13 ms·

The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• diwash007 1y ago
  nice
• arlyle 1y ago
  we wont fix things by adding but deleting
  • maephisto666 1y ago
    The less, the better
  • esjeon 1y ago
    Yes, but deleting is more difficult and often more expensive than adding. It becomes another burden if you are not bold and determined enough.
• bflesch 1y ago
  This resonates
• Nevermark 1y ago
  I have spent some percentage of my life attempting to rewrite all software from first principles up. Software is so spectacularly broken. Applications that don’t let me adjust the position of a little button for my work habits. Why is that impossible!?! A global software and commerce system, where you can buy candy or transfer $ billions, both with cute warnings like “Please, oh, please, sir! Please don’t hit the back button!” I can sum up the results of my quest quite simply: “The rewrites continue…” Is this chasing windmills? The case for that seems solid on the surface, but… It is true that every rewrite of a specific set of features, or a platform for enabling better support for efficiently and correctly commingling an open class of features, inevitably runs into trouble. Some early design choice is now evidently crippling. Some aspect can now be seen to have two incompatible implementations colliding and setting off an unnecessary complexity explosion. Etc. But on the other hand, virtually every major rewrite points to a genuinely much improved sequel. Whose dikes keeping out unnecessary complexity hold up longer with less finger holes to plug, for a better return. Before its collapse. Since there must be a simplest way to do things, at least in any scoped area, we have Lyapunov conditions: Continual improvement with a guaranteed destination. A casual proof there is a solution. It’s a dangerous phantom to pursue! —— It would be interesting to compile a list from the heady 90’s, when corporations created boondoggles like Pink and Cyberdog, and had higher aspirations for things like “Object Linking and Embedding”. You just don’t see as many romantic technological catastrophes like those anymore. I miss them!
  • throwanem 1y ago
    > Is this chasing windmills? Yes. Well, "tilting at," jousting specifically. The figure relates to the comical pointlessness of such an act; the windmill sail will in every case of course simply remove the lance from the rider and the rider from the saddle, and turn on heedlessly, as only a purblind or romantic fool could omit trivially to predict. > You just don’t see as many romantic technological catastrophes like those anymore. The 90s were a period of unparalleled economic surplus in the United States. There was more stupid money than at any other time and place in history, and stupid money always goes somewhere. Once that was tulips. This time it was this. > I miss them! I miss the innocence of the time, however amply undeserved. But I was young myself then.
    • Nevermark 1y ago
      > I miss the innocence of the time, however amply undeserved. But I was young myself then. I see things slightly differently. Big failures whose practical and theoretical lessons and new wisdoms are then put to use, more carefully, ambitions unabated, teach things, and take technology to unexpected places. But big failures, institutionalized as big failures, become devastating craters of resources, warding off further attempts for years or decades … but only after the fact. That didn’t need to be their legacy.
      • throwanem 1y ago
        The abatement of American ambitions is something the world has long, not to say desperately, awaited. Not that Americans should not aspire; indeed, the world has long loved us best when we dream most generously the utopias of which we forever will dream as long as we call ourselves Americans. It's only that generosity, not the reverie, of which we've lately lost the habit.
  • exe34 1y ago
    I don't know if this is post-hoc justification, but I see myself as somebody who wants to know what everything is and how everything works - so to me, re-implementing (and always failing to take it to completion) is the means to an end. I think I spent the first 25 years of my life studying, so learning has become the goal itself. Work is there to provide funds to support me while I learn. Re-implementing the basics of something is a terrific tool for learning how it works.
• throwanem 1y ago
  Welcome to your thirties!
  • layer8 1y ago
    That's a bit early, IMO.
    • throwanem 1y ago
      Welcome to your late thirties!
• esjeon 1y ago
  > Knowing which problems are worth your energy. This, but with proper balance. TBH, you can live a happy life if you just stop caring about every technical problem, but that would make you unimaginative and passive. Just make sure your pick a hole (or two) you're gonna die in.
• maephisto666 1y ago
  Amazing piece of text. Honestly, I saw myself in everything you wrote. The struggle, the attempt to write a single line of code to make it perfect, durable, etc. it never works at the first try...but man the joy of having the control over fixing things... And I also relate with the personal chaos that maybe we tend to fix by fixing our software... I see a lot of this "unfinished" behaviour with other things in my life as well... Cleaning the shed, finishing videogames.... Sometimes even the feeling of having the challenge is enough...I don't even try, because I know it will take time to make it right
  • throwanem 1y ago
    What would it mean to be finished with life? Where are you going in such an all-fired hurry?
    • 1dom 1y ago
      Trying to get to the world that all the people unlike us live: a world where a brain can power down for a bit because everything is fine for now.
      • throwanem 1y ago
        You think that's where "people unlike us" live? My God, have you met any?
• abhisek 1y ago
  So true. I have tried building from scratch so many times for specific use-cases with my own opinionated experience only to recreate the bloat over time. That’s actually good. The alternative was building something based on momentary spark of creativity that no one, not even me end up using.
• abstractspoon 1y ago
  Can't disagree with any of that
• atoav 1y ago
  Some truth in there, but I have to admit that most simple static generators I have written I wrote out of fun and curiosity and not because I thought all existing ones had flaws (even if they did). It is okay to do things and abandon them later, that is how we learn. We programmers are multipliers, which gives us special responsibility. If we create a shit tool with a shit workflow that wastes time, we waste time multiplied by the number of users of our software. If we save time or bring joy, the same is true. That can be beautiful and devastating. But every software needs to be maintained somehow and maintainability is a technological choice as well. I have an embedded project running for well over a decade without a single maintenance step of either the hard- or the software. I could have built that project also with more dependencies to the outside world, or in more sophisticated ways with more moving parts, but I wanted to not deal with the consequences of that. This choice isn't always easy, but it is a choice. Ask your sysadmin which things worked for the past decades without having to touch them and investigate. Typically it is boring tech with boring choices. Another aspect the article does not tackle is that if you know to repair or build many things, people will naturally also come to you asking you to do precisely that. But that again produces maintenance work and responsibility. This is why I like working in education, you can show people how to do it and then it is their project.
• Melkaz 1y ago
  I'm seeing myself in the text, but one aspect that doesn't seem to be covered enough is the ego. I find joy in receiving praise from my colleagues when they have good experiences with my tools.
  • alexisread 1y ago
    Playing devil's advocate here, but is that simply validation that stuff you've written is actually useful? This could be seen as a proxy for self worth, which if something is useful, helps stave off that nagging anxiety in the back of your head? The question here is, is that a useful driver to build new things, or do we let things go? That's kinda similar to the article's premise. (takes one to know one here)
• dmichulke 1y ago
  Wow, great piece. We are playing software factorio and the winning move is not to play.
  • WJW 1y ago
    It's more like society factorio, but unlike factorio it's not fun and you're forced to play against people with much more resources and talent than you.
    • TeMPOraL 1y ago
      Also if you stumble and fall behind, you don't get to hit pause and plan your next steps carefully - that'll only make you fall behind even further.
  • Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    Don't start, I've started a playthrough again with the new expansion and just landed on the first planet after overbuilding my home base with grids and trains and stuff.
• EZ-E 1y ago
  There is the curse of knowing how, and maybe more importantly there is the curse of other people knowing you know how.
  • Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    Family members asking you to fix their printers.
    • brianhama 1y ago
      It never ends.
    • aleph_minus_one 1y ago
      > Family members asking you to fix their printers. My honest, brutal answer is: "Your problem is very likely self-inflicted. Buy a decent Brother laser printer." This attitude resolves you of nearly all such requests. :-)
      • Aeolun 1y ago
        I don't think you even need to qualify that? Any Brother laser printer is a decent one. They don't have all that many models.
    • caseyy 1y ago
      Family is the F-word I can't stand, much like Louis Rossman. Whenever someone pulls "but I'm your family" or "but I'm your friend" into an ask, there's a 95% likelihood you're being guilt-tripped. Whether you wish to help the manipulators is your choice, but it's important to understand what's happening.
    • bigstrat2003 1y ago
      Depends on the family member. My parents? They fed and clothed me for a couple of decades (not to mention literally wiped my ass for years). I owe them big time and I'll do basically anything that isn't immoral for them. My cousins? I like them and will try to help them, but I'm not going to bend over backwards either.
• walterbell 1y ago
  > I can fix something, but not everything. “Calvin: Know what I pray for? Hobbes: What? Calvin: The strength to change what I can, the inability to accept what I can't, and the incapacity to tell the difference.” —Bill Watterson (1988)
  • Tepix 1y ago
    A parody of the Serenity Prayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer
• ajuc 1y ago
  Great article. I know it's not the main subject, but I really liked this part: > Technical Work as Emotional Regulation Men are taught to do that in most societies. You are unhappy - don't bother talking about it (men don't cry), do sth for the society - you'll receive praise in return and your pain will go away for a while. Even if nobody'll praise you - you'll think better of yourself. Same thing that makes our fathers obsessively fix any minor inconveniences around the house instead of going to the doctor with their big health problem. Men often laugh at women talking for hours instead of fixing the damn problem (and it is frustrating to observe). But we often do not fix THE damn problem either - we fix other unrelated problems to feel better about the one we fear thinking about. What's more tech-specific IMO is the degree to which our egos are propped by our code. Code is the one thing many programmers had going for them when they grew up. It's what made them special. It's what was supposed to pay for all the bullying in school. It's what paid their bills and made them respected. It's very hard not to make code your main source of value. People praise "ego-less" programming, and most programmers adhere to the rules (don't get overly defensive, take criticism, allow others to change "your" code, etc.) But that's not actually ego-less programming, it's just hidding your ego in the closet and suffering in silence. If you procrastinate when programming - it's because you feel your code reflects on your worth as a human being. It's all ego. Changing what you do won't change that. You need to change what you think.
  • Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    To expand, code is a means, the core "habits" that programmers develop (at least speaking for myself) is twofold; abstracting, trying to reduce things to simple stereotypes; codifying / decision-tree-ing interactions, things like that. And problem solving, when someone mentions an issue, the gut reaction is to try and fix it. And it takes a lot of internet wisdoms and/or therapy to learn that you are allowed to let people stew in their problems, or that unless you're asked for a solution you don't need to offer one. Problem solving is easier than listening and empathy.
• arjvik 1y ago
  These days, knowing that instead of spending hours artfully crafting a solution to something, GPT could code up a far-less-elegant-but-still-working solution in about 5-10 minutes of prompting has all but solved this.
  • pmkary 1y ago
    I went down this road and it doesn't free up time, you just get to fix many many more problems.
    • arjvik 1y ago
      I should clarify - I don’t mean I use GPT to write these solutions, I leave them unsolved knowing that they’re solvable in a very inelegant way.
      • TeMPOraL 1y ago
        That makes me feel even more guilty for not solving them, now that I realize the solution is one or two orders of magnitude easier to do. Not joking with orders of magnitude. At this point, I regularly encounter a situation in which asking ChatGPT/Claude to hack me a little browser tool to do ${random stuff} feels easier and faster than searching for existing software, or even existing artifacts. Like, the other day I made myself a generator for pre-writing line tracing exercise sheets for my kids, because it was easier than finding enough of those sheets on-line, and the latter is basically just Google/Kagi Images search.
  • Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    Yeah but if you let go of your years of coding standards / best practices and just hack something together yourself, it won't be much slower than chatgpt.
  • layer8 1y ago
    For some value of "working".
• nyanpasu64 1y ago
  There's a... sad comparison of this article about over-responsibility, and https://www.benkuhn.net/blub/ https://www.benkuhn.net/blub/ about the value of learning about the stack you use (the more you know about the workings of bugs, sometimes the more they gnaw at you).
• d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
  I think about this from the perpective of change management. Every defect I hope to fix entails a change, which has a certain probability of creating another irksome deficiency or incompatibility. When building complex systems I try to design them with the end state, that you describe very well, in mind. Each time you set about to make a single change ask what is the probability (p) that this change results in another change, or track this probability empirically, then compute 1/(1-p) this will tell you how much change you should "expect" to make to realize your desired improvement. If you have n interacting modules compute 1/(1-np). This will quantify whether or not to embark on the refactor. (The values computed are the sum of the geometric series in the probability which represents the expectation value) So this is about how we manage change in a complex system in order to align its functionality with a changing environment. I suggest that we can do so by considering the smallest, seemingly innocuous change that you could make and how that change propagates through to the end product. In the end, a solution may be to make systems that are easy and painless to change, then you can change them often for the better without the long tail effects that drag you down.
  • rocqua 1y ago
    The N systems case equation has to be wrong. I think you need either 1/(1-p)^n or 1/(1-p^n)
    • d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
      I think it says 1/(1-np).
      • d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
        It is easy to see this by forming the geometric series and rearranging terms, the standard Euler trick.
      • rocqua 1y ago
        That's what it says in the original post. It is also non-sensical. If the probability is 10% (p=0.1), and the number of systems is 11 (n=11), then you get 1/(1 - 11*0.1) which is -10.
• figassis 1y ago
  I too suffer from this, but as I learned, Nature built an elegant solution to this. Have a family and kids. Your choice when you have time off of work will be reduced to hacking or playing with your child that you have been neglecting due to a crunch at work. You’re welcome.
  • yuppiepuppie 1y ago
    This is a great comment, as it hits far too close to my heart. Im currently trying to get my team to rethink how they are building the APIs for certain services in our product, and focus really on design and craftmanship. To the point where Im ready to start breaking it apart myself and coding up the solution on my off hours. But then I look at my son, and say "screw it, they couldnt pay me enough to care out of hours and give up play time"
  • piva00 1y ago
    Or just have another hobby not involving programming. I got into this from being my main hobby as a kid, the passion thing I did when free time was available, I learnt a lot (enough to build it into a career), I had lots of fun but that time is gone. My free time is to be spent on other things, I get paid to fix issues and that pays my bills, I don't want nor need to be thinking about these issues outside of paid hours, you know too much to the point where you know how much effort it will take to fix something that might look innocuous, innocent, but definitely has deep tendrils of other related issues to tackle. It's not worth it, not if I'm not being paid for it or it isn't part of a personal project I'm really passionate about. So I learnt to not care much, I help my colleagues, deliver what I tell I will deliver, and free space in my mind to pursue other more interesting stuff to me.
    • aleph_minus_one 1y ago
      > Or just have another hobby not involving programming. This can actually make things (much) worse: Since you have now another topic you are insanely passionate about, you see a lot of additional things in the world that are broken and need fixing (though of course typically not via programming). Thus, while having a very different additionally hobby (not or barely involving programming) clearly broadens your horizon a lot, it also very likely doubles the curse/pain/problem that the original article discusses.
• pmkary 1y ago
  This was something I really enjoyed reading, having suffered greatly from the same conditions. It made me realize I’m not alone, and for that I hugely thank you, and everyone else in this thread who commented.
• kookamamie 1y ago
  It's good to remember it's a marathon, not a sprint and that everything rots over time.
• Barbing 1y ago
  raf: from grins to smirks, thank you for repeatedly putting the smiles on my face. You know me so well considering we’ve never met. Ever so salient; thanks for (hopefully) course correcting any of my remaining years :)
• mgaunard 1y ago
  Letting go means stopping to care. That's a slippery slope to coasting.
  • pjc50 1y ago
    I think the Buddhists would disagree with you on the moral valence of this.
    • WJW 1y ago
      There's plenty of Western philosophy as well that sees "not caring" (at least not about things outside your own actions) as very desirable. Not to mention the Epicureans, for whom freedom from worries ("ataraxia") was the highest attainable state. OP's fear of (being seen to be) "coasting" would be entirely foreign to them.
  • Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    Letting go of everything means stopping to care about anything, sure. But the point of the article is to try and stop caring about everything and focus on the things that are really important to you, focus on the things you can change.
  • arkey 1y ago
    > Letting go means stopping to care. This reasoning (which I can easily identify with) is a slippery slope towards OCD anxiety and depression when you refuse to acknowledge that you can't fix everything. You need to be realistic, set your priorities within a limited, defined context, take decisions and actions based on those, and forget about the stuff that didn't make your priority list. That's not not-caring. That's focusing on what really needs your care. Wish I was better at it though.
• daliboru 1y ago
  I see a similar issue in 2025, but with vibe coding. It all boils down to the 3 key factors: speed, quality and cost. And you can't have it all Know your trade-offs.
  • Tepix 1y ago
    With vibe coding, you have none of those. The initial speed advantage will disappear once you need to maintain the mess.
    • daliboru 1y ago
      Tnx for the comment. Discussing tools (in this case, vibe coding) naturally raises the issue of what skills are actually needed to use them effectively, such as prompting, which in turn leads to a broader question about the role and relevance of traditional software engineering skills. It's a whole other topic... You can create value with vibe coding. As I said, know your trade-off, your context. You wouldn't use a hammer to fix a watch, would you?
  • layer8 1y ago
    How do you achieve speed and quality at the same time?
    • daliboru 1y ago
      To quote one movie character: "Bro, when you can't fix a problem with money, you fix it with a lot of money." Jokes aside, you find the crème de la crème of engineering, and pay as much as they ask for. Speed + Quality = $$$$$ On the other hand, Speed + Cheap = Crap Quality Cheap + Quality = Slow
• foobahhhhh 1y ago
  Glad I'm low enough on the bell curve to not have this problem. If a tool is broken I shrug. Maybe someone will fix it
• erulabs 1y ago
  Software engineers, I love yall. To see the light at the end of the tunnel. To see some glorious perfect paradigm that maybe could be. I envy you. I grew up in a datacenter. Leaky air conditioners and diesel generators. Open the big doors if it gets too hot. Now let’s go back. Back to when we didn’t know better. Software doesn’t stay solved. Every solution you write starts to rot the moment it exists. Everything, everywhere, is greasy and lousy and half broken. Sysadmins, we accept that everything is shit from the very beginning.
  • galbar 1y ago
    I have said many times to teammates: the only code that is perfect is the one that hasn't left our minds. The moment it's written down it becomes flawed and imperfect. This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make it as good as we can, but rather that we must accept that the outcome will be flawed and that, despite our best intentions, it will show its sharp edges the next time we come to work on it.
    • moffkalast 1y ago
      I'm sure some mathematicians would disagree.
      • pjc50 1y ago
        I think applied mathematicians started to encounter this reality of the impure world the first time someone taped a dead moth into the logbook of the Harvard Mark II.
      • bonoboTP 1y ago
        Math can be greasy and messy. Definitions can be clumsy in a way that makes stating theorems cumbersome, the axioms may be unintuitive, proofs can be ugly, they can even contain bugs in published form. There can be annoying inconsistencies like optional constant factors in Fourier, or JPL quaternions. Yes, prototypical school stuff like Pythagoras are "eternal" but a lot of math is designed, and can be ergonomic or not. Better notation can suggest solutions to unsolved problems. Clumsy axioms can hide elegant structure.
• sapht 1y ago
  I'm compulsively drafting ideas along these same lines, but now I don't need to fix that. Wonderful, brilliant text, thank you raf.
• anthk 1y ago
  Well, with OpenBSD: - Updates often don't break things - Remind for notes - Gopher as my main site - Multimarkdown+git for a wiki - A web/blog without RSS is not worth your time - Nvi can be good enough against vim, entr+make do magic - mbsync/msmtp/slrnpull and so work in batch mode, fire mutt and forget I don't hack my tools any more. I don't distrohop. CWM, XTerm, MuPDF, GV and friends like Bitlbee do everything well since years. Now I'm focusing in Forth, because in a near future low power microcontrollers and laptop will say a thing or two.
• thewisenerd 1y ago
  https://archive.is/2xEGK https://archive.is/2xEGK
• PixelForg 1y ago
  Hopefully the future me is able to relate to this, because I really feel like I'm in a rut when it comes to working on personal projects. I have many ideas that I want to build, but I'd have to learn new languages, yet I just can't sit and go through the documentation every day like I should. Still haven't finished the rust book. The other way is start building already, and if you come across a block, then learn about that thing and move on, but I feel uncomfortable having gaps in my knowledge, AI exists but I don't want to use it to generate code for me because I wanna enjoy the process of writing code rather than just reviewing code. Basically I'm just stuck within the constraints I put for myself :(, I'm not sure why I wrote this here, probably just wanted to let it out..
  • monkeyelite 1y ago
    To me this doesn’t sound like you find programming very fun - but as a chore to get to something else. That’s not a bad thing - just find out which part you actually want to do
    • strangegecko 1y ago
      Responding to this as someone who has struggled with similar inner conflicts, the "chore to get to something else" rings true for me. In my case, being good at programming was my means to feeling valued and valuable, and the sense of "I should" came from feeling useless and not needed, specifically after being forced into early retirement. (but the same pattern has been with me since childhood) Not having a family or passion project (which fills those gaps for many people as far as I can tell) made all of this feel very urgent and threatening. > which part you actually want to do Which sounds like such a simple question, but I found it hard to answer. For me, it quickly turns into "what is worth doing", which is a bit of a monstrous question. I'm still trying to figure out whether this is a result of being mostly estranged from myself and the question of "what do I want" due to being so overwhelmed with trying to succeed with the external constraints and demands the world places on us.
      • monkeyelite 1y ago
• throw_away_0613 1y ago
  As I'm getting older, I want things to be as standardized as possible, and just don't worry about the details. I have learned from my mistakes The script I made for deployment, because existing solutions didn't "feel" right, required a lot of work and maintenance when we later had to add features and bug fixes. Another script I made for building and deploying Java applications, because I didn't like Maven and Puppet. The micro service I rewrote because I wanted to use my own favourite programming language. I introduced a lot of bugs that were already fixed, missing features and another language for my co-workers to learn when they inherited the application when I left.
  • clan 1y ago
    I hope many people read this and take it to heart. It is a rare and wise insight which only becomes crystal clear with age. Choose your battles very carefully. This is a golden nugget up there with "time flies". I never understood that as a kid but really hits hard with your mid-life crisis. Listen carefully little grasshoppers.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • DavidPiper 1y ago
    Totally agree, standardisation makes everything so much more legible, even if there are problems with the standard. I also think there is a profoundly non-linear relationship (I don't want to say negative-exponential, but it could be), between: - The number of lines of code, or distinct configuration changes, you make to the defaults of an off-the-shelf tool - The cognitive and practical load maintaining that personalized setup I'm convinced that the opportunity cost of not using default configurations is significantly higher than we estimate, especially when that environment has to be shared across multiple people. (It's unavoidable or even desirable in many cases of course, but so often we just reinvent hexagonal wheels.)
    • Aeolun 1y ago
      While I have experienced both sides of the equation here, I find it much more pleasant to have things specialized instead of standardized. Yes, you spend a bit of time maintaining the functionality, but all that functionality (and maintenance) is there in support of your goal. Using standardized software often leads to spending half a day just trying to find a way to work around the limitation you face. The next level there is that you realize you can just fix it, spend half a day crafting the perfect PR, and then submit it into the void, leaving it hanging for half a year before someone gets to it.
• GardenLetter27 1y ago
  This is well-written. I think LLMs can help a bit here too - the other day I was watching a rare, old film with my wife and the subtitles kept de-syncing. I.e. the frame-rate was slightly different as well as a fixed offset. So I explained it to Claude and made it write a Python script where I could manually set a few fixed times and it would adjust the SRT file, and it worked perfectly. I literally paused the film and did that in under 5 minutes. It was amazing. So fixing a lot of small things has become easier at least.
  • urig 1y ago
    My takeaway from this post is not to find better ways to do, but to find a way not to.
    • GardenLetter27 1y ago
      Yeah, but the main thing is I didn't publish the script, or try to develop it into a more generic tool with more features (automatic synchronisation, etc.) - that is where things become overwhelming. Like I have published a FOSS tool from some scripts I had for managing VPNs, and there I get constant issues around new providers / updates and it not working in people's specific environments (which I can't test). The LLMs make it viable to write quick throw-away scripts with almost no time investment, and as such you feel no pressure to share or improve them.
  • syndeo 1y ago
    Whaaaaaat… This same thing happened to me this past weekend, and I used Vercel v0 to fix it. https://v0-captions-adjuster.vercel.app/ https://v0-captions-adjuster.vercel.app/ Not shilling my solution; this is nowhere near actually good yet, but it was "good enough" to fix the problem for me too. Only posting it as proof that I had the same thing happen to me, and maybe it can help others too.
• lightyrs 1y ago
  Having kids is an excellent solution to this feeling. Besides occupying any time you used to have for unnecessary work, they have an uncanny ability to remind you just how little you actually control. However you get to the end of the OCD tunnel, the journey is often very worthwhile.
  • olup 1y ago
    I am a father of two, and I could not have penned that any better.
• howtofly 1y ago
  Serious software development is rarely an individual endeavor; most issues should be resolved through collaboration. In other words, they should be addressed through management. What the author needs to overcome, in my view, is essentially a form of extreme individualism.
  • TeMPOraL 1y ago
    I guess that's a problem for a lot of us who learned to program as teenagers. A big reason programming felt good for me is precisely because it let me do interesting and impressive stuff myself, and not collaboratively. There were very few kids who had even remotely similar interests to me back then - and that's true in adulthood too, outside of work contexts. While on the job, my projects may be collaborative in nature, but after hours, there's very few people among my family and friends who'd even be interested in doing a small software project, much less capable of doing so.
• davnicwil 1y ago
  Fractal complexity. It's not only that solutions decay, though that's true, but also that the search for improvement itself becomes recursive. When you identify something can be improved, and fix it, your own fix and every individual step of it now become the new thing that can be improved. After the most fleeting of pauses to step back and appreciate your work, this becomes your new default. Indeed I often look back at my own solutions and judge them more harshly than I would ever judge anyone else's. Why? Because as the article says, I know much more about how it works. Cracks increase surface area by a lot. I know about a lot of the cracks. I wrote a blog post [0] about this mindset getting in the way of what you care about in product development which you might enjoy, if you enjoyed this article. [0] https://davnicwil.com/just-build-the-product/ https://davnicwil.com/just-build-the-product/
  • jonlandrum 1y ago
    "Just build the product" this was a good read, and a trap I get sucked into. Always focusing on amassing ever better tools, and forgetting that the practice of using those tools is what really matters.
    • davnicwil 1y ago
      thanks!
• dusted 1y ago
  This resonates a lot with a thought that I've had for a long time.. A computer is not a tool, it never was, it never will be.. It's a workshop.
• brador 1y ago
  The next step is burn out, then keeping everything default and just living with it. I know of no steps after this.
  • WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
    Then one day you die and get a standard-issue funeral. I guess.
• A_Stefan 1y ago
  Thank you for sharing your personal journey. I too have (too) many ideas floating around, getting ready to fix everything I see broken, ignoring what's really important. So I whole-heartedly agree with "You learn how to program. You learn how to fix things. But the hardest thing you’ll ever learn is when to leave them broken."
• moconnor 1y ago
  > I believe sometimes building things is how we self-soothe. > I have written entire applications just to avoid thinking about why I was unhappy. I think this is true too. The prefrontal cortex is inhibitory to the amygdala/limbic system; always having a project you can think about or work on as an unconscious learned adaptation to self-calm in persistent emotionally-stressful situations is very plausible. I wonder how many of us became very good at programming ~through this - difficult emotional circumstances driving an intense focus on endless logical reasoning problems in every spare moment for a very long time. I wonder if you can measure a degree of HPA-axis deregulation compared to the general population. And whether it's net good or net harmful. To the extent that it distracts you from actually solving or changing a situation that is making you emotionally unhappy, probably not great. But being born into a time in which the side effects make you rich was pretty cool.
