Would You Take A Paycut for More Interesting Work?

HellsAngel asks: "I work in a business consulting firm. While the pay and the benefits are great, the work itself is mundane and boring, consisting of Excel, Access, and VBA macros. Recently, I got a job offer to move to a startup doing OS development and Systems and Network programming, however it would involve a paycut. Would you leave an otherwise perfect job to work on something more interesting?" "Today, I work as an IT Analyst for a multinational firm doing business consulting. From the looks of it, I've got the perfect job: high pay, extravagant benefits and bonuses, flexi-time, can telecommute whenever possible, and best of all the coworkers are great and have truly become my friends, even the boss.

However, the work I actually do seems to be a waste of my CS education. My current project right now involves hooking up Excel and Access with a little VBA and some macros. The other day I was asked to export a Lotus Notes database into an Excel file and format it. The most programming-intensive project that I've done here was an ASP.NET webapp, for the company intranet.

Am I selling out by continuing to work in my current firm? Should I take the pay-cut to work at a startup where I can make more use of my talents? I'm a recent grad with no loans or credit cards to pay, so I have a low cost of living aside from a girlfriend. Which would you prefer: fun at work, or fun outside of work?"

Comments

Re:Paycut for a more intelligent Mgr

[Americano]

If you're talking about project managers, I think they ought to know more than their underlings. Management that deal in budgets, communicating with higher management, etc, seem totally different. [ . . . ] I would feel dispirited if someone were promoted past me because they couldn't function at the lower level. I've seen it several times (well, a couple times, but I haven't been in the corp. world long) where the clueless employee is promoted because mgmt doesn't want to risk taking the best guys off the lower-rung jobs.

I disagree with this sentiment. There seems to be, amongst technical people especially, a preconceived notion that being promoted into management is some sort of a reward for a job poorly done. I won't argue that this *never* happens, but look at the skill sets that are required to be a good developer, project manager, or plain-old manager. They're vastly different. In the ~9 years I've been working as a software engineer, I've known a bunch of good managers, good project managers, and good developers. And I've seen plenty of people who are, at best, *mediocre* software engineers, who turn out to be absolutely brilliant project managers and managers, and conversely, plenty of brilliant software engineers who end up being complete hacks when they're given proj. mgmt or management responsibilities.

I certainly wouldn't want to see a bad software engineer getting promoted into a senior *technical* role. But your logic that bad developers cannot be good managers is kind of like claiming that a brilliant doctor must also make a fantastic lawyer... or someone who's bad at being a fireman would also be a terrible chef.

It sounds to me like you're more likely wishing for a senior TECHNICAL person on your team, i.e., an Architect-level job, who knows more than you, who can mentor you, and so on. And to that I say, "AMEN!"

Don't make the mistake of assuming your boss is a complete moron just because he doesn't understand the minute details of your work. If he can't understand the general thrust of what you do, then take a step back, and figure out what you need to do to educate him, and communicate more effectively. However, it's not necessary for him to be able to replace you tomorrow in your job, and in fact, any boss who would purposely hire a staff that isn't better at development than he is, is going to wind up with a terrible product on his hands.