This is exactly how my working days looked like in the last 12 months before I quit. Sitting in front of the screen waiting for the next emergency ticket. Why even bother to start some deep work? It will be interrupted, possibly for days, in the next few hours anyhow.

Creativity and experimentation are not needed for survival, so stress hormons flow and the nice things are postponed.

This is also happening in government, IMO.

Govts get caught up in the latest emergency in the social/media and completely forget about innovation and long term planning. It's particularly acute in the UK at the moment.

I kept my sanity at one place by working on refactoring every moment there wasn’t an emergency. I was trying to make all the changes easier. But that was after having tried several other solutions, including the dreaded Infinite Configurability, which has to be the absolutely best way to punish most of the team for how clever two or three of them are.

I’m working at a place like that now and it’s been an eye roller. After ten years on the project one of the problem people has finally seen this as a problem (though I haven’t heard him admit that he contributes). He’s looking at code now written by two people who have been copying his code style for years, and suddenly feeling the pain of it. It’s great he’s growing, but he’s over forty and should have learned this years ago. I blame a mix of things including staying at one place for far too long.

And I keep telling him this code used to be worse, but I’ve been chipping away at it for some time.

I empathize deeply with you. I have been dealing with a system of "infinite configurability" for the last couple years and it's playing out the same way. The best I've been able to do is slowly codify the most problematic corners and put guard rails as many places as possible.

Sometimes I want to put my hands up in defeat and leave but there is also a satisfaction and growth from simplifying the Rube Goldberg machine.

It still sucks though.

"Code coverage" and code that does everything and thus nothing are a potent cocktail as well. You can have 90% 'coverage' on a file and still only be covering 5% of the actual code paths (that's unfortunately not hyperbole, but a real number from a real analysis I did. When the numbers disagree that much, people tend to ignore the terrifying one)

> But that was after having tried several other solutions,

I should clarify that I didn't mean concurrent or consecutive here, but across several different projects. Different preconditions can sink a strategy. It's hard to get any signal when you apply multiple unsuccessful strategies to the same 'experiment'.

Hi, do you have some resources I could check out to understand the concept of what infinite configurability is, and how to recognize it ?

Slightly off-topic, but as a father of two (toddlers), I can relate to this. I have plenty of ideas but if I have (say) 15min available, my brain won't even start because it "knows" the next emergency / interrupt will probably occur within that time period. A bit sad I confess...