> My job turned from amazing with coding every day to maintaining broken things last year (mostly black boxes others left behind). You generally have more cont

> My job turned from amazing with coding every day to maintaining broken things last year (mostly black boxes others left behind). You generally have more control over your job description than anyone will acknowledge to your face. If you’re miserable maintaining broken black boxes, then stop doing that. Figure out what you’d be more productive doing, tell your boss, and start doing it. You may have some uncomfortable conversations. Stand up for yourself. There’s a huge gap between what your boss will complain about vs what they’ll fire you for. In most cases it’s incredibly difficult to fire someone who is doing something (almost anything) valuable. Another thing you might consider is to pick one of those black boxes and dive into it. Tell people this thing is broken and you need to fix it and they need to cover the rest while you do so. If the company doesn’t have the resources to do so, that’s the company’s problem. Then focus on it until it’s not broken and not a black box (at least to you) anymore. Now you have job security as the person who understands the thing, and it’s a nice job to have because you made the thing nice.