Drive to work to pay for this car.
I seem to like many pop English bands with female singers. Metric's Handshakes
Two of the lines are reflective of how work seems ceaseless sometimes.
I'm currently on my coop year of school. I'm living at home with my parents. And I don't seem to like how my life is going.
The background:
In my third year as an undergrad computer engineer I slacked off a lot more than I should have. Several days I skipped class and didn't do homework. I didn't apply for jobs either because I was so lazy. I'd often play games for an entire day in my boxers.
I failed a course because of this laziness. And felt a lot of stress as all my friends were getting internships at big companies like AMD.
The job
I did end up getting my old job from the previous summer. It was a government job. Most people were relaxed but there were a few stressed out people who worked on construction. Things never got done as planned and then there was always a large blame game to find out why. I never really saw much of this as I worked a lot with web design and my boss, although sometimes pushy was a really nice guy.
A few days before school ended, my dad found a potential job for me at a company in Boston. I did a skype interview and a few days later miraculously got the job. Originally it was supposed to be a summer internship but I talked to my interviewer/boss and asked her if she could extend it to a year during the interview. She seemed pretty excited about having me for a year.
I know I'm lucky to have a job in this kind of economy. Especially for someone who fails classes. I had to send a copy of my transcript as well so I didn't expect it. I knew I was moving away from a lot of my friends but I really wanted the opportunity to work at this company. They worked on educational products and I really thought I wanted to work in a big educational company to slowly change how education worked.
The way I imagined the work is far different from what it's really like though. I'm just so far disconnected from the front end developer side that nothing I do ever gets seen by an end user. To be honest, a lot of the time I felt like what I was doing was useless. I went volunteering today at the Boston Book Festival and seeing kids reading books was really cool.
The summer passed and two of the interns left, leaving only me behind. One of the other interns really brightened my days over the summer. She made work bearable. There are still many new hires though. A few are college graduates and a few are young. We just never hang out. We often go different places for lunch, some of us are very shy and untalkative, and to be honest, I don't trust any of my coworkers. This is my fault. I should invite them to lunch daily and talk to them more about non work things. They're not untrustworthy.
I recently switched to another division of the company and now I make unit/feature tests. Basically whenever someone writes code and releases it, their application has to be tested by my code. I feel like I'm doing a lot of work but it's not really all that useful. Like I'm running on a treadmill. If anyone changes the UI of the application, then my tests will fail regardless of whether the features of the application are working. Why write tests when their results are less trustworthy than the things they're testing? But I do as I'm told.
+ Show Spoiler [sauce] +
My boss is very demanding. This is something really good about her. She gets things done. She's not afraid to say what's on her mind and many people in the other offices fear her. She will often compare me to other people and point out that I've finished less tests than they have or that I should be more sure of what I'm able to accomplish. But at the same time, I'm new to java, and testing, and project standards, and have had more responsibilities than what's shown in our planning sessions. This has resulted in me staying 1+ hours late every day and eating lunch in the office many times to try to get more work done. I get in just before most of my coworkers and am often here when the custodians are vacumming. I'd like to think I'm used to hard work, but I'm not getting much sleep on weekdays either and I'm just not very happy.
I get paid well. I don't have to pay rent with my parents. I get to see my little brother. I still play games all day on the weekends like I did sometimes in school. But this is not the life I want to live.
I'm afraid to again bring up that we need to talk to HR to extend my internship. Because my boss is not satisfied with the number of tests I've finished. I think it's very common that management thinks coding is easier than it really is, and that developers think managers don't know how to run a company. The main reason I want to continue with the Co-op is to graduate with all of my friends at the same time, and to graduate in April when all the companies are hiring. I wouldn't hate my boss if I got fired. She'd be doing what she thinks is right. If I did get fired I'd have time until the spring semester started to learn whatever I wanted. I go home with a smile on my face because I like coding... but I don't know... I want more. First world problems.
I think I lack fulfillment in my work, and don't socialize enough. I play with my friends on the weekends and get to see my little brother but there's something missing. Perhaps a girl(stupid hormones. Go away so I can be productive). I try to fill the missing void by going on TL each day.
When did the fun go away spongebob?
It went away when you stopped sleeping on weekdays and moved away and stopped talking to many of your friends.