"Working at any of the companies I’ve been at has never really been an intellectual pursuit, even though such a pursuit was the main driving force in my betterment up until I found work. It has been an exercise in solving a problem using given tools (and often, no more), and doing it quickly. What does that mean? It means I can’t spend 12 hours doing the equivalent of bumbling around finding interesting or ingenious solutions to things, it means I lookup on Google and StackOverflow what the correct way to read in a file line-by-line, copy-paste the code, and modify it. I could definitely write my own, but why bother swapping in that memory when the L2 cache—that is the internet—has it already? Unfortunately, this toxic habit leaked, and I find doing the same thing for other problems I have, including math problems. I have developed the hazardous mindset common in programming, “if it has already been done, why should I do it?” It is a dangerous inverse of Not Invented Here, or NIH syndrome." - × × ×