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Embrace the Grind

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Re: Embrace the Grind

#121

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

It's funny. I was talking with the team on a call, yesterday, and one of them was telling me we should hire someone to do "the boring stuff," so I would be free to do "the fun stuff."

I said no. I've been shipping (as opposed to "writing") software for over thirty years, and, if there's one thing I've learned, is that "shipping" software is about 60% - 80% "boring" stuff. I can avoid it, if I'm only interested in "having fun," but if I want to "ship" my work, I need to power through the grind. I also don't believe it's stuff I'm comfortable entrusting to others. When I'm at the car wash, I inevitably see someone driving a car -often not the fanciest ones- through the wash, because they don't trust the attendants. I guess I'm that guy.

I really enjoy knowing that my work is out there, in the wild, and not just in a pitch demo. I consider it a craft, and I love to finish projects. That means that I need to take the time to break out the 2000-grit sandpaper.

That makes it a lot less of a "grind," to me.

But that's just me. YMMV.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#122

Post by nitrogen »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #47
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #30

When I joined a mentoring program targeted at recent college grads, I expected to be teaching things like interview prep, resume writing, negotiation skills, communication skills, and how to deliver results in a workplace. For about half of the mentees, that's roughly true. However, for the other half much of my mentoring ends up being about time management, following through on commitments, and putting in the effort…

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 p…

All I want is for people to stop thinking that I'm doing this on purpose.

Somewhat jokingly: maybe you should start doing it on purpose, and call it "prioritizing what matters." If you can afford to hire someone to clean, do that.

But seriously, this sentence really resonated with me. When I was in my teens and early 20s, a lot of things I couldn't change were being labeled as intentional laziness or sometimes drug abuse (I was in reality coding all night because highschool sucked, and never even touched so much as alcohol until my late 20s).

Re: Embrace the Grind

#123

Post by emodendroket »

habitue wrote: post #65
jldugger wrote: post #45

> 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 in…

One of the most important things I think Kanban[1] emphasizes is that once you eliminate unnecessary bottlenecks, you're left with unavoidable bottlenecks, and this naturally means there will be slack. Explicitly expecting slack time is super useful to allow developers at all levels of seniority to do surprising and necessary things like this that would otherwise never be scheduled. [1] not the project board shape, b…

I think the reason people don't like Kanban is there are a bunch of tasks that suck to get stuff over the line and without the "deadline" there's little incentive to help with them instead of just pulling something else off the backlog.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#124

Post by emodendroket »

datavirtue wrote: post #106

One of the best pieces of advice I ever learned was to volunteer for the jobs no one else wants to do. Shitiest job imaginable rears its head? Jump up and wave your hand like a happy idiot. Managers' sigh of relief. Who can compete with that?

This is a great way to end up being the "expert" in PHP, Rails, frontend dev, and other stuff you actually don't really enjoy doing, and have everyone just keep assigning you those tickets instead of lifting a finger to do it themselves. Ask me how I know.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#125

Post by mwlp »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #47
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #30

When I joined a mentoring program targeted at recent college grads, I expected to be teaching things like interview prep, resume writing, negotiation skills, communication skills, and how to deliver results in a workplace. For about half of the mentees, that's roughly true. However, for the other half much of my mentoring ends up being about time management, following through on commitments, and putting in the effort…

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 p…

Consider looking into a prescription for Jornay. It's taken at night and kicks in ~10 hours later, and will normally last me the entire work day. I've tried just about everything, using Ritalin for the longest, and I've found Jornay to be the least intrusive when it comes to my attitude, diet and work.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#127

Post by nullsense »

pbourke wrote: post #57
jldugger wrote: post #45

> 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 in…

> 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 agree with this statement and your other points. I’ve noticed a more insidious variant of this behavior: the expectation of interruptions. Some groups have such frequent priority shifts and/or a culture of fire fighting or door knocking such that even with a r…

"meteor strike" what a brilliant way to put it. Been struck by a few of those in my time.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#128

Post by emodendroket »

legerdemain wrote: post #87
travisjungroth wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an entire family of tricks called card forces. I used to have a whole routine based on them. Here's a blog post with three of them: https://conjuror.community/best-card-forces/ I had about a 50% hit rate on the natural force. You just fan through the cards and time it so they pick the one you want. Wouldn't work for the tea trick, but works fine if you have a fallback.

Thanks for the link. Of the three techniques mentioned, one (the entire deck is all the same card) obviously doesn't withstand any scrutiny; one (riffle through a deck and skip to your chosen card when they say stop) feels like it'd be too risky for a trick that took days to set up; and one (the "natural" force) says "please pay us to learn the secret." I don't think the trick that's the show pony of this blog post h…

People use card tricks like these in poker games where real money is being bet and there's a good chance of physical violence if people catch you. What makes you think they can't get it good enough for a parlor trick?

Re: Embrace the Grind

#129

Post by caseysoftware »

dceddia wrote: post #16

This quote stuck out to me: > More trouble than the trick was worth? To you, probably. But not to magicians. It makes me realize how fundamentally different the values are between some fields. The amount of time magicians put into the craft is mind-boggling. I see it also with how movies are made -- to think that sometimes they're spending days or months and tens of thousands of dollars, building sets, waiting for th…

> Maybe a similar sort of thing with software would be spending time on animations

A few years ago, I was running a meetup in Austin and a local game studio offered a couple of their people as speakers. Intrigued, I asked about their projects, specializations, etc and learned about fabric animation.

That's when I learned that the Sony studio for DC Universe Online had a "fabric guy" who animated Superman and Batman's capes.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#130

Post by pixl97 »

EmptyMoon wrote: post #95
gonehome wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author's tactic gives them a good sense of the project, common requests, and bugs over a long time period. This context is really valuable when reasoning about the product or determining what's important to prioritize. The issue with the "declare bankruptcy and important stuff will come back" is that you don't actually solve the underlying ruthless prioritization issue and very quickly end up in the exact same po…

I have to agree. There is nothing more demotivating for me than documenting a bug thoroughly, only to have it returned to me two months later as part of a bulk 'we didn't get to this in time' cleanup. Issues for those teams usually 'best effort' isolation going forward, which compounds the issue.

A bug left alone long enough grows from an child bug to an adult bug. You're still caring, feeding, and maintaining that bug the entire time.
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