But back to the original post, I think 'having good taste' and knowing when something feels like the right solution is one of those hard to define qualities that can make the difference between average and great products (and has far reaching effects in any business).
All rational thought depends on its axioms/premises, and there's no rational way to define a new axiom - by definition they are asserted from scratch, so you need to depend on gut feeling to choose a good axiom over a bad one.
Rationalism "only" works to discard or modify some subset of your axioms when you discover that they lead to incompatible conclusions; which is a good outcome if you want to achieve a consistent theory, of course; but it doesn't help in selecting one consistent theory over a competing one. Again, those preferences are led by emotions.
If I taste something, and carefully critically consider my experience, I would count that as a better decision, and the opinion of experts don’t really factor into it, because they’re not me.
Anyway at the end of it I chose a song that I later realized was definitely not my favorite despite me being unable to explain logically why my favorite song is my favorite song. Basically having to explain things made my ratings worse.
Is this different from rationalizing? Or are we saying that rationalizing is okay if you are sufficiently attuned to your feelings?
One of the worst hires I ever worked with was excellent on paper, came with good credentials, had an impressive resume, and did objectively well on the interview questions.
However, everyone who interviewed him felt uneasy about him. He failed the vibe check, even though he checked all of the boxes and knew all the right things to say. At the time there was a big push for eliminating bias and being and as objective as possible in hiring, so we were lightly admonished for raising questions based on vibes.
When he was hired, it turned out our vibes were justified. He was someone who played games and manipulated his way through his career. He could say the right things and navigate his way through office politics unscathed while causing damage to everything he touched.
Since then I’ve observed a number of situations where decisions that seemed objectively good but came with weird vibes were later revealed to be bad. Some of the most skilled grifters I’ve encountered were brilliant at appearing objectively good but couldn’t pass vibe checks of experienced business people. Some of the most objectively good deals on paper that came with weird vibes later turned out to be hugely problematic.
I think the trap is thinking that vibes and feelings are wrong and should be ignored in favor of pre-selected objective measures. This is good practice when doing a scientific study, but it’s not a good practice when you’re entering a real world situation where an adversarial party can root out those criteria, fake them, and use your objectivity against you.
People who instantly take against you tend to see every mistake and interpret every event the worst possible way and eventually decide that their initial feelings were right. Once again intuition triumphs. You don't get a chance to prove you're no worse than anyone else - there's just a period of time where they look for evidence to confirm their vibe.
I remember going to work in a country where my apparent origin was seen in a positive way and realising that if I'd been from somewhere in Eastern Europe I'd have been automatically disrespected. I remember going to an interview for a flat share and the moment I said I was from Zimbabwe one guy said that "South Africans" (sic) "drink and party too much." Since I'm white I'd never been on the opposite side of prejudice before and it was highly interesting.
Oh yes, I agree, it is information that's telling you something but because one doesn't usually have a way of putting it into words it's not clear what the message is. People who are different from you are sometimes just nervous and not sure how to present themselves.
I have, however, had to fix the terrible work of grifters (e.g. no unit tests, every minor change breaks something silently) and nobody ever cottoned onto them even though they were quite obvious. The feelings they gave management were "good ones" despite them being terrible for the business. I, as the person fixing stuff after said grifter left suddenly, was blamed for everything that was wrong.
Set base credentials, lottery of everyone who passes the post, full hire or fire after a short (1 month, at most) probationary period where vibes are considered. There's no reason to go through rounds and rounds of interviews over months. It's a waste of everyone's time. Unless your criteria are completely compromised, you'll find someone within a few tries.
Are those people the ones you really want to hire?
Maybe your bar is low and your confidence is high, but I'd certainly never come work for you under those terms.
1) If such a short probationary period is involved, there's no reason to permanently move during it. A short-term rental will do. If the position works out, then move. (I have done this, it is doable.)
2) Then maybe the job isn't right for you.
