[overcast]

Can your company offer a challenging environment where I learn daily, and look forward to walking into your building? That's the biggest issue I find with most employment opportunities. 90% of the jobs aren't stimulating me enough, and I'm thinking about being somewhere else.

Cheesy puns I can handle, are you adept at talking in movie references only?

[rconti]

Is this a "you" problem, or a job problem?

I've worked with quite a few people who initially impressed me with how much they knew, but then they peter out and disappear after 12-18 months, because they can't be bothered to actually do work. Too often people want to be paid to enjoy their pet projects and work on whether component they feel like working on; not maintain their stuff when they get bored of it, and so on.

To be fair, you absolutely need to be able to learn and grow in a role to advance professionally.. But at the same time, some folks don't seem to understand that you're getting paid to use your existing knowledge to accomplish something you're already good at.

[galistoca]

From my experience in a lot of cases this is the manager's fault or the system's fault, especially if the guy was initially enthusiastic. Here's an example: On my first day at work, I found some UX issue with our existing system and fixed and pushed the code. I told the manager what I did and he said "well this is not in the sprint, so why don't you roll it back?" That was my first commit and I rolled it back. Also I realized working too hard didn't do me any good. In the first couple of months I was super productive and just kept pushing out code, but nobody really cared and if anything I was being penalized for it because the more I commit the higher the chance that something will reopen, and I get even more workload--all without being much appreciated. Anyway stuff like this happened too much. After a while I started not caring at all and learned to become that guy you describe.

[enraged_camel]

>>I told the manager what I did and he said "well this is not in the sprint, so why don't you roll it back?"

I hate managers who punish initiative-takers. I hope he got fired.

[galistoca]

Actually, no. He's been promoted to higher position now. This is another thing that made me disillusioned. At larger companies it's all about politics

[chris_wot]

Perhaps though it might be best to roll it back but keep it in a private branch for later?

[ultrasaurus]

Boring manager PoV here: I love initiative, but bring it up in standup to minimize surprise. Sometimes one step forward conflicts with another 10 steps forward on another story.

On our team we have a bunch of fun stories with lower RoI at the top of our ready backlog, that may never get pulled into the sprint, but are there if we eat all our vegetables (e..g code reviews) and get the Sprint goal done early.

[galistoca]

OK here's the situation: I was a new hire and the manager never assigned me any story for quite some time. Which means I had nothing to do with a "sprint goal". Of course it would be a weird thing if I have other tasks assigned but work on some unrelated minor issue instead of things I need to do for the sprint, I don't do that. But at the time I was literally idling away because I was never assigned anything. Leaving a new hire to do nothing for two weeks is a bad enough management. It's even worse when the new hire gets frustrated doing nothing and just fixes something that's obviously broken and is clearly something that doesn't conflict with other "10 steps forward". I forgot exactly what it was but imagine something like fixing a broken css. And I was made to revert it because it was not in the sprint. Anyway the point is not this singled incident. I mentioned how things like this happened all the time, making me care less and less over time.

[CuriouslyC]

Not necessarily. It is entirely possible to have a job where your role is to figure out elegant solutions to hard problems. If you hire someone ostensibly for that role, and they end up spending most of their time refactoring the code of junior devs, writing tests and tweaking the build process, they have a legitimate grievance and are fully justified in leaving.

On the other hand, if someone got hired on for a typical mid-level developer/engineer position without any promises of a research/advanced engineering focus, they need to man up and do their job.

[lazaroclapp]

> Not necessarily. It is entirely possible to have a job where your role is to figure out elegant solutions to hard problems.

Sure. But often when that's the case your title will say something closer to "Principal Researcher", rather than "Software Developer Engineer".

Don't get me wrong, a good thing about a job in engineering is that figuring elegant solutions to hard problems is a significant part of what you do there. Also, you can definitely optimize for that being a larger part of your time, if you aim for that when choosing where to work.

However, the jobs for which that is the only function you are employed to fill, and where you are expected to delegate maintenance of your elegant solution to someone else, are exceedingly rare. That's why the academic job market in CS is so much harsher (including industry research labs) than the software development job market. And, for the record, research work does end up involving either some amount of grunt work or some amount of management work at every place and level I have seen so far (universities, industry research labs, etc)

[danieltillett]

As a former academic I would say that there is more boring grunt work in academia than industry. Even worse a lot of it is totally pointless activity caused by the university bureaucrats needing to justify their position.

[yeukhon]

> On the other hand, if someone got hired on for a typical mid-level developer/engineer position without any promises of a research/advanced engineering focus, they need to man up and do their job.

