Willing to Drink the Koolaide - Just Want a Different Flavor

I.  Am.  Excited.

Not super excited.  It is the same level of excitement as I usually am, when I point and say "this is my excited face" in a dry manner that most people take for sarcasm, sometimes rightly.

I hate my job.  I think I've always hated it and just never admitted it to myself.  For the first year, I regretted my decision to take the job during every single on call shift.  We built a new workflow system.  That was awesome.  Then I got loaned to some transportation teams on a nightmare project that blew up in my face.  During those days I would stare for weeks at the code other people had written, trying to figure out why it would compile for them and not me, or why it would finally compile for me and then silently fail.  That was the first time I remember staring at the clock, hoping it would speed up, since being in high school.  That is also when our ordering system, and all of its software, ceased to be interesting, at all.  I don't care who is doing what with tax or accounting or whatever, and I have completely lost interest in our abysmally poor testing practices and the ducktape-and-spit procedures we must do to test our software.  After the failed project the team split and some of us were sent to a team who owned services composed of the nastiest c++ code I've ever seen.  I should have put a lot of effort into learning the space.  I didn't, because I was bored, and it showed.  Instead I actually tried to avoid learning anything.  Then I started looking into switching teams, but only half-heartedly, because there was always something better on the horizon.  And switching teams also didn't pan out, because thanks to my lack of ambition (within the company) I was still and SDE I, and SDE I's only get shit work, regardless of team.  More team shifts happened but the rest of that story is boring--save for the little fact that every time I opened up this journal to bitch about it, I realized that everyone reading it would probably roll their eyes because of all the posts I had written previously, bitching about my job.  That is when the cracks in the wall of denial widened.

Fortunately, now, all of the cool shit on the horizon that I might hang around for has evaporated and though I don't necessarily hate the day-to-day elements, or at least what I do with the day-to-day elements, looking at the carreer management materials (my company has a move-up-or-get-out policy) and having frank discussions with my managers has made me realize that I actually just hate all of this.

That being said, here is the part that might shock you:  I am thinking about working for Microsoft.

Shocking, I know.  I am also planning on being nicer to people.  Its just talk for now.  I've talked about moving on before, however before, I was always planning on having the other job in hand before I decided to quit.  This time I'm certain about quitting, and am simply hoping to find another job so that I can line up the health insurance and everything.  The weirdest thing is that as soon as I decided that, tasks that had seemed mildly interesting before suddenly became more boring than I thought imaginable--it was as if a switch had been flipped, or a rose colored pair of glasses had been broken.  I had to actually drag myself through everything I did.

I've been day dreaming all day about working somewhere that I can write code and not deal with this on call bullshit, and I'm getting excited.  Honestly I don't know who I'll work for.  Maybe something on the east coast, west coast, somewhere else...who knows.  Where I go next is just a big beautiful question mark.