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There is lots to unpack here, but part of the reason why I personally think that lots of people feel that they have an unrewarding dead end career is because they are truly trying to enjoy it and let the misery that comes from it serve as a rewarding experience. I honestly think that there are few jobs out there that give you a rewarding experience.
A friend of mine is a helicopter pilot and he loves it, there is fun to it and when he does what he does he gets handsomely rewarded in monetary compensation and is regarded a hero (medical evacuation, but does other things with the piloting) We on the other hand have tried glamourizing software to be this enticing exciting career, but I seldom believe that things that happen behind a screen are enjoyable safe for watching dumb shit on the internet or playing games.
I have lost faith a long time ago, and decided to be a mercenary, you wanna pay me to write VBScript? fk yeah I'll do it. -
@AleCx04 and the reason why I do it is that to me its just a job, not something that represents me as a person or should affect my personality, there are millions of monkeys out there that do what we do, some with major talent in countries that pay them a potato wage, regardless of how talented they are, it is just the nature of the field.
So, I take my paycheck, and go do something nice with it, your position tells me that you may very well be very talented, but unsatisfied with what you do, the best way to get a salary raise is to move to a different company, that is also the nature of the field.
Try to find somewhere else where you can make more money, even if it won't be exciting cutting edge tech that makes you a l337 hax0r, shit code whatever and just make a salary and find enjoyment in being your own person, not in being the awesome dev that your company appreciates, companies don't give a shit about us anymore. -
I get paid money to solve sudoku puzzles
All codebases are redundant boring messes and few will ever dispense attention to quality, people are territorial of what currently is and what do I get out of having those battles, and recruiters/interviewers think they're selling you luxury brands so scoff at you due to their naive hubris
I can say that being well regarded got me in more trouble than I ever wanted. Your myth becomes what everyone compares every new person to, management will use that measuring stick to hit and "motivate" people with, and you become the evil bad guy boss monster at the final level that haunted these poor devs for years in their nightmares, and then you might be unlucky enough to run into one of them!
And thusly, codebases remain garbage, management dysfunctional, and recruiters... Well I don't think anyone can take credit for that one; high turnover rate keeps them naive
So i wasted last 24 hours trying to satisfy my ego over a shitty interview and revisiting my old job's codebase and realising that i still don't like that shit. just i am 25 and have no clue where am i heading at. i am just restless, my most of the decisions in 2023 have given very bad outcomes and i am just trying doing things to feel hopeful.
context for the interview story-----
my previous job was at a b2b marketing company whose sdk was used by various startups to send notifications to their users, track analytics etc. i understood most of it and don't find it to be any major engineering marvel, but that interviewer was very interested in asking me to design a system around it.
in my 1.2 years of job there, i found the codebase to be extremely and unnecessarily verbose ( java 7) with questionable fallbacks and resistance towards change from the managers. they were always like "we can't change it otherwise a lot of our client won't use our sdk". i still wrote a lot of testcases and tried to understand the working of major features.
BTW, before you guys go on a declare me an embarrassment of an engineer who doesn't know the product's code base, let me tell you that we are talking SDKs (plural) and a service based company here. their was just one SDK with interesting, heavy lifting stuff and 9 more SDKs which were mostly wrappers and less advanced libraries. i got tasks in all of them, and 70% of my time went into maintaining those and debugging client side bugs instead of exploring the "already-stable-dont-change" code base.
so based on my vague understanding and my even more vague memory from 1 year ago, i tried to explain an overall architecture to that interviewer guy. His face was screaming the word "pathetic" from his expressions, so i thought that today i will try to decode the codebase in 12-15 hours, publish a cool article and be proud of how much i know a so called martech system design. their codebase is open sourced, so it wasn't difficult to check it out once more.
but boy oh boy i got so bored. unnecessary clases , unnecessary callbacks static calls , oof. i tried to refactor a few classes, but even after removing 70% of codebase, i was still left with 100+ classes , most of them being 3000-4000 files long. and this is your plain old java library adding just 800kb to your project.
boring , boring stuff. i would probably need 2-3 more days to get an understanding of complete project, although by then i would be again questioning my life choices , that was this a good use of my 36 hours?
what IS a correct usage of my time? i am currently super dissatisfied with my job, so want to switch. i have been here for 6 months, so probably i wouldn't be going unless i get insane money or an irresistible company offer. For this i had devised a 2 part plan to either become good at modern hot buzz stuff in my domain( the one being currently popularized by dev influenzas) or become good at dsa/leetcode/cp. i suck bad at ds/algo stuff, nor am i much motivated. so went with that hot buzz stuff.
but then this interview expected me to be a mature dev with system design knowledge... agh fuck. its festive season going on and am unable to buy any cool shirts since i am so much limited with my money from my mediocre salary and loans. and mom wants to buy a home too... yeah kill me
rant