My suggestion: Major lifestyle change before you burn out and involuntarily go out of business for six months. Take control of this while you still can.
Ask HN: What do you do when your entire being opposes the task at hand?
21–30 of 210 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you do when your entire being opposes the task at hand?
#22you have to make a choice imo. you can either suck it up and get on with it or flat refuse to do it. if you feel strongly enough then refuse to do work and quit the job... fulfil your contract to the minimum possible whilst giving them every legal reason possible to want to pay you to go away.
however i feel inclined to reserve that for serious problems, like weak leadership, oppressive or immoral behaviour etc. rather than poor features or undesirable work...
doing things you don't want to do is part of work. letting your leaders make their mistakes and learn from it is part of it too. i'm strongly inclined to say you just need to grow up a bit and get on with it... and be grateful that this is a 'problem' for you because its nothing compared to what most people consider to a problem in the workplace.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do when your entire being opposes the task at hand?
#23Yes, I left such a position to go and get a doctorate, because I was fed up with the dumbing-down of the codebase, the way that my colleagues wrote absolute undocumented spaghetti cruft, I had to keep fixing their bugs, and management were making some very dumb decisions about key features. As far as I know they are still going fine, which is surprising given I was the only one who could understand how whole subsyste…
Something else that can help is that once you've learned how to write clean, safe, reusable code, the next step is learning when not to. Clean code is an expense, and there's times to put in the extra effort, and there's times to not. Code's needs are not evenly distributed, in fact they are very unevenly distributed (power law distribution I suspect without proof)... carefully crafting to the n-th degree an end-user GUI page for a marginal feature is probably a waste of time, just make it work. On the other hand, adding a hack to a core routine used by huge swathes of the code may have much bigger negative effects than it even feels like now, and it sounds like it already feels pretty bad.
Consider working on the next level and using this as a chance to study when and where the effort is actually worth it. It may feel like you're handing yourself a license to be sloppier, but if done correctly this actually turns you into an even more capable developer than someone who finely engineers everything, because you'll have that much more time to finely engineer the things that matter once you clear away the time of fine engineering of the things that don't, and on the whole you'll be creating much more value in your code.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do when your entire being opposes the task at hand?
#24People tend to reserve pair-programming for tasks they perceive as being unusual, complex, or otherwise needing extra review. Personally, I've found it can be helpful even when you simply need to stay on task. When you both have the same goal, you can rally each other; it's typical to become more productive together than you would have been apart. If this sounds like it could be your style, grab a buddy and see if yo…
Actually, I find that it works better of the mundane and boring. Pain reduces by sharing it! :P
It's easier to stay on an interesting task, but here a good pair keeps you from going off the rails and totally losing track of the goal.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do when your entire being opposes the task at hand?
#25It seems to me that this kind of situation is what some types of programmers try to escape by creating "amazing" code. This is the kind of code that you come back to a little while later and wonder what you were thinking when you wrote it.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do when your entire being opposes the task at hand?
#26The question I thought this title was asking, and one I'd like to hear answered, is: "What do you do when you're asked to do work that you feel is unethical, as a developer?" For example, I was recently asked to build a system wherein users would be refunded actual money into "credits", and allow the administration to modify the value (1 credit != $1) arbituarily.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do when your entire being opposes the task at hand?
#27Don't let yourself get paralysed by indecision.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do when your entire being opposes the task at hand?
#28Welcome to programming!
"Also I waste considerable amount of time trying to do things in the most readable, maintainable and simple way possible"
Motivation is tied to your attitude here as you are looking to do more 'interesting' work, whereas the task at hand looks boring. However the task at hand could be important for the company, so it is important to take trouble understand the big picture here. Most engineers (and I am one of them) are too self-centered to do this, and this can be debilitating.
It involves coming out of your shell, being proactive to talk to the business, product and other areas and see why these set of features that needs to get done has important implications.
At the end of the day, everything is about service. If you enhance your attitude to think more in a service-oriented way (it is not all about you), this changes your 'attitude profile', and in turn can boost your motivation factor by several orders. Suddenly what looked boring becomes very important. It may mean to be more pragmatic ( no ideological fixations on 'purity of code'), roll up your sleeves and get it done.
The valuable service to the customer, can lead into repeat business, which adds to the bottom line, and that later could mean more bonus for you, which you can use it up for that special time with your BF that you have been planning for a while.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do when your entire being opposes the task at hand?
#29You have no power to choose the features you're assigned to implement. The most, then, for which you may reasonably be held responsible, even by yourself, is that you implement a bad idea in a good way. From the sound of it, you've got a lot of practice at that, and you've made it a habit. That being so, you have nothing for which to reproach yourself. Cultivate detachment, and relieve yourself of the need to try to take on more responsibility than your authority can support. This will free you to concentrate on what you can control, i.e., the quality of your implementation.
And, if you can't change jobs, then consider coming up with a side project. It doesn't have to be commercial, or even of particularly general application; even if you're just scratching an itch of your own, it'll give you scope to exercise the agency whose absence in your day job is giving you fits.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do when your entire being opposes the task at hand?
#30Actually, you could probably quit and it wouldn't be as big of a deal as you expect. Most people over-estimate the risk of quitting. And most people are a lot more understanding than we give them credit for.
Every time I've reached that point that you have described, I've quit. It was the best thing for me every time, too. There is no point wasting your time doing something you don't want to do, especially if it's for someone you care about. You'll just do a shitty job and you don't want to dump shitty jobs on people you care about.
Is it just that the work is boring, or are you being asked to do unethical things? I mean, either way, I would quit, but if it's anything unethical I would urge you to run as fast as possible.
However, if it's just "boring" work, perhaps recasting it in a different light might help. Look at it as a game of seeing how many you can finish in a single week. Stop worrying about doing the "best" job on it. If the project is so boring to you, then you probably shouldn't care so much about the quality of it. Just dump out some garbage, get the checkboxes filled, see how much you can get away with. Make it a learning experience, a chance to test your boundaries.