Ask Slashdot: How To Avoid Becoming a Complacent Software Developer?

An anonymous reader writes: Next year will be the start of my 10th year as a software developer. For the last nice years I've worked for a variety of companies, large and small, on projects of varying sizes. During my career, I have noticed that many of the older software developers are burnt out. They would rather do their 9-5, get paid, and go home. They have little, if any, passion left, and I constantly wonder how they became this way. This contradicts my way of thinking; I consider myself to have some level of passion for what I do, and I enjoy going home knowing I made some kind of difference.

Needless to say, I think I am starting to see the effects of complacency. In my current job, I have a development manager who is difficult to deal with on a technical level. He possesses little technical knowledge of basic JavaEE concepts, nor has kept up on any programming in the last 10 years. There is a push from the upper echelon of the business to develop a new, more scalable system, but they don't realize that my manager is the bottleneck. Our team is constantly trying to get him to agree on software industry standards/best practices, but he doesn't get it and often times won't budge. I'm starting to feel the effects of becoming complacent. What is your advice?

Comments

risk something

[bugs2squash]

Design a system or an improvement to a system, argue that it should be used. Defend your ideas. Stop depending on your manager to put your ideas forward. That should solve the problem one way or another. You'll either be up to your eyeballs in responsibility for a project or out on the streets pretty rapidly I should think.

Re:risk something

[pspahn]

The last time I did this, I was labeled "toxic".

Best severance envelope ever.

Business

[Anonymous Coward]

>Our team is constantly trying to get him to agree on software industry standards/best practices,
Maybe your team is full of snot-nosed upstarts trying to push the latest fad techniques on him, and he doesn't see things your way.
Maybe not. But I'm only hearing one side of the story.

If your way really is better, maybe it's better to have him replaced.

Re:Business

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Yeah, here's the thing about being complacent.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Software isn't always better because it's new. Procedures either. I'm not about to have anybody use Ruby, just because some 20-something new hire things it's cool. And while I like Agile, I know that it works only because the team meets every day, forces them to track real progress vs estimates, measures what's happening in real time and basically keeps their eye on the ball. Stuff I was doing about a decade before the word, "agile" existed.

So, color me unimpressed by Powershell, Agile, objective C, json and Azure. These technologies are neat and sometimes useful, but ONLY if they solve a problem and/or IMPROVE something - a test many new technologies fail, pathetically (e.g. 100 lines of powershell to do what one line of "NET USE xxxx" does).

Re:Business

[spaceyhackerlady]

Umm... JSON is a pretty significant force behind modern Web design. Without it, the Web would still be a pretty static place.

Judging by the number of broken web sites I've seen lately, we could use a bit more staticness and a bit less dynamicness. :-}

...laura

Re:Business

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm 55, 25yrs experience, I've been the boss and don't want to do it again, I work my contracted 8hrs because my employer is a mega-corp, not a charity. I may look burnt out to a 20-something but I certainly don't feel it. My main gig is looking after the large cvs repository and automated build process I was hired to build ~10yrs ago. I've learned a whole bunch of scripting languages and tools in those 10yrs and forgotten a whole lot more. I make a comfortable living being the grumpy old fart sitting on the code repository, my pay is roughly twice the national full time average but still 10's of thousands less per annum than in the the late 90's.

Over the years I've observed that workload is like used disk space, it rapidly expands to fill the available hours. If you habitually work 12-16hr days when paid for 8 it becomes an expectation to the point where the boss will sometimes complain if you cut back to the contracted 8. If you work 8 and occasionally stay back to put out a serious fire, you are invariably thanked for the extra effort (and won't burn out so quickly). Doesn't matter who the boss is, this almost universal behaviour seems to be one of those strange social quirks we humans posses. Basically if you act like a "whore" people will (subconsciously) treat you like one.

Besides, I didn't go to uni so that I could earn the same HOURLY rate as the factory shift work I was leaving behind.

2 options

[greywire]

Use your passion to either:

A) Leave.

B) Or take over.

Well of course there's a third option: stay and have your soul crushed. But who would choose that?

Truly an unanswerable question

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm young and enthusiastic, and can't understand how older people aren't as young and enthusiastic as me."

Embrace the burnout

[Anonymous Coward]

Accept the burnout with open arms. Embrace it. Know it and love it. Take your other 16 hours per day and do things that profit you instead of your task masters.

Not necessary complacent...

[ageoffri]

I've got almost 20 years in IT, mostly in various aspects of security. I don't consider myself complacent at all, but at the same time I'd much rather work the 9-5 M-F then put in lots of hours. In my 20's I thought that the more hours you worked, the more it showed the company that you were valuable. Sure I got top ratings but I was only focused on my career. These days I consider it a source of pride that my overtime for last year was less than 10%. I'd rather spend time with my wife, with my friends, doing things that are fun. I stopped working to work and now work to enjoy life. I'm so much happier and the hours I put in our more productive, after about 10 hours pretty much everyone is better off calling it a day.

Re:Not necessary complacent...

[Jason Levine]

I grew up watching my father leave for work at 5am, come home at 6pm with a stack of work, do work at nights, and do more work on the weekends. His excuse was that his bosses saw him producing a certain level of output and he needed to keep it up. He's retired now. Do you know what all that extra work got him? Laid off when someone else with better connections wanted his job.

When I first started my job, I made it clear that I wasn't going to do this. I'm willing to remote in if there's a problem that can't wait until morning, but that's the exception, not the rule. I get into work at 8am, leave at 4:30pm, and stop thinking about work the minute I leave the doors. Granted, I love what I do - web development - so I'll often freelance or work on my own stuff on the side, but that's my choice. I'll also put that stuff on the side to teach my boys how to ride their bikes or to watch Doctor Who with them.

I enjoy my job, but part of what keeps me enjoying it is that I don't let it take over my life.