Comment by mcv
5 days ago
I've recently had a job that started out reasonably good, but after a year and a half, I started wondering what I was doing there, was I really in the right place? Some of the tickets I worked on went nowhere, and I didn't enjoy the stuff I was working on. That lasted a couple of months, and I was seriously considering quitting. And then came a complaint from a user that opened up a whole cesspit of necessary improvements, optimisations and bugs for something I'd previously worked on, and that turned into 9 months of the best fun I've ever had at work. Made a factor 20 improvement to a hideously complex algorithm that nobody understood, found and fixed a bunch of bugs in the algorithm that we had always thought was perfect -- you know, fun stuff. And then my contract ended. But on a high note.
This isn't general advice or anything, but I'm glad I didn't quit a year earlier.
The times I've really had to scramble on something at work describe both some of my best working experiences and some of my worst. I think a big differentiator is clarity. If I know that X needs to be done, and it's important and urgent I'm happy to dig in.
The bad emergencies tend to be scenarios where I'm told OMG we need to fix A, it's an emergency, only to be told a short time later that actually never mind problem B is the real emergency, and then jumping to problem C after that, and so on. That kind of scattered direction can be soul crushing, where I invest in a problem and get far along on a good solution, only to be told that oh actually that urgency was BS, but trust us this new emergency is totally important.
Exactly. In this particular case, it was fun because I recognised the problem and had/took the freedom to get to the bottom of this and fix it as thoroughly as I could. I could easily have decided to accept that the big import process took an hour, but I stubbornly thought it could be faster, and reduced it to 3 minutes. Biggest dopamine boost ever. Still coasting on that. And in doing so, discovered a bunch of bugs, undocumented behaviour users depended on, and ended up addressing all of it in the way I wanted.
That freedom was absolutely key. The same job could have been frustrating and stupid if someone else had been ordered to do what I did.