How habits that makes you good at coding can make you unhappy, and what to do about it

After I finally got over the “I’m not good enough” hurdle (which took way too long), I’ve been wishing I could go to work with the same enthusiasm I had when I was a grad.

I recently learnt how to love my job with the help of a wise lawyer friend. I want to share it with my dear dev community, because I think being a good developer is very hard work, and we all deserve to enjoy our jobs.

The Developer Brain

Good developers need critical eyes and high sensitivity to both existing and potential problems. We are amazing at locating problems in complex systems and coming up with solutions. We are also trained to foresee problems, so we can prevent them from happening.

As we become better coders, some** neural pathways **in our brains get strengthened. I believe this does something interesting to our ways of thinking.

We Focus On What’s Wrong

We almost never celebrate how we got thousands of things right, even though we had a couple critical bugs to fix. Meanwhile, we are constantly thinking about what went wrong and how things can be improved. This gets us into the habit of focusing on the negative side of everything.

What’s Wrong With Being Critical?

Nothing. It just tends to make you unhappy.

I’m not suggesting you to relax your coding standards or give up on coding. I’m suggesting that what makes you good at what you do can hold you back in some ways.

If we be aware of our tendencies, we can deal with it.

This Reealy Bothers you Doesn’t It?

We are sensitive to imperfections. This isn’t even code and it bothers you a lot.

Would you agree that seeing a real problem would bother you more than it would bother many other people?

Where Our Feelings Come From

I used to think that what happens in life causes me to feel certain ways. It’s important to realise that people can feel completely differently about the same fact depending on how they interpret it.

If I keep thinking about what’s wrong with my job and how I can’t change things, I’ll become unhappy. If I keep thinking how fortunate I am to get to where I am today, I’ll feel happy.

Your feelings come from your thoughts, it’s got nothing to do with your job.

The Reality

Even with the best job in the world, your developer brain will still quickly make a list of what’s wrong.You are too good at spotting errors.

So Are We Screwed?

Not really. It’s going to be hard for a lot of us to think more positive thoughts than negative ones. Those positive neural pathways are probably full of grass by now.

You start somewhere though. We can create new neural pathways in our brains with conscious effort. We developers are good at learning. You’ll be alright.

The Solution

Coming back to my lawyer friend, this is what she said that inspired me,

I couldn’t imagine how anyone could love to read legal documents all days, so it made me realise people can actually enjoy their work even when the work isn’t very interesting. This showed me the power of positive thinking.

As developers, we can often get new jobs if we aren’t happy about anything. But often we jump around and still never find happiness. Eventually I realised that although changing our environment may help, lasting happiness comes from our thoughts and attitude.

I know this sounds a bit silly, but try it for a week and see how it feels. What I found is that when I started to look on the bright side, my feelings about work changed more quickly than I expected. I felt a lot happier.

The Choice

When you associate work with positive emotions, work will no longer drain your energy and you will enjoy it. Seeing and talking about the good side of your job doesn’t mean that you are too blind to see the problems.

Love is the ultimate positive emotion. You can choose to love your job even if it’s not perfect, because it will feel good if you do. You can create the emotion of love toward someone or something by accepting their imperfections, appreciating them, and giving. The appreciation part may feel foreign to us, so it takes practice.

We still want to go for the opportunities that maximises our learning and income, but changing jobs doesn’t always give us happiness. While you are at a job, how about trying be kind to yourself and notice what’s good about it?

We all know talented coders who struggle with their feelings about work. Or perhaps about life in general.

Don’t leave them alone in the dark. Give them a hand. Talk about it. ❤

• happiness
• happiness at work
• mental health