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I agree with the content of the article, but I don’t agree with the premise that these things aren’t also “work”. Engineers tend to obsess over, “focused work”
by TameAntelope 5y ago
I agree with the content of the article, but I don’t agree with the premise that these things aren’t also “work”.
Engineers tend to obsess over, “focused work” like it’s the only way to be productive, and anything that’s not “focused work” is wasted time. That is a surefire way to burn out.
Instead, finding ways to “riff” on your job by doing work with longer time horizons of payoff keeps your job fun.
It’s all “work”. Maybe the title ought to be, “Stop obsessing over focused work.”
- giantg2 5y agoWell, the bosses usually only care about work the helps produce value. They might like the fact that you know some new tech that they can use in their latest assignment, but they weren't giving you credit while you were learning it the year before just for fun.
- Aeolun 5y agoThere are a lot of things you can learn that do both?
- toomuchtodo 5y agoFind better bosses and employers. They are out there.
- giantg2 5y agoI have looked but haven't found any.
- jader201 5y agoAt the end of the day, even the best bosses care about making money, because that’s what _their_ bosses (i.e. investors) care about. So even if you find a boss/employer that is supportive of “the fun stuff” for a season, that will eventually come to an end.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoI had a boss who became a friend that borrowed me $30k on 24 hours notice, made me a partner at their startup, and was the best man at my wedding. n=1 Rare? Absolutely, but so is finding good people in general. Gather whatever signal you can, and keep rolling the dice, just as you would with friendships and romantic relationships.
- dominotw 5y agoexcept finding a boss is a tedious process vs swiping right.
- eden-alpha 5y agoHonestly that's what anyone employed to a company should care about. Your aim should be delivering value, which sometimes means making long term investments that improve the development environment. You also should spend a portion time learning as it enables you to create more value over time. And yes you should take time to get to know your colleagues, take breaks, play ping pong, etc. This helps you refresh yourself and avoid running out of steam. But the work is meant to create value, hence why you are rewarding with currency you can exchange for things you value. Manage a positive work life balance and and do the "fun" stuff outside of work. Life is not all work and work is not all of life.
- 5y ago
- dominotw 5y agoHow does one go about this? You interview your boss in the interview process and get a feel for what type of preson he is and then go with that gut feeling yes/no when your current boss leaves and you get a new boss that you don't like. Quit and go back to step 1. Does anyone operate like this? doesn't seem very practical or foolproof.
- Msw242 5y agoSmaller companies are more culturally homogeneous. With smaller companies, managers are usually a reflection of the company's cultural values. If you accept the above as true, then you can start to reach out to team members at the company and ask them what the work environment is like. If the work environment lines up with your values, then you'll probably be fine, even when the hiring manager moves on to greener pastures.
- dominotw 5y ago> ask them what the work environment is like. I've been asked this when i interviewed ppl but i never gave them the truth and I've never gotten any honest truth when i was on the other side also.
- giantg2 5y agoI find there's generally a hidden truth in how they answer it, but not in the answer itself. Stuff like hesitation, over the top praise, indirect answers, etc. If it sounds like they're telling me what I want to hear (or sounds like a sales pitch), then the BS meter starts clicking.
- Msw242 5y agoReach out to people who aren't interviewing you People in the interview are under scrutiny and don't want to be responsible for driving away candidates
- wildmanx 5y ago
- commandlinefan 5y agoI've had great bosses, all the way up the chain... but they were all held captive to the "efficiency" measures of the time-tracking system. Everywhere I've ever worked has implemented a methodology that, regardless of what they called it (XP, Scrum, Kanban, whatever) boiled down to: write down everything you're going to do, write down how long it's going to take, and I'm going to measure how accurately you predicted how long it was going to take. And then they start clamping down on the "what you're going to do" part and make sure that everything you're "going to do" aligns with the business goals (that is, has a direct, immediate path to more money). Obviously reading an entire book would never fly under this regime. It's doubly frustrating because it's always there, and drives so much inefficiency _in the name of_ efficiency.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago> but they were all held captive to the "efficiency" measures of the time-tracking system Were you working at an agency or consultancy that billed hours to clients? I've never seen a good engineering organization use time tracking software on their engineers. I'd go so far as to take it as a major negative sign against the company if your time is being tracked like that. Exceptions of course to any business that is billing hours, which obviously must be tracked. However, even those organizations are smart enough to know that writing code isn't the only productive activity.
- cardosof 5y agoNot parent poster but I've seen more and more startups setting up their jiras with whatever the folks who invented "safe" (scaled agile framework) say, while obsessing over measuring and predicting delivery metrics, all in order to have hard data to backup roadmap claims.
- wins32767 5y agoYou're performing a local optimization rather than a global one. The reason predictability of delivery matters is that the rest of the company needs to do a bunch of work for the set of features you're delivering. Support needs training, marketing needs to send some emails, the sales team needs to update their demos, etc.
- Consultant32452 5y agoI have different advice. Focus less on what your bosses want and more on what you want. Doing what your boss wants is a cost you pay, do as little of that as possible so that you can do the things that you want. This is an exchange in a market. If Best Buy wants $500 for that new TV, would you go in and offer them $750 for it? If Wal-Mart will sell you the same TV for $400, consider going there isntead.
- giantg2 5y agoI agree. A fun side story is when I got a new manager a while back. In our first one-on-one, he told me that he has connections through the company and can use them to get me promoted to another team if I make him happy. I get that making the boss happy is part of a job, but that should be accomplished by doing good work. This direct proposition just felt too quid pro quo and had a stink to it, in my opinion.
