I feel this deeply. I had an extremely similar situation at my last job. My current job is quite a bit better at least, but I still deal with it here.

I guess there's a reason the phrase "code monkey" exists. Jonathan Coulton said it pretty well:

Code Monkey have boring meeting

With boring manager Rob

Rob say Code Monkey very diligent

But his output stink

His code not “functional” or “elegant”

What do Code Monkey think?

Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write god damned login page himself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEBld6I_AKs

I personally much prefer this version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUbp_d2DkYU

I hate being treated as "just the nerd who pushes the nerd-buttons to make the thing we want work", as if the important part of the work was having the idea and not the execution.

One reason they do this is usually around control. A lot of people feel like they have to be in control of everything in order to be safe. There may be ways you can make them feel safe without needing them to be in control.

Another reason is that until the thing is built, there's nothing to do, so everyone gets involved in that. This happens a lot in startups where they have a "build it and they will come" attitude. It's not true; building a sales/marketing channel doesn't actually need a product at the start, and there's a ton of stuff that needs doing while the product is being built. But it can be difficult explaining this to new founders.

Good luck :)

> "building a sales/marketing channel doesn't actually need a product at the start..."

Never knew this, can you tell more about it?

The technique of building the funnel to point to a "sign up for our mailing list and we'll let you know when the product is ready!" link. You get valuable customer insight from the funnel, and if your marketing funnel is working right then you'll get interested customers in your mailing list. If it's not then you can iterate on it, and find something that works (or fail fast if you can't find anything that works).

I'm curious if you still see this working well these days, or what techniques you use to make it work well. I've historically found those types of pages quite useless when we're in a time that anyone can throw up a page to try to validate vaporware and no one wants to give out emails.

I have a feeling that advice was great 10 years ago, and not so great now.

Leave that company immediately and find something that gives you room to breathe.

Thank you. That's currently the plan :)

I think I'm in a similar situation and try to find out how to cope with it. The strategy I'm thinking about is - realizing what's happening (as you have articulated wonderfully), anchoring my self-worth else where (writing code / designing original solutions -> pushing what ever that's being discussed by those 3 people to an executable conclusion), finishing and delivering this project asap.

I guess the next step for me is to figure out how to avoid going into such situations (I entered the situation because I was joining a team in an area that I wasn't familiar with and decided to work on an existing project whose owner has a very strong presence and I didn't clarify the specific work item / boundaries clearly in the beginning).

Seems like you got a plan! How to avoid this situation in the future is also something I've talked about in therapy, and while I haven't reached a conclusion on that, a major takeaway from my session is that it's sometimes beneficial to not rationalize uncommon situations, as that can lead to self doubt and unnecessary guilt.

Even if we do get into a similar situation in the future, we'll be much better prepared to not only deal with it, but to identify it before it necessarily becomes a problem. To me that's the important bit.

tell us the reason! can't be as bad as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27454589

I usually wouldn't mind, but my theory involves personal information that would make me very easily identifiable. I'm not hiding my online identity by any means, but when it comes to work related things I'd rather not give the impression like I'm throwing dirt on any specific person. What I talked about in my comment is much more of a systemic issue from my perspective, and I feel like a coworker reading it knowing it was written by me could take it personally.

Edit: you're right though, it's definitely nothing like that. 1 job is more than enough for me :D

So, you do scrum?

No. We do "do whatever for 3 weeks and work 12 hour days on the week before a deadline comes". Maybe there's a name for that :p

"Procrastination driven development" maybe?