141–150 of 415 posts
I work 7-hour days, but I might work 2 or 3 hours during that time. A lot of the time I find the work unbearable and can only bring myself to do it in short intervals. When the task is interesting, involves my skills, and I'm making progress, I can work for hours with almost no breaks. It really is an emotional thing. I won't force myself to do anything that is really painful because it ruins my mood for the whole da…
I was in a similar rut. Not just professionally but academically as well for most of my life. Motivation had to be forced to do more than just enough to blend into the crowd. It took me saying enough is enough in my 40's to go get tested. Turns out I have ADHD. Getting therapy to deal with anxiety and depression stuff as well as getting on Adderall has done wonders. I'm not suddenly working 40+ hours always in the zo…
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No, I'm pretty sure it's true. I had to spend a ton of time explaining what I did and its values to my managers, like writing "ELI5" docs and then suddenly when they "got it" they paid very close attention to my work, and formed a team around me and established scope and got headcount. This is the messaging I got every single quarter: """David, your work is very good. All the people you work with say you're great and…
> you need to spend more time finding metrics that demonstrate that value and improving those I have always had trouble with this type of nebulous goal.
For example, in my case (sending machines causing invisible data corruption to be replaced) I could have been promoted by doing the following:
1) Finding a metric that correlated with the user pain that I was fixing. In this case, it would be something like "number of jobs that die with a NaN in 1 hour" while running an A/B test (half the jobs in the fleet have some feature enabled) and showign that, with significance, our fix reduces the number of NaNs significantly. (data driven)
2) Demonstrate that the NaN rate corresponds to user productivity (this could be # of papers published, # of models trained per hour, whatever) and that high NaN rates really did have an effect (impact)
3) filter the data carefully, because the vast majority of nans are actually caused by user error, not silent data corruption (this was the actual hard part and nobody has a better solution than "run a determinstic calculation on 8 cores and use majority vote to find the baddie")
Run the above for 6 months, show it to all the execs in your division, get a few people from Search, Ads, YouTube or Research/DeepMind to say it increased revenue or decreased costs by 10%. Bingo: promotion, along wiht a full time job maintaining a dashboard with constant requests to add new features, fix code broken by other teams, and making even more presentations to execs on how dysfunctional it is.
Or, I could just focus on fixing the machines, hearing anecdotally from the ML Whisperers that it's working again, and go back to surfing hacker news and getting another 100 karma in a day.
If your employer is happy with you, there is no reason to 'feel guilty'. Being competent (top 20%) and working 3hrs / day is way more productive than a middle performer working 12 hrs / day. In my personal experience: I work with people that, in 5 minutes, I can accomplish more than they can in a day. And those people are not stupid / unmotivated. I also work with people that, in 5 minutes, can accomplish more than I…
> Being competent (top 20%) What sort of toxic exceptionalism led you to think that only 20% of workers are suitable for their jobs....
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My dad explained it to me like this when I was a kid. I ignored it for a long time, but it definitely stuck in the back of my head. I asked him if we wanted to get a promotion or be a manager but he said he thought his role as a documents library was fine. "Do you know the Peter Principle? It's the idea that you get promoted when you do good work, but at some point, you'll be promoted to a level you're not competent…
Your dad was on to something.
I can really pump out code with my own projects but doing the same to finish a bunch of nameless JIRA tickets isn't really the same. What do I get for providing some corporation more value? A pat on the shoulder? Hah.
If your employer is happy with you, there is no reason to 'feel guilty'. Being competent (top 20%) and working 3hrs / day is way more productive than a middle performer working 12 hrs / day. In my personal experience: I work with people that, in 5 minutes, I can accomplish more than they can in a day. And those people are not stupid / unmotivated. I also work with people that, in 5 minutes, can accomplish more than I…
> Being competent (top 20%) What sort of toxic exceptionalism led you to think that only 20% of workers are suitable for their jobs....
Essentially 80% of all corporate output is performed by 20% of the workforce, and continues down each chain (of the 20% doing 80% of the work, 20% of them are doing 80% and etc…)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/business/trends-and-in...
You’ve got management written all over you!
I was diagnosed at 33, and it changed my life infinitely for the better. YMMV, and you may not have ADHD, but if you do, it is nothing to feel guilty about - it, in fact, gives you some insanely useful abilities that others simply don't have, as evidenced by the number of comments on this post explaining you have no guilt to feel, and your positive performance reviews.
But being able to understand why we do these things, and being able to understand how to adjust for them (whether through medication or coping mechanisms) is, alone, insanely relieving.
Consider picking up 'Driven to Distraction,' or 'Delivered From Distraction,' or check out these posts by Mark Suster which was what led me to get started on the path:
* https://bothsidesofthetable.com/how-to-know-if-you-have-add-...
* https://bothsidesofthetable.com/why-add-might-actually-benef...
* https://bothsidesofthetable.com/developing-an-action-plan-fo...