Do you have any guiding star for what work gives you meaning?
I thought getting closer to the users/customers would help me. After all, software is for humans. But I found the social aspects of that, handling bugs, setting expectations for features, was tiresome and not meaningful. The only happiness I did find was when I saw my client/users flourish without me with the software I made tailored as best as it could be for the money. But that doesn't make a business unfortunately...
It helps to be close to your users, or to build software that has a clear purpose. It’s good to work on a small team where your input has a clear influence on the quality pf the product.
I think you are rationalizing your choices by thinking everything does the same. It is not true, some are not stuck anywhere, some choose to live a simpler life that needs less money, fewer compromises, etc. etc. the world is a big place.
Like, I’m not going to work overtime for free or anything, but the time I do work gets my best effort.
I think we forget the big picture that "no one gets out alive" and that it's up to each of us to spend the time we have in a way that makes us happy. If you can afford to not spend 1/3 of your time at a job in order to fund the remaining 2/3 of your existence, lucky you! But if not, choosing to slack off at a job you hate is essentially choosing to throw 1/3 of your life away being miserable. (Not judging if that's your choice, but its baffling to me.)
Is it reasonable to accept/leave a job based on no interesting connections?
It’s led me to wonder how one could structure a knowledge work job in a similar way. The tough part conceptually is how to make progress long-term while still only keeping your focus on a day at a time, max.
No investors, no board of directors, just a woman and her son who owned the business. They wanted to grow it but were very reasonable about it.
That being said the salary was probably 20-30% below market. At the time I wanted to make more money so I chased that for a while instead.
Most of the problems in tech are of the employees own creation. Unreasonable requirements and unreasonable timelines, often coming out of thin air for no reason other than some middle manager's political interests.
It is super hard to fight against it, and it's even harder to demonstrate how forcing tech to work more than necessary is bad for business.
Small businesses deal with it by being small. Big companies are just chaotic complex systems where you don't have much of a choice.
Companies that can kind of do anything and it’s fine. Like Google with AdWords. Whatever they do, AdWords goes to work every day and pays the bills.
Other companies get high on their own supply and invent things like “Holocracy” and claim it is responsible for their success.
You can try to find your own thing that you'll focus on after work. After 5 I would switch off any company equipment, phone etc. Make sure that there is never an expectation that you could be available outside of your work hours. Feel free to forget anything you worked on after 5, you'll catch up next morning. Some workplaces will be against that and make fuss. Find another job then and if it is not possible, just deliver as little as you can without being sacked. If manager is unhappy, but not unhappy enough to let you go, then you are doing great.
Where I work, a normal workday is 9 AM to 6 PM with an hour lunch. There's some flexibility as to the actual hours, I usually do 8-5, others do 10-7. Yet, some people always put in very long hours for some reason, complete with gulping down a sandwich in front of their computer for lunch. I'm not sure what gives them the impression they have to do it, since it's clearly not expected from our common higher-ups.
Guilty. The reason was living with abusive partner and not being brave enough to end the relationship. Things were bad, but not bad enough to do something about it.
This is just how I like to work and approach problem solving. I can take breaks when I make the effort, but, when work starts, I rarely think about anything except climbing whatever mountain I find myself on, helping others at my company, or exceeding my own (or others') expectations. That intensity helps me think deeply and solve problems effectively.
There are people in my company who do good work but draw boundaries clearly and sharply. I respect that. I just love what I do and find it interesting and absorbing partly because I love the intensity of striving and struggling, constantly refining, improving, growing, and exploring.
My company generously rewards good work, too. That also helps; my effort never feels wasted, unacknowledged, or unrewarded.
This seems quite distinct from what is discussed in this thread, which is people feeling some kind of pressure to work long hours, or to be available after work hours when they're supposed to be doing personal stuff. And, usually, the reasons for being called up don't seem to be some genuinely exciting problem that it feels invigorating to tackle. Instead, it's typically some form of TPS report that needs pushing around.
