throwaway_stuck

I get hung up in a number of ways, but the most severe is when I'm trying to learn how the existing system works. I'll be listlessly paging back and forth between spaghetti code classes, and things get all fuzzy, and then it feels like I've spent enough time on this, and some sort of strategy to do my project occurs to me.

And then I try it, but it doesn't work because I still didn't understand the existing code. Rinse, repeat.

However, just the other week I decided somehow to FIGURE OUT HOW IT ALL WORKS, DAMMIT. I actually kept a glass of ice cubes next to my desk and pressed one to my head if I felt I was drifting, which worked surprisingly well. I realized that this codebase always had a lot of the functionality I had always wanted, hidden away in a particular method. I'd been staring right at it for months and it didn't click in my head.

I felt ashamed.

Big things like agreeing to start coding without requirements.

Little things like inconsistent return conventions or code disagreeing with documentation comment blocks.

People are referring me to classic coder texts like Code Complete. Okay, maybe I do need a review but I fucking read that book in the 90s. It's incredibly galling.

See "this is serial" above. I took about 9 months off. Didn't really do any coding at all.

My job is about as good as it gets. I believe in the work, the people are great, it's interesting and affects lots of people. The downside is the codebase is old and has problems, but I've seen far worse.

Part of me is itching to strike out on my own but if I don't have the discipline to even do halfway well at a job like this, how am I going to deal with a startup?

This is serial. I've lost a couple of jobs in a row from this.

Luckily I still have a reputation earned from some years ago. Plus, I interview well. People still give me jobs.

Managers don't seem to have a response here. In my experience most managers only have one bit of information devoted to programmer ability (ROCKSTAR xor SUCKS). They have alternately told me to try harder, or threatened then fired me.

I had felt like I was deceiving employers so I took a nine month break and did an artistic project. However even with a whole day to do nothing but that, I wasn't able to achieve much. I worked with a small number of people and lef that project, and it got done, but not very well, even though it was my "full time" job. Still, I felt that I had had enough of a sabbatical, and also had made some progress in psychotherapy, so I returned to the workforce, only to run into the same problems I had before. I now think the psychotherapy was not addressing the right problems -- it's more about what I do than how I feel. And it's clear my attempt at a sabbatical didn't clear up the fundamental issues.

I have friends that are able to learn programming languages on the side or take blacksmithing courses and otherwise have full and exciting lives. In other words they have reserve energy. I am so behind on just the basic requirements for my project, I feel I can't do any of this. I schedule more and more and more and more time for work and yet still nothing gets done.

As for happiness with work; I have a pattern of working with codebases that are in great need of refactoring and I am feeling a great need to stretch out and do something more original. So that is a problem.

That said, the guy who sits next to me has enough energy to actually satisfy those needs both at work (gets managers to agree to major refactorings) and also code up some great things in his spare time. Whereas I'm perenially playing catch-up and my code is ugly.