deaf_fish

I have been a software engineer of off highway farm equipment for most of my life. I have like 15 years of it. I have just lost the ability to care about it anymore.

I have explored all the things that interest me and now it seems like everything is just turning the crank to completion. A very boring/slow turning with deadline pressure. I am doing less development and more code reviews because I have become a more senor developer.

My position in the company is pretty good and I could probably ride it out until I die or the company picks up on the fact that my output has dropped due to the lack of caring. But that eats at my soul and it isn't fair to my coworkers.

If money wasn't an issue, I would jump to game development but I hear that doesn't pay well or treat their employees well either. I suppose I could start my own company...

I have a wife and we plan to have one kid if that is possible for us.

Burnout is a possibility, but if that is what this is, I am not sure what to do about it.

So here is what I think my options are. I am open to other suggestions:

1. Stay where I am.
2. Pivot hard to management where I am.
3. Try to find a new job within Embedded Systems
4. Try to do Game Development.
5. Drop everything, become a philosopher like Diogenes of Sinope

Thanks for your consideration.

I am enjoying the game, except one thing in the story that keeps coming up and causes me cognitive dissonance. I am in the first system and it isn't clear to me why we are not considered Pirates.

The characters are always saying stuff like "Don't be a Pirate" or "Kill all the Pirates". And then we do stuff like steal from factions/corporations that are neutral to us. Why doesn't that cause us to be Pirates?

We literally accidentally kidnapped someone. I am so confused.

So, I have come to the conclusion that the word "want" in my brain has two closely related meanings.

1. Something I want right now for the dopamine. Ex Ice Cream.
2. Something that I want for my self long term. Ex to be healthy.

It is hard enough to organize my thoughts normally, but when I have competing wants like Ice Cream, vs to be healthy. It really sucks to have the same word for both.

Does anyone else feel this way? Is there other words that you use to help separated these ideas in your head?

I am writing a unit test and mocking library in C and I want to set the call stack memory to some pre determined value like memset. I want to do this before the test function is called so the test writer can verify they aren't using uninitialized memory in their tests. Is there any somewhat portable way to do this?