At a previous job where I had basically become the manager of my manager and held my department together, I spent 3 months just trying to get a meeting with the guy who had the power to give me a raise.

In that time I found another job and put in my two weeks, my new job paid 90k but for shits and giggle I told them I was getting 130 and asked if they could do any better, they immediately came back with 110 which was almost worse since I was only initally asking for 80. I said no and went on to my new job which was 110% the right call.

Shortly after that they announced that they were selling the company, I heard from my old manager that the sale went through but in the mix that had to drop a good chunk of their clients from my old department (the most profitable one) since I was the only one there who knew how to handle a majority of the work and the only reason they could bring them on was me. I don’t know how it all worked out but the old owner got sued for fudging numbers and is now the current owner.

Last I heard they fumbled keeping my department alive and all of my coworkers got layed off along a lot of other people and the company’s not doing so hot.

Not really a dumb reason, but back in the day I was stuck in the WordPress developer loop and tired of it. I was pretty familiar with a handful of languages, but wasn’t doing much more than setting up themes and building out pages with builders.

One day I heard the CTO talking about a tool he would love to have but couldn’t find anything that worked how he needed it to. The CTO was a big buzzword guy and recently shared an article with my manager at the time about how C++ was “the best language”. So naturally I chimed in and told him I could build that tool easy peasy and I would use C++ obviously because it’s the best language.

It was such a simple tool, basically just matching phrases and categories and spitting out a list of options. It took me months to make, but I learned a lot and it kind of worked for the most part and everyone was happy. I eventually got a de-facto department in the company where I would just build internal tools and handle some legacy codebases that they were previously outsourcing.

I later on got my current job because of that leap.

TLDR: I learned C++ because I was bored and lied that I already knew it.

I do something similar, I’m on a dev team of 2 and a while back we started going in once a month for a “planning day” where we spend a couple hours in person planning out our month and spend the rest of the day talking to the teams who actually use our software to get feedback and ideas. At first the owner would take me and the other dev out for lunch but we’ve turned it into a whole office thing. So usually the whole offices shuts down for about 2 hours for a nice free lunch when we come in. One day a bunch of us went out for mini golf after lunch on the bosses dime. Another month a couple of us played old Xbox games and smoked cigs in the basement while we “brainstormed”.

To a lot of people that’s too much effort for “no reason”.

People care, but not enough to put any effort in whatsoever.

This is a great response that I’m gone a steal the next timee someone has an issue with my son carrying around an Elsa doll

I generally agree with this, there’s specific circumstances but for the most part its true.

I went from a C# position to PHP, to Python, to perl all with little or no experience with what I was jumping in to. There’s different nuances and the syntax might take a bit to get used to but as long as someone understands the how and why of what their code is doing that can be pretty easily transfer to most other languages. It’s all about the fundamentals.