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Embrace the Grind

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Re: Embrace the Grind

#191

Post by closeparen »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #72
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 think being able to sit down and do work is more about removing distractions than improving focus. Also, I'm curious about these statements: > 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 Really? Who believes this and why? > but then turn around and tell me that they're only…

Experience? When I find that I have been focusing for many hours on a complex task, it is usually something I slipped into effortlessly, even accidentally. The whole experience is pleasant. On the other hand I have tried on many occasions to force this when it wasn’t forthcoming, and on top of being extremely uncomfortable, it’s never worked.

I don’t think I’m completely helpless about it - factors such as sleep, exercise, environment, schedule fragmentation, etc. do seem to be involved, and I can influence those. But it doesn’t respond to force of will in the moment.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#193

Post by habitue »

emodendroket wrote: post #123
habitue wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Take this with a grain of salt, because I haven't done Kanban personally, but I think the theory is that if you hard cap work in progress, and everyone is sitting around on their hands, it puts a lot of pressure to eliminate bottlenecks to progress.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#194

Post by lolthishuman »

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…

Imagine how the kernel and operating system feels...

Re: Embrace the Grind

#195

Post by glennpratt »

rufius wrote: post #78
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…

Honestly, I’d have approached it differently. 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 can be really uncomfortable to do. But it’s how I’ve rescued a couple of teams that I’ve led as either an EM or Tech Lead. Put another way - if everything is important or “must fix”, nothing is. So to the author: that seemed like a waste of time.…

Ahh, the infuriation of seeing the issue you worked hard to document, closed by summarily by somebody that didn't even try to understand.

And of course that person didn't close their pet project or the features they promised.

It's slightly soothed when it's realized one of your summarily closed bugs could have prevented the next incident or major customer loss.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#196

Post by mdip »

titanomachy wrote: post #166
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…

This resonates with me deeply. I can barely get work done most of the time. My "solution" is to leave a company before people get too frustrated with me. Changing companies frequently nets me better pay and more promotions than my harder-working peers, but I haven't felt fulfilled by work in a long time. What do you tell these mentees? What would you tell someone a bit further along in their career who still has the…

  > what would you tell someone a bit further along in their career who still has the same problems?
If it's been going on for a while but you are otherwise successful at the work you're doing, the best advice I can give you is to ask a trusted third-party (friend[0], therapist/mentor that you've worked with for a while) and ask them "why, do you think, I have these problems?" Obviously, this has to be someone who won't pull punches, who will tell you the honest truth and you have to be willing to accept it as "just a problem to be solved" rather than allowing it to demoralize you. And they might be wrong, too, but more often than not there's something to whatever it is they spill.

If it's a relatively new thing, you might be going through a little burnout. I've been there a few times.

The first time it happened to me, I almost "fell out of it" by accident. My day job was in a bit of a lull at the time and I just decided one day that I'd had it with a lacking feature in Visual Studio and decided to sit down and figure out how to write an add-on shortly after waking up on Saturday. I ended up completing a really basic version that day -- enough that I knew I could do the rest of it, which I continued to work on for about a month until I released it.

I did this all during a handful of free evening hours during the week, but I checked my download counts regularly and was giddy every time they went up. I can't tell you when the burn-out ended -- probably that following Tuesday -- but any time I start to feel that way, again, I look at what I'm working on that I'm really excited about and I often find that there's nothing there. So I look for something new, usually not day-job related, with the goal of it being "far enough outside of my wheelhouse as to require a decent amount of new learning" and "not terribly difficult to do once that learning is over" because if I can't quickly get to a working "something" on a project like this before I close the IDE, I'm unlikely to revisit it. Ideally, that new learning leads to some new things to work on at the day job, too.

[0] Friends are often not the best unless you have a friend who is not afraid to insult you/the "hard truths". I've had a very close friend for most of my adult life that has been willing to say "You're being stupid/evil/what-have-you" when it was necessary.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#197

Post by emodendroket »

dragonwriter wrote: post #186
emodendroket wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> If the meeting is on a calendar ahead of time it's not really an interruption. Knowing about it doesn’t make it interrupt flow any less, unless you just avoid the kind of work that would require flow around it, which still imposes the same kind of productivity impact on intellectual “making” workers. [0] [0] related: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

I don’t know about you guys, but I can’t really keep a sustained bust going for 8 hours anyway. Even if I had no meetings at all, I have to stop for the restroom, tea, food, or even just to give my body a break.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#198

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

cbushko wrote: post #135
morty_s wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, terrafo…

> we want to move from AWS to GCP

Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#199

Post by alanbernstein »

legerdemain wrote: post #88
wott wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has put in his article a link to the Wikipedia definition of 'Forcing' (and once there, there is a link to a book describing techniques). edit: sorry, I hadn't refreshed and seen the other 2 replies before I replied myself.

I don't understand what you comment contributes to my knowledge. The author says that he will explain a magic trick. He says that step one is to XYZ. He does not say how to XYZ. He instead links to a Wikipedia page that says what XYZ is, but doesn't describe how to XYZ in a way that would work in the magic trick. Instead, it links to a book that might say more about XYZ. I am not about to buy that book. Do you consid…

I came here with the same question. I couldn't help asking it, but we've both missed the point: "which I’ve further simplified here for clarity". The details of the magic trick aren't relevant, the analogy is about the grind, not the one little deceptive detail about the trick, which could be sleight of hand, suggestion, etc.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#200

Post by mikepurvis »

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…

I did an internal transfer and took over from a team that I think had been in this state for some time— it was really the ideal scenario because in many ways I wasn't having to ramp on everything the way a true new hire would, but I still had the clean slate and clean calendar to immediately get a bunch of stale systems upgraded, processes cleaned up, start into writing some documentation, research new tools to deploy, etc. Very invigorating and a lot of progress possible in a short period of time.
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