Coding is fun but for me collaborative development has stopped being fun. People can be rude, biased, and it seems there is always someone with 50 questions or a concern who sucks the life right out of it.
I have recently adopted a large, sprawling side-project of which I am the sole developer. Having a big space to play in on the side has really helped me keep my interest pure and exciting. Not answering to anyone but myself is easily the best aspect. The codebase is private and no one but me may ever see it.
I am also a lot more pragmatic about the codebase at work, as I am not trying to squeeze in fun/innovative ideas at the expense of productivity or the experience of other teammates. Now, most of my "blue sky" ideas wind up being things for my side project. Feels like I have a pressure relief valve that I can rely on now. There have already been a few cases where I implement a crazy idea on my side project and determine the abstraction is also an excellent fit for something at work. Being able to iterate on these ideas in a completely separate domain from work concerns allows for deep (and enjoyable) refinement without taking the rest of the enterprise for a trip every time.
People get so hung up on how cool the thing they just did is and not at all on was useful. Sometimes you just gotta let it rest for a month to get over that honeymoon phase.
Tool flame wars, constant bike shedding, “that’s too abstract” premature optimization wars (apparently a list comprehension is too abstract for some eng, if-else all the way down!). Every Medium post by a tech somebody becomes a religious soapbox.
I quit it all but kept my job. People complain I skip meetings and take Friday mostly off.
But my stories are done by Weds, so really I take Thur off and just do work log updates Fri to make it look like I was still working.
And the reason they’re done by Weds is cause I do the programming and skip everything else.
Job life feels like being in high school anymore. It’s about social appeasement, debating well trodden concepts at length, and exploring little new ground.
Import toolkits and go home. Like most creative endeavors, writing code to express my own mind is fun. Writing code to satisfy the pretense of our job worshipping culture is mind numbing.
Edit: Oh almost forgot my “favorite”: environments where open source is leveraged heavily. Millions of lines of imported code, at best 5% was written internally. But somehow the business environment is that they’re engineering thought leaders for building a “tech biz” around a traditional business model. Smh
This is definitely a serious issue. Imo, unless the project is tiny, your own codebase should be at least the majority of whatever binary is shipped, otherwise you're adding very little value.
Maybe somebody is exploring an idea and doesn't really care about maintainablity or something else.