It's a lot like a STEM degree. It's fun recognizing problems, fixing them, optimizing your solutions, getting marketable skills, etc. However at a certain point the projects you're working on become more tedious than fun, especially when you start factoring in scale. Because you're spending so much time on something you find fundamentally draining, your interest in other hobbies decreases, you find doing actual life both too similar and too dissimilar from what the Factorio/STEM life is. And perhaps the biggest con, your social life takes a massive fucking hit--unless someone is also living the STEM/Factorio life, you're probably not gonna see them often.
Still though, in such a fundamentally unstable world, there's a definite appeal to being able to have a plan, follow through with that plan, and then see the fruits of that plan come to fruition. The industrial revolution happened for a reason right? We all need some rigidity, formality, and industriousness in the chaotic systems of our lives. I played the most Factorio when I was mentally rotting away at a bad coding job, physically isolated from my friends; in that period, the sandbox of problems and solutions was a perfect mental escape. Not to say that Factorio is only appealing when you're suffering from sadness (though this is very much a "breakup-game" if there was one), but that there's something distinct about the appeal that can really hit at certain points of life.
But IDK maybe I'm just projecting.
Still though, in such a fundamentally unstable world, there's a definite appeal to being able to have a plan, follow through with that plan, and then see the fruits of that plan come to fruition. The industrial revolution happened for a reason right? We all need some rigidity, formality, and industriousness in the chaotic systems of our lives. I played the most Factorio when I was mentally rotting away at a bad coding job, physically isolated from my friends; in that period, the sandbox of problems and solutions was a perfect mental escape. Not to say that Factorio is only appealing when you're suffering from sadness (though this is very much a "breakup-game" if there was one), but that there's something distinct about the appeal that can really hit at certain points of life.
But IDK maybe I'm just projecting.
2 Comments
oh it was a kind of low stakes coding job for an insurance company, in terms of like code we worked alot with python & SQL & django & the usual frontend stuff (html/javascript/uhh maybe React i forget)....in terms of corp pressure tho it was v easy i never had a major deadline crunch & was left to my own devices for the most part, the job only sucked rlly when the company assigned me to a diff department. it depends on what you hate about compsci but it'll be hard 2 avoid a job that doesnt have some drudgery and tedium 2 it, and the whole interview scene for entry level jobs is more brutal than when i was starting, but the key is finding a joh that gives u a tradeoff of time/money thats worth it 2 u
vanda
1 month ago