The Darkside of Software Engineering is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural

As an unemployed software engineer, I'm glad that I'm back at the farm

Software industry is weird because there are these cool fang influencers who tell everyone how the industry is, but they have jobs/work in enviroments that arent the reality for 99,x % of people. The only other industry similiar to that is finance, where influencers talk about their cool wall street jobs while 99% of their audience end up in a district savings bank where they permit loans for car port extensions or a new bath room. For many people, the path to unhappiness is predetermined from the very beginning!

I've definitely felt the "fear of being left behind" before. In a previous position we weren't using anything "modern," and I was only keeping up with newer things because I was sacrificing home life to learn. It was exhausting!

About burnout, for me it's the opposite, doing backend is the fastest way to burnout. But maybe it's like that because most of my time with backend is with Java (not because the language per se, but architecture of the majority of apps built with it), doing the simples change require an insane amount of files, connections, binders, configs. You spend more time debugging and tryind to understand what's going on and where you can put your code than actually coding

Your comment about Hurry is something I realized in my own life recently. An example that clicked for me a while ago was someone describing koi fish swimming in a muddy river or pond. Those who swim too fast kick up the dirt and cloud the water, they are swimming fast but aimless. You need to go slow enough to not kick up the silt and dirt. And in the end if you do this by being intentional, you will get to where you want to go much faster worker a lot less hard/stressed. HUGE. Love the content!!

As a new software engineer back in the day I looked forward to learning new things with bright eyes. It was great. Slowly, slowly it downed on me I had spent two or three decades basically learning how to do the same things but in a different way. For a long time it seemed every project I joined used a different language: Algol, PL/M, Coral, Ada, Pascal, C, C++... that is great, they all have their sweet features, but it seemed to me they were all conceptually the same. I was not really learning anything new. I was just using new syntax, new libraries, etc for the same old, same old. Depression set in. I lost my will to even look at the new shiny things as they came along. I could say much the same about operating systems and other things. Having said that my career in software has been great. It has gotten me into places and industries I would never have imagined getting into. It has taken me to many countries. Perhaps I have been lucky but I have always worked with wonderful and smart, helpful people in great companies. Eventually a programming language came along that grabbed my attention. Finally a language that offered something conceptually new. A language that prioritised the value of correctness and robustness that was in my first love ALGOL. That language is Rust. Now I run my own little company, work at my own pace, using tools that I choose. Software Engineering is great again.

Honestly this is one of your best takes yet. The amount of support, understanding and overall good advice that you provide here is amazing. Thank you.

I've been programming since 1983 as a kid. I programmed professionally since 1991. I burnt out every 5-7 years, and I didn't know why. I had to take a break for 4 months and then re-engage into employment which is not easy to to do or to explain to prospective employers. In 2015 I retired from programming professionally and started a business to pay the bills. Now, I still spend +30 hours per week programming on my own terms and I love it! I wished I had said NO, NO, NO to all those extra hours I spent working TO MAKE SOMEONE ELSE RICH. It is as simple as that.

Prime is like that funny, friendly and extremely loving senior we all lack in our professional lives. You make me believe in the fact that programming indeed is a happy career if you're into it, I mean you have been in it for over a decade and yet you're never bored of it. A true inspiration.

The "man of momentum" hit home, saw the same burnout when im back from a vacation I lost interest to quite an extent even on things that i was super excited to work on before vacation

“Tons of rejection, tons of hardship, it’s all nostalgia at this point” -CHAD

I've been programming since I was a teenager, it's my passion, and I'm 40 now but you couldn't pay me enough to program for 80 hours a week. Maybe when I was in my 20s but that would kill me now. If they're making people spend that much time at the computer then no wonder they hate their career.

I love being in software, because of what it allows me to do, but I also hate it, because it really is only truly good for people at the very top. It's always the whole Steve Jobs vs Steve Wozniak situation. You do all the work, but people only remember your marketing partner. At a vast majority of companies, you'll be treated as a human resource, and you'll be forgotten as fast as you were introduced

Good advice. I've worked on both sides of this fence - pressure cookers and non-pressure cookers - and within the pressure cookers it really is on you to be your own advocate - sometimes you only get what you're willing to ask for, or even what you're willing to walk away for.

