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0 pointsplutonorm5y ago0 comments

But this is my personality. Given repetitive work I become depressed quite quickly. I say this as a 40 yo who understands themselves well. Yes I can struggle through, but this career has brought me to the brink of suicide on two occasions. Working to the grind of an agile development cycle is poison to me, it drains all color from the world. I'd rather break my bones. Where is the space for people of my color? Who dry up and die if asked to write boiler plate crud code and unit tests for fizz buzz UI elements.

Unless I'm solving a problem that's genuinely intellectualy stimulating then I have 0 interest in coding.

Most of us hide the misery because we know that the only outcome of airing it is dismissal either in the short or the long term.

There is no role for us in this career but having sunk so much time into it we have no other option but to keep on going.

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caffeine5y ago

You have to do your own thing ... usually that's bad advice but for people with the temperament you describe I think it's reasonable.

Also a lot depends on expectations and finding good partners. In a previous job I worked with another guy as a team. I would start projects and get an MVP out and delivering value - then move on to the next thing. He would go through and essentially rewrite them to be high quality, solidly engineered products, well integrated with the rest of the stack.

We both got to do what we enjoyed and were good at: I am very fast at breaking new ground and delivering new value, and find engineering a bit boring. He was very good at improving existing systems, but too slow and plodding to try out new ideas effectively.

nyanpasu645y ago

i have the unmet rambling dreams of the first person, and the anxiety-driven perfectionism and revulsion to poorly written code of the second person... so i'm unhappy thinking about unfulfilled ideas, unhappy writing new programs, and unhappy fixing old programs.

"i can only do so much and of course it's never enough"

i want the perfect programming language, the perfect gui library api and theme, the perfect program, the perfect ide... and i can't accomplish a single one

and of course C++ is an all-devouring Cthulhic monster that does everything but poorly, Rust has immature gui libraries and doesn't fully align with my values and desired features (I want linear typing, strong typedefs/subclasses of integer types, polymorphic variants/anonymous unions, prioritizing iterator generators over async), qt is basically legacy code and Qt Widgets is mostly unmaintained but difficult to fork (to build, create Windows installers, and convince Linux distributions to accept behavior-changing bug fixes), and my personal dream project (https://gitlab.com/exotracker/exotracker-cpp) is vaporware no matter how much i burn myself out making it (trying to both explore new ideas, and engineer them well, at the same time).

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse