I was offered a book deal and turned it down, hah. I read in spectacular volumes and books have a very special place in my heart. Growing up in Malaysia, most of my English was initially mastered from a gigantic pile of Enid Blyton books my family had lying around after the British occupation. We even give everyone at Hermit Tech a day off per week to study non-IT things and let the subconscious do some processing on work. Not because I'm a weirdo (though I am), but because I genuinely believe this produces a higher-quality experience for our clients, and no one can stop me from testing things like "five day work weeks are too long".
In any case, the book deal had constraints like "no swearing", and it was implied they'd find their own artist for the cover. I didn't even intend to swear, but I care too much to let them assign an editor and impose arbitrary constraints. I ended up chatting a bit with Ed Zitron after the AI rant article went super viral, and he told me that I have the audience to just publish my own books.
So I'm doing just that! I'm starting with ten short stories, at the advice of someone in the local Melbourne scene that has helped many people publish. Then I'm aiming to write one book containing a series of essays on IT work, and one fantasy/fiction book. I'm a reasonably good judge of popularity, and because neither will be particularly angry, I will probably only sell a few hundred copies. But I'll have a book with my name on it, which is very special to me.
If this was a job with a non-abstract input and output process they would have OSHA saying it was genuinely unsafe (and definitely stupid.)
Many of us build systems to manage automatic actions to take care of this stuff, if I had an engineer I had to take 100+ steps to get something done I would definitely be considering 1) What the hell am I paying for and 2) Why the hell am I paying for it?
Quick question: How many years of industry exp do you have? I thought the same way until this year when the burnout got to me too. I thought I was too much of a high achiever to get burnout and yet I'm in the same boat as the author.
Also, once the people who speak up about a problem leave, all you are left with are idiot yes-men in management, old timers doing their job as minimally as possible to not to be noticed by management, and fresh new engineering grads ready to be grist for the mill. When those sorts of people are writing all of the code around you, no matter how good you are, you will be driven insane.