As someone who’s been in software and hardware professionally for 30. I can honestly say that I’m fed up with software engineering. You do the same crap over and over again with different languages and the challenge gets less and less. Ironically the hardware gets faster and the code gets bulkier and slower because of stupid choices like Rest APIs 😂 we code worse! I’ve seen software life cycles go from decades to on average 3 to 5 years. It’s sheer stupidity and that’s also what I see with most developers that graduates after 2000. The whole engineering part is gone it’s become software hacking, trial and error, patch in production. Something that’s just foreign to us old folks. My dad build online testing systems (hard- and software) for bespoke ball bearings. Some is still running in nuclear power plants’ crane that exchanges fuel rods. And tunnel boring machines. Some stuff he found out recently ran literally from the year I was born! That is a 50 year lifecycle! Even the hardware is still running in most cases - DEC PDP-11 is indestructible 😂He recently was invited to check out the new offices and they showed their old colleagues what was still around from their labour; As a token of appreciation for what these now 80+ year olds did. My dad was so proud to see that some stuff was still running on old hardware but even more proud that for newer hardware they’d recompiled his FORTAN code or ram in a PDP-11 emulator when it was the early assembly language stuff. The biggest challenge was creating new interface boards to connect the existing (often also bespoke) transducers to. Now that is rewarding. All my projects start or with “oh this just needs to last 4 years”. It’s not firing you up to do good engineering with that attitude.

I recently worked as a backend developer intern at a company and my experience there can vouch for everything this article has said. The boss once told me during a 7 PM standup that I can only leave after fixing a bug caused by some code written by the previous intern, even though I told him that my mom is calling and it's urgent. My mom fell sick the very next day and I quit the job after 30 more days torture known as notice period. After quitting the job with 4 months of experience, I can't find any other internship and I can understand why many people can't afford to say no to their boss. Some even develop Stockholm syndrome towards this behaviour just to survive because there aren't many jobs left and the market is very competitive.

I feel like a lot of the pressure and stress this guy or girl is talking about is self induced. They deep down feel like they need to prove themselves to themselves or others so they work more. It's hard to overcome especially if your family put pressure on you growing up, but you have to learn how to stop working so much if you want to survive.

Loved this episode, prime. I agree with many things you said. I also have the 3 foundations I try to keep by: eat well (no sugars, no fast/junk food, take it easy on the heavy meats), sleep consistently, exercise regularly. Community is also huge, but I also try to meditate every day. Stay healthy my friends.

The sword of Damocles is from a story where the king of Syracuse (I think) let a guy sit on his throne for a day but he hung a sword over his head to simulate the experience of being king

Agism and tech bullet lists mean 10 years of experience from 20 years ago is effectively useless; even legacy shops fancy themselves as on the cusp of upgrading and will pass you over. I personally love that there's always something new and shiny to play with, but I also get how it isn't really 'optional'. If you want to sit on your sweet vb6 or ROR skills, you'll eventually be stuck in a very poorly managed gig you hate with very few options.

The Damocles' Sword story is a very useful tale...

This sounds exactly like my time at university studying biotech. I ended up falling deep into apathy and escapism, which lead me to my expulsion at last year of study.

