4 ms·
> When we see a world-class musician flawlessly play challenging music, it can be tempting to imagine that they were always able to do so. A moment's thought ma
by mkl95 5y ago
> When we see a world-class musician flawlessly play challenging music, it can be tempting to imagine that they were always able to do so. A moment's thought makes it obvious that they must have had to spend huge amounts of time practising basic techniques in order to reach that level. What's less obvious is that they have to continue spending considerable amounts of time simply to maintain that technique, let alone expand it.
The average SaaS engineering job is akin to recording a different concert for several hours every day, with no time to tune your instruments and little investment to fix or replace them.
Even if the orchestra is out of tune, the conductor won't necessarily notice or care because his job is not to actually conduct the orchestra. In fact, he doesn't understand music, he just knows how to request and deliver recordings. At times he pretends to understand music, which mostly involves flailing his arms spastically while musicians do their best at not minding him.
After 8 hours where only a couple were actually spent playing and the rest were spent arguing and debating how to play music with the conductor and the audience, musicians are left exhausted, with no energy to improve their skills.
- froh 5y agoYou may want to watch a number of Benjamin Zander's YouTube videos and revise your statement. I share your frustration on feature pressure with no official room for practice and refactoring however the metaphor about the role of a conductor is completely off. A conductor knows and understands music, deeply, a d they connect the dots and coordinate the orchestra and zoom into lots of little details while improving the big picture.
- mkl95 5y agoThe conductor in my comment is a project / engineering manager and is meant to show how bad OP's analogy is.
- froh 5y agoThe article is talking about deliberate practice at an individual level. No conductor, no orchestra, no collaboration. I agree there are incompetent men-in-the-middle managers who make things worse. It didn't occur to me to think about that in the context if the article, plus, I've had the joy if working with excellent project managers, too. So the bad conductor ex machina didn't click with me.
- valbaca 5y agoYou're describing a good conductor/manager. Everyone knows a conductor's role is vital. What mkl95 was talking about is the manager/conductor we actually get.