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I was just talking with someone who's project has ended. He expects to be let go at some point in the future, but for now is on an "Internal Research and Development" project.
I expressed pleasant surprise that there is management forward-looking enough to support these kinds of projects.
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It does indeed suck. I was in the hunt about 2 years ago at the start of Covid. The only real good thing I have found is the number of companies that no longer care where your butt is located. But otherwise as JSOP said. We are a dying breed and alot of what they want us for is maintenance mode for old apps. It pays pretty well. But it is boring. I had one job consulting in the middle with a guaranteed base each week for 40 hours and I could do the job in 10. Boring but nice in someways. The dog got lots of walks.
To err is human to really elephant it up you need a computer
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I resist the urge to believe our best years are behind us, but...
- Ah, the thrill of being a high priest of computing, allowed to enter the machine room sanctum with its roaring fans and shaking disk drives, its black and blue cabinets of hardware, its blinky lights. Now a computer is just a featureless black slab on my desk, or worse yet a cloud of vapor(ware).
- Ah, the pride of being treated like a professional, like the accountants and lawyers; the knowledge that your unique talents made you valuable. Now you are a highly paid galley slave, endlessly rowing.
- Yes, the flow-state ecstasy of starting a project from a blank screen, turning a blinking cursor into a thousand lines of code. How painful nowadays to fiddle someone else's bland, banal code to squeeze in another feature just like the last thousand.
- And the women, the geeky, interesting women. Remember when there were women writing software? I really miss women in a workplace where the air is a mist of testosterone.
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If your job is so dull and you crave excitement why don't you quit your job and start your own start-up?
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Yes, working at a startup was probably one of the most 'fun' jobs I've had. 12-14 hour days, 6-7 days a week and it was still fun. I was just unlucky enough to join the startup about a year before the big DotCom crash!
If you can't find adventure, I'd recommend trying to find a job where you'll learn something new and different from what you know. I was luckily enough to find a job were I could learn a fair amount of DSP. Something I'd never have thought I'd really like, but did.
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I am probably the most irrelevant person here as I still use Visual FoxPro (but keep reading!)
I am retired but had a problem with a local council department. I asked them some questions and then wrote a simple system (maybe 40 hours coding) to obviate their problems that "there was no way round" and gave them a demo on my ancient laptop. They were open mouthed at the result and are looking to see if they can somehow get a separate laptop to install it on as "they would never allow it on their network". It should save them hours of boring paperwork per week.
SO I got some satisfaction from that, although I didn't do it for money, I might get a reduction in the bills for the junior football club I am treasurer for.
Alan
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Get into BlockChain and NFT. Steal from the rich and ... (I forget the other part).
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That other part is probably not important.
If you can't laugh at yourself - ask me and I will do it for you.
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You could work for the company I work for.
There are dragons... Soft cuddly ones, but they are ferocious nonetheless.
If your interested in dot-net 6 (C#), Angular, something called micro services, Azure, and one line requirement documents, drop me a message.
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I’m sure you’ve been flooded, but if you’re still looking. The company I work for has been the best company since I’ve been a SE. I spent almost 2 years on internal tooling (which I volunteered for between projects, and which I very much got to do what I wanted to do).
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Driving an MCU as a display controller - that was particularly wicked.
Bit banging an 8-bit parallel bus
Hacking the SPI hardware registers on an ESP32
etc.
Do you ever wonder if you're doing the open source community a disservice by unleashing such things upon the world? Maybe they shouldn't exist in the first place.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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honey the codewitch wrote: Bit banging an 8-bit parallel bus
Sounds more like the pr0n industry.
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Embedded lives in a parallel dimension. Forget what you learned and embrace the Chaos.
GCS/GE d--(d) s-/+ a C+++ U+++ P-- L+@ E-- W+++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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Q. How many Software Engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
A. None, its a Hardware problem.
Q. How many Hardware Engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
A. None, you can do anything is software.
Ran into this a lot in the early days, and unfortunately I'm both.
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
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You summed up my past 10 years.
GCS/GE d--(d) s-/+ a C+++ U+++ P-- L+@ E-- W+++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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honey the codewitch wrote: Bit banging an 8-bit parallel bus
Awk! Pieces of eight! Awk! Awk!
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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The real disservice was done by the hardware designers.
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reminds me of the project where I bit-banged 16, 150 baud serial ports on parallel interface to communicate with the pin sensors on an automatic bowling lane scoring system.
Worked great on the Dev system, but would not work in Production.
Spent days trying to figure it out, gave up, slammed the stack of fan-fold paper list closed in discussed.
Looked down at the first line and realized I hadn't initialized the stack pointer, which was done automatically on the Dev system.
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
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I still don't know what was causing the issue with the first screen in one of my apps going wonky on my old RA8875 driver implementation. Subsequent screens worked fine, but even when I put in a "fill" to try to force "a new screen" first it still didn't work.
The actually drawing code for the screen is battle tested.
Anyway, rewriting the driver the other day fixed it. 
Feels a bit like putting something back together, it working, and having parts left over.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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honey the codewitch wrote: Feels a bit like putting something back together, it working, and having parts left over.
Reminds me of a class in college where the professor was a complete prick. The 2nd half of his final exam gave you a list of around 50-60 8085 assembly language instructions. The problem was to write a routine which accepted certain arguments in specific registers and did a particular thing. You were allowed to use each instruction from the list only once. My original solution used only about 40 of the instructions. Since I had plenty of time, I figured out another solution that used all of the instructions exactly once.
When he was grading my final project, he was going to flunk me because I wasn't finished. He relented and decided to look at my exam scores. I had a perfect score on the midterm, and a perfect score on the final. I was one of only three people to get the 2nd half correct.
He was somewhat indignant when I told him I'd been writing 8085 assembly language for two years at that point  . I got a C in the course.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Gosh that reminds me of my first pro-gig when I got hired at microsoft at like 18? (maybe i was 19 i don't remember)
One of the people on the team did not like that i didn't go to school. The thing is I coded rings around him. I think he didn't like that either.
I ended up moving on to bigger and better things, but not before I either earned his respect or our PM told him to back off some. I'll never know which and don't care. =)
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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not sure if athletic analogy applies, but no pain, no gain.
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always admired your passion!
diligent hands rule....
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