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Software Engineering, Work, Well-Being
Why Your Productivity Plummets in Complex Software Systems — and How to Fight Back
The real impact of system complexity on human performance and well-being
This article is an excerpt from my video course Modern Software Engineering: Architecture, Cloud & Security — available with a limited-time discount.
An Arabic version of this article is available here: تجربتي مع فوضى الشركات والأنظمة القديمة (ولماذا لا أزال مبتسمة)
The alarm screams. Not literally, maybe, but it feels like it. Your eyes crack open, and the first thought isn’t “Carpe Diem!” but more like, “Ugh, standup.”
You drag yourself to the kitchen, brew the strongest coffee known to humankind, but somehow, it lands like weak tea. Your brain feels like it’s running on dial-up in a fiber-optic world — sluggish, buffering, refusing to connect.
You sit down at your desk, stare at the backlog, the Jira board, the tangled mess of code you were wrestling with yesterday. You know you need to dive in. You know what needs doing, sort of. But engaging the mental gears feels like trying to push-start a battleship. There’s this invisible wall of resistance, a thick fog of “can’t even.”
