Enough
First, let me apologize if you have found the content and the quality of it here a bit sub-par lately; however, I hope I’ve gotten back on track with my posts this week. This post is about things that have gone too far…
As of Friday December 15th I had 63 hours of overtime, in December alone. Simply put, the reason for this is that I have been involved in a crazy project as a consultant for a client where the release date and budget was set without consulting any web developer at all what time it would actually take to achieve everything they wished for. I won’t, and can’t, share any of the details with you here, but suffice to say, I’ve had enough.
Last Thursday I had a short meeting with their manager that’s responsible for my assignment, and I told him that I wish to discontinue it. I’m probably burning bridges with my decision, but at least he seemed to understand and respect my stance. On the other hand, I probably burned them already when I refused to launch a web site where the text of every link was “Read more”…
If I had been younger and single, maybe I could’ve dealt with it, but now I have a family. I don’t want to be away from home 15+ hours per day, never seeing my girlfriend or daughter except for when they’re asleep. My top priority isn’t work anymore. Don’t get me wrong, most of the time I love working with the web, but that lust has slowly been drained ounce by ounce lately… And I don’t want to lose that, it’s given me a lot of joy and interesting opportunities. Therefore, I decided I had to move on.
Another thing I’ve decided to stop wasting my time on is narrow-minded people who aren’t willing to learn. If they just want to keep on developing web sites the way it was done many many years ago, no desire to evolve whatsoever, that’s fine with me. On the other hand, people who don’t know how to do it, but are open to discussing web standards, CSS, unobtrusive JavaScript, accessibility etc are more than welcome to come and talk with me! It’s all about attitude and ambition.
I just hope one day that the ones that don’t care about those things mentioned above will realize that they have to evolve to be able to survive in this line of business…
Lastly, I will stop wasting my time trying to get recognized by the famous names in the Internet business. I’m not sure if it actually is like that, but sometimes I get the feeling that all I see is the same names, promoting each other all over, and there’s a hard struggle to get into that group. Or maybe it’s just me. Whichever, I have decided to solely focus on what I’m writing here, not lobbying to get mentioned elsewhere. If people like what I write and want to mention it, I couldn’t be happier. But it won’t be talked about just because I beg of them to do that.
Now I will try to focus more on writing helpful articles and hopefully funny and interesting anecdotes, and if I decide to criticize anything, to then do it in a respectful and constructive manner (something I think I did with my post JavaScript animations). Time to let content and quality be king. Enough of wasting my life on the wrong things.
Bob
and relax. If you have the possibility, something similar might be a solutions.
