alt Hacker NewsYou're not always doing something groundbreaking. Sometimes you're just building a thing that needs to exist. People who build houses don't obsess over this shit, they just build a house and then someone moves into it.
I wage a constant battle of motivating myself because my neurology craves novel sources of dopamine but my job is doing the needful 90% of the time.
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TBH I just use AI to do the needful as much as possible and spend my time in other ways.
It's so much more rewarding to get that one stupid extra parameter added to an API + unit tested in 30 minutes rather than 3 hours.
Not every simple thing needs to be handcrafted to perfection.
> People who build houses don't obsess over this shit
Because they have built the same house 20 times already. And this exact house has been built 2 million times before. They know the requirements and how to do it, they know what can go wrong and how, and know how long it will take.
It makes a lot of sense to build the same physical house again and again, but if you are doing the same for software, you are definitely doing it wrong. Thus, typically each software development project is bespoke and has a lot of unknowns.
> People who build houses don't obsess over this shit, they just build a house
Quality of new builds is not that great (at least in the UK) because the speed is the main focus.
There's a thing on YouTube these days where house inspectors basically shame builders. There's one guy who says "I can't tell you who the builder is" while walking past the builder's sign then proceeds to show how the house is completely fucked. Real sloppy work. Brick wall with no concrete so you can literally push it over with one hand. Tiles with voids underneath. Door and window frames cracked. Shower leaking water. Roof tiles broken. Roof vents loose, some times already blown away by the wind. Missing/sloppy insulation. Broken roof trusses.
Maybe the people who build houses should obsess a bit more over this shit.
Yeah, this is very real, and I think it can inflict paralysis on programmers with a certain level of experience and 'i know better' syndrome. Or even a 'it _might_ be better' type syndrome.
Sometimes, you might really know better, and it doesn't matter. You build the thing with the wrong tools, with a crummy framework, with a product at the end that will probably not succeed. But that is okay, hopefully you learn something and your team and your org learn something.
And if not, that is okay, sometimes its just a job and you need a paycheck and a place to be from 9 to 5.