I can’t remember the last time I went to a software development conference. It must have been well over 10 years ago. Maybe that shows my age. However I plan to change that this year. My company let’s you attend a training class once a year. This year I am going to propose that I go to a software development conference instead. The only good thing so far this year is that I watched an online video from a presentation at a development conference. The video bombed about half way through it. But I picked up some interesting thoughts from the part I did see.A theme of the talk was that corporate goals are evil. You will most likely need to achieve some of these goals in your day job if you need to pay bills. But that does not make them any less evil. Some of these corporate motives include ignoring whether users like your software. Other motives are plain greed of corporations. The development work itself in the corporate world is usually boring.
For interesting problems at work, companies will most likely want to purchase solutions. It is difficult to get approval to roll your own solutions even if yours are superior. The decisions are usually made by clueless individuals at the top of the food chain. One way to prevent this is to become a top dog at your company. However you can also try to make the best darn presentation to convince the management that it would benefit the company to let you solve problems yourself.
Part of the problem to gain credibility is that management thinks that you are lazy. They liken you to a factory worker. You are supposed to do what you are told. They essentially want you to be a corporate coder. Such individuals are distinguished by working with only one programming language, not writing code outside of work, and only working on things you are supposed to do. One way to combat this trap is to write software outside you daily job.
Some of the work I do for a living is fun. Most of it consists of normal corporate boring tasks. I have been trying to branch out and roll some projects of my own. However it gets harder and harder to find the time. It is hard when the evil corporate machine wants you to work lots of hours to achieve their goals. I have not given up the fight yet though.
