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I am finding the day to day experience of being a developer in a team / corporate environment quite taxing on mental health these days. Some issues are: JIRA / agile / whatever methodologies, so many metadata fields in the ticketing system that are all just matters of opinion. So much time spent hoarding and prioritizing "wishlist" items, and discussing which order to do things if, hypothetically, they were to be done... instead of actually doing them. Pull requests / code reviews - now that these are done in a web browser, there is no bar to having an opinion and having your two cents. As a developer, the pull request is something I produce after executing and debugging some code for a few days, but then I cant merge it until people are happy with how it looks, not how it works. Testing & documentation - everyone wants this, nobody can agree how it should work. It's in a constant state of "aspiration", a few broken / flakey test cases from the last attempt that slow down development, but provide no confidence in the safety of changes. You can improve the situation by writing new testcases and fixing old ones, but sooner or later someone will have an urgent change that they "know" is safe that breaks the test cases that they will merge anyway, and then it's back to square one. General poor quality work environment - open plan, long hours, noisy, some "interesting" characters. Very little scope to ever control your work environment. I find all these to be instances of cognitive dissonance, where there is a huge gulf between how people think things should work, and the actual, day-to-day reality of making a change. Somehow people are only interested in talking about some hypothetical future state, but nobody cares about how things are now and how to get there, and if you do, you are perceived as being "difficult". |