http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~keackerm/Escalation.html
I feel like I have all these untapped reservoirs of skill and ability and talent, lurking beneath the surface. I don’t know how people get their ‘dream jobs’. Do they just fire off email to places that sound like what they’re looking for? Everyone I’ve ever heard of who has a ‘dream job’ seems to have just gotten lucky. Maybe the difference between happy people and unhappy ones is luck.
It's not luck. It's that their skill isn't "just below the surface".
If your skill is "just below the surface", then you don't have any, you have "potential". If all you have it potential, you need to do what the people with skills and talent did:
develop your potential. Which, in the case of a programmer, means studying and working on projects on the side, and learning how to be so goddamned good that your work is more valuable -- in terms of any quantifiable measure -- than that any 10 'cube-dwellers'.
In programming, particularly, this is inexcusable. It's not as if developing talent in programming requires your dad to drive you to a frozen fucking pond at 6AM. You read books, real books, take in deep knowledge about discrete mathematics and lambda calculus, and reshape your mind; you find out how to solve all of the problems that plague businesses and how where the problems are; you acquaint yourself with new methods and technologies. And that's it.
In far less than the time that he took to write his pretentious lament -- around 4 hours -- I wrote an animated 2d cellular automata (3-color totalistic or 2-color elementary, nearest neighbor) in javascript this Sunday, and used that as my introduction for the (free, if they like you enough to let you attend
startup/VC session I'm attending at Harvard. I probably won't end up going the startup route, because I've been arranging my own affairs for so long out here in the prairie that I can easily fund my own development on the side, and my goal is to work part-time from anywhere (which conflicts with the high intensity of a high-end startup) -- although, who knows. I have a feeling that being there will change my mind.
Maybe that’s the big difference between the other people here and me. I just can’t take what we do seriously. Nothing that’s happening at this company is so important that failure to accomplish it is going to really matter.
Agreed. That has nothing to do with you and your pointless, brainless existence, however. You can deal with this by getting better. Outstrip everyone you work with in speed and quality, exponentially. Consider the actual, underlying problems that your incompetent managers are having you work on, and consider how you would solve them. Really, do it. And then push hard for it to happen. You will need skill to back up your talk, but on speed you ought to be learning an INCREDIBLE amount; I speak from experience.
Keep pushing.
Eventually, Mike will hate/fear you. Your code, which is profoundly better than his, and your knowledge, which is profoundly deeper, will impact his manner when he is around you. Remember, he actually does live for the petty, mindless, crappy programming tasks that are eventually responsible for allowing someone like me to work from home in the middle of nowhere. Your ascent will allow you to dominate him -- and he and others may react with fear/hostility, but it doesn't matter, because they are afraid to lose you by this point. You won't try for this to happen; you have a clean conscience. But it will happen because by this point, while they can do your work, they would have to hire 4 or 5 other people to do it.
Eventually, someone will try to make your life a living hell -- Mike will be actively sabotaging you -- but by this point you have several impressive personal projects, projects that were intellectually fulfilling and a blast to work on, completed. Largely, these projects will have been mirroring or shadowing work you were paid to do at your day job, but they're accomplished in better languages and with better tools and are of a much higher quality.
Long before this happens, you will have been testing the waters elsewhere. Eventually, someone like Mike will get promoted over you, and you will flip the switch and work somewhere else -- again, without having cheated anyone, and while doing great work for them, and without being a little pussy and sitting there helplessly while an idiot talks your face off. You will have been given the freedom to ignore people like Mike because you're by far their biggest asset.
At this point, maybe you won't go to another job. Maybe you will pick up contract work. Maybe you will even start your own company.
But you won't be whining on SA/livejournal like a little bitch.
The End.
