Save the programmer... Save the world...
Yesterday I had an interview with a company. Though everything seems to have turned out quite alright, they're very surprised that I had to give them a 3-month notice period. Well, obviously it was too long but it was in my contract. The most shocking thing was though... It would seem that my current project is degrading my market value.
It's been more than 3 months that I've been working on a maintenance project. This, like no other maintenance project is a very boring task. This isn't like you could refactor code anytime you want, the company that we are working for, of course has a long term plan for that in the future. I see no growth for me here as a Java developer because they're gonna be porting everything to .Net in the near future. Bad decision? I dunno...
So what is the rant all about? I think I already did my part and did my job the best I could. After having read the first few chapters of Code Complete by Stever MCConnell, I came to a realization... In the book he said:
"Despite economic ups and downs, good programmers are perennially in short supply (BLS 2002), and life is too short to work in an unenlightened programming shop when plenty of better alternatives are available".
Though not very experienced as of this point, I consider myself as a good programmer. And therefore I am opening myself to other opportunities that would come. I plan to stay for at least a year though... I plan to expand my knowledge and not just debug javascript code, property files or xml files. Though I'm doing an end to end work here, I'm not really learning anything other than the business process. I thought learning the business process would be enough reason to present to my future employer but then it's not. When you've worked on a maintenance project, other companies would see you like you're being benched. I'd like to make it clear though that I am not in any way keeping grudge (Tosho!) with my present employer. I am hoping they would understand when it's time for me to go that I am young and in search for more knowledge.
I wish the best for us all, and other developers who's still finding the light in the cave they're in.