22 ms·

> 4. Smart people get bored easily. Being smart is not exactly the same as being curious, but if you have both these qualities you might find yourself becoming

• dfsegoat 8y ago
  Ditto to all you just said: Figuring out how to strike the balance between "filling myself up" learning new things - while becoming an expert at repetitive drone work (cough cough documentation) was the hardest thing I've done. Still working on it. Previously I had no balance - always was at one extreme or the other.
• abledon 8y ago
  I’m seeing how a few sprinkles of VBA can make an .org so much more efficient than trying to bend management to green light an entire new web app system written in a ‘real’ programming Lang
  • stopnamingnuts 8y ago
    I concur. The tedium of maintaining somebody else’s crap code in an obsolete language is an invaluable learning experience for new devs. Also, it’s hilarious to listen to the whining.
    • _Schizotypy 8y ago
      Sometimes I feel like whining about someone else's crap code is enjoyable in itself.
      • le-mark 8y ago
        Until you realize it's code you wrote. Happened to me when our children were little. There were large parts of a system I'd written, sleep deprived, that I had no recollection of writing. Version control said I did, but I didn't remember it.
        • Skrillex 8y ago
          That can make it even better, particularly if you can remember why you were making the decisions that you did.
          • ptr 8y ago
            Yes! It's actually great -- you can rant as hard as you want because you know the author won't be upset.
            • _Schizotypy 8y ago
              Oh but the author is upset, just with themselves
    • mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      The property of finding their complaints hilarious would make me deeply question your technical judgment & maturity while also being certain you lack leadership skills. I’d also worry you would dismiss ideas of junior team members regarding how adopting new tools could better solve business problems, which is critical even in situations where you’re constrained by stability requirements of a legacy system.
• joshdev 8y ago
  All jobs have some amount of grind. Being able to acknowledge its going to suck and push through it quickly can be super beneficial to your career. It's also one of the reasons why I encourage those in high school or college to try a non technical job first. Learn to appreciate doing monotonous tasks well.
  • _red 8y ago
    As a manager of a dev group, I've migrated away from trying to hire "10x developers" and now optimize for "intelligent and persistent". The "10x" developers are seductive, and can supercharge a project into getting version 1.0 off the ground in months instead of years. However, each one we've hired has left us worse off than before once they got bored and left us in the weeds trying to piece together what they had done. Most of them suffer from "shiny ball" syndrome and are constantly dismayed by the complexities of the real world. The real world is a grind, filled with edge-cases, filled with needing to make 1-off exceptions, etc. These types of developers tend to hate that, and prefer the abstract beauty of their elegant and simple solutions....and when the real world crashes into their elegant creations, they get 'burned out' and jump ship. I'm not blaming them, its just an observation. These 10x developers can be a godsend to a brand new startup, but past a 1.0 product, they can subtly turn into a liability fairly quickly.
    • astrodust 8y ago
      Unless you can coach and pivot someone from that "must make everything perfect" mentality to one where they can take a more pragmatic approach to things.
      • kradroy 8y ago
        This is really hard. Really hard. It can take years to get an engineer to that sweet spot. When I build teams I usually select "builders" and "improvers." Improvers can't create new systems because they spend all day theorizing edge cases and what-ifs. Builders can't improve systems because they spend all day theorizing new systems to replace the legacy one they see as imperfect. You also have to get the right ratio of those two. Too many builders gets you a lot of brittle systems and a huge JIRA backlog; too many improvers creates stagnation.
• mkirklions 8y ago
  Im a chem engineer by degree, worked in a factory. After got a job designing in Mechanical Engineering, got another job in a different product, finally I'm in Electrical Engineering. Being a self taught programmer for 10 years, I've found this variety in experience allows me to engineer pretty much everything from embedded to packaging. I might have been very talented at making airbags, but I would not be controlling electricity if I stayed in that one job.
• projectramo 8y ago
  boredom is part of the human condition. It has nothing to do with being smart. Here are two tips: 1. get sleep 2. drink coffee
  • bootsz 8y ago
    Check and check. Coffee definitely help me with grinding through boring mental tasks.