Awesome video, and your take is spot on. I'm on the tail end of recovering from burnout myself, and I definitely felt a lot of what this person was feeling. It was also almost entirely my own fault for exactly the reasons you mentioned. I willingly allowed work to take over too much of my life, and I won't even claim I'm anything more than an average performer in my field (if even). It doesn't really matter, because once you enter that spiral you end up in the same place, because the only direction is down. The moment you decide to start sacrificing energy from other areas of your life without a strict time limit, you're hosed. Then when you inevitably see your performance drop you try even harder, sacrifice even more, and that only adds more gasoline to the dumpsterfire that is your productivity and state of mind. I loved my job, loved the people I worked with, and was never pressured into overworking. Whenever I explain to people why I've not been working for months they seem to default to "it must have been an awful place to work", and I have to correct them. It's hard to explain how this happens, but you can see how if you just assume the perspective of this author. I absolutely love learning new things, but in my burnout I just couldn't do it because I felt the weight of how behind I was on projects because I was just not productive. The prospect of truly exploring and learning a new technology was daunting, and the pain is real when you see your colleagues doing these things while you're stuck. And attempts to help just make the problem worse, because nothing stings more than to become a burden to other people. I definitely say most of the blame lies with us, because we are still rare enough that no employer can afford to explicitly create a toxic work environment with extreme hours. We do it to ourselves and to each other by working extra hours, taking work home, and constantly trying to get ahead. I know there can be good reasons to compete and prove yourself, but I think for most people that kind of sacrifice is not warranted. I can tell you that having plenty of pretty numbers in your bank account won't mean much to you when you're burned out, your relationships are failing, and you have nothing going in your life other than binging TV or videogames by yourself because you feel too exhausted after working to do anything else. Even in a positive and friendly workplace you can put the weight of the world on your own shoulders, and you can easily create the toxic environment in your own mind. I think a lot of this does boil down to culture, though. Imagine the reaction you'd get as an assembly-line or retail worker if you took work home with you, or worked overtime for free. Sure, a salaried position does warrant *some* additional stake, but IMHO it should probably be bad form to do it without being directly asked to (and a balance of 40 hours really ought to be maintained). Constantly going above and beyond should be seen as a positive quality, but also as a problem that needs to be corrected for the good of the employee, their coworkers, and the corpany. Burning through bright-eyed recent grads who don't know what they're sacrificing (or who think they're the exception) cannot possibly be the most profitable system unless you have a shortsighted view of things. Not sure where I was going with this other than just ranting, lol. Oh, the bit about being momentum-driven makes me wonder if Primeagen might have ADHD.

Dude I'm literally two years in, but I'm already completely with you on the tools development. I've been working with Terraform to automate generic infrastructure deployments on as many cloud providers as possible so that anybody who has written anything for the web can deploy it anywhere they want with the click of a button if they package it correctly. And the package is containers. That's it. Just containers.

I can so relate to the momentum bit. That's literally what I face every time. I find it extremely hard to switch to vacation mode and then back to work mode. It always ends up being a half assed vacation because I always have it in the back of my mind to keep the work momentum going, knowing I have to go back and switch back and hit the ground running.

You're uploading so much ❤ thanks!

i used to work in a place where i do the same thing over and over and over again, which i absolutely hate. Not only that, im also doing this like 12++ work hr per day. The overtime demand was so bad, i worked 450ish hrs per month. It was pure suffering, but i persevered. I came in as a boy, and came out as a man. Looking back, im so glad i kept suffering and become the man i currently am; i can see the positivity because i've been in bad places.

I had the opposite experience building tools the last year. But that was because every time someone had a problem somewhere, it trickled through a game of telephone up the organization chart to the nearest common ancestor with my dev team, and then back down, picking up a lot of pointless requirements like "it has to have a SPA front-end" and "it has to look like Excel". We were never trusted to understand the original problem and come up with a solution for ourselves.

When things go sideways and you're tired of being a software engineer, there's still many options out there. Of course management/leadership is an option, but you can also pursue roles like a Sales Engineer. Twenty years of developer experience primed me to be extremely successful as a Sales Engineer. I also get to talk to customers, travel, and be more social. The social aspect sounded horrible to me before but now I love it. Being able to talk to developers every day while also building one-off demos that you can later throw away sometimes makes for exciting days. Plus, the pay can be a whole lot more. So, when you're in a rut, look for some of those tangential opportunities where you can still put your skills to good use.

GPT shouldn't make you feel left behind. It doesn't write secure code at all, even when you tell it that it missed buffer overflow or SQL injection, it won't fix it. Without experienced engineers that know what they're doing, it could become like hacking in the 90s again.

There is not only the beautiful world of Netflix-culture, Mr. Streamberry, in big enterprises the blog article exactly describes the working environment. Complex legacy systems were you first debug the application before adding a new feature. Again, you rarely build new a application normally or cool new features on a green field in enterprise companies, you have to deal with old and worst designed existing software. Period. Everybody who isn't ready for this could find themselves very quickly in that exact very uncomfortable situation. So be aware when applying for a new job at an enterprise company.

