First thing I did upon starting my work day was to open a beer. Just one out of two purchased for the occasion of yesterday being payday. I then proceeded to skim through my inbox and appointments for the day, concluding that beyond migrating this one production system over to the new VPN there’s not going to be a whole lot happening today. Just like most other days.
Second thing I do is to fire up my personal PC. For three reasons:
- Write this post
- Check if there are any new torrents worth downloading
- Check my personal e-mail to see if the competitor has gotten the paperwork ready. I’m so looking forward to jumping ship for the competition.
So, long story short, I worked for a company we’ll call A. We had a customer that we’ll call B to whom we sold a few older production systems. Then A got bought up by huge company C. Initially I didn’t mind. But while A was the perfect size for me - Big enough to give me a nice budget and the resources I asked for, company C is 90% red tape, where I can’t do shit without approval from everyone. On top of that, people more skilled at office politics than I managed transfer all of the interesting aspects of my job halfway around the world. Then, it turns out that a couple of former coworkers of mine joined company B as consultants, and they wanted me on board. 30% pay increase, and I get to do what I liked to do again. That’s an easy choice. I can’t jump over soon enough.
So while I now am severely overpaid to do ridiculously easy stuff, I’m so fucking demotivated and sick of my employer and all of its corporate bullshit (which constitutes 80% of my inbox nowadays) that even when I do nothing, and I’m sitting in my living room couch, I fucking hate it.
I had a revelation around half a year ago, where I was out in the field, and I was having a beer with a friend/coworker. “It’s not fun anymore…” we agreed. That’s when I started toying with the idea of looking elsewhere. I used to enjoy what I did for a living. I found my work day interesting, the right amount of challenging, and it catered to something I was good at. And I know most people have more valid complaints than their job not being fun, and I know that I’m spoiled in that regard. I hate my current job, not only because it’s not fun. But because it’s turning me into someone I don’t want to be - A bullshit employee with a bullshit job.
I don’t know where I wanted to go with this post, or what I wanted to achieve. I just needed to vent, even though the gas that comes out of the vent is a moist fart with not a whole lot of pressure behind it.
ive had similar feelings with my job, honesty, i could have written half of this.
my employer though, to their credit, seemed to have stepped up their game… they dont want me jumping ship, so they are feeding me interesting things to keep me busy between ‘big’ things.
do you have any overlapping technical hobbies to fill that need in your daily life? maybe generate the fun you want?
one of my personal solutions to this exact issue is by tackling a fully functional, scalable fediverse implementation. fun! it has forced me to learn several new pieces of tech, and revisit ones i thought i had a handle on.
I do have some sort of server room at home that I tinker with now and then. Setting up my own fed instance is something I might do, but I need another rack installed first, as I have another server I’d like to dedicate to that purpose.
However, once I get on board company C as described above, it should be good. I’ll get the interesting stuff back again. It just takes its time, because I told them that one of my demands for joining them would be to establish an EOR in my country (better employers protections and rights, etc), and that part of the ordeal is taking its time.