151–160 of 243 posts
The first group is afforded the "ask for forgiveness not permission" mantra, while the latter is left with "fall on the sword".
This leads to generally higher pressure and less feedback since you are kinda sorta pioneering and not just following hand-me-down instructions.
You need to accept that you cannot always win. You will fail at some point in life. Accept the fact that you could lose your job tomorrow. Then, don't worry about it. Wing it and almost everything you do. I always tell myself "well they haven't fired me yet so I'm clearly doing something right." Although you're in a CTO position so it's definitely different. But the concept applies. Brush shoulders with people who matter. Make them like you or stay on their good sides. Take work off their hands to the point they feel like they need you. Give yourself a purpose.
Unfortunately, you may need to let go of your tech work, or shunt it over to "nights and weekends." I was a manager for 25 years, and one thing that I learned, was to never put myself into the critical path. I could do tech projects, but they needed to be "nice to have on the side" projects. Management requires that we work on interrupt. We can't have that sweet "fugue," that makes us productive developers. What I di…
Thank you for this. My boss left in October and I have not been dealing well with the influx of things on my plate even though I have the time in terms of hours, and that explains why: The items I took over from her are directly opposing what I need to do my job.
Well. It doesn't fix it, but it's validating, I guess.
It does sound like burnout, and also like not being in the right environment (which contributes to burn out). I had one job where there was a lot of technical debt, but my manager did not respect me and my colleagues had what was basically a "learned helplessness" attitude. So I'd go around trying really hard to make things better, but everyone responded to me like I was just crazy or naive or didn't know what I was…
I've seen that happen at more than a few workplaces. It's a very interesting phenomenon, almost like a cultural helplessness that seeps into an environment. The crazy thing is that it only takes one or two people and everyone gets infected eventually. It seems you have to have a very, very strong personal fortitude to resist it. I think the "sense that you can change things", for which positivity is required, is the…
I think moving away makes more sense personally.
Is it possible that you're not making the "right" moves because you're the CTO? Leadership is hard and it's hard because you're making bayesian calculations on suboptimal choices. Almost by definition. Say a Jr. dev has a problem that they can't solve. They kick it to an intermediate. The intermediate can't solve it so they kick it up to a senior. The senior can see a couple of solutions, but want's to run it past th…
I heard it on a podcast, though I'm pretty sure he didn't coin the phrase.
Trust your gut. You've been busy with other things, and you have fallen behind as a developer. That doesn't mean you are worthless or unable to improve again. It just means you need to be humble and have a plan to improve as a coder.
The only way to improve consistently I have seen is to seek feedback from peers. Seek out a trusted colleague and ask to pair program for a while. Submit PRs early and often, and get early feedback.
I know a lot of people who would never admit they are struggling, and just say everyone else is the problem.
It has this gem of a quote:
> It helps to realize that the key difference between a big decision and a small one is whether you can fix your decision afterwards. Any decision can be made small by just always making sure that if you were wrong (and you will be wrong), you can always undo the damage later by backtracking. Suddenly, you get to be doubly managerial for making two inconsequential decisions - the wrong one and the right one.
It goes on to mention that most technical decisions fall inline as small changes and why.
Is it possible that you're not making the "right" moves because you're the CTO? Leadership is hard and it's hard because you're making bayesian calculations on suboptimal choices. Almost by definition. Say a Jr. dev has a problem that they can't solve. They kick it to an intermediate. The intermediate can't solve it so they kick it up to a senior. The senior can see a couple of solutions, but want's to run it past th…
> When problems reached him in the White House, he said, it was because they were unsolvable. He generally was being asked to choose between two bad options. “By definition, if it was an easily solvable problem, or even a modestly difficult but solvable problem, it would not reach me, because, by definition, somebody else would have solved it,” he said. “So the only decisions that came were the ones that were horrible and that didn’t have a good solution."
I highly recommend reading the Linux kernel management style guide at https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/management-st... . It has this gem of a quote: > It helps to realize that the key difference between a big decision and a small one is whether you can fix your decision afterwards. Any decision can be made small by just always making sure that if you were wrong (and you will be wrong), you can always u…