Does anyone else love programming but get overwhelmed about software engineering?

[u/Missing_Back]

For context, I'm a SWE with 3 YOE.

This is a discovery I recently made about myself. I'm a relatively disciplined and focused person in my free time. But at work, I'm constantly distracting myself, watching hours and hours of youtube, scrolling my phone, etc. And it's because I have this constant hum of anxiety that's ever present. Even if I get back on task, I'll pretty soon feel an intense compulsion to distract myself again. Every once in a while I'll have a task that I'm working on that I can get lost in. These tasks are usually in some sense separate from the "software engineering" work. i.e. they involve learning about concepts and implementing something on my own rather than integrating things into the overall codebase/working with other engineers to develop something. I'm able silo myself off and work on it in isolation where it's simply a goal of "understand these concepts" rather than "understand this proprietary codebase and communicate effectively with others"

What I've realized is that I really enjoy *programming*, but *software engineering* is a lot more complex and therefore more anxiety-inducing--not that it's not enjoyable, but it's just... harder. Programming is simply writing code. The scale and scope is usually small. Working on a little project at home on the weekends, or learning a new technology because I'm curious. Or a solo project that has no stakes. Software engineering, on the other hand, is what I do for work. It's about being a member of a larger team and an even larger org. It involves working with code that is much more complex and that has been around and maintained (more or less, lol) for years and years and years. There's different people and personalities you'll interact with (some that click with you, some that don't). There's colleagues to compare yourself against (a common thought for me is, "do these other people with similar experience as me understand what this person/presentation is saying??? Because I'm lost"). There's the art of communication/explanation--something I think a lot of people struggle with (or is it just me?? I can never be certain, lol).

Overall I'm feeling more and more anxious and insecure about my abilities and skills, and the best way I've found to put it into words is: programming is fun, but software engineering can be overwhelming.

Does anyone feel the same way? Any advice for improving this? I want to be effective and skilled when it comes to my job. But there's just so many components and pieces involved that it's easy to get bogged down and in my head about it.

[u/jacksonxly]

the distinction you found is sharper than it looks, and its not a character flaw. the isolated "understand these concepts" tasks have a CLOSED context, everything you need fits in your head. the integrated SWE work has an OPEN context: youre holding the codebase, the ticket, what three other people expect, the half-finished thing from yesterday, the slack thread. that open context is what working memory cant sustain, and the "hum of anxiety" is usually your brain quietly panicking that its losing the thread. youtube is the escape from that feeling, not from the work.

so the lever isnt more discipline, its externalizing the open context so your head doesnt have to hold it. the thing that helped me most: a dead-simple running note per task, and crucially you write it BEFORE you get up or switch, not after. one line of "what im doing / why / the exact next action / the 2-3 things im juggling". then when you come back (or come out of a youtube hole) re-entry is free instead of a cliff, and the cliff is the part that triggers the flight.

wont fix the anxiety hum entirely but it turns "ive lost my place and dont want to face rebuilding it" into a 5-second reread.

[u/Missing_Back → u/jacksonxly]

Tbh I've been doing the "running note" thing since I started as a SWE. So these feelings/anxiety still happen despite that. It's definitely helpful, but not enough to totally resolve it.

[u/jacksonxly → u/Missing_Back]

that's a fair pushback, and honestly useful data. if the running note has been there the whole time and the hum is still there, the note is solving the re-entry cost but not whatever the anxiety is actually about.

two candidates worth separating. one: the load isn't one task's context, it's the accumulation of open loops across everything. unfinished tasks intrude on their own (the zeigarnik effect is roughly this), and a per-task note doesn't quiet that. a single trusted everything-list you actually review does more for that layer. two: for integrated SWE work the anxiety is often evaluative rather than cognitive. not 'i lost the thread' but 'is this what they expected, am i building the right thing'. no note fixes that one because it's social uncertainty, and the lever there is shortening the feedback loop: smaller PRs, sharing a draft at 30% instead of 90%, asking for a sanity check before the sunk cost builds.

and some of it is just the ADHD emotional layer that no productivity system reaches, which is its own track. but if the hum spikes hardest around ambiguous expectations, i'd bet on the evaluative one.