>One thing newly minted adults would do well to realize is your first few years at any job are going to be spent doing the grunt work.

Is this what most people experience?

The earliest bits of my career consisted of me getting thrown in to situations for which I was in no way qualified, then being expected to sink or swim without much help. Often nobody at the company really knew how to do the job I was hired for.

Great fun, really; by the time I figured out how to "swim" I usually decided it was about time for a new job.

I guess that's the thing... when there are problems... go solve them. If the boss doesn't give you more work, go find some.

I had something similar, but we're lucky. If you go to work for a "big company" they'll have their whole dumbed down training program, you'll have to learn to push paper around "their way", etc.

is this always so? when I was working for yahoo a few years back I got my little brother a internship. He did a whole lot of useful work; on his resume he brags that he replaced three temps, and he's not exaggerating... he really was more productive than three dudes from a well-known technical body shop.

I mean, I think the difference is more in the person than in the job. At yahoo, if my brother wanted to, he would have been able to skate by doing almost no real work at all... but he didn't. well, part of that was me pushing him a little... if I get you a job I expect you not to embarrass me. But I think he would have done useful things anyhow.

In my experience, yeah, you aren't always expected to accomplish much... but if you decide to do something useful anyhow, people almost never go out of their way to stop you. (they might not help you... but they won't stop you if you don't require anything of them.)

I remember my first programming job was littered with finished projects that were never put into production because that would have been work. (I converted our access billing system from a shared-file db that was crashing once a week because 300 people accessed the file over a NT share at the same time to an ODBC connected database... never implemented because the parent company was going to replace it anyhow. We continued repairing the database for the rest of the year I worked there.)

But enough of the shit I wrote had enough of an 'immediate need' (customer impacting seemed to be the line) to get implemented that I was pretty happy with the job.

Actually, that job was /really satisfying/ because so much was so obviously broken that a few small fixes on my end (a three line patch to apache to make dynamically configured mass virtual hosting work with our weird naming scheme/directory layout, and a few lines of c to make our pop3 redirector use a real db rather than a seperate file for each of our three million emails to determine where to redirect the user) made some really dramatic improvements to the service. Yeah, that was really, really fun. Honestly, I'm not sure I've been quite as productive since.

Part of it might have been that nobody knew what to do with. I was hired up from tech support (god, I sucked at phone tech support) to the NOC, but the rest of the NOC were network guys and i was hired as a programmer. (Hah. that was a laugh. I had read the white book in high school, and I taught myself perl while I was on phone support at night.) and the boss was some leathery EE who was great fun at first, then it was switched out to a MBA who wanted to be my friend, but otherwise pretty much let me do what I wanted as long as I didn't piss off the ops guys.

Funny story, I found one of the ops guys who worked with me at that job many years later, after the .com crash... working in a deli, and I hired him.

Depends on the company, and your manager. Y! is still fundamentally a tech company and they've had a lot of really good people there over the years.

IBM or Lockheed Martin, probably quite a bit different. (I have in fact gotten in trouble for implementing something useful at one particular job I briefly held. It made people look bad, and I was written up for not staying in my lane.)

hah. well, I've never seen that, but I imagine I have massive selection bias (I mean, if you are a 'by the book' company, you are pretty much going to bin my resume right off... there's no "education" section.)

The only time I've gotten in trouble for 'getting out of my lane' is when I started to take over someone else's project, but didn't finish, which seems reasonable to me.

Your experience pretty well mirrors my own.

My first several jobs I was thrown into the deep end and expected to find my own way back up. Typically about the time I'd get a solid handle on what I needed to do, the job turned into something I was much less interested in.

You're telling me, my expectations absolutely were too high in this case.

However, at this particular company, it was actually the accepted culture to hate your job and hate the company. Seriously, people seemed to compete with each other at how miserable they were. 2-3 years would not have made a difference here.

That aside, assuming it would have gotten better in 2-3 years, is it really worth spending 2-3 years of your early-twenties being miserable, convincing yourself that it's necessary and will get better at a later time? Afterall, that's what everyone at this company had done, except replace 2-3 years with 20-30 years; they were in it for retirement.

Where do you draw the line? I guess that's a personal decision everyone has to figure out for themselves. My line was 8 months.