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The Long Dark Tea Time Of The Software Engineer

Dr Stuart Woolley
CodeX
Published in
7 min readJan 1, 2025

It’s the eve of returning to work, yet the messenger bag that carried your dreams has become a millstone around your neck. But, why?!

“Image generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E.”

I wrote a while back about us menial technicals working hard in the Grand Game of Software Engineering just accepted things (in that case the unpaid overtime of commuting) because, simply, that’s the way they were, and that’s the way they’ve always been.

No matter that those things were actually quite destructive, likely damaging to both physical and mental health, and depended upon the fact that they had been accepted as some kind of habit, a blood price paid without question, and something habitually expected from, you guessed it, your employer.

Originally I pondered on commuting and wondered how, for so long, we’d sacrificed so much of our time, and money, it being voluntarily burnt to ashes as unpaid overtime — just getting to, and from, a place of work before even actually doing any work.

Then, last night, in the wriath like silly season between Christmas and New Year I realised something else quite terrifying about work.

If you spent more than a critical amount of time away from it then you get to see it for what it really is, and it’s frightening. Very, very frightening.

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CodeX
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Dr Stuart Woolley
Dr Stuart Woolley

Written by Dr Stuart Woolley

Worries about the future. Way too involved with software. Likes coffee, maths, and . Would prefer to be in academia. SpaceX, X, and Overwatch fan.

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