PCSpectra wrote:What I need to do is find me a full time, in house development position, so I can clock in at 8AM and leave without fuss at 3, 4, 5 or 6 at the latest.
10-6 would be a perfect shift, monday through friday. $20/hour and I'd be happy so long as there were no NCA's or some stupid thing that prevented me from working on my own thing in the evening and weekends.
Uh oh. I think you just triggered my inner beast...queue the death metal...
That's one thing I hated about working in-house. They say 40 hours on the contract, but then expect 80. If you get upset about it, they point to the door and say, "There's the door. You decide."
The other thing is that I haven't been to a job yet where they would let me just nonchalantly walk in la-te-da at 10am, even if I wanted to leave 8 hours later. Instead, the guys that get promoted always show up at 8am or 8:30am. It's like flex time -- yeah, flex your a-- in here at eight! Well, when you show up at 8 or 8:30am, and they ask you to stay late, that's one heck of a long day and the managers don't care.
Next comes the performance review. What a worthless bunch of smurf. I mean, after getting 10-15 years of these, you can practically write one in your sleep. And often you are your own, sharpest critic, but still it's not good enough. And then you have managers who are morons with these, who are younger than you, who want to get ahead, so they show that they are straightening out their own staff or something. In my case, I had a younger guy who misinterpreted what HR said about the review process. He swore that every review had to have something negative in it or it would be rejected by upper management. I went to HR and found out that this was not the case at all. So, for about 2 years before I finally threw my hands up and quit, my manager was giving me negative reviews that were really reaching. I also love how you get some kind of nit-picking that you can't fix because it happened like 8 months ago.
Next comes the noise. Some managers think that programmers, project managers, business analysts, and sysops need to communicate more. So, they give everyone smallish desks and half-wall cubicles. I'm sorry, but I can't work in that kind of situation anymore.
Next comes the office jokes, the office politics, and the constant seeing of one another for more than 5 years. That starts to wear on you, especially if you think the people you work with are lazy morons.
Next comes the pay. They work you three times harder occasionally and keep three times of that income you just brought in for them. On your own, when you work that hard, you keep that pay.
Next comes the promotion. They always play the same game at company after company. They withhold your true salary for like one or two years and give you a reduced salary until they trust you. Once they find they can trust you, they give you the amount they had budgeted for you. But once you make that amount -- that's it. After that, you only get a 2% salary increase, if that. I've worked at several companies and they keep playing this game over and over. And the only way to beat these odds is to move into sales or to quit and start your own company.
Next comes the programming language. You come in the door as their PHP and MySQL or PostgreSQL expert, and a year later they tell you that the whole project is going to switch into using PHP on the front end as the mere templating engine, or the V and C of the MVC, and then J2EE on the backend and that they want you to start taking Java classes. Or, worse, they think you already know it because you are a "programmer".
Next comes the DBA. In some companies, the database is Oracle, and it's managed by a pristine set of fine gloves pulled from a door and worn by a highly-paid DBA who like flies in from Singapore or something to touch that database and install that schema for you, or to tweak it. Okay, I'm exaggerating, but you get the point. And often you get a DBA who reviews your table schema and thinks that EVERYTHING must be in
Sixth Normal Form, which really only gives you faster writes, but not faster reads. I've seen DBAs being praised up and down, but when you get a table schema from them, it fills an entire wall and everything is taken to like Sixth Normal Form. Time to smack your head on the wall. Like no one ever heard of the reasoning why denormalization is good for some of the table schema? But anyway, the other problem is that you can't take that Oracle development database and twist it one way one day, another way another day -- not without going through an aggravating middle man (or woman). And often there's a lot of crazy garbage in the existing Oracle tables that you just have to live with. And once Oracle has established its roots in an office -- there is no removing it. You can argue until you are blue in the face that PostgreSQL is the best thing out there, but upper upper management at the corporate HQ just don't understand something so powerful that comes for free -- not while golfing at events sponsored by Oracle or by vendors that work only with Oracle. At best, you might be able to bring up some rogue PostgreSQL servers to host your stuff for production needs, but then walk that data over to Oracle as the reporting database (data warehouse).
Next comes the security audits. A lot of companies are required to do business continuity auditing, which means documenting yourself out of a job, and then data security auditing, which is a nerve-wracking mess of security improvements at first, but then a painstaking log taking process after that.
Next comes the many hats. Sometimes you go in as the Senior Dev, and they make you the Senior Dev + Sysop + DBA + Guy Who Cleans The Server Room + Guy Who Fixes The Clogged Toilets At Night With A Wrench + Facilities Management Guy (AC, Heating, Power, Telecom, Etc.). At least -- that's what happened to me and it drove me nuts until I had to just say ENOUGH!!! and I walked out.