How emotionally invested are you in your work?

[Stuart Dootson]

Too much, maybe. I have pride in the products our company produces, I have pride in the heritage of the company I work for (it *does* have a lot - over 100 years worth). And I have pride in the work I produce - but I think I'd be like *that* whereever I worked.

[Shog9 0]

Michael A. Barnhart wrote:

I did have a manager tell me several years ago that I would be a much better employee if I would learn not to care so much.

We care a lot about exceptions, crashes, cracks and smashed stacks We care a lot about the copy-paste coders on our backs We care a lot about bloat and SCRUM and UML RUP We care a lot about neglect, baby rot, code rot, yeah! We care a lot about the gamblers and the spammers and the trolls We care a lot about the loops and tricks and scripts that mask the holes We care a lot about the death of the command line and text mode We care a lot about it all, cause we're out to save the code! YEAH! And it's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it...

every night, i kneel at the foot of my bed and thank the Great Overseeing Politicians for protecting my freedoms by reducing their number, as if they were deer in a state park. -- Chris Losinger, Online Poker Players?

[Jerry Hammond]

I'm interviewing for my first tech job in a couple hours. If how I feel about getting this job is any indication of how I will feel about the work itself then I have to say that without hesitation I'll be damned invested...yes, damn invested indeed!

"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true." -- Professor Robert Silensky

[Joe Q]

Toward the actual with requirements analysis through Validation and verification, the helping young Engineers learn, all the stuff I sign up for and am responsible for, 99% emotionally invested. This stuff, I'll call it "the fun stuff", takes about 25% of my time. Toward everything else in my job, the poiltics, the items other people say I'm responsible for but I'm given no authority over, the artificial deadlines, the real deadlines that I tell the bosses can not be met, 0% emotionally invested. This takes up most of my time and I'm not emotionally invested enough to give it a name.

[Anna Jayne Metcalfe]

Pretty damn close to 100%, right now...it's 11pm, and I've just killed a really annoying bug that we've been trying to chase down for absolutely ages.... :-D I rather think it's time to crash now though I think. I've done enough bug-hunting for one day. :rolleyes:

Anna :rose: Currently working mostly on: Visual Lint :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "Be yourself - not what others think you should be" - Marcia Graesch "Anna's just a sexy-looking lesbian tart" - A friend, trying to wind me up. It didn't work.

[Anna Jayne Metcalfe]

Me too. I really, really detest working on messy code. X|

Anna :rose: Currently working mostly on: Visual Lint :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "Be yourself - not what others think you should be" - Marcia Graesch "Anna's just a sexy-looking lesbian tart" - A friend, trying to wind me up. It didn't work.

[Anna Jayne Metcalfe]

That's pretty much been my experience too. Sad but true. :(

Anna :rose: Currently working mostly on: Visual Lint :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "Be yourself - not what others think you should be" - Marcia Graesch "Anna's just a sexy-looking lesbian tart" - A friend, trying to wind me up. It didn't work.

[El Corazon]

Marc Clifton wrote:

Just that. No further explanation to that question.

You can't get emotionally invested in your work in my business. It'll destroy you. At the same time I do have a bit of pride in my work, at least for the quality and time spent listening to the customer (which is rare in my business -- we're supposed to tell the customer what they want, not ask). I do get a bit insulted when someone puts down my work, it does represent 12 years of my life, at 41 that's longer than either of my marriages lasted... combined! But you can't get me PO'd over it, many have tried. So I will still say very, very little. Plus, I have new distractions in my home life, work's getting less and less of my priority. :->

_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)

[Anton Afanasyev]

Easy. 42. Did I pass the test?

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:badger:

[Ennis Ray Lynch Jr]

My code must be elegant, beautiful, and functional. Also, the stupidest little things can ruin my day: like maintaining something that makes extensive use of undocumented globals and Pascal case members.

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On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage

[Paul M Watt]

Not much anymore. The first program that I learned how to develop Windows and C++ with took 2 years of my life. It was great, the whole project was my baby. I wanted to do things with the software, but management was shortsighted, and kept holding me back. In the end, I got screwed at that position because I wouldnt drop out of college for them. Leaving that job and that application tore me up. Since then, I take a lot of pride in my work, and I still take ownership for everything that I do, however, I try not to become attached unless it is something that I do on my own, and I have sole ownership of it. Getting torn away from that first project was like losing my first true love. I am sure another project will come along that will make that strong emotional tie for me again, but it will have to be something special.