The point is to strip the desperation to find The One True Candidate/Job On The First Try, from both sides. Companies are already hiring based on vibes, so this just formalizes it. Employees are already subject to swift termination, based on their employers' whims; this just makes that expectation transparent. From both sides: if it isn't going to work out, we get there quickly and move on. Little is worse than being on a job for half a year, only to get sacked because it took that long for the company to decide that it doesn't like you.
Except in practice, they mostly aren't because onboarding takes time and cost and relocating employees (if applicable) has costs.
Of course, if you're a pro football player, here today/gone tomorrow is the norm. But I'm not sure that is or should be the expectation for an engineer. In part, because I doubt there is a "One True Candidate" for the the most part.
Yes, roles shift/requirements shift and both companies and employees move on but there's generally some value to stability on both sides. Even if an employee can get an employer-paid rental for a month, thy've still presumably left their prior job and will have to scramble in various ways.
Not the one you're replying to, but is the above quote not enough to explain why they were a mis-hire?
If you go with vibes too much you only ever accumulate data saying that vibes matter.
- not answering questions (e.g. by asking counterquestions or giving long-winded non-answers)
- not taking responsibility in bad outcomes (when asked about problems they were facing)
- not saying "I don't know"
- using "we" for bad outcomes and "I" for good outcomes (socialising loss, privatising profit)
...
Rationalists cannot get away from empiricism. There's nothing to rationalize about without observation of the empirical.
Western philosophy has always tried to carve out very precise lanes of thought like empiricism and rationalism, but one requires the other.
There's no nature or nurture debate. It's all emergent aspects of nature.
Humanoids went centuries learning to adjust to internal feelings of enough water and food. Strived to find balance.
Language came along and agrarian warlords focused effort on made up balancing acts of gods; He will be mad if we don't do things right. Lame projection
Well, acting without reason is unreasonable, for sure. But since I don't think knowledge is (mostly) hierarchical, I don't think chains of reasoning are the main part of how we arrive at preferences. To the extent that knowledge does have foundations, the foundations are beliefs, and they're built in no particular order, and survive by merit of seeming to chime with other beliefs, fitting together in a paradigm. That effect where they seem to chime is an impression, a hunch, which is a feeling.
What reasoning can do is tell you "these two beliefs definitely can't go together, because they're logically incompatible", and then you have to jettison one of them (or attack the argument), even if it feels like they both belong. Somewhat disconcerting.
We walk a dangerous line when feelings are the executive decision maker, even when we know what we should do (what's right) doesn't give us the same emotional response.
It's like working out. Nobody really wants to do it, but it only stands to benefit the body in the most logical, tangible sense.
That said, it's true that few are rational and honest. Everyone wants their ideals to be reality, but most people confuse their ideals with reality itself. Even those who can tell the difference may choose to trick others into delusion, so that they may use them for their own benefit.
I used to do that, but not so much now. Being honest with myself and the world is a more interesting way to live.
If you didn't know about the case, Damasio's Eliott is the personification of this observation : you have to feel first.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250614042654/https://www.thecu...
The corporate machine does not feel it.
It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead.
Perhaps that was just the magic of Jobs, who definitely felt things. But he didn't make the iPhone single handedly.
Apple also made the Newton. But folks don't call back to it or praise its makers very often.
I found the idea fascinating, but it was too clunky and heavy for the features it offered. I think the concept was too far ahead of its time, it couldn’t be implemented well in available tech.
I agree, but I don't think it would have been as polished as the iPhone out of the gate.
> Apple also made the Newton. But folks don't call back to it or praise its makers very often.
As a sibling comment mentioned, I think the Newton was perhaps better than you're giving it credit for, but my point isn't that Apple makes great products, it's that it's possible at certain times for certain teams within large companies to "feel it".
Perhaps entertainment could be another example. Do you think the team that made Wall-E didn't "feel it"? What about Zelda Breath of the Wild?
I think people are forgetting how extremely unpolished the iPhone was out of the gate. No app store. Even something as fundamental as copy/paste took until years later.
