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Take a break

robinrendle.com

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Re: Take a break

#81

Post by ip26 »

Silverback_VII wrote: post #46
Swinx43 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is impossible to understand how much additional stress and anxiety being a parent of small children bring without being in that position. I refer to it as the best kept secret of parenthood. No one tells you this until you are in it.

>I think it is impossible to understand how much additional stress and anxiety being a parent of small children bring without being in that position. I have to disagree and I'm a father. I think it's exactly like in the book "the happiness advantage", some people will see the positive and use it as possibility to grow and to get more productive. On the other hand, People who focus on the negative and didn't learn to…

Good luck “looking on the bright side” when you’ve had less than four hours sleep every night for the past week.

Some kids are just angels and sleep like champs, others fight every inch of the way and wake up constantly. As a result, different parents come up with wildly different “truths of parenting”.

Re: Take a break

#82

Post by thrwawyprnt001 »

CalRobert wrote: post #41
greymalik wrote: post #14

> small hurdles spike my anxiety, my anger flares at the slightest confrontation, I notice fewer jokes, fewer attempts on my part to make people laugh. My memory goes to all hell too and I can’t seem to concentrate on prolonged amounts of anything. Books fall off my radar, I stop listening to music. My phone is in my hand at all times, scrolly-anxiety-inducing apps become impossible to avoid. This describes me perfec…

I wish I'd understood the degree to which small children destroy you. The amount of focus time you get falls by 90%+, you sleep horribly every night without fail, and you spend every quiet moment waiting for one of them to start screaming because they found some new and ingenious way to hurt themself. Maybe a lot of that was having a 1-3 and 3-5 year old wfh during covid, but I feel like I'm broken ever since.

Anecdotal comment inbound, but you sound like you could benefit from a bit of hope: it really should get better, and soon. I have kids similarly distanced in age, the years you mentioned were the hardest so far and by far, even without a pandemic in the mix. That said, after they both were above age ~7 and able exist with a small bit of independence, things became easier. Like, an order of magnitude easier on my subjective and invented scale. Sleep improved, activities became fun again... in fact, I'm a bit sad when I can't convince one or the other to join me to do even simple things like picking up groceries.

Hang in there. Good luck.

Re: Take a break

#83

Post by zasdffaa »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #8

May I suggest a purely rational, evidence based take? The trap is your belief in a linear relationship between effort and outcome. Working harder and longer produces more productivity, right? That's false. As you say so yourself, your memory goes to shit. It's not just a law of diminishing returns. For coders, past a certain point, exhaustion leads you to start undoing your work. You are into negative productivity. I…

"Sometimes it's better to stay in bed on monday rather than spend the rest of the week debugging monday's code"

- some computer bod I can't remember

Re: Take a break

#84

Post by ThalesX »

wildrhythms wrote: post #28
thenerdhead wrote: post #25

On top of taking regular breaks, I think we should also work slower. Burnout is a scary place to be in. While the news calls it “quiet quitting”, I think many people are simply burnt out from the last few years of world conditions and add on the rubber band effect of everything going back to “normal”. It’s just too much change in a short amount of time. I wrote a book about this topic when I was in a state of burnout…

I work with a project manager who is obsessed with deadlines. "Hey do you have an update? When do you think it will be done? Hey, the deadline is really close!" They maintain a complicated Gantt chart. What happens when we miss the deadline? Nothing really, our updates aren't on a fixed timeline, and our users are very happy with our product today. Everything is artificial.

We get the not enough “velocity” or not enough “productivity” talk from time to time. And it’s also defined against arbitrary deadlines with no consequences if missed. Ultimately, as a team, we end up producing lower quality code at higher burnout rates. We have a very high turnover rate and the solution proposed is always more “velocity” and / or “productivity”, whatever that means.

Re: Take a break

#85

Post by oldsklgdfth »

> small hurdles spike my anxiety, my anger flares at the slightest confrontation

This has been me for the past few months at FAANG. Basically, behaving completely disrespectfully to my boss. Anywhere else I’d been fired, but I guess if you deliver it’s fine?

We had meeting after meeting about how to work better together. I think we both knew I needed a break and I’m taking one. But I would never expect a boss to tell you to not show up to work. Even though they won’t think twice before asking you to work late or the weekend.

How do you handle such situations?

Re: Take a break

#86

Post by ThalesX »

tomrod wrote: post #61
wildrhythms wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work with a project manager who is obsessed with deadlines. "Hey do you have an update? When do you think it will be done? Hey, the deadline is really close!" They maintain a complicated Gantt chart. What happens when we miss the deadline? Nothing really, our updates aren't on a fixed timeline, and our users are very happy with our product today. Everything is artificial.

I wonder whether you've ever asked the PM what happens when a deadline is missed? It may be he or she is shielding you from consequences and impacts you're unaware of, hence the anxiety. I had a PM act this way during on one of the projects in my department for awhile and they were a mess. Finally I requested they let the team absorb the impact instead of the PM handling everything. While fortunately is was recoverab…

As an IC I don’t want to absorb that. It’s really not in my JD. I don’t go to my “higher ups” to absorb some tasks from me and get down and dirty, and I expect them to also not involve me in their orchestration. Ultimately they should manage the situation for the money thay they receive.

When in the position to manage, it’s my responsability to create a controllable pipeline for task delivery and not bother the devs with office politics while providing them with a reasonable segmented work and enough autonomy to accomplish their best work.

This jumping to help, that I also used to partake in until I got burnt too many times, at the end of the day is one of the reasons for why, as a profession we get so much money but so little respect.

Re: Take a break

#87

Post by rtlfe »

nik736 wrote: post #18
nonrandomstring wrote: post #8

May I suggest a purely rational, evidence based take? The trap is your belief in a linear relationship between effort and outcome. Working harder and longer produces more productivity, right? That's false. As you say so yourself, your memory goes to shit. It's not just a law of diminishing returns. For coders, past a certain point, exhaustion leads you to start undoing your work. You are into negative productivity. I…

I am not sure about that. There are always tasks that can be done without having to think too much about it. The more time you put into them, the more of those small tasks you can complete. I wouldn't start building new features or change important parts of the code base after a 10hr day for sure, but there is a lot more that can't "break everything".

> There are always tasks that can be done without having to think too much about it

As you tack more of these on to the end of the day, you get less rest, and tomorrow's window of opportunity for doing difficult work shortens.

Re: Take a break

#88

Post by rubyist5eva »

calrain wrote: post #7

30 years in the workforce 2 years starting a new startup 5 years after it was acquired Total burnout... I resigned and am 10 months into a break, it's the best thing I've ever done!

10 months without work? I mean this as a sincere question but…how do you afford to live?

Re: Take a break

#90

Post by rtlfe »

Tade0 wrote: post #71
Silverback_VII wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think it is impossible to understand how much additional stress and anxiety being a parent of small children bring without being in that position. I have to disagree and I'm a father. I think it's exactly like in the book "the happiness advantage", some people will see the positive and use it as possibility to grow and to get more productive. On the other hand, People who focus on the negative and didn't learn to…

Also a father, and I don't see it as a case of positives and negatives, rather how much energy you're putting into it. There are many methods of minimizing the effort you're putting in and you can make it relatively easy, but like with everything it's a tradeoff. Food is one major point. You can introduce a baby to solids early on and practice the BLW method, or you could just spoon feed them with ready-to-eat baby p…

Absolutely this. You need to make sure they're clean, fed, safe (physically and emotionally), and are able to play (learn). Beyond that, choosing to parent on hard mode just gives you more stress for no benefit.
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