I could use this advice too. I love programming; it was a teen hobby prior to making a career out of it. I inherited some elements of my old man's work ethic ("

I could use this advice too. I love programming; it was a teen hobby prior to making a career out of it. I inherited some elements of my old man's work ethic ("If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right", "Do it right the first time", etc) which I think are, at best, a low priority, and at worst, incompatible with the way software is built in the majority of software gigs. Value first, quality ..maybe. So I'm attempting to reconcile the reality of modern, corporate software development with the way I derive satisfaction/meaning from my career. Boiled down, my naivete about our relationship with work, which is undoubtedly encouraged and exploited by society, has started to wane, and now I'm trying to uncouple how I get meaning/satisfaction from how I get money. New years resolutions aren't for me but this year I tried to start loosely viewing things in my life like investments, specifically in terms of ROI. It's more of a reminder of how to think than a spreadsheet. I imagine myself as having an 'energy' budget. Sometimes I spend some energy and I get some back; other times I get nothing in return. As far as my career goes, I need to spend X to get my pay check, which eventually converts to energy. Sometimes I spend X+Y, hoping I get something more, like recognition/education/satisfaction. Sometimes that Y is engaging in a debate in peer review. Sometimes it's trying to anticipate one's manager or "showing initiative". The important thing is to track Y and if there's no return, mark that as a bad investment to be avoided in future. I burned out a couple of years ago because I was spending Y like mad with zero regard for the ROI, or at least with the vague expectation there would be some ROI one day. Obviously this is not novel, or even a good analogy ("all models wrong; some useful"), but this framing is a (potentially) temporary way to adjust my thinking and behaviour from the brainwashed, single-minded, career-focused, please-notice-me-ceo-daddy track I started out in after school/uni.