I think this is a self-driven promise. Like another commenter said, this is up to your job description. If you work in the research department, you are more likely to do more "innovative" thinking than those who are hired to build a product because your primary job won't be building CEO a search box. "Product" can be interesting or totally banal, whether you are hired to build public-facing application, or internal application.

I say research focus is self-driven because unless you work in an extremely "do what I say or you are fire" environment, normally you can tell your lead or the product team how to build or enhance a feature. If you think your automated testing infrastructure looks broken, offer ideas to folks who are paid to build that part of the infrastructure. Sometimes, overstepping into another team's boundary is actually a good way to tell people you are capable of doing more than implementing a stupid drop down menu. IMO a good software engineer begins with you giving a clear analysis of the problem and providing a clear and competitive solution (pros/cons with other solutions). That's research, that's "leading", that's architectureing. As simple as building a drop-down menu, well, are you tired of writing a whole new menu every single fucking time yet? Well, here is a research, here is an architectural change - make that shit reusable and make your template whatever resuable, convince your colleague your suggestion is better than theirs and that they are idiot this whole time. No not that hash, but along that line.

And most real research job spend a good portion on writing and doing presentation.

Yeah I keep saying implementing a drop-down menu. But why? Because a lot of the tickets will be around enhancing user experience and that can either be very interesting to some, or extremely boring just because.

[Retric]

Boring programming jobs often relate to bad code bases. Is adding feature X tedious? Why is that not automated? Novel bugs are usually interesting, seeing the same thing crop up 10 times is a sign of brittle code.

Are deployments a single click, or do you go down a 30 item list every time?

Users often push systems in new ways and have interesting issues; the 5th redesign because some manager got a new idea is not.

[geebee]

ah yes, the ol' bait and switch. It's fair to point out that employers aren't the only ones who do this, employees are guilty of it too. I've certainly seen it happen where people were hired to write code for a particular project and instead try to do an entirely different job ("what we really need to be working on is a mobile site!", "what we really need is a scrum master!").

However, employers sure do promise autonomy and a creative role, only to attempt to turn that new developer into someone who is supposed to check JIRA in the morning and fix bugs or implement a narrow set of features defined (with little to no creative input), often with a corrupted form of agile that turns the daily standup into a daily application of deadline pressures and demands for status reports.

I've come to realize how valuable some of those stuffy old bureaucratic pratices really can be for me, as a developer. For instance, I have gotten a great deal of value out of formalized, written job description with everyone's signature on it, filed away with HR. Once you're in a relatively senior technical role, you will almost certainly have language like "determines technical requirements", "aligns software architecture with business interests", "makes technology choices", and so forth. These will often have a little percentage next to them, as if we can somehow explicitly state how much of your time these things will take. "Writes code to implement features" and "performs other IT duties as required" will probably also be in there, but it's unlikely, if you're in a senior role, that these will be more than 50% of your job description (certainly not that last one).

This works well, because if you're accused of "not doing what you were hired to do" when you refuse to maintain an old pile of crap without a clear path toward a better code base (where you determine the technology, business alignment, and architecture), or if people tell you the project that you believe clearly aligns with the needs of the business is your "pet project" and what you really need to do is complete those JIRA tickets, it's usually pretty easy to point to your job description (with everyone's signature on it) and make a very compelling case that you are in fact doing exactly what you were hired to do, and that someone else (often a project manager or business unit manager) is trying to grab job authority that aren't in his or her description, but are clearly in yours. You can also make the case that while you're always willing to pitch in and do what is needed, random tech tasks have greatly exceeded the percentage of your time they are supposed to be taking.

One thing I've slowly learned - the looseness and casualness of the software industry doesn't necessarily favor developers. Sometimes a formalized set of rules can really help us.

[p4wnc6]

I always liked Michael O. Church's way of phrasing this from his post on "the Haskell tax" (I think it's been taken down).

Paraphrasing, he said something like, "most jobs require you to have work experience that is exponentially better than the work experience they will give out."

That is a huge red flag for me. If a place is straining itself to "hire the best" and put candidates through the paces of a very difficult interview process, but then the actual job is some full-stack bullshit where your specialty or past experience is completely disregarded and you just do whatever random work happens to someone's misguided priority this week (which is almost every start-up job) it's just a bad, bad deal.

[jared314]

"It’s ridiculous, but most companies demand an astronomically higher quality of work experience than they give out."

Why programmers can’t make any money: dimensionality and the Eternal Haskell Tax - Michael O. Church [1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20151221082425/https://michaeloc...

[danieltillett]

Developers need to get away from the idea that it is the companies responsibility for your career development. You are responsible for your own career development. The company has hired you to do a job and they pay you for doing that job. Do not expect anyone else to invest in you unless it is in their interest.

