I’ve been on my current contract for around 18 months and there is probably 18 more months work ahead but, for me, I think it’s time to move on. It’s been a learning experience. It’s the first time I’ve had to work in Australian “big corporate” culture. For the most part it’s felt like wading though mud. The faster you try and move, the more you sink. There’s always the pressure to release on an immovable deadline with an immutable feature set. So you give up your weekends, put your head down and try while those that decided on the arbitrary deadlines go home at five. Of course the deadline constantly changes as does the feature set but the culture of “a week to go” prevails and if your not careful (as the former team leader of the area I now look after wasn’t) you end up with is a system built up from hack upon hack (I spoke of this a little in a previous post).
I struggle with the limitations of “big corporate” culture. It’s lack of agility. It’s lack of honesty. There are far too many chefs and too few cooks. Decisions on technology, techniques and tools are made by people who will never use them. So you end up fighting with a substandard application server because the vendor has a box at the footy and a very impressive sales kit. You’d think that working for a very rich company would mean good developer gear. Wrong there too. 1024 x 768 LCD screens, 512MBs of RAM, Sun Java Studio Enterprise. Domain policies that prevent you installing an updated JVM (though all of the guys in my former team installed linux over the corporate XP configuration and I got lucky with a Mac).
I just don’t quiet fit. I want to get it done. I don’t want to spend half of my day sending “cover my ass” emails. I don’t want to be able to point the finger when something goes wrong (I just want to fix it). Most of all I’m not enjoying my day. I love software engineering. I love to nut through a problem and let my fingers fly on a solution; get it wrong, think again, refine, think, type, test, refine, test. Finally produce something that I’m proud of, that represents my talent, my passion. There are too few opportunities for it here in corporation x.
So with my contract running out in a few weeks I think it might be about time to mosey on down the road. Find a position where I can do some interesting work. Somewhere that makes me want to get up in the morning and travel for an hour.
June 10th, 2005 at 12:05 am
ouch it hearts… it is very very sad to find out that thess corporate ‘bad habbits’ are spreading worldwide. I thought and hoped that these are limitations of young markets which are ‘fighting’ bureaucracy, nepotism, and such old problems.
i wish you best luck,
:alex |.::the_mindstorm::.|
June 10th, 2005 at 11:29 pm
It seems to happen all over the world. I tend to last about 12-18 months at any given job for the reasons you mention, and I am about to hit that point once again. This time though I might take the solo route and build a product of my own. I’ve seen what companies will pay for rather crappy software and in some cases I know I can do it better so I think I will
Good luck to you, and all others who are stuck in the corporate world.
July 28th, 2005 at 12:06 pm
I hear ya, brother.
September 26th, 2005 at 10:01 am
Corporation XXX has suffered from beaucratic “cover my ass†types since the stock exchange formed. Lets face it “aint goin to change”. In the nineteen thirties, executives were jumping out of windows, unfortunatly executive offices now dont have windows that open.
Good luck in your next Corp X.