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I've spent a lot of time in both worlds, there's nothing really glamorous about the startup space. You're in such a hurry and requirements change so frequently

I've spent a lot of time in both worlds, there's nothing really glamorous about the startup space. You're in such a hurry and requirements change so frequently that whatever you build ends up being a godawful mess and you just have to live with it. It kills me because I used to take so much pride in writing (what I considered) beautiful code, but now things are always so rushed that I slap stuff together as well as I can given time constraints. There are some components of my codebase that I try to avoid looking at because it just puts me in a bad mood. All I know is that it works and seems to be relatively bug free, but it's gnarly as all get out. My core project is around 60k lines of Python, I have no doubt that I could rewrite the whole thing in less than 10k lines if I had time to refactor, but there's little chance of that ever happening. I guess what I'm trying to say is that once you're burned out and forever trying to cram 20 hours of work into a 10 hour day there's little chance that anything you do would be what "good engineers" do, so don't beat yourself up about it. I was an engineer for a fortune 500 consulting company at my previous job, the work was somewhat boring but you had the resources to produce extremely high quality work if you were so inclined. I sort of miss that.

vonmoltke 12y ago
I know what the reality is, and I know me feelings are irrational. Of course, depression usually is irrational. Honestly, it depends on what frame of mind I happen to be in on a given day. Sometimes I look back on my ten years at a defense contractor and think how great it was to work on a complex radar power supply and on complex signal processing software with some seriously crazy platform constraints. Other times, I look back on that same period and see the two years of misery at the end of my tenure as I repeatedly tried and failed to find a new job to get me out of miserable working conditions, all while being told repeatedly from outside how hot software engineering was and figuring it must mean I was a defective doomed to my existence.
- MagicWishMonkey 12y ago
  Where do you live? Location is everything, you shouldn't take it personally if someone in san fran or austin can find a job easily, those markets are on fire. It's a different story if you live in Kansas or Arkansas, you definitely shouldn't take it personally. Some of the crappiest engineers I know have a plethora of offers coming in on a weekly basis, just because the supply/demand curve for tech workers is completely out of whack here in Dallas. Geography makes a big difference.
  - vonmoltke 12y ago
    How funny. I'm in Dallas. I did finally end up getting out to a small local company here, but as I said it took two years. I didn't apply much locally, though, since I couldn't find much that wasn't enterprise CRUD work. Except for my current company, those I did apply to (Lockheed, General Dynamics, CapitalOne, Gearbox, a few others I have forgotten) never contacted me over my resume. But yes, I know geography matters. That only helped the rational part, though.

vonmoltke 12y ago

I know what the reality is, and I know me feelings are irrational. Of course, depression usually is irrational. Honestly, it depends on what frame of mind I happen to be in on a given day. Sometimes I look back on my ten years at a defense contractor and think how great it was to work on a complex radar power supply and on complex signal processing software with some seriously crazy platform constraints. Other times, I look back on that same period and see the two years of misery at the end of my tenure as I repeatedly tried and failed to find a new job to get me out of miserable working conditions, all while being told repeatedly from outside how hot software engineering was and figuring it must mean I was a defective doomed to my existence.

MagicWishMonkey 12y ago
Where do you live? Location is everything, you shouldn't take it personally if someone in san fran or austin can find a job easily, those markets are on fire. It's a different story if you live in Kansas or Arkansas, you definitely shouldn't take it personally. Some of the crappiest engineers I know have a plethora of offers coming in on a weekly basis, just because the supply/demand curve for tech workers is completely out of whack here in Dallas. Geography makes a big difference.
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  How funny. I'm in Dallas. I did finally end up getting out to a small local company here, but as I said it took two years. I didn't apply much locally, though, since I couldn't find much that wasn't enterprise CRUD work. Except for my current company, those I did apply to (Lockheed, General Dynamics, CapitalOne, Gearbox, a few others I have forgotten) never contacted me over my resume. But yes, I know geography matters. That only helped the rational part, though.