Embrace the Grind

The effort to impact ratio is wildly different among bugs in a large backlog. Sometimes a 10-minute single line change will produce a massive benefit for all users. Other times a developer can slog on a bug for weeks only to realize that no one cares about the fix anymore. You want to start tackling the ones in the first category before spending time on the second.

I can really relate to this. Countless times I've run into tasks that are even only minor grinds (some tedious work that maybe takes 30 minutes to an hour to do), and countless engineers I've worked with will just complain, avoid, or just plain be unwilling to do them. They'll indulge in discussing why things are wrong this way, what architecture should be like etc. And countless times, I'll just get through the minor grind and do the thing. Many of these engineers are smarter and more knowledgeable than I am, but when the time comes for performance reviews, promotions, these grinds really count. It's exactly as the author describe it, these grinds look like magic to the audience (management); because they are impactful to the business. Having said that, of course it's no excuse to create or perpetuate poor engineering or architecture by grinding. It's a balance.

> For example, I once joined a team maintaining a system that was drowning in bugs. There were something like two thousand open bug reports. Nothing was tagged, categorized, or prioritized. The team couldn’t agree on which issues to tackle > I spent almost three weeks in that room, and emerged with every bug report reviewed, tagged, categorized, and prioritized.

Honestly, this is one of those traps a team can fall into, where nobody feels empowered to ignore the rest of the business for 3 weeks to put the bell on the cat. The only person without deliverables and due dates is the new hire. And it takes a special kind of new hire to have the expertise to parachute in, recognize that work needs to be done, and then do it with little supervision.

But he's right in general, that you can get some surprising things done by just putting in the time and focus. Which is why it's so utterly toxic that corporate America runs on an interrupt driven system, with meetings sprinkled carelessly across engineer calendars.

I'm not gonna disagree but I want to add a couple things.

1. Kids with ADHD probably can't develop executive function as fast or as far as other kids. I'm pretty sure I have it, it explains the repeated performance reports of "You're good when you apply yourself and useless when you don't." Unfortunately I struggle to _choose_ to apply myself.

Willpower doesn't seem to come naturally to me, even after 10 years as a professional programmer. Adderall didn't help - I had to take it in the morning, after breakfast. So I was still late for work, because eating breakfast is not something I'm good at, and I couldn't start my day until I had finished breakfast. Then after work the stimulants wore off and I felt like shit and reverted to my normal do-what-i-want executive function. But it made me feel normal without caffeine.

So I quit the Adderall and just cutting caffeinated soda with non-caff every morning, as though I was lowering my dose on a prescription. So far it's working. I still never clean my room, which is status quo for the last 20 years, and work is still pretty easy. The phrase "idiot savant" comes to mind. All I want is for people to stop thinking that I'm doing this on purpose. I don't enjoy constantly feeling like a moron and being behind on simple household chores despite making decent money at a job that is considered (by other people) to be difficult.

And that might even be the case for the kids with detailed exercise programs. I don't exercise at all because it's not my interest. I program, because it is my interest. Kinda like how autistic people can't choose their special interests. I pity the kids whose interest is exercise but are trying to force themselves through a CS program into a career track they can't possibly do.

Dr. Russell Barkely goes into some detail in a 3-hour talk about ADHD here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSfCdBBqNXY If anyone thinks I don't have ADHD because I sat through a 3-hour talk about psychology, maybe they need to watch it, too.

"There's a growing perception that traits like work ethic, focus, and motivation are fixed attributes that one is born with (or without) rather than abilities that are developed over time."

What if they are, though? What if it's like height, where genetics sets a range and environment picks a point in that range? If I had starved as a child, I would be shorter than I am now. But if I had eaten more, I would not be taller. I'm about the same height as my parents are.

There's a hypothesis that the current age of mass distraction (TV, phones, Internet, etc.) doesn't _cause_ ADHD, but it does _aggravate_ it. I don't know if the studies bear it out, but I really want this to be true. What if it's something that's latent in the human genome, and the fact that we can profit off of exploiting it nowadays just brought it to the surface? In early centuries, if I had nothing to do but my work, maybe I would find it easy to just "accept boredom" and do my work anyway.

2. I'm not sure how many employers would have hired me in college. I get the sense that unskilled labor just isn't worth much anymore, and pushing kids to get more education is kicking the can down the road since, as you pointed out, nobody wants to hire an adult with zero work experience whether they're 18, 22, or even 30.

When you put it that way, that's obscenely expensive. Maybe we should be steering kids toward entertainment that we can create as well as consume because it's not absurdly expensive.