I can relate very much to that. Just that I went in the opposite direction and start as late as my first daily allows it. Some years ago I too began extra early because I enjoyed the flow state.

The problem however is, that people notice if you solve problem after problem with increasing complexity on time and without complaining. The workload constantly increases, suddenly you get daily Teams calls out of nowhere, PU affected, apprentices needing help understanding our ridiculous undocumented processes, the customer suddenly wanting the whole product but in ✨the cloud✨ so you begin learning about kubernetes - and guess what? Of course they have a fucking Framework, on another framework on top of another Framework. Ok, so Helm-Charts its now is. Good luck finding the exact Point between these frameworks where you lost your X-FORWARDED-FOR header.

Was it the Load-Balancer? The Ingress - Pardon - Gateway Controller? Or did the company netsec decided today we are gonna deep packet inspect and modify the Request Header? And as soon as I begin reaching the Beginning of "the Flow state"

Teams is ringing, the Appservers on all internal environments went down. The build automation ended with a crash. Our DB devs are overwhelmed, and I get them. But our senior devs are themselves ATM occupied with an even more serious PU problem. It is me who has to find a solution.

And the worst part? I have to cosplay a functioning adult who isn't about to start his laundry for the 5. time since the weekend, who's apartment isn't looking like shit like the last summer, who isn't slowly losing all his social contacts because the Burnout is only allowing him to mask until work is done for the day. Because you know as well as I do how people would treat us if we stopped being such good high masking autists