What about work?

To continue my thoughts started in the last post I will move on to the topic of work. I am a software developer and frankly I have lost interest in being one. The hard part is that I don't know what else I want to do. I have many friends in the business and some love it and some feel the same as me. It is definitely a detractor in my life right now which is too bad. I don't really want to go back to school just when I am almost done paying off debts but I am not really sure what else to do. Then again I don't find it to be a good idea to dally in school when I don't know what I want to do in the first place.

Many of my friends who still like the industry suggest that I change jobs because of the work that I do. Specifically I hear things like, "You will get paid more doing XYZ development." or "You will be so much happier writing in XYZ language because it is so easy." Frankly there where only two languages that I never liked or I felt were confusing and I don't use either of them at my current job. In fact, a recent count of the languages used in all our legacy projects totals 7. Some old some new, I think it is actually a bonus that I get to work in different languages to break the monotony.

This attitude that the language itself, via either ease of development or nice syntax, is what makes the job fun is something that is totally foreign to me. It shows a total lack of caring about the people and the company, something that I think is both common and bad in our current society. The only thing that I think could be improved on in this line of thinking is caring about what I am actually developing. As such I always keep an eye on the FHCRC. Since I am currently not in a scenario where I really like the project I work on and I don't know any fellow developers who are working on a project that I would like to work on, I count such an option as a dream, a goal to pursue but not something that I am counting on to make or break my life.

One of the things I like about where I work is the people. I think we have a great group of people. However it is also the people that often make work most depressing. Everyone has their own problems and despite how they try they end up bringing them with them to work. Seeing as how I care about people at work, this can make things at work bad, especially if people are experiencing some extreme circumstances as is currently the case.

The second thing that makes office friends depressing is that, despite how I feel, we are all still just that, office friends. Recently when the people who I have called my own friends for years where unavailable and I needed people to talk to or just plain have fun with to try to take my mind off things I approached the 'office friends'. This didn't work out. I guess I knew it wouldn't but I was hoping that maybe this time something would be different. Instead, I was the one who brought their problems to work to a group of people who like me well enough, but don't feel comfortable enough with me to try to help.

I am guilty of the opposite of this. I always want to try to help despite not knowing people well enough to know how to help. This often makes it awkward for others. This is something that I constantly have to remind myself of. People will talk to me if they are comfortable with it but if they aren't I shouldn't press them to despite what I want.

In summary, I don't think changing jobs would help because of what aspects I care about in my job. It could lessen some of the things that bother me once I had severed ties with the people at work that I care for and stopped thing about them. On the flip side, I think at this point if I changed jobs to another one where all I cared about was the pay, I would probably feel even more isolated as I wouldn't have those people around that I care about. I really don't care about developing anymore so trying something new in that arena as a total problem solver seems absurd.