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Embrace the Grind

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Re: Embrace the Grind

#221

Post by swsieber »

chmod600 wrote: post #212
titanomachy wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have a similar problem. What's weird for me is that I feel totally useless and undisciplined, but when I look back, I actually do accomplish important things. But if you watched me day to day, it is obvious I'm wasting a ton of time. Not just on work, but on myself as well. I don't mean "wasting" like relaxing and maybe sorting out a problem in my subconscious. I mean wasting . I seem to be doing better recently. W…

This hits home for me.

I'm also fairly certain I have ADHD.

And moving jobs terrifies me because I do pretty well in my current job, and my current job is a good long term one due to the freedom (and somewhat paradoxically some restrictions... it works out really well) it gives me.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#222

Post by imwillofficial »

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.

It’s an interruption from the task you were working on. Being planned or on a calendar means it’s not an ‘unplanned interruption’, however, anything that takes you away from what you’re doing is, by definition, an interruption.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#223

Post by eecc »

Yes.

Here I am, looking at a Salesforce integration to Dynamo.

Several attempts at elegance thwarted by the trashyness of the AWS libraries. The Salesforce data-model a pile of hundreds of ad-hoc fields.

I wrote the most Java1.4 code I ever wrote, copy-pasted the hundreds of fields into a spreadsheet and am slogging through the list picking what to keep and what to ignore.

It will get done by pure force of labor, and the customer will be disappointed by “what took you so long”

Sigh

Re: Embrace the Grind

#224

Post by dehrmann »

bluquark wrote: post #17

My secret weapon for bug diagnosis is that when a regression is reported on a system without an automatic bisect tool, while everyone else is trying to reason about the problem with guesswork and code inspection, I sit down and spend 2 hours just bisecting manually (full sync, rebuild and install of old versions of the software). This provides a guaranteed culprit CL, often one that no one guessed, and also a potenti…

> without an automatic bisect tool

At that scale, reading through the commit messages is often enough to narrow it down to a few suspects.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#225

Post by Gravityloss »

mwcampbell wrote: post #49
mensetmanusman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The movie thing is a good example. I remind my kids that some of these movies cost $1,000,000/minute to make. That might be what they make in their lifetime, so it is about that many hours of work per minute (a life’s work).

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.

TV became digital and the amount of channels exploded. Yet the amount of eyeballs watching advertisement didn't. So the money spent per TV program minute went down. Enter reality TV.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#226

Post by tome »

ttiurani wrote: post #208

This article is very on point and every team benefits tremendously from people who do just spend the time and sleigh the monsters. In a bigger team, a big second reason why these kinds of very uncomfortable tasks aren't done is that they also often don't produce immediate business value. You then have double resistance: the PO wants features from you and grinding is boring. The people who first get to a position wher…

> sleigh the monsters

I love this image

Re: Embrace the Grind

#227

Post by wombatmobile »

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…

Mark Ruffalo dramatised the lawyer who did exactly this in Dark Waters to foil DuPont. Thanks to this grind, we know what DuPont did to pristine West Virginia waterways with Teflon toxic waste.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=yBGi3SzxkKk

Re: Embrace the Grind

#228

Post by legerdemain »

alanbernstein wrote: post #199
legerdemain wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup, and I see what the author is doing there. That's great, whatever. But if he is illustrating his point by trying to explain a magic trick, and even including a "spoiler warning," I want him to actually explain the magic trick. Otherwise, it's a kind of a comical piece of rhetoric. "Some jobs are like this magic trick I'm about to explain. First, you do something cool that seems like magic. Now you see, magic and work share an element of extreme tedium!"

Re: Embrace the Grind

#229

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

charrondev wrote: post #205
titanomachy wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who do this job at large companies are called Staff or Principal engineers. One reason startups might be less likely to have them is that they are extraordinarily expensive.

And you can’t cheap out on the role. It’s also really hard to recognize the right kind of person for this without a somewhat Mature engineering team. The wrong person in this type of role at a smaller company can things back significantly.

Yeah, there's one principal DS at my company, and he's a net negative. I'm honestly amazed that they have hired him and kept him (which speaks to deeper issues with the company, unfortunately).

A bad principal/staff person has around the same level of impact as a bad manager/director, except it tends to cause more technical badness than social badness.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#230

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

sdenton4 wrote: post #101
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…

Just had a meeting with some students looking to outsource some dataset validation work. I had them time themselves for a couple hours doing it themselves, and we found that seeing aside am hour a day for a couple weeks will get them through everything... And they'll end up with higher quality data than they'll get from outsourced validation, with a better idea of the pitfalls of the dataset.

Those students are in the wrong career. You can't make good things from data without (metaphorically) getting your hands dirty.
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