Goodbye Microsoft, Pete has left the building

[TheMagicM]

Good to read about a Amiga user...

http://peterwright.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-bye-microsoft-pete-has-now-left.html

[cv643d]

Yeah lots of people are just doing work and lacking passion, I saw lots of that when I was in University CompSci.

[nadoom]

I saw lots of that when I was in University CompSci.

Man thats so true.

[balrogsoft]

I really feel the same working as programmer, i had a lot of new ideas for programs and games some years ago, with a lot of energy to make new projects i made some commercial projects, but then i worked 2 years on a videogame company (mainly developing mobile and web games) and i left my work 3 months ago. Now i'm trying make my own games and applications, but i'm very tired, i don't have the same energy to start the new projects. I lost my passion for programming, now i'm programming only to earn some money. I don't recommend if you really enjoy making your games and programs as a hobby.

[Fester]

You start off falling madly in love with something. It becomes a passion. Then it becomes a job and then a chore. That's pretty common place. I think my reason for having an Amiga again has a lot to do with this. Just trying to find something fun about computers again.

[weirdami]

The best places to work are the ones where shooting nerf guns at work is acceptable behavior. :-D

[Hans_]

weirdami wrote:
The best places to work are the ones where shooting nerf guns at work is acceptable behavior. :-D

... but it's most fun to shoot nerf guns in places where it is not acceptable behaviour. :-D

A nerf war in business suits... pure entertainment.

Nice article BTW. I think that workplace culture has a big role to play. It's hard to be enthusiastic when creativity is not encouraged and rewarded.

Hans

[TheMagicM]

thats exactly how I feel..i used to love coding in my spare time but its just a job now.. I have some coding projects I need to finish for myself but its one of those "I'll get to it eventually".. so now its just a job..pays well though.

[trekiej]

I wish you luck.  I hope to do that one day.

[InTheSand]

A very accurate article!

I used to work for a large insurance company in the UK and was part of a small and skilled head office IT group that was allowed to innovate and just get on with the job with a minimal amount of red tape. This was a great time, with everyone passionate about what they did and very efficient with it. We had happy developers and happy end users.

After a couple of years, though, things changed and we were merged into a UK regional group, bogged down entirely in red tape, and then made to work with the regional group's "developers" who in reality didn't have a clue about what they were doing, even as far as the real basics went. Innovation and passion understandably went out of the window, quality went down as the useless "developers" had to be hand-held through every step, and the lifeblood was generally drained out of us due to the stupidly huge amounts of red tape, paperwork and administrivia we had to complete.

The end users also suffered as a result of this, and the "solution" from on high was to transfer us and our jobs to an outsourcing company (rhymes with "crap venture") that then proceeded to transfer all our jobs to overseas developers that were also pretty clueless. Great!

Anyway... the moral of the story is: large companies may pay a lot, but if you want to keep the passion alive, work for a small company or yourself...

 - Ali