If I won 100M, I wouldn't work the exact same job - I'd probably move into an adjacent role that was more ambitious and took on a lot more risk, because I would be a lot less concerned if the company I was working for crashed and burned. The outlines of my role would stay the same.
I feel I've been clear-headed about my feelings about work. It took a lot of thinking to get to a place I enjoy. I haven't always enjoyed my work; I've worked at places that I hated and places that were just meh. But yeah, my current work is awesome, I happily do it nights and weekends just for fun (much to the chagrin of my girlfriend). Most people I work with, and most friends I have outside of work, feel similarly. I'm sorry you don't feel the same, but I encourage you to think before telling other people they feel a different way than they actually do.
I couldn't bear to pour all my energy in something that, ultimately, is not mine. But I could feel your enthusiasm through your post, which made me a bit jealouse.
So, yeah.
But you are not doing the exact same thing for 40 years. Since I started my career, there have been so many new projects, new ideas, new things to create and so many new ways to do it. But underneath it all is the common denominator of enjoyment and love of programming.
I'm not sure why that is so unfathomable. Sure, I have plenty of not-so-great days when nothing works or the project I'm working on is uninspiring. But that is just the nature of life. I would wager that your beloved partner isn't an enjoyable company 100% of the time. But you enjoy being with them most of the time because they make you feel great - that's sort of an important requirement. Programming makes me feel great most of the time I'm doing it.
> I'm sure you enjoy aspects of your work. But I would guess if you won $100m you wouldn't keep going. If you truly enjoyed it, you would do it for free.
I'll be able to set the balance of when I want to program and when I want to go watch a movie - we are not one dimensional creatures after all. Of course all of us need to eat but I don't see what getting paid for it has to do with my love for it. Plenty of people love stuff that doesn't pay at all.
Sure, it isn't/can't be 100% peachy 100% of the time but then I'm not sure if anyone is asserting that. I don't think anything is that way.
In that case some peole are bound to find more enjoyment from something else, or why would the paycheck even be worth it?
Sometimes that can occur within the very work they do, maybe even their life's work, which can take long enough to proceed through phases of education, underemployment, business ownership, retirement and back again.
Surely there are other kinds of enjoyment continuity, which can function in parallel to a certain extent, that those concentrating on the paycheck alone may not come close to achieving.
The last remotely compatible situation was the late USSR, and a dysfunctional Soviet corpse plundering by middling oligarchs to even more pathic notional leadership is precisely what it is.
Be of good cheer, it collapses under its own weight in this neighborhood of dysfunction. Its almost over.
There will be a mess to clean up, then it'll be summer again until we get lax again.
Always been this way, always will be. Empires grow in power, then corruption, then only corruption, and then they're done.
A perfect example is the terrible mismanagement of the epidemic in the USA; over a million people dead, many (most?) of them unnecessarily for the active rejection of basic infection control measures. A perfect example of the corruption of which you speak: many countries got €1-2 rapid tests (I bought a 50 pack) where the US only approved the $30 two-pack. Thousands died unnecessarily so the state could funnel money to their buddies.
This is just one of a million examples. The rate of degeneration seems to be increasing further.
You’re right about it getting close, but unfortunately “almost over” in this context usually means a generation or two. Children born today might only know a lifetime of suffering only for their own adult children to finally emerge in the spring.
This is why I don’t like takes like this. It is impossible to be in good cheer when there will be millions of preventable and utterly unnecessary deaths and hundreds of millions of lives and bodies damaged and stunted irreparably due to lack of access to medicine and education and equal protection of law. Preventable diseases not being prevented, treatable conditions going intreated. Forced and unnecessary poverty costs lives. It is no different than any other genocide or intentional mass murder.
If there's a genocide level event it won't have my endorsement, I'm still mourning a kid brother who would still be here if it weren't for a lot of the factors killing men his age in stupendous numbers. That genocide? It's been happening for a minimum of 5 years, more like ten.
