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Not learning anymore. The previous job I was at was a rather boring one after a few months. The company had already encountered most of the customizations clie

Not learning anymore. The previous job I was at was a rather boring one after a few months. The company had already encountered most of the customizations clients requested and most of the new projects ended up being solely copy-paste work from older projects. This meant writing no new code but just applying older patch files and tweaking some config like the header and footer of the website. Since I was not learning anything new anymore at this job it felt like a drag going to work. I started interviewing for some other companies and one thing I wanted to be sure of was to have a job where I would actually write code instead of tweaking some config files all day long. I have enjoyed every day at work since I decided to leave that company.

tombert 9y ago
+1 to this. The most important part of any job for me is "do I feel like I'm smarter at the end of the day because of this job?" I had a job at an advertising agency, which, by most objective measures was a pretty decent job. However, I felt like about 95% of my work was "copy-paste, tweak-slightly". Eventually it got to a point where I wrote a script that could generate most of my work, and I realized that it was time to move on.
gargravarr 9y ago
Agreed. A job needs to be mutually beneficial or you'll wind up hating every day of it. I'm at a stage where I have learned a lot, but I find a lot of resistance to implementing my ideas for political reasons - e.g. in replacing our ticketing system, I drew up a proposal for something we already had licenses for, would integrate with our systems and provided features our developers would want. An unrelated team in America had been trialling some expensive software in isolation. I learned the software I was proposing, taught colleagues how to use the prototype, got positive feedback, got licensing sorted (free)... and my idea was swept aside because it wasn't the expensive software the guy in charge (who had approved my prototype) had already decided to go with. Figured then there was little point in me learning stuff that would benefit this company because decisions have already been made, so I'm moving on.

tombert 9y ago

+1 to this. The most important part of any job for me is "do I feel like I'm smarter at the end of the day because of this job?" I had a job at an advertising agency, which, by most objective measures was a pretty decent job. However, I felt like about 95% of my work was "copy-paste, tweak-slightly". Eventually it got to a point where I wrote a script that could generate most of my work, and I realized that it was time to move on.

gargravarr 9y ago

Agreed. A job needs to be mutually beneficial or you'll wind up hating every day of it. I'm at a stage where I have learned a lot, but I find a lot of resistance to implementing my ideas for political reasons - e.g. in replacing our ticketing system, I drew up a proposal for something we already had licenses for, would integrate with our systems and provided features our developers would want. An unrelated team in America had been trialling some expensive software in isolation. I learned the software I was proposing, taught colleagues how to use the prototype, got positive feedback, got licensing sorted (free)... and my idea was swept aside because it wasn't the expensive software the guy in charge (who had approved my prototype) had already decided to go with. Figured then there was little point in me learning stuff that would benefit this company because decisions have already been made, so I'm moving on.