I've worked for a dozen years in IT at a very large, very stupid corporation which has gotten larger and stupider every year. I've been phoning it in almost my entire career, and despite that I get ridiculous raises and promotions all the time. Most of my projects I consider to be failures in one way or another. Either came in late and over-budget, undelivered on features, was poorly designed and difficult to use etc. The only successes were the small projects early in my career where I wore all the hats and did everything myself. So that is really all I am good for but instead I manage teams working on projects worth as much as 12 million a year.

I recently tried to take a step sideways and get a different job in the company where I'd be more hands on and six months later they had me take over the group. Despite the fact that I mostly wasted my time here. My only real useful survival skill here is sounding smart on the phone and winning lots of the status meetings, and that seems to be the key success criteria.

So I just sort of look at it as one big joke and tell myself I'm just here for the lulz and the fat paychecks as long as they are dumb enough to keep writing them but...that's not exactly true. Sometimes I do get stressed out and angry about how lame we are. Usually this happens when I work with a very small software vendor and can compare their productivity to ours.

I'm going to spend the better part of my life doing this work, and its meaningless. And I tell myself I do this so...my kid can have the same great opportunities that I passed up. He will probably do the same.

Sometimes I'll resolve to try harder and make a difference but I probably have similar akrasia and ennui issues as Rain. I had the same problems in school. I'd score in the 98-99th percentile on all standardized tests and average Cs in most classes since I would never do homework.