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"stuck in problem solving"? Hell, that's like half the reason I chose a career in computer related stuff. That's like a huge part of the "fun" of it.

synu 4y ago
There was a big switch at one point to people doing the career for money, which is totally understandable. They may have never played with or fixed computers for the fun of it.
dilyevsky 4y ago
I think the key word here is “stuck” as in “unable to make headway”
locallost 4y ago
That's true, but there are various jobs. Problem solving can be fun, but it can also be trying to fit something that's easy on paper into a badly designed or incomplete system, for the nth time.
delusional 4y ago
To me "stuck in problem solving" doesn't mean what it sounds like. Stuck in problem solving means putting out fires. You're constantly in a losing fight against the decay of the current system and therefore you never get to actually solve any of its problems. You're stuck in the solving phase, and never get to the execution phase where you get to interrogate product market fit and the needs of your users. You're forever "solving" the same problem but the solution is never implemented and in 6 months you'll be asked to solve it again.
- synu 4y ago
  They quoted some people who described what they meant: > “I feel negative when I get really stuck on something and cannot get around it”. Another respondent elaborated: “I also thought of situations where I’m debugging some issue with the code and I can’t figure out why it isn’t working – when it seems like everything should work, but it just doesn’t. This is definitely one of the biggest gumption traps I encounter”.
  - delusional 4y ago
    I was looking for that, but in the wrong section. thanks for pointing it out.
rroot 4y ago
It depends on what is "problem solving". Philosophically everything is problem solving. Here's a contrived example. Let's say you became a house builder because you liked building houses from scratch. In a few years you find yourself working for a company and you are the window frame expert. You calculate, design, draw windows for the bespoke houses. You also make sure they fulfill building regulations. All day long. Note that you don't get to make the windows, other guys in the company do that. Then you realize that this is not what you had in mind when you wanted to become a house builder. But the company pays you very well and you have some nice co-workers. You need to leave but you don't. We can argue about the specifics, but stuck in solving that type of problems (especially if it's for incompetent co-workers) can drive you mad in the long run.
- comfypotato 4y ago
  The specific type of “stuck in problem solving” is outlined in the paper. I think it’s just the core value generation of the engineer. It’s both the hardest part and the most fulfilling to execute.
fxtentacle 4y ago
1. "stuck solving a problem I should be working on" That's awesome. I call it flow and truly enjoy it. 2. "stuck solving problems pushed onto me" Oh wow, how I hate that. Like when a user f*cks up their account on a Friday evening because they mixed up the "Delete" and "Rename" buttons (how do you do that? they are even color-coded..) and of course they have an urgent deadline so now instead of going home early to enjoy the sunshine I have to clean up this mess. And of course it's always the big important clients who employ cheap unskilled employees, so of course their mess gets triaged as critically important. I believe the study intended to poll for #2, but clearly they didn't formulate it well so that #1 fits, too.
arinlen 4y ago
> "stuck in problem solving"? Hell, that's like half the reason I chose a career in computer related stuff. I highly doubt you are referring to the same thing. One thing is being challenged to present a solution. Another entirely different thing is being stuck with an impossibility when you are reaching a deadline and all your managers and peers look at you as if you're hopeless when in reality you're just working a workfront that is not practically solvable. I've been in a project where I was assigned a task that was severely underscoped and was riddled with emergent blockers. The quick description of the task sounded like a trivial thing that could be done in a couple of days, but in the end it turned into a months-long, multi-team effort. I was a few weeks into the project when another engineer was tasked to help me out, in the spirit of "let's pull this idiot out of the mud because this is getting embarrassing". It took a week or so for that engineer's mood to change from "here I am to save the day" to "please someone, anyone help me". Does this sort of scenario fit your "problem solving" ideal, where everyone just loves the whole experience? I highly doubt it. One of the key factors in happiness and fulfilment is the sense of mastery and performance. Sometimes we need to shift to a lower gear to move over bumps in the road. Sometimes we find ourselves in the depth of a gorge with no possible way out. The latter leaves everyone miserable.
- throwaway98797 4y ago
  sounds either like a communication failure on your part or the inability of the organization to listen why judge yourself for others incompetency?
  - arinlen 4y ago
    The example I gave had absolutely nothing to do with incompetency. It just so happened that the problem manifested as a sequence of time-consuming blockers which could only emerge once the previous one was unblocked. Regardless of the example,the point is that it's naive and very ignorant to portray all blockers as feel-good "I overcame a challenge" opportunities. Sometimes you feel good because you managed to jump a hurdle, sometimes you feel bad because you're stuck in the middle of a ravine with your arm crushed by a huge rock and the only tool you have is a pocket knife. Sure, you exercised your problem-solving skills on both scenarios, but they are hardly on the same level in terms of personal fulfilment and happiness.
uwuemu 4y ago
Eh... yea, but as with any other creative profession (3d artist...), not all people get to do "fun" stuff often enough for the job to not become frustrating / boring. Yes, programming itself really is fun, but only if you care about the thing you're working on (which most of us will for our own personal/side/business projects, but not that many of us work on exciting stuff in our 9-to-5). I mean... You can only do so many years of repetitive coding tasks in a typical corporate environment. That's why so many senior devs (upper 30's and 40's) either move to a management position or quit the industry ("quit" as in they start working for themselves in their own business or they just do something different and maybe do contract work from time to time). Personally, I can't imagine myself doing the corporate worker drone programming for much longer (10+ years has been more than enough), I want to stop some time in not too distant future and I'm actively working towards that goal.
regularfry 4y ago
Where you put the comma is critical: - "Being stuck in, problem solving": great, fantastic, hooray, woo, yay, hoopla - "Being stuck, in problem solving": not so much
- shric 4y ago
  Capitalization too: - I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse
amelius 4y ago
Software engineering in practice is mostly about glueing components together. It's problem solving for a very narrow definition of the term. Yes, in the end the customer will be happy. But you spent 99% of your time glueing stuff and 1% of your time thinking about what to glue.
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  Gluing things isn't really all that easy. I was unaware of how many different types of glues there are, their different strengths and weaknesses, which materials can and cannot effectively be glued, which pairings you might want for aesthetic vs. functional reasons, which kind of glues can't be used in the presence of other factors, different strengths, the amounts that have to be used, implications on health and safety (e.g. is a glue strong enough to do x for y time). I've seen software engineering described as 'complexity management' and I think that gets closer to it than purely the use of other libraries which is commonly called just 'glue'.
  - amelius 4y ago
    You still spend 1% of your time thinking about what glue to pick (which I didn't say was easy), and 99% of your time applying the glue. Complexity management is a nice name. But again, it's only 1% of what you think about in a typical job. The rest is applying duct tape and glue.