Sure, it sometimes happens that I'm working on some interesting project, and I may find myself thinking about it after my workday is done. But it's because I generally love what I do. It wouldn't surprise me that, say, a pastry chef would possibly think about combining ingredients in some different way, too.
I think the only job where you absolutely wouldn't have to think about it is if you don't have any kind of agency and only do what you're told. I'm not sure that I would enjoy that kind of job.
The work amounts to super overpaid (thanks unions) retail using antiquated software that it modernized could eliminate at least half the jobs, but since there are union staffing minimums and salaries the employer has no incentive.
There’s something nice about helping customers for a couple hours, doing some other mindless work which could be done in half the time if automated, and then going home.
And the group of folks in the industry are mostly great to be around. Particularly after nearly 5 years of working from home in roles that are increasingly more isolated and less collaborative.
You can't move the needle unless you are part of management and learn how to do politics. Large companies mean lots of politics being done. And you want to position yourself on the part of the winning team.
Also, people skills always trumps technical skills. Being aware of that helped me immensely on my career, much more than anything else I could have done.
People skills matter , But I suppose in large organisations. I don't think people skills matter "that much" in open source (other than documentation and hey not messing up like attomatic and being a little bit nicer in general)
Hell we should all try to be a little nicer in general , not just in open source.
Now, you might say that the Linux kernel is a large project, and you’d be right
I’ve been trying to make that switch as it’s the only career prospect I have, but…
Would love to hear how others have solved this
There’s still plenty of time to change gears, or move back and forth between the two choices. There are also other paths; see my comment above.
Important part is to not ignore the discomfort. I suggest reading Charity Majors’ blog posts around leadership vs engineering roles.
I think my future is moving towards consulting and building my own products. If people want to fight each other to get a seat at the table, be my guest. I see it as a waste of life. I can already build significant projects on my own, and it’s long overdue for me to reap all of the profit that those efforts generate.
Hence the issue xD I’m at the top of what my track offers, but it feels silly to stay in the same place for the next 30 years.
finding things that could be better or tools that should exist but don’t, and that if materialized would solve multiple problems at once instead of just one; and
explaining why that’s important in a way that everyone can buy into and dealing with naysayers who’ll want to cut you down and doomers who will say it’ll never work; and
have the focus, discipline and grit to make it through a 10k LoC project and land it on the other side while ekeing out code review along the way and not tripping over loose cables and uneven steps of your initial design / architecture / model that was either flawed from the outset or not malleable enough to fix after a month of entrenchment into your code; and finally
once you’re ready, to then go over the entire codebase and lift the old code up into your new way of doing things so that there is no split brain between the old way and your new tool:
then you can make it as a 10x engineer. It is exhausting but so is running up and down a football field, cycling laps around France, or serving tennis balls at 90mph for three hours at a time. Taking the elite-coder staff-engineering path isn’t for the faint hearted.
Now given a fixed level of technical skills it’s obviously always better to have more people skills, perhaps that’s what you meant.
Though maybe that’s why you can move those needles; nobody is guarding them jealously.
In some jurisdictions you need to check your employment contract as company may feel entitled to your idea you are developing outside of work hours. Ensure you don't have any such stipulations in the contract.
Thankfully I'm not ground down to a nub. I've found a lot of support over the last few years outside of work.
Coupled with the fact that, as you yourself pointed out, there is a literal endless amount of work to do, forever. This is also due to the nature of the company being so big.
All companies always has work to do, and no one is ever «done», but in a giga-enterprise all meaningful deadlines and deliveries sort of tangentially rounds down to zero in terms of impact.
I almost burned out from this myself working in Microsoft. I was succeeding in my work by most metrics, but I am motivated more by my work being MEANINGFUL and having impact more than anything. That is almost impossible to achieve in any large enough company.
Jumped off to be a startup CTO and life started smiling again instantly.
Take time away from work, but not too much time. Comments such as «it takes years» can be true if you have ground yourself down to a nub, but trying (and being ok with failing) to do some work that lets you feel like you mean something and contribute back to society is an understated and important part of the healing process.
Good luck!