• metalman 1y ago
  This is very amusing, and evocative of what creative makers go through in many other fields....and as an do it my self absolutist, got me mired in attempts to pick up programing as another side gig/hussle in a life that is wildly over subscribed. So reluctantly I am letting go of a bunch of stuff that lingers, Presque vu skills, always almost, and never enough time to push up and over. The bonus is that I have focused on things that I did level up on, and can now do with ease, and a bit of flare......and perhaps more importantly give others a bit of joy to watch and see, "hey! that doesn't look so hard now!" One of the things I picked up.along the way was, audio engineering, live and studio sound, where when it kicks in, it's pure misery, and every mistake and buzz, ruins all music listening, fingers twitching for sliders that are not there, griping like a back seat driver.....the better the stereo, the worse the experience, especialy with heavily produced studio work.....at least with live recordings, all the mistakes are honest and oten the recovery is where the magic happens.
• pknerd 1y ago
  The site is down
• codelikeawolf 1y ago
  > We write a new tool because we are overwhelmed. Refactor it, not because the code is messy, but your life is. We chase the perfect system because it gives us something to hold onto when everything else is spinning. This really got to me because I've been doing this without realizing it for as long as I can remember.
  • jonlandrum 1y ago
    Yeah, I feel called out by that line
  • matheusmoreira 1y ago
    Same. Low tolerance for frustration. Starting something is easy. 20% of the work gets 80% of the results. It's beautiful to see. Then you gotta do the last 20% and you see the 80% of the job ahead of you. Seeing it through quickly gets frustrating. It turns into a job. How to get away from this? Just start a new project...
    • strangegecko 1y ago
      Does that cycle connect to the question of why you're starting those projects in the first place? If it's "play" and experiencing joy, then quitting after the fun part would seem to do its job.
      • matheusmoreira 1y ago
        Part of the reason is wanting to make cool stuff. I'm not even half as brilliant as guys like Fabrice Bellard but I certainly would like to be. My strongest reason to start a project though is very much along the "self-soothing" lines described in TFA. I do it to prove to myself I'm not insane for thinking that something is possible and that things could be different. If I can think of something, surely people much smarter than me would have done it already, right? For example, I wanted to embed data into ELF executables and access it at runtime. The accepted solution was to add sections and have the program find, open, read and parse its own executable in order to read those sections. That just didn't seem right to me, I couldn't accept it and I didn't rest until I figured out the real way to do it. https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/self-contained-lone-lisp-applications https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/self-contained-lone-... I got the Linux kernel to find, open, read and parse the executable for me. It memory maps the data before the program even starts. When it does, it just needs to follow a bunch of pointers to find it. Simpler and more robust. As far as I know, no one else has done this. At least one linker out there gained features just to make this easy and efficient. My most painful free software development experience was when I tried to contribute one of these "insane" ideas and someone described it as schizophrenic. Pretty much just dropped it and never went back there again. Patches are still on the mailing list so who knows.
• smallflykkoo 1y ago
  [dead]
• dandellion 1y ago
  I really can relate with the article. Also, it doesn't just apply to software but to lots of other things. It's the same mentality as being into cars and always tuning or restoring old ones. Being into woodworking or craftsmanship and fixing and building stuff around the house, etc.
• jeffreygoesto 1y ago
  /.ed :(
• sylware 1y ago
  "SSL error"...
• naabb 1y ago
  Anyone else unable to access the site? I get a connection refused.
  • TheJuli 1y ago
    HN hug of death
  • shiandow 1y ago
    https://archive.ph/2xEGK https://archive.ph/2xEGK
• mrheosuper 1y ago
  My most useful hobby project is the one i just "hack and find out". I make a matrix led clock that can sync time through network, using Arduino and esp32. Due to time constraint, the coding standard is horrible(magic number, dynamic allocation, no abstraction between module, etc), but hey, it works, at least for 7 years now. The code took me 3 days to finish, and i would never write such code in production FW. There is a bug that may makes it unable to connect network, but it can be fixed by turning off then on again, i never bother to debug or patch it. Perfect is the enemy of good.
• shiandow 1y ago
  https://archive.ph/2xEGK https://archive.ph/2xEGK
• manduz 1y ago
  [dead]
• mentalgear 1y ago
  Link is broken, maybe someone has a backup archive.
• dc96 1y ago
  Link is down. Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250506062631/https://notashelf.dev/posts/curse-of-knowing https://web.archive.org/web/20250506062631/https://notashelf...
  • AdrianB1 1y ago
    It is not down, we are probably overwhelming the server. It works, intermittently.
    • bookofjoe 1y ago
      Truth.
• z3t4 1y ago
  Modern software is like sand castles, you can go there every day to maintain it, but one day it will be completely washed away. Everything that is beautiful will start to rot. After something have reached perfection it will change or die. It doesn't have to be that way though, you can put the OS in a virtual machine, so every time you work on your beautiful software it will feel like you are carving rune stones.
• ferguess_k 1y ago
  I believe after a certain age the most valuable skill is know how to remove things from your life instead of piling things up. Things that other people believe to be so crucial that your action of removing them from your life is going to offend them.
• thedanbob 1y ago
  I used to never finish personal projects. Then I realized that the biggest thing preventing me from finishing them was (perversely) my sense of duty to get them finished. Once I decided that I was under no obligation to anyone to work on them, not even myself, I had no trouble finding the motivation to get them done. So now side projects are a strictly "just for fun" affair. I work on them when I feel like, no deadlines, and once they're "in production" I maintain them because I like tinkering. The only problem with this approach is I've gone from hating the thought of programming after work to coming up with side projects at work.
• bobrobpr 1y ago
  It's like you went inside my brain and heart and divulged my feelings. Well done! Now, back to feeling worthless.
• napolux 1y ago
  It's funny how it's returning a 503 :(
• erdaltoprak 1y ago
  I was in the middle of rewriting a library and adding sensible defaults for the CLI. I feel like I wrote this for myself
• hanselot 1y ago
  Why do I have 244gb of environments and beat myself up when I delete something to play a game? This deep desire to affect change in a controllable way... This infinite desire for self value defined by external validation. It's not sustainable. Perfection can only be obtained by observation of perfection of combined self through self and other. It's okay to discard parts of yourself to balance yourself with your counterpart. A willing violation is no longer a violation. Not observation of one or the other on a pedestal, but accepting that both are vital parts to the system and observing the perfection that comes from co-iteration. Essentially turning a binary system quantum.
• itfossil 1y ago
  This post resonates a lot with me. As somebody in the twilight of their coding career - I totally understand what the author means by "over-responsibility" After 25 years - I'm over it. But the flip side of that is that I can't un-see the fact that so much of the tech shit in my life is broken and it has practically become a second job trying to manage it and / or fix it. Thankfully I don't do it by trying to code replacements like the author seems to. Instead I try to come up with workarounds or find replacements. Nevertheless the weight of the curse is about the same I figure.
• bookofjoe 1y ago
  As a non-techie (retired M.D.) who wouldn't know source code from Morse code, reading these comments is extremely absorbing.
  • arkey 1y ago
    Do you perceive this as a tech-specific thing though? I'm a software engineer but this resonates with me more within other aspects of life in general than my professional background specifically.
    • bookofjoe 1y ago
      Not sure what "this" refers to.... edit. OK, I just went back and reread the parent post and now I understand what you're asking. I do agree with you, this is generalizable across the board: file under the old saw "Perfect is the enemy of good." edit #2. Also applicable, from Alfred Korzybski's classic 1933 book "Science and Sanity": "When in doubt, read on." I've always generalized this statement (which I first encountered around 1968 while an undergraduate at UCLA when reading his book not for a class but because I had gone down a wonderful rabbit hole after learning about Korzybski and his huge influence at the time he was alive ) to all things that puzzle me or cause me to stop moving toward whatever it is I'm aiming at. edit #3: PDF for Korzybski's book: https://archive.org/details/alfred-korzybksi-science-and-sanity https://archive.org/details/alfred-korzybksi-science-and-san...
  • strangegecko 1y ago
    HN is really unique in that regard for me. I don't come here that often, but when I do, I usually end up getting stuck in what is often a borderline off-topic discussion of life challenges I'm dealing with. This morning, I started out trying to use NotebookLM to solve my "what would a meaningful life look like for me" problem and ended up spending over an hour on this thread (mostly reading/thinking). I only came here as a symptom of procrastination when the friction I encountered with that main goal became too much.
• pammf 1y ago
  A good part of that is a disguised sense of superiority. Life becomes way lighter when you realize other people are also smart and what you’re “fixing” can very likely be: - something so unimportant that no one felt it was worthy working on - something that was supposed to work like that, and you simply don’t agree and want to make it your way
  • arkey 1y ago
    > A good part of that is a disguised sense of superiority. Or not. It can be the struggle of having higher than average standards. Sadly, your list is incomplete without: - something someone didn't bother to put any effort or thought into at all.
    • pammf 1y ago
      You are right. My comment wasn’t meant to completely invalidate the point of the article or to provide an alternative exhaustive list of causes, but more to bring this other aspect that I felt wasn’t surfaced yet.
    • Joker_vD 1y ago
      Like the accessibility ramp that has a sign post right in the middle of it.