synu 4y ago

There was a big switch at one point to people doing the career for money, which is totally understandable. They may have never played with or fixed computers for the fun of it.

dilyevsky 4y ago

I think the key word here is “stuck” as in “unable to make headway”

locallost 4y ago

That's true, but there are various jobs. Problem solving can be fun, but it can also be trying to fit something that's easy on paper into a badly designed or incomplete system, for the nth time.

delusional 4y ago

To me "stuck in problem solving" doesn't mean what it sounds like. Stuck in problem solving means putting out fires. You're constantly in a losing fight against the decay of the current system and therefore you never get to actually solve any of its problems. You're stuck in the solving phase, and never get to the execution phase where you get to interrogate product market fit and the needs of your users. You're forever "solving" the same problem but the solution is never implemented and in 6 months you'll be asked to solve it again.

synu 4y ago
They quoted some people who described what they meant: > “I feel negative when I get really stuck on something and cannot get around it”. Another respondent elaborated: “I also thought of situations where I’m debugging some issue with the code and I can’t figure out why it isn’t working – when it seems like everything should work, but it just doesn’t. This is definitely one of the biggest gumption traps I encounter”.
- delusional 4y ago
  I was looking for that, but in the wrong section. thanks for pointing it out.

rroot 4y ago

It depends on what is "problem solving". Philosophically everything is problem solving. Here's a contrived example. Let's say you became a house builder because you liked building houses from scratch. In a few years you find yourself working for a company and you are the window frame expert. You calculate, design, draw windows for the bespoke houses. You also make sure they fulfill building regulations. All day long. Note that you don't get to make the windows, other guys in the company do that. Then you realize that this is not what you had in mind when you wanted to become a house builder. But the company pays you very well and you have some nice co-workers. You need to leave but you don't. We can argue about the specifics, but stuck in solving that type of problems (especially if it's for incompetent co-workers) can drive you mad in the long run.

comfypotato 4y ago
The specific type of “stuck in problem solving” is outlined in the paper. I think it’s just the core value generation of the engineer. It’s both the hardest part and the most fulfilling to execute.

