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Managing Daily Expectations
The paid transaction of modern work can be a draining experience, but joy can still be found from time to time through creative thinking…
It’s common knowledge, and often spouted on that endlessly spouting fountain of platitudinous and faux motivational memes that is LinkedIn, that if you manage to find a job you like doing then actually doing it won’t feel like work — though perhaps, the sentiment was better worded by the great Mark Twain¹.
“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” — Mark Twain.
It’s aspirational at best, but pretty much untrue most of the time, as I’m sure Mr Twain would attest to if he himself were a software engineer.
Thing is, fellow progressive engineers, if you’ve spent any time at all in the Grand Game of Software Engineering — having either graduated from teenage bedroom programmer or erstwhile student of computer science (or both) — you’ll quickly find out that jobs in the industry aren’t always² exactly what they seem.
Working for The Man has become something of a transactional exercise in modern times. You write the code and the company gives you the money — no matter how much the actual process is dressed up in assumed loyalty, supposed perks, bells, whistles, agile, HR wellbeing exercises, and “do X, Y, and X” and you’ll get…