  • matheusmoreira 1y ago
    All of programming comes from a sense of superiority. Programming is the closest humanity has ever gotten to godhood. We're creating entire structured universes out of unstructured bits. The system reflects the understanding of its creator. We're all pretending to be gods, warring over the system's design.
    • wiseowise 1y ago
      I wish this meme would die already. You're just writing some mumbo jumbo that you've learned (at least most of it) in a couple of years, chill out.
• gbuk2013 1y ago
  > The trials are never complete. This is not true - one day you will be dead. Hopefully that day is a long way away but it will eventually come around. It is good to keep this in mind and spend some time coming to terms with this. If you do, the problem this article talks about will naturally fall away. Realise and acknowledge the limitations to your ability to act. Then consciously make a choice as to what you spend your limited time on and don’t worry about the rest.
  • Aeolun 1y ago
    > This is not true - one day you will be dead. Bold of you to assume that being dead also means the trials are complete. I imagine it as the beginning on the next set of trials.
    • gbuk2013 1y ago
      I don’t assume that. :) Just that the “me” facing them will no longer have any care for those the “me” here is facing.
• edelans 1y ago
  Slow down, you crazy child You're so ambitious for a juvenile But then if you're so smart Tell me why are you still so afraid? Mm Where's the fire, what's the hurry about? You'd better cool it off before you burn it out You've got so much to do And only so many hours in a day, hey But you know that when the truth is told That you can get what you want or you can just get old You're gonna kick off before you even get halfway through, ooh When will you realize Vienna waits for you? Slow down, you're doing fine You can't be everything you wanna be before your time Although it's so romantic on the borderline tonight, tonight Too bad, but it's the life you lead You're so ahead of yourself, that you forgot what you need Though you can see when you're wrong You know you can't always see when you're right You're right You've got your passion, you've got your pride But don't you know that only fools are satisfied? Dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true, ooh When will you realize Vienna waits for you? Slow down, you crazy child And take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while It's alright, you can afford to lose a day or two, ooh When will you realize Vienna waits for you? And you know that when the truth is told That you can get what you want or you could just get old You're gonna kick off before you even get halfway through, ooh Why don't you realize Vienna waits for you? When will you realize Vienna waits for you? "Vienna" by Billy Joel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jL4S4X97sQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jL4S4X97sQ
• pmarreck 1y ago
  Oh wow. This hits hard in the feels. Here's my personal submission for "UI problem that has existed for years on touch interfaces, plus a possible solution, but at this point I'm just shouting into the void": https://medium.com/@pmarreck/the-most-annoying-ui-problem-r3ditm-31773fe6bbd5 https://medium.com/@pmarreck/the-most-annoying-ui-problem-r3... In short, an interface should not be interactable until a few milliseconds after it has finished (re)rendering, or especially, while it is still in the midst of reflowing or repopulating itself in realtime, or still sliding into view, etc. Most frustratingly this happens when I accidentally fat-finger a notification that literally just slid down from the top when I went to click a UI element in that vicinity, which then causes me to also lose the notification (since iOS doesn't have a "recently dismissed notifications" UI)
  • majewsky 1y ago
    I have another submission for most annoying UI problem: Trying to read a thing, but it's on medium.com. The sheer amount of popups and overlays I need to click away before I can actually read your thing, geez.
    • sevensor 1y ago
      The worst is when somebody has a custom domain, but it’s actually medium so I don’t know not to click on the link.
    • LeifCarrotson 1y ago
      The sheer amount is zero with an ad blocker enabled. I consider UBO basically mandatory for browsing the web in 2025, too many sites are unusable and infuriating without it.
      • warp 1y ago
        I had two popups visiting that medium link with uBlock Origin. Perhaps it is possible to get zero with UBO, but default settings don't seem to be enough.
• jurgenaut23 1y ago
  > Burnout does not just come from overwork. It comes from overresponsibility. I don't _think_ it is accurate. I think burnout comes from putting energy into things that don't have meaning. Case in point, this article: as you realize that fixing everything is a never-ending game with marginal ROI, you end up burning out. If overresponsibility alone caused burn out, I think that every parent out there would be impacted. And yes, parental burnout is a _very_ real thing, yet some of us may dodge that bullet, probably by sheer luck of having just the right balance between effort and reward. Throw this tradeoff off balance, and most parents just burn out in weeks.
  • diggan 1y ago
    > I think burnout comes from putting energy into things that don't have meaning. That'd mean that people who are burned out all did so because they did stuff that didn't have meaning? Ultimately, I think you can get burned out regardless of how meaningful it is or isn't. People working at hospitals (just as one example) have probably some of the most meaningful jobs, yet burn out frequently regardless. More likely that both different people burn out because of different things, and it's a mix of reasons, not just one "core" reason we can point at and say "That's why burnout happen, not the other things".
    • jurgenaut23 1y ago
      I'd argue it actually makes things worse. When you can have a higher-purpose job (an ICU or ER nurse who is saving patient's life everyday) and you're spending most of energy on administrative overhead, the effect is just magnified. Meaning is a subjective thing. That's why some people thrive in some environments and some may burn out. If you put your average IRS auditor in a hospital, they might actually find more meaning in filling forms than exchanging with patients.
    • SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
      I think meaning can't be imposed externally. What society finds meaningful and what any individual finds meaningful can differ. And what an individual finds meaningful will vary over time. A meaningful activity, repeated often enough, can become routine and lose its meaning.
• survysandwich 1y ago
  If you started coding in the 70s like most xers, once you hit your mid fifties you stop caring. You realize it is easier just to use the tools as clumsy as they are to make your own happiness. As bob villa said: only an amateur blames his tools.
• sevensor 1y ago
  I like to take the “programming as theory building” approach. Every program is an experiment. When it stops working, you have more information about the world. At that point, you can revise the program, or you can let it go. Either way, you’ve refined your theory of the domain, and that’s much less likely to tumble back down the hill than some source code that at best represents an imperfect application of the theory.
  • jonstewart 1y ago
    Related, it’s more fun to engage in your own theory building by programming, right? One thing that has changed in the industry, I think due to a combination of labor force expansion, DevOps, and greater reuse, is software engineers have increasingly become users of software. It’s… less fun. Where have all the sysadmins gone? Oh wait, we’re the sysadmins now. :-/
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• _spduchamp 1y ago
  I've been leaving things broken from the get go! I'm a frigggin master of this!
• Tabular-Iceberg 1y ago
  This happens on an organizational scale as well. Once a company grows beyond a certain point it no longer needs to keep a razor focus on the core business, and a disproportionate amount of effort gets redirected to creating sometimes useful but often completely pointless and gratuitous internal tools. That way every middle manager gets to justify an ever growing number of reports and make his mark in the organization.
• steveBK123 1y ago
  re: Technical Work as Emotional Regulation This is a lovely point, and probably why a lot of technical people like to take on tactile hobbies outside of work. Follow these woodworking steps and at the end you have a properly built cabinet. Or why doing the dishes can sometimes be soothing, etc.
• jazzypants 1y ago
  I'm getting a 404.
• petecooper 1y ago
  https://archive.is/2xEGK https://archive.is/2xEGK
• RGBCube 1y ago
  The site owner has misconfigured nginx with schizophrenic options to death. Here is an archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250506062631/https://notashelf.dev/posts/curse-of-knowing https://web.archive.org/web/20250506062631/https://notashelf...
• matheusmoreira 1y ago
  This resonates so much. It's always nice to see I'm not alone. I believe computer programming is the closest humanity has ever come to godhood. We're creating entire universes out of unstructured bits. It's addicting. I feel this deep need to remake everything in my own image, to have the entire system reflect my own understanding. I often feel like I'm insane for thinking there's a better way. Surely someone much smarter than me would have thought of it, right? I must be stupid and missing some crucial fact that proves me wrong. Then I do it and it actually fucking works. What a rush. I only regret the fact I'm a mere mortal with just one lifetime and whose days have just 24 hours which must be carefully allocated. Real gods have infinite time and are capable of infinite effort. Just look at the universe. It's a deep religious realization. > Your once-perfect tool breaks silently because libfoo.so is now libfoo.so.2. ... Solution: get rid of libfoo and do it yourself. Now when it breaks you only have yourself to blame. Yeah, I know... At some point it becomes pathological. It can still be an immensely fun activity if you're curious and have way too much free time on your hands. > Sometimes, it’s OK to just use the thing. Also okay to just complain. No, you don't actually need to send in the damn pull request. It's alright.
• phito 1y ago
  I've known how to fix things for a loonnggg time, however I've never felt the need to fix things that aren't absolutely blocking my current goal. I'm not sure the two are that deeply linked, except that the former potentially enables the later.
• erikerikson 1y ago
  I expected this to be about the curse of competence. Still an interesting write, appreciate the sharing. I find the key is to have a purpose that would be less pursued if time is spent poorly. Combined with getting exceedingly honest with your estimates and internalizing https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ you can avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
• gorjusborg 1y ago
  Prioritization is a brilliantly simple solution to this and other resource constraint problems. If you can't do it all, you have to choose. How to choose? Come up with a way to assign value to each, and do the most valuable first. The value metrics depend on the system / outcome desired.
• Draiken 1y ago
  I don't know why but this almost made me cry. Every day I keep looking at everything that's broken and thinking I should find a way to fix it. Then I finish my work day and have zero energy to do anything useful and it all becomes guilt over the inaction, the feeling of not being productive at all times. Very well written my friend.
