I actually came back to a place that I used to work at before taking a year long “break” to work on some freelance stuff (and moving to the city etc.), I regret it.
I got to work on some new things and met some new colleagues which was nice, but returning to a heavily abstracted monolith and a DB schema that doesn’t spark joy makes me want to do literally anything else. The people are nice and thankfully it isn’t a toxic work environment, but there are definitely disagreements and practices that I don’t agree with and that won’t change due to any changes just introducing more inconsistency into said platform.
Working on it tanks my velocity, which also tanks my morale, when trivial changes take hours and I’m never sure whether things will work the way I hope. I hate the type of project.
That said, it’s less about a particular workplace and more about greenfield vs brownfield projects, I bet some people thrive on maintenance projects, but I’d at least want to maintain a project started in the last 5 years or so, or at least something tastefully divided into multiple separate modules that don’t make my CPU hit 97C when compiling it and trying to run it locally. Oh and a DB that I can run locally in a container, ideally with data seeding from day one, being able to do that with projects that use PostgreSQL does spark joy and I can test possibly breaking migrations as much as I want.
I got to work on some new things and met some new colleagues which was nice, but returning to a heavily abstracted monolith and a DB schema that doesn’t spark joy makes me want to do literally anything else. The people are nice and thankfully it isn’t a toxic work environment, but there are definitely disagreements and practices that I don’t agree with and that won’t change due to any changes just introducing more inconsistency into said platform.
Working on it tanks my velocity, which also tanks my morale, when trivial changes take hours and I’m never sure whether things will work the way I hope. I hate the type of project.
That said, it’s less about a particular workplace and more about greenfield vs brownfield projects, I bet some people thrive on maintenance projects, but I’d at least want to maintain a project started in the last 5 years or so, or at least something tastefully divided into multiple separate modules that don’t make my CPU hit 97C when compiling it and trying to run it locally. Oh and a DB that I can run locally in a container, ideally with data seeding from day one, being able to do that with projects that use PostgreSQL does spark joy and I can test possibly breaking migrations as much as I want.