> That's probably where I have the greatest autonomy, since nobody strictly asked me to create it.

This rings really true to me. Generally I think I do pretty ok navigating through things, do ok, but eork has always been a bit hard for me as well. I feel misaligned & hampered at work-places. My priorities dont match up. There can be tech impedances- bad operational visibility, bad past architecural choices I have to live with, frustrating tooling... but the real struggle is just people. Not that they necessarily obstruct or arent helpful or well intended, but there is a vast chasm between thr technical & the non-technical in particular, and techies are the ones that have to every day cross that chasm to come explain & elaborate the pieces & parcels of the deep worlds they experience that literally no one on the other side has the ability & experince to comprehends. (Even sharing our travels with other closeby techies can be enormously hard.) It's all on the worker to simplify again and again the current tiny little facets pieces & scenarios of some large unseen unknowable edifice they isolately work upon & hack at.

Maybe I just dont know the literature, but I think it's super undertold how alienating it can be being in tech. There's broad topics around management knowing how the sausage is made, but techies sausage makers are their brains and management can literslly never know how the sausage is made. Getting remotely close to the experience of what production is in any software shop (factory) is intensely challenging, even if you are a top of your game engineer with rich understanding. To most of the org chart, we are aliens. What we are actually doing is indescribeable, unintelligible, and there's only a crass superficial surface level understanding of output that is at all assessable.

The business has so many things it perceives itself as wanting & desiring. Most middle management is obsessed with growth, with new things, with features. MM doesnt have the aptitude to assess or appreciate what possibiliies open or close as we take than path or that, tend to this tech want or not. They dont suffer the same pain we do when the codebase starts feeling rancid or muddied. They dont have their names in git blame, to be thanked or scorned by future generations. Features, users & the business are real to them, and the code is abstract. Code and systems are real to us and tbe business can be abstract.

Im not the best at getting the things I want to work on done, using my own personal time to be productive. But it happens some! I do wonder what my motivation would be like if I had time & space. I have taken some not-working periods here & there, & intended to get up to more, but was so relieved just to be enjoying my time freely for once & travelling that peoductivity was minimal. This is to say, I dont know what true pure self sovereign autonomy really would mean for me, but ideally my personal coding time would grow from 10hr target a week to 30+ hr.

Perhaps I'll leave off with this impression of what being a coder at a corporation can sometimes feel like, as you're great abilities must meet the constraints & wants of the org,

> Phenomenal cosmic powers! Itty-bity living space!