• exabrial 1y ago
  This is precisely why RaspberryPi/Raspbian broke every _fricken_ tutorial on the internet by moving /boot to /bootfs ok... I mean great. There's also a chance it's probably just fine. Leave it alone if it's not causing problems.
• ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  > The Illusion of Finality One of the most important skills that I've learned, through writing ship software, is "Knowing what 'Done' looks like." There's a point, where -even though there's still stuff that I have to do- I need to declare the project "done," wrap it up, slap a bow on it, and push it out the door. There's always a 2.0. Writing in an iterative manner (where I "discover" a design, as I develop the software), makes this more difficult. One thing about "hard" requirements, is that there's no question about what "Done" looks like.
• jmull 1y ago
  I don't feel the "moral weight" the author mentions. For one, there are many, many directions you could take at any given moment, but you have to choose only one. You have no choice but to triage. That's not a moral failing, just the nature of agency and existence. I do have some perfectionistic tendencies, which might be behind some of this. But a long time ago I graduated to a deeper perfectionism... The problem with simple perfectionism is that you can only achieve a level of perfection in a simple and superficial way, often to the neglect of more interesting goals... after you "perfect" something, you look deeper and inevitably see more problems. You can pursue those, but you then just look deeper again and repeat. At some point you'll realize you're spending a lot of time on something that is only meaningful to an arbitrary standard that exists only in your own head (that you only recently invented). So I moved on to "perfecting" the balance across the relevant competing concerns and constraints. Since there's rarely a perfect balance, no closed-form answer, and since your attention is certainly one of the factors to balance, real perfection requires that you can find something "good enough" given the circumstance to move on to something else. Put another way, if you can't find satisfaction of your perfectionist impulse in finding something good enough, you could be doing "perfection" better, and should probably work on that.
  • shoemakersteve 1y ago
    A good name for that could be "pragmatic perfectionism". Has a nice little alliteration and everything
  • GMoromisato 1y ago
    I don't know if this is what the author meant, but the "moral weight" appears for me when someone starts relying on my stuff. This is why so many open-source maintainers burn out: they create something that people find useful and suddenly, almost inadvertently, incur the obligation to keep users happy. That is both the best part and worse part of creating software.
    • matheusmoreira 1y ago
      > the "moral weight" appears for me when someone starts relying on my stuff Yeah. These feelings of guilt are terrible. I once threw something out there and forgot about it. Woke up one day and realized users had found it somehow, they even built new stuff on top of it. Someone asked for help on how to use the thing and I didn't even notice because I had notifications turned off. In these situations I repeat the license terms to myself like a mantra. The software is provided "as-is", in the hope it will be useful, but without any warranty.
• dvektor 1y ago
  Fantastic post, definitely could relate to quite a bit of that.
• Aachen 1y ago
  > > You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. > But programming lures us into believing we can control the outside events. That is where the suffering begins. Isn't it the opposite? We're not surprised if someone who grew up amidst criminals also does crime. I'm not sure that I can choose whether to feel attracted to men instead of women. I can't control my mind, but I can choose what people to stay with and what media to be exposed to. I can adjust everything except for my mind: my hands write code, my feet take me elsewhere, I can tune into different media, I can choose to not speak agitatedly when a service rep. is following corporate policy, etc., whereas my mind moulds or reacts in response to those inputs (I'll still feel irritated by that corporate policy and be influenced by advertising) If anything, I could see an argument for that you control neither, because obviously your control of your hands is coming from a combination of your mind's outputs and the physical laws of our environment
  • Dumblydorr 1y ago
    The mind is an elephant and “I” is an illusory rider on top of it, with barely any influence.
  • bigstrat2003 1y ago
    [dead]
• financetechbro 1y ago
  This was beautifully written. Thank you for sharing
• Empact 1y ago
  One of the ways psychologists classify people is between those who are maximizers/optimizers and those who are satisficers/stop when things are "good enough." As someone who is very much on the optimizer side of things, and experiences the struggles described in this article, the lesson I take to heart is that while satisficers tend to be happier, optimizers get more done. Your optimizer tendencies make you into an expert, they open up new opportunities for learning and growth, they have the potential to have real consequence in the world. Be thankful for them, even as you guide them to their appropriate application.
  • leafmeal 1y ago
    As someone who sometimes thinks of themselves as an "optimizer", I feel the opposite take away. I spend too much time "polishing" trying to make something perfect, at the cost of actually getting things done.
  • roelschroeven 1y ago
    "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." (George Bernard Shaw) But are those really different classes of people? Isn't everyone a maximizer up to a point where they think "good enough"? Where that limit changes between people, and for each person probably depending on area of interest, area of expertise, and so on?
    • airspresso 1y ago
      I see it much more being a mindset. Either you approach everything with the goal of improving it, or you approach everything with the goal of finding a works-and-is-good-enough solution. One is about maximizing quality and another about minimizing effort. Since it’s a mindset, you can define it as different classes of people. What I’ve observed is that the ones that are minimizing effort in the area you care about (tech as we talk about here), are doing it as a conscious choice to free themselves up for another area of life they value higher. Could be kids, could be something else.
• shayanbahal 1y ago
  So... it's not just me that see the world as a collection of broken tech/tools that I know how to fix but won't have the capacity to do everything myself and it feels frustrating...! I really liked framing it as "Technical Capability as a Moral Weight"
  • Suppafly 1y ago
    > I really liked framing it as "Technical Capability as a Moral Weight" I think learned people have this sort of feeling of moral weight about a lot of things, it's why they're less happy than uneducated people.
    • shayanbahal 1y ago
      wise words, I feel less lonely after reading your comment, so thank you :)
• Ccecil 1y ago
  I've learned through the years that I can't stop for every car with it's hood open. Sometimes you just need to use it as a reminder to maintain your own vehicle.
• JohnMakin 1y ago
  This just sounds like perfectionism. I believe it is a curse, because I hate working with teammates like this. They'll spin their wheels solving some insane problem no one asked them to do because it's "better" while ignoring the larger scope and goals of the project. I've tried to coach people out of this mindset, because I used to have it very early in my career, til I realized the sheer impracticality of it. I use this really annoying, poorly supported terraform provider. I've written a wrapper around it to make it "work" but it has annoyances I know I can go to that repository and try to submit a patch for it to fix my annoyance. But why? This is "good enough," and IME, if you sit on things like this long enough, eventually someone else comes along and does it. Is that a good attitude for everyone to have? Probably not, but now it's been a few years of using this wrapper module, I have 2-3 viable alternatives now that didn't exist before that I can switch to if needed. I could've turned it into a several week project if I wanted, but why? What purpose does it serve? As you grow, you realize there is very rarely, if ever, a "right" answer to a problem. Consider the way you think it should be done is not the only "right" way and you'll open more doors for yourself.
  • fragmede 1y ago
    There's a difference between picking up on some esoteric detail.in your company's product and making it your only mission to solve it, ok the detriment of everything else vs taking Friday afternoons for a month to fix a Terraform provider for the world. There are two kinds of lazy. The kind that makes us good programmers and the kind that makes us bad programmers. If you're gonna be the second kind of lazy and just wait for someone else to do it for you, you might as well become a manager at work and take credit for their work while you're at it.
    • JohnMakin 1y ago
      It's not laziness though. I have dozens of competing priorities at any time. It is far from the most efficient use of my limited resources and time (and company time) to spend on a project that does not need doing that will inevitably be done by someone else anyway. It provides no business value whatsoever either. It's not "taking credit" for anything unless you count using anything open sourced as "taking credit" for the work done on that project. Yes I use jq, no I do not take credit for writing/maintaining it. Do you see the difference?
• agentultra 1y ago
  This can be difficult in a work context too. Plenty of times in my career where I had to depend on the output of another party even though I could see the mistakes they were making, offered advice/help, but ultimately had to work with what they developed regardless. One of the worst feelings is being right about these things. Tons of software relies on bodges to get things to work. If you tried to "fix" everything you'd go mad and never be finished... and then someone else will come along and want to "fix" it. Definitely avoid staring into the abyss. But like Camus' Sisyphus, we often have to smile in these situations and carry on with our work. Dwelling on the absurdity of it all gets us nowhere.
• dpifke 1y ago
  There's a quote I learned when doing theatre, which I've seen attributed to either the stage magician Doug Henning or possibly Stanislavski, describing the process of art as taking something that's difficult and making it habit, then taking something that's habitual and making it easy, and then taking something that's easy and making it beautiful. For example, as an actor, you learn your lines by rote (they become habit), then you gain an understanding of the character's motivations (remembering the lines becomes easy, because of course that's what your character would say), then you work to tune your performance so the audience shares in the emotion and unspoken meaning of the lines (that's beautiful/art). As this relates to software, I think it goes something like: you learn the magic incantation to make the computer do what you want (solving a hard task becomes habit), then you learn why that incantation works (solving it becomes easy), then you figure out better ways to solve the problem, such that the original friction can be removed completely (you find a more beautiful way to solve it).
  • scarecrowbob 1y ago
    "Kneel down and you will believe."
  • begueradj 1y ago
    That quote is meaningful. In a similar context, Bruce Lee said about martial arts that "martial" is to discover the dangerous animal within us, and the "art" is to be able to tame that animal.
