Frustration is your greatest engineering asset. What do you do the 5th time someone asks for the same damn thing yet again?

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Frustration is a powerful engineering signal. Instead of repeatedly doing the same manual task, great engineers use that annoyance as motivation to eliminate the problem permanently. Three concrete examples illustrate this: upgrading CI/CD runners to cut build times from 10 to 2 minutes instead of endless Slack debates; building a self-serve permissions UI so managers can grant roles without engineering involvement; and writing AI-assisted tests to cover complex invoicing edge cases that were impossible to reproduce manually. The core philosophy is that your job is to remove work, not just do it — build tools, scripts, dashboards, and automation that create durable value and eliminate recurring friction.

Frustration Driven Development

This is so true.
For example we have a file at our company that shall not be imported into another file or the files that it depends on, because it will literally break everything, for NDA reasons i cannot say more than that.
The problem is that people did not know which files were also dependencies of this file, which lead to me having to fix this with every single release.
The only real solution was to do a complete rewrite that basically separates that part of the codebase into its own project, which sadly would lead to lots of duplicated code unless i would also create a third package where i can put the shared code.
Nobody got time for that.
Instead i wrote a script that traverses the dependency tree and figures out using static analysis which file imported the wrong file and reports it.
That now runs in CI, i never had to fix this again since then, it probably saved us 100s of hours already, because before also figuring out which was the wrong import wasn’t easy as well.

In my project I usually follow &quot;If a machine can do it, let the machine do it.&quot;

Simple, direct, yet so true ✨
I’ve heard “being a Software Engineer is being a master at laziness” and since then I walked that same path.
Being a good SWE is being able to reduce your workload, not doing it perfectly!

every time I wake up im frustrated and annoyed that i have to get up. have you guys solved this yet?