Wally is the one Dilbert character I can tolerate in the workplace. He's honest about who he is and what he does. When you know you're in a bloated company run by buffoons, all you can do for your sanity is work to rule and not upset the apple cart.
I was Wally for the last 2 1/2 years of that previous job until I started to realize I'm becoming more and more like a Dilbert character myself. Something in my brain just told me it wasn't sustainable, call it fear of God or paranoia, but letting my skills atrophy in a place like that for 20 years didn't seem like it would end well for me.
The only problem was that I stayed so long, and it made me hate software engineering so much that I didn't even want to be a software engineer anymore.
I put up with it just long enough so I could avoid selling stock and drawing cash out of my portfolio, and now I'm back at square one as a post-bacc student getting my applications in order for MD and PhD programs where I'll most certainly wind up drawing hundreds of thousands out of my portfolio to pay rent and eat dinner for about a decade.
It's sad, I really enjoyed systems programming, but it seems like finding interesting systems programming and distributed computing projects that have significant economic value is like squeezing blood out of a stone. Maybe LLMs or future progress in bioinformatics will change that, now that finding ways to shovel a lot of data into and out of GPUs is valuable, but I'm so far into physiology, genetics/proteomics, and cell biology that I'm not sure I would even want to go back.
I'm currently in a place that pays me €100k just to sit on my ass, and I can do that remotely. I've tried actually doing some work, but that backfired. Not sure what to do, because on one hand my skills are evaporating, but on the other if I wanted a job that pays more I'd have to learn a lot and then work substantially more. I'm wondering if maybe sitting here until retirement is a viable option.
Similar situation. I work for a provincial government and make €61k, my scope is actually relatively large for how long I’ve been with my team but the actual problems are simple enough that some decent code means I have 0 downtime. As a result if I don’t bug anyone I typically get left alone to manage a bunch of products that run without issue. This week I literally have no meetings on my calendar, just a small project with a generous due date where I’m the solo developer.
I’m lucky in that before I got the job I was in talks to do a PhD but negotiated saying I’d only do it remote.
Now I do whatever is required to keep my day job happy and then spend the rest of my time working on my PhD. My plan was to go to FAANG after I got my degree but who knows… a comfy, unionized tech job that gives me ample time to do side projects is also not something I’d give up too easily.
I’d say do whatever is necessary to keep your job and then devote any extra hours 9-5 to some project. If I wasn’t doing my PhD I’d be making an app or a game probably, or maybe still moonlighting as a researcher. I think most office/tech jobs don’t require your full 40 hours and I can tell you I have a bunch of friends who have even less work responsibilities than me but they just use that spare time to play video games. Just do something productive 9-5 and you will outpace 99% of people is what I’ve found.
Honestly I do use that time to play video games because I don't see the point of working my ass off. Suppose I grind my ass off and manage to get a €200k on-site job with on-call. Is that actually a win? I don't think so.
I do the same, but mostly because when I have bothered to work my ass pff to try and get a cool job, I never get hired anyway because they only hire established domain experts and juniors via a university pipeline.
Software development evolved well past the point of solving problems, now it is just plugging solutions. Very few people actually work in novel stuff these days...
I was Wally for the last 2 1/2 years of that previous job until I started to realize I'm becoming more and more like a Dilbert character myself. Something in my brain just told me it wasn't sustainable, call it fear of God or paranoia, but letting my skills atrophy in a place like that for 20 years didn't seem like it would end well for me.
The only problem was that I stayed so long, and it made me hate software engineering so much that I didn't even want to be a software engineer anymore.
I put up with it just long enough so I could avoid selling stock and drawing cash out of my portfolio, and now I'm back at square one as a post-bacc student getting my applications in order for MD and PhD programs where I'll most certainly wind up drawing hundreds of thousands out of my portfolio to pay rent and eat dinner for about a decade.
It's sad, I really enjoyed systems programming, but it seems like finding interesting systems programming and distributed computing projects that have significant economic value is like squeezing blood out of a stone. Maybe LLMs or future progress in bioinformatics will change that, now that finding ways to shovel a lot of data into and out of GPUs is valuable, but I'm so far into physiology, genetics/proteomics, and cell biology that I'm not sure I would even want to go back.