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One thing that might explain this is how different the pressure is between different professions. My best friend is a surgeon, I work in tech. We both experien

by IMTDb 5y ago

One thing that might explain this is how different the pressure is between different professions. My best friend is a surgeon, I work in tech. We both experience pressure but in ver different ways: 1. If he is having a bad day, the impact on his patient life is immense. If I have a bad day, I can always fix it the next day 2. When he is done with his surgeries and comes home, he is "done" for the day. Aside from operating on one more patient - which is unrealistic - there is nothing "more" he can do. On my side, projects can lasts weeks or month. There is always one more bug to tackle, one more behaviour to implement, one more user story to consider. As a consequence, it's quite easy for him to work part time: just operate on X days instead of Y days, the outcome of his work (Quality of Life for his patients) is not directly impacted by this choice (arguments could be made there). On my side, moving part time definitely has a direct impact on the outcome of my work (Delivery speed of the project). In other words, I think it is easier to work part time on jobs where the outcome consists of a lot of small independent tasks, while it's harder for jobs where the outcome is a single bigger unit.

solarmist 5y ago
Your example is an extreme example; one that’s hard to find patterns from. I think lawyers/accountants would be a better examples. Independent units of work, but different levels of effort give different results as well. Very similar to programming and familiarity with the specifics matter. There are a lot of opportunities for decoupling of tasks for software engineers that are ignored because of that line of thinking. Yes, on boarding members to a team is time consuming, but the deadlines that are pushed rarely matter in any real sense. I can’t remember the last time anything I worked on would have had a material difference if we shipped two weeks later. (Cutting off scope creep isn’t a valid reason for deadlines.) So I see it mostly as this is just how it works mentality.

by IMTDb 5y ago

solarmist 5y ago

Your example is an extreme example; one that’s hard to find patterns from. I think lawyers/accountants would be a better examples. Independent units of work, but different levels of effort give different results as well. Very similar to programming and familiarity with the specifics matter. There are a lot of opportunities for decoupling of tasks for software engineers that are ignored because of that line of thinking. Yes, on boarding members to a team is time consuming, but the deadlines that are pushed rarely matter in any real sense. I can’t remember the last time anything I worked on would have had a material difference if we shipped two weeks later. (Cutting off scope creep isn’t a valid reason for deadlines.) So I see it mostly as this is just how it works mentality.