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How to find an actual programming job?
I want to program in C in exchange for money, but I'm starting to suspect that large companies (in the EU) don't want me to do that at all, in fact they have an endless supply of ways to stop me from programming: all kinds of trainings that aren't relevant to my tasks, paperwork, meetings, formal steps to be allowed to get anything done, reporting which days and how long I work in 5 different places, all the things that I hate. (skip to the last paragraph if you don't need a detailed description of the situation) I started working for a multinational industrial company 2½ years ago in Poland as an embedded C software engineer after 14 years of working on my own (mostly in signal processing/raster graphics), and my experience is quite mad, although probably very typical: these people don't want you to program at all, they get upset when you write code, essentially wondering if you couldn't have found a way to do the same thing without writing anything, and it's like they want to make the whole process as slow and painful as possible. One project manager assigned a task to me but expressed worry that I would get creative with it, because they want the bare minimum, not the best I can do. While I understand their logic and don't need it explained to me (they'd prefer not having to test, review and approve my new code), that doesn't work for me, it's maddening. They also have a strange phobia of numbers and mathematics, they'll generate absurd enum lists for any possible set of values (yes, 2D enums), and a reviewer was deeply distraught when he saw the simple mathematics (+ and &) involved in a circular buffer I wrote, that was too complicated for him, he couldn't make sure it would work. And that's when I have any programming to do at all! While I understand how their stance towards new code and mathematics is justified (and they get by fine without doing any math, shockingly), this doesn't work for me, I want to write lots of code with lots of math in it, I want to write things most of my colleagues couldn't write, I don't want reviewers who aren't easily capable of understanding it to bother me about approving a basic textbook algorithm for weeks, I want to be paid for creating something valuable that works and not be bothered with much of anything else. The large company I work for has such a natural tendency to absorb a worker's life that they even floated the idea of making me take Polish language lessons (I'm a French national), I had to strongly decline. I don't want to be treated like a person who needs help with learning and growing, I don't want to become a part of anything, I want to be treated like a mindless machine that produces C functions, a goose that lays golden code, don't require anything else of me, just take the code I lay, ask me to test it or fix it, don't ask me to devote Friday afternoons to taking an online course about recognising workplace corruption or pester me about reporting my working hours for each project code in SAP every single week. My coworkers seem perfectly fine with all this, but I'm not them, I'm not as pliable, I can't help it, I'm me, I hate what I hate, and this is driving me mad, I feel like I'm resisting a system that makes other people try to force things on me that have nothing to do with what they hired me for, and the more I'm subjected to it the more I yearn for a way out. So the question is how do I find a job that is actually about programming/mathematics and not about corporate rituals like turning on my webcam at weekly meetings? From my limited experience I assume that all companies like the one I work for function in a similar way, and logically a smaller company should probably be the kind of place I'd be looking for, but when I look for C developer jobs at least in Poland it's all the same: big industrial companies offering embedded microcontroller dev jobs. I've had random people pay me to make programs and while that was great those things just randomly fell into my lap infrequently, paid much less than I get at this company and everything was done in just a few weeks. I don't need absolute job security and I don't need (nor want) a job that makes me work full time all year round, I don't even have financial goals beyond not running out of money, I just want money in exchange for programming. But where are these (presumably small) companies in the EU that just need a guy to lay lots of code?
I want to program in C in exchange for money, but I'm starting to suspect that large companies (in the EU) don't want me to do that at all, in fact they have an endless supply of ways to stop me from programming: all kinds of trainings that aren't relevant to my tasks, paperwork, meetings, formal steps to be allowed to get anything done, reporting which days and how long I work in 5 different places, all the things that I hate.
(skip to the last paragraph if you don't need a detailed description of the situation)
I started working for a multinational industrial company 2½ years ago in Poland as an embedded C software engineer after 14 years of working on my own (mostly in signal processing/raster graphics), and my experience is quite mad, although probably very typical: these people don't want you to program at all, they get upset when you write code, essentially wondering if you couldn't have found a way to do the same thing without writing anything, and it's like they want to make the whole process as slow and painful as possible. One project manager assigned a task to me but expressed worry that I would get creative with it, because they want the bare minimum, not the best I can do. While I understand their logic and don't need it explained to me (they'd prefer not having to test, review and approve my new code), that doesn't work for me, it's maddening. They also have a strange phobia of numbers and mathematics, they'll generate absurd enum lists for any possible set of values (yes, 2D enums), and a reviewer was deeply distraught when he saw the simple mathematics (+ and &) involved in a circular buffer I wrote, that was too complicated for him, he couldn't make sure it would work. And that's when I have any programming to do at all!
While I understand how their stance towards new code and mathematics is justified (and they get by fine without doing any math, shockingly), this doesn't work for me, I want to write lots of code with lots of math in it, I want to write things most of my colleagues couldn't write, I don't want reviewers who aren't easily capable of understanding it to bother me about approving a basic textbook algorithm for weeks, I want to be paid for creating something valuable that works and not be bothered with much of anything else. The large company I work for has such a natural tendency to absorb a worker's life that they even floated the idea of making me take Polish language lessons (I'm a French national), I had to strongly decline. I don't want to be treated like a person who needs help with learning and growing, I don't want to become a part of anything, I want to be treated like a mindless machine that produces C functions, a goose that lays golden code, don't require anything else of me, just take the code I lay, ask me to test it or fix it, don't ask me to devote Friday afternoons to taking an online course about recognising workplace corruption or pester me about reporting my working hours for each project code in SAP every single week. My coworkers seem perfectly fine with all this, but I'm not them, I'm not as pliable, I can't help it, I'm me, I hate what I hate, and this is driving me mad, I feel like I'm resisting a system that makes other people try to force things on me that have nothing to do with what they hired me for, and the more I'm subjected to it the more I yearn for a way out.
So the question is how do I find a job that is actually about programming/mathematics and not about corporate rituals like turning on my webcam at weekly meetings? From my limited experience I assume that all companies like the one I work for function in a similar way, and logically a smaller company should probably be the kind of place I'd be looking for, but when I look for C developer jobs at least in Poland it's all the same: big industrial companies offering embedded microcontroller dev jobs. I've had random people pay me to make programs and while that was great those things just randomly fell into my lap infrequently, paid much less than I get at this company and everything was done in just a few weeks. I don't need absolute job security and I don't need (nor want) a job that makes me work full time all year round, I don't even have financial goals beyond not running out of money, I just want money in exchange for programming. But where are these (presumably small) companies in the EU that just need a guy to lay lots of code?
