3 ms·

if no one else at a company knows how to do a task, and you are doing it, you're not a 10x dev, but an 'infinite-x' dev, no?

Jtsummers 7y ago
And you should also start looking for a new job. It means you're 100% utilized, you have no free-time, no real opportunity for growth, and no chance to improve the situation. You have one job (or one set of jobs). You take a single day off, a week, you come back to a fire. You spend a day or a week fixing that fire and you're back in the same grind. It may be fun, but you can't be promoted without killing that business line. You can't work on new projects/products without killing something. If you have decent management, they'll set up firewalls between you and the people requesting work. Trainees or people of some experience but perhaps not as quick under pressure. Reduce the burden, start automating what can be automated. But if that's absent, if the pressure remains. Enjoy the glory, but look for an exit. You're one vacation away from returning to a layoff.
- Balgair 7y ago
  > You take a single day off, a week, you come back to a fire Enforced vacation time is a great way to figure these things out prima facie. As employees, we all know that 'unlimited vacation time' is just a code for 'no vacation time' (with rare exceptions). But companies get into that trap too. When they red-line their employees that hard, they expose themselves to unncessary risks. People get sick, they have tooth aches that need mending, they get jury duty notices during a crunch, their folks go into the hospital, etc. Let alone actual in-house issues of burnout, server issues, internet connectivity. I worked with a shop that was dog-friendly once. They had to get fumigated every year or so, as the pooches would invariably bring in ticks and bugs. That was four days they just could not work at the office each year, with a pretty nasty decline in work enviroment quality in the lead up to each fumigation. Enforcing vacations causes the firms to deal with these issues ahead of time. Vacations have been well studied and, especially with knowledge workers, improve employee productivity (generally). But they also act as vaccinations towards unseen workplace issues and black-swan events.
  - Jtsummers 7y ago
    Tangent: This is related to the idea of JIT and low-inventory in Lean. By reducing inventory, it allows problems in production to be revealed so they can be addressed. Consider a simple 2 stage process. The first stage is down 50% of the time on average: A -> B When A is running, perhaps it can produce inventory faster than B can process it. So we run A at full-capacity and build up massive inventories in front of B. A happens to be down for a week straight, we exhaust that buffer and can't produce any more products. Because the inventory is usually allowed to go so high, the problems with A aren't addressed (they aren't pain points for the business). By the time A is down for a week and it becomes a pain point, it may be too late to save this business. In Lean, you pull inventory into B only when needed (realistically you'd have some lead time, of course). You maintain a modest buffer to accommodate that lead time. If A can't produce in time, instead of growing that buffer permanently, you address the issues with A. Identify the failing components in A and find a more reliable replacement. Maybe there's not enough people trained to operate A so you cross-train people. Maybe you buy a second system (cheaper, lower capacity?) that can do what A does to shift the burden, or you find another machine that can be conscripted and used to make the same things that's only rarely needed for its primary purpose. People who operate at 100% capacity and are your "heros" are similar to A. Everything seems great as long as they're there, but once they're gone (even for a day) they're noticed. By capping overtime (or eliminating it), by encouraging vacation time, you can find out who is critical to your business processes, and start shifting the burden (because it's an obvious pain point). Anecdote: We had a guy who wasn't officially IT, but had been doing IT for our build and other dev systems, it wasn't his main job. He was gone for a vacation or business trip for a week, on Monday the systems went down. Nothing was accomplished until he returned and fixed the problems because no one else knew how to do that work. He was a liability for the team and business. This happened on more than one occasion. Management loved him because they didn't recognize the causal relationship between his leaving and things being in a failing state (didn't happen everytime, he wasn't causing the failures, but his absence meant the failures were noticed and not addressed quickly). Control your "WIP" (work-in-progress or work-in-process) better, and you'll see work piling up in specific places. Just track it on a board or create a helpdesk ticket system that people have to interface with. It'll make all these pain points obvious so they can be addressed.

Jtsummers 7y ago

And you should also start looking for a new job. It means you're 100% utilized, you have no free-time, no real opportunity for growth, and no chance to improve the situation. You have one job (or one set of jobs). You take a single day off, a week, you come back to a fire. You spend a day or a week fixing that fire and you're back in the same grind. It may be fun, but you can't be promoted without killing that business line. You can't work on new projects/products without killing something. If you have decent management, they'll set up firewalls between you and the people requesting work. Trainees or people of some experience but perhaps not as quick under pressure. Reduce the burden, start automating what can be automated. But if that's absent, if the pressure remains. Enjoy the glory, but look for an exit. You're one vacation away from returning to a layoff.

Balgair 7y ago
> You take a single day off, a week, you come back to a fire Enforced vacation time is a great way to figure these things out prima facie. As employees, we all know that 'unlimited vacation time' is just a code for 'no vacation time' (with rare exceptions). But companies get into that trap too. When they red-line their employees that hard, they expose themselves to unncessary risks. People get sick, they have tooth aches that need mending, they get jury duty notices during a crunch, their folks go into the hospital, etc. Let alone actual in-house issues of burnout, server issues, internet connectivity. I worked with a shop that was dog-friendly once. They had to get fumigated every year or so, as the pooches would invariably bring in ticks and bugs. That was four days they just could not work at the office each year, with a pretty nasty decline in work enviroment quality in the lead up to each fumigation. Enforcing vacations causes the firms to deal with these issues ahead of time. Vacations have been well studied and, especially with knowledge workers, improve employee productivity (generally). But they also act as vaccinations towards unseen workplace issues and black-swan events.
- Jtsummers 7y ago
  Tangent: This is related to the idea of JIT and low-inventory in Lean. By reducing inventory, it allows problems in production to be revealed so they can be addressed. Consider a simple 2 stage process. The first stage is down 50% of the time on average: A -> B When A is running, perhaps it can produce inventory faster than B can process it. So we run A at full-capacity and build up massive inventories in front of B. A happens to be down for a week straight, we exhaust that buffer and can't produce any more products. Because the inventory is usually allowed to go so high, the problems with A aren't addressed (they aren't pain points for the business). By the time A is down for a week and it becomes a pain point, it may be too late to save this business. In Lean, you pull inventory into B only when needed (realistically you'd have some lead time, of course). You maintain a modest buffer to accommodate that lead time. If A can't produce in time, instead of growing that buffer permanently, you address the issues with A. Identify the failing components in A and find a more reliable replacement. Maybe there's not enough people trained to operate A so you cross-train people. Maybe you buy a second system (cheaper, lower capacity?) that can do what A does to shift the burden, or you find another machine that can be conscripted and used to make the same things that's only rarely needed for its primary purpose. People who operate at 100% capacity and are your "heros" are similar to A. Everything seems great as long as they're there, but once they're gone (even for a day) they're noticed. By capping overtime (or eliminating it), by encouraging vacation time, you can find out who is critical to your business processes, and start shifting the burden (because it's an obvious pain point). Anecdote: We had a guy who wasn't officially IT, but had been doing IT for our build and other dev systems, it wasn't his main job. He was gone for a vacation or business trip for a week, on Monday the systems went down. Nothing was accomplished until he returned and fixed the problems because no one else knew how to do that work. He was a liability for the team and business. This happened on more than one occasion. Management loved him because they didn't recognize the causal relationship between his leaving and things being in a failing state (didn't happen everytime, he wasn't causing the failures, but his absence meant the failures were noticed and not addressed quickly). Control your "WIP" (work-in-progress or work-in-process) better, and you'll see work piling up in specific places. Just track it on a board or create a helpdesk ticket system that people have to interface with. It'll make all these pain points obvious so they can be addressed.