I actually wrote this in my cube on a particularly bad
day:
Sitting here in the cubicle, trying to find a reason to
care enough about this job to stay the last obligatory
hour. These keystrokes are stricken with a malaise that
has crept in from many encounters with red flags of
various stripes. They became an amorphous, solid banner
months ago, and now I sit waiting for my escape pod to
slice through the curtain and take me to some better
place.
I still enjoy the nature of this profession, the
creative problem solving, the opportunity to work with
smart people, the order of magnitude difference that one
small decision can make. But this place reeks of apathy.
It's a scent without aroma, as though distinctiveness
itself would be cause for offense. The ideal is to have
no ideals. To stoically accept the status quo. To feed
managerial egos tender hours that would be more rightly
spent with loved ones.
This is my prison, my years of penance determined by the
magnitude of my debt. Most of my purchases were bought
to increase the quality of my free time, but now I
schedule my free time to be more productive, as more
work is required to keep pace with the world. But the
world is mad. Everyone is running in place, feigning
motions of progress without moving one step in the right
direction. There's always a glimmering something just
beyond our reach. A promotion, a house, a fancy new car.
It's usually enough to distract us from the subtle,
sublime beauty that abounds in the moment, but we just
might be better off if we took a step backward to
appreciate it all.
Questions like "What are the biggest risks in your
project right now? Who would you fire right now if you
could? Who would you hire?" are things a team lead
should be able to handle in real life, not just on an
anonymous blog.