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- Feb 24, 2022
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Hi All,
I just joined the forum even though it's been months since I finished MJ's latest book, The Great Rat Race Escape . I'm a software developer approaching his mid-30's currently based in Colorado, and over the past several years, I've encountered somewhat of a midlife crisis with regards to my career. it's kind of an FTE, except for the fact it's more like a string of FTE's rather than a specific FTE since I'm apparently a glutton for punishment.
Anyway, I think my FTE's first started several years ago...
FTE #1: I worked at a place where all business domain knowledge was tied up in one individual's head (my boss). This worked out okay until after probably 18-24 months when he started having his attention called onto other things. My productivity went down because we had no Business Analysts or anything of the sort who could be called upon to tell me how our biz processes ought to work. I'd warned our CEO the first year I was there about this knowledge bottleneck but it was never acted upon. Anyway the FTE event at this employer was me having to debug some broken legacy ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) system for one client who hadn't been migrated off this old system (that'd been knowingly broken for YEARS) that *nobody* at my company understood, not even my boss. "Hey BMT1987 how do we fix this"? "Well I can't tell you from a business standpoint what is supposed to happen -- only what is technically happening, so I don't know". Those were fun meetings -- management had been too gutless to forcibly migrate our client's customers to our new (correctly working) system where most of their business had already been for years. I decided to leave after having to deal with that BS with no leadership of the issue.
FTE #2: After FTE #1, I was at a new employer who apparently valued the above-and-beyond work I had done on a critical, yet very shitty application to transfer data between my employer and their clients. This hard work I was rewarded after two years by having some noobs get put onto the new teams that had opened up to do brand-new (we call this "greenfield" in the industry) development. I was rewarded with more of the same brownfield development (hilariously, I just realized how often "brownfield", which means maintenance and bug-fixing of existing applications, is akin to having to do shit(ty) development
) on the same garbage app that I'd already been working. My above-and-beyond work was specifically cited as to why I had to stay on maintaining this app. Since I'm in a high-demand field, needless to say, I didn't tolerate that very long. 
FTE #3: A few years passed after FTE #2 before FTE #3. I appeared to have finally found a decent employer. I got to do largely greenfield development during most of my first year at the company. I had played a critical role in developing a new web app that had been created to replace a crappy and extremely buggy Excel application, but the underlying poorly designed database which was the source of most of this company's issues (and thus issues with this application), was not addressed with this project. From what I could gather, there was some politicking going on regarding why the database hadn't been fixed/rewritten. Despite my warnings about the fragile state the database was in and the critical work that was needed to address the root causes of the issues we were seeing, my warnings were ignored. However we'd have a circle-jerk every couple of weeks where some airhead would ask me "oh well how could this happen"? In one meeting I almost lost my shit when she (an extremely non-technical person) told me (obviously, a very technical person) that the catastrophic failures couldn't POSSIBLY be because of the database, every time, despite the fact numerous big-name outside vendors had ALSO made it well-known at my employer that indeed this database was an epic problem.
FTE #4: At the same employer as FTE #3, I got blamed for some incomplete feature being deployed to production despite the fact I'd specifically warned the interested parties of the issues and suggested we revert the deployed code). I was ignored (again), and despite the fact that I had quite literally nothing to do with the development of this incomplete feature (you won't find my username anywhere in the source control for this code), I got bitched-out at an early-morning meeting with our contractors and blamed for what happened. The airhead from FTE #3 who I'd warned about the issues denied all fault on her part (she was the one responsible for making the decision as to whether or not a production deployment was a go or not and the one who never responded to my urgent warnings). I'd never come so close to rage-quitting a job in my life. After this meeting and the month that followed, I worked my a$$ off to get this incomplete feature into a workable state.
FTE #5: This is kind of a continuation of FTE #4. I got a nice bonus that year for my hard work. That was cool. But the next year, I got an even bigger bonus despite the fact my role had somewhat diminished at the company. lol. It's at this point that it occurred to me that hard work in Corporate America isn't tied to how much money you make. I probably got diminished due to the fact my explanations for the root cause of our problems (the database) had gotten less eloquent and professional over my tenure at this employer because I got tired of being asked the same questions over and over again, and there being no will in the company to address the root cause of our problems.
FTE #6: Still at the same employer as FTE #3-#5. I'd gotten some of what I wanted at the company; namely I was able to stop dealing with the SOS for awhile. However, I was told by my boss that I was going to be able to influence the direction of some of these applications I'd worked on (FINALLY). But as time went on, this never materialized. A contracting company had been onboarded with a lead software architect and I was subordinate to him. When I asked my boss what the hell during one of our 1-on-1 meetings, his reason was "...yeah I kind of dropped the ball on that one". Well chief, that's a pretty F*cking big ball to drop! lol
So after enduring 4 FTE's at this one employer, a couple months after FTE #6, I finally left the company. Now, I can't remember exactly when, but sometime between FTE's #3-#6, I'd stumbled upon MJ DeMarco's book, The Millionaire Fastlane courtesy of a YouTube interview he did with John Sonmez of Bulldog Mindset. I read the book and I gotta say -- @MJ DeMarco , The Millionaire Fastlane was hands-down THE MOST inspiring thing I've ever read!! It helped encourage me to continue forth with a product idea I'd came upon while talking to some folks.
Unfortunately, that product has hit quite the roadblock recently that I could really use people's insights on. Since that's a separate topic, I'm going to edit this intro post with a link to the roadblock post once I've created it (gotta create the intro post before I can post elsewhere). Thanks in advance everyone and I hope that I can contribute something positive to folks on this forum!
P.S. Actually... could someone please point me to the most appropriate subforum for me to create a post regarding my roadblock with the product I'm working on?
P.P.S. Here is my roadblock thread.
