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

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

#91
post #46

I felt obliged to comment because I feel I know what you are talking about and I also worry that much of the advice posted so far is wrong at best, dangerous at worst. I am 42-year-old very successful programmer who has been through a lot of situations in my career so far, many of them highly demotivating. And the best advice I have for you is to get out of what you are doing. Really. Even though you state that you a…

The personal identity paragraphs literally feel like they were directly removed from my head. So relieving to realize I'm not the only one who feels that way. The level of self doubt that can encroach on you when you are actually just doing the wrong job is really frightening.

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

#92
>>Have you been in such situations?

Similar - not coding though.

>>How do you get in the zone and get it done

I treat it as an optimization problem. Specifically because I have a problem with this too:

>>I waste considerable amount of time trying to do things in the most readable, maintainable and simple way possible

So I consciously aim to force that compromise between quality & time more towards the time side. That goes against my fundamental nature, but I've come to the conclusion that I must learn this...and as a result it feels more like a learning & personal development challenge rather than me doing something I don't want.

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

#93
post #58
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wouldn't mind writing unclean code if I weren't the one who's going to have to maintain it and add new features to it in the near future or the years to come.

This is part of what I mean by learning when it is and is not appropriate; I tried to make it clear it was not a blanket permission slip to be sloppy (anticipating that obvious misunderstanding of my point). If you end up having to seriously maintain "unclean" code, you did it wrong. You will do it wrong before you get the hang of it, no sarcasm. Untrained gut intuitions are not very reliable here, and the only training available is practice.

And on the other hand, "maintain" is a very ambiguous word. If you are frustrated because it took you ten minutes to add one field to a form, once in the course of 3 years (to put some concrete numbers on for example's sake), you still came out ahead not spending an additional 10 hours polishing the code to a fine sheen, so you could be happy adding that one field 3 years later and saving that ten minutes. If you're frustrated because you actually have to overhaul it significantly, and it's a mess, and now you've also dropped all your context and can't remember what is what at all, and you could have cleaned up up three years ago in three hours and now lose two weeks just to understanding what the hell, then you've lost, yes. And of course "maintain" can mean a lot more than either of those two cases, too.

And as a final note, it's all gambling, and that is also something you must come to grips with. You don't really know where the changes are going to be in three years. However, you can learn to guess with a success rate much higher than mere random chance. (Don't forget to discount future time appropriately.)

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

#94
post #46

I felt obliged to comment because I feel I know what you are talking about and I also worry that much of the advice posted so far is wrong at best, dangerous at worst. I am 42-year-old very successful programmer who has been through a lot of situations in my career so far, many of them highly demotivating. And the best advice I have for you is to get out of what you are doing. Really. Even though you state that you a…

I agree and it's a much better and longer answer than mine. Then I realized who you are. Off-topic, I probably speak for many when I say I am glad you found this path for yourself - because you make some amazing art.

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

#95
post #46

I felt obliged to comment because I feel I know what you are talking about and I also worry that much of the advice posted so far is wrong at best, dangerous at worst. I am 42-year-old very successful programmer who has been through a lot of situations in my career so far, many of them highly demotivating. And the best advice I have for you is to get out of what you are doing. Really. Even though you state that you a…

> I burned myself out once and it took at least 12 years to regain full productivity. Ouch. Took me two years. Six months completely out of work and then the rest slowly building up to full time. My workplace bent over backwards to take care of me, which was fantastic. I don't know where you are based, but you may not be in a country where the employee has this level of protection. I would agree 100% - don't let it g…

In which country are/were you?

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

#96
I spent a lot of time forcing myself to conform to others' wishes and will. Or to "work around" the problems, e.g. by staying late -- both to get some quiet time at work in which to concentrate, and to avoid some nasty neighbor issues at home.

Ultimately, I ended up at another definition of that word: "Spent".

I'm just saying...

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

#97
I was in the same position as you five years ago. I decided to leave and work on my own product. I worked 80-hour weeks for months and years, sacrificed my health and relationships, but the motivation of working on my own thing kept me going. It was incredible. Just a few months ago, the product was acquired, and I joined their team. And now I'm dealing with the same nonsense I was dealing with at the original job.

As developers, this problem isn't going away any time soon. Our options are basically to create our own thing and be our own boss so there is no management to frustrate us, or just give in, write the code, take the check, and enjoy our lives outside of work. It's that simple, but it's also quite liberating when you allow yourself to accept it.

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

#98
Why would your managers fire you?

Your managers demanded a stupid feature, and you took long time implementing the stupid feature due to its complexity.

The only thing missing is you need to warn your managers before you start coding such as "This is going to take long time due to the complexity, many many weeks. Also I don't think it's right for the product either."

As long as expectations are clear beforehand, and you met those expectations, then no one is getting fired, and therefore you should relax and enjoy coding Easter Eggs into each shitty feature.

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

#99
If I was in that situation I'd try to get a different job. I know how hard it is to do that in the current economy though, so failing that I'd just do the minimum needed and be uncompromising about working only the assigned hours so as to maximize my utility outside of that particular employment role.

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

#100
It seems your internal struggle about your perceived inefficiency is burning you out. Rightfully so if you are wasting time on what's not particularly important. Do your managers value the quality of your work as much as you do? If not, do you think you'd be able to live with a slightly lower quality deliverable that frees you from the stress? Perhaps it would allow you to work on that feature you do want to work on.

We have a right to be happy. We should make decisions that satisfy the majority of our lives and where do what we love. For things not under our control, we still need to love what we do.

The easiest solution to your problem is creating discipline and decisiveness. When you give yourself more hours to work than you are expected to, you create a vacuum of inefficiency. You work unsustainably on things of little value. Instead I would force you to a) figure out your success criteria, b) what are those steps, c) prioritize those steps, and most importantly d) set time limits for each of those steps. The constraint of time will force you to get to the 80% quickest. I have written some articles on these exact problems and in the process of creating an app with those insights. Feel free to read more here: https://medium.com/produce-productivity/ee13c1600b6b

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