I think my long term career goal of becoming a DBA on multiple platforms will probably serve my family better, anyway.

Coding has changed in the last 3-4 years from being an enjoyable longer-term thing, permanent thing to being a "how fast can you get it out the door"?

Earlier in my career, projects took 1-2 years, delays were not the end of the world, and we got it done "right" in due time. Now, if you don't have a major deliverable every 3 months, then you're toast. It's even worse at my company because the owner of the company believes you can have it written in a day or two. (But, I'm not complaining, because it IS a paycheck.)

It's no longer fun for me to be in a race to get things done. I would rather take my time and do a good job. The code I'm rewriting now was thrown together in a day, then literally thousands of man hours have been expended trying to "patch" it to keep it running. I don't believe in MilSpec, either, but I do believe in at least some software design.

My boss wanted me to patch this crappy code, AGAIN, on Friday and have it done by noon. When I was done patching at 2:30 pm, it was too late to put it in for the day and he was disappointed. (What kind of crap is that?) Now the manager of customer support is on vacation, I'm not allowed to patch anything, and I've decided to take the week and just rewrite the whole damn thing. It's only 1000 lines of code anyway, and about 600 lines are just crap. It will be 1000 lines when I finish, but 600 of those lines will be comments (and 400 lines of really good code).

Glen Austin
Who is deciding that it's better to DBA than to code.