Having to wade through code I hate has the same effect on me. Doubly so if I have to test it in an environment I hate. Triply so if I am trying to accomplish a goal I don't care about.

That's one of the reasons why I don't like working on UIs. The code tends to be messy. I often have to test in environments like IE for Windows. And I don't actually care about how things work as long as they work.

> Triply so if I am trying to accomplish a goal I don't care about.

That happens sometimes. It is then that I remind myself how much a I make a minute plow through it.

This. 100%! I find whenever I have a career crisis, or lack of motivation, it is because of this right here.

So much code no matter where you go will be something like this. You'll have to make something work even though all the code surrounding your feature is a dumpster fire that is so hard to predict, that you'll pull your hair our worrying about all the ways your feature will break.

When I get to build a new system from scratch? It's a breeze! I get thousands of times the amount of work done in the same amount of time.

So much irony here. Some other poor soul has to come along and procrastinate fixing your old code because you didn't want to and moved on to some other company.

True, but not a decision of my own making. I'm talking about times where I explicitly recommend a refactor to get things in good working order, but I'm forced by my manager to not do that, and instead get it done ASAP.

If only we could build all own systems from scratch. I guess I'd be lucky to finish a working terminal emulator, editor and shell in my lifetime, and maybe a window manager as a stretch goal.

Ironically, you then leave and someone else has to pick up your old code - or offer to build a new system from scratch. So the cycle continues.

This is me right now. I want to work on more go projects but I need to complete this legacy backbone javascript project that hasn't been touched in like two years....The code I'm working on right now is pretty notorious even to other teams.

Oh man I feel your pain. I spent so much time working on a Backbone project wondering what the purpose of all that MVC structure was, and I still don't know.

I am the exact same! Also, if it is some mindless donkey work that is pulling out modules from certain places and refactoring it just so as to fit with a new pattern, I procrastinate, waste time on the internet and question the meaning of life. But if it's a challenging problem, or even writing code from scratch, I will bulldoze through it and finish stuff super quick.

Amen! Especially when there's so much technical debt that you can't predict whether you'll need to fix two or five unrelated issues before you can accomplish what you originally set out to do (if you can still remember what that was by the time you get there).