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A Response to Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s “Incompetent but Nice”

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Re: A Response to Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s “Incompetent but Nice”

#81

Post by trilobyte »

rdubz wrote: post #49
TexanFeller wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pairing is actually one of my most helpful strategies for keeping myself on task with boring tasks. People probably notice my ADHD much less when pairing with me. One reason remote work has destroyed my productivity is that pairing just can't happen in the same way.

interesting, I've had a much easier time pairing (and felt benefits like you describe) over Zoom. Pairing by actually having 2 people at a desk never felt very comfortable, but screen-sharing with each person on their own monitor etc. works great, IME. I'm curious what you've tried / why it hasn't worked...

Back in the day, about 15 years ago now, when I was pair-programming every day and trying to teach new people how to do it, everyone was awkward at first. People who were Vim experts suddenly started stumbling over basic tasks. All of them who persisted eventually got over the awkwardness. Not all of them enjoyed the pair programming, but the ones who I talked to later found that it wasn't as awkward after a bit.

Re: A Response to Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s “Incompetent but Nice”

#82

Post by stavros »

zamnos wrote: post #76
stavros wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been there, and it's hell. You waste your day staring at a screen, trying to get yourself to do something , but you can't, so in the end you both get absolutely nothing done and you waste all your time on it. It would almost have been better if I just said "fuck it" and didn't work at all. I'd have exactly the same output, but at least I'd have my free time back. If you're in this position, I recommend you work…

If you're that executively dysfunctional to the point where it's affecting your career, then it's time to escalate the problem beyond what your immediate manager can provide (but do talk to them about this), and find a mental health professional that can help. everybody has their off days but if those days turn into months and then days and then years, it might be burnout, at which point you'll still want a mental he…

In my case, I got a job I really enjoy doing, and I'm extremely productive at it, but I agree in general.

Re: A Response to Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s “Incompetent but Nice”

#83

Post by skeeter2020 »

donatj wrote: post #22
alfor wrote: post #10

ADHD is probably the problem under this behaviour. Can’t complete tasks and underperform but want to help other, be part of the team. People with ADHD have developed coping behaviour to fit in but have very low control on their executive functions, they can’t keep working on something that doesn’t catch their attention. It’s very hard to understand for someone who don’t have the problem "why can’t they just do it!" W…

This sounds a lot like me. I do get a TON done, am always working hard, but I can’t single thread to save my soul. I have a tendency to work on 6+ tickets at the same time which has in the past clashed with what management has wanted - clean single threaded work that looks nice on a kanban board. For instance I have a project right now that in linear time has taken about a week but has taken well over a month in actu…

>> clean single threaded work that looks nice on a kanban board

It's pretty unfair to characterize the demand as a desire to look nice, when in your next sentence you admit that a week task has taken you more than a month. I don't give a shit about the kanban board but I do care about work in progress. There's no value until you finish, and I mean done-done. What you consider multi-threading is micro time slicing, with significant context switching costs.

The funny thing is you probably consider your approach agile, while me, an old fart in management, see a giant pile of have half-finished widgets collecting dust. Until you adopt my old-fashioned approach of single threaded work you'll never be successful with the newer approaches of continual delivery, and constant, small-scale, non-scary releases.

Re: A Response to Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s “Incompetent but Nice”

#84

Post by giraffe_lady »

CM30 wrote: post #25
alfor wrote: post #10

ADHD is probably the problem under this behaviour. Can’t complete tasks and underperform but want to help other, be part of the team. People with ADHD have developed coping behaviour to fit in but have very low control on their executive functions, they can’t keep working on something that doesn’t catch their attention. It’s very hard to understand for someone who don’t have the problem "why can’t they just do it!" W…

> When the job is new, the team is new it’s all very interesting but as routine and boredom set in the get unable to stay on the task. They hate themselves for not doing what they should do and want to do the right thing but are unable. It’s very stressful and often lead to burnout. I think you basically summarised my own issues with work in the past, and why I seem to burn out so quickly. Wouldn't be surprised if I…

Yeah I spent a long time with different people telling me I had adhd, or maybe autism. Or autism, but maybe adhd, they are similar in some ways after all.

