by CIMMYT

Question by NinJah: I hate my job, any advice?
I’ve been working from this IT company for three years. It’s my first job as a programmer and it’s been so hard trying to love it. I received an award a year ago, got a chance to work in CA for five months (i’m from Philippines btw), got a raise thrice: 2%, 50%, then 12%.

The reason why I’m hating it because our project is getting really blurry. I am placed at a position where I had to develop and research for a new product line for the same application on a different language. It has been a race against technology and I’ve been working on this project for two years. We are a group of four people for this project (2 in US, 2 in PH), we are trying to move a big application from one language to another and all of us are not so experienced on these new technologies and even on the object oriented architecture and also system analysis and design. And not just that, we are putting up new features in it. The hardest part is, the old app is not designed in OOP manner while the new app will be built on an OOP platform. I’m the youngest and inexperienced in the group. Somehow only 2 of us in PH are working actively on this.

I feel like i’m stumped. Fed up. And slowed my learning process. I yearn for learning the new methods in programming like unit testing and some other stuffs from which we don’t usually practice, or we are practicing it differently. Our project is moving realllly slow and we’ve been going back and forth. I lost thinking of all options to hasten this project, though I’m not the project lead here. It seems like there is no organization to put up with. And almost at every meetings, there are always changes. And every meeting only occurs “once in a blue moon” due to the fact that there are also major projects that the seniors are doing, this has been the lowest priority for 3 years now. There are also a lot of arguments and sometimes with the manager it gets really personal and usually affects my confidence. It does seem like the project is never ending.

I applied for a another company 2 years ago however I usually suck at interviews. My application got dump 7 times, 4 times was an application on the same company, 2 on another and 1 for another company. I know I’m good at what I am doing, I’m just no good for interviews.

My interests are on game programming, OOP, and building tools and utilities. I’ve always wanted to be a game developer, somehow there is just no company here with that position. I’m a noob at this and I have too little time to do these things already. However I do know a lot of things and some are just slowly fading away since I could not really use it.

So far, I’m still not liking it, sometimes I just want to get sick so that I won’t be able to come in the office. However I’m really doing my job the best that I could. And I’m always finding ways to motivate myself. For 2 years I’ve motivated myself and still I get to the point where I want to quit. Just now I think I ran out of ways to motivate myself already.

I’m still under contract till January next year, but the contract is transferable with a fee of course.

Now I really don’t what to do, it has been really really long and endless journey to finishing this project and I don’t think it’s halfway, my estimates would be 5 to 8 years… I couldn’t find a new job with better management or if they have, I just couldn’t make the cut.

Does anybody experience something like this? Any advice?

Best answer:

Answer by cant stop searching
Yes I have. Not in IT but I assume in IT it is even worse as things will always be shifting. The only constant is why you are doing what you are doing, the end result is really abstract – to help the enduser/client of the corporation do what they want to do? That is the fundamental aim that is concrete and which you should keep in your sights. The best way to do that, like what platform is best must change constantly. My career has had to change radically to survive, so that it needs people who are the opposite of what they were 20 years ago with different qualifications. What is really really difficult is if you feel you don’t have the knowledge or personality to do your job. and I found that to be an insurmountable problem and I had to leave. Problm is I tried fo so long to be someone different that my resume does not fit what I should be doing.

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