fxtentacle 4y ago

1. "stuck solving a problem I should be working on" That's awesome. I call it flow and truly enjoy it. 2. "stuck solving problems pushed onto me" Oh wow, how I hate that. Like when a user f*cks up their account on a Friday evening because they mixed up the "Delete" and "Rename" buttons (how do you do that? they are even color-coded..) and of course they have an urgent deadline so now instead of going home early to enjoy the sunshine I have to clean up this mess. And of course it's always the big important clients who employ cheap unskilled employees, so of course their mess gets triaged as critically important. I believe the study intended to poll for #2, but clearly they didn't formulate it well so that #1 fits, too.

arinlen 4y ago

> "stuck in problem solving"? Hell, that's like half the reason I chose a career in computer related stuff. I highly doubt you are referring to the same thing. One thing is being challenged to present a solution. Another entirely different thing is being stuck with an impossibility when you are reaching a deadline and all your managers and peers look at you as if you're hopeless when in reality you're just working a workfront that is not practically solvable. I've been in a project where I was assigned a task that was severely underscoped and was riddled with emergent blockers. The quick description of the task sounded like a trivial thing that could be done in a couple of days, but in the end it turned into a months-long, multi-team effort. I was a few weeks into the project when another engineer was tasked to help me out, in the spirit of "let's pull this idiot out of the mud because this is getting embarrassing". It took a week or so for that engineer's mood to change from "here I am to save the day" to "please someone, anyone help me". Does this sort of scenario fit your "problem solving" ideal, where everyone just loves the whole experience? I highly doubt it. One of the key factors in happiness and fulfilment is the sense of mastery and performance. Sometimes we need to shift to a lower gear to move over bumps in the road. Sometimes we find ourselves in the depth of a gorge with no possible way out. The latter leaves everyone miserable.

throwaway98797 4y ago
sounds either like a communication failure on your part or the inability of the organization to listen why judge yourself for others incompetency?
- arinlen 4y ago
  The example I gave had absolutely nothing to do with incompetency. It just so happened that the problem manifested as a sequence of time-consuming blockers which could only emerge once the previous one was unblocked. Regardless of the example,the point is that it's naive and very ignorant to portray all blockers as feel-good "I overcame a challenge" opportunities. Sometimes you feel good because you managed to jump a hurdle, sometimes you feel bad because you're stuck in the middle of a ravine with your arm crushed by a huge rock and the only tool you have is a pocket knife. Sure, you exercised your problem-solving skills on both scenarios, but they are hardly on the same level in terms of personal fulfilment and happiness.

uwuemu 4y ago

Eh... yea, but as with any other creative profession (3d artist...), not all people get to do "fun" stuff often enough for the job to not become frustrating / boring. Yes, programming itself really is fun, but only if you care about the thing you're working on (which most of us will for our own personal/side/business projects, but not that many of us work on exciting stuff in our 9-to-5). I mean... You can only do so many years of repetitive coding tasks in a typical corporate environment. That's why so many senior devs (upper 30's and 40's) either move to a management position or quit the industry ("quit" as in they start working for themselves in their own business or they just do something different and maybe do contract work from time to time). Personally, I can't imagine myself doing the corporate worker drone programming for much longer (10+ years has been more than enough), I want to stop some time in not too distant future and I'm actively working towards that goal.

regularfry 4y ago

Where you put the comma is critical: - "Being stuck in, problem solving": great, fantastic, hooray, woo, yay, hoopla - "Being stuck, in problem solving": not so much

shric 4y ago
Capitalization too: - I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse

amelius 4y ago

Software engineering in practice is mostly about glueing components together. It's problem solving for a very narrow definition of the term. Yes, in the end the customer will be happy. But you spent 99% of your time glueing stuff and 1% of your time thinking about what to glue.

bigDinosaur 4y ago
Gluing things isn't really all that easy. I was unaware of how many different types of glues there are, their different strengths and weaknesses, which materials can and cannot effectively be glued, which pairings you might want for aesthetic vs. functional reasons, which kind of glues can't be used in the presence of other factors, different strengths, the amounts that have to be used, implications on health and safety (e.g. is a glue strong enough to do x for y time). I've seen software engineering described as 'complexity management' and I think that gets closer to it than purely the use of other libraries which is commonly called just 'glue'.
- amelius 4y ago
  You still spend 1% of your time thinking about what glue to pick (which I didn't say was easy), and 99% of your time applying the glue. Complexity management is a nice name. But again, it's only 1% of what you think about in a typical job. The rest is applying duct tape and glue.