It's my personal state in a company setting, I'm simply in pain, I can't think straight, I struggle with mundane things, I lost taste and desire to craft nice solutions.
Made me question my skills for a bit, until I realized that when outside my job, I enjoy reading/thinking about what I'd consider non trivial topics (parsing techniques, state machine minimizations, ...) and in these moments, it's nothing but joy, even when it's hard it's a positive feeling. And it yields long term enlightenment.
There's no such thing when you finally found why lib-a doesn't work well with lib-b anymore, or if lib-c will be compatible with the previous ones.
Now you mention 'solving interesting puzzles with peers' maybe my puzzles are not interesting and i can't rely on my peers to find interesting ideas :)
Also there were topics on how companies mis-apply agile development, which end up in this never-ending bug chase and cramming half features in an application. But based on conversations around me, it seems that a lot of people live in this average.
Made me question my skills for a bit, until I realized that when outside my job, I enjoy reading/thinking about what I'd consider non trivial topics (parsing techniques, state machine minimizations, ...) and in these moments, it's nothing but joy, even when it's hard it's a positive feeling. And it yields long term enlightenment.
There's no such thing when you finally found why lib-a doesn't work well with lib-b anymore, or if lib-c will be compatible with the previous ones.
Now you mention 'solving interesting puzzles with peers' maybe my puzzles are not interesting and i can't rely on my peers to find interesting ideas :)
Also there were topics on how companies mis-apply agile development, which end up in this never-ending bug chase and cramming half features in an application. But based on conversations around me, it seems that a lot of people live in this average.