I just joined the forum even though it's been months since I finished MJ's latest book, The Great Rat Race Escape . I'm a software developer approaching his mid-30's currently based in Colorado, and over the past several years, I've encountered somewhat of a midlife crisis with regards to my career. it's kind of an FTE, except for the fact it's more like a string of FTE's rather than a specific FTE since I'm apparently a glutton for punishment.
Anyway, I think my FTE's first started several years ago...
FTE #1: I worked at a place where all business domain knowledge was tied up in one individual's head (my boss). This worked out okay until after probably 18-24 months when he started having his attention called onto other things. My productivity went down because we had no Business Analysts or anything of the sort who could be called upon to tell me how our biz processes ought to work. I'd warned our CEO the first year I was there about this knowledge bottleneck but it was never acted upon. Anyway the FTE event at this employer was me having to debug some broken legacy ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) system for one client who hadn't been migrated off this old system (that'd been knowingly broken for YEARS) that *nobody* at my company understood, not even my boss. "Hey BMT1987 how do we fix this"? "Well I can't tell you from a business standpoint what is supposed to happen -- only what is technically happening, so I don't know". Those were fun meetings -- management had been too gutless to forcibly migrate our client's customers to our new (correctly working) system where most of their business had already been for years. I decided to leave after having to deal with that BS with no leadership of the issue.
FTE #2: After FTE #1, I was at a new employer who apparently valued the above-and-beyond work I had done on a critical, yet very shitty application to transfer data between my employer and their clients. This hard work I was rewarded after two years by having some noobs get put onto the new teams that had opened up to do brand-new (we call this "greenfield" in the industry) development. I was rewarded with more of the same brownfield development (hilariously, I just realized how often "brownfield", which means maintenance and bug-fixing of existing applications, is akin to having to do shit(ty) development
) on the same garbage app that I'd already been working. My above-and-beyond work was specifically cited as to why I had to stay on maintaining this app. Since I'm in a high-demand field, needless to say, I didn't tolerate that very long. FTE #3: A few years passed after FTE #2 before FTE #3. I appeared to have finally found a decent employer. I got to do largely greenfield development during most of my first year at the company. I had played a critical role in developing a new web app that had been created to replace a crappy and extremely buggy Excel application, but the underlying poorly designed database which was the source of most of this company's issues (and thus issues with this application), was not addressed with this project. From what I could gather, there was some politicking going on regarding why the database hadn't been fixed/rewritten. Despite my warnings about the fragile state the database was in and the critical work that was needed to address the root causes of the issues we were seeing, my warnings were ignored. However we'd have a circle-jerk every couple of weeks where some airhead would ask me "oh well how could this happen"? In one meeting I almost lost my shit when she (an extremely non-technical person) told me (obviously, a very technical person) that the catastrophic failures couldn't POSSIBLY be because of the database, every time, despite the fact numerous big-name outside vendors had ALSO made it well-known at my employer that indeed this database was an epic problem.
FTE #4: At the same employer as FTE #3, I got blamed for some incomplete feature being deployed to production despite the fact I'd specifically warned the interested parties of the issues and suggested we revert the deployed code). I was ignored (again), and despite the fact that I had quite literally nothing to do with the development of this incomplete feature (you won't find my username anywhere in the source control for this code), I got bitched-out at an early-morning meeting with our contractors and blamed for what happened. The airhead from FTE #3 who I'd warned about the issues denied all fault on her part (she was the one responsible for making the decision as to whether or not a production deployment was a go or not and the one who never responded to my urgent warnings). I'd never come so close to rage-quitting a job in my life. After this meeting and the month that followed, I worked my a$$ off to get this incomplete feature into a workable state.
FTE #5: This is kind of a continuation of FTE #4. I got a nice bonus that year for my hard work. That was cool. But the next year, I got an even bigger bonus despite the fact my role had somewhat diminished at the company. lol. It's at this point that it occurred to me that hard work in Corporate America isn't tied to how much money you make. I probably got diminished due to the fact my explanations for the root cause of our problems (the database) had gotten less eloquent and professional over my tenure at this employer because I got tired of being asked the same questions over and over again, and there being no will in the company to address the root cause of our problems.
FTE #6: Still at the same employer as FTE #3-#5. I'd gotten some of what I wanted at the company; namely I was able to stop dealing with the SOS for awhile. However, I was told by my boss that I was going to be able to influence the direction of some of these applications I'd worked on (FINALLY). But as time went on, this never materialized. A contracting company had been onboarded with a lead software architect and I was subordinate to him. When I asked my boss what the hell during one of our 1-on-1 meetings, his reason was "...yeah I kind of dropped the ball on that one". Well chief, that's a pretty F*cking big ball to drop! lol
So after enduring 4 FTE's at this one employer, a couple months after FTE #6, I finally left the company. Now, I can't remember exactly when, but sometime between FTE's #3-#6, I'd stumbled upon MJ DeMarco's book, The Millionaire Fastlane courtesy of a YouTube interview he did with John Sonmez of Bulldog Mindset. I read the book and I gotta say -- @MJ DeMarco , The Millionaire Fastlane was hands-down THE MOST inspiring thing I've ever read!! It helped encourage me to continue forth with a product idea I'd came upon while talking to some folks.
Unfortunately, that product has hit quite the roadblock recently that I could really use people's insights on. Since that's a separate topic, I'm going to edit this intro post with a link to the roadblock post once I've created it (gotta create the intro post before I can post elsewhere). Thanks in advance everyone and I hope that I can contribute something positive to folks on this forum!
P.S. Actually... could someone please point me to the most appropriate subforum for me to create a post regarding my roadblock with the product I'm working on?
P.P.S. Here is my roadblock thread.
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) -- please PM me!
