ALWAYS lie. Always pretend you’re 100% committed until you’re certain you’re not doing it. Honesty has no place in business unless you can use it as leverage

misery in the hand is better than two misery in the bush. guarantee you that that job would have sucked twice as much as you think it would have.

Kinda the sad truth of capitalism. You can and should try for a job you care about but you will probably have to settle for one you tolerate.

I still feel like its the right decision if you weren’t really feeling it at the time. But if anything in the future you could just accept the job and stay on for a bit to see how it is. If you really don’t like it then quit.

Just don’t be too hard on yourself

Ehhh, I managed to rope myself into a position that I absolutely 100% regret taking. The pay is a step up from what I was making before at what was essentially run like a tiny mom-and-pop operation in spite of being a regional medium enterprise (meaning lots and lots of direct interference from nepotist “managers” all through the org), but it’s still low for the sector. It’s stable, but none of my duties really match what was in the job description, and I feel like I’ve genuinely stagnated since starting at this place roughly 6 years ago.

We’re stuck doing development on this shitty proprietary platform, and experience on it is useless in the outside world because 1.) we’re doing things in the most fucked-up, ass-backwards way possible (because reasons), and 2.) whatever community there used to be around this product died off around 2019-2020 when the vendor decided to close-source most of it, break backwards compatibility with their own software, and start ushering everyone over to SaaS/PaaS offerings so they can herd them into a rent-seeking scheme. The vendor also keeps churning through developer staff, so it’s like being in the fucking wilderness whenever we run across core/platform bugs. None of it fucking matters to the higher-ups because our company is balls-deep into vendor lock-in with these absolute clowns.

Even doing basic dev tasks on this platform takes an absurd amount of extra mental load just to remember all of the quirky shit that breaks when you try to use things like basic IDE features. And if it isn’t a problem with the IDE itself, our corpo remote desktop environment has so many security/antivirus/binary execution/network traffic nanny background processes that the IDE runs like absolute shit. I love clicking on a UI element and waiting two and a half minutes for the program to respond. Doing a debugger run? Grab a cup of coffee and come back in 8 minutes, and your simple Hello World program might finally be running. (If you’ve ever used any of the “weird” IDEs that were built on top of Eclipse, e.g., Eclipse PDT, this is a similar animal. It makes Electron look minimalist.)

It’s pretty incredible, and it makes me long for goddamned fucking PHP. So yeah, I used to be a big software dev enthusiast. I have a physical bookshelf that is overflowing with everything from game development books to Web framework stuff to software engineering, design, and QA works, and a handful of “learn X programming language” textbooks that I like to use as desk references. I have a massive collection of tech ebooks. I run a VMware ESXi homelab with a second server running a FreeNAS instance as both a filer and a block-storage SAN. I have forgotten more about Red Hat Linux command line than most of my counterparts will ever learn in their careers… And I am done with this shit. I am beaten. Broken. I want to move to a fucking cabin in the woods and live off the grid so I never get roped into another 25-person Zoom meeting full of incompetent middle managers ever again. The only reason I haven’t quit is because my self-confidence is completely shot after all of this, and I don’t know that I can make it through an interview without having a breakdown.

TL;DR: You probably made the right call.

Often times, you can go back on a ‘yes’ in cases like this. It’s much harder to go back on a ‘no’.

For anyone with a good moral compass, your regrets are going to be more of what you didn’t do than what you did do.

But this is something to reflect upon and move on. You’ve still got the skills they were looking for and much more, you’ll still find jobs and other rewarding things.

At the time I didn’t think I could even tolerate the job. Got some space to think properly and I just don’t think that’s true any more.

This jumped out to me as typical of decision making in general. I think of investors as only having two moods “oh I’m an idiot, why did I even waste a cent on that stock? I knew it was cratering.” and “oh I’m an idiot, why didn’t I take a loan on the house and bet that too? I knew it was going to the moon.” There’s never a satisfaction or some sort of emotional clicking-into-place that lets you know you chose right of two uncertain calls. If you do get that click DM me, tell me your secrets, and save me from myself.

I remember this audiobook (which, I’m told, probably has a regular book form too) called Algorithms to Live By. It talked about how computer/software engineers need to think about computational limitations where time is finite. There are things like the Secretary Problem and Optimal Stopping Problems. It really stood out to me that, given best strategy, you had a 1/3 chance of actually getting the best secretary (interview -> thumbs up or thumbs down (optionally: -> changing your mind).

I think you made a valid decision insofar that its internal logic was consistent. I have faith you made a grounded decision insofar that you took into account your material conditions. If a choice has both of these, I count it among your rational decisions. I think you simply wait and see whether that glorified rougelike-on-rails we call life gives you good RNG. I think giving into second guessing your decision undermines your ability to make your next rational decision. I don’t think you can do much better than following what excites you, making rational decisions, and not attaching your worth to the outcome.

TL;DR: You probably made the right call.