I started a new job this last week - a "good job", meaning a job, that pays, that allows me to descend more slowly into the abyss that was once the "American Dream". But it is a good job - and the people there are decent, nice enough.
Many of the roles I've had in the last 5 or 6 years have been "triage situations". Circumstances where, because of massive code debt or incompetence or any number of other things, I've been "riding in on my white horse", to save the day, only to get burnt out "saving the day" and then getting a "Kroger Turkey Card" for the 6-12 months of Hell.
My last role? - I literally had to spend the last 6 months of it (before I resigned) fixing problems that were "fraud and lawsuit" problems (meaning the company could have been sued out of existence). The previous "engineer" had sat on his fat ass, building up his halitosis and FACEBOOK following, and not doing much else. One of the "artifacts" was a .net 2.0 web service, written in VB.NET, that had no authentication (no password required), no SSL or encryption, and allowed anyone with a smart phone to access public school demographic data. Another piece of their system would transmit student documents, without encryption, 100% in violation of FERPA and totally susceptible to "man in the middle" attacks - somewhere there is a server, in central Asia, which will reveal student report cards (playing the odds) for some "celebrity" in 15 to 25 years. Of course, I'm not sure this wretched civilization has that much time left in it ... but ... whatever ...
So this new role? - I was given a bug, an issue, and applied my knowledge of root cause analysis to fix it - amounting to 50 lines of diagnostic code and a few hours of analysis. They told me "you did something in a day we couldn't get done in 30" - ask me, if that made me feel better or worse? This incident led to a soft promotion, first week on the job, a team lead role (more responsibility, no more money). You'd think this would make me happy - but you're not me, and you haven't been living the eternal recurrence of the "Software Mary Poppins".
I'm tired of being the "Dutch Boy", with 1,000 fingers to keep the dike from collapsing ...
I'm tired of keeping the decay under control ...
I'm tired of "swooping in" and saving the day ...
I'm not that special - what's special is how horribly failed the current business environment and software engineering world is. It's not that I'm a genius - it's far more likely that incompetence reigns everywhere, and having a minimal set of capability, plus non sociopathic personal ethics, makes you ... too ... a "Software Engineering Mary Poppins".
I don't know what happens next week - sprint planning, taking on this "soft promotion", maybe going to a company event where one of the muckety mucks buys us beer ... so we can get drunk ... and pretend that everything is "normal".
But everything isn't normal.
Everything is falling apart.