> to being surrounded by Dilbert characters.
As a real life Wally I appreciate this comment.
As a real life Wally I appreciate this comment.
I was Wally for the last 2 1/2 years of that previous job until I started to realize I'm becoming more and more like a Dilbert character myself. Something in my brain just told me it wasn't sustainable, call it fear of God or paranoia, but letting my skills atrophy in a place like that for 20 years didn't seem like it would end well for me.
The only problem was that I stayed so long, and it made me hate software engineering so much that I didn't even want to be a software engineer anymore.
I put up with it just long enough so I could avoid selling stock and drawing cash out of my portfolio, and now I'm back at square one as a post-bacc student getting my applications in order for MD and PhD programs where I'll most certainly wind up drawing hundreds of thousands out of my portfolio to pay rent and eat dinner for about a decade.
It's sad, I really enjoyed systems programming, but it seems like finding interesting systems programming and distributed computing projects that have significant economic value is like squeezing blood out of a stone. Maybe LLMs or future progress in bioinformatics will change that, now that finding ways to shovel a lot of data into and out of GPUs is valuable, but I'm so far into physiology, genetics/proteomics, and cell biology that I'm not sure I would even want to go back.
I’m lucky in that before I got the job I was in talks to do a PhD but negotiated saying I’d only do it remote.
Now I do whatever is required to keep my day job happy and then spend the rest of my time working on my PhD. My plan was to go to FAANG after I got my degree but who knows… a comfy, unionized tech job that gives me ample time to do side projects is also not something I’d give up too easily.
I’d say do whatever is necessary to keep your job and then devote any extra hours 9-5 to some project. If I wasn’t doing my PhD I’d be making an app or a game probably, or maybe still moonlighting as a researcher. I think most office/tech jobs don’t require your full 40 hours and I can tell you I have a bunch of friends who have even less work responsibilities than me but they just use that spare time to play video games. Just do something productive 9-5 and you will outpace 99% of people is what I’ve found.