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Build a man a fire, and he will be warm for a day
Light a man on fire, and he will be warm for the rest of his life!

[Michael P Butler]

Marc Clifton wrote:

Just that. No further explanation to that question.

Far too much for my own good.

Michael CP Blog [^] Development Blog [^]

[S Douglas]

I invest in the corporation what it invests in me. That's my standard answer come review time...

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I'd love to help, but unfortunatley I have prior commitments monitoring the length of my grass. :Andrew Bleakley:

[Siderite Zaqwedex]

Code is alive and I give it life. I am completely emotionally involved into coding. I sleep with code in my bed, kiss it good night and, of course, it kisses me back, since I programmed it to. Every time a bug slips in, nothing else matters except getting my baby healthy again. Then we ship it.

---------- Siderite

[WillemM]

It really depends on the project. Sometimes I stick my head above the crops and then I'm pretty involved in the project. But there are plenty of projects in which I handle things professionaly and don't care if project dies or something else happens to it that makes the management decide that we have to stop working on it.

WM. What about weapons of mass-construction?

[Stick]

I am very emotionally invested in my code. To me coding is an artform, and sadly one that often no one else ever sees or appreciates, except the poor MVPs on the forums that are forced to help me with learning that art. :rolleyes: Seriously, sometimes I think of code as a bit like owning a Mono Lisa that no one will ever see or appreciate, like a kind of hidden art developed by a bunch of us in the secret art of development. Stick

[Paul Watson]

I am more invested in the products the code creates than the code itself. Of course a product can be negatively impacted by ugly code but I am happier getting the product right than the code. Though I did spend three days on some code last week only to realise in the end that we wouldn't need it. It was a lovely block of code and I felt sad that it was to be left unused. I've kept it of course, under my pillow and next to my gun.

regards, Paul Watson Ireland FeedHenry needs you

Shog9 wrote:

eh, stop bugging me about it, give it a couple of days, see what happens.

[hairy_hats]

Enough to get teasy when users don't use my prog the way it was designed to work and then start whining that it doesn't work the way they expected it to. :sigh:

[lil_nicci]

As i'm really new to programming and a student on placement i struggle to get excited about it because i suck an am not used to being bad at something. I have a keen interest in programming an when its good it amazing but when it's bad i find it really distressing. I think i havent got passed the hard bit yet but once i do i think i would be protective over it, as i spend so much much time every day looking at it hehe. :)

to err is to be human but to really foul things up you need a computer!

[RichardInToronto]

Hi Marc, I love this forum; it shows that developers all over the world (Canada, US, UK, lots more) are all dealing with the same issues. I personally feel that software development is the trickiest profession - lots of hidden traps, and not much common wisdom offered by colleagues/companies. In regards to your frustration about code reviews, style guidelines, I can relate directly. In my last position, the quality of a programmers code was determined by one programmer, who was a brown-noser to management. Not only did he not have as much development experience as I did, but he also emphasized speed and time to completion! "Code Complete" by Steve McConnell? Who/what is that? Comments? What the !@#$ do you need those for? Extra functionality that would be a boon to user productivity, and that I dreamed up while implementing? Why did you write and test that code, when we didn't ask for it? Team code reviews? Only in one company I've worked for in Canada, and that was mainframe development back in the early nineties. I take a lot of pride in my work - I do think style and thought put into coding is still relevant. I hate it when management says that your code should be indistiguishable from other developers in the project, especially when there are often no coding standards at all. I personally believe that a programmer will produce better work when: - His/her name is in the code - He/she feels they aren't just writing code, but is involved in a group process and that the whole group needs to learn - There isn't just an emphasis on code, but an emphasis on thinking, and - Each developer is recognized as a unique person, that their contributions are diverse, and conformance to an arbitrary rule is ridiculous. I find it naive to believe that many companies who pay lip service to coding practices and forward thinking policies actually work this way. In virtually every company I've worked, there is a big gap between what management says, and what the programmers reporting to those managers actually are told to do. Management walking the talk? More like management enforcing coding practices that bolster short term financial objectives! If houses are all about location, location, location then code is all about minimal time to write, the least possible number of bugs, and definitely not about modularity, extensibility, simplicity to understand, performance, or elegance. In regards to how emotionally involved I am/have been at work, I offer these points as evidence: - Waking up at 4am in a cold sweat,