It turns out it's both, which is its own exciting thing and in some ways a very surprising or unintuitive combination of what you would expect.

And also surprisingly, specialists for both struggled to identify it correctly. I'm not sure if I just got unlucky there or what. But yeah you might want to consider and look into what experiences are like for people who do have both, because it's not what I would have expected before I knew this about myself.

Re: A Response to Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s “Incompetent but Nice”

#85

Post by manv1 »

Finishing things is surprisingly hard. You have to practice to get good at it.

I'd suggest learning how to paint. Why? Because a painting is literally never done. Just like software, there's always more you can do to a painting. But at some point you need to finish and hang it up.

Even pollock-style splatter painting will work for this exercise.

I've been shipping software and finishing projects for a long time, and it does get easier. There's this weird feeling of anxiety when you're near completion...it's a lot like stage fright. And getting that last 1% done is really, really hard. It takes a ton of effort...more effort that it takes to start.

At some point you have to decide "it's as good as it's going to get" and be done with it.

That's not to say I don't have plenty of projects that I haven't finished; I do. But I also have a lot of stuff that I finished off and am relatively happy about.

Again, read books about art, not about programming. Finishing stuff is hard. It's one of those things they don't really talk about in CS class...or in engineering. It's the reason Jobs used to say "artists ship." They do, or at least commercially successful ones do.

Re: A Response to Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s “Incompetent but Nice”

#86

Post by danielvaughn »

danpalmer wrote: post #59
danielvaughn wrote: post #56

I'm now in my second role where this applies to me. The first one, I was fired from, but I chalked it up to inexperience. This time around I have a lot of experience under my belt, and for that reason it's weighing on me quite a lot. I'm finding myself digging into Kubernetes for the first time and no matter how hard I try, I just can't seem to crack it. None of it makes any sense to me - I get what K8s is at a high…

That sucks. Can you focus on strengths instead? I happen to find infra quite easy, but CSS/design systems, I just always seem to suck at, and I'm thankful to work with people who are good at these things. I'm all for working on weaknesses! But at some point I think it's better to focus on where we can add value and play to our strengths.

I'm exactly the opposite - always been mostly FE. I can find my way around a backend, but you wouldn't want to trust me with a complex/critical system.

I was hired at this company as an FE dev, but after doing a bit of BE work for them, they asked if I wanted to join the platform team. After years of being shielded from devops/infra stuff, I felt like I was stagnating if I stayed in the FE lane, so I went ahead and took the dive.

My mood shifts from one day to the next. Some days I'm okay, but others are really, really hard. Like I'm barely able to understand k8s, and we're also using terraform, helm, etc etc. It might be the largest single learning curve I've ever faced.

Re: A Response to Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s “Incompetent but Nice”

#87

Post by CuriouslyC »

stuckinhell wrote: post #80
CuriouslyC wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That works better in comic books than software. As an example, I have a coworker who is pretty good in terms of domain knowledge, and can push out work pretty fast, but he does things like write migrations that insert rows of data one at a time in a loop, or adds three layers of almost do-nothing wrapper functions around business logic that doesn't need to be abstracted. He's made a lot of useful contributions but th…

Manager here, I can tell you sometimes the things engineers care a lot about like algorithms and the fastest/correct ways to do things are not important. Domain knowledge is typically far more valuable. The real world of business has tons of weird legal/finanical/workflows edgecases. I'll always hire a mid engineer with strong business domain knowledge over a very technical engineer with no strong businss domain know…

As a staff engineer at an org that heavily prioritizes domain knowledge and promotes for it and agreeableness heavily, I think that view is only true in the most black and white of cases. We have lots of developers working at 25% productivity because the flaming dumpster fire of tech debt we inherited is slowly turning into a flaming landfill fire as we pile shit on top of shit rather than fix things. I'm not sure why management hasn't made the connection between repeatedly missing deadlines and rampant unchecked tech debt, I've pointed it out many times. At this point I'm just glad I'm not on a team that's severely impacted, but I feel bad for the people who are going to be forced to crunch and will still come out looking like poor employees.