- couchand 5y agoWas your new manager new to being a manager? I could see that kind of offer coming from an operator, but I could just as much see it coming from someone lacking confidence trying to project a miscalculated sense of authority.
- giantg2 5y agoThey were a manager for a long time before that.
- TameAntelope 5y ago"Learn about new tech" is only one of a great many other things. Cultivating your relationships professionally is also "work", as is talking to your customers, reviewing and discussing code, writing about and showing others what you've built, keeping your resume and interview skills sharp, staring up at the ceiling and thinking about work, etc.
- giantg2 5y agoYeah, and most of that similarly doesn't count when it's time for the chips to fall.
- haliskerbas 5y agoI wonder if the same is true for other professions as well? Athletes must have to design their entire lives around a few minutes of competition. Surgeons need to train for years, and all that is evaluated is the patient outcome in the operating room. Lawyers need to train, study, and prepare, and only the court outcome matters. Maybe this is an unfair parallel, but I cannot see why.
- TameAntelope 5y agoVery few lawyers, proportionally, ever enter a courtroom. The vast majority of "lawyer" work never sees a courtroom at all.
- giantg2 5y agoMaybe that is a fair comparison for IT as a profit center. If seems that wouldn't work so well for IT as a cost center.
- TameAntelope 5y agoMy point is it absolutely does "count"; what your boss values is not what's best for your career. That's extremely short-term thinking.
- 5y ago
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y agoI think for going from junior to senior, this is true, but for going from senior beyond, it’s the opposite.
- gedy 5y agoLord, not my last boss. Basically was dividing salary by # of Jira tickets to measure productivity even for architects and directors. I got out of their asap.
- wildmanx 5y agoJust open tickets for those things then. "Read Xyz book", "catch up on C++17", "brush up on advanced git concepts", "have coffee with Jim from product management", "play pingpong this week with Jack and Julia from my team". Tons of ticket opportunities, and soon enough you'll be underpaid in the pay-per-ticket metric.
- giantg2 5y agoI wish I could say this surprised me.
- Mvandenbergh 5y agoThat might be true for what your direct boss writes on your annual performance review but what do his peers and his bosses think? What do other potential collaborators, bosses, and investors in your local area or your industry think? I think engineers can become obsessed with MinMaxing the wrong, purely local optimum without thinking: "what work-adjacent things might lead to a CTO role in five years?" and this is often quite a different question than "what makes Mr Shankly happy in this quarter's performance review?". Yeah, if your immediate boss thinks you're useless and sacks you then your overall profile might not help much but being an invisible cog in the their team will only improve the esteem that they hold you in and not your larger professional reputation. Did "the bosses" reach their own positions by closing the most tickets every month? I kind of doubt it and it is worth distinguishing what makes you useful to them vs puts you on the path to join them. If that seems overly careerist, well fire up Jira and get another bug sorted after dinner.
- IAmNotAFix 5y ago> That is a surefire way to burn out. Any source on that? I agree with the assessment about engineers (althought it's a generalization), but I always thought it was because their "focused work" is what they actually like doing. In my experience work was most stressful when it strayed the most from focused work.
- TameAntelope 5y agoCan you elaborate a bit on what kind of "source" you'd like to see? I'm trying to imagine what could possibly satisfy this request and I'm coming up blank. Generally, slapping "Source?" in a reply to a comment is a lot less helpful and productive than you might initially think.
- zozbot234 5y agoIf you can maintain a state of focus and actively like your work, you are likely near peak productivity and quite far from possible burnout. Just don't push beyond your reasonable limits or you might end up giving yourself a heart attack.
- rconti 5y agoFor me, I think it was related to conflating my value as am employee to being able to efficiently and effectively complete tasks to a high standard in a short amount of time. It felt like if I wasn't producing enough tangible results fast enough, I wasn't doing a "good enough job". It didn't really matter if it was a day/week/month where I was absolutely crushing it, or a time period where I was having a hard time focusing; the end goal was the same. The internal satisfaction, if you can call it that, was accomplishing tasks. It wasn't (usually) to the point of overwork or burnout. But the problem was, I never considered my own growth. It never felt like a good use of time to take on more challenging projects because I wouldn't get the same sense of accomplishment. It would be hard, I wouldn't have much to show for myself for a few weeks, and so on. Obviously this is all subconscious, you don't realize you're choosing things you're good at, or an expert on. Expertise feels nice! And, to be fair, not everyone's employers give them the freedom to choose/learn/grow that many of us enjoy.
- tunnuz 5y agoThis is very relatable to me. Since you’re using the past tense, would you be happy to share what helped you get out of that mindset?
- rconti 5y agoStill working on it! I'd say the biggie was finding myself at a not-quite-FAANG-tier SV company where suddenly I'm surrounded by people who are all amazing. Where you have to prove your accomplishments to get promoted rather than just being handed promotions because you're "good at your job". Some mentorship. Some reading. Being encouraged to look farther down the road (which implies it's okay to not 'get things done' between standups). Honestly, lots of self-reflection and looking around. FWIW I'd say I have about 25 years in the industry, so, it didn't come to me quickly or early.
- Qub3d 5y agoI think the article author agrees with you. That's why they put 'work' in quotes. It is useful for their argument to split 'work' and 'not work' along these lines because they are trying to reach readers that honestly do believe that any time not actively writing code for a jira ticket isn't work.