Ok, story time.
I’m a Sr swe, and because of some strange decisions by management, half my time or more is meetings where I’ve providing status updates on the project, or getting status updates on the project. I’m obviously expected to contribute to the project, but the only thing I get time to do is review code, test, and occasionally step in to help lesser experienced team members solve problems.
But the real problem? The project involves one of my key areas of interest in computer science, and I didn’t have any involvement in designing the system. So I’m doing all of this work for a poorly designed system that I can point out all the limitations of it, can guide a work around, but because of the tech stack it literally will not be as effective as the customers dream of.
My lunch breaks and after work involve Factorio or Satisfactory where I have the power to do things right and fix when I need to. Without these games I probably would have lost my mind ages ago.
If you like Factorio and Satisfactory, I would highly recommend Dyson Sphere Program as well. The planets are tiny, but the factory is even more efficient once you upgrade to Interstellar Cargo Drones.
I’m in a similar boat here. Classic Peter Principal in action. It sucks that management comes with higher pay. If I was making what I make now and just be an individual contributor I would totally go for that. I guess that’s why they have to pay you to do it, because it’s no fun.
Yeah…
I’m currently on-site in a warehouse coding the control of some machines. Getting back to the hotel, tired as fuck, but hey, let’s get into factorio!Back in 2005 I fell into a great gig at a gulf coast shipyard programming eight huge steel-cutting robots. They had previously been controlled by PCs running DOS (in 2005!) and the company that provided the control software was demanding a $2 million fee to upgrade the computers and software. The shipyard brought me in as a consultant to see if there was a cheaper way to control them; I investigated and found that it was really quite easy and I prepared a bid for around $50K for two months effort (which was about as padded as I could possibly make it). We had agreed to this in principle and then the fucking hurricanes (Katrina and Rita) hit and buried the robots under ten feet of mud. Alas my dreams of getting all eight robots to dance to Blue Danube.
