Title: In the movie Moneyball, we learn that the Billy Beane character, when he entered baseball as a young player, was judged as a potential superstar by scouts. But he turns out to be a bad performer in the real game. He gave up other opportunities to play Major League Baseball. So those baseball scouts actually ruined his life.<p>I think I&#x27;m a lot like him. How can I break out of this?<p>I happen to be very good at a-ha problems, which show up often in interviews. I know a lot about how to optimize algorithms. I can talk learnedly about the tradeoffs between various paradigms. Interviewers are often very impressed.<p>The problem is, the job has nothing really to do with the above skills. It&#x27;s mostly about slogging through poorly documented Java framework code, and getting some masochistic buzz from it. The desire to craft perfect code is an <i>obstacle</i>. Know how to do it better? Congratulations, you will be permanently dissatisfied.<p>And let&#x27;s be clear, most of the job, even under the best of circumstances, isn&#x27;t about coding. At best it&#x27;s about communication and careful risk management. At worst it&#x27;s cutthroat office politics in an industry that has too much money to ever treat people in a sane or humane manner.<p>I get depressed about this, and then those same people who judged me a potential superstar start collecting evidence to fire me.<p>So I&#x27;m in a job search right now. I just aced another interview. It&#x27;s a company that wants to pay me way, way too much money to work on updating their legacy app. I have money woes right now but I&#x27;m considering turning it down. I am sick of being a disappointment.
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