the usual struggles
Now that i am working full-time again, i am also an alcoholic again. I'm not quite at the drinking-every-day stage, but i get blackout drunk every Friday night and usually at least one other night during the week i get drunk enough that the next day i know i'm not at 100% performance. It's depressing. I waste half my weekend being hungover, and the other half disappointed that the next day i need to go back to work again.
And my work is fine, you know? It's for a company whose values and product i generally believe in. My manager is soft-spoken and supportive. My teammates are decently motivated. It's been so much worse.
I mean. There are the usual problems of working in the tech industry. Most notably, almost everyone you work with is male, and they all think they are the smartest guy in the room. They will wear you down by arguing for way too long over trivia just to try to prove that they were right. It's especially embarrassing when it turns out they were wrong but you still had to sit there debating it for half an hour because they can't let anything go. There's an industry term that describes way too much of my professional life: "bikeshedding" - arguing over what color to paint the bike shed when the house still needs to be built.
On my current team i once again have the guy who thinks he's God's gift to software architecture and will call you out on every single line of code that doesn't follow his ideal. And, to be fair, he tries to reference stuff like Code Complete, Pragmatic Programmer, Clean Code, Refactoring - veritable Bibles of our trade. But there is also a law of diminishing returns when it comes to trying to pursue the most beautiful Design Patterns (another Bible) in software. You can spend a week or two trying to build the most elegant technical solution in the world, but at the end of the day, the customer just wanted a fucking button they could click to turn the lights on. And often in sofware, the customer will change their mind, or the requirements change later on, and now you have this elaborate structure which isn't even needed any more.
There is lots of jargon in our trade around how or why to build something. DRY is one - Don't Repeat Yourself, i.e. don't build the same thing twice if you could build it once in a more abstract and reusable way. YAGNI is the opposite - You Ain't Gonna Need It, i.e. don't build something too abstract and pluggable when there's no immediate business case. It's old fashioned, but often you can just reduce all the trendier acronyms down KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid!
Then also on my team i have the other guy who likes to rename and redesign things "so they're easier to understand", but what he really means is so they're easier for him to understand, at the expense of changing established jargon or making things more mysterious for developers who don't have exactly the same world view that he does. And if you call him out on it, he will go to great lengths to try defend his changes, to the degree it's just not worth the headache.
It's exhausting to deal with. Even though i have been dealing with this for 20+ years. Even though i have heard literally every argument that these guys wheel out dozens of times before. Even though, now, 20+ years into my career, i know when it's not a battle worth fighting, when to give guys the "win" they so desperately need and when it's okay to quietly ignore their "contribution" altogether... But that doesn't make it any less tiring. It's part of the job, and it's why jobs suck. You are constantly forced to deal with other people's quirks. You can't just nope out of stuff when you get sick of it, you're literally being paid to sit there and figure it out.
So, you do. I do. We all do. We go to work, and we spend a bunch of time in varying degrees of conflict with our coworkers, and then we get home frazzled and spent. And even when you got up in the morning with an optimistic face, with grand plans to go do some kind of fun after work activity, by the time you get to the end of the day, you're shattered and destroyed, and the only thing left to do is zone out in front of the TV or drink to oblivion.
Work fucking sucks. I hate work so much. I hate it. Even "good" jobs suck. They all suck.
And, of course, also as usual, I am spending less than a quarter of my take-home income on rent and food. All of that extra money is wasted, because i can't use it. I'm too tired. Even if i wasn't tired, what would i spend it on? All i need is rent and food. I don't have expensive hobbies. I don't have expensive tastes. I don't own anything. I don't want to own anything. So i just sit here, doing this job, amassing a war chest that only has one use, and that's to pay for me to not work. Which, if i could not work in a relatively affordable country like Taiwan, i could not work for a long time. But i can't live in Taiwan, or any other affordable country, without a work visa. So it's a vicious circle. I have to keep working.
Last weekend i went out for a Sunday bike ride. I went in the direction of Taoyuan again, but instead of turning south when i crossed the county line, i turned west and cycled all the way out to the coast. I found an old port that seemed to have been converted into a seaside shopping street. Lots of parents were there with kids eating deep-fried tentacle snacks, and there were musical performers singing kids' songs. Baby Shark do do do do do do. On the way I also found a big animatronic god or demon or some such thing.
I didn't have the energy to go into the temple to find out more. Turns out i cycled almost 80km that day, which makes me feel happy. If i did that several times a week instead of once every two weeks, it might almost make up for the flabbiness my stomach has built up from all the booze calories over the past few months. I hate to look at myself, i feel disgusting.
Meanwhile, my skin condition continues. New dots are springing up. Some nights i wake up with torn up skin because i was scratching the itches in my sleep. I emailed my dad and he said when they lived in Africa his mom got a parasitic worm infection from mosquito bites that left her suffering for months. I am so over this shit i couldn't even get especially upset or grossed out when i read about the condition. I don't know what it is, i don't care any more, i just want to be better.