  • gnulinux 8y ago
    It's ironic that if you do 2 too much you can't do 1.
    • jcadam 8y ago
      Though you can try to substitute #2 for #1. It works... sort of... for a little while.
  • bacro 8y ago
    I would risk number 2 and replace it with exercise (not too early or too late)
  • kingkawn 8y ago
    Boredom is part of living a sedentary life. Not the human condition.
• moron4hire 8y ago
  I hate to say this, but I've been finding Nicotine to be very useful for dealing with anxiety, restlessness, and boredom with rote tasks. I've had some issues with depression and anxiety that I've been managing with my doctor, but there are still times where extreme stress can cut through the drugs and still give me some issues (work has been very political lately). I started craving a cigarette, which is weird because I was only ever a cigar smoker, very infrequently at that, and gave it up (very easily, given I usually went months between cigars) years ago. So under the guise of "if you're craving potato chips, maybe you're low on sodium", I bought a small, very low dosage, disposable e-cigarette at a convenience store. And the last two weeks have been some of my most stable, calm, consistently productive weeks in a very long time. Now, I know Nicotine is very addictive, and I have no plans to go back to smoking. I'm planning to switch to a nicotine patch, as the vapor is irritating to my throat and there is still some concern of increased lung cancer risk. I think a patch will be easier to meter out the dosage, too, rather than puffing on a pen every time I feel like it. Sum total, I think I'm receiving a net benefit right now (it has also calmed my snack cravings and my blood pressure is now at a 5-year low). Anyway, it's dangerous to self-medicate, but most people do anyway, whether it's with alcohol or bad relationships or the internet, and it's not my job to tell you what you can or cannot do. Just trying to relay that there might be some decision tradeoffs that might leave you with a net benefit.
  • adrianm 8y ago
    I think you should talk to a doctor about this.
    • moron4hire 8y ago
      I don't think that is a helpful comment, especially considering I did say I am working closely with my doctor to monitor my health and mood. The practice of medicine is not actually that hard. It's all about risk profiles and benefit tradeoffs. The Lexapro I have been prescribed for my anxiety and the Advair for my asthma could very well be more dangerous for me than any trans-dermal Nicotine patch might be. Our Food and Drug Administration has decided that it's relatively safe for me to buy Nicotine in whatever amounts I want without any more restriction than me being more than 18 years old. They've decided that Advair and Lexapro have risk profiles worth forcing me to go through my doctor before allowing me to have any. We have thousands of years of data that shows Nicotine doesn't just randomly make you want to kill yourself. We have a lot of evidence that smoking tobacco can increase risk of cancer, and that the additives in commercial cigarettes can increase that risk a lot, but that doesn't apply to Nicotine specifically. There is some evidence that any sort of lung irritant can increase the risk of lung cancer, so even vaping might not be completely safe, but neither do we know the magnitude of that risk, especially separate from the many other irritants we're exposed to on a regular basis. I'm not trying to advocate for using Nicotine. There is a risk of smokers pointing to information like this and saying "see, my disgusting habit is not that bad". That's not at all what I'm saying. But just because I don't have MD after my name doesn't mean I can't make informed decisions on my own about my own treatment. I'm just sick of this infantilizing concept that intelligent adults can't figure out a few things on their own.
• _Schizotypy 8y ago
  These are the types of people that belong in research.
  • quantumhobbit 8y ago
    Until they get bored writing grant proposals and lose all their funding.
    • _Schizotypy 8y ago
      It would probably be optimal to have a business that can sustain itself in the background so a researcher can be self-funded.
• josephjrobison 8y ago
  This part was also key: "Solution: Try taking a 30,000-foot view of when it’s worth tolerating some boredom to collect easy wins when it comes to your overall success. Instead of attempting dramatic change, decide when tolerating short periods (a few minutes or hours) of boredom could have a very beneficial impact on your success. For instance, devoting 5 hours a week to an activity that’s monotonous but lucrative. Additionally, make sure you have enough outlets for your love of learning across the various domains of your life, including your work, hobbies, physical fitness, understanding yourself etc." Doing work that's lucrative yet monotonous is one of the biggest struggles. I have in front of me a great strategy that I know will work, but I'm avoiding putting in the elbow grease. Anyone know of a book that goes into this in detail? I know I'm procrastinating more by looking for a book to solve this, but at the same time, when I understand something thoroughly, I do it more often!
