>So I'm in a job search right now. I just aced another interview. It's a company that wants to pay me way, way too much money to work on updating their legacy app. I have money woes right now but I'm considering turning it down. I am sick of being a disappointment.
My advice? Take the job. Solve your money woes. do what you can to fix their shit. Accumulate a pile of cash. Label the checking account "the freedom to say no" - 6 months from now, you should have enough money that you don't have to worry for another 6 months. I'm not saying to quit in 6 months, but think about it. Still, my advice remains, solve your money woes, because if you can earn programmer money, money woes are easy to solve, and money woes are stress you don't need.
Interviewing well is almost a superpower. This means you have way more choice and freedom than most people. And that's the thing... jobs are super different. Try out different jobs, with different people, in different industries. Hopefully, eventually you will find one that is tolerable. This is another reason to solve your money woes. If you know you can go 6 months, then you should be pretty comfortable telling anyone "no"
>And let's be clear, most of the job, even under the best of circumstances, isn't about coding. At best it's about communication and careful risk management. At worst it's cutthroat office politics in an industry that has too much money to ever treat people in a sane or humane manner.
Huh. from what I've seen, we get treated way more humanely than people in industries with less money. Quite often when I go out I see someone berating or otherwise mistreating workers who make like 1/10th what we do. Frankly, for what I get paid, if I had to eat a little shit, I would. but I don't. (or, at least it doesn't feel I am eating shit... perhaps it is because there is so much bread.) as far as I can tell, we get treated better in other ways as our pay goes up. It's backwards and unfair, I think, but it's backwards and unfair in our favor.
Serious politics that you couldn't just ignore by pretending to act more introverted and nerdy than usual have been rare in my work (and it's almost always acceptable to withdraw into 'nerd mode' and just focus on the objective, in my experience.) - I mean, once in my career I was in a situation where that wasn't okay, where, you know, one of the parties doing politics thought that if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. Man, that job was miserable, I should have quit so much earlier.
But that's the thing, if interviewing is your prime skill, you are in a uniquely good position to just say "No" and leave, if you aren't treated decently.
Also note, I personally have found that large companies treat you better, and as long as you are clearly an individual contributor and clearly not gunning for management, they are, in my experience, much better than small companies at shielding you from the unpleasant parts of politics.