Comment by Mithaldu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mithaldu | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

    > I want to get away from coding for you and code for me.
    > I don't like coding for you. I don't think any of us do.

I'm sorry you haven't found anything to like and be excited by, but i assure you it is out there. I personally have never worked in a company with much process, so i haven't experienced that kind of hell. But do keep in mind, there's also another kind of hell: Where everybody is a cowboy coder and walks all over anybody's changes; where everybody codes 9-5 and then doesn't think about code ever, never improves, coding the same as when they started, 15 years after they start.

I've found my enjoyment in taking such companies and teaching them how to produce quality code without compromising on speed. I've found my enjoyment in encouraging such companies to take on young coders who i can then teach, and see flower into excellence they could otherwise only reach with years of investment.

And occasionally there is the one or two projects that are just for fun, or really touch many many customers.

Don't give up and blame the world. Look harder. Maybe even change your language. I mainly do Perl, which gets a bit of a bad rap by people who don't use it. But compared to companies doing e.g. Java or PHP i find a marked difference in culture. Maybe you're just stuck with the wrong focus in your skill set?

Or, if you feel brave: Maybe your problem is that you keep getting into the kind of company that wants an employee. Maybe you can change your situation by becoming a freelancer. Keep in mind that as a freelancer, you eventually, if you're good enough, end up in the position where you may fire clients. You also tend to see a lot more projects of much more variety.

Thanks for the advice. My first job was full stack Java backend (SpringMVC) and jQuery hell front end. Second was full stack, Python backend, AngularJS front end. My new job is writing Protractor tests for multiple AngularJS applications.

I enjoy writing Python. Javascript isn't that thrilling to me. Not super excited by the countless FooJS libraries and Promises and async everything. In Protractor if I want to get the text of an element in the DOM, that's a promise. I mean come on? .getText() should not return a promise. I'm not a Javascript expert, so this will sound whiney-ish, but I think Promise hell is a thing just like Callback hell is.

I escaped the boredom by becoming very proficient in a popular open source project that I found interesting and that multiple companies are looking to hire for. While the business requirements for the features I have to add may come from my employer sometimes, for the most part I'm really just working on upstream and making it better. I've also job hopped a fair bit to try to find a job where there was motivation on both sides before getting to this point, so your tale is somewhat familiar.

Perhaps you could aim for something similar. There's employers out there (eg. RedHat) that will happily pay you to hack on open source if you can show that it's in both of your best interests. That way you get to choose what you're working on going in. Even just specialising a bit more might make things more interesting as you'll be hired to work on <thing you actually quite like> instead of some random stack put together by someone who may not have a clue.

Good luck in your search :)

Python isn't bad, though it can also be constricting. Java is of course the kind of language likely to land you in Enterprise Country. Maybe you can pick up Clojure though? And yeah, as a web dev myself, everytime i have to touch JS i walk away with a headache.

Also, if you want something challenging, but not quite C, maybe give Rust a chance. I hear lots of companies with fun stuff are using it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com