As a reskiller from the kitchens, it does get difficult to keep up with the hype trains on what is supposed to get you hired. I basically gave up on that and decided to start rolling an MSP with my buddy using modern technologies we like for their effectiveness rather than their popularity. Still getting some details together, but the bottom line is a good system lasts as long as it's well maintained. The less it depends on, the easier it is to maintain. I think if you can effectively leverage those facts, you can carve a niche for yourself. Still testing that theory.

Unfortunately sometimes a bad / unhealthy work environment is the only option for many people, especially juniors

"Creature of momentum" you touched my heart in a profound way @theprimagean Thank you.

Prime is absolutely right, the hell in my head forced me to start looking at things with blind positivity or indifference. Its not easy but you can do it, trust me on that. The world is on fire, but atleast it means you arent gonna freeze to death. * This doesnt mean you shouldnt address the sources of negativity btw, but you can do alot by seeing the brightside.

Just left a job where the standard deploy process was running serveral scripts in a specific order on your local machine, using your local code, straight to prod. And pushing directly to master was common. Also most files had 2000+ lines of unrelated code

im in an awkward phase where I love and hate software, I dont see myself staying in it long term but I’m definitely not stopping it forever. Looking to pivot into another field while still writing software for fun on the side.

Man "Creature of Momentum" is the exact description for me as well. I find it so difficult to start, but once things are going I can be consistent for a long time.

I just can’t relate to these stories, early on my career I was very overworked but one day I decided to say no more often and negotiate more, after that I never worked outside business hours and it didn’t affect my career, it helped me a lot, I naturally was more productive and had more time to study what I was interested. Most opportunities that I had came from side projects, usually dumb ones like telegram bots

I actually really enjoyed this post. It was quite pessimistic, but I think it is someone really feeling it at the moment - they are almost writing this to themselves. I've been through this "dark side" as I had a toxic manager that slowly turned me into a pessimistic person, but now that I've been away for several years I've gotten through it. Sleep, exercise, eating healthily, and social interaction can be the base of the "light side" 💯. It didn't help that my "dark side" coincided with Covid, so my habits were thrown off. Best of luck to anyone going through this - just focus on those good things and take charge - for me it was holding out a little longer until I found a better job opportunity, and relying on my spouse.

10:55 -- I mostly agree with this idea. If you're doing something that seems hard enough (but clearly doable) at a glance, and it will take over 2-3 weeks by your estimate, you really don't know how long it'll take. Most certainly, you'll uncover some part of the problem or process along the way that extends how long it'll take. Sometimes (rare), it could go the oppoosite way and you find that something you thought was north of 2-3 weeks is substantially less because you discover something that does the hard work for you. One of my pet peeves as a software engineer related to deadline pressure, is managers expecting you (the engineer) to put together months long project plans telling them week to week when pieces would be done. What the actual F purpose is this? A deadline as a date is fine, but giving them a week to week playback for that long of a period of time is always a pain in my ass. It feels like double talk because they would also say "oh, its fine if things slide, and get pushed back." So then why am I writing down when I think it'll be done rather than just focusing on getting it done? Why can't my plan list what the pieces are and how they depend on each other rather than spending time an energy describing a future that has a low chance of materializing? No one has told me if this is just a sh*ttest in the corporate world about something else. I've been hit with it way too often and I have easily proven I am a senior level engineer on long lived projects, able to meet deadlines or communicate effectively around realities no one reasonably beats.

If it’s on Medium I just know he’s going to read the worst takes ever.

It's refreshing to see a nuanced commentary on a topic that is usually treated as "this good the other thing bad". Thank you! On the topic of fearing obsolescence and skill depreciation : There is no magic in computer science, every new "thing" is an optimisation on a different older "thing", if you know the old thing, learning the new thing is relatively trivial: microservices is SOA but good, Go is Java but with a better GC scheme and channels, go channels are UNIX pipes, you get it. For anybody starting out, please don't fall for the marketing BS (learn this language or whatever to stay relevant). Knowledge never goes 'out of flavor', products do.

