For the last couple of months I've been feeling frustrated at work. Instead of fixing problems, creating solutions, and making customers happy I've been hacking at workarounds, half-arsed solutions, and trying to keep clients from being too unhappy. In some ways I feel like Sisyphus in my toils, it seems with a bit more effort I can push my stone over the hill and move on, but instead it's been a bit two steps forward, one and a half steps back. I'm not expecting that work should be so much fun that I jump out of bed every morning excited about they day ahead (though that would be nice), but it shouldn't feel so much like a struggle. Should it?
I find that, for me, if I start feeling like I'm struggling in a job for which I'm qualified, there are probably serious communication/organization issues. Given that I worked on a contract with your company, though, I'll say nothing else other than I was disappointed to find out that none of my code was ever used
As Ovid points out, if you've got the qualifications for the job, it could be something else, organizational, that creates the struggle.
Faced with something similar a while back, I had a couple of clear choices. I could either try to cope as best as I could, but no longer take work as seriously. In other words, find other things that interested me and just treat it as a job, do it the best I can and then move on. Sometimes, as was the case for me, managers never expect all of it done, but you get invisible "brownie" points at least for trying.(in my case, from an organization that thought biannual reviews were a "waste of time", but said brownie points had to be accumulated to "succeed")
The other idea is to take an aspect of your work and treat it like your pet project. Experiment, goof off, branch the code off and hack on it, basically do stuff with it that you wouldn't normally do. This presupposes that you occasionally have time to spare to do it
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