Re: A Response to Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s “Incompetent but Nice”

#88

Post by schneems »

alfor wrote: post #10

ADHD is probably the problem under this behaviour. Can’t complete tasks and underperform but want to help other, be part of the team. People with ADHD have developed coping behaviour to fit in but have very low control on their executive functions, they can’t keep working on something that doesn’t catch their attention. It’s very hard to understand for someone who don’t have the problem "why can’t they just do it!" W…

> Medication help, so is meditation, omega-3, better/more sleep, exercice and jobs that have movement and a lot of change and creativity.

This list is good. Also there are communities to learn from and therapy is really important.

A provider said to me “therapy without medication is okay, I wouldn’t do medication without therapy”.

Also it’s important to remember that people with ADHD excel in areas that neuro-average people do not. In an ideal team people work together to accentuate each other’s strengths and build systems that work for everyone.

Re: A Response to Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s “Incompetent but Nice”

#89

Post by stuckinhell »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #87
stuckinhell wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manager here, I can tell you sometimes the things engineers care a lot about like algorithms and the fastest/correct ways to do things are not important. Domain knowledge is typically far more valuable. The real world of business has tons of weird legal/finanical/workflows edgecases. I'll always hire a mid engineer with strong business domain knowledge over a very technical engineer with no strong businss domain know…

As a staff engineer at an org that heavily prioritizes domain knowledge and promotes for it and agreeableness heavily, I think that view is only true in the most black and white of cases. We have lots of developers working at 25% productivity because the flaming dumpster fire of tech debt we inherited is slowly turning into a flaming landfill fire as we pile shit on top of shit rather than fix things. I'm not sure wh…

I sympathize as well, but I also know many many developers are extremely poor at judging what/how the code affects a given Firm's KPI's.

I've been in literally hundreds of conversations with engineers who want to refactor a given technical system and don't realize the code debt is really due to the fact human businesses run on endless edge cases and weird exceptions. They only account for the majority use cases, but the problem is the firm would get sued without complete coverage. So when they deal with the edge cases, the code looks like shit again, and then what was the point of the company spending money on the refactor ?

Application/Code Architecture in real world businesses is extremely tough given moving requirements, endless legal/financial edge cases, and subtly different but similar concepts across different business domains. It's gets even tougher when you have to make difficult decisions about cost centers and profit centers.

My firm has a super specialty team (extremely well paid) that goes in and refactors/clean's up codebase's that are identified as becoming less efficient. However even the average senior engineer lacks the experience and understanding to clean up code debt in most business codebases.

Re: A Response to Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s “Incompetent but Nice”

#90

Post by evntdrvn »

danielvaughn wrote: post #86
danpalmer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sucks. Can you focus on strengths instead? I happen to find infra quite easy, but CSS/design systems, I just always seem to suck at, and I'm thankful to work with people who are good at these things. I'm all for working on weaknesses! But at some point I think it's better to focus on where we can add value and play to our strengths.

I'm exactly the opposite - always been mostly FE. I can find my way around a backend, but you wouldn't want to trust me with a complex/critical system. I was hired at this company as an FE dev, but after doing a bit of BE work for them, they asked if I wanted to join the platform team. After years of being shielded from devops/infra stuff, I felt like I was stagnating if I stayed in the FE lane, so I went ahead and t…

Don’t be too hard on yourself, the learning curve as a new infra/platform engineer is VERTICAL. Try not to hide that you’d benefit from some bootstrap assistance in a misguided effort to “not look clueless”, that’s a fast ride to a bad perf review or worse. One strategy that is incredibly effective in this situation is to ask if you can shadow an experienced/skilled team member for a sprint or two, and then switch to pairing with the same type of person for the following month or two. Your rate of learning will skyrocket using this approach, compared to trying to “go it alone” Good luck and enjoy the ride!
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