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Every developer I know has a version of the same story. They were grinding LeetCode at 11 PM, or building a portfolio project nobody would ever see, or studying something that had no immediate payoff — and at some point in that grind, the question surfaced: what’s the point? I’ve asked myself that question. I’ve watched it surface in people I work with. And I’ve noticed something about the developers who eventually break through: they didn’t have a better path. They had a worse one, they knew it was worse, and they chose it anyway. The article that’s been making the rounds on this topic argues that too many developers follow the same formula — CS degree, LeetCode, internship, job offer — and in doing so, create a monoculture that flattens both the job search and the person doing it. Everyone looks the same to recruiters because everyone optimized for the same thing. And when the path doesn’t work out, there’s no backup plan because there was never a backup plan. There was only the plan. There’s something true in that. But I think the deeper issue isn’t the formula itself — it’s that people run toward the formula without understanding what they’re signing up for. Here’s the part that stuck with me: a quote from Loki. Most purpose is more burden than glory. You never want to be the one who tried to avoid it, because you can’t live with that burden of knowing you didn’t try. That’s not鸡汤. That’s just accurate. The people who make it are rarely the ones who found a shortcut. They’re the ones who found a burden they could live with and then lived with it. There’s a scene in Tales of the Jedi that illustrates this well. Anakin trains Ahsoka with Clone Troopers instead of training droids — the standard curriculum. The clones are unpredictable, adaptive, and vastly more difficult. She complains. He doesn’t soften it. The point isn’t just difficulty for its own sake. It’s that the harder training built reflexes that saved her later, when Order 66 came and everything familiar collapsed. The burden prepared her for something nobody could have predicted. This maps to software development cleanly. The side projects you finish when nobody is watching. The late-night debugging sessions that teach you how systems actually break. The technologies you learn because they’re interesting, not because they’re listed in job descriptions. These aren’t resume padding. They’re training for a version of your career that hasn’t arrived yet. The argument isn’t that suffering equals growth. Plenty of people grind for years and get nothing from it. The argument is that the grinding — the consistent, unglamorous, often unrewarding work — is the actual mechanism. Not talent. Not connections. Not timing. Just the willingness to keep carrying something when nobody is clapping. What I’ve seen in six years of watching developers up close: the ones who break through aren’t the smartest. They’re not the most credentialed. They’re the ones who found a specific burden they could tolerate long enough to get good at something. Maybe it was contributing to open source. Maybe it was grinding a specific domain like embedded systems or compilers. Maybe it was just building things in public and accepting that nobody would care for a while. The formula everyone follows is the formula everyone follows because it mostly works. But mostly working means mostly competition, mostly sameness, mostly a crowded middle. If you want something different, you have to choose differently. And choosing differently means accepting a burden that doesn’t look like everyone else’s burden. Not easier. Not harder. Just yours. What you sacrifice for is less important than whether you can sustain the sacrifice long enough for it to matter. Pick something. Choose your burden. Then carry it. Tags: reflection, career, growth Layout: post