Job Musings

I was physically and mentally exhausted after graduating from college. I didn't want to have anything to do with school anymore. I skipped the graduation ceremony and didn't even sign up for the yearbook. I just wanted to stay home and be a bum; do absolutely nothing for as long as possible.

This lasted for around three months, the happiest days of my life. That is until my mother cut my allowance and I ran out of money. So I was forced to go out and look for a job. At the time I thought I was a pretty good programmer, better than most programmers, and that a lot of companies would want to hire me. I was wrong. I wasn't able to get work as a programmer anywhere. I guess they didn't like my academic record or something. I wanted to get in these prestigious companies where pretty ladies wore fancy dresses and where they paid their programmers 8,000 pesos a month, which was a lot in those days. Unfortunately none of those companies would take me so I was forced to settle for work in a small firm that paid half that amount. Still, the 4,000 pesos a month still seemed like a lot because I would now be able to afford to eat at McDonald's everyday.

I remember my initial feeling when I started work. I was thinking, 'what, I have to spend all day in front of a computer monitor, day in and day out?' It wasn't my idea of a good time. In fact it was like torture. Even during college and high school, I would only write code for at most three hours at a time. Spending eight hours a day writing and debugging code didn't appeal to me. I didn't enjoy my first job that much, but getting money in return for the work felt good so I saved as much of it as I could so I can afford a new Pentium PC to play games on at home. Also, I did enjoy the friendships I made in my first company, the people there were funny and cool. So although I hated the work, I liked the money and the people.

The second company I joined paid slightly higher, 5,000 pesos a month. I moved after a little over six months on my first job. I didn't get along as well with the people in my new job, not much friendships. But I did like the work more because it was writing low level C Systems code and some assembler. The work was hard and sometimes impossible but I felt this was an improvement over writing boring database code. Money was ok but I felt that my savings were going at a too slow rate to be able to buy that Pentium PC. After a year, I was getting tired of all the low-level system stuff and the Unix environment in general. Windows 95 was out and so was Visual C++, it was the coolest programming environment I have ever seen. I was very lucky that Max, my college friend called me one day at work asking if I knew how to do bitmapped graphics in C++. I told him it sounded like a cool project and he said the company he just joined is looking for C++ developers. Of course I jumped at the opportunity.

My time in Max's company turned out to be some of the most fun years of my life. I developed many lifelong friendships there, and the work was great. It had the college environment, lots of fun people, interesting situations, lots of overtime, and good pay. I stayed there for four years. The place felt like home and the people were like family. I enjoyed staying in the office more. Sure there were lots of stressful situations and evil managers who made life hell for me, but the whole thing was still like a great adventure with heroes and villains and great stories that unfolded. We had something special there. In retrospect, perhaps I should never have left that company. But life goes on and I wanted to do something new and get out of my comfort zone.

By this time, year 2000, I felt extremely burned out. It was as if I had nothing left to offer technically. I had progressed from voracious programmer to a bumbling project lead who no longer wrote code but instead told other people what code to write. I thought for sure this was the end of me. That's it, throw in the towel, I've had it. Enough with the software industry. My fuel tank was empty. So I decided to join a more laid-back company that sold business application software. I just wanted to coast along, be in less stressful situations, stop spending so much time in the office. And for a short time I got what I wanted. Still, the people in this new company felt like lifeless droids and I couldn't relate to them. I definitely missed my old friends and atmosphere in my previous job. But I was burned out and so this was my fate.

Of course, this laid back situation didn't last long. That small easy-going company was eventually bought by a much larger software company. The situation started to get out of control. I kept fighting with my boss. I didn't feel like I had control over the project or the technology. We were forced into using another team's tools that were buggy as hell, at the same having unrealistic deadlines. I wanted to just get away from it all. Do something more peaceful and more meaningful. I almost resigned a couple of times, but the money, plus the fact that I had nowhere else to go kept me aboard. I thought I was doomed for sure, but for some reason my competitive instincts reawakened and I was able to recover and refocus myself on making a comeback.

And now this is where we come in. In the present time, our small dev group is currently under seige. Internal competition among groups is tight. There are some who believe we don't deserve to be here, that there are more worthy and deserving engineers who should be in our place. There are some who wants to do away with the old and burned out people (like myself) and replace us oldies with younger, more vibrant programmers. We are in competition for our jobs, for our very lives.

There are some days when I think to myself, as Danny Glover would say "I'm too old for this shit." Or perhaps like Rambo in his self-imposed exile telling Colonel Trautman "My war is over." Sometimes I'd like to believe that I'm really old and burned out and settle for the simple and relaxing life. There's no need to continue fighting if you no longer believe in the cause.

However when I look at my pattern of work, I notice a pattern, a cycle of fun, stress, burnout, friendships, comebacks, and resignations. Everytime I felt burned out and washed up, the competitive juices would always return. My fear is that day when I get that feeling of being burned out where I don't recover. Where I finally end up as a has-been. Hopefully that event will still be many, many years from now. In the meantime, they may think I'm down and out but deep inside me there is still that young college guy who still has that pent up hunger for that 4,000 peso salary and Pentium PC.

I've also found many more important things than staying in the office. There is more to life than this daily grind of staring at the monitor and typing in stuff and hitting 'compile'. I've come to appreciate good friendships, good company, and good times more.

And laziness, never underestimate the power of laziness.