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"I tended to overcommunicate in those" I found a clipboard, pen, and paper to be the simplest, easiest to use, and highest productivity system for this. Split

by VLM 12y ago

"I tended to overcommunicate in those" I found a clipboard, pen, and paper to be the simplest, easiest to use, and highest productivity system for this. Split the paper up by day and make sure to fill the fraction of a page each day, that's about right. Work on it through the day and its no big deal. There is some politics involved, you don't want to explain later, perhaps at review time, why "contemplated use of XYZ technology" was not implemented. Never write down anything except what you actually completed. Your examples are good. If you don't want to use AngularJS never refer to it by name unless you can't avoid it.

dennisgorelik 12y ago
"Never write down anything except what you actually completed." I disagree. Documenting and sharing failures is important too. It's useful to look back and analyze sources of mistakes, misjudgments and inefficiencies. It's also important to know for the manager to know that implementing {successfulTask} was actually fast, so it would be low cost to implement it next time.
- VLM 12y ago
  May be a language impedance mismatch rather than actual disagreement. Everyone on both sides of review time knows that "considered the use of AngularJS" only minimally requires 10 seconds or so. So writing that down doesn't mean much. However, a completion like "implemented a helloworld class AngularJS demonstration, and determined for X,Y,Z reasons it would be inappropriate for project Q" would be totally valid. There are also corporate culture issues, nobody here gets a bonus for stuff that doesn't work, so it might be useful to separately document that data, but... Another corporate culture issue relates to coddling, some employers are like the mother duck with the ducklings following her and others are like the building trades. Some places promote useful career advice and training so discussing failures might lead to training, experiments, etc. On the other hand some places just don't care, much as I really don't care if my plumber doesn't like a certain brand of pipe wrench.
  - dennisgorelik 12y ago
    When stated that way -- I agree: 1) State your "unsuccessful" tasks as completed accomplishments ("learned XYZ"). 2) Do not include "learned that we should not use XYZ" into your "give me my bonus" pitch.

by VLM 12y ago

dennisgorelik 12y ago

"Never write down anything except what you actually completed." I disagree. Documenting and sharing failures is important too. It's useful to look back and analyze sources of mistakes, misjudgments and inefficiencies. It's also important to know for the manager to know that implementing {successfulTask} was actually fast, so it would be low cost to implement it next time.

VLM 12y ago
May be a language impedance mismatch rather than actual disagreement. Everyone on both sides of review time knows that "considered the use of AngularJS" only minimally requires 10 seconds or so. So writing that down doesn't mean much. However, a completion like "implemented a helloworld class AngularJS demonstration, and determined for X,Y,Z reasons it would be inappropriate for project Q" would be totally valid. There are also corporate culture issues, nobody here gets a bonus for stuff that doesn't work, so it might be useful to separately document that data, but... Another corporate culture issue relates to coddling, some employers are like the mother duck with the ducklings following her and others are like the building trades. Some places promote useful career advice and training so discussing failures might lead to training, experiments, etc. On the other hand some places just don't care, much as I really don't care if my plumber doesn't like a certain brand of pipe wrench.
- dennisgorelik 12y ago
  When stated that way -- I agree: 1) State your "unsuccessful" tasks as completed accomplishments ("learned XYZ"). 2) Do not include "learned that we should not use XYZ" into your "give me my bonus" pitch.