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At least in my experience, yes, it really is that dull. If you get senior enough it manages to be both very dull and very stressful. I managed to stick out for
by jon-wood 3y ago
At least in my experience, yes, it really is that dull. If you get senior enough it manages to be both very dull and very stressful.
I managed to stick out for about a year after the startup I’d been working for was acquired by a multinational. I’d been an early engineering hire at the startup, and by that point was a technical lead for one of the teams. On being acquired I got promoted to technical lead for the newly formed division, which in practice meant endless meetings about every aspect of what we were doing. I’m talking eight hours a day on Teams calls, and a couple of hours writing things up between them.
One thing I’ll never forget is that an early task I picked up was working out how to tell if someone had opted out of marketing communications. I naively went in thinking it couldn’t be that hard, just look them up in the system that tracked these things. When I left we still didn’t have a decent solution. I’d spent months on calls with everyone up to the Data Protection Officer, and the closest I ever got was something we thought might work. For all I know they’re still trying to work it out 18 months later.
In the end I hated that job so much I took a ~50% pay cut and left a five figure retention bonus on the table to get out. I’m now happily back in a startup writing code every day, solving interesting problems, and laughing whenever someone complains about how much process and documentation there is.
- neongreen 3y agoWhat were the biggest obstacles to figuring out whether someone has opted out of marketing communications?
- badpun 3y agoI worked in a large bank (top50 globally) who literally couldn't tell you how many customers they have. It was an impossible task, and when the new CEO asked, he was told exactly that.
- galdosdi 3y agoNot the OP, but I recognize this kind of situation from my own frustrations at bigcorps: There are probably 1) many legacy systems with slightly different definitions of opted out, which may be out of sync with each other, forcing the developer to figure out an algorithm for what to decide in the many edge cases, forcing the dev to gather more requirements from many different stakeholders who did not anticipate this 2) many organizatioal owners for all these involved systems and for pieces of the logic and it's consequences, all of whom have different corporate priorities and incentives and calendar schedules The result is a trivial thing becomes a jungle of scheduled meetings to gain access to the appropriate systems and to make decisions about each edge case, and ultimately go further up the change to reconcile incompatible opinions about how edge cases should be handled
- quickthrower2 3y agoProbably they couldn’t discover the user info provider because the user info provider aggregator service requires an ISO timestamp representing the end of the universe. I think that Microservices parody is frighteningly close to real life.