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Hitchhiking Inverse Log Hitchhiking Inverse Log @hitchhiking_exponential · 2.85K subscribers
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My job from a year ago has changed and two aspects of the change are hard on me. I think the concern is generalizable.

1. The state of flow is gone. The manual process of writing code used to be my main source of dopamine, for two decades. 99% of the time I was in the state of flow in my life was from coding (the other 1% being piano), and I didn't have it since December. This has impacted my mental health. I had similar symptoms when I left my job at Google to join Amazon as a Principal Engineer (PE) - the job has changed from mostly coding to mostly reviewing design decision and sitting in meetings. That was 5y ago and I've had the same feeling since February.

2. Massive context switching. In the past I'd work on the same thing for long stretches of time without context switching. Now most deep work is done by claudes and I review higher-level decisions, very similar to how a PE often spends all day in 30min meetings, but it's much worse now because I spend maybe 1-5min per discussion iteration per claude, so now I have to context-switch every 1-5min. The job has changed from working on the same thing for hours to a firehouse of unrelated information. This is pretty destructive for my ADHD brain. It took months to realize this side effect.

My brain got hyper-optimized to a specific job for years, but now its priors/habits are suboptimal for the new job. This is not a fun side effect of progress and job transformation.

I don't see any signs suggesting that the progress will slow down, so I suspect the job will transform again in a year. I expect a state of constant change, with accelerated pace. As I wrote before, the moat for an individual like you or me, becomes adaptability. I think the most adaptable fraction of the overall population is kids and young adults. The rate "oh, this is new to me" is highest in the childhood and goes down with age, and so does the need for adaptation, so it atrophies. If you are a student reading this, then somewhat paradoxically, I think you are in the best position, better than professionals with an asset baggage of experience whose value is dropping at an exponential pace.

Don't get used to anything in particular. Stay mentally flexible, keep an open mind. Keep a few things constant for your sanity - in my case it is family, and in particular your shared dna is truly immutable.

Accept that the horizon at which you are able to make accurate predictions about the future will keep shrinking, so don't waste your time on worry/anxiety about the future - your predictions will mostly likely turn out to be wrong and your worry about a particular version of the future you might have imagined will likely to end up being a waste of time and nerves. It's far more optimal focus on the present moment.
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