Ask HN: What do you do when your entire being opposes the task at hand?

Frankly, it's just called programming. Programming is that pesky, resilient three-headed monster between your idea and the finished product, you have to give in and tame it.

Yes, 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 subsystems worked, mainly because I knew how to write safe threaded code.

But, enough on that. A few years before then, I felt like you did, but I wasn't actually in that situation. There is a very real positive feedback loop in effect - you feel like you're doing a bad job, so work longer hours on it, end up taking longer, feeling like you have "wasted" hours, and feel worse about doing a bad job.

Believe your employers when they say you are doing great, otherwise you're likely to be heading down the burnout route which had me off sick for half a year. It's not every coder that has such high standards as you, and that is not something to be ashamed of. Be proud of the code that you have produced. Think to yourself "It's just as well I wrote this bit, because if X had, it would have been awful".

I know this sounds like extreme arrogance, however sometimes it is necessary for the purposes of regaining balance. It sounds like you are being a little too humble. If it gets too bad though, get some help from someone.

While I can 100% relate to your scenario, a big part of being a professional at any job (not just development) is being able to set aside your personal feelings and emotions and get your job done.

It's good that you are getting your job done, but it seems that you are still having issues setting aside your personal feelings and emotions. This is pretty normal for inexperienced developers. It's something you should focus on working on.

Here's how I developed that skill:

1) Remind myself that this is not my company or my project. It's someone else's. There's no reason for me to feel so personally invested in the project as a whole. If I've voiced my concerns and thoughts and been overruled, then my job is to get what is asked of me done to the best of my ability.

2) Have side projects that ARE personal and that I CAN be emotionally invested in. When you have a side project where you do call the shots and it's done 100% the way you want, you will find it is easier to not be so emotional over your day job.

3) Lastly, I have found that as I get more experienced and better at explaining myself, situations where managers overrule me and tell me to do something that is against my own recommendation become more and more rare (they'll still happen sometimes as long as someone above you can make unilateral decisions, so never expect it to fully go away.)

It's good that you've recognized your situation needs to change. Best of luck.

Unless it's morally against my ideals, like violating privacy, stealing money from kids with phones, etc., I don't see that many problems with features I don't agree with. They want it, they pay, why not? Surely, if it was my own company or a team I'd value, then I'd hesitate to implement that feature and argue with everybody about it. But at some point, I leave the project and once I don't I own it anymore, I don't have problems with features I don't like. That is, unless they tell me /how/ to solve the task.

What helps me most is finding a technical challenge that makes the feature interesting and fun to implement. This shouldn't be too hard, if you are free to design the feature technically. Hope that little hack helps you getting things done.

I post about it on Hacker News to procrastinate