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> After a "hard" day, I am completely exhausted and my mind is blank. After a "deep" day, I am satisfied and euphoric. Maybe this is the reason for the ubiquit

> After a "hard" day, I am completely exhausted and my mind is blank. After a "deep" day, I am satisfied and euphoric. Maybe this is the reason for the ubiquity of over-engineering and other patterns of over-complication - quite a few people enjoy deep work, but the vast majority of jobs in software development, or writing, or even a fair few in science, turn out to be only hard work when done with optimal efficiency.

nisa 6y ago
I disagree. A few days a week of deep work every week can spare you from months of hard work with optimal efficiency :)
- dasil003 6y ago
  Yes! But only if you think of deep work as holistic problem solving rather than fetishizing some technical aspect (which is hard to avoid for certain flavor of programmerly personality).
- wpietri 6y ago
  I think this is true, but only if you have sufficient control over the context. I've been very careful about how I choose my jobs. But a lot of developers end up in situations where the truly deep work can only be done in coordination with a bunch of others. Assuming typically bad management, this means that the only thing left is hard work. The first time I saw this pattern was with a place that used their master database as the central integration point for a lot of different code bases. They could have simplified things greatly, but that would have required multiple teams to simultaneously change how they used particular tables in their code. The database was controlled by a central group of database administrators who were very busy and had different incentives than the teams they supported. Getting all these people on board for a change was possible only if it rose to an executive level. Which if it could be achieved at all, required lots of politicking. So in practice, every team had to make up for the garbage architecture through hard work. Which however much they meant well, tended to reinforce the problems.
  - nisa 6y ago
    I wrote this because I'm in a place were we all do almost nothing but "hard work" - most this hard work is the result of bad decisions and every effort to improve has gone stale because everyone is so busy chasing bugs and stupid assumptions in the architecture but it's been the idea of management and while first not realizing what I'm up to I've quickly came to learn that trying to criticize the architecture is met with silence as it's the child of management and co-workers that are there much longer than me. We use ant with a lib-folder - worked on maven in my spare time - nobody cares. Worked on automated tests - nobody is willing to discuss this or do the required changes like fixing Angular timeouts and assigning some unqiue-id's to elements that tests don't break. We misuse the API from the parent project we are building a plugin for - some calls take 3s or more instead of feasible 100ms if correctly implemented. We have a useless PHP addon that constantly breaks for "performance" but it's slower than doing it in Java correctly. Brought all of this up. It's not even a topic.
    - wpietri 6y ago
      That sucks and I'm sorry to hear it. People who study the Challenger accident talk about "normalization of deviance". When things are bad once, people react. But if they're bad regularly, people just get used to it. Bad is the new normal. And that's very hard to change. I think the only times I've seen significant progress had 2 common elements. One is a fucking disaster. Something has to blow up so badly that the grand poobahs feel the pain, and make sure everybody beneath them does too. The other is a bubble of sanity. Maybe it's one team that has a few people like you, enough to say, "Well in this team, for this product, we're going to do it fucking right." And then that team has to show that doing it right produces great results, results that prevent the fucking disaster from ever happening again. So for your sake, I hope you either change your organization or change your organization. You deserve better.
      - nisa 6y ago
        Thanks for your kind words - I'm working on doing the latter - at least one colleague shares my thoughts - if that won't work out I'll move on.
waynesonfire 6y ago
yep.. and we see posts of people moving monoliths to microservices and vice-versa as a result. You either find meaning in that or there a salary premium and lots of vacation time for the mindless work. Otherwise, you're probably working "hard"
_benj 6y ago
I disagree with this statement, and I'd argue that most people haven't actually experience "deep work" (which btw, the book with that title change the way I see and experience work deeply) Deep work has nothing to do with over-engineering and everything to do with non-distracted focused time doing something that actually releases dopamine and feels good. Deep != complex

nisa 6y ago

I disagree. A few days a week of deep work every week can spare you from months of hard work with optimal efficiency :)

dasil003 6y ago
Yes! But only if you think of deep work as holistic problem solving rather than fetishizing some technical aspect (which is hard to avoid for certain flavor of programmerly personality).
wpietri 6y ago
I think this is true, but only if you have sufficient control over the context. I've been very careful about how I choose my jobs. But a lot of developers end up in situations where the truly deep work can only be done in coordination with a bunch of others. Assuming typically bad management, this means that the only thing left is hard work. The first time I saw this pattern was with a place that used their master database as the central integration point for a lot of different code bases. They could have simplified things greatly, but that would have required multiple teams to simultaneously change how they used particular tables in their code. The database was controlled by a central group of database administrators who were very busy and had different incentives than the teams they supported. Getting all these people on board for a change was possible only if it rose to an executive level. Which if it could be achieved at all, required lots of politicking. So in practice, every team had to make up for the garbage architecture through hard work. Which however much they meant well, tended to reinforce the problems.
- nisa 6y ago
  I wrote this because I'm in a place were we all do almost nothing but "hard work" - most this hard work is the result of bad decisions and every effort to improve has gone stale because everyone is so busy chasing bugs and stupid assumptions in the architecture but it's been the idea of management and while first not realizing what I'm up to I've quickly came to learn that trying to criticize the architecture is met with silence as it's the child of management and co-workers that are there much longer than me. We use ant with a lib-folder - worked on maven in my spare time - nobody cares. Worked on automated tests - nobody is willing to discuss this or do the required changes like fixing Angular timeouts and assigning some unqiue-id's to elements that tests don't break. We misuse the API from the parent project we are building a plugin for - some calls take 3s or more instead of feasible 100ms if correctly implemented. We have a useless PHP addon that constantly breaks for "performance" but it's slower than doing it in Java correctly. Brought all of this up. It's not even a topic.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    That sucks and I'm sorry to hear it. People who study the Challenger accident talk about "normalization of deviance". When things are bad once, people react. But if they're bad regularly, people just get used to it. Bad is the new normal. And that's very hard to change. I think the only times I've seen significant progress had 2 common elements. One is a fucking disaster. Something has to blow up so badly that the grand poobahs feel the pain, and make sure everybody beneath them does too. The other is a bubble of sanity. Maybe it's one team that has a few people like you, enough to say, "Well in this team, for this product, we're going to do it fucking right." And then that team has to show that doing it right produces great results, results that prevent the fucking disaster from ever happening again. So for your sake, I hope you either change your organization or change your organization. You deserve better.
    - nisa 6y ago
      Thanks for your kind words - I'm working on doing the latter - at least one colleague shares my thoughts - if that won't work out I'll move on.

waynesonfire 6y ago

yep.. and we see posts of people moving monoliths to microservices and vice-versa as a result. You either find meaning in that or there a salary premium and lots of vacation time for the mindless work. Otherwise, you're probably working "hard"

_benj 6y ago

I disagree with this statement, and I'd argue that most people haven't actually experience "deep work" (which btw, the book with that title change the way I see and experience work deeply) Deep work has nothing to do with over-engineering and everything to do with non-distracted focused time doing something that actually releases dopamine and feels good. Deep != complex