RE: I quit
Hey!
I am back - I'll try a 2-3h per week (once a week) for the forums.
It is working out well. It is exhausting but not stressful. Since I don't have to join meetings and I get usually 1-2 emails per week, I have plenty of time to work uninterrupted. My attention capacity is increasing and I am learning a lot. On the other hand, I am usually brain-dead in the evening and my hobbies and personal study are neglected at the moment.
I am working with 2 Windows devs (C# and .NET), so I end up with some monstrosities. For example, I am automating most of the internal workflows using shell scripts, but instead of having one script for each task, they want some interactive wizards with colourful fonts, progress bars and the stuff, which truly hurts my soul (and it is very inefficient to maintain). I also need to re-write everything in PowerShell because they want to run things directly in their Windows boxes and even WSL is too much of a hassle for them.
It's a shame, because one of them is basically an algorithm genius.
On the bright side, everything that is not user-facing I get to write my own way. For example, we needed a way to store emails easily (removing dependency on email stack in the business logic is too complicated), so they wanted to create a small email store using .NET. Instead, I implemented 300 lines of C that opens SMTP port, does a very basic dummy handshake and stores the messages. The binary is 4KB and I wrote it using my Octane. It builds everywhere I've tried without any changes and it took me an afternoon to write. I'd have spent way more time figuring out even how to get python or .net running.
Naturally, we are in Azure, so I got to learn a lot about it as well. It's quite a pain... each solution can use or not a different separator character, or doesn't support this or that. I found in other forums how much people complain about having to learn how to set an IP address for the 76th time depending on the hosting solution you are using. and then learn how providers have their jsons, yamls or xmls set and I am feeling that pain as well (especially because I am also helping our customers). Seriously, let me just automate stuff via scripts and it is way more portable this way.
So, long story short... it is a job, but we grow (or sink) together. We are 10 now, but we all know what we are doing, so there's no organisational overhead.
The pluses:
- No one is counting vacation days.
- You get to (mostly) work your own way. No need to use a corporate Windows image that would take 10 minutes to boot.
- Everyone knows what they are doing.
- No one is in your neck.
- Bonuses whenever we get a new client.
- I learned more in a year than I did in the previous 5, although I'd rather have learned some different things.
- No BS.
The minuses:
- No health insurance. I get the basic from the state and usually pay a private doctor. A good chuck of my income now go to my psychiatrist and physiotherapist.
- Less income overall.
- Sometimes accidentally working 12-13 hours and not seeing the light of the day.
- Very few colleagues to talk to. Social life got worse.
The ugly:
- You get to hate corporations and how much people get paid to do no work.
- You get to see how obsolete salaries are and how obscene the whole ordeal is.
I'd not go back to a corporation voluntarily.
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