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1. If your contract allows it (and it should), get more involved in public dev community. Your employer benefits greatly from making a small closed source core product, with a giant open source ecosystem around it. Write public articles. Working in a community larger than one single business is fun.
2. Start a company coding club, a "labs" division, work in a slightly more exotic language. Great if your employer gives you time, but using some of your own is worth it too. Work on non critical tools, creative experiments. Sometimes you stumble onto incredibly valuable ideas which would never have popped up if you had strictly followed stakeholder requirements.
3. Listen to your body. If you feel restless, go for a run. If you feel tired, take a nap. If you're stuck, wander around the company. If you feel down, go find a place with more than a dozen trees. And always have a notepad nearby for doodling!5 -
No work is going to be tolerable if you don't enjoy it. If you got into programming or IT or any industry simply for the money you can earn doing it, you're in for a BAD TIME.
I love computers, linux, programming, configuration, automation, and problem solving. So I love what I do. I am currently three weeks into 13 weeks of parental leave, and I have been having dreams about work at night.
The best piece of advice I can offer to someone who has trouble getting motivated is: make sure to like it first.10 -
Try pair programming! I've never had an official pair programming session, but I'll be damned if my best code and quickest solutions didn't come from having a bitch session with my coworker. Just having to talk it out or having that second set of eyes can work wonders. Plus you have a built-in de-stressing outlet to help you sleep at night.3
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The combination of fun colleagues and trying to learn things (more and more CLI stuff in my case) make my days awesome, also some customer interactions are hilarious, that altogether makes it very much worthwhile!
(although: I'm a Linux engineer, NOT a dev professionally)3 -
Have an 'anger' project open to the side, so when you get annoyed or tired of the paid work, take a quick break and jump into that project to clear your head, even if it is just a simple command line tool, done it before and it's quite a good thing from experience
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-Games (board games or video games)
-Coffee and other beverages
-Enough tech gadgets
But most important of all, love what you do. -
Don't hire monkeys that write shitty code that cause production issues.
Just spent the entire morning with our global team (10+ ppl) looking into the cause of a production issue.
Root cause: shitty code that anyone that has read an algorithm book (array resizing costs) and understanding how DB functions should be used and why (bulk inserts vs one at a time) would never write.
Even the code itself is a mess...8 -
Have a positive mindset. If the work in general sucks, you can almost always find some micro or nano task that you can focus on. Then you find something more fun to work with and switch job. But until then, stay positive and be happy. And use devrant to blow off steam.
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Pick fun and enjoyment over money. I make considerably less than I could somewhere else, but I enjoy doing it.
Good and friendly co-workers are also a huge plus.1 -
Not doing it for the money alone unless you want to be depressed and wealthy.
Find the most inspiring work that pay your bills: when you're the best at what you love you will find a way to get paid for that (or something closely related).
On the micro level, I try to talk to / learn from coworkers a lot and take regular breaks.1 -
If you're finding your paid work boring & mediocre, then utilise the stability of your current job to be fussy over choosing your next one.
Shoot high, do research, apply only for places you think you'd genuinely enjoy working, and demand a good offer with any reasonable perks you choose.
You might take a few months to find somewhere, but you'll eventually land yourself somewhere where you really want to be. -
No experience with paid work yet, but for sysadmin work I'd mostly look at the environment and how the previous admin left the premises, and why they left. I wouldn't want to work with a bird's nest for a server room, that's got everything jammed into one clusterfuck of a god-function sort of server or something crazy like that. Separation of services, security, wire management, all those things matter because that's the state that you'll be working in, and cleaning up someone else's mess.. it makes my blood boil.
Payment is important, and if the job doesn't pay well, don't take it. Or if they place a wee bit too much value in those expensive pieces of toilet paper called certificates, it denotes incompetence from the employer by being unable to gauge your skills on their own (and I get that there's time management involved, but come on.. how long can it take to have a conversation with someone to gauge what their skillset is). But the working environment in particular is of vital importance. If it's all going to be yours to build, great (and don't you dare to half-ass it -_-). But if it's already been partially done by someone else, they'd better done it well. -
If you want other people to have fun at their job, tell them they did good work and give a compliment or two.
Everyone loves appreciation2 -
Don't forget to give the developers the opportunity to innovate. Nobody wants to sit and type out the same structures day after day. That's not why we got into this job. We like solving problems. In my current team we set aside some time every sprint to spend on individual innovation. Super useful as it gives us the chance to break out from the standard chugging of the backlog and spend some time trying to solve some of the trickier problems and bringing improvements back to the product that we discovered by messing around with stuff. If you are reading this and you are in charge of a development team, try this out for a sprint or 2.2
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Find a job that allows personal growth on the boss time. This helps you do what you want while doing with being the slave of the customer in between.
In the end your company will profit from it.1 -
For me, I personally just over estimate the time and take my time working on it. Take breaks whenever I need, that could be going for a walk, watching a few videos, etc.1
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Just spent the whole morning making a custom loading indicator for our app (an animated version of our logo). Animations are fun!3
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Don't even say your initial time estimate/guess out loud. It will probably become your deadline, and you probably assumed that most things would take a reasonable amout of time.
Bonus: Try to get onto projects that you think you can get interested in. Once on a project try to keep interested in it's success.8 -
I'm always learning. That way it becomes funny to me. And also coffee. So fucking much coffee. Alcohol helps a lot too.
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randomly get into a position where you can choose the tech stack yourself and get allowed to use some more time to experiment with alternative technologies instead of doing it as fast as possible. Bonus points for getting additional time to create something that not only works now but can be extended later on
tl;dr: pray to fortuna and praise the godess of luck -
Working on a project in which the work is planned around what I'm already good at, isn't much use.
Yes, the person who is paying for the project, would want only someone with experience (good experience) to work on the project.
But really I'd like to work on stuff which will be challenging (in terms of learning new stuff). So yes, I'd like to get paid for learning! -
Whenever i get bored at work i try to motivate myself, because i notice that as soon as i am less interested, i loose focus and make mistakes.
Therefore i try to keep motivation up. One thing that helps is actually TDD, because you are able to have several small subgoals, which each leave you with a feeling of achievement, when a test you wrote passed, kinda like achievements in games.
When the task itself is so boring that even TDD doesn‘t help, i try to have fun while painfully working through it. Like have a coffee break every now and then or rant with a coworker about the task.
One time a coworker and me had to create a demo in Unity and we hated the task, because it was exactly this brainless and cumbersome clicking in the Unity3D UI which felt awful to us (we are embedded developers and we find comfort in the terminal 😄)
The only thing that got us through the task was ranting at Unity and periodically goofing around in the engine and adding weird behavior to objects. -
Maybe is just me but I'm starting to move from the idea that work needs to be fun at all.
If it is, awesome! If it's not it's OK because work is just about 20% of my life in which I don't have a lot of control but enables me to have control over the other 80% (hobbies, relationships, community, fun)3 -
I dealt with boring parts of my job by automating them and utilizing the free time in work to make an improvements. At the end of a day I feel happier if I manage to simplify something and it still works flawlessly.1
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It's going to be different for everyone, but for me would be:
- More schedule freedom. I hate being forced to stay here from 9am to 6pm. What if today I want to get here at 11am, and only leave at 8pm? I'm still working the full 8 hours, so what's the problem?
- Actually work with what I want and enjoy doing.
To be honest, that would be all for me. This is all (I think) I need to be happy while working.2
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