[logfromblammo]

One man's grind is another man's passion.

I'm usually the only one on any team that is willing to sit down with "that tool", written by some guy who left the company years ago (maybe using VBA Excel or Access macros because he wasn't actually a trained programmer), and understand it to the point that I can fix just one piece of it without rewriting the whole thing from scratch.

And then I can recommend ways to wean the company's process away from that sort of fragile dependence on unmaintainable code.

But that kind of work is not for everyone. A lot of the time, people don't even like the smell of the code they wrote themselves only a few months ago, so slogging down in the sewers of the ex-COO's magic Excel spreadsheet would be absolute torture. I see it less like an undercity diver busting up grease clots in the drains, and more like a surgeon carefully and methodically removing colon polyps before they go malignant.

And I am burning out here because I have been explicitly ordered to not fix anything without prior permission. Ordinarily, I would be spending some time every day safely refactoring old code and eliminating dead code. But SLoC is a management metric here. Reducing the total lines of code would upset the applecart.

[duderific]

> But SLoC is a management metric here. Reducing the total lines of code would upset the applecart.

God... what a horrifying situation. That seems like exactly the opposite of what management should be doing. I get satisfaction when I can refactor copy/paste, unparameterized code with something more concise and easily testable. I hope you find a better place to be soon.

[logfromblammo]

I have been at least keeping my eyes open for almost two years. I have worked here for almost two years. I recognized almost immediately that this was a dead end for me, so I just turned the resume burner down to simmer.

I already have a job, and it pays well enough, so even considering the poor working conditions, I haven't seen any offers that would entice me to leave it. I don't really want to work with professional 3rd-party recruiters, and more than once I have walked away from a company that wanted to start negotiating salary before even inviting me to interview.

If this were San Francisco or Silicon Valley, I would probably be gone by now. But quieter markets seem somewhat less eager to hire anyone with less than exactly five years of experience, and are very reticent about paying anything extra for older prospective employees.

Aside from the job itself, I am getting so, so sick of modern software industry hiring practices. It seems like every person in every HR department is constantly keeping secrets and monitoring possible lines of sight from any hidden lawsuit snipers.