Reading this makes me want switch jobs. I want to again work somewhere where in the morning I wake up and feel excited to work, instead of feeling forced to work on some stuff that does not interest me at all.
I have come across a few places/companies which do great work and employees just LOVE(D) being there. Here are some on my list:
* Bell Labs
* Sun
* Microsoft
So, this begs the question: Which companies today (Sep 2023) are the Google's of the early 2000s?
FWIW, I went through all previous threads of this interview and there is no such discussion or mention of any company names.
edit: bullets
I personally think it’s what made my adult life possible at all. I have ADHD and I have a very hard time working on things I don’t find interesting to the point where I might not be a functional adult if I couldn’t. So I’m very grateful that I can job hop and work where I want sort of frictionless. I’ve never had a bad experience switching jobs. I’ve been to some interviews where someone better beat me, which sucks, but I’ve also been to several interviews where it was clear that me and them just weren’t the right fit. The latter has never been a bad experience for me, I’ve even made some friends along the way and sometimes I’ve gotten different jobs because the boss I was talking with knew another boss with a better match in their organisation.
My best advice is to just get out there and look!
Even in the prestige companies like Amazon or Microsoft most devs don’t work on greenfield projects but on maintaining the cash cows.
What I dislike is typically tied to all the bullshit that comes with programming. Because I’m mentally damaged the way I am, I have to expend an enormous amount of energy to pretend to listen in a daily standup meeting when people I don’t work directly with mill about whatever the code I’m not at all involved with does. Which is how SCRUM “works” in basically any Danish organisation because none of them have teams actually working on the same thing to justify using SCRUM. Or if you bill by the hour, so you can’t help another developer chase down that silly mistake that turns out to be ridiculously obvious because then how do you bill that half an hour in JIRA? Those things are what I personally look to avoid.
So yeah, if you’re not that into programming anything, then I guess it’s harder but it’s still possible. The first thing I did at my current job was to work with solar inverters and collect massive amounts of data from our solar plants. Which was certainly a challenge, I haven’t really read a manual the way I needed to read those solar inverter manuals since I did some silly stuff in C with BitMap images during my computer science education. So those jobs are also out there.
Can you share more of your story and maybe give me some advice, I really don't want to end up burnt out
I started uni at 19 (math & computer science at a local state university, I didn't have to go into debt for it) and that gave me a big boost in my programming ability (i continued working in that first job part-time throughout school). After that I went through several jobs in the next ±decade and made sure to always apply to places where I'd learn something new and level up as a developer.
At that point I knew a lot better what I wanted & didn't want to do. But I don't think I could have learned that without that experience and I don't regret it as it really helped me hone my skills and learn a lot. I also learned that the people you work with often make a bigger difference to the experience than the product you work on.
It doesn't always have to be greenfield, though. It can be complex and layered with legacy problems, it just has to be something I haven't explored before to be engaging. Right now I'm lucky to have a job where I'm assigned tasks from a variety of projects, modes and tools which really helps keep me focused.
Btw I resonate with not having the patience for bs jobs. Thankfully I don't have ADHD (I think) but working on something I dont enjoy is such a struggle that I have to think of it is a checklist of chores i have to get through the day for the reward at the end - working on side projects in the night! Sad I know.
Good god. Imagine if your life's ambition is to find a job that makes you excited to work. A slave who wants to be excited about his enslavement. A slave owner's dream.
True dystopia isn't some brutal authoritarian whipping the slave into submission. True dystopia is one that teaches a slave to want to be the best slave he can be.