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How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

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Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#121

Post by mongol »

bennysomething wrote: post #97
twblalock wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being in meetings means you get to be in the room when decisions are made. Even if you aren't an active participant, you get to at least listen in. Almost all problems are really people problems, and people problems can only be solved by communicating with other people. Some engineers seem to want to work for long stretches uninterrupted, like monks copying sacred texts. That is not the way to succeed. To succeed you…

I think the idea of deep work has a place too. I haven't read the book but I think it touch's Linus locking himself away at a critical point in Linux's development. Bill gates did something similar (not sure what he was working on at that time).

I think he did that when he created git?

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#122

Post by bigpeopleareold »

ipaddr wrote: post #44

As someone who has been in the industry for 20+ years I've noticed changes that may have lead to this point. Daily standups, meetings, gluing frameworks Daily standups are is a one size solution to a communication problem. Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. Daily standups leads to cutting projects into small daily tasks. This leads to a system of micromanagement and it doesn't…

> No one wants to reinvent the wheel so gluing together packages is considered best practice. The work has become more about making decisions around the packages you choose rather than being given time to make the package.

While I have not been developing anything much lately, I realized that most of my career making things ended up being. In part because of this, I found the passion to start digging through again stuff I wanted to learn but never had a project for, basically now a deep dive into system programming. At the moment, I'll probably only gain insight, but it feels more gratifying than learning how to glue packages together.

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#123

Post by sdoering »

gherkinnn wrote: post #105
twblalock wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being in meetings means you get to be in the room when decisions are made. Even if you aren't an active participant, you get to at least listen in. Almost all problems are really people problems, and people problems can only be solved by communicating with other people. Some engineers seem to want to work for long stretches uninterrupted, like monks copying sacred texts. That is not the way to succeed. To succeed you…

Decisions made in meetings? 9 out of 10 decisions are made far away from meetings. Meetings are there to tell people about a decision.

Or to make people believe they had actual input and ensure a stronger commitment that way. Because a team that committed to something is more likely to see it through. Even if it means unpaid overtime and all the other crap management uses to extract the highest possible return out of us working drones.

And why wouldn't they? If I can ensure that a machine runs at 120% by giving it the illusion of participation in decisions I would absolutely do this.

/s

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#124

Post by johannes1234321 »

ipaddr wrote: post #44

As someone who has been in the industry for 20+ years I've noticed changes that may have lead to this point. Daily standups, meetings, gluing frameworks Daily standups are is a one size solution to a communication problem. Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. Daily standups leads to cutting projects into small daily tasks. This leads to a system of micromanagement and it doesn't…

> Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating.

I don't agree there. Constant communication is important for a good team, however in constant flow it often is being lost, what is important. Important things easily get lost between other noise.

Whether a daily is the right approach can be argued. Maybe a weekly is enough. However having a time where everybody listens and things can be brought to attention is useful in my experience.

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#125

Post by aozo »

twblalock wrote: post #89
ipaddr wrote: post #44

As someone who has been in the industry for 20+ years I've noticed changes that may have lead to this point. Daily standups, meetings, gluing frameworks Daily standups are is a one size solution to a communication problem. Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. Daily standups leads to cutting projects into small daily tasks. This leads to a system of micromanagement and it doesn't…

Being in meetings means you get to be in the room when decisions are made. Even if you aren't an active participant, you get to at least listen in. Almost all problems are really people problems, and people problems can only be solved by communicating with other people. Some engineers seem to want to work for long stretches uninterrupted, like monks copying sacred texts. That is not the way to succeed. To succeed you…

>Being in meetings means you get to be in the room when decisions are made. Even if you aren't an active participant, you get to at least listen in.

Why do I care if I have no say in it? Why am I wasting an hour or two of my day listening in on this when they could have emailed me the meeting minutes and decisions so I can spend 5 minutes reading through them?

If I'm not actively participating i na meeting, if my views are not taken into account and respected, then it's a pointless meeting for me.

>Some engineers seem to want to work for long stretches uninterrupted, like monks copying sacred texts. That is not the way to succeed.

The reason we want to do this is precisely because we're *not* just copying sacred texts. But rather we're sitting there working with some mental models and concepts, figuring out the chain of API calls and how it all clicks together so that we can better work on the actual problems. Getting up to that point always takes some time. Even getting to the same headspace where I was the previous day when I left work, takes some time.

So if you come to my desk and interrupt me I'm going to have to start from zero again and this will take time. So if I have a meeting coming up in 30 minutes, there's a good chance I won't start anything big. And after the meeting I'm again going to just be going through stuff for 30-60 minutes before I get to the point where I was.

