Very true, having lots of work doesn't mean its not lots of boring work.
Bored People Quit
61–70 of 156 posts
Re: Bored People Quit
#62For what it's worth, people exhibit the same kind of behavior changes when they think there will be layoffs.
If I don’t have a lot of work to do—or if I know the work that I do have could be done by someone fresh out of college—then I assume that the next time there is pressure to reduce staff, my name will be on top of the “to be laid off” list.
Re: Bored People Quit
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
quit immediately. if you have a job where you have a "lead" or "manager" title but have to ask someone else before making personnel/project decisions, you are not a lead or manager of anything, just a scapegoat.
Managers and leads aren't all-powerful. They answer to their managers and, in some sense, to their peers.
That's half his point. As a manager you should have full control of your direct reports. You shouldn't even need to ask permission to rearrange focus within your team. He shouldn't have even asked in the first place, though this is probably a sign of weakness in the manager and not so much the upper management of a company (if you have to ask, your peers will automatically play devil's advocate. The status quo, while not most efficient, has usually proved safe enough).
Re: Bored People Quit
#64Axiom: Boring work can never compete with Hacker News. Axiom: Hacker News can never compete with interesting work. Theorem: The interestingness of my work is inversely related to my Hacker News participation. Supporting data: Today I'm regression testing. I'll be here all day, folks. Idea: Employers, monitor your logs for Hacker News. Occasional spikes probably indicate boring, but necessary tasks. Chronic use probab…
It works the other way too.
According to rescuetime, I've been spending a LOT of time lately on HN and links to articles.
It kind of crept up on me and I didn't realize just how bored I've been at work lately. Definitely time to figure out why and how best to return to a happy-nonbored state. (Quitting isn't really a viable option right now)
Re: Bored People Quit
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but this is entirely true. I'm sat here watching a data mining job. It's wasted time, largely brought on because the job doesn't have unit tests, so I have no confidence it'll actually complete correctly, so I need to watch the log and see what its doing. This not a good use of my time, and I hate seeing that console, and I feel bad for being on HN when I could be productive.
./data_mining_job && growlnotify -m "Success!" || growlnotify -m "Failure :-(" (season with while , read and grep to taste)
Hah, if only it was so simple! The integrity of the job is the problem. It's been coded to failover problems (as the original data integrity its mining from isn't good), so it will happily do something stupid for hours. That's why I have to watch it, and make sure its not doing something stupid.
Unit tests would ensure stupidity was not a possibility, and regressions could be tracked. Too late for that, unfortunately.
So I watch.
Re: Bored People Quit
#66I had a nice little company with 30 or so staff, the first employee was a major asset but made a huge mistake when left in charge, ordered 300k of stock in one day from suppliers, then went on holiday and was off sick for some time afterward. The bills wipped out the pre Christmas profits we made and very nearly bankrupted the company. It was a hard slog for a year to get back into the blank, during which time I put him out of the office in final checking and testing. However, after about 8 months of this he landed the bombshell, he was leaving. Despite all pleas for him to stay, (despite his honest blunder he was one of those people you need, would do over and above the call of duty), alas he left. When I replaced him and modernized the management it was less than 16 months later he arrived in my office after I had called him in tears ( I don't cry) explaining the bookkeeper and general manager had scammed me out of over 100k... later I explained why he was 'demoted' I was astonished to realize he was oblivious to the problem he had created, how on earth had I managed to miss that vital information while begging he stay with the company? Being too involved and too busy, along with not trying to have a blame culture is what proceeded those events. My utter shock though at his ignorance to the real problem, and in his boots I guess I would have left too.
Re: Bored People Quit
#67If your company uses google calendar, I recommend you take a look at your coworker's schedules to get an idea of how many meetings people are subjected-to.
At my old job every in the office had a TON of meetings, except me. That place got boring really fast.
Re: Bored People Quit
#68"I’m going to keep digging until you look me in the eye"
Are you sure you want to do that to engineers? There's a joke that goes something like:
How do you tell an introverted engineer from an extroverted one? The introverted engineer stares at his/her shoes when talking to you. The extroverted one stares at your shoes.
I don't think it's a good idea to "keep digging until you look me in the eye".
Re: Bored People Quit
#69Disclaimer: The following is not related to the topic but is instead a rant inspired by reading the article.
A good article, but it is unfortunate that it starts by categorically slamming all authors who write about employee motivation and retention:
It’s written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don’t have a clue about the daily necessity of keeping your team professionally content because they’ve either never done the work or have forgotten how it’s done.
Why is this necessary? I find it nauseating. In fact, when I read or hear someone who basically states “everyone is stupid but me, and all who have come before me have been doing it wrong” in their opening spiel, it’s a good sign to me that the speaker/author has some blind spots and may not be considering all perspectives.
Maybe one reason I find it so nauseating is because I have suffered from this myself, and I’m still tempted at times to point out where others have failed and where I’m so much smarter. (After all, “we judge most harshly in others that which we are most guilty of ourselves” – can’t remember who said that.) It wasn’t until a close mentor confronted me on it, and basically taught me that life goes a lot better when you don’t walk around thinking you are smarter than everyone else. Biggest reason? It shows. You may think you are hiding it, but your face may be wearing a subtle smirk while others are talking, and they can see in your eyes that you aren’t listening but instead are formulating a rebuttal.
Steve Blank teaches this same concept (i.e. don’t think you are smarter than everyone else) in some of his blogs, although more related to sales. And good articles like this on the importance of humility reinforce this for me:
http://blogs.hbr.org/tjan/2011/07/why-some-people-have-all-t...
In a Fortune article on “the best advice I ever got”, the CEO of Pepsi, Indra Nooyi said the best advice she ever received was from her father, who taught her to “always assume positive intent” which I have found gets you a lot further than “assume everyone is an idiot”, which has been the stance of many programmers I have met. (Fortune article link: http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0804/gallery.bes...),
I’ve heard it said that “people don’t quit their jobs, they quit their manager”. Maybe in IT we are boring people by ceasing every opportunity to show our underlings how smart we are…
*Edit: Typos
Re: Bored People Quit
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hacker news participation can also indicate compilation, as it does for me right now.
Compilation is a form of boredom ;-)
No shit. I would much rather spend $10k in hardware than have a developer bored while waiting for something to finish.
Part of the problem, though, is tools. A lot of things are built for resource use minimization. That made sense 20 years ago, but now I have 8 GB of RAM and 4 fast cores on my desktop, and most of that capacity just sits idle. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm typing and the compiler isn't already running then it's missing an opportunity.