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Surviving Disillusionment

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Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#41

Post by horsawlarway »

im3w1l wrote: post #20
cycloptic wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would they though? I think that's a shallow outlook, the importance of saving lives doesn't lessen once you become wealthy. Everyone has to watch their friends and family get old and sick eventually. Compare that to a lot of technology jobs. I think my friends and family will be fine if the schedule at Netflix slips and they have to wait a few years to watch sitcoms in 8K. (Edit: I don't mean to disparage anyone work…

A doctor gets to see the smiles that are the fruit of his labor. The engineer gets to see some metric move by a tenth of a percent.

I think it's actually much worse than this.

A doctor can be fairly certain that a healthy, smiling patient is unequivocally a good thing. A thing to feel proud about.

An engineer is often tasked with moving a metric they don't personally believe to be meaningful, or worth while.

If I'm told that "We're prioritizing new user activation and engagement" and my team's quarterly review will be based on how I move that metric, it's soul sucking to realize that the optimal way to engage new users happens to also be objectively worse for our existing users.

There is no unequivocal "Good" for me to do. I'm not really doing "Good" at all, I'm just making bank for an employer that:

A - Won't return the favor in any meaningful sense.

B - Is of questionable business acumen (Is trading old customers for new customers a viable strategy? Maybe. Maybe not. I don't get to see the discussion and understand the trade-offs that were discussed).

C - Clearly values metrics that correlate to profit over any real pride in their product.

----

Once you dispense with the idea that you're actually helping people with your profession, the only real motivator left is money. Money certainly matters (anyone who says otherwise is lying) but every dollar has a diminishing return on motivation.

If I can pay mortgage/utilities/food and still have enough cash for a night out or a nice drink every now and then, I no longer want more money - I want more fulfilling work.

That might mean making smiles.

That might mean having more control.

That might mean working on a task that judges excellence more objectively than "Making lots of profit".

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#42

Post by borroka »

jkaptur wrote: post #22

> ... running breweries and hydroponic farms, with no desire to ever again touch a compiler, let alone get back into the fray. Reiterating the point of the article: it doesn't need to be this way . Whether tech is your passion, your hobby, or your job, it does not need to feel like a "fray". This website is one of the worst offenders, since it relentlessly, breathlessly promotes new shiny things every refresh. It's a…

But people who get disillusioned with tech are not people who don't want to talk about "JS frameworks" or similar tech topics. Quite the contrary, they want their view to win, broadly speaking, in the conversation or the deployment. It is the lack of agency, not the conversation, the problem for the tech-frustrated.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#43

Post by jimbob45 »

reikonomusha wrote: post #33

Much to the chagrin of many of my fellow career programmers, I’ve always tried to operate slightly against the grain to keep things interesting. I do so not gratuitously, but because I know I’m in this profession for the marathon, and so I need to compromise instantaneous velocity to maintain {energy, sanity, motivation, ...}. I get made fun of and occasionally lambasted for it, but I also frequently outpace my organ…

I like where your head is at but, at least for our company, our workload is such that we’d be doing those puzzles in OT.

Also if there was free time to be put to puzzles, I’d rather remove my mind from programming entirely to refresh when I return.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#44

Post by borroka »

blippage wrote: post #37

I think the author misdiagnosed the problem. It's not Corporate that's the real problem, it's the fact that what you're working on is probably just not that interesting. Plus the fact that you have to keep slugging away with it whether you like it or not. No-one gets excited about writing accounts packages. It reminds me of an anecdote a pro photographer gave to someone thinking of entering the field: if you love pho…

Which in other languages is translated as someone who has interest or passion for an activity, but they are not very good at it.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#45

Post by ofrzeta »

im3w1l wrote: post #20
cycloptic wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would they though? I think that's a shallow outlook, the importance of saving lives doesn't lessen once you become wealthy. Everyone has to watch their friends and family get old and sick eventually. Compare that to a lot of technology jobs. I think my friends and family will be fine if the schedule at Netflix slips and they have to wait a few years to watch sitcoms in 8K. (Edit: I don't mean to disparage anyone work…

A doctor gets to see the smiles that are the fruit of his labor. The engineer gets to see some metric move by a tenth of a percent.

I think that paints an overly romantic picture of being a doctor. In reality you have to work with a bureaucratic health system where there's never enough time for each patient. Also patients might not be as willing to cooperate as you wish (as an example I recently read about cholesterol medication where many doctors advised a healthy lifestyle opposed to medication but many patients just weren't willing or able to change theirs but prefer medication). Getting patients to smile is certainly satisfying but it's also not that easy.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#46

Post by hinkley »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #13

This is a tale as old as time. You get into something because you're passionate about it, and lo and behold doing it for work saps all the fun out. Pick anything creative at all and this will hold true - the more expressive the more challenging it is to find the work not be draining as it competes with business requirements. There's no real suggestion here other than simply recognizing that only a lucky few in life g…

Find the thing you love, and do it for a living is horrible advice.

Many of us have independently revised this to:

Find the thing you love second-most, and do that for a living.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#47

Post by reikonomusha »

jimbob45 wrote: post #43
reikonomusha wrote: post #33

Much to the chagrin of many of my fellow career programmers, I’ve always tried to operate slightly against the grain to keep things interesting. I do so not gratuitously, but because I know I’m in this profession for the marathon, and so I need to compromise instantaneous velocity to maintain {energy, sanity, motivation, ...}. I get made fun of and occasionally lambasted for it, but I also frequently outpace my organ…

I like where your head is at but, at least for our company, our workload is such that we’d be doing those puzzles in OT. Also if there was free time to be put to puzzles, I’d rather remove my mind from programming entirely to refresh when I return.

Maybe so. It depends on the business, as well as the management culture. If the business demands 100% attention 9–5 (or more) and is at risk of failing otherwise, or if management is gung-ho about “getting their money’s worth” out of programmers, then it can’t happen. Where I worked, it was understood this was an avenue to higher productivity, and it paid itself off many times, not the least of which was the contribution to higher retention.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#48

Post by pgt »

My monastery is Lisp (mainly Clojure) and the ritual is functional programming. It keeps me sane and in software.

But today, and for the next two weeks I have to deal with the hell-hole that is the JavaScript/NPM/Webpack ecosystem and it made me want to quit my job.

This is why I warn people about Lisp: it can ruin you and make you unproductive for a long time if you are forced to use inferior tools.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#49

Post by hinkley »

blippage wrote: post #37

I think the author misdiagnosed the problem. It's not Corporate that's the real problem, it's the fact that what you're working on is probably just not that interesting. Plus the fact that you have to keep slugging away with it whether you like it or not. No-one gets excited about writing accounts packages. It reminds me of an anecdote a pro photographer gave to someone thinking of entering the field: if you love pho…

It is amazing to me the classes of software that are still written from scratch by each company instead of using COTS systems instead.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#50

Post by mikelyons »

gabereiser wrote: post #9

20 years in, I stay because of alimony, not because of heart. This article is sooo spot on. My question is, what can we, the collective, do about it? Do we have to become the leaders we wish we had? Or will we fall into the same traps of illusion? Deep Thoughts for a Monday morning.

Do you feel capable of that level of leadership?

I sure don't.

One of the chief causes of my perennial suicidal ideation is the inability to even take care of myself, let alone be a leader of an actualized life or anyone else for that matter.

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