Bureaucracy Considered Harmful

Okay, I’ve written this essay a hundred times.

It’s always true. It’s always necessary.

Sometimes, I get stuck. Writers talk about writer’s block. I’m not a writer. I don’t get that, not in the normal course of life.

I’m an engineer. I get engineer’s block.

The solution is always to do something, to do anything. For me, the solution is usually writing.

I need to write something. To put words on a page, to get used to making progress on something again without feeling constantly overwhelmed by the approach of obstacles.

By bureaucracy and its hideous head.

I hate paperwork, and I hate testing (not unit testing manual testing), and those are the two rewards for completing the work that’s assigned to me.

This is my problem.

I’m sure that this is what causes me to get blocked.

What I need to do to overcome it is to do work that goes unpunished.

I want to write code, really I do. But I also really, really don’t. I’ve developed a resistance to the idea. A mind block, maybe even a phobia.

I bet the writers who get the worst writer’s block are the ones who dislike editing.

When work is its own punishment, you develop an aversion to doing it.

I like writing. I like editing. I'm afraid of publishing, sharing, having a world that can in principal respond. Trying to publish and thinking about publishing are the things that have given me writer’s block in the past. (I finally got over this about three weeks ago, I think and hope.)

JIRA tickets give me engineer’s block.

Sometimes, I want to get buried in a project and not come up for air for a month or two. Always, I want that. There is some semblance of peace in that, some escape from drudgery.

Instead I have to edit JIRA tickets constantly, go through the experience of annoying a coworker until he or she finally reviews my code, and then do a bunch of manual testing every couple of days as soon as I finish a little project, and I hate it. I detest it. I feel like I’m suffocating.

Come up for air is a strange analogy. I think I’m a fish and writing code is my water, and every time I finish a project I get dragged back up onto the boat. I just wish I could just write code and never finish projects.

Actually, I don't wish that. I just wish the release process wasn't so horrible, and I could go back to working in a code base that relies on unit tests instead of manual processes for quality control.