How to be a sane programmer

What if there is just another dimension to this?

OP could be wired to be very productive if he doesn't have side projects and instead focuses on hobbies.

yangez's examples (parent of your comment) could be wired to only be very productive if they do nothing but become immersed in their work.

What if some of us can only thrive with imbalance by nature?

Or worse. In a crowded office that can't control its climate with small screens and poor equipment. The equipment makes a lot of difference, I agree, as does the environment. It's unfortunate that many companies do not realize this and implement policies to cut costs that end up just hurting productivity in general and their bottom lines in the end. To not see this from a management or executive POV is to be intentionally blind. It's a loss all around from the individual to the whole company and one that can't be mitigated against any other way.

I used to find, btw, the pressure of programming difficult to deal with on an ongoing basis. Then one day it occurred to me:

Perfection in the big projects doesn't matter. The world is full of crap software. Perfection in the little pieces however really matters, and this makes it possible to build better software.

I still have stressful days, usually involving bug reports and unhappy users. However, for the most part that realization meant that rather than the stress being an ongoing thing, sometimes lasting days or weeks, it became an occasional thing usually lasting only hours, and the sense of beauty in seeing successful things come together has become more common. That doesn't mean you spend time chasing perfection on every little detail because a lot of things are legitimate tradeoffs and you won't know some deficiencies until it is actually used.

To me that is craftsmanship.

Disclaimer: Off Topic

I am feeling like this (burnout/mental sickness of programmers) is becoming a successful theme on HN lately. Many-many posts are popping up to front page.

Not like it's a bad thing, being myself a victim it feels good to read experience of fellow coders who has seen what I am about to see or how to avoid seeing it, but still, it is becoming a theme. I am imagining hordes of posts on this topic coming up. Or may be we already have 'em, just the good ones are popping up to front page.

There are actually more than one pattern emerging. I think I gotta hint of for writing posts more likely to hit front page.

> Show me a world-class writer who doesn't obsess about his writing with every waking moment.

> Show me a master painter who doesn't paint every single chance she gets.

Well, there's Dante Gabriel Rosetti, who decided one day to give up painting and become a poet. While he is remembered more for his paintings than poetry, his poetry carries with it the essence and soul of his paintings as well as the imagery. He decided to paint with words. I don't think he obsessed about writing all the time. As he put it, though, "A sonnet is a moment's monument."[1]

This gets at what I think is an important point though. All of these creative endeavors require real-world knowledge. Hemmingway went out on adventures. For Tolkein, writing fiction was not his day job (teaching about medieval literature and linguistics, however, was). You can see their respective works that the live of the writer and the other obsessions beyond writing are what make the author.

Similarly with programming, yes, it is a technical endeavor and yes it is a creative one. However just like writing the great works of fiction, these don't come out of nothing. They require a context grounded in other knowledge and experience.

[1] http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/medievalism/areading.html Note that this was the introductory sonnet to "The House of Life" which chronicals Rosetti falling in love, getting married, coping with his wife's death, and finally finding solace in his religious worldview. The poem, despite its abstract nature is full of classical Greek imagery and something one could probably write volumes about. At the same time, it is an exposition on why he wrote poetry, and it provides the framework for fully understanding the hundred or so sonnets in The House of Life in that way. There are love sonnets, and sonnets which, as he puts it "in Charon's palm it pays the toll to Death" (i.e. allowing the dead and the living to begin to move on).