[pdeuchler]

It is in their interest. You want the best people at their best positions so you can leverage them to make more money. If your company doesn't care about making sure people are empowered to make the business money then I'd be worried about how they're going to pay your salary in the future.

[danieltillett]

If empowering and training is in their interest then the company (if it is smart) will provide it. The problem is that because you can leave at anytime the ideal investment for the company is likely to be less than what is ideal for you.

[p4wnc6]

If they provide less than ideal for you, then you leave. Providing less than ideal is less than ideal for them, unless they don't care about losing you, in which case you probably don't want to be there anyway.

Out of the four jobs which I have voluntarily chosen to leave, three of my four resignations were because the employer stopped giving me meaningful work that prevented skill atrophy in my primary areas.

Preventing this skill atrophy on my own time, such as with side projects, is (a) ridiculous and (b) a physical impossibility because of the burden of working hours and exhaustion demanded by the employers I had at the time.

It's absolutely unreasonable to say that someone must find a way, outside of work hours, to effectively perform an entire second job's worth of practice and development, because their job isn't giving them work that exercises them.

It's like hiring a super model, asking him or her to sit on a sofa eating candy bars all day as the work you are paying them for, but then telling them to use their personal time to remain fit for supermodeling. It's a patently absurd idea.

You're free to say the words "developers should take control of their own career development" if you want to, it's just absurd. I mean, in once sense of course you're in control. Even if the career development happens at work, it's you doing it, so you (by definition) are in control.

But you aren't just saying "you're in control" in the obvious, tautological sense. You're going further to say that you should place no expectations whatsoever upon your employer to match up real-world business items to your skill set in any way that is related to appropriateness or which factors in your goals. That's the absurd part. You're saying "don't expect your manager to actually manage anything ... just resign yourself to the idea that they will randomly throw undifferentiated business concerns at you like a dartboard."

Real management acts as a double-sided adapter, with bespoke, unpleasant business realities on one side, and well-fitting tasks that are matched up to employees on the other side. Converting bespoke, unpleasant business needs into appropriate, on-topic tasks for specialized employees is managing. Saying an employee shouldn't care about this, to me, is among the worst advice I can think of. This should be one of the primary things any employee cares about.

Because the one thing that absolutely won't happen, simply by physical limits of exhaustion and life responsibilities, is for you to personally cultivate or exercise those skills during non-work time. Yeah, maybe you can read a tech book here and there. Maybe you go to a conference. Maybe you occasionally do some open-source work. And all of that put together amounts to maybe 5% of what's actually necessary to stay sharp and competitive in the employment market.

Instead, you absolutely should hold the employer accountable. They are asking you to bear an insane opportunity cost of lost time whenever you're working for them -- so much lost time in fact that if that time is not actively dedicated to building competitive skills, you will quickly become unemployable and you'll be so atrophied that you'll have no option but to stay at that employer because no one else will want the shell-of-a-former-expert your current job will have morphed you into.

There are a lot of good reasons to quit a job. You might not be paid the amount you prefer. You might not receive benefits that enable the life you prefer. And you might not be asked to perform tasks that cause you grow in skill, solve challenges, or learn new things in the way you prefer.

For me, these are not tradeoff-able. An employer either satisfies all of them adequately, or else it's not really an employer but just a thing wasting my time that I quit from.

[p4wnc6]

That's like saying developers need to get away from the idea that it is the company's responsibility to pay them salary, offer retirement benefits, provide them shelter from the weather while working, etc.

The company may not have any literal obligation to provide such things, and no one cares. If they don't provide such things, reject them, move on, life's too short.

[danieltillett]

No it is the companies responsibility to pay you a salary (and any other conditions negotiated or legislated) in return for your labor.

Of course companies invest some resources in career development as part of their salary package, but it is likely to be less than what is ideal for you as an individual since you can walk out the door at anytime. Every developer needs to take control of their own career development because they gain the most out any investment.

This does not mean that you always take the highest salary, but you need to look at training and career development as an extra that is part of your overall salary package. In some cases the training offered to you is more valuable to you than it costs the company to provide and in other cases it is better to take the cash and invest it yourself. The important thing is take control of your own career development and don’t expect it to be handed to you by someone else.

[collyw]

If a decent developer gets bored or frustrated then they are more likely to leave, despite having spent a lot of time learning the system .

[danieltillett]

Yes this is one of the difficulties of management. You need to balance the desires of the employees with the needs of the company and try to achieve the right balance. It is not easy.

[overcast]

God damn, I am stealing that quote.

In regards to those "hire the best", where the application process is more drawn out than top secret government clearance. Those just aren't for me. I'm not looking for top tier(I'm not), but I am looking for intellectual stimulation, and being involved in something that someone will actually be using. I get the majority of my satisfaction watching others use something I've created. My rant is over!