|
|
|
|
|
by UglyToad
2490 days ago
|
|
I think it's maybe partly that the jobs I've tended to work have no real socializing/email answering/meetings aspect. I've tried to get more onto that side just to preserve my sanity but it's been very much "go through tickets for 7-8 hours a day". I can't remember the last time I needed to respond to an email. And they've all been very different jobs/industries - consultancy, startup and large company. Maybe part of it is the tech (C# .NET) or the location (England) but from talking to my friends in the industry the experience seems to be similar. |
|
I miss the days when I could just sit down in front of a program, and just program for 6+ hours out of the day. I did that when I worked for a small startup. I talked to a boss for 30 minutes to an hour sometimes, but otherwise I was left to myself to build software.
Right now I work as an Architect/Support/Developer combo, and it feels like I get nothing real done most days. I'll have meetings at random times throughout the day, half of them status meetings, I'll get pinged at random times in the day by the business side asking to look into various things (I maintain the phone systems for three call centers, and various things don't happen the way they expect and they need us to look into it...we used to have a dedicated support guy for this, but he quit and they won't replaced him, it's been six months now). And then I need to look into our codebase for any of seven different internal phone applications I'm responsible for, figure out how to add the new enhancement requested by the business, and then write precise instructions for our offshore dev team of else it won't be done correctly (might as well have done it myself, half the time).
There are some days in which outside of the meetings, I'll fix a couple of tickets requested by the business side, and then feel like I have no mental energy for anything else.
Every once in awhile I get a taste of what it used to be like when I was productive when I work on projects at home, but even that has lots of distractions between my spouse and attention seeking dogs. I don't mind those distractions quite as much though. Usually. :)
I probably should find a small developer to work for again, where I can just be expected to code, but at my age I'm almost afraid to do that, since I know ageism is going to start limiting the dev jobs I can get before too much longer, and I could make a lot more money just embracing the management roles....but my brain wants to build cool things, not people.