I appreciate the merits and gravity of your complaint (to put it mildly) but mine is the wrong complaint box for it.
> Be of good cheer, it collapses under its own weight in this neighborhood of dysfunction. Its almost over.
There's nothing remotely cheerful about how bad it's going to have to get first before it gets better. The fact that a genocide eventually ends is not a reason to be happy about being in the beginning of a huge one.
In my opinion, you have to “feel it” in order to do your best work.
However(!), and also in my opinion, you shouldn’t always strive to be in a position where you “feel it”. While it is important to spend most of one’s life feeling it / doing their best work in order to be fulfilled, the hazard of insatiably “feeling it” is that you can much more quickly burn out.
Working with passion fuels a level of intensity and emotional involvement that can take a while to recover from if you don’t get the result (read: success) you desired.
But yes, you do indeed mostly have to feel it.
The bigger problem is usually the opposite: nagging negative emotions, feeling annoyed, feeling contempt towards some parts of the work that one is bound to do. These emotions are unbecoming, so the psychological defenses hide them, as if there's no feeling at all. This is what "mind-numbing" work often is.
I think this applies much more broadly because even in conversations people are quick to latch onto a subtle inconsequential detail and then dismiss the rest. Being able to read the words does not make one literate, it is the interpretation of them that does. I think this example is quite prolific with internet conversations, enough that we can circle back to sarreph's mention of this in their first sentence. But I think another great example was from this post from a week ago[1]. Most comments are responding to the headline, but many even looked at the post and missed the entire point (which isn't about work being interrupted).
[0] Authors may not acknowledge them in the work because the review process is too adversarial and such acknowledgements can be used as ammunition against them (thanks lazy reviewers ;), because solving those flaws is a good followup and they don't want to get scooped, or many other reasons.
The academic conference situation will implode under its own weight. As more and more people enter, the quality of reviews suffers, there is less and less illusions about any form of duty, responsibility, honor etc. and it's all a game of turf wars, citations rings, just slipping through the cracks by submitting enormous numbers of papers and resubmitting in a few months those that get rejected, without even fixing the typos that the first reviewers pointed out. And observing this just makes the few who did care also become jaded and put in less energy. Just as you have people in college who want to put in the absolute minimum work in order to get the piece of paper, you have the same happening in academia. Pump out the most papers with the least works, and the reviewers are just an obstacle in that view.
I think at a minimum academia needs to start tracking abuse. Because right now, when we find plagiarism we hide it, usually just disappearing during blind review. These people should get a one year ban on first offense and a 5 year ban for every subsequent occurrence. Make it a citation network, and everyone you've co-authored with in the last year gets flagged for extra review. And FFS, let's not give best fucking paper of the year at the number one ML conference to a fucking intern who hacked the company you interned at. Not only is that just encouraging more highly unethical behavior, but how the fuck can you even trust the results of that paper? I love this field, but how did we get infiltrated by a cult?
> Working with passion fuels a level of intensity and emotional involvement that can take a while to recover from if you don’t get the result (read: success) you desired.
The number of IQ points doesn't really matter but this is about feel. With passion you're much more likely to dig in. By digging in you're more likely to see subtle issues that can result in drastically different outcomes (the more complex something is, the more likely such issues exist). You care about the thing working and so you care about finding out when it doesn't work.
On the other hand, if you have no passion you just go through the motions. You spend less time thinking. It passes the tests? Okay great, let's move on, "it works, so who cares?" In this situation you care less about the thing working and more about getting the task done.
I feel like the second attitude is becoming much more common. I'm sure there are a ton of reasons why but I feel like one of these is that complexity has just exploded. An unfortunate fact is that you can make things too simple. Little errors compound to become big errors that are difficult to wrangle. I think we've gotten to a point where there's so much (often hidden) complexity that we are constantly being overwhelmed, making it harder to care, creating a dangerous feedback loop.
