This is a strategy, but your results may vary. After a few years meditating on how much of my psychic energy I could give to my work, I found that programming for work was impossible. Understanding systems enough to update them, debugging, and keeping up with the ecosystem are very hard work. For me there’s no way to do it well without thoughts of work clouding my brain at all hours of the day. On the other hand, doing my job poorly is an even worse option. I don’t think I could live with myself if I brought apathy to work, since I do it more than anything else.
So as a result I don’t program anymore.
Knocking your ego down to a reasonable size is nice, but it probably also means not making very much money.
> Understanding systems enough to update them, debugging, and keeping up with the ecosystem are very hard work. For me there’s no way to do it well without thoughts or work clouding my brain at all hours of the day.
I often think about that Isabel Fall attack helicopter story [1], where pilots of the AH-70 Apache Mystics must have their brains rewired to include the helicopter as part of their gender, so that they'll fly by intuition. Otherwise they wouldn't be good enough to fly.
I thought this was an interesting premise already, but now I wonder how much of my programming skill is really ego. How much of my code takes up space in my brain where gender or religion or joi de vivre or something was supposed to be stored.
I certainly agree about the apathy part. I can’t sustain mediocre or poor performance for long without having it spill into other areas of my life.
As for the impossibility of compartmentalizing software work… I hope you’re wrong. But my experience doesn’t exactly contradict you. Whenever I’ve felt good at my job it’s also been quite all-consuming.
Knocking your ego down to a reasonable size is nice, but it probably also means not making very much money.