Do You Like Your Job?

G-shock asks: "I've worked for the government (NASA), large public companies, and small startups as a software engineer. They all have something in common. It seems like management at this company is just winging it. I find myself putting all my energy, both mental and emotional, into a project only to be disappointed by decisions made by management. I really feel like management at my current employer is disconnected from what is actually going on. They manage a project, but not the people. They also seem to lack any real vision. Direction is constantly changing and proper time is not given to engineer these changes correctly. This leads to mandated quick and dirty solutions that end up being maintained with great pain for long periods of time. All this leads to me feeling cynical about the work I'm doing. What I want to know is, how can I feel good about the work I'm doing if I don't have confidence in my management? How many of you are happy with your management? Why? Why not? What can I do about this? Thanks in advance for your insight." Considering that this seems to be a common problem in technology companies, and seeing as we have been producing software for basically half a century, do you think that managing software projects is a different beast than the management of anything else? How many of you have had this problem in your career and what did you do to adjust?

Comments

Funny you should ask, I wrote this last week:

[StrawberryFrog]

I hate my boss. Aargh! I used to like him, he was a distant friend. Then I started to work for him. Always a mistake. Now I can deal with him if I must, I just dont want to. Passive-agressive behaviour is a defence mechanism for stress ("What happens when you supress the desire to choke the living shit out of someone").

He may be a good engineer, but he is a manager in the same sense that a woodpecker is carpenter. He is charge of some people, that's about the extent of his managerial abilites.

One week before I am sheduled to leave, a fact that he has known for months, still I have no replacement, but he has asked me to implement a metric ton of changes, most of them off-the-cuff.

Yes, he wants value for his money, but darn it, management is about planning and timing. This is like a paniced seagull.

On an inspiration, he also asked me to move all the strings returned to the user in the program into a resource file or database where he can edit them without messing with the program. This is not a Win32/C program with a resource table, it is a website in PHP and Java. I should have laughed out loud, but all I did was mentally move it to the bottom of the priority list, which is already too long.

I didn't tell him that the new 1.4 version of java is finally out of beta, for fear that I'd be asked to "just quickly" roll it out on Friday before I leave.

What really boggles my mind is the complete lack of any conception of the need for a shakedown period. I finish all these changes on next friday and then walk away, and it all works perfectly. Never mind that it's never done that yet, not on this project, any other that this company has been involved with, or come to think of it, any other software in history.

But being proactive is not one of this office's virtues. Patching the patches is the first order of business.

But he is not a person to whom it is easy to tell things that he doesn't already know. Not easy to disagree with.

I am taking pride in making this program, this site work. Out users like us, and I get off on that. I'd gladly hand it over to someone else, but my boss is determined to mess it up and he doesn't have the faintest clue that he's doing that. If I do tell him he wouldn't understand.

I'll do what he says, it's the path of least resistance but I don't like it. It's unprofessional.

Two other employees are leaving in the near future, one with a personality clash with my boss. This would be OK, except he many years of hard-to-replace operational knowledge. This was supposed to be an easy six-month contract, don't get too involved, don't commit long-term. Sadly, all I can hope for is that I am far away when things do go wrong. Work is like that. You do all you can, and when it's over you never look back.