Well... I've been programming for something close to 25 years, created a bunch of libraries used by... I don't really know the statistics today, but at the height of popularity there were certainly hundreds of users. I can write decently in a bunch of programming languages, some very popular and some not so much. I've been a teamlead for some years, a department manager.
Today I'm a grunt in a department of a large international company. This department was previously a separate company, but was acquired two years ago. The parent company has very little interest in what our department is doing in general.
But, that's not the most useless part, of course. My boss sucks as a programmer. But, on top of being very bad, he's only worked for this one company where he's today. He has no clue how bad he is because he's never seen anything else. After tasking me with writing some code and not being able to understand it, seeing how I wouldn't use the disastrously bad practices he instituted in his department, he decided to never give me any work that requires writing any code ever again.
It's been close to two years since I've written the last bit of code that went into any of the company's repos :) I've been given tasks that require exclusively painfully boring manual testing. It's even funnier because all those things I'm allegedly testing are, sort of, tested automatically (but automation is so awful that it mostly doesn't work).
I attend every morning meeting (online) and just read the news / Reddit / HN during the meeting. The meetings consist of my boss enjoying himself talk for about an hour. Then me and the other guy tell him that we have nothing to add and wish him a pleasant day.
I haven't opened my work email for months :) The last time I did so was because HR sent some form I had to sign, and they found me in Slack to tell that they've been waiting for my signature for far too long.
To add to the pile: the product our department works on is awful in more ways than I can count. It's hard to decide which part of it is worst, but to give you an example: in one of the recent features the customer asked for, instead of implementing this feature the two developers assigned to the task produced two MS Word documents, one around 10 pages long another one closing on 90. These two documents detailed a DIY process of implementing this feature (by the customer), mostly consisting of shell commands interspersed with terse and vague descriptions. Needles to say there was never any kind of plan for how the feature should be implemented. Product management is, basically, nonexistent where I work.
And then I was asked if I can test it... :D In, like... a few days. Because the mothership company requires publishing a release a month, and that feature has to be in the next release.
Today I'm a grunt in a department of a large international company. This department was previously a separate company, but was acquired two years ago. The parent company has very little interest in what our department is doing in general.
But, that's not the most useless part, of course. My boss sucks as a programmer. But, on top of being very bad, he's only worked for this one company where he's today. He has no clue how bad he is because he's never seen anything else. After tasking me with writing some code and not being able to understand it, seeing how I wouldn't use the disastrously bad practices he instituted in his department, he decided to never give me any work that requires writing any code ever again.
It's been close to two years since I've written the last bit of code that went into any of the company's repos :) I've been given tasks that require exclusively painfully boring manual testing. It's even funnier because all those things I'm allegedly testing are, sort of, tested automatically (but automation is so awful that it mostly doesn't work).
I attend every morning meeting (online) and just read the news / Reddit / HN during the meeting. The meetings consist of my boss enjoying himself talk for about an hour. Then me and the other guy tell him that we have nothing to add and wish him a pleasant day.
I haven't opened my work email for months :) The last time I did so was because HR sent some form I had to sign, and they found me in Slack to tell that they've been waiting for my signature for far too long.
To add to the pile: the product our department works on is awful in more ways than I can count. It's hard to decide which part of it is worst, but to give you an example: in one of the recent features the customer asked for, instead of implementing this feature the two developers assigned to the task produced two MS Word documents, one around 10 pages long another one closing on 90. These two documents detailed a DIY process of implementing this feature (by the customer), mostly consisting of shell commands interspersed with terse and vague descriptions. Needles to say there was never any kind of plan for how the feature should be implemented. Product management is, basically, nonexistent where I work.
And then I was asked if I can test it... :D In, like... a few days. Because the mothership company requires publishing a release a month, and that feature has to be in the next release.
----
Hope you feel better about your plight now :)