I somewhat identify myself as being such worst kind of programmer. I like to tackle hard problems. I like playing around with new technology. I like to try out

I somewhat identify myself as being such worst kind of programmer. I like to tackle hard problems. I like playing around with new technology. I like to try out new ideas how to solve problems. I started coding since I was a child, around 10 years old. I tend to code many hours non-stop on interesting problems. (Now with family and kids, I'm somewhat limited in doing that, though.) Many people say that they admire how productive I am and how much I accomplish. Sometimes some of the design decisions of some projects seem to be bad and lead to lots of overhead later. Basically the wrong kind of abstractions were chosen. Other parts of the software are much better and the abstractions seem to be quite nice, but this is not true for everything. (Related recent discussion here: Goodbye, clean code (2020): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38566235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38566235) I often tried to discuss some of the designs with more people, but noone was really interested in this work, so to push things forward, it was still often just me doing the decisions. I think the management just does not want to invest more resources into the software development. After all, the software works and does its jobs, but it's messy and I think it holds us back in some ways. But my manager keeps saying, we are not a software company, the software is just there to solve some problem. So, how to improve myself? I was trying to improve on basic design decisions of the software. The feedback loop here is very long though, and then difficult to really pinpoint it in the end. I also tried to improve my communication skills, but here it's even harder to tell whether I improved. At least every decision I do is discussed and communicated in many ways. I definitely learned already that the simpler the solution, the better, as also this article is pointing out. But that comes back to the problem of making exactly the right kind of abstractions, i.e. the right design decisions. Often I think I overthink some of the problems now to come up with the right abstraction. I want to get back to my older habit to just do things and iterate. But I'm afraid that this again leads to more messy solutions.