Every good problem solver knows that the best way to tackle a problem is to break it down into bite sized and simpler pieces. But the flip side of this is that every big problem is caused by the accumulation of many little problems. For some reason we have a much harder time thinking in this direction. For this reason I think we need to stress the importance of the little things[0]. It is also important to remember that when solving the big problem that solving each little problem is not enough. That only works if they are independent. You may want to start out treating them as such but that's why this tends to become an iterative process, because as you converge to solving the larger problem these hidden complexities start to reveal themselves. So solving small problems is a defensive strategy.
[0] This can easily be misread. I am not insisting that everyone be a perfectionist. What I've said is far easier said than done. Perfection does not exist, there is always something wrong. The question is much more about bounding that error and keeping it small. It is about recognizing these issues and keeping track of them. More important than solving problems is the recognition of them. After all, it is incredibly difficult to solve problems you don't know exist. By keeping track of these things you can better triage tasks. Even a few comments in the code stating what assumptions are made or stating the conditions that the code is expected to run on will save you tons of headaches in the future. A trivial amount of work in the moment can pay enormous dividends when given enough time.
Went through the grind of getting visa, then the work permit, then the different visa, then the short-term residence permit.
Changed jobs, had to go to the immigration department again, because these residence permits are tied to the employer.
Kept a spreadsheet with dates of each exit and entry.
Had to keep all my paperwork ducks in a row.
To be able to get married, I had to get a permit from a judge.
Got married and had to go through the immigration office again, as this changed the primary purpose of my stay yet again. The queue to the immigration office was so long that I had to come there at 2am (yes, 2 in the morning) to even have a chance to file my paperwork.
Still had to keep the spreadsheet with exit/entry dates, the printout was attached to each application.
Went to another city to pass the language exam to be able to get the long-term residence permit.
In a couple of years, applied for citizenship. Had to go visit my birth country and gather some more paperwork from there, get it translated.
All the while it all felt as if I was a student again and this was an important exam each and every time. Stressed. Constantly afraid that a document would be missing and I would need to start over.
Then finally they texted me. I went to collect the papers that certified that I now was the citizen of my new country, almost ten years after starting the quest. I could apply for my new shiny national ID. I now wasn't a second-class person anymore.
Upon leaving the government building, I felt nothing. I had expected that with all that stress and buildup, some kind of relief would come. But it never came. No relief, no joy, not a sausage.
I remember that the weather was miserable on that day.
However, I would say that when a battle lasts long enough, one might have no emotional resources left to feel the victory.
That also applies to TFA.
This needs to check a lot of boxes: is it easy and quick to setup, do I need some hard to obtain 'license key', does everything work out of box or at least is easy enough to fix, and most importantly: is it a joy to use (which is entirely subjective though).
If something doesn't pass this test then I also don't want to waste time with it at work. In a nutshell this is also why wheels should be reinvented over and over again, and if it's just for the sole reason that the new wheel feels better to just the person who reinvented it. Chances are other people will feel the same after trying the new wheel (on a weekend, hah) and start using it (or not and that's fine too), but in the end this is how innovation happens.
I've even seen this stupidity in myself sometimes. In a way it's funny how you can get so lost on the numbers that you forget about the thing.
This is just the frame that the author is trying to prop up in order to sell us their shallow, meaningless piece.
I wouldn’t normally even comment something like this about someone’s article, but I see this pattern a lot in “influencer” content that people sometimes share with me and I am worried that if we don’t point it out, we will lose our ability to spot nonsense like this and side step our critical thinking.
The “trick” is contrasting or relating something completely irrelevant to some sort of nonsensical or obvious “thought piece”.
I am sure this is some sort of named fallacy and someone else can explain it a lot more eloquently, but this is my attempt.
Look at my other posts and you'll see I'm not like an "influencer content" person. I purposely made this piece shallow to encourage more people to read it and discuss the core idea, rather than get distracted by specific examples or points.
I've blogged long enough on a personal level, done corporate PR long enough at a professional level, to know that the more words there are, the more people get bogged down in the details.
