[ChipSkylark]

Personal take/rant/experience:

I fell in love with programming because I didn't give a shit about maintainability, architectural considerations, stressing vulns or holding a pager all night to support a living computer system. I learned how to code and got the degree because of how much fun it was every day as a beginner - growing, learning something new and exciting, feverishly building new things to show my friends and use for myself.

I hate to bring a cloud over this profession but I recently left engineering completely because of my depression and how harmful these ways of thinking can be to a person in the long run: modeling everything an equation/stats model, applying worst case scenario visualization and planning to everything you do, risk analysis and limiting your downside by covering every base, preventing you from going all-in on your dreams and enjoying the reward from the risk. You're basically being paid to be paranoid and to think and act like a computer all the fscking time.

Not everything can or should be quantified, and your value as a person and the relationships you have to others are not math equations or statistical models. The incredible beauty and magic of the human experience exist outside these modes, and can be found in your relationship with people, your feelings and emotions, and the freedom to follow your nose and truly embrace things that are meaningful and fulfilling to you.

[creaghpatr]

I empathize with this. My job is to package analytics and build forecasting models and if the data shows anything less than stellar it becomes super stressful to try and dress it up and contextualize for management. [Proverbially] shooting the messenger is a real phenomenon and no one likes the "actually things are looking bad" guy.

[adregan]

> applying worst case scenario visualization

I recently learned about "thinking traps" (essentially spiraling out of control imagining terrible outcomes) when my pandemic stress hit an all time high.

I learned coping mechanisms and ways to short circuit them (really comes down to awareness), but realized that I get paid to engage in this destructive behavior! We have pre-mortems at work trying to imagine everything that might go wrong; a little of the macabre mixed in with the stress.

I became a professional programmer later in life, and I've been wondering whether or not it has been influencing my behavior and personality in negative ways. I don't remember this paranoid in my previous life.