I feel like back then I could appreciate the usefulness of my work a lot more. Even a very simple program was like magic and I got my feeling of accomplishment.

I feel like back then I could appreciate the usefulness of my work a lot more. Even a very simple program was like magic and I got my feeling of accomplishment. Nowadays it's all about best practices, getting stars on Github or writing influential blog posts to further my career. By surrounding myself with other successful people, the bar has become a lot higher than in my childhood days where most peers could barely even turn on a computer. I have realized that writing a software to do X is most of the time trivial; getting tests to pass is only the very first step. But writing software in a _good way_ (whatever that means) is the hard part and the worst thing is that there is no clear indicator if you are even improving. It used to be the program either works or it doesn't. But values like maintainability and scalability are intangible and a perfectionist like me is compelled to work themselves to death in pursuit of an unclear goal. In many cases I don't even care if the program works as long as the code is beautiful, like a mathematician who spends all his time working out elegant proofs with zero applicability whatsoever. It doesn't help that I have to waste my talent on pointless CRUD and yet another e-commerce system, which only serves to sell people things they don't need and make the rich even richer.