trystan.org

Beyond the simple matter that it facilitates far too much beer consumption, I’ve come to the realization that I’ve been bound to golden handcuffs for the past 8 years; well at least gold plated. Working as a developer is financially rewarding but also spirit crushing. After all, profit and capital are king. Creativity is usually considered more of a liability than a virtue. If your goal is to make money and be efficient it is indeed sensible to minimize surprises. However, this is not the environment for me. Consistency and suppressed creativity leads to boredom, boredom causes frustration, frustration leads to stress and chronic stress causes brain atrophy! I would have stopped killing my brain cells long ago if it weren’t for my own insecurities and the propoganda machine telling me, “you need a large income to be safe and held in high esteem by others” and “you won’t be happy unless you have a big cozy house.”

For the last few years I’ve worked around the problem by taking a boring development project and turning it into something I was interested in. However, you can only get away with this for so long. Words like “loose canon” tend to get around after management discovers that you’ve written the application in a little known language using techniques unknown to anyone else in the organization. Although it may translate to near term job security, they’ll always remain paranoid of what you may do next if given any rope. I fully admit that this is terrible practice for a commercial application development environment but it’s the only way I can motivate myself to do that kind of work anymore.

It should have never gone that far…but those damn golden handcuffs. I may also be able to plea temporary insanity due to the loss of grey matter due to chronic frustration. Anyway, as previously alluded to in this blog, I’ve decided that I’m sure I want to return to school at this point and pursue a research career. I just need ‘way’ more variety of things to explore. Learning a new programming framework every now and then it nowhere near enough to keep me going. I’m just a bit bummed it took me so long to arrive at this conclusion. For the very near term, I’ll subdue my frustrations by trying to get neural critters to run around mazes in Lisp.