> I've wondered if going to work for a slow, boring company would help.
I had a similar thought and so I left startup world to go and work for a government software department.
3 years in, I can definitively say that it’s just a different twist on the same shit sandwich.
The people I work with are incredibly bad at what they do, they’ve been there for 5–20 years, and the pressure doesn’t come from investor wanting growth at all cost but rather from clueless managers, PMs, and other stakeholders who insist on velocity at the expense of quality. Our software is very poorly written (think the daily wtf level of quality), has no thought put into architecture, most don’t even know how to write a unit test, but we are pushed to fix bugs and add features faster and faster because “its just a button, why would it take so long”(tm). Never mind that adding the button requires us to modify half a dozen packages and break the backend because of the senseless architecture.
Anyway, I’m ranting. The point is that this kind of company tends to attract lifers who suck at their job. It’s stressful and it sucks as well, but for different reasons than your typical high pressure startup.
But at least I can stop working at 5:00pm on the dot and no one will tell me anything. Same after 40:00h a week, I just shut off the computer until the next Monday. So there is that.
I had a similar thought and so I left startup world to go and work for a government software department.
3 years in, I can definitively say that it’s just a different twist on the same shit sandwich.
The people I work with are incredibly bad at what they do, they’ve been there for 5–20 years, and the pressure doesn’t come from investor wanting growth at all cost but rather from clueless managers, PMs, and other stakeholders who insist on velocity at the expense of quality. Our software is very poorly written (think the daily wtf level of quality), has no thought put into architecture, most don’t even know how to write a unit test, but we are pushed to fix bugs and add features faster and faster because “its just a button, why would it take so long”(tm). Never mind that adding the button requires us to modify half a dozen packages and break the backend because of the senseless architecture.
Anyway, I’m ranting. The point is that this kind of company tends to attract lifers who suck at their job. It’s stressful and it sucks as well, but for different reasons than your typical high pressure startup.
But at least I can stop working at 5:00pm on the dot and no one will tell me anything. Same after 40:00h a week, I just shut off the computer until the next Monday. So there is that.