"if you leave your job none of your coworkers will keep in contact with you" that hits hard cause it's been like that for me in school, highschool and University as well.

It's good to have experience in different things. Because it is exactly the same in any other job. You can be an translator, a builder, support engineer, whatever you want. If you think that you can escape this by not doing software, you just don't know life. If you don't set boundaries, the management and clients will do it for you and they always push for what they want. The irony here s that people fear that they will miss out, and be replaced, that they have to work long hours and always say yes to anything, but then they're surprised that it does not pay because that exact attitude makes them easy to abuse. If you don't do that, you'll miss the shitty jobs, sure, but maybe you'll have a shot at something better.

Halfway done watching this and I already appreciate how easy of a time I am getting at my job... Therefore, more motivated to grind and do better here! Communicate and pray you have a good relationship with your manager (lots of things need to go right to accomplish this but if it does happen, it's the dream!)

He has a point about the work following home, though for me its a bit different: I sometime still think about work and actual for work coding in my off hours, where its like a worm that intrudes into my mind and doesn't let me unwind.

I think the last line settles the problem: sometimes it is an issue of just surviving, you don’t have to thrive all the time. Just be ok with being human. Strive to thrive when you want and when you can afford to.

I understand this guy, even if I do not share a lot of the experiences. I think the only thing I dislike are people with a mindset that tries to push the coders to their limits, which leads to such horrible environments. You have to research narcissism if you want to work in Tech, and know how to survive or cope with the situation if you have someone in your company who was hired to find the weakness. Also, it never works out, it will always be random people being fired. Toxic work environment never really saved a business, but it for sure killed them.

21:52 THANKS for the words of encouragement. The only issue is: I hate golang today. For it's interfaces, for the import cycles, for the mess that you get with absence of modules, just packages... My brain is very strained when using this POS

I don't think this is an issue with software engineering, I think it's an issue with bad management. Being a dev sucks when none of the people who are foisting their bad decisions upon you are devs themselves... When product dictates the expectations, and devs dictate the implementation, being a dev is pretty awesome! It's when the lines start to blur that things get frustrating.

Its been 5 years since i start developing. Your last speech exactly true, grow as an orphan in poverty. I can't even remember 3 days in a row that i didn't code 15-16 hours a day. What we lose from birthright we will take ourselves. Rn im miles away from where i start coding but still cant drop overworking habit.

In startups it's tough. I now see it's all round problem. The pressure is hight all the time but client deadlines are the greatest pain. Being the 'All in one' developer. Now with such experiences we get to endure the challenges that come a long. This is the iceberg that everyone does not speak about. We are only told of good salaries. This is an eye opener and good to know many devs also fee the same around the globe. Working on Bugs, Self growth, New features, Life balance and all these are always in conflict

My extensive overtime and learning at home stopped when I went freelance. I work less hours now than ever and earn more than ever. Then again like I said I’ve done it all it’s just a different language or framework or even environment. But all my overtime was on me, because I was the tech lead and I found I had to come up with solutions. Now I realize if I’d done less they’d added another person into the team. When there’s no necessary to add people because work gets down, why add them?

In my opinion Rust is very powerful and versatile thanks to its novel approach to memory management at compile time. But it is the first iteration of that idea in the wild, and I suspect we'll get a better approach on a future language. That, combined with a lot of features such as operator overloading, macros, traits rather than simpler interfaces, makes the language very difficult to learn. I think or hope we will get a language that a let's you do what Rust does, but feels and learns like Go. Imagine, for instance, optional GC except when you don't want it or prefer not to have it. Imagine optional goroutine like concurrency with optional runtime for that, only when needed and no async/await (colored functions).

I work as a maintenance person for residential housing. What the article said at 12:54, the superman syndrome, is rife in this industry to. The sort of "go fix the thing" mentality, even if you have no idea what you are doing. Just the other day, they sent our painter who does minor repair tasks to uninstall furnace parts, when he has zero experience on furnaces and not even the correct tools to do it, and then got upset when he said he needed someone to help and show him what to do.

