HR: Hey we heard about all of the apps you are building and we were wondering if you could build one for us too

Dev: Well I’d have to run it by my manager first, what kind of app were you looking to build?

HR: Ok basically it’s a button that when you press it it completes the list of daily tasks that normally take us all day everyday like payroll and attendance reporting.

Dev: You…. want me to…automate your entire job away?

HR: No! We would be the ones to push the button😡.

Dev: I….. I’ll…. I will pass that along.

So I joined this financial institution back in Nov. Selling themselves as looking for a developer to code micro-services for a Spring based project and deploying on Cloud. I packed my stuff, drove and moved to the big city 3500 km away. New start in life I thought!
Turns out that micro-services code is an old outdated 20 year old JBoss code, that was ported over to Spring 10 years ago, then let to rot and fester into a giant undocumented Spaghetti code. Microservices? Forget about that. And whats worse? This code is responsible for processing thousands of transactions every month and is currently deployed in PROD. Now its your responsibility and now you have to get new features complied on the damn thing. Whats even worse? They made 4 replicas of that project with different functionalities and now you're responsible for all. Ma'am, this project needs serious refactoring, if not a total redesign/build. Nope! Not doing this! Now go work at it.
It took me 2-3 months just to wrap my mind around this thing and implement some form of working unit tests. I have to work on all that code base by myself and deliver all by myself! naturally, I was delayed in my delivery but I finally managed to deliver.
Time for relief I thought! I wont be looking at this for a while. So they assign me the next project: Automate environment sync between PROD and QA server that is manually done so far. Easy beans right? And surely enough, the automation process is simple and straightforward...except it isnt! Why? Because I am not allowed access to the user Ids and 3rd party software used in the sync process. Database and Data WareHouse data manipulation part is same story too. I ask for access and I get denied over and over again. I try to think of workarounds and I managed to do two using jenkins pipeline and local scripts. But those processes that need 3rd party software access? I cannot do anything! How am I supposed to automate job schedule import on autosys when I DONT HAVE ACCESS!! But noo! I must think of plan B! There is no plan B! Rather than thinking of workarounds, how about getting your access privileges right and get it right the first time!!
They pay relatively well but damn, you will lose your sanity as a programmer.
God, oh god, please bless me with a better job soon so I can escape this programming hell hole.
I will never work in finance again. I don't recommend it, unless you're on the tail end of your career and you want something stable & don't give a damn about proper software engineering principles anymore.

Software engineering is slowly being lowered to a basic skill to please corporations that literally want you to automate your job away. The only fruitful areas of software engineering that I can see being relevant in the next 10 years are those mixed with other hard sciences such as bioinformatics, robotics, bleeding edge statistics and mathematics (AI research), physics, etc. The trend I see right now is that software engineering is being integrated with business-oriented degrees or arts degrees, targeted programs towards beginners offered for free or low prices. There's going to be a higher barrier of entry for the jobs that are actually worth the stress and I'm praying I'll be able to catch the train before it leaves the station.

Favorite / most used systemd timers?

I recently wrote one to pull the location data of users for an app and make a heat map of sorts which updates every hour. Probably could make it run on a quicker timer but not many eyes on it at the moment.