I keep thinking about solutions to these, as most of them feel artificial. Very often it's the social dimension of them which are harmful. If something is impo

I keep thinking about solutions to these, as most of them feel artificial. Very often it's the social dimension of them which are harmful. If something is important and I don't feel hugely guilty if I fail, I will enjoy time pressure. Repetitive tasks can be amazing, analyzing the patterns and optimizing them away is a cool exercise. It hurts when people forbid you to do so ("don't write a script for this" "why are you changing this to do it your way, it's not right"). Same for imposed limitations. Underperforming colleague is only an issue is if it's unspoken, not discussed or imposing secrets on you. If my colleague is slow then I want to reallocate the efforts so I can do a bit more to avoid him dragging down the team, and I just don't want the manager to bother me with slow perf if there's a slow guy nor I want that slow guy to force me to lie so he can stay his way. It just has to be open and optimized. Unexplained broken code requires a shift in thinking: freedom to break it, freedom to get time to do so. You need to reverse the context, system and desired outcomes to improve understanding and fix it. Another aspect is that I think adult life removed a lot of important emotional layers: no more open challenges that tame into natural competitiveness, that unleash positive pressure and brain activity leading to learning with more fun. A lot of jobs devolve into politics. Quite often I've heard people tell me "shh don't tell we're done so we can slack a bit". From the smallest jobs to highly paid engineer.. same behavior occurs. Kinda creates low levelling.