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Working in an enterprise has its own benefits and detriments. On one side you get exposed to a huge company wide technical/functional architecture and few too many business processes. And on the other side once you get well acquainted and spend quite a substantial time with it, the excitement dies. You are mostly locked to “rigid/legacy/boring/meh/same o’ same o’/non-bleeding edge/you name it” technology stack.
I know legacy software is not always useless as whole business of enterprise relies on it. But then a time comes where tech evolves so fast that our good old legacy software cannot keep up with it. You miss on really shiny and sometimes quite useful features which have become industry standard in meantime.
There is nothing much you can do to change it other than suggesting it, as it requires decision from business (Top-down) to flag something as legacy which also includes the budget, resources, capacity, deadlines, etc.
Specifically for a tinkerer like me it gets booooooring really soon, then the un-ending struggle starts. I get stuck in a vicious circle of learning a new technology to keep up with the ever-changing world of tech and then not being able to apply it anywhere in your work (literally anywhere), and eventually loosing the grip on whatever I have learned.
This annoys me big time as there are a few viable options left for me to do such as:
Changing jobs:
It could be a viable option but then to switch to a small startup which actually keeps up with new technology could be hard for someone who has worked extensively in an Enterprise. Why you might ask? So here’s why (totally my opinion).
- Job security/stability in small startups
- Comparatively low paying
- Multiple responsibilities on an individual (Ranging from dev > test > ops > incident management gah..)
- Tighter deadlines
Yeah yeah, I agree that the things which are mentioned above can also happen in a large enterprise but chances are slimmer and very relative to one’s personal experience.
- Find/explore other areas in same company/project:
- Which would fulfill my wish to learn/apply the learnings and put it to real world use, but this never worked out for me. Other than doing some small POC’s for certain clients and stuff similar to that.
- Find an open source project and contribute to it:
- This does sound delightful but it’s more easy said than done. If I like a project to the extent that I wouldn’t mind sacrificing some of my weekends and contribute to it, I’ll definitely do.
- But many mainstream/indie projects does require even deeper understanding of the subject matter/underlying technology in order to meaningfully contribute to it. I hope to find something like that which would become my gateway to OSS.
This might sound more like a rant but I just wanted to express whatever I’ve experienced and the post is totally opinion based. Meanwhile let me know what you think? Do you agree or disagree?
Anyway happy coding. 😇