Skills atrophy in my current job. How to deal with it?

[slugg]

My current job is not pushing me to exercise my brain or skills. On a difficulty level from 1 to 10, I'd give it a 3 on a good day. It's really been driving me nuts and I feel like I'm losing my edge; I was disregarding the limits of possibility in my old job, yet barely scratching the surface of common sense at this one. The work day takes a lot out of me (nothing but mind-numbing work) and by the time I get home, I don't even want to look at a computer.

The really scary part is that I haven't used any marketable skills in 7+ months. We use many in-house "solutions" (really, homebrew garbage) and dead technologies. From a software engineering perspective, we're actually doing some pretty advanced stuff, but I can't claim anything useful on my resume. It definitely takes a good programmer to understand our architecture and codebase, but basically none of the knowledge transfers to the outside world.

I bet I'm not the only one here to go through something like this. If you have, how did you deal with it? Specifically, from a software engineer's perspective?

Thanks!

 

[DaveSimmons]

I've got copper handcuffs keeping me at my company until I retire so I've just given in and let it happen

When the weekend rolls around I feel more like sleeping late than playing with Unity3D or setting up some non-work Amazon stack to do . . . something. Ahh, sleep. And movies. Lucy was fun.

 

[mikeymikec]

@ OP

Re-do one of the in-house solutions, but make it faster/better with a more relevant/appropriate language? If you can make it noticeably better with potential for further expansion in ways that will benefit the business, demo it and give yourself something interesting to do?

Admittedly I'm interested in other answers to your question as I feel I'm in a similar-ish situation myself as I've been self-employed for more than ten years.

 

[purbeast0]

to be frank, that was one of the major reasons i left my first job out of school. i was there 5+ years and was using stuff on the 5th year i was using day 1, and it was just flat out c++ with no newer technologies. they even used a filemaker database. this was from 2004 - 2010.

i go to eat with some of those guys now a days, and many of the people that i started with there fresh out of school are still there. they are STILL doing the same stuff. those guys would have a problem finding a new job unless they strictly wanted to stay with C++. but they wouldn't be able to branch out and do other stuff, like web apps anything with a backend for that matter. and on top of that, i bet i make nearly double most of those guys do.

since then, i feel i have learned A BOATLOAD of stuff and it has driven me to actually learn on my own time and do side projects. it's also helped me be able to basically pick up any technology that i want. i'm at the point now where language simply is not a barrier. as long as there are docs, i can basically use any language/tools that are necessary to get the job done. i have no problems integrating 3rd party libraries and what not either, and do it regularly (at work professionally and on side projects).

OP, if you can't find a new job, i'd suggest doing some mobile development on the side. it's a lot of fun and it's just "neat" to build something and see it on your phone working, knowing that you created it. it can also generate some fun money.

but #1 thing you have to do if you aren't learning, is look for a new job that uses newer/current/changing technology. it makes work A LOT more fun/rewarding.

 

[Markbnj]

When the weekend rolls around I feel more like sleeping late than playing with Unity3D or setting up some non-work Amazon stack to do . . . something. Ahh, sleep. And movies. Lucy was fun.

This gets to be more and more true as I get older. I will still occasionally do a side project but it has to be pretty compelling.

 

[neegotiator]

Somewhat in same boat, technology stack I'm on is fine, but the problems I'm being asked to solve aren't all that interesting and at times truly mind numbing. Definitely have those days where the motivation isn't there.

Currently, I've just tried to keep myself entertained rewriting solutions in different languages, finding ways to further automate my workflows, or exploring different features of the stack we're on that hasn't been explored yet. Then presenting to other developers in our organization what I did and trying to maintain that exchange of knowledge between us. As well, chatting with non-engineers in our organization about challenges they're facing, and maybe sparks conversation about potential software solution.

As others have said though, ideally find another gig. I had a one at a startup as a full stack software engineer, definitely gained more breadth of technical knowledge there than all my other jobs combined. Unfortunately couldn't continue due to changes at home, but was great to be surrounded by other developers who each had their own areas of expertise, and freely shared knowledge.

 

[Spungo]

Re-do one of the in-house solutions, but make it faster/better with a more relevant/appropriate language?

This. Most of my learning comes from trying to avoid work.

I initially made a batch script that can create a 7zip backup with the current date and time in the file name because I was sick of manually typing dates and times. I wanted to start writing some fancier things, but it seemed like a more powerful language was needed, so I started learning Perl. From there, I was able to automate a lot more things. Making date stamps in Perl was similar to making date stamps in batch files, so that skill carried over nicely. Perl taught me a lot of things about how to approach simple data and lists - how I should write data in .txt files so the data is easy to read, create, or add to. Perl puts a lot of emphasis on regular expressions, so that was a nice skill to learn. I eventually wanted drag and drop support for certain things, so I started learning C# and WPF because I couldn't understand any of the GUI stuff Perl had. C#'s approach to config files is very different. Instead of using regex on plain text files ("my_setting" = "setting_value"), C# wants everything in XML format (<my_setting>"setting_value"</my_setting>), and that's another valuable less that applies to many things.
Now my programs are getting fairly large and complicated. One of my programs works so well that I had to request a new hard drive for my computer. Regular hard drives lag out when writing 10 PDF files at the same time, but a solid state drive doesn't.

A long journey really does begin with a single step. Try making a tool to make your job easier. A simple tool can slowly morph into something huge, and you learn a lot along the way.