Twelve years. That was the number I had in my head. Twelve years until I could kick off the shackles of work life and just relax – chill out, as I believe the kids say these days. A reasonable horizon. Something to aim at.
And then I did some maths on the twelve years I’d already put in. And I thought: you know what?
Job 01 – Publishing
I worked for a publishing company. 128 pages a week, 18 hour shifts, every week, for crappy kids’ magazines. The kind of place where deadlines were physical events – where fax machines, laptops, and tables were thrown in my general direction. No, I am not kidding. Not metaphorically. Thrown.
Job 02 – E-commerce
Then there was the company selling goods online and over the phone. I secured their website. Stopped them storing credit card numbers as plain text – an actual crime dressed up as a legacy system. I maintained the call centre software, trained three developers, and actively improved things. In return, I got demands for “landing pages” with twenty minutes’ notice. That was the thanks. Twenty minutes and an email Cc’ing directors because ‘No’ was not a word they recognised.
Job 03 – National company, multiple divisions
A national company next. Multiple divisions that could not agree on uniform branding, because their division heads were in quiet, eternal competition with each other. The housing section wanted to be better than the care division specifically because their MD was – and I am quoting a real human being in a senior management position who said this out loud – “a prick.”
Posh London offices, a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace. A marketing department of two people who agreed on nothing. A brief that changed depending on which of them you asked, and which day of the week it was.
Job 04 – The agency
And then the agency. When I joined there were five developers. Watch what happens:
5 developers, then 4, 3, 2, oh back up to 4, 3, 2
During COVID, we were the only ones not furloughed. We kept the lights on. We kept client work moving. We were the last line. And then – two weeks before everything opened back up – they started furloughing us. The timing was almost artistic.
Any thanks? Of course not. IT get jack shit. That’s not bitterness, it’s just true. It has always been true. You’re the plumbing: invisible when it works, someone to shout at when it doesn’t.
And then the last few years happened. I won’t go into the details – some things aren’t for the internet – but they were hard. Personally hard. The kind of hard that makes you look at your Monday morning and wonder why the fuck am I still doing this?
Ticket raised. Priority: Urgent.
Description: “Can you add a full stop on this blog post.”An actual ticket. Marked urgent. That I had to action.
That was the moment I knew. Not the flying laptops. Not the credit card numbers stored as plain-text. Not the MD who was, allegedly, a prick. A full stop. Marked urgent.
I handed my notice in.
Zero regrets.
Now I work night shifts. Eight hours a day, three days a week. That’s it. That’s the whole job.
You know what I don’t get anymore? Issues raised at 4:55pm on a Friday. WhatsApp messages over the weekend because someone didn’t properly check a deployed patch. The low hum of permanent availability, the assumption that your brain is always on-call even when you’re not.
I’ll still do development work. A few hours here and there – projects I choose, on my terms, when I feel like it, sometime volunteer work. That’s the part I don’t hate. I never hated the craft. I hated the industry that grew around it like a tumour.
A career in it, though?
Fuck. That.
Comments (0)