My parents were bank clerks when computers and ATMs took off. Where I live, bank clerks used to be well compensated and to be considered in a position of trust. Then computers came along and they became essentially a cheap interface between the machine and the customer. So yeah... I have a pretty good life as a SE, but their history stuck with me. I am indeed afraid of becoming obsolete.

I don't understand why working from home blurs the line between work and home. I was warned about this when I started working from home. But when the work day ends I have family commitments that stop me from working? Why is anyone checking work emails after logging off?

When asked about deadlines, I usually just tell people the project could take years. I never give an actual number. If I end up finishing the project in a week, then they will just think I'm just really good at programming.

The online software engineering community is such a bizarre space.

I have been in this industry for not more than 1.5 years, but I completely understand what you mean. The way I deal with burnout is by continuously learning. By expanding my knowledge, I feel less stressed and I'm more capable of solving the problems I encounter. However, some may argue that excessive learning can actually contribute to burnout. Nevertheless, I have embraced this approach because I never saw software engineering as just a job; instead, I view it as getting paid for doing what I love.

I came into programming from another job (portfolio management). Every job can burn you out, especially if you’re driven. It’s really up to you to have discipline around habits, separating home and work, etc. Sometimes it’s not your fault, but you owe it to yourself to find out. Otherwise, you’ll find that every job burns you out.

Regarding the origins of the word Utopia, it derives from two Greek words: Eu-Topos (The good place) and Ou-Topos (The place that cannot be.)

I've been in data science for 7 years now, and I have never had the opportunity to work with neural networks, and it feels like every company and their mom wants their own neural network guru, and I am stuck unable to find a job because I've never been given the raw resources to be able to experiment with NNs in an actual, real environment - the biggest company I've worked in is Coca-Cola, and the most powerful machine i've had there was my work laptop with an integrated GPU. I've worked for one of the biggest forex brockers in the world, and all the resources they dedicated to me for NN experiments were a server with 4 cores and 8 GB RAM which were also shared with some other services. I have no idea what to do, it just feels like my years of expertise building ML models are a bloody waste because I don't have the experience in my Resume.

You cant tell someone how long its gonna take to complete something when you can't tell how long its gonna take to solve the bugs you have yet to run into.

IIRC: Utopia was coined by Sir Thomas More (for his book), based on Greek 'eu' meaning 'good' and 'topos' meaning "place". Dystopia was then coined off of utopia to mean the opposite

Creature of habit vs of momentum. Love that

10:45 Here's the gist of it: Damocles was punished by a king the following way: He was in a bed with all good foods etc. and was not allowed to leave it. At first he didn't noticed that it was a punishment, but then he looked up and saw a very sharp sword hanging from the ceiling only hold up by one string of horse hair and could as such fall on him at any moment (which would result in a painful death).

I agree it depends on one's ability to say No. As Uncle Bob said "We never borrow tomorrows energy to fix today's problems". You can never do enough in one day so no need to push yourself beyond the normal work hours. However, you have to keep learning.

Sounds like you’re describing the utopia of Brave New World, where everything’s so perfect it’s numbing and dystopian

Ngl on the fear of being left behind, therapy and like coaching esc therapy works really well, ion know worked for me a while back really well

I've worked in really great environments and I've had really shitty experiences. Most recently was with a group contracted by the gov and everyday felt like the hunger games.

Fear of feeling left behind becomes real when you have to work in a legacy environment for a long time without any variance in work like tooling or something new. It's real imho and i've felt it aswell.

If the blame is external there's nothing you can do about it except complain. If you take responsibility suddenly all the power is in your hands.

As a software engineer that took that changed career path after a burnout in another field (no regrets, I love it and am very passionate about it, and learning so much and finding very motivated people), the problem of this person is not software engineering, it's time, people and boundaries management. You can do whatever you want, if you don't know how to set boundaries and take care of yourself and prioritize yourself, nobody will do it for you and certainly not your team who first of all is not in your head and does not know how you feel, and also benefits from you overworking yourself in the short term. If this person does not reconsider how they function, they could end up in this kind of spiral with any job. I know I did. It's not bad to mildly inconvenience your team for your own survival. If you need it, verbalize your need for clear boundaries between work and not-work, know your needs and wants of the moment and communicate them in a healthy way, I always do it and it's either well recieved or I don't want to work there anyway.

