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I don’t belong in tech

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Re: I don’t belong in tech

#2

Post by dublinben »

The writer sounds like a crippling perfectionist. The world isn't perfect, and neither is any real program. It's an important step in your personal development to recognize and deal with that.

Perhaps they would be happier as a designer, where they can make everything fit into perfectly neat boxes.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#3

Post by sb8244 »

dublinben wrote: post #2

The writer sounds like a crippling perfectionist. The world isn't perfect, and neither is any real program. It's an important step in your personal development to recognize and deal with that. Perhaps they would be happier as a designer, where they can make everything fit into perfectly neat boxes.

It's interesting because I suffer from perfectionism as well, severely so. Probably for worse, I've also been able to achieve it in a lot of aspects of life. This reinforces my desire for perfection.

The interesting part is that programming is the one place where perfection escapes me, as in I haven't desired for it. I realize there are bugs and caveats to written code. My flip side here is that I strive for perfection of the user's experience. I do get disheartened when a user experiences something negative in the code based I work on.

The key for me has been focusing on the perfection to a user and not perfection of code. There may be a dark edge that they never see, and it's fine.

When there is a careless bug, I still struggle balancing empathy and drive to fix it. That's fine, however, as I'm aware and work to not do it. I could see where someone who strives for perfection would easily get disheartened and feel misalignment in values.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#4

Post by zachlatta »

dublinben wrote: post #2

The writer sounds like a crippling perfectionist. The world isn't perfect, and neither is any real program. It's an important step in your personal development to recognize and deal with that. Perhaps they would be happier as a designer, where they can make everything fit into perfectly neat boxes.

> Perhaps they would be happier as a designer, where they can make everything fit into perfectly neat boxes.

Typically I'd just downvote, but was that condescending comment really needed? This is the sort of toxicity that turns people away from our community.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#7

Post by dunkelheit »

Maybe she should quit doing user-facing stuff and try getting into systems programming for a change. Or some other area where sloppy solutions lead to tangible reduction of business value and thus are not tolerated. Tech is big, no need to quit all of it.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#8

Post by tptacek »

dublinben wrote: post #2

The writer sounds like a crippling perfectionist. The world isn't perfect, and neither is any real program. It's an important step in your personal development to recognize and deal with that. Perhaps they would be happier as a designer, where they can make everything fit into perfectly neat boxes.

Or maybe they'd just rather do computer science than software development.

There are lots of branches of technology work that prize understanding over shipping.

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