So, that's life. Work work work. Drink. Bike. Work. Itch. Sleep. I think i am going to make noodles and play a computer game.
And my work is fine, you know? It's for a company whose values and product i generally believe in. My manager is soft-spoken and supportive. My teammates are decently motivated. It's been so much worse.
I mean. There are the usual problems of working in the tech industry. Most notably, almost everyone you work with is male, and they all think they are the smartest guy in the room. They will wear you down by arguing for way too long over trivia just to try to prove that they were right. It's especially embarrassing when it turns out they were wrong but you still had to sit there debating it for half an hour because they can't let anything go. There's an industry term that describes way too much of my professional life: "bikeshedding" - arguing over what color to paint the bike shed when the house still needs to be built.
On my current team i once again have the guy who thinks he's God's gift to software architecture and will call you out on every single line of code that doesn't follow his ideal. And, to be fair, he tries to reference stuff like Code Complete, Pragmatic Programmer, Clean Code, Refactoring - veritable Bibles of our trade. But there is also a law of diminishing returns when it comes to trying to pursue the most beautiful Design Patterns (another Bible) in software. You can spend a week or two trying to build the most elegant technical solution in the world, but at the end of the day, the customer just wanted a fucking button they could click to turn the lights on. And often in sofware, the customer will change their mind, or the requirements change later on, and now you have this elaborate structure which isn't even needed any more.
There is lots of jargon in our trade around how or why to build something. DRY is one - Don't Repeat Yourself, i.e. don't build the same thing twice if you could build it once in a more abstract and reusable way. YAGNI is the opposite - You Ain't Gonna Need It, i.e. don't build something too abstract and pluggable when there's no immediate business case. It's old fashioned, but often you can just reduce all the trendier acronyms down KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid!
Then also on my team i have the other guy who likes to rename and redesign things "so they're easier to understand", but what he really means is so they're easier for him to understand, at the expense of changing established jargon or making things more mysterious for developers who don't have exactly the same world view that he does. And if you call him out on it, he will go to great lengths to try defend his changes, to the degree it's just not worth the headache.
It's exhausting to deal with. Even though i have been dealing with this for 20+ years. Even though i have heard literally every argument that these guys wheel out dozens of times before. Even though, now, 20+ years into my career, i know when it's not a battle worth fighting, when to give guys the "win" they so desperately need and when it's okay to quietly ignore their "contribution" altogether... But that doesn't make it any less tiring. It's part of the job, and it's why jobs suck. You are constantly forced to deal with other people's quirks. You can't just nope out of stuff when you get sick of it, you're literally being paid to sit there and figure it out.
So, you do. I do. We all do. We go to work, and we spend a bunch of time in varying degrees of conflict with our coworkers, and then we get home frazzled and spent. And even when you got up in the morning with an optimistic face, with grand plans to go do some kind of fun after work activity, by the time you get to the end of the day, you're shattered and destroyed, and the only thing left to do is zone out in front of the TV or drink to oblivion.
Work fucking sucks. I hate work so much. I hate it. Even "good" jobs suck. They all suck.
And, of course, also as usual, I am spending less than a quarter of my take-home income on rent and food. All of that extra money is wasted, because i can't use it. I'm too tired. Even if i wasn't tired, what would i spend it on? All i need is rent and food. I don't have expensive hobbies. I don't have expensive tastes. I don't own anything. I don't want to own anything. So i just sit here, doing this job, amassing a war chest that only has one use, and that's to pay for me to not work. Which, if i could not work in a relatively affordable country like Taiwan, i could not work for a long time. But i can't live in Taiwan, or any other affordable country, without a work visa. So it's a vicious circle. I have to keep working.
Last weekend i went out for a Sunday bike ride. I went in the direction of Taoyuan again, but instead of turning south when i crossed the county line, i turned west and cycled all the way out to the coast. I found an old port that seemed to have been converted into a seaside shopping street. Lots of parents were there with kids eating deep-fried tentacle snacks, and there were musical performers singing kids' songs. Baby Shark do do do do do do. On the way I also found a big animatronic god or demon or some such thing.
I didn't have the energy to go into the temple to find out more. Turns out i cycled almost 80km that day, which makes me feel happy. If i did that several times a week instead of once every two weeks, it might almost make up for the flabbiness my stomach has built up from all the booze calories over the past few months. I hate to look at myself, i feel disgusting.
Meanwhile, my skin condition continues. New dots are springing up. Some nights i wake up with torn up skin because i was scratching the itches in my sleep. I emailed my dad and he said when they lived in Africa his mom got a parasitic worm infection from mosquito bites that left her suffering for months. I am so over this shit i couldn't even get especially upset or grossed out when i read about the condition. I don't know what it is, i don't care any more, i just want to be better.
So, that's life. Work work work. Drink. Bike. Work. Itch. Sleep. I think i am going to make noodles and play a computer game.