  • wool_gather 8y ago
    Not quite exactly about "lucrative yet monotonous", but The War of Art is definitely an extended meditation on "putting in the elbow grease". It's not a manual of techniques about how to get things done, but it is inspirational for getting out of your own way, shutting up, sitting down, and writing. It's written by someone who mostly writes movies, but it applies to anyone who does anything remotely creative, where your project has a lot of uncertainty and many opportunities to stall or talk yourself into giving up. Highly recommended.
    • josephjrobison 8y ago
      Great book - I love that one, anyone who creates should read it (code, writing, art, marketing) - I agree! Agree that it's a meditation/mantra-like book that can be read monthly to refocus.
    • ozzmotik 8y ago
      hey thanks for suggesting this, based on what I've read so far it's extremely applicable to my situation and is the sort of thing I've been needing to read for a while. hopefully i can intuit the wisdom at this point in my life.
• eismcc 8y ago
  This is the most succinct description of my experience I’ve seen. Thanks!
• nine_k 8y ago
  > performing a set of behaviors repeatedly I suspect there are some wins to be had by thinking on how to automate or otherwise delegate well-understood repeated behaviors, while still collecting the proceeds from them. This is something that could interest a smart and curious person for some time, and actually benefit from the intellect and curiosity expended on it. The person can also reframe the "repetitious monotonous task" as "learning the best way to execute and then automate the task". But learning with any confidence takes a lot sampling for any statistical significance!
• pjungwir 8y ago
  I think going deep on something is the key. It lets you keep learning without getting bored and needing to jump ship. One of my pet peeves is how programmers think "keep learning" means "learn another programming language". Not that that's bad, but after the twentieth or so, . . . instead try learning something "adjacent" to what you enjoy & do well. For example for a Ruby+JS web developer: read some HTTP RFCs, play around with SSL certificates, learn some admin/devops skills, get really familiar with some part of modern JS/HTML like your framework or build system or HTML5 canvas or video, read the Rails Github issues list and fix a couple bugs, try writing your own gem, try writing your own gem with some C/Rust implementation, go fix all the n+1 query problems in your app, learn how to use CTEs and lateral joins, learn some plpgsql, write your own Postgres extension, etc. Or pick something adjacent-but-non-technical, like marketing or SEO or sales or financial statements. Remember that careers are long, and learning pays compound interest. There is no reason to get bored!
  • ac2u 8y ago
    I would piggyback on your answer to say that learning those adjacent skills will also help you work on your process of learning in general. You're less likely to get stuck and give up because they're adjacent, and then when it comes to learning something not adjacent you're already a more experienced at learning and organising your thoughts when it comes to tackling a new problem.
  • shostack 8y ago
    This really resonates with me. I'm a marketer who has become more and more technical over my career. The amount of opportunities that has unlocked have really been worth it for sure, but it also simply lets me be better at my trade than those who do not have those skills because I see connections they may not, and I can implement those things independently or with fewer resources than others. It also frankly just makes things more interesting, because when I think I've reached the bottom of a rabbit hole and risk getting bored, suddenly there's this new tunnel branching off of it that I can explore, and before I know it, I'm delving into expert-level problems of a part of my industry I've never considered before.
  • gspetr 8y ago
• munchbunny 8y ago
  Over my admittedly not that long career, I've found that minimizing the overhead that the daily grind creates in your productivity is by itself an art form. The grind isn't avoidable, but you can be more or less productive despite it. As an example, I recently had a project where most of the drudgery was changing one line, testing the whole thing (including manual tests), realizing another one-liner was needed, doing it all again, etc. Automating testing wasn't a good idea at the time (high risk code, so you don't want to pile a refactor on top of a risky change), but I figured out approximately how long the builds would take, so I started setting timers on my phone. Kick off a build, switch tracks, come back when the alarm hit. By doing that I was able to context switch more efficiently to an unrelated project rather than twiddling my thumbs for twenty minutes every time I needed to wait for the build.
