blog/catfish-programmers
http://edw519.posthaven.com/willie-sutton-would-be-an-enterp...
* legacy doesn't necessarily mean old -- maybe the system uses some trendy new tech stack, but no one wrote any tests, and the first wave of contractors already left