461–470 of 1001 posts
It can be anything from aiming at climbing up the ladder to working on your own stuff. You get like 2 decades of life where you have the most energy and potential, might as well make the most out of it.
I've been a software engineer and managed software engineers for 20 years and worked in all kinds of businesses. This is both normal and mostly acceptable, in my professional opinion. Doing just as much work as your employer requires and no more is way less of a problem than employees who actively steal, commit fraud, bring drama and distract other team members, or are introducing defects because they've faked their…
> You only have one life, do something with it that is satisfying. Get out of the rat race. How? I find satisfaction in many things, but none of those things pay the bills or put food on the table.
This is asking the wrong question. A few weeks ago I ran into quote on hackernews... [1]
“Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.”
I hope I'm not stretching this too far as I'm not too good about explaining stuff like this. But, my take away is that you'll discover the things that pay the bills and the things that don't are one of the same. The difficulty of life is finding that peace.
After 5-6 hours of mentally intense work, there are diminishing returns.
Therefore, I think about 6 hours/day are what should be expected from a developer, including 30-60 minutes of meetings/admin work. Though some companies might need another hour or two-- hopefully such extra time is not mentally intense and is more socially oriented work (such as meetings).
"Youtube: How Hard Should You Work? - Jordan Peterson"
I mention this because I've found that this attitude of "I don't work enough" often comes from people who are working more than enough but only count the hours they're logging in an IDE.
Eventually I decided it wasn't worth it. I took an enormous pay cut (more than half) to switch to a very, very different field. At first I had some money problems. Changing one's mindset from not having to even think about a budget, to having to actually make choices, does not happen overnight. But after a while I was in good shape and had enough to meet my needs, save, and have a little left over for fun stuff.
Then I made the idiotic mistake of going back to school. Now I'm back in this awful industry again out of sheer necessity, and I'm miserable again. You can bet your buttons I'll be out the door and back to my other career the instant my debt is paid off.
It's not that I'm not good at programming. I am. I've built some stuff everyone here has heard of, and that a lot of people use. I've been on some fantastic teams. But those times were the rare exception. It's also not that I don't enjoy programming per se. I do enjoy it again, up to a point, when it's no longer my job. But as work--this industry just isn't for me. And it sounds like it isn't for you either. The sooner you accept that and move on, the happier you'll be.
(Aside: How is it not a global fucking crisis that 85% of people hate their jobs? You know, the thing they spend most of their time doing? 85% of people hate most of their waking lives, and we're just fine with that.)
In the past two years, I have been working in at a company building a high-tech 3D printer and developing slicing software only used by my colleagues. I am strongly motivated by helping people and I feel motivated by developing features that my colleagues benefit from. They are mechanical and process engineers. I feel I am part of a team that does not only exist of software engineers and I love it.
I think there's also something to be said for passive processing. Sometimes I'll know I need to write some code or some function and I'll just think about it in the back of my head while doing other things, sometimes for a whole day or two. Then I'll sit down and write it in like 20-30 minutes. Did I work 20-30 minutes, or have I been working for a day or two? I would say a day or two, and the 20-30 minutes was the t…
This. I will backburner a ticket for days, then when what I need to do comes together I will sit down and bang it out in an hour. It's to the point that I will deliberately review a ticket and code segment every day, even if I'm not actively working it, just to have the pieces come together in my mind and crank out the ticket. This method is not very scrum friendly, because in truth I'm actually brain-working all of…
Software development isn't a matter of sitting down and generating a fixed amount of code per hour. The rate of writing code is hugely variable. It's not unusual for most of my "productive" (as in typing actual code) time to be concentrated in a few particular days in a month. The time not spent typing (or being in meetings, doing admin, etc) isn't actually "unproductive" though. It's mostly spent solving problems, a…
Well, they said they don’t do anything some days and bullshit their way to the next standup. It is clear to me where they stand at.
If they deliver X, and the expectation is X; OP may call it "bullshitting" but his point is that he's delivered expectations and now he's coasting which is totally fine. He delivered on expectations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>However! I will say that this way of working and living comes with some significant hazard to your mental health. Doing something you don't like, care about, or believe in for decades long periods of time can really mess with your sense of self worth and happiness in life. You only have one life, do something with it that is satisfying. Get out of the rat race. This is where my comment about remote work comes into p…
As a SW developer you provide two benefits to the company: - the build phase: develop spaghetti code - the maintain/insurance phase: maintain the spaghetti code and keep it up to date with the software package dependencies required by the spaghetti code In the long term its easier/cheaper to have the person who originally wrote the spaghetti code be around to maintain and add one off small feature improvements to it…
When I was a kid, sitting in a rear row of classroom I felt invulnerable. Chatting with other kids, reading a book, playing with pencil and eraser, there was NO way teacher could POSSIBLY know what I am doing. Not when there were so many rows of other kids between us!
Decades later I visited a elementary classroom as an adult. I was shocked... it was tiny! I could practically reach the last row. I could see, in exquisite amount of detail, EVERYthing that happened in that room. Everything.
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As a system administrator for 15+ years, I had weeks where I worked 40-60-80 even 100hrs. But most weeks, I did not work quite as hard.
Then I became a team lead, then a manager... and I have far more awareness of my team members than I thought was possible. At the end of the day, I care about targets, plan, deliverables, ownership. If you and the team are meeting those, I am far from the micro-manager who cares exactly how you spend every minute of every day. It's up to me to ensure you are challenged, motivated, productive, and delivering; and if I need you to work harder and deliver more, it's up to me to set that expectations and hold you accountable. If I don't... it's 100% fair game for you to do what is required, meet expectations, and nothing more if you're happy with where you are and don't desire growth.