It is 3:45 on an ordinary afternoon in the ordinary office of an ordinary software company. Alan, a 25-year-old programmer, is deep in concentration as he tries to debug a piece of legacy software written by people who left the firm years ago. The code is bad, but the functions all seem to work individually, as none of the unit tests are failing. There seems to be an undocumented assumption about how the pieces of the program fit together. One run out of every 10,000, a catastrophic error is produced; the other 9,999 times, nothing goes wrong. Alan has added logging statements to the program to print out its intermediate state, but all of these subroutines get called thousands of times per minute, mostly without error, so the 5,000,000-line log file he has produced has more noise than signal.
As someone who re-reads "The Gervais Principle" monthly, I found this enjoyable. I also suffer through a lot of office politics.
I'm probably neurotypical by your definition (with strains of sociopath). I sometimes wish I was more energized by office politics. That's how the Stalins of the world outmaneuver the Trotskys, after all. But maybe it's for the best that my goals aren't quite so lofty. Many executives seem haunted to me, like hungry ghosts who will never be satisfied. Rapacious mouths who want to devour the world and probably will succeed some day soon.
As someone who re-reads "The Gervais Principle" monthly, I found this enjoyable. I also suffer through a lot of office politics.
I'm probably neurotypical by your definition (with strains of sociopath). I sometimes wish I was more energized by office politics. That's how the Stalins of the world outmaneuver the Trotskys, after all. But maybe it's for the best that my goals aren't quite so lofty. Many executives seem haunted to me, like hungry ghosts who will never be satisfied. Rapacious mouths who want to devour the world and probably will succeed some day soon.