The Man Who Ruined My Life

I am a programmer by trade. Mainly .NET (for those of you familiar with the programming world). There are so many different domains of programming. Making websites, software packages to sell, programs that people use to do their work, internal stuff. There are many, many more but hopefully you get the general idea.

The stuff I am doing now is internal. While we do have a software package we offer to customers, hardly any work gets done on that. Main job for me is maintaining a staff intranet (internal use website for staff) and make a bunch of random tools. These tools are used at some point or another to help aid processing data.

So to put it in another way, internal stuff is mainly gluing and patching things together and improving and automating processes.

Boring zzzzz. Ok let me explain another concept. I call it the art of programming. When you make something, you need to think about its design. If you design something good then you can build it good and hopefully when something changes, because of your good design, upgrading and maintainance becomes easier.

However, with internal stuff, because most things are needed quite quickly there is no time for design. You just hack it out and make something that works. Because of this the design sucks, the code sucks it is all just a mess.

The only way you can get away with hacking stuff out and it still being good is if you have good skills in the first place.

When I came here I inherited work from some other dude. The way most of the stuff is written is beyond a disgrace. This causes trouble for me since trying to understand stuff that is poorly written and designed is a headache. Having to maintain it is even worse.

This is my third job here in Japan. My first job was awesome. I was making software for clients and the work was interesting. I was on my game in those days. I remember getting the train home and thinking about how I could make my code run faster or how to fix the problem I had been stuck on for the past few days.

However, there were two small problems. The politics and the money. A few dumb traditions of the company annoyed me and the money sucked for what I was doing. Because of that I left.

I joined the 2nd company. I was mainly making websites for clients. The work was too easy. Boring even. The rules of the company were ridiculous. They were breaking every law in the book in terms of workers’ rights. However, it was easy money and better than the company before so what did I have to complain about?

One day the most amazing thing happened. I moved desks. My desk was situated in a location that nobody could see my screen.

I remember watching the Matrix Trilogy at work the next day. Every day I would watch movies, TV shows, play poker and just browse the net.


It was the life. Or at least I thought it was. You see going to work and doing close to nothing everyday starts of fun. But after a few months the appeal wears off. Yeah, yeah so you can watch Youtube all day every day, but it still felt ridiculous. The companies culture was also starting to piss me off. They kept making more and more illegal rules. They tried to make a rule on lateness where if someone in your department came late every single person in the department would have to pay a fine. Are you kidding me?

So yeah I started feeling dissatisfied about the silliness and with doing nothing all day. I mean you might not believe me but how much browsing and movie watching can you really do without feeling like you are wasting your time and wasting away. I am working in a field where if you don’t keep on top of things your skill set will become useless and you will get left behind. And at that company I had probably been regressing and actually getting dumber and dumber.

So I left and came here. Money is better than the 2nd company, but still leaves me with the same dissatisfied feeling. Instead of complex and interesting work I do boring and frustrating work.

So what now? Time to join company number 4? Lol guess I kinda shot myself in the foot jumping from company to company.

Should have just stayed at the first company and worked hard until I got a pay rise. Oh well, I was young, greedy, and impatient. A recipe for disaster.