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

As a programmer and perfectionist with Impostor Syndrome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome), I've learned some ways to mitigate these frustrations and stress causing issues, and figured they might be worth sharing.

I think many of us know your pain, and as a consultant I'm exposed to it on a pretty regular basis. It takes some of the fun out of my job for sure, but I don't let it stress me out. First, we should always want to be passionate about the projects we work on, and I think this is a result of being passionate in general. Being passionate makes it enjoyable, and it allows you to bring your best work forward (which is rewarding), but in our industry we must always create a balance of cost and quality in the midst of a very complex process. To me, this all boils down to priorities and expectations.

When you take your own priorities and combine them with those of someone else, you will never be able to get them to mesh completely. Your priorities may be to make quality code, or to make it elegant or smart -- easily maintainable, extensible, etc. etc. These are things that make it fun, and programmers all know the benefits of these things. Clients, or your bosses, may not understand the importance of these things, or they may, and they may be willing to pay it down later, whatever the case may be, there are conflicting priorities at play and this is the thing you must mitigate to avoid stress.

For me, I must either disregard the external priorities entirely and do it the way I believe it "should be done", or I must disregard my priorities entirely and adopt the external priorities as my own. This may result in technical debt, or a slow progression in the future, or can raise the potential of bugs to be introduced, but these are not my concerns if they are not part of the external priorities.

It's important that you communicate all of my concerns up front, and if it doesn't impact the priorities that are communicated, you must trust that it's ok. If you don't trust that it will be ok, or think you will be negatively impacted by doing it the way you're being asked to do it, you should leave. A management(or client)/ employee relationship is built on trust, and if you don't have that trust you will be less happy than you could be.

"You have to have one" has been true since we lost our ability to photosynthesize, and it won't be false, at a minimum, until we replace all labor with robots and develop an effectively infinite energy source for those robots.

> people don't need to clean toilets for a living,

I swear to you, our janitor is the happiest, hardest working person in the building. Everyone looks up to him. But I can totally see where he couldn't work at McDonald's, let alone do QA runs on lab systems (a lab tech's job), or diagnose disease. And I think a genuine source of his happiness is having a job. Basic income doesn't solve the problem of feeling valued.

My third point addressed this and the OP pre-emptively stated he/she isn't open that at the moment.

>'I've had this argument with my stepfather until he became abusive.'

That's not terribly surprising given your selective comprehension and tendency to speak in absolutes [1][2][3][above] about who other people are or what they should do.

Chill out.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7451659

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7486177

3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7452011

> (I am not in a position to change jobs at the moment. I am helping my > BF's startup by doing this job.)

Quit. Get out. Work out a plan with your BF. It's no good to you or him if you destroy yourself on work you hate. Be happy and poor together rather than rich and dysfunctional apart.

I've never had to work (for a long time) in a job I truly hated, but I've felt the pain of working in a company with a poor management culture -- it's taken me a long time to get back the joy of development since I left. I now work in a completely different, low paying job -- but it's better being payed less and not having to compromise your work every day. I'll probably end up with another job in the industry (well, I hope, anyway!) -- but I'll be very careful in choosing where I apply -- unless I manage to make a living independently.

For you it sounds pretty much anything, anywhere would be an improvement though...

I had a gf that worked in a job that crushed her (she did the right thing, moved away, got certified as a padi instructor and now lives with her husband and their child, both working as diving instructors -- I'd say she made the right choice :).

Quitting might not mean that everything works out for you and your current BF -- but it sounds like staying will ensure that things will not work out for you.

Anyway, good luck, whatever you end up doing...