I hate being interrupted because my work is in large parts, inside my own head as opposed to just typing in code. And thinking is often easier when someone is not talking to you.

https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#126

Post by makeitdouble »

onion2k wrote: post #75
ipaddr wrote: post #44

As someone who has been in the industry for 20+ years I've noticed changes that may have lead to this point. Daily standups, meetings, gluing frameworks Daily standups are is a one size solution to a communication problem. Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. Daily standups leads to cutting projects into small daily tasks. This leads to a system of micromanagement and it doesn't…

There's a very simple fix if you believe you have too many meetings - decline them. If you don't think you're needed in a meeting, say so. Give a reason like "I have nothing to add to that discussion." or "There's no agenda so I don't know if I'm needed." or simply "I'm busy, I think my time would be better spent on story 123." Make the people who invite you start to consider if you're really needed[1]. Also, create…

Your point sounds to me like: "It's your fault if you're miserable. It's up to you to confront your peers and fight your organization to protect your sanity "

It might be true in many settings, but I'd see that as a toxic and hostile environment we shouldn't be accepting as normal. Some people will sure enjoy Fight Club kind of places, I still wouldn't assume they are "a very simple fix" to shitty companies.

Quitting for a better workplace looks to me like a better course of action if the opportunity presents itself.

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#127

Post by jrs235 »

timalmond wrote: post #85
Trasmatta wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: meetings, I really think we need more tech companies taking the initiative to cut out meetings entirely . I think many companies would be shocked to find out that work would continue on, productivity would actually go up, and reported employer happiness would improve. I think it would be a "2020 remote work" style revelation for many teams. Many teams thought remote work would never work out for them, but when th…

There's a place for meetings, but if you're efficient, they should be rare, small and short. No, you don't need a weekly project update meeting. I can send you something out of Jira and if there is an issue, you can post a reply to it, or email me. And I can spend time thinking about what you've written and write a careful reply. Only when that still doesn't work, do we do a synchronous meeting, at which point we cov…

>The other beauty of tools like Jira is that the conversation is preserved. Why did we approach the problem that way? Well, go look at it.

I wish this is how it worked IME. IME "documentation" or rather a document would need to be created explaining the decision. No one reads the documents anyways! Referring to the ultimate source of truth, the conversation, preserves EVERYTHING that went into it. "But I don't want all the details so please create a document." You want a document? You know what you want in it? Why don't you go and write it? Seems no one can be bothered to research and read anymore. /End rant

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#128

Post by sascha_sl »

ipaddr wrote: post #44

As someone who has been in the industry for 20+ years I've noticed changes that may have lead to this point. Daily standups, meetings, gluing frameworks Daily standups are is a one size solution to a communication problem. Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. Daily standups leads to cutting projects into small daily tasks. This leads to a system of micromanagement and it doesn't…

I've spent 2 years in a team that was allowed to build platform tooling from scratch and it's been the most productive and high impact work i've done to date.

The only reason I'm not there anymore is that the team disintegrated after a change in leadership. Despite that being years ago, our tooling survived, judging from some headers.

If you glue things together, you inevitably have unknowns about the specifics of how your software actually works, and that very often comes back to bite you. But it's even worse if you do platform engineering, because developers downstream from you will find features (or anti-features) you didn't notice and completely derail and guardrails you had envisioned.

Having full control over everything we wrote kept us nimble and able to react fast. If you own all your code, making small adjustments is easy. If you glue together packages or off the shelf code you may end up having to choose between a trade off and maintaining a fork of a piece of code far beyond the scope of the thing you need. The only pain we had left was keeping in step with kubernetes API packages.

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#129

Post by jrs235 »

jayde2767 wrote: post #68
ipaddr wrote: post #44

As someone who has been in the industry for 20+ years I've noticed changes that may have lead to this point. Daily standups, meetings, gluing frameworks Daily standups are is a one size solution to a communication problem. Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. Daily standups leads to cutting projects into small daily tasks. This leads to a system of micromanagement and it doesn't…

I view the daily standup as a way to communicate status to a Product Owner/Project Manager/SCRUM Master who may have to communicate status to a larger "Standup of Standups", if you will. I agree that a high quality team communicates with each other often and status amongst them should not be necessary, or require a daily scheduled time.

Standups aren't supposed to be status reports. They're supposed to be huddles (to determine the plan of action). Want "status"? Look at the "xyz board". Blockers? That's important. Communicating any blockers that need to be addressed. That can be an email. And shouldn't have to wait until the next huddle. You can waste hours waiting. Communicate blockers immediately synchronously (interrupting) or asynchronously (noninterrupting, like email) depending on your work environments preferred or agreed upon protocols.

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#130

Post by malka »

0xedd wrote: post #109
twblalock wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being in meetings means you get to be in the room when decisions are made. Even if you aren't an active participant, you get to at least listen in. Almost all problems are really people problems, and people problems can only be solved by communicating with other people. Some engineers seem to want to work for long stretches uninterrupted, like monks copying sacred texts. That is not the way to succeed. To succeed you…

Have yet to meet a company where a developer's opinion is taken into account in software architecture and solution design. And, usually, like some other guy here said, they aren't invited to these types of meetings, at all. The best line I heard, from a team lead that wouldn't back a "don't implement a task queue using postgresql", was "because I don't understand it/am not familiar with it [the alternative solution,…

Why do you care ? If top monkey want to spend money on stupid shit, I'll happily indulge it. It is not my money that is badly spent anyway.
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