3 ms·

To be fair, my company was a little unconventional. We made NLP systems for defense clients, and as such we were working on interesting problems and had some re

by amyjess 10y ago

To be fair, my company was a little unconventional. We made NLP systems for defense clients, and as such we were working on interesting problems and had some real scientists on our payroll. I actually felt kinda out of place because I came from a systems and platform background and wound up being immersed in academic CS stuff and computational linguistics, while also being surrounded by experts on the subject with lots of experience, when I've never been good at the academic side. As much as I liked working at that company, I'm glad I'm now doing NMS engineering at a telecom instead, because what I'm doing now actually matches my skillset. Personally, though, I've never cared that much about working on something that's fulfilling in and of itself. As long as I'm getting paid enough to fund my life, the hours are good, the work environment isn't abusive (I learned that lesson from a startup), and I'm doing something I'm actually competent at, I'm content. If I want to work on something that tickles my fancy, that's what personal projects are for.

logfromblammo 10y ago
Grishnakh got it done in one. I agree with every last sentence, down to the punctuation. No, wait. Make that down to the kerning. I'll also add that some places are not just warming chairs with asses, but intentionally gaming the numbers and incurring mountains of technical debt in an apparent effort to suck more money out of the government customer than they were originally willing to pay, which is usually an insane amount to begin with. It's hard to see the line between make-work scheme and outright fraud, but think I was probably on the wrong side of it for roughly two years. I didn't care much for the territorial pissing and office-level politics there, either. The only reason I stayed at that place so long was because I was so sick of job-hunting and interviewing that I couldn't bring myself to do it more than once or twice a week. In the end, I settled for an opening at the same company that had laid me off with three days notice and no severance two years before, which was what forced me to go to the crap job in the first place.

by amyjess 10y ago

logfromblammo 10y ago

Grishnakh got it done in one. I agree with every last sentence, down to the punctuation. No, wait. Make that down to the kerning. I'll also add that some places are not just warming chairs with asses, but intentionally gaming the numbers and incurring mountains of technical debt in an apparent effort to suck more money out of the government customer than they were originally willing to pay, which is usually an insane amount to begin with. It's hard to see the line between make-work scheme and outright fraud, but think I was probably on the wrong side of it for roughly two years. I didn't care much for the territorial pissing and office-level politics there, either. The only reason I stayed at that place so long was because I was so sick of job-hunting and interviewing that I couldn't bring myself to do it more than once or twice a week. In the end, I settled for an opening at the same company that had laid me off with three days notice and no severance two years before, which was what forced me to go to the crap job in the first place.