• ratsimihah 8y ago
  I spent most of the day trying to get access to the new Instagram API when all I wanted to do was getting some data for my ML model.
  • badpun 8y ago
    I've found that probably over 50% of my work as a developer in bank was about dealing with security: - Getting credentials to some external system with which we need to integrate - Learning how their authentication scheme (Kerberos etc.) works - Finding workarounds to not having admin rights on my laptop - Finding workarounds to bank's firewall (a lot of package repos were blacklisted) - (the biggest one) Having to deploy the app into dozens of separate unix accounts, because, according to security "no one account should have access to all this data"
• pier25 8y ago
  That 4th point strikes very close to home. Maybe the problem is that this kind of personality should be working in R&D instead of regular code-for-money types of work.
• sevensor 8y ago
  > But in reality looking back I see that a lot of that sh*t-shoveling has actually made me much better and wiser at my profession, I agree with this to the point that I seek out the stupidest, most concrete, least automated solution as a point of reference before I build anything smart.
• navinsylvester 8y ago
  Not everyone can find the right balance and that is the issue. This is the reason why we need to strike the right balance when forming a team. Having too many "rockstars" can actually sound good on paper alone. In my experience the people who actually focus on shipping are the real rockstars.
• gordaco 8y ago
  My conclusion to the BS inherent to any job is this: get your "brain food" outside your job. Start today if you haven't been doing this. It's fine that sometimes we get to learn interesting things while on the clock, but we have way, way, way less control over what we learn. I have followed this strategy for some years: 1) Look for a low-stress job with manageable time. In tech this doesn't mean "low-pay" as well. I'm being paid quite well and I will never do more than 40 hours a week. 2) Treat that job as your day job to pay the bills, and learn whatever you want during your (relatively abundant) free time. Learn a new programming language, learn about any other topic of computer science or software engineering, get any skill not related to your job, get a new degree, whatever. It is up to you whether you want to learn something that will make you more money in the future or not. Beware: open source projects are nice but, unless it's a project of yours and yours only, you have less control over what you do, and in that sense it's a bit closer to a job. It's also true that mundane tasks will make you much better at your job, but TBH, while that's helpful (and helps building a career more than most young people would think), it's not something that important to me. I'd rather be good at things that are important to me. A job is there to pay the bills and nothing more; anything else is a bonus which I won't take for granted, and this includes the social aspect of the job.
  • haihaibye 8y ago
    I used to think like that but worked towards getting a better job. My work has millions of dollars of DNA sequencing equipment, lab experts and a states / nations worth of patients data. No side projects for 7 years and I am ok with that. I can also take days/weeks off to read or experiment but have been grinding lately.... with a family and meetings etc running a team of 3 I basically have to take any chance I have to crank out code.
• bePoliteAlways 8y ago
  I felt the harder things to convince someone(including self) is to spend lot of time to learn the "other skills" (mentioned in the article). People do try to improve their "other skills" to some extent but that may not be enough. Feedback loop for seeing the impact of the "other skill" is long and it is harder to measure. So one doesn't know if one has learnt enough. Regarding boring. I have found that sometime if we zoom out too much things are boring. Life is boring if we think everyday we just wakeup, work, sleep. When we zoom in and look at the variety and try to understand life becomes more interesting. Zooming in too much also can cause boredom. Zoom into the coding too much and think I am just typing another ifThenElse or while loop or some keystrokes it can be boring too. Usually I have found, for management work zooming out makes it interesting for me. Technical work usually is interesting at the level I see it. Like some people mentioned listening to music, doing something else when the work look boredom can also keep one going with passion. The other challenge is once the work becomes routine, one starts feeling anyone can do it. One starts feeling am I justifying the money I get for it?