4 years ago I graduated from college. I was really excited to be going back to the company. I had interned there the previous summer and it had been a mutually rewarding relationship. With almost no hesistation, I signed on the dotted line. The first year I worked hard to distinguish myself. Fixed more bugs than nearly everybody else (I fixed 4 the first week I was back). Launched two company wide projects for my team. Ported our software to a new version of our operating system. Refactored a bunch of crufty tools to make them better. Looking back, I don’t have any doubt that it went well for me.
It is now 3 years later. I’m older, wiser and more experience. I’ve slowed down a little but overall I’m a better programmer. Not so much in my coding ability (although I do that better) but in my ideas too. I was a little wild with my ideas back then. I may have even swung too conservative in my ideas. The problem is I’m still stuck doing the same things I was doing 3 years ago. The scale hasn’t changed very much either. I’m still doing little itsy pieces of work. Building on top of other’s people code. I’ve not had much chance to write code for other people to build on (maybe that’s because I prefer to reuse old code rather writing new code hmmm…). For this year, it looks like I’m going to be building a whole bunch of fancy new webpages. <sarcasm>Oh wow!</sarcasm>
Coming out of school, I had distinguished myself by being really good at:
- operating systems
- concurrency
- programming languages
- compilers
- computer architecture
Rather than grow in any of the areas, I’ve regressed in all of them. I read up on them but it’s not very effective when your work is incredibly mind numbing. I’ve gone from building stuff to assembling stuff. The stuff I have for assembly isn’t well built in the first place. I agonize constantly on how to workaround problems. Once I tried to introduce some cool algorithmic ideas for the group to use but I got pulled to working on a dumb perl script.
I’ve told myself. You’ve got to earn your dues before they let you work on interesting stuff. Distributed systems. Scalability. Cool Systems that do cool things. I think I’ve earned my dues. Earned my dues to be back doing what I did 4 years ago.
I’m constantly stressed. I always feel tired. I don’t get enough exercise. I used to have passion and drive for what I do. But I’ve burnt out my will. Like a wizard without his will, I’m all too ordinary. My energy rate is at the lowest its ever been (when we are having nice weather too). Nothing I’ve done seems to be able to restore my energy levels. At this rate, I’m going to be burnt out before the end of the year.
I know it sounds bad. It’s not. I work with the best group of people. I’m friend’s with a lot of them. I love talking shop with this great bunch of intelligent people. I just stopped liking what I did two years ago. And that has been eating away at me ever since. The job market is looking better these days (funny how that is), various parts of the organization are hurting for experienced people. It would be so easy for me to go work elsewhere but something is just holding me back. I’m not sure what it is.
To leave or not to leave? That is the question to paraphrase a certain fictional danish prince. By leaving, the change of environment might help to kickstart me. By staying, I continue down my current path. What to do? I don’t know. Too tired to think anymore.