I knew I generally had cushy jobs, but reading this discussion makes me appreciate just how cushy they’ve generally been.
Somewhat ironically, my very best job was also came with the worst ending - I’ve probably already mentioned the 38 studios bankruptcy clusterfuck. I missed a couple weeks pay and had to flee the country - okay, not technically fleeing, but when you’re in the US on a work visa, you’re obligated to vacate with haste when you lose your job - but I wasn’t one of the people who suddenly found out they were still on the hook for a mortgage they thought was already settled, and I didn’t lose my insurance in the middle of cancer treatment like one of my co-workers, so it could have been worse.
Looking back on it, I have some complaints in retrospect about a job I had making multimedia sales tools for the pharmaceutical industry. Not that I was treated especially badly. But, at the time, I looked at what we were doing, and I said to my self, it’s dumb that we’re redoing stuff so often, when most of the apps we make are so similar to each other. So I wrote some handy code that could be reused, and then I created a way of making individual components that could be reused & bundled together into useful drop-in functionality (and all this in Macromedia Director). And at the time I was just trying to avoid redoing boring work. It wasn’t until years after I quit (because they were getting pissy about me showing up late) that I was reading about the Capability Maturity Model that I realised that the code base I built up over the course 5 years working there took them from Level 1 (Chaotic) where success is constantly dependent on individual talent to Level 3 (Defined) where each new project was a small variation on a proven code base. It’s taken years of experience and perspective to realize exactly how much I was worth to them - I don’t know if they realized it, even after I left, because once the structure was in place, keeping it going wasn’t actually that hard. I doubled my salary within 3 years of quitting that place, and I have probably never provided that much value to anyone since.
Also I didn’t realize that I probably should have publicized/published some of what we were doing, because I don’t know if anyone else used Director the way we did. Probably in general I should be sharing my work more - it’s so hard to distinguish when something clever might actually be useful to someone else, vs when it’s a one-off hack
