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I'm really stuck. I hate my job and dread every day of it. I'm too scared to move on somehow because of some ill form of loyalty towards its owner and a limited

I'm really stuck. I hate my job and dread every day of it. I'm too scared to move on somehow because of some ill form of loyalty towards its owner and a limited job market here. I've dropped out of college (a really good one, you should know it) because I couldn't afford it any more and I'm now working as a .NET web developer (4 years) with people clearly less knowledgeable about programming and the internet in general. The most senior dev guy (works there for 14 years) is a cocky jog who only knows VB.NET, who advocates the use of POS content management systems such as DotNetNuke. His code is such a bad and unmanageable mess, I could supply thedailywtf with code excerpts for the rest of eternity. When you try to explain concepts such as anonymous methods to him his head explodes. Do you think we have code versioning? Do you think we freeze functionality, have releases, or even any sort of requirements for our custom modules and libraries? No, every fucking web site has a slightly different version, it's a pure ghetto. Sometimes I slack off for the entire day, browsing reddit, and with 30 minutes of coding I'm still more productive than any of ny work mates. These guys don't know what the "cascading" in CSS stands for. "What is a selector?". When I started I had to fix the all of our web servers, they crashed every day because of simple configuration mistakes. These are guys that set up the dbs with a full transaction logging only to delete the transaction logs every day because they're getting too big. "We" now made the decision to move like 400 web sites, (some of them are nationally known and get a lot of traffic), sites that expose public web services, sometimes have custom services running in the background that require os access, and more, to a SHARED web hoster where we don't have any other access than PLESK. Without any migration plan. Bringing up VPS or dedicated hosts will give you empty stares. They now started migrating and realized that well, it's not going to work out like this... durr... "what do we do now?" These guys make CMS updates on a live server without informing the customers, if they're having a good day they at least don't forget to make a db and site backup first. Ah yeah, we also don't have staging servers. So most of the guys do development on live sites. I tried to change things, introduce new practices, I tried really hard. But now I'm just bitter. Before I was a nice and outgoing guy, now I'm not even advocating for alternatives and I stopped giving input. Man... I'm about to throw up

deerparkwater 15y ago
Um you need to get in contact with some folks here at hacker news after you put a nice project up on github and contribute to haxe. The people you work with are not programmers. Programmers understand discrete operations.
ramanujan 15y ago
Put an email in your profile. You are complaining about the right things, in a constructive way which shows you want to improve the system. There are a number of people hiring on HN who value that.
ctide 15y ago
Sounds remarkably similar to my life in my early 20s. Get out. Now. I spent about 5 years in a job that initially taught me a lot about a lot of different technologies, but I peaked very quickly. I felt like I couldn't leave, however, since I was easily the most technical and was responsible for lots of disparate systems. So, I would go to work and spend 95% of my day chatting on IRC and 5% of my day writing a solid chunk of code that made it look like I was busy. The biggest regret I have is that I spent at least 2 years too many at that job before I grew the balls to change my life. Don't waste another day of your life rotting away in an environment that's doing nothing for you.
slindsey 15y ago
Currently in an almost identical situation. Finally made the decision to start an independent software business within the last month. Not sure how. Don't know what to make. Don't know how I'm going to market anything. But simply having the plan makes a huge difference. I feel so much better. "with 30 minutes of coding I'm still more productive than any of ny work mates" Use the rest of your time on research and planning for your own business. Don't actually do work on their computers, but research is fine. Feel absolutely no loyalty to the company. I guarantee they have no loyalty to you.

deerparkwater 15y ago

Um you need to get in contact with some folks here at hacker news after you put a nice project up on github and contribute to haxe. The people you work with are not programmers. Programmers understand discrete operations.

ramanujan 15y ago

Put an email in your profile. You are complaining about the right things, in a constructive way which shows you want to improve the system. There are a number of people hiring on HN who value that.

ctide 15y ago

Sounds remarkably similar to my life in my early 20s. Get out. Now. I spent about 5 years in a job that initially taught me a lot about a lot of different technologies, but I peaked very quickly. I felt like I couldn't leave, however, since I was easily the most technical and was responsible for lots of disparate systems. So, I would go to work and spend 95% of my day chatting on IRC and 5% of my day writing a solid chunk of code that made it look like I was busy. The biggest regret I have is that I spent at least 2 years too many at that job before I grew the balls to change my life. Don't waste another day of your life rotting away in an environment that's doing nothing for you.

slindsey 15y ago

Currently in an almost identical situation. Finally made the decision to start an independent software business within the last month. Not sure how. Don't know what to make. Don't know how I'm going to market anything. But simply having the plan makes a huge difference. I feel so much better. "with 30 minutes of coding I'm still more productive than any of ny work mates" Use the rest of your time on research and planning for your own business. Don't actually do work on their computers, but research is fine. Feel absolutely no loyalty to the company. I guarantee they have no loyalty to you.