Sorry if my thoughts are a bit scattered, it's just random things I feel at the moment and I'm trying to not give too many details. I don't know if it's burnout, bureaucracy or just boredom.
I just got back from over a month of AL and I feel very uninspired by work (a slow build-up over the months that AL hasn't resolved for me). When i joined we were a much smaller startup but now we're a very big company and we're in the middle of restructuring to make-it-work with our influx of teams and clients.. which just means renaming some folders and changing slack channels.
This is my first "proper" software job, and I've been here about 3 years now; I enjoy the work (and obviously appreciate getting food on the table) but having this inner feeling of "bleugh" slows down my work a bit and makes the whole thing less enjoyable. Python has many pain points, but people tell me that all software can be messy, no matter if it's golang, rust, or clojure (things that I've looked at with interest - new and exciting).
I know there's an element of "all companies do this" and naturally, finding success means bigger company, bigger company means more bureaucracy.
I've dabbled in making my own businesses / ideas on the side but it's hard to find the time when the main work really drains the spirit. Should I just look for more exciting work or just not take it so personally and focus on my side projects or what?
What have you done with similar thoughts? How do you find enjoyment in work, especially when it goes from "fun startup" to "corporate enterprise" - am I just being childish?
I loved working at Macromedia while it was between 1,000 and 2,000 employees (a lot of expansion by acquisition) but did not enjoy working at Adobe when they acquired us -- Adobe had a very corporate mindset, Macromedia almost felt like a whole bunch of startups. I had a blast working for Verizon (no idea how big they were back in the mid-90s but the IT department alone covered an entire floor of a warehouse-sized building), but then I went to work for a much smaller actuarial firm and, while the _project_ was fun, the corporate culture was not.
You have to figure out what is important to you ("fun", "interesting" are reasonable goals for work) and what sort of compensation you're willing to take in order to have fun. Are you willing to put up with more corporate BS for a ton of money? Would you rather have more fun and less rules but less money and far more risk (startups can be fun and interesting but also long hours and most of them fail -- I've been at three that imploded but I can't take that risk now I have a family and a home to keep up).
Is the tech stack important to you? Important enough that you'll really limit your choice of jobs? Important enough that you'd rather be out of work for months than work with tech you dislike?
I've been in IT for... over 40 years now. I've done everything from assembler and COBOL to Scala and Clojure, in companies as small as four people up to many thousands of people. Most of what contributed to my enjoyment at various jobs was the team interactions, closely followed by the problems being solved -- not the size of the company (nor the tech stack: the assembler job was at a large insurance company but the project was fascinating, and the team were awesome; and Macromedia was mostly C++ and Java and some ColdFusion -- but great people and interesting projects). For the last decade, I've mostly done Clojure and I love that and joke that I wouldn't work in another stack... but if push came to shove, I probably would if the team and the problem space seemed fun and interesting.