    • gameman144 1y ago
      > the "art" is to be able to mate that animal. I'm assuming (hoping?) that this was supposed to be "tame"? If not, I've got some questions about Bruce Lee.
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• tehasem 1y ago
  this is realy good, great writing
• svilen_dobrev 1y ago
  Aargh. As someone who went into programming at ~12 after trying toys, woodwork, mechanics, electrics, electronics, .. - and stays there for 40years - i would have blessed software if it was just the software to blame. But i also knowhow all the other things before/besides that.. So it is, a total DIY-as-noone-will-fix-it-and-no-way-buying-it. Or it was but i haven't noticed things have changed? (the saying goes that every man sooner or later grows.. into buying new socks instead of darning the holed ones. That i have accepted, but my question is, Shouldn't that apply to other things too?) Handle of fridge broke? Well.. no-such-thing-as-buy. Fix it - or replace it - with a rope (from some gift-bag handle actually). Uncountable toys being fixed and overflowing the wardrobe.. No way Throwing (almost) working things. Pfft. Same thing as these hudreds of Makehells^b^b^b^b^bfiles, or that proper rename tool [1] which after 10years has become a swiss-army-knife and i still find more use cases to add :/ A cage looking for a bird.. vs learning when to leave things broken... Maybe that last one is like learning to pick your battles. Seems the hardest life lesson that can only be self-taught, sigh. Thanks for the revelation.. maybe one day i'll write mine :/ [1] https://github.com/svilendobrev/svd_bin/blob/master/filedir/rename.py https://github.com/svilendobrev/svd_bin/blob/master/filedir/...
• dkarl 1y ago
  It's funny that you can't get HN commenters to unanimously agree on much of anything concrete, but we are all united in our belief that we know better.
• tycho-newman 1y ago
  Facts.
• throwanem 1y ago
  I see what the author is trying to do with the title, which would be correctly punctuated as: 'The curse of knowing how; or, fixing everything.' (The full stop would be period-optional, but period-appropriate.)
  • sd9 1y ago
    Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
• jayd16 1y ago
  I think its easier to get past this when you decide to be a bit more humble and give a bit more respect to the decisions made. As long as you don't assume your immediate reaction is gospel because you feel like you're better than someone who actually spent time solving the problem, suddenly you can look at things as decisions they made that are different than yours. Yes dumb, bad things exist. But often they are simply compromises. If you were to rewrite things you'd often just make different compromises. In that light, there is no 'moral imperative' or some such thing. You can start to look at _why_ decisions were made and probably find subtlety you missed at first glance. You might think this is foolish optimism and you know better but think about every refactor you've actually taken a part of instead of theorized and how much complexity shook out.
• js2 1y ago
  "You learn how to program. You learn how to fix things. But the hardest thing you’ll ever learn is when to leave them broken. And maybe that’s the most human skill of all." Well, that's the serenity prayer, isn't it? "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference."
• hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
  >I’ve lost count of how many projects I have started that began with some variation of “Yeah, I could build this but better.” Genuinely, I think the best antidote to this is to refuse to do this until you personally feel about 80% confident you really understand how to work with the thing from the inside out. Don't try to rewrite Vim until you've already read and annotated a copy of Practical Vim and drove it daily for a few years, for example. Don't try to rewrite SQLite until you've started hitting up against use cases even the common advice online can't help you with. This means you will probably do very few rewrites. That's intentional - focusing your effort on making new software that solves new problems is, for all those who trash talk it, really much more valuable. And if you ever do a rewrite in earnest you'll walk in with intimate knowledge of what exactly you're trying to do here.
• jamiedumont 1y ago
  This is very close my personal struggle; summarised by “I can do anything except one thing”.
• shadowgovt 1y ago
  This is solid insight. Particularly the part about letting go. For software, if one decides to solve a problem, it's easy to transition from making a birdhouse to becoming deeply invested in the mating habits of swallows. In addition, I find when I start these projects from a place of hubris ("there couldn't possibly be a reason we transfer 10MB before every build"), I find myself consistently humbled. It's Chesterton's Fences built out of other, smaller Chesterton's Fences. The shape of the system is arbitrary but not meaningless.
• sota_pop 1y ago
  I resonate with some of this. Personally, I am motivated and driven by understanding “why/how” things work. The actual implementations are rarely more valuable to me than an exercise I know is “good for me” - and one that will help me gain insight into “the next thing” more quickly and efficiently. One major drawback to this that I have a bad habit of explaining how/why something works to the people in my life… even if they didn’t ask. Definitely something I am learning to filter. Additionally, one of the most unsettling things I find about LLMs is the (now well-observed) phenomenon of hallucinations. As someone who is terrible at memorization and has gotten by life thus far in large part to mental models - I didn’t realize until their popularization that I may or may not have regularly “hallucinated” things my entire life - especially when forming opinions about things. … makes you think … Great article! edit: I also find that the type of abstract thinking reinforced by writing software regularly, is addictive. Once you learn how to abstract a thing in order to improve or increase efficiency of the thing, it starts a cycle of continually abstracting, then abstracting your abstractions ad infinitum. It’s also a common bug I see in young CS students - they are fantastic problem solvers, but don’t realize that most (all?) of CS isn’t a thing - it’s the thing that gets you to the thing. Which is (I believe) why we have a generation of software engineers who all want to build platforms and marketplaces with very few applications that ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING. They haven’t taken enough humanities courses, or gained the life experience or something - to find the “REAL” problem they want to solve.
• alganet 1y ago
  A more verbose description of the practice known as "yak shaving" or "letting the perfect get in the way of good". More storytelly, emotional. It's popular. It appeals to some profiles: The leader who doesn't understand why the worker is taking so long. The worker who doesn't understand why the coworker is redoing his stuff. If you let a popular saying guide your life, then why live at all? You got to experience those things first hand to understand. If you never went through the process of trying to make something better, you will never understand the cost. That's why managers who say this kind of stuff are often despised. They demonstrate to know the sayings but not the experience of living through it. When they do, they are respected. That is also why the product manager and the technical lead are often two distinct roles. The product manager can't make those calls, it only cares about whether the final product matches expectations. The technical lead can make those calls about technical investment cost, but no calls about the project direction. It keeps a good social dynamic that prevents automatic popular sayings and "I heard that..." stuff to override human behavior.
• w10-1 1y ago
  The wheel of dharma - suffering as the misalignment of the self with the world - has both compressive and tension aspects (for things happening to you and things you do respectively) each with aversive/grasping aspects (depending on your taste). The post describes grasping tension, the blessing and curse of the powerful. Grasping tension highlights the value of work -- the difference between the end/telos model and the actual - or "execution" in business -- and the fundamental priority of time as a value: opportunity matters most. Yes, you do need skill and resources, but they're useless without opportunity. So, at a minimum, stop polishing turds. But the main thing about opportunity is that it's a value to someone else. Yes scratching your own itch might end up helping others, but that's incidental luck. So the solution to this curse might not be perfecting your own craft or impedance-matching your emotions, but really to focus on solving other people's problems. The really nice thing about this solution is that it enables you to work with a lot of other people. So long as they're acting in good faith to solve the same problem, you'll minimize any coordination costs and enjoy all their strengths without having to do it all yourself. And when your work is needed by others, there's no time or need to worry. Is that not happiness, to make yourself useful?
• absoluteunit1 1y ago
  I cannot emphasize how much I relate to this It’s gotten better but in the past I would : - happily spend weekends exploring what possible with QMK (consistently tweaking and re-programming my keyboard; diving into the depth of QMK docs) - spend hours building various neovim tools for myself and playing around with different configs - building various bash scripts I’ve recently quit my software dev job to pursue building online products and my friend said something that sometimes being an engineer going into business can be a detriment - because you feel that you can build anything…and you can end up building forever. Whereas a business person would leave it at a “good enough to sell” state and move on
• Baeocystin 1y ago
  This essay is (painfully) apt, and it reminds me of where I was when I finally switched, to my great relief, from being a Maximizer to a Satisficer*. It was all just Too Much, and I was feeling overwhelmed with responsibilities. And my drive to Solve All The Problems was not making me happy. At all. It was just a way to exert control over a difficult life, and by being terminally distracted by the easily-solvables, I was avoiding the big problems I genuinely needed to confront. *https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
• shahzaibmushtaq 1y ago
  I rarely click the favorite button, and this one 101% worthy of it. My humble broken words to the humans who read this, "You can't control everything. The one thing you can control is your action. Master it."
• NotAnOtter 1y ago
  This article seems to be resonating with a lot of people so I guess I'm just the outlier rather than OP being wrong. But I cannot express how absolutely pedantic and melodramatic this comes off to me.
• morning-coffee 1y ago
  This really resonated with me. After reading, I thought "This person is likely from the same generation I am". I started programming in 1987. According to their About page, they've been programming since 2018. I wonder how they can feel that burned out after such a (relatively) short time?!
• bsnnkv 1y ago
  > Software doesn’t stay solved. Every solution you write starts to rot the moment it exists. Not now, not later, but eventually. Libraries deprecate. APIs change. Performance regressions creep in. Your once-perfect tool breaks silently because libfoo.so is now libfoo.so.2. Since I started using Nix flakes to build everything and pin to specific versions this largely stopped being a problem for me. I happily run things I last touched many, many years ago without worrying about stupid stuff like this ^ > Burnout does not just come from overwork. It comes from overresponsibility. I remain unconvinced by this, and the more years I rack up, the more I recognize the pattern of burnout having a direct relationship to alienation of labor.
