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Embrace the Grind

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Re: Embrace the Grind

#131

Post by nullsense »

emodendroket wrote: post #119
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…

If the meeting is on a calendar ahead of time it's not really an interruption.

Certainly feels like one when I know the context switch is coming and it's scheduled in such a mid morning or mid afternoon slot that the time either side of it isn't long enough to do deep work, particularly when the rest of the team will interrupt me ad hoc to get unblocked on their work. If there were no meeting I can deal with their interruptions and context switch back to my work and get a long enough stretch to concentrate. With frequent meetings in certain timeslots I get virtually nothing done some weeks.

It likely affects some people more than others depending on the demands placed on you.

Think I'm going request meetings never fall mid morning or mid afternoon.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#132

Post by datavirtue »

emodendroket wrote: post #124
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.

Hmmm....it landed me as the tech lead for all of IT and development.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#133

Post by sneak »

nitrogen wrote: post #116
sneak wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Close everything older than 2 weeks. If it’s important/relevant, it will crop back up. If it’s not, then it stays unfixed. This seems like a great idea: technical debt bankruptcy. In reality, you're throwing away hugely valuable data that people spent real time and effort producing for you. See also: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Note: you'll probably want to copy/paste that URL instead of clicking it, because unless something has changed (e.g. browsers not sending referrers), JWZ had/has a Referrer rule that will show something...else for anyone coming from HN. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...

That's half the fun of legitimate opportunities to link jwz's content. :D

Re: Embrace the Grind

#134

Post by cgriswald »

aspaceman wrote: post #77
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…

> 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. About 6 months into a job I realized this was what I needed to do and totally cracked. Didn’t know the questions to ask or the way to learn what I needed to so I burnt out quick and quit. My fault for sure, but there was a ton of pressure to identify issues and…

I had the opposite problem. I took to it like a duck to water and then was told to stop because I had “better things to do.” When I asked what they suggested things I had already done. I become so bored it really affected my work ethic. I didn’t like that and eventually quit.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#135

Post by cbushko »

morty_s wrote: post #103
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…

> it takes a special kind of new hire Yeah, it does. I’ve had a good amount of experience doing this. You need to have tact and a kind of humbleness that can be difficult to maintain (tbh, it was for me at least). In my most recent experience with this, many of the bugs were unknown. During my ramp up, I read through nearly all of the code I’d be working on and got a good sense of what needed to be done, but the code…

This resonates with me so much as I was in this position 3 years ago.

My boss came to me and said "we want to move from AWS to GCP, using kubernetes and not have it be a mess like we have now"

I was new, senior, free from ownership. I chose to stay as a team of 1 so that I wasn't burdened with fires and meetings. It freed me up to put my head down and get the work done.

The grind was learning GCP, kubernetes, terraform, the platform/product, gathering requirements from several teams and mentoring people that would pop into the project as their time allowed.

I won't lie as learning new things was great. The project was partially greenfield as it was a platform migration and not a product rewrite. There were a lot of constraints & debt to deal with.

Maybe the new employee churn is one of the reasons that most startups get so much done... the new people are not burdened by ownership and being the subject matter experts. They are free to do things, good or bad. :)

Re: Embrace the Grind

#136

Post by nullsense »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #54
ReactiveJelly wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

ADHD is a difficult topic to discuss on HN. I'll preface this by saying that I'm not doubting your situation, or any other commenter's particular situation. This [section of my] comment is meant to be general: In the context of this mentoring group, we go through phases where almost everyone suspects they have ADHD for various reasons. This is usually triggered by one of two things: Either someone shares an online "D…

As someone diagnosed with ADHD a year ago now, the GPs description of their life experiences are pretty textbook ADHD.

And things like this:

"Some times the things we have to do in life aren't immediately enjoyable. It's on us to find ways to make them more enjoyable (e.g. find a sport you like, or take up walking), and some times we just have to do the unenjoyable thing for the sake of progress."

Are just insanely tone deaf things people without ADHD wind up saying to ADHDers because they have the capacity to do those things and haven't experienced not having the capacity to do them.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#137

Post by nullsense »

beaconstudios wrote: post #71
fartcannon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said anything about not improving, the parent comment believes the ADHD sufferer is simply not working hard enough. He's trying to show him where his bootstraps are.

People who are currently struggling can fall into a self limiting mindset. I can attest to that from personal experience. I don't have ADHD, but I can imagine that having it might make you believe that you couldn't improve your attention at all. The reality is that you might just be able to, even though it would probably much harder than for the general population - in the same way that an underweight person would fi…

On the contrary, one of the biggest sources of suffering in an ADHDers life is constantly being pounded with this very message your entire life despite trying your absolute best.

When the vast, vast majority of people are capable of a baseline far above yours, they hold you to their standards mercilessly.

The number of times I've been reduced to tears by this conversation. I'm telling you. This is by far the worst part of it all.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#138

Post by chrisco255 »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #97
chrisco255 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time you grind to get that 100% perfect solution, the number of requirements the business has put on you in your backlog has extended well beyond what you can keep up with. It's not like software engineers are the only actors in a software system. They are reactive to the needs of product development who are reactive to the needs of customers. You have to balance your limited development resources against a co…

I was gonna say that! curl and ffmpeg are definitely commendable "100%" FOSS projects, but they aren't chasing new features. HTTP3 is big, but it's not like curl had to break HTTP 1.1 compatibility to add it. AV1 is big, but it's not like MPEG1 will ever change. Both projects deal in protocols, which means most of their requirements are literally set in stone, or silicon. Whereas youtube-dl is constantly breaking _on…

Yeah agreed. There's a big difference between the base layer utilities and the application layer interfaces.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#139

Post by boring_twenties »

nitrogen wrote: post #116
sneak wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Close everything older than 2 weeks. If it’s important/relevant, it will crop back up. If it’s not, then it stays unfixed. This seems like a great idea: technical debt bankruptcy. In reality, you're throwing away hugely valuable data that people spent real time and effort producing for you. See also: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Note: you'll probably want to copy/paste that URL instead of clicking it, because unless something has changed (e.g. browsers not sending referrers), JWZ had/has a Referrer rule that will show something...else for anyone coming from HN. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...

Thanks, I'd forgotten all about that, and also why jwz's domain was resolving to 127.0.0.X on my system.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#140

Post by Jakobeha »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #117
narshian wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it’s not. Speaking as someone who specifically has this problem: even eliminating all possible distractions does not do the trick.

Which problem exactly? Not being able to sit down and code for more than 2 hours?

It could be that he isn't productive. I have this problem, where if I sit and code for too long I end up just wasting time debugging or writing useless code.

Maybe I'm just another uneducated recent college grad, but I really don't see how you can work 7+ hours a day and actually be productive. Doing different kinds of work or taking frequent breaks, possibly. But not just sitting and staring at your computer for 7 hours.

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