p0ints

I'm feeling the same. I think it's very common. That's what motivates people to go above and beyond and try to be financially independent - as the alternative is having very little from life until you're old and retired.

Regarding falling asleep - I've noticed an interesting phenomenon in myself. Usually it takes me around 30 minutes to fall asleep, during which period I seem to gradually mellow, my internal narrative becomes weaker until I finally fall asleep. During the final stages of that process, I sometimes imagine beautiful and quite complex music or art that I like a lot (unfortunately, I'm nowhere skilled enough to try to create actual pieces based on this). This does not happen to me in any other state - it's as if there's a temporary imbalance between my mental functions (perhaps the logical brain shuts off first) that generates this unsolicited creativity.

> Even Russia did kind of ok.

That may be true from 10 thousand miles away. Upon closer inspection, there's a huge difference in current wealth and standard of living between Russia and say Finland, while 100 years ago they were roughly the same. Not to mention the unimaginable wealth of natural resources that Russia has, which, under proper political and economic policies, could make it into a Norway-like paradise.

> it made me realise you can generally achieve the things you want in life if you focus on them

I'd be cautious here; video games are designed, artificial worlds where difficulty level is carefully controlled by the maker. They are designed to give you sense of accomplishment and empowerment, so they cannot be too difficult, whereas real world accomplishments can be brutally difficult to achieve.

> What would happen to you in the workplace if you behaved like a Westerner and looked for opportunities to contribute to others' priorities, praised others' work, and shared your productivity enhancers?

I curently work in a large Western Europe organization (30k employees), which does a lot of its software development in Poland. I'd say the work is in many ways organized in a terrible way (courtesy of the higher-up geniuses in the HQ). My observation is that the rank-and-file employees in the Western Europe branches tend to more often eat shit and smile about it than people in Poland. That may be because I don't know them as well as my Polish collegues though.

I agree with most of this (I'm a Pole, currently living in Poland). I'd say that we're closer to the world norm and the Westerners are the outliers - universal wealth on an unprecedented scale has created some paradise-like conditions in those countries. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world (most of Africa, Asia, South America, Eastern Europe) people are scamming and robbing each other left and right, which creates a justified amount of mistrust. My prediction is that further automation and globalisation will be the great leveler, and in 50 years people in the West will be considerably worse off (it's already happening, hence Trump, Brexit etc.) while the rest will improve.

> How to get into those heavily engineering oriented firms, like JPL or NVidia, doing the low level stuff?

Maybe first try to talk to someone who does that kind of work, to see if it's even appealing to you? I say this because my understanding of this issue is very similar to the parent poster - no matter what the domain, programming as a career WILL be dominated by dealing with large and ugly code bases, where your main struggle will be to understand them and then try to make intelectually trivial changes in a non-breaking manner. For example, I spoke with people who developed GPU drivers, and they said that the code base was an insufferable mess, and that they escaped it to do something theoretically much more mundane, but at least with much less preexisting code.

My gloomy conclusion is that software engineering is not the best career choice for someone creative and intellectually curious. It's just too dull.

My (anecdotal) observation is that this big4 "professionalism" is mostly a self-imporant delusion (probably imprinted into people by years of company culture and trainings), and that a lot of senior people in there are insufferable wankers. That's from my experience with senior managers from Deloitte and PwC.

My view is the opposite - Poles are more honest (which usually translates to - more whiney) at their jobs than Western people, where centuries of capitalism have taught people that it's best to keep your thoughts to yourself and pretend to be happy/content. Poles have yet to internalize this lesson.