That article has some solid reasons for a stronger union in ITC

Hearing ppl with life figured out giving advice is always like yeah I'm 100% my worse enemy.

Outopia means "no place" and eutopia means "good place."

exactly. thank you sooooo much!

Im doing a CS uni atm and one thing I hate with passion is writing stupid reports about ethics and philosophical crap.

Yeah this article pretty much perfectly reflects my daily experience, and yet I still love my job somehow XD

I'm addicted to this channel

Eat/sleep/exercise/community is great advice, I wonder what the other 3 points are?

I wonder if Prime would have gotten to where he is now had he NOT been one of the people who didn't say no early in his career. Easier to let off the gas when you've already established yourself. At many of the companies I've worked at there has been a strong culture of "put in your 80 hour weeks when you're young and reap the reward later."

Wow... hold up a second! I need to reiterate what I just heard. The 3 important things that make all the difference: - Sleep - Exercise - Diet (For me, in that order.) It took me until I was 40 for them to click. When you're young you might not feel them one way or the other, but looking back I can now see how they have ALWAYS played their part. If you get these 3 right for you, every week, you're going to be a beast at whatever you do.

Our business unit is in such a mess that I have spent literally the last year doing nothing but hand-holding 20 different teams integrating our simple API that we already deployed in December. Yes, there are 20 teams doing basically the same job. Our API will transparently support any combination of product, region, and integration type, yet we have 20 teams, each doing the exact same work over and over for each combination of product, region, and integration. We used to be 10 developers following Agile + scrum and we could push a new "combo" in two to four weeks. Now we're 60 developers doing the same work and it takes MONTHS because no one knows who is working on what and everyone has their own separate task board and schedule.

You are doing good thing, thank you

Any attempt to create a utopia inevitably creates a dystopia. “There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs; and you try to get the best trade-off you can get, that's all you can hope for.”

It's true to me, burnout comes when I'm not learning or not improving in any areas. Stagnation and doing the same things on a daily basis without opportunity to improve triggers burnout.

now let's imagine being a software developer, now that's some real Tom JDSLing

Got the same about learning

The Sword of Damocles that’s based on Greek mythology. He was the executioner at the court of Syracuse. His sword was the method for execution. It’s a very famous European saying.

“Not scope creep, scope realization.”

Use cost of delay instead of estimating time. Tell your manager how much money the software is going to make / save. It'll easily justify most budgets. Otherwise you should work on some other task. Make sure you get enough sleep, eat nice food and attend some hobbies. It recharges your creativity which is crucial to write good software. And btw, your creativity span is definitely not longer than 8h per day, probably only like 3h. It's ok to do the complex task tomorrow with a fresh mind. No one will enjoy a half-baked feature on a Friday release. Switch to an easy task if things go wrong to regain some confidence. Deliver something every day. It'll create trust between you and your clients that you can deliver value. Hope this motivated someone who's struggling.

3:40 Employee Number 427. Pushing buttons on a keyboard.

23:09 Amazind advice Ahead!

It could be worse You could be programming specialized machines where you are dependent on the hardware working correctly, but the hardware itself is a prototype too. Some parts of the machine may not work as thought out by the mechanical gods of architecture, and have to go back to the drawing board. This takes time and until the new parts arrive the deadline is still crawling closer. And suddenly you only have a week to implement and test a complex and complicated process of high speed image capturing and processing of cosmetic defects in a pharmaceutical product made by a well known customer starting with P at production speeds of 600 per minute. And the customer understands why mechanical stuff takes longer, because he can see it, but the software stuff? Its somehwere in a cloud.....

Sounds like code bro has trouble setting boundaries.

"I just don't like putting all the blame externally. I personally try to take on most of the blame, 'cause often all the things that go wrong are because I have misread the situation." And now we know the _real_ reason for your success.