In the movie Moneyball, we learn that the Billy Beane character, when he entered baseball as a young player, was judged as a potential superstar by scouts. But he turns out to be a bad performer in the real game. He gave up other opportunities to play Major League Baseball. So those baseball scouts actually ruined his life.

I think I'm a lot like him. How can I break out of this?

I happen to be very good at a-ha problems, which show up often in interviews. I know a lot about how to optimize algorithms. I can talk learnedly about the tradeoffs between various paradigms. Interviewers are often very impressed.

The problem is, the job has nothing really to do with the above skills. It's mostly about slogging through poorly documented Java framework code, and getting some masochistic buzz from it. The desire to craft perfect code is an obstacle. Know how to do it better? Congratulations, you will be permanently dissatisfied.

And let's be clear, most of the job, even under the best of circumstances, isn't about coding. At best it's about communication and careful risk management. At worst it's cutthroat office politics in an industry that has too much money to ever treat people in a sane or humane manner.

I get depressed about this, and then those same people who judged me a potential superstar start collecting evidence to fire me.

So I'm in a job search right now. I just aced another interview. It's a company that wants to pay me way, way too much money to work on updating their legacy app. I have money woes right now but I'm considering turning it down. I am sick of being a disappointment.