I plan to follow up this post with specific callouts and associating it directly with my work (both positively and negatively). But, for example, if I used Terraform as an example of something in this (hypothetically), people would focus in on arguing the merits of "feeling" Terraform. That's not the point.
The point is to think about what we're shipping.
My point isn't that you can't write whatever you want because of course you can.
The audience of my comment is the consumer of any online content to be careful about projecting too much into it.
Our company is smaller and earlier than that. I enjoy the focus on metrics, it's a good push for us, but sometimes you just have to do the obviously good thing for users without trying to build a metrics framework around it.
They are not mutually exclusive, but they compete to a degree. If someone's time is mostly spent on what can be measured, they can't spend time on "common sense" or investigative work that is less easily tracked. At the end of they day, trying to measure everything makes as much sense as trying to document every line of code. (Most of this, naturally, also applies the other way around).
> This is just the frame that the author is trying to prop up in order to sell us their shallow, meaningless piece.
> I see this pattern a lot in “influencer” content that people sometimes share with me
I think a lot of the shallowness is from blogs or HN being a public, persistent, broadcast written media. In a face to face conversation, you can generally follow up and share more specifics and nuance without fear of getting a bad reputation.
If anything I think the bias is the other way around, on the Internet whatever you write can get cherry-picked and framed to make you appear terrible, in person it's much easier to get a fair sample.
I land on the point of the tradeoff spectrum where you have some "instructions" and rules, but it's also a "spirit of the rules" kind of thing, and someone has the means to exercise subjective judgment, instead of trying to fully eliminate subjectivity in favor of ever growing rules with ever growing exceptions that become a maze to navigate, and can become its own form of tyranny, especially if someone has the power to arbitrarily decide which set of rules to choose to apply for each case.
You can have the best processes and rules, if the people are bad. You can't compensate for that. And if you have good people, you can and should allow them some range of judgment.
This vibe was pervasive at Apple and could be taken more or less for granted, but elsewhere it’s all over the place.
And, like, sure, there are projects and industries where this doesn’t matter. But giving a shit and feeling it can be a major differentiator.
The current vibe at Apple is "we want you to be an obedient worker".
[0] https://systems-souls-society.com/what-is-this-the-case-for-...
I know there are still a ton of good people there, but it's a way, way different company now.
Looking back at most times I have felt horrible in the depth of adversity, resistance or burnout I realize those were the times of greatest potential for achievement, learning and growth. Those are the memorable chapters, the things that define my character. The times when I continued to grind, continued to push through and didn't give up because of feelings were the times when I actually accomplished something: raised a kid, bought a house, switched continents.
Happiness is basically equivalent to feeling steady (even if slow) progress in response to one's own effort towards valued goals.
It think it was Theodore Sturgeon that said "90% of everything is crap."
For myself, I enjoy what I do. I write software that I want to use, in a way that makes me feel good.
I have no illusions that I would be allowed to work like this, if I were still in the workforce, though.
in my experience, those times have been with the most talented and productive people. perhaps they don't need the crutch of process
it is rare, and does not last forever. as teams scale up, this is gradually lost. regression to the mean?
leading with feeling is vulnerable. it can be very rewarding when met with like or very damaging when crushed under the corporate wheel
The people in those pockets will have to use their discernment to figure out where the next pocket is located. But it can't be something that everyone can easily do.
Yes in the sense Kano refered to as 'delight' [1]. An unexpected or tacit feeling of quality in an interaction with a product.
No, because for whatever reason we sadly have become prone to spurious and unbridled emotion, making mountains out of molehills at the slightest friction. I sometimes feel what now passes as acceptable is what used to be borderline bipolar disorders.
At the last hackathon I went to I was sitting in the audience at the presentation at the end with one teammate while the other one was upstairs pounding away at last minute revisions. We were scheduled last but I still had to make excuses to the organizers.
