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Surviving Disillusionment

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Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#61

Post by gabereiser »

mikelyons wrote: post #50
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.

If you wait for yourself to be capable, you aren’t growing my friend.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#62

Post by andrepd »

ci5er wrote: post #56
quickthrower2 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do "book clubs" and we are doing a Hackathon soon where I work. I think these things do keep you motivated. I am not ready to use lisp! But I do like to have a side project going at work. Often I merely get to think about the side project an maybe do a tiny bit of research, but it's motivating. It usually of the form "what would disrupt our app" or "why don't we just X". By side project I mean for work, not me com…

How does the "Book Club" thing work? By briefly observing it at my pre-Covid work-place, it seemed that (somehow) a book was chosen, people would buy and read it within about 30 days, and then sit around the lunch table and discuss their impressions or feelings or something. I read about 5 fiction and 2 non-fiction books per week, so the reading is not the challenge for me. The challenge for me is that I feel that I…

Do you really read a book every day? That strains belief.

But I don't understand. What do you mean by "touchy feely" book, and why are you afraid you will be ostracised by your opinions?

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#63

Post by Cancan82 »

ssivark wrote: post #55
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…

If you get around to setting up a blog or a github repo with these examples, I’m sure a lot of us would find it interesting :-)

Agreed.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#64

Post by ci5er »

Bodell wrote: post #59
ci5er wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does the "Book Club" thing work? By briefly observing it at my pre-Covid work-place, it seemed that (somehow) a book was chosen, people would buy and read it within about 30 days, and then sit around the lunch table and discuss their impressions or feelings or something. I read about 5 fiction and 2 non-fiction books per week, so the reading is not the challenge for me. The challenge for me is that I feel that I…

"Touchy-feely" doesn't really explain to me what potion you hold that would be criticized. What is it you usually read? Why would your comments on the emotional content on a book ostracize you?

I guess it depends on workplace culture? I have worked and/or consulted at places where I would not have been (in general) afraid to be bold.

Books like "Think" by Simon Blackburn don't bother me to comment on. They are pretty light treatments of the underlying topics, but (as philosophy), they are framed as rational discourses. (Whether they are or not is a different topic).

Topics about things like emotional intelligence (EQ) or persuasion or even nudging or race-relations in the 20th century can trigger a fairly rapid group response (primarily amongst the younger co-workers), and then you get to feeling piled upon (and even cancelled) pretty quickly.

It's a new world, and I'm pretty old, and as a sit-at-my-workstation-and-code engineer, I'm guessing that I may have allowed myself to get behind the curve on normative (allowable?) social opinions.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#65

Post by Cancan82 »

“Develop a routine to keep drudgery away and the romance of technology close. Practice it religiously. Physical mechanisms and analog circuitry are better than digital; used hardcovers are better than Kindle. Know your long-term goals.”

This is so hard - even waking up the same time everyday is rough because you never know if you are going to pull a late-nighter, you know?

I’ve heard this from psychologists as well... something I need to work on... thank you for the reminder.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#66

Post by reikonomusha »

ssivark wrote: post #55
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…

If you get around to setting up a blog or a github repo with these examples, I’m sure a lot of us would find it interesting :-)

Some of them were posted here but it wasn’t regularly updated. http://watrophy.com/

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#67

Post by ci5er »

andrepd wrote: post #62
ci5er wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does the "Book Club" thing work? By briefly observing it at my pre-Covid work-place, it seemed that (somehow) a book was chosen, people would buy and read it within about 30 days, and then sit around the lunch table and discuss their impressions or feelings or something. I read about 5 fiction and 2 non-fiction books per week, so the reading is not the challenge for me. The challenge for me is that I feel that I…

Do you really read a book every day? That strains belief. But I don't understand. What do you mean by "touchy feely" book, and why are you afraid you will be ostracised by your opinions?

1) I have for a long time. Now with Kindles, I don't have to load 10 paperbacks into my computer bag every time I go on a global jaunt. A lot of time in airplanes and hotels gives you a lot of time for this (on average - which is why I said "per week", not "per day"). But, most under 250 page non-fiction books can be polished off in less than two hours. A lot of people spend two-hours/day watching some Netflix movie - this is the same thing.

2) I guess the ones that are based on subjective interpretation instead of objective fact (whatever that is today). There is a book called "How we know what isn't so" (https://www.amazon.com/How-Know-What-Isnt-Fallibility-dp-002...), and it talks a fair amount about humans can clash by developing different interpretations of reality that they think are really real. I guess this isn't "touchy-feely"; I guess it is just that the reason I got into engineering is that machines are a lot more predictable and understandable than humans (to me). I did not mean to denigrate anyone's choice of book; I just didn't have a better term at hand (I still don't!)

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#68

Post by 29athrowaway »

Many people are attracted to software development because of compensation. But not everyone. Some people are developers because they like to develop software.

Software development organizations can be a good place to work, but the taker mentality in software engineering makes everyone miserable.

And the more money there is in software, the more takers join the industry: people that truly hate development and see it as means to an end.

They want to stop being developers as quickly as possible because they hate development and see it as a lowly way of life. They feel entitled to manage others despite not caring about what they do. They resort to business excuses even when their contribution to the business are code deliverables.

And some organizations are dumb enough to indulge into that.

And from there, it is a downwards spiral. You want to hire the best, but at the same time you have entitled managers that hate development and punish people that care about what they do and make feel demoralized instead of inspired.

For a developer, the code you work on is a mental place. And if that place is chaotic, developers will be unhappy because their working conditions are inadequate, unless what truly makes you happy is clocking out at 5pm instead of getting to work in the morning.

There are people out there telling developers that messy chaotic codebases are normal and they should adapt to chaos and tech debt instead of trying to do something about it. I do not think that is the answer.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#69

Post by bobthechef »

Maybe people are failing to understand that work is often uninteresting. The expectation that it will be and must be can itself be a cause of despair.

From the economic perspective, no one cares whether you find your work interesting. You don't either when you buy a product or a service. Someone is paying you for some product or service, not to make your life fun. That's your problem. You think everyone else is having lot of fun at work? You want to go tell them how uniquely awful your life is? How you thought work was supposed to be a 24/7 orgasm? How your jobs is about _you_ and _your_ jollies and not the client or the user?

Perhaps a maximum 40hr work week would be a better industry benefit than free snacks and the other goofy gimmicks that companies like Google like to ply people with. That way, you can spend the extra time on your hobbies.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#70

Post by trustfundbaby »

I'd like to chip in with a slightly different take ... as a minority engineer, one of my greatest sources of frustration and disillusionment is how an occupation that is ostensibly lends itself to much clearer and objective outcomes and approaches is anything but.

There is an unfairness that is so hard to see if you're not a minority in tech, that leads to lots of minority men just saying 'fuck it, this isn't worth it' (there's even an article about this https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/04/27/toxic-wo...), and recently I've been finding myself on that same path ... at least till my fortunes changed and I got a different more understanding manager.

But the bitterness of my experiences with previous managers, the powerlessness you feel in the face of being treated so differently never leaves you. It really sucks to find out that the whole idea of it just being about the code, meritocracy blah blah blah ... isn't really true. And worse still, that quite a large group of people, don't really buy that this stuff really happens.

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