I once heard a conversation between an engineering manager and a very senior leader at NVidia.
The manager was sharing how challenging it was for his team to debug a certain type of code that they were responsible for. Without missing a beat, this very senior leader replied: "What do we need in order to make it fun? What kind of tooling or other improvements would make it enjoyable and easy?".
I'm paraphrasing because I can't recall the exact words, but I was flabbergasted to hear how he framed the problem as a lack of "fun".
Interactions like that are why I left NVidia with enormous respect for their managers and not just the very bright individual contributors I had the privilege to meet.
I bet people who have been on the inside can guess who the very senior guy was. Absolute legend.
Most projects are fun when they're a greenfield and then become a slog by the end when they're in maintenance mode with layers of cruft. My goal on any new project is to keep the "fun" going for as long as possible.
After a decade or two of maintaining a complex, "grown" application it might be become fun again. You really know all the quirks, all important patterns and call chains. You know the pains of the customers/users and, if you have the time, might be able to do something about it.
Frankly, starting every other year on a completely new application/system does not sound so much fun to me, now that I am programming for more than four decades.
I left NVidia because I retired, not because I was unhappy with the managers or my coworkers. They were exceptionally good.
You do realize there are all sorts of reasons why people leave a job, right? I left Qualcomm perfectly satisfied with my managers and coworkers, too.
If somebody always leaves because of being unhappy with their coworkers, they may want to do some introspection to find out what those disagreements have in common.
> I left NVidia because I retired, not because I was unhappy with the managers or my coworkers. They were exceptionally good.
No worries at all. Asked because the comment about the manager asking how to make it "fun" could also have been read along the lines of "see how out of touch the managers are", and I wasn't sure which meaning you were going for. :)
The manager was sharing how challenging it was for his team to debug a certain type of code that they were responsible for. Without missing a beat, this very senior leader replied: "What do we need in order to make it fun? What kind of tooling or other improvements would make it enjoyable and easy?".
I'm paraphrasing because I can't recall the exact words, but I was flabbergasted to hear how he framed the problem as a lack of "fun".
Interactions like that are why I left NVidia with enormous respect for their managers and not just the very bright individual contributors I had the privilege to meet.
I bet people who have been on the inside can guess who the very senior guy was. Absolute legend.