Never Be Angry at Work

To me, that reads as a bit immature, and there were times when I felt exactly like what you described, but switched one project to another and I felt embarrassed from my own past behaviour.

I'm getting paid to build someone else's project. I enjoy the work I'm making so I build it the best I can given the time constraints. I'm a paid worker, not an artists. Every entropy that I add to this system, is entropy that delays capital income to the whole company, so that entropy needs to be productive and not fundamentalist following unnecessary perfectionism. If something can be done quickly but imperfectly and still be relatively well maintained with manageable debt, so be it, that's what delivers the most value to the whole company. It's a bit one sided if I banged by foot no the ground and said "no, this will take 6 more months that what you want because I want it to be done in my perfect way". And this idea of perfectionism crumbles even more when you realise your idea of perfect is not objective. There's always someone else who has a better and more perfect idea than yours.

This doesn't conflict with the programming I do on my personal projects. Personal projects give me more satisfaction than what I do at work, but personal projects don't give me any money, as it should be, or I'd be compelled to work faster.

My work is not a craft, and that's fine. I'm just another human helping other humans advancing the company to acquire more money. I respect and understand my boss's incentives to get more money and they respect my needs to build maintainable software. So, more often than not, we meet in the middle. Sometimes more toward my view, other times towards theirs.

You dislike engineers because they are acting like engineers instead of artists? The typical engineer is a paid mercenary, working to get widget 2.0 out the door. They are not robots, but are paid to play nice with others to advance their employer's interests. To act like a temperamental artiste in that environment would be immature and unprofessional.

An artist making a painting owns the IP of the painting[1]. A software engineer working for an employer generally does not; the employer (or client) usually owns the IP, and usually has a larger financial stake in the software than any individual.

I think this attitude is fine if you are the sole stakeholder and IP owner (e.g. a personal project or a small business you own). But not for something you are building in collaboration with other engineers for someone else's ownership.

[1] Artists do often make works for client IP, in which cases, they also do not have full creative control of their output!

marxist alienation (or even debord/situationist alienation) is a spot-on analysis of this mode of neurosis. kudos.