> then you start to see common causes behind a lot of the mistakes and you think, if people would just fix those, I'd like my job a lot more.

> And that attitude is self-defeating. It leads to unhappiness and unfulfillment and procrastination and mistakes of your own and, finally, resentment.

I get that there's a bad attitude lurking in there, but if you see the common causes behind a lot of the mistakes and you don't work to fix those, then you are just going to be constantly shoveling dirt around. In my mind the most important thing you can do to level-up as an engineer, is to ask, "how could we have avoided these hours/days/weeks of pain?" and then work to address those root (or more root) causes.

Sometimes the answer is very simple, like changing the naming scheme for your data files, because we just spent days chasing our tails looking at the wrong data and making assumptions that weren't true (has happened at several teams I've been on). You can't just tell everyone to be more diligent and "check all your assumptions", because they won't (and no one has time for that in a crunch anyway). But you can make it easier for them to validate their assumptions in the background with things like filenames and clean logs. (Too many false warnings and people stop paying attention.)

When I was in grade school I really enjoyed math, and was really good at it. But some time around the beginning of college I hit a wall and started to resent math. I was supposed to be good at this stuff!

I hope I never find myself in that spot with software. This talk has the right mindset that it's possible to figure out just about anything if you dig deep enough, but a) you have to put in the work to dig, and b) there's seemingly infinite depth so we have to keep a humble and open mind.

Not sure why you got down votes for this because you speak the truth. It reminds me of a time when I was in a lower division Physics class and the professor announced to the class that calculators would not be allowed during the test. Since most of the class was made up of engineering students there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. But the professor explained that calculators wouldn't be needed because if there was any numbers at all in the answers they'd be trivial to calculate. This came as quite a shock to a lot of students who'd been equating math with numerical operations.

Probably downvoted for making hyperbolic generalizations?

Also, your anecdote about kids feeling more comfortable on calculators has nothing to do with what is or isn’t math, and comes off as another kids-these-days story.

The standardized tests were god-awful and the curriculums were hit-or-miss, but I meant that I liked math itself. I think it began when my parents got me a book called “I Hate Mathematics”.

This may be one reason why the BOFH stereotype exists. It definitely helps to have the right attitude.

If you can view the bugs and problems you have to fix as an adventure game puzzle rather than cleaning up other people's messes, you definitely enjoy your job more. Having co-workers who understand your work definitely helps, because working a vacuum sucks.

This is exactly how I see bugs - a mystery to be figured out. In the process of figuring it out, you usually learn a lot about the system, and you (hopefully) become better at avoiding creating bugs yourself.

https://henrikwarne.com/2012/10/21/4-reasons-why-bugs-are-go...

BOFH apparently stands for “Bastard Operator From Hell”.

Good points, you can also approach it with an engineering view. Act in order to reduce time spent and create tiny tools to distribute the effort onto other agents (users and their computers) so that when they interact with you, part of the work is done.