I’ve held jobs where I was able to work on only greenfield projects with minimal oversight and the ability to put in 3-4 hour days if I wanted to, and I’ve held jobs like the blog post author’s, working on hellish enterprise CMSes.
I can say the former is incomparably better and makes you grow into a stronger, more fulfilled engineer. I think as long as I could support myself financially and keep living somewhat comfortably, I’d take a 30% paycut to work that way.
I agree. I always work for startup type companies and they end up getting acquired and the process changes from what worked great (enough to get acquired) to shackles and mud. I hold on as long as I can and move to another startup type company.
Big companies suck the soul and passion out of you. You really have to be careful. Any passionate developer that wants to get out of development was most likely crushed by large company process.
>Because it’s not really “passion” they are looking for, but people who are merely willing to endure long hours. They aren’t really looking for the person who spends a few hours on the weekend on an open-source project, they are looking for the person who comes home from work and spends all night on it.
I feel that the author is describing a lot of startups or mid-sized companies. Personally, I think the size of the organization is not the best indicator of how rewarding your work there will be.
For me, it isn't necessarily the long hours that do me in, it's the overburdening process that strips any creativity or problem solving out of the trade.
I don't mind working long hours as long as they don't expect me to. I'll do it because I want to finish something cool and useful I'm working on, and move to the next cool and useful thing I get to create.
Also, my perspective is from outside SV. I don't have any desire to work there.
>I don't mind working long hours as long as they don't expect me to.
And there's the rub, there seems to be a tacit expectation at a lot of software-based SMBs that you should be staying longer. They justify it with a bunch of perks they can't afford, by applying not-so-subtle mental pressure (using the right phrases like 'we're a family', 'we're changing the world' 'we love it here so much we often stay later' and 'hustle and grind').
And at the end of the day, most of them are building yet another CRUD-heavy inventory app with some reporting feature thrown in.
I think thats an important point. As someone on the back end of a career in software I look back at all the projects I was proud of and thought I crafted well, and in the end they turned out just like all the other large unmaintainable swamps that everyone complains about.
Not completely clear about this, but the industry seems structured in such a way that (most) everything ends up being a horrifying mess of hacks over time. For any codebase, you can see it fall over the cliff. Poorly chosen compromises are made. People lose track of whats going on. A simple joy with boundless possibilities turns into a pointless daily slog. A rewrite would be too expensive and risky. An incremental refactoring too unjustifiable. The passionate people leave, and the interns are left running the asylum, hating every minute.
I don't know what the answer is, but no one seems to want greenfield development anymore, probably for good reason. The prospect of picking up someone else rotten excreta is pretty unappealing.
So yes, I think its salient to point out that that terrible bloated CMS you're stuck trying to mush into shape was once someones bright and shining future.
I can say the former is incomparably better and makes you grow into a stronger, more fulfilled engineer. I think as long as I could support myself financially and keep living somewhat comfortably, I’d take a 30% paycut to work that way.