Entries Tagged 'Jobs Suck' ↓

Do you work your butt off for 12 months then hope for some recognition and reward once a year in your annual performance review?

This just in, don’t bet your career on it. Most managers have a difficult time keeping up with all of their corporate projects, let alone remembering all the things you contributed over the last year. Sure, you can document them all and give them to your boss but will it really make that much of a difference?

Is there any chance that they’ll actually compensate you appropriately for the massive time and effort you put in this year? This is more what you’re more likely to hear:

Remember that month where you worked nights and weekends to get that project done? How about that project where you missed vacation and worked like a dog to get it finished on schedule? Since you gave up two months of your life we’ll change this number from a 3 to a 3.5.

Fighting for Pennies
In many cases, managers have a pool of money to split across all of their team for annual increases. In order to give you more, they have to give someone else less. So the amount of your reward is not proportionate to how well you did or how hard you worked but rather how much was allocated to your group for salary increases and how well everyone else in the group did.

Performance Ratings
Don’t even get me started on the corporate merit ranking systems many of us use. Those of us that excel in our jobs really get screwed there. For example, on a performance scale of 1 through 5, one and two mean you’re almost on the way out the door so only slackers get those. No one ever gets a 5, it’s reserved for super human effort that saves/makes the company multiple millions of dollars and requires working 24/7 for months at a time.

Basically the mediocre workers get all 3’s and people like you and I get a few 3.5’s and maybe one or two 4’s. Sound familiar? Is it really worth all of our hard work to get a half point higher merit score which translates to a measly salary increase?

Freedom from Performance Reviews!
What if you take the same amount of effort you put into earning those 3.5’s and 4’s and apply it to your own endeavors? You’ll see rewards much sooner than the end of the year. You won’t have to wait for someone else to maybe recognize your hard work; your effort should result in a much faster increase in income if you’re working for yourself.

Of course you can’t quit your job tomorrow and start earning a salary for yourself the next day, so start building your business today and maybe by next year you’ll be free of your job and giving yourself your own performance review!

The best thing about three day weekends is Thursday afternoon.  The worst thing about three day weekends is Monday morning.

Being away from work for three days allows you to begin to forget all the unpleasantness that comes along with the job.  Your tolerance for incompetence and mind numbing activities decrease as the joy of living outside of work thaws the emotions you’ve frozen out of self defense.

Then Monday morning rolls around and you’re rudely plunged back into the world of TPS reports, buggy software, pagers, and deadlines.  Your body revolts and wants to dash for the exit but your mind visualize those bills sitting on the kitchen counter and forces you to remain in your chair.

Your chest is tight, your mind is racing.  “Why do I keep coming back to this place”, you frantically think.  “How can I get out of here!”.  As the weight of voice mails, projects, emails, and meetings slowly squeeze the energy out of your struggling mind you begin to give in.  The thrashing slows as you try to work through the to-do list and by the end of the long day; you’ve succumbed to the will of the corporate life-sucker.

As you shut down your work for the night you think to yourself, “One down, four to go till the weekend”.

Sound familiar?  How many Monday’s have you forced your unwilling psyche to shoulder the corporate baggage and live only for the weekends?  How much longer can you put up with the horrible events of Monday morning?  Isn’t there a better way?

How many times have you been tempted to trash your pager in any number of creative ways, never to be head from again?

I Hate the Pager
Isn’t it sad to think of the number of hours of our lives we’ve wasted acting as servant to the ever-insistent, ever-annoying pager? My latest experience came this Sunday afternoon as the pager chirped minutes after I sat down at my computer to work on my online businesses.

Wasted Hours
I called the number on the pager and gathered from the business person on the other end of the phone that there was a problem with a transmission from another division of the company. This is a client that’s been around for several years and the people that wrote the system have long since come and gone. My heart sunk as I realized the complexity of the issue, the outlook for my weekend afternoon, and the hopelessness of my situation.

Tech Support Sucks
Who likes spending a whole Sunday digging through poorly documented scripts, config files, and code trying to figure out how the hell a system works and why the foobar job won’t run? Everyone you call for help either doesn’t answer their phone or isn’t close to a computer so can’t help. Who blames them? I mean its Sunday, it’s supposed to be a day where you don’t have to worry about the corporate B.S. It’s supposed to be a day where you can live your life, free of the shackles of work.

Tell Someone Who Cares
Ever feel like telling someone that? They page you with this “urgent issue” in the middle of the night and you’re supposed to give a damn about it? I have no problem staying up to 2–3 in the morning working on web projects. I do it all the time, for MY own businesses. I’ll work all hours to make money for myself since my income will be in proportion to the amount of hours I work. In a corporate job, we get paid the same whether we work 40 hours a week or 80 hours a week so what motivation do we have, other than keeping our job, to bust our ass when the pager goes off?

Working for Myself
I decided working insane hours just to keep my crappy job isn’t worth it when I can make more money and be happier working for myself. Do you have to carry a pager? What are you doing to free yourself from its brutal grip on your life?

Part of becoming a successful entrepreneur is networking with other like minded over achievers. I’ve formed a close relationship with several other successful website owners and we were exchanging emails about our plans for the future.

Several other people in the group are software engineers and we were all bemoaning the negative aspects of our jobs and how we were counting down the days until we walked out the door. One of the guys who is in a different field all together posed a question to us:

“I find such quitting job conversations very amusing. Is this sort of a norm in the software industry ? … I mean I have quite a few friends in software development and none of them seem happy with their jobs. Is it because there is no such thing as “career development” ? or is it because of other reasons? “

Of course I won’t go into the reasons why here since that would take more time than we have but needless to say we provided him more than enough reasons that I’ll cover individually down the road.

I found this email exchange quite discouraging. Different developers working for different companies in multiple areas of the country all came up with the same gripes about the industry. Sure it’s not a scientific study but in my mind it proved a point, software jobs suck!

There are many people I work with that voice the same concerns I heard in those emails, yet they do nothing about it. I’m glad I’m part of the group that’s decided to make a change and take a different direction with my life. Which group are you in?

I have loved writing code ever since I took my first programming class. Analyzing a problem, breaking it down into bite sized business rules, designing a system, and seeing it come to life in code gives you such a feeling of satisfaction and pride. Software development rocks.

Unfortunately, a “software job” often throws roadblock after roadblock into the path of creating software and can make your professional life miserable. All the corporate B.S. that gets in the way of building solutions and then bleeds over into the rest of your life is what makes many software jobs suck.

I’ve experienced enough of the downside of this industry to know it’s not for me. I’ve spent enough nights and weekends away from my family to realize that working as a corporate software engineer is not the job of the future. I began learning how to apply my technology skills to make money for myself, not someone at corporate office. I’m on the road to becoming a full time webpreneur and can’t wait to get there!