Admin work, because its all manual:

- Each new project has to fill out an Excel tab in a workbook, with a list of all the major tasks and who is responsible. This then needs to be used to create a Gantt chart, manually, in the same tab, showing in what month a task starts and ends.

- Every month we have to manually enter status updates into a powerpoint slide on a shared deck. Which has a collision at least once per month.

- Once a quarter we need to do something similar as the powerpoint slides, but into a word doc instead.

- Once a week we need to track our time on projects in a tool that can't be integrated with (no API or anything). Meaning we can't link up a ticket tracking system to it, so again, all manual.

- Once every 6 months a new round of research funding opens up and we write proposals. The status for which are tracked in another Excel spreadsheet, manually, once a week until the deadline.

- The instructions for what to do with the proposals are so vague and badly documented that there is an unwritten rule, that for the first time you will have to ask a bunch of questions to the project manager. This is accepted by everyone and its just the done thing.

- Everything is stored in a dropbox style system, which has become so cluttered I can only find resources by saving the links sent out previously.

- Some of these updates / reports also get a 1 hour meeting for everyone to stand up and read out what they've entered.

- From time to time random things will need to be reported on to the higher ups (how many publications, research papers, patents, times and dates etc.). Again rather than a tool, a new Excel spreadsheet is whipped up and emailed to everyone on the team. Whoever sent it out, then has to merge the 20+ copies into 1 doc.

- Some of the staff (mostly the devs), use a ticket tracking system to keep track of everything. Management refuse to use it to track the things they need. Instead we have to copy paste from it into the word docs, powerpoint, excel etc.

- By far the most annoying. Management force all the above as they need the info for finance, accounting, legal etc etc. So we have to do it, but whenever there is a question from legal, management send the question to us. So despite having documented every facet of everything imaginable, it all gets ignored in favour of endless emails.

I once tried to to put an end to all of this madness by proposing the use of a ticket tracking system, and then building reporting tools on top of it.

... I was told that it "wasn't appropriate". Still don't know what that means.

Fuck my life sometimes.
I'd just finished my work for an ongoing project, it's been over 6 months only to be dragged out to be told another system needs an immediate change which at best will take 3-4 weeks.

Like seriously just let my mind come off down from the completion of previous project before dropping a new barrel of insanity on my desk 😬

I like being busy, don't get me wrong. but damn not even a day of recovery 😓

Question to all you web developers out there: how do you survive long term in this job without going nuts? I have been working in this industry for almost 7 years and feelings of frustration have accumulated, to the point where I honestly feel like laying g bricks as a job would be more rewarding. Here are the main reasons why:

1) The fact that your job is never "finished" and it looks like and endless stream of tasks. Either the project has money being rolled in or is pretty much dead. Ever changing requirements ensure that most of what you do will be rewritten in 6 months or so. This is ok for the most part, but overtime it does give you the feeling that most of your effort was wasted, and you have the same website/app to show for it, slightly different...

2) The never ending churn of tech, particularly in the Javascript/node ecosystem. Sure, there is a good side of learning new approaches of doing things and it brings variety, but there is the dark side that you never feel you are getting better at doing your job, as every new project does not look anything like the previous. Even if all the stack pieces are the same (never happens), everyone sets it up and organises the project differently enough that you have to spend loads of time solving things you have done before. This makes it difficult to get a sense that you are mastering something...

So, if autonomy, purpose, and mastery are the keys to fulfilling work, I find this career lacking in mastery and purpose...does anyone feels/felt the same? How did you counter it?

Before 2012, I always worked in cubicles and had weekly status meetings. In 2012 I moved to a big city and learnt there was something worse than cubes: the open work plan. Marketed as a way to increase coloration, the open work space is really just the result of real estate prices being expensive in cities and how desks are cheaper than 3-cube walls.

Up until 2013, we'd usually just have the weekly status meeting. Here are your tasks for the week. I'd do them at my own pace. Some days fast, some days slow, but they'd all get done by the end of the week and I'd proudly go down my list of stuff I had done.

Since then, it's all been "agile" and "stand-ups" every. fucking. day. The work is endless. A Product Owner once told me that stand ups weren't suppose to be status meetings; that you were only suppose to say if you're blocked or need help. But in every place I've worked at, they're daily status reports. You have to preform every day.

I really hate IT today more than ever. I miss the cube. I miss the weekly status reports. Today things are so high stress and higher paced and the work is endless. You can't even really pace yourself anymore.

No idea how I ended up here. So basically started with simple wordpress websites, transitioned to react. This move was the hardest.

Then caught up on node and mongodb. And before i knew i was doing db, backend and front end tasks. Now i know bits and pieces of everything

I don’t like the term “full stack dev”. I personally feel like I’m a Jack of all trades and master of none. There’s so much to learn if you’re a full stack developer. Endless possibilities, endless rants and endless frustration 🤯

For 2 weeks I was scheduled to work on a project. After tirelessly asking the useless PM for a list of tasks I should work on I gave up and worked on another project.

Fast forward 2 weeks and now that the PM wants me to fill in a form they are more than capable of completing (API request) I am getting endless 'kind reminder' emails. How can someone be such a cunt!

Venting my frustration about this incompetent idiot here is likely stopping me saying something I would otherwise be fired for.

It was one of those "I need more coffee days"..
I was writing some checking function called "check" (now to clarify my company is not coding oop style so no classes etc.) And as I went on I included another file for some functions and what not. Pretty normal stuff right? Right. In that file I required there also was a function called "check".
Guess who tried to use the "check" function of the imported file in the "check" function?! Right! A Fucking genius aka. me!!
So I tried to figure out why the page wouldn't load and why the server was starting to lag more and more.
After killing all the apache tasks three times i finally realized what I did.
Took me 10 minutes to figure out that i was causing endless recursion. That day wasn't my best and clearly not filled with enough coffee.

PS: yes I know oop would have probably eliminated the possibility for this but I'm just adapting to the coding style of my company as I can't really change things since I'm just an intern.