  • trinix912 1y ago
    > Since I started using Nix flakes to build everything and pin to specific versions this largely stopped being a problem for me. I happily run things I last touched many, many years ago without worrying about stupid stuff like this ^ It only solves the "Libraries deprecate" part. APIs (at least the internet ones) still change, hardware still changes, problems you're trying to solve change, all outside of your control. Nix doesn't solve any of those.
• ujkiolp 1y ago
  this could be dunning-kruger in action
• asdfasdfasdf33 1y ago
  The corollary, ignorance/management is bliss.
• Animats 1y ago
  Every piece of software becomes a TODO list. The classic form of this is people hacking EMACS. The other side of the problem is when you're building on a base that's broken and needs more maintenance than it is getting. Much open source is like that. With too few eyes, all bugs are deep.
• casey2 1y ago
  It's the Moneymaker effect. It's less that you became a programmer and more Linux is so broken that you have to learn to code to get anything done. Couple that with cheap student loans and "learn to code" and now anyone is a programmer, not just those snooty researchers.
• MrAureliusR 1y ago
  Oh man, the shelf is famous! Awesome article my man.
• dwaltrip 1y ago
  Very good post. I’m happy the author has had these important personal insights. Things that I’ve learned (through much difficulty) for myself that feel relevant: * Boundaries: not all problems are mine to fix. It’s okay to say no, even if someone else doesn’t like it. * Acceptance: perfection is an illusion, there will always be an endless list of problems to work on, human time and energy have real limits, I am allowed to have different desires and motivations today versus yesterday (or an hour ago!) *Emotional maturity: humans are emotional beings, it’s okay to get annoyed / upset at something, including particular issues with software. The root cause of an emotion often becomes clear much later than after the initial trigger, which usually is only slightly connected to the deeper issue. *Wisdom / self-love: it’s ok to rest. It’s okay to not finish a project. It’s okay to say no. Human lives are immensely complicated, we will always make mistakes, and change happens always. Words like need and should are are directives springing from the shifting, hidden narratives we have imbued our lives with. We can understand and reshape these narratives. If I had more time I would have a written a neater, more concise, and more complete list :)
• rglover 1y ago
  I sympathize with the nihilism, but having built tools that do just work as described, I've found that the problem is mostly rooted in a culture obsessed with novelty. And not novelty with a point (a truly better solution comes out), but novelty for novelty's sake (something new to talk about that's "popular" in dev circles, even if it's junk). The only way to build solid things is to start with the POV that they need to exist and be stable long-term. You have to give a shit about simplicity, stability, performance, backwards compatibility, etc. You have to teach people what you know and form professional opinions around why you do or do not go with the crowd (and stand behind them, even under pressure from those who don't "know how"). If you commit to that (and I mean commit long-term, not for a year but decades), you can build things that don't break constantly, don't require constant maintenance, and don't drive you insane.
  • Zenbit_UX 1y ago
    > I've found that the problem is mostly rooted in a culture obsessed with novelty. And not novelty with a point (a truly better solution comes out), but novelty for novelty's sake (something new to talk about that's "popular" in dev circles, even if it's junk). Ah yes, seems like you’ve discovered Clojure, and it’s bastard child ClojureScript.
• HiroshiSan 1y ago
  At least the failures were in software and not hardware. Nothing worse than having to take everything a part again after spending hours on an engine job because you forgot to plug something in or a seal wasn’t installed properly. Or you wonder why the engineers decided to put that oil filter right beside the cat so you could burn the back of your hand.
• welldonehn 1y ago
  I suspect the reason for increasing frequency of this kind of topic - in particularly the reflective commentary here, is in large part due to the average age of HN poster going up. The self-congratulatory tone is on the verge of the (now outdated) self-fellation, held back by a sense of poignancy and nostalgia. In other words, y’all got way too soft at shitposting.
• amelius 1y ago
  "Ideas are more important than code." -- Unknown
• jongjong 1y ago
  This article resonates. After coding obsessively for almost 20 years, it's muscle memory. I don't have to find bugs anymore, they find me. I can feel their presence. Pretty much all the bugs I write now are intentional "will focus on this later" kind of thing. I know exactly what I'm neglecting, why I'm neglecting it and when is the right time to address. I can write bug-free code if appropriate though it takes longer to do and not always possible in a company environment where there are deadlines. It is a burden to see all the issues and complexity and not being able to address it fully.
• mattbillenstein 1y ago
  I think the flip side of this is at some point after looking at enough crap software, you feel free to write your own. You can actually solve your directly problems in simpler ways with a lot less code than more generic tools. I've had great fun writing little daemons, deployment and config management systems, my own tcp networking protocols, process management, and using these tools to "build my own k8s" more or less. It's more fun for me to build and understand these relatively simpler systems than pick up all the tech debt of some more established ones. And, given enough time, it can be very stable, fast, and tailored to my specific needs.
• pease344 1y ago
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• doright 1y ago
  If you had to ask me years ago, I would probably say that programming was my lifeblood. Not only did it pay, but it was fulfilling. Nothing could have convinced me otherwise. Some people will have to go through the burnout phase and reach rock bottom to learn this advice, I'm afraid. Only from there can they see the consequences of not leaving everything broken, and decide to do something else.
• groby_b 1y ago
  I was with the author right up to the Marc Aurelius quote "You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength." The funny thing is that actual engineering _requires_ being resilient in the face of unpredictable external events. And his quote "You run the thing, and it works. Or it _doesn’t_, and you fix it." shortly after is fundamentally the difference between coding, and engineering. And maybe that is the true curse of our profession. We call ourselves engineers, but we never behave like it. Engineering isn't "scratching the itch to build". It is defining requirements well, building something that fulfills the requirements, and then leaving well enough alone.
• gitroom 1y ago
  been there way too many times tbh - that endless urge to fix every little thing, even when i know it's not worth the headache. you think the constant itch to improve stuff actually helps or just burns us out in the long run?
• breadchris 1y ago
  I was just journaling about this. Your post nailed the sentiment.
• CommenterPerson 1y ago
  I enjoy building or fixing physical stuff. So much that when I visit family members (or even close friends) I take my tools along. People are usually happy at the results. It has become something of a pleasant joke among the visit-ees. The key is to enjoy what you are doing. If anything becomes a drudge, search for something else that matches your talents and is enjoyable.
• 126123412 1y ago
  Similarly once you know how to clean every nooks and cranies in your home, your whole weekend can just become a deep cleaning festival.
• ppipada 1y ago
  Wow, this post hit just too close to me. I came to same conclusion quite a while back (the author also mentions that we most probably always know this); BUT never able to get out of that mindset. I think fixing boundary issues is a hard problem, but still solvable. Dealing with Your Things (or atleast the ones you think are yours), i.e stuff that you have marked as your boundary, seems much much harder to deal with. My mind has argued, and won to some extent, the opposite, but within a boundary: if you are responsible, why not do it better, if you are not doing it better, what is the point of it all?
• sublinear 1y ago
  > This is what I’m trying to learn now. After the excitement. After the obsession. After the burnout. I’m trying to let things stay a little broken. Because I’ve realized I don’t want to fix everything. I just want to feel OK in a world that often isn’t. I can fix something, but not everything. Sounds like we're making excuses for a world left far behind. Not all of us do this for the paycheck. This world is in some deep shit.
• shireboy 1y ago
  Yeah, this resonates, and not just with software. I have a “jack of all trades” attitude passed down from my father and grandfather. If I don’t know how, I learn. I do my own large tree work, electrical, plumbing, car repair, and haircuts. In many ways this is good- it’s saved me money and in the case of the zombie apocalypse I think I could last a few months at least. Sometimes I think I should pay someone else, but somehow that always feels like more trouble. So I end up feeling like I should do it all. And then get overwhelmed and in a rut with all the psychic weight of the things I need to do. Similar with software. I always tell my clients “yes I can do that” because, well, I can. But then I end up juggling too much, working nights and weekends, and not having time for the tree work and haircuts I have to do at home.
• pontifier 1y ago
  This is definitely applicable in other areas as well. Think too hard about why you are unhappy and you'll find yourself entering politics like I did.
• jewscum 1y ago
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• Zenbit_UX 1y ago
  I was hit pretty hard by this blog post, it felt deep and targeted at me. Not because of code but from a desire to fix the current state of the world and the knowledge that even if I tried I don’t think it would make a difference. The same burden of moral responsibility can be applied to any systematic dysfunction. Those that know how to fix institutions, economies or governments are feeling this pretty strongly right now. And even in the places where I’m not even sure how to fix it like the radicalization or both genders, or various ethnic groups into hating each other… In my downtime my brain annoyingly tries to tackle these problems until I’m overwhelmed by the conclusions I’ve arrived at - many times the inevitable result is that things will continue to get _much worse_ before they get better. Maybe I should take up crosswords.
• pickdig 1y ago
  i feel the same is this one of knuth's 'premature optimizations'?
• nurettin 1y ago
  > My dev directory, as it stands, is nearing 30 gigabytes. It is probably full of node_modules/, venv/ and target/