Now i have >10 years of experience as a developer. So i can talk based on my experience.

But i have found on most of my jobs(sure maybe bad luck) is the following loop:

Sure sometimes there are some tricky bugs that cannot be reproduced that you must track in order to solve it. But in the end; it will be a wrong loop, missing a variable assignment or a uncovered use case that you need to add. But in the end and every Monday the same loop repeats.

So i love graphs and i think the motivation vs knowledge of the job(technical and business) might look like this:

And as you become more senior in software development the motivation will go down quicker than before.

Also as you are more mature; you learn(the easy or hard way) what a job is and is clearly not you having fun all the time(despite agile coaches efforts to make you smile) or always learning new things everyday. A job is to finish a feature that is just a CRUD, another dev issue, an external API integration, fix CSS stylesheet all day or just deal with customer support guys to explain that is not a bug and is the user that is not using correctly the feature.

So should we get comfortables in our pods with Netflix and let the matrix use us as battery ??

Or just become Borgs and let the system assimilate us and just forget about our aspirations or continue asking ourselves: when im going to apply calculus in real life ?

Yeah no problem with that ? Lets not obsess with jobs and lets focus on Friday or weekends !! Sure.....but the only problem that i see in a job is that we spend so many hours sitting in front of a laptop. And i wont do depressing calculations on how many hours in our lifetime, we spend working.

Obviously there could be a solution. But i love a graph about job satisfaction that i found in a coursera course called the science of well-being(coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well-being)

And in this course they mentioned a book named Flow(amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Peren..)

And we have the following graph:

And i 100% agree with this graph and i think is what we should look for in a Job. Our current or new one.

To sum up: i meant that our job should be challenging enough that we can apply our skills so we can enter to a flow state that we don't feel we are working any longer. I think it is possible.

So i think we can escape our matrix pods and im trying some ways:

Maybe im the only one feeling this way or maybe not. But i hope is helpful for the ones that feel this way.

Lets be a Bug in the matrix !

EOF