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The futility of my employment
Mar. 5th, 2003 11:15 pmI think I had a lot to say on this subject earlier, but seem to have forgotten it as the evening has drawn on and my stress has ebbed away. So here are the edited highlights.
Today I got my pay for my 3 days work. But half of me feels that I cheated them out of it, and half of me feels like I'm being cheated out of greater things. In those 3 days, I have worked hard but have little to show for it. If my employers look on my hard disk over the next 2 days, they'll see about 5K of code... about 4 pages perhaps. Maybe 4 to 6 times as much as you'll read in this journal entry which will take me no more than 15 minutes to write. But as any programmer knows, sometimes the number of lines of code is not important. So does this code do anything cool and/or useful? No. It does nothing, essentially. It's support code for a graphical user interface. Eventually, in theory, this user interface will connect to file-handling and serial port communication routines, but right now, it does neither. So why have I been working for 3 days on essentially nothing?
Basically, what they asked for in the job description was not exactly what they wanted. They gave a list of all the skills they desired in a candidate, but didn't really emphasise why they wanted them, and what aspects of them they wanted. For example, I have 7 years of "Visual C++" experience, but - unfortunately for me, and for them - that includes 0 years of "GUI development using Embedded Visual C++ for the Pocket PC platform" experience. It's not that what they want is hard - it's just that I don't know how to do it, and I know that they're not looking for people to train up for the future. So I dumped Visual C++ in favour of using Visual Basic, which is far better for me to develop GUIs in. However there are a lot of other things I cannot do with it, rendering most of my programming experience useless, therefore severely reducing my worth as an employee.
My employers are decent enough; friendly environment, reasonable people, laid-back attitude, etc. There is the irrational obsession with nice shirts and XML that most modern computing companies have, and they're really not paying very much (20% above minimum wage) considering the breadth of experience they're looking for, but that's ok. It's just that I feel we're wasting each other's time.
So I feel bad for being paid for doing nothing useful, and feel bad for being unable to actually do what I'm good at. Not a lot of fun.
Today I got my pay for my 3 days work. But half of me feels that I cheated them out of it, and half of me feels like I'm being cheated out of greater things. In those 3 days, I have worked hard but have little to show for it. If my employers look on my hard disk over the next 2 days, they'll see about 5K of code... about 4 pages perhaps. Maybe 4 to 6 times as much as you'll read in this journal entry which will take me no more than 15 minutes to write. But as any programmer knows, sometimes the number of lines of code is not important. So does this code do anything cool and/or useful? No. It does nothing, essentially. It's support code for a graphical user interface. Eventually, in theory, this user interface will connect to file-handling and serial port communication routines, but right now, it does neither. So why have I been working for 3 days on essentially nothing?
Basically, what they asked for in the job description was not exactly what they wanted. They gave a list of all the skills they desired in a candidate, but didn't really emphasise why they wanted them, and what aspects of them they wanted. For example, I have 7 years of "Visual C++" experience, but - unfortunately for me, and for them - that includes 0 years of "GUI development using Embedded Visual C++ for the Pocket PC platform" experience. It's not that what they want is hard - it's just that I don't know how to do it, and I know that they're not looking for people to train up for the future. So I dumped Visual C++ in favour of using Visual Basic, which is far better for me to develop GUIs in. However there are a lot of other things I cannot do with it, rendering most of my programming experience useless, therefore severely reducing my worth as an employee.
My employers are decent enough; friendly environment, reasonable people, laid-back attitude, etc. There is the irrational obsession with nice shirts and XML that most modern computing companies have, and they're really not paying very much (20% above minimum wage) considering the breadth of experience they're looking for, but that's ok. It's just that I feel we're wasting each other's time.
So I feel bad for being paid for doing nothing useful, and feel bad for being unable to actually do what I'm good at. Not a lot of fun.
