"eager to learn, sense of ownership"

Well, that disqualifies me. The way most organizations tie your hands means one is given all the responsibility without real authority. I'm completely unmotivated because of that.

Edit: Sucks that my feelings are being downvoted.

Downvoting on HN is fickle; sometimes it's the point that's being made, sometimes it's how it's being made. I think asking "have I meaningfully contributed to conversation" is part of it... but a lot of downvotes comes as emotional response or simple disagreement. You can choose whether to take it seriously and grow/change to satisfy it, or be yourself and take votes in passing.

That being said - sad to hear you are not eager to learn and don't have sense of ownership; you are correct that disqualifies you from some roles (most, in a way, but recruitment process is all sort of obscure and counter-logical).

For what little it may be worth: it mostly comes back to the old proverb of "courage to change things you can, accept things you cannot, wisdom to know the difference, and zen to make peace with it". I try to coach my team members very early on "these are things that are part of organizational machine; satisfy them so you are done with them. These are the things where you can make a difference and where most of your value will be concentrated. Focus on those once you've fed the machine".

I think part of disillusionment, at least it was mine, is the feeling that somebody somewhere, and ideally ourselves, should have all the necessary power. In reality, we all operate within constraints, more or less visible or scrutable.

Ultimately, life is imperfect, professional life included; it's a life's pursuit for most of us on how to grow our own acceptance and peace with it. Sometimes we make that change within ourselves, sometimes we are able to make an external change that aligns more with our priorities.

Best of luck!

That proverb holds a lot of truth.

I would add that treating the company's money as if it is your own also works quite well.

Never get too attached to a user story/task is another important lesson. Sometimes a task has to go, even though you disagree.

To OP I'd say that you should really try to rediscover the desire to learn.

That and being able to quickly locate related information for a task are two of my most important skills.

To add to your point of treating company's money as your own -- "Tracking Money" will help understand a lot of corporate priorities and explain a lot of decisions. --I-- may want to update something because "it's the right thing to do / makes for cleaner code / etc". But the management probably has a reason (good bad or ugly) for their own priorities. Advice I read mid-way through my career is "understand your manager's goals and reasons", and it was so simple and yet so... shocking to so many of us techies. We always expected manager to understand our recommendations and priorities. Hubris! :)

(in Public Sector, "Tracking Money", interestingly, did not work as well; but "Tracking Personal Status/Blame/Credit" worked well. The two should be equivalent but in my limited experience there's differences)

Sometimes downvoting is purely to move a comment down when there's another comment right below it that's being pushed up (with an upvote).

In a sense, it's almost like a comment got 2 upvotes.

I once was a team lead for an team of outsourced software developers. It was the worst part of my career. The whole outsourced team was awful. Wholly incompetent.

I had the responsibility of delivering a product, but I didn't have the authority to fire these folks who were a net negative on the project. I would have been happier with implementing the whole project myself, which I mostly did.

I too was unmotivated, but the stress of being responsible was unbearable.

Perhaps some people disagree that "most organizations" give responsibility without authority, but I've seen it happen a several times in my career.

I have also been bitten by this and I also ascribe it as the worst part of my career.

A warning to anyone who hasn't experienced this, if you're ever tasked with doing this the correct answer is "no" followed by "goodbye".

I’ve left positions for similar reasons.

Another strain of this is forcing some COTS application to work via a million hacks and integrations (usually via consulting resources) when a fundamental architecture or application change is needed. Responsibility coupled with the resource and authority to execute is stressful in its own way but it at least allows one to more easily own their failures.

You know what they say, if you can't change your workplace .. change your workplace!

> Edit: Sucks that my feelings are being downvoted

There was more there than feelings. Saying you know how most organisations work is probably it.

That's been my experience. I believe That's a universal truth when it comes to working in groups. You can't do what you think is best. You have to do what the group decides, or what the person in the leadership structure above you says. I'd be very curious to hear about company structures that don't have a top-down leadership/authority scheme.