this is a follow-up post to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43282410
TLDR of that post: 5yoe embedded engineer, started a new role within a highly dysfunctional organization with no clear responsibility or supervisors after a semi-burnout within a startup, felt extremely discouraged. Company is in aerospace development.
It's been little over a couple months since I've started and things have not improved yet. Sspposedly a lead engineer is going to start working with my team soon; however due to continuous changes of plans, lackluster collaboration coming from other teams and still no clear directions for the future of the project the morale of the other members of my team is that of extreme gloom, and there are days I find it very hard to bother doing what I'm being paid to because 1. I feel like fighting an uphill battle against not only work activities but also my own peers and 2. the feeling is almost always that we're simply doing busywork that will have to be redone in a few weeks/months time.
Keep in mind that all of this is simply technical writing (requirements) and involves no coding at all nor a particularly deep knowledge of the underlying technology, since it's iteratively monkey-pasted until it appeases some subjective and still unclear measures of the main customer, which also seems to have its own internal strifes regarding variability of staffing, which eventually leads to repeated re-thinking of the overall project. Worst of all is that we have to closely follow suit because some deadlines are approaching and if the project team does not manage to respect those basically the whole company is royally f*cked in the hindquarters.
Due to the overall situation, we (the SW team) received recent news from the project manager that for the foreseeable duration of the project (4-5y more or less) there will be no internal SW development made because of de-risking, and everything will be outsourced instead. I will personally not delve into why I think this is a dumb decision, but it is what it is; only that at this point I really don't understand which reasons I have to keep working here, aside from the relatively cozy position (which btw does not differ much from previous positions I held). I have plans to open up a small SW startup i 5-10y time for development in this field, but that requires a non-indifferent amount of expertise whose growth would be obviously stunt from sitting idly for years to come, especially for someone with so little experience such as me.
I do not want to turn this into a meaningless rant, so I'm asking again for HN opinion on this: what would you personally do in this case? I feel like I'm being irrationally capricious and ungrateful for leaving a cushy job in these trying times and markets, OTOH I fear that developing no experience for several years to come is going to leave me stranded when I'll eventually try to scale up into new roles or future endeavors, nevermind the expectation of an extremely dull day to day experience.
Another thing is, I really like the space sector and would love to stay in it, but the feeling I get from working in it and hearing from other people that have been doing it at different levels of seniority is that you either get startups that do not know what the hell they're doing at frantically try to spin up some working satellite with hopes and strings, or immovable giants in which you're parked in some role and hardly move anywhere. Considering how much I love working with low level stuff, PCBs, CPU architectures and so on, maybe this is not the right call for me, and I should be better off working in some other fields...
Thanks to anyone that takes their time to respond, appreciate it immensely.
I believe so too. If you do 4-5 years of "technical writing involving no coding at all nor a particularly deep knowledge of the technology", that's IMO bad if you plan on going back to writing software. You have 5 years experience now, in 5 years it will mean that you haven't coded for half your career. If you want to keep on coding for a while, look for a job now. It doesn't mean it's urgent; you just don't want to stop coding for years.
2. It seems like it's your second company, and the first one was a startup where you burned out. I just want to let you know that not every company is toxic or dysfunctional. There are a ton of stable companies that are interesting and allow you to have a healthy work/life balance. It does exist, don't lose hope and keep looking! It seems like there is no rush, so you are in a good position.
3. "I really like the space sector and would love to stay in it"
My opinion here is that as a software engineer, it's easier to change domain than to compensate for years of non-coding. I.e. I believe it would be better for you to find a nice software engineering position in a different domain for a while and eventually come back to the space sector than to stay in the space sector and stop coding for 5 years. You will learn useful things in another domain, while if you don't code in your domain... you still don't code. Again, not that it is bad to not code, but you seem to be willing to keep coding for a while in your career.
Again my opinion: as software engineers, we will regularly have to choose whether we want to go into less technical roles, typically management. It's always possible to go from more technical to less technical, but once you do, it's very hard to come back. If you want to stay on the technical side, you have to do it now (I mean, in the next year, not in 5).
This is an absolutely awesome place to be. You can either get by doing hardly anything or you can do anything you want.
Which are you going to pick?
Layoffs may be coming anyway. At least by looking now you can go in with less pressure.
Could you argue that your org needs to be automating testing that deliveries meet functional and performance requirements?