I don't necessarily agree. Most software work is maintaining existing code. The ability to diagnose issues and fix them, especially in code that sucks and everyone knows involved with the code sucks is a valuable skill. A few years back I had to maintain and internal company application written in Delphi 2 with one function consisting of 3000 lines!! It was brutal and could only be debugged/built on the developer's machine who left the company. That app has since been killed. The key is to also make sure you keep your skills relevant with your own side projects if need be. I have actually landed jobs based on projects I have done on my own time.
The worst job? correct mistakes of others, many times you find that there is no logic whatsoever in what you find and it is a nightmare to correct the wrong systems of others
Option 3 is also Quiet Adaptation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Te_of_Piglet As a regulatory economist/expert witness for a good chunk of my professional life, I learned too slowly that doing Great Work (to stick out, y'know -- cuz the world *is* a meritocracy, right?!?!) would, as our Asian friends remind us, get me hammered: "The nail that sticks up, gets hammered." (Compare that to the occidental: "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." Yow.) So, I would do aforesaid Great Work and earn a horrible result. I eventually learned The Te Of Piglet, and lasted much much more than most.
Insightful but one dimensional. Meanwhile in the real world, individual people are different and have spent thousands of years working together for common goals. Companies, as they're supposed to be, should be about sharing that work and its results. For some #1 would be too tedious in the longer run, even if they technically can do the work. For others, #2 would make them miserable, as they thrive in #1. People in #1 and #2 won't have the time to do #3, and need the higher perspectives and broader vision that #3 may bring to the table. It's about cooperation, but seems humanity is losing it.
Obviously. Only noticed no interviewer ever gave a fuck so it's not very taken care of. I use it myself for auto trading with IB. It's the whole system except the proprietary trading engine which is loaded as a plugin. For now it handles marketdata and executions, perhaps in the future I'll add positions, risk and what else.
That's because there's no cooperation in a gladiator's arena. http://blog.devicerandom.org/2011/02/18/getting-a-life/ "The problem is that a lot of clever people want to go for the sky, and there is much more people who want the sky compared to the available positions. In general, science career is a race, where three people go to the podium and all the others sooner or later will go back home. The competition for funding and positions means that not only the hopes of getting a job are really lousy, but that people become nasty. Like, really nasty."
The problem with not being able to do good work? It slowly but surely pushes you into poverty and troglodism. Having grown in rural Eastern Europe I've noticed that (at least in my country,) the percent of rural guys albeit making almost 50% of the population, only get to form some 1% of the technically literate (and employed) population. I think it's worse, far worse than the relative percentage of black guys in the US who make it to the "top" (as defined by not flipping burgers). And, PC aside, Eastern Europe relative to Central and Western is like rural my country compared to the developed cities. In the countryside you NEVER get #1 unless you're already rich or your parents are at least middle class, case when you get it intermitently, pretty much what I'm experiencing now. If you're lucky like me, you get to do your "education" (scoffing at it as emphasized by mocking quotes) AFTER THE CHORES ARE TAKEN CARE OF. Any resemblance to 9-18 job anyone? And in the countryside it was far better than the "dream job" I get in the city, where apart from those 9-18 useless #3 hours at best or #2 if boss figures it out, I also get to make 2 hours transit EACH WAY. So really, I thought my family were retards for having me work on chores around 6 hours per day including pauses. After which I could do/study/fuck/sleep/do whatever the fuck I wanted. And got so far as thinking that talking on an obscure Internet forum with a bunch of idiots is better than what expects me tomorrow when I go to work