He showed up with something that basically worked but I kept cool under pressure, made sure I didn't commit to anything until I was sure about it, and used good showmanship. We were all shocked when we won the 'player's choice' award. Mind you, it helped that he was experienced at writing platformers in Unity and the other student could draw, but thanks to my showmanship people saw everything that didn't worked and didn't notice the bugs and people were left with the impression that 'wow that looked like a polished game' whereas the main author said 'I don't think I'd want to play it' afterwards. My continuous push towards a 'minimum viable product' combined with their push to make something that looked polish really helped that showmanship work.
It's hard to feel the feelings of many types of users.
Devs who work on customer-reported tickets end up knowing a lot more about customer needs than some of the pms I have worked with.
Also, the feeling he’s referring to is what sold me on Ghostty. It was clear that he’d thought quite a bit about good defaults. Performance is great without having to tweak anything. In a way, I love that this sort of thing cannot be qualified, because it means that it cannot be commoditized or democratized. It either connects with someone, or it doesn’t.
Doing my taxes felt the same as getting a degree and publishing a book.
I do share this ambition. In my own metric, I was as successful as it gets when “the desired feeling” is achieved. But I often have the impression that others around me don’t share this, or do so to a lesser degree. However, that doesn’t stop me one bit.
my best guess is that it is far easier to deeply feel complex concepts rather than to arrive to similar conclusions purely based on reason/logic
Totally absurd! The metrics and specifications are what make all of that possible.
This feels like it was written for execs and managers who bury their heads in the sand when they're overwhelmed.
A year or so ago I got tired of this, started doing the opposite, and I will never go back.
Feelings overall are underrated.
Two sides of the same coin. Humans have an internal need to see that their work output is valuable and they are useful to society/community. This is not some unrealistic expectation. For most of history, it was fairly easy to see how one's work directly results in value. Farming, butchering animals, making clothes and shoes, paving roads or building houses or whatever it may be. People could feel satisfaction of jobs well done, applying their experience and being valued for it. It is normal. Pointless drudgery eats away at one's soul and leads to burnout, much more than simply being "overworked". If much of your work-related mental energy goes towards timing when to jump ship before it sinks, that won't be sustainable. Working on some pointless project that you know will get axed, but for some internal politics reason it has to remain up and running for a few more months to get someone promoted before killing it, etc.
When people say that a job is a job, and you wouldn't get paid for it if it was enjoyable, it's just not right. If you produce value, you do deserve the pay, it's not supposed to be compensation for being miserable.
On the flipside, when MBAs internalize this message, what they take away is that "passion" and "motivation" makes employees more productive and prone to put in extra effort. So they come up with the genius idea to test whether you are "passionate" before hiring you. Resulting in a dreaded and ugly song and dance ritual where you have to exaggerate your passion and talk in unrealistic language, and grifters and smoothtalkers win in that.
That's not the kind of passion that is needed, the outwardly, enthusiastic-glowing passion. Just something where you feel that it's neat, it's a net positive for the world even if small, and you left the world a bit better when you go to sleep at night compared to when you woke up in the morning. Even extra money can't compensate for that in the long term (short term yes).
Pulumi isn't much better. I feel IaC done that way isn't the way we will settle on long term.
https://peace.mk/blog/checkpoint/
(old blog post, but I'm slow in making progress)
With Terraform I have felt I'm fighting it at times but I also understand the reasons.
The state file thing gets a relatively large part of the hate but it's that and the limitations of the DSL that make the DAG possible and useful. Pulumi and all the other wrappers don't solve this, though they can plausibly solve the "closer to programming" problem and I'm sure that has a valid audience.
I guess what I'm saying is, I think it'll stick around and we will in fact settle on it for a large part of operational work. I'll add that I also think k8s should die a quiet death and _that_ will be seen in retrospect as a necessary step to something better.
I refuse to let such a shitty experience be what defines my day.
I was hoping pulumi would help. Haven't used it yet, but it is sad to hear it doesn't live up to the hype.