It seems to me that checking out mentally is only an option if you're doing mindless, repetitive work. But as Fred Brooks put it, "The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff." So is it even possible for programmers to check out mentally without seriously degrading the quality of their work?
> "The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff."
I don't agree with this. Programming does not start from scratch. You are always building on someone else's work. Sure, there's the hardware and software you're building on top of, but there's also methodologies and philosophies that other people came up with that you're using too, even if it's only subconscious. It's not the same all-encompassing mental marathon that writing good poetry is. Or, at least, it doesn't have to be.
My work quality went up when I stopped caring about things I really shouldn't have been caring about. I now feel that the biggest source of problems in codebases comes not from so-called technical debt, but from programmers incessantly biting off more than they can chew.
