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Keep work fresh by teaching your successors and investing a bit in long-shots

tidyfirst.substack.com

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Re: Keep work fresh by teaching your successors and investing a bit in long-shots

#21

Post by heisenbit »

A few observations

- I find 5% for any investments very low. It is hard to get deeper into a new topic with that level. Our work has very high context switching costs.

- at the moment I work one day on another project requiring a fair amount of learning. While I learn a lot this way I found the two project setup exhausts my ability to push yet another set of things forward. There are limits to my ability to manage initiatives.

- the whole agile treadmill can be leveraged by management against self management. I found slowing down things and pushing myself to explore alternatives in my 80% block helps a bit to stem the tide.

Re: Keep work fresh by teaching your successors and investing a bit in long-shots

#23

Post by photon_lines »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #22

Aside: has anyone ever subscribed to a substack blog from this banner or do we all just press continue reading?

I rarely do. I recently started using sub-stack for blogging myself, and I added in a paid version as well just to annoy people haha :) Just kidding though - the paid version is for everyone who appreciates my work and who wants to help me continue writing. It takes quite a while to come up with content and posts and time isn't 'free'. The free version is for anyone who wants to continually get new posts in their inbox which attempt to explain concept topics in an intuitive and visual manner. Yes - the pop ups I agree are relatively annoying, but I appreciate what sub-stack is attempting to do regardless. If it were up to me, I'd simply include a subscribe button at the end of each post which asks the user whether they'd like a free or paid subscription should they click on it. That's me though. I'm not sure what type of UI testing they've done nor what effect that would have.

Re: Keep work fresh by teaching your successors and investing a bit in long-shots

#24

Post by dclowd9901 »

> If you’re doing what you’re told to do, they are paying you too much.

Not keen on this mindset. I’m glad to keep myself marketable, but that’s my business. My company’s business is: am I making what you want? Good. Pay me.

Re: Keep work fresh by teaching your successors and investing a bit in long-shots

#25

Post by dclowd9901 »

scarface_74 wrote: post #14
angarg12 wrote: post #5

> If you’re doing what you’re told to do, they are paying you too much. I'm glad Kent Beck got that one out. I work for a Big Tech that pays (comparatively) well, and sometimes there is lot of ambiguity. Some new hires have a hard time adapting, and complain that they lack direction or have nothing to do. When these kind of companies pay you big bucks, part of the job is to be proactive at finding and solving the pro…

Our guidelines (BigTech consulting department) on a high level are L4 - problem and solution is well defined L5 - problem is well defined, your responsibility to come up with a solution or at least be able to reach out to the right people for help. L6 - neither problem nor solution is well defined

And at any of those levels, you’re doing what the company is telling you (implementing actual specs vs creating specs).

Re: Keep work fresh by teaching your successors and investing a bit in long-shots

#26

Post by dclowd9901 »

angarg12 wrote: post #5

> If you’re doing what you’re told to do, they are paying you too much. I'm glad Kent Beck got that one out. I work for a Big Tech that pays (comparatively) well, and sometimes there is lot of ambiguity. Some new hires have a hard time adapting, and complain that they lack direction or have nothing to do. When these kind of companies pay you big bucks, part of the job is to be proactive at finding and solving the pro…

Then what do we need managers for?

Re: Keep work fresh by teaching your successors and investing a bit in long-shots

#27

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

photon_lines wrote: post #23
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #22

Aside: has anyone ever subscribed to a substack blog from this banner or do we all just press continue reading?

I rarely do. I recently started using sub-stack for blogging myself, and I added in a paid version as well just to annoy people haha :) Just kidding though - the paid version is for everyone who appreciates my work and who wants to help me continue writing. It takes quite a while to come up with content and posts and time isn't 'free'. The free version is for anyone who wants to continually get new posts in their inb…

I also subscribe to substacks but I have never once done in the middle of reading a new article.

Re: Keep work fresh by teaching your successors and investing a bit in long-shots

#28

Post by majormajor »

jstarfish wrote: post #8
angarg12 wrote: post #5

> If you’re doing what you’re told to do, they are paying you too much. I'm glad Kent Beck got that one out. I work for a Big Tech that pays (comparatively) well, and sometimes there is lot of ambiguity. Some new hires have a hard time adapting, and complain that they lack direction or have nothing to do. When these kind of companies pay you big bucks, part of the job is to be proactive at finding and solving the pro…

[flagged]

If you want management to tell you explicitly what to do, expect management to be paid MUCH more than you. And if it's explicitly not your job, hopefully you never question or disagree? (And yet... if your management is expected to make all the calls themselves, in practice, that's gonna risk getting it wrong more frequently - there's only so much time in the day to be fully up to speed on all the decisions and branch points in plans.)

Complexity is fractal, you can often find important solutions to important problems as an individual without needing to be "crowdsourcing the direction of the company."

Good individuals who can let their managers focus on organizational things and solve technical things are valuable. Otherwise, if you just execute a list of tasks, you're pretty interchangeable.

Re: Keep work fresh by teaching your successors and investing a bit in long-shots

#29

Post by ssss11 »

jstarfish wrote: post #8
angarg12 wrote: post #5

> If you’re doing what you’re told to do, they are paying you too much. I'm glad Kent Beck got that one out. I work for a Big Tech that pays (comparatively) well, and sometimes there is lot of ambiguity. Some new hires have a hard time adapting, and complain that they lack direction or have nothing to do. When these kind of companies pay you big bucks, part of the job is to be proactive at finding and solving the pro…

[flagged]

I believe it’s a two way street.

Employee can’t be a mushroom in the corner waiting to be told what to do.

Also, Manager can’t be incompetent and _only_ rely on employees to figure out what to do.

Both need to be proactive - employee in being interested in growing and manager in providing direction and interested in employed growth.

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