41–50 of 65 posts
"Contrary to popular belief, burnout isn’t caused by a lack of work-life balance. It’s driven more by the lack of ability to do meaningful work." Couldn't agree more. I wish I was more like my peers who don't seem to get as fully invested in their work (emotionally, mentally, etc)...but if I'm dedicating 40 hours a week to something, it's hard to continue if the work isn't aligned with what I define as meaningful. Li…
I failed doing this at companies that had too many layers, rules, people, roles and my work was an insignificant cog.
For me it meant leaving the, what I call 'enterprise' world behind. No longer 7 layers of middle management between me and the CEO.
I am no longer filling out templates and forms or chasing KPIs that someone made up. I improve the lives of our customers every single week/release.
For older people, do you ever find what you are looking for, at least at a reasonable price? I was once the way of OP but then decided that fixing that would involve mostly eliminating other people (and I am highly risk averse, so doing my own thing is not acceptable to me) and I decided that was not feasible. So I embraced apathy and am now the time killing bureaucrat calling meetings about status codes that both OP…
I can live with that and it no longer bothers me the same way it did when I burned with the need to prove myself and do something awesome.
I'm still a creative person, I invent algorithms and play guitar and write software I care about. The job pays the bills.
"Contrary to popular belief, burnout isn’t caused by a lack of work-life balance. It’s driven more by the lack of ability to do meaningful work." Couldn't agree more. I wish I was more like my peers who don't seem to get as fully invested in their work (emotionally, mentally, etc)...but if I'm dedicating 40 hours a week to something, it's hard to continue if the work isn't aligned with what I define as meaningful. Li…
Meaningful work will become boring. Pick your favorite dish and have it for 45 days straight and you’ll desperately want something else to eat. Ok, so the counter would be that we need variety of work. But, you can ask someone who travels a lot for work and see if they like this variety of places to see; they don’t. They get sick of variety. All of these discussions IMO make no sense to me. For every claim, I can fin…
The hardest part of my job has become the soul crushing endeavour of having to keep up with dysfunctional business organisms filled with every kind of clueless engineers and their day to day crap.
I have to attend "api architecture" meetings where people have zero clue of what domain modeling is, and only ever ask "what should backend/frontend do?" or "array or object for this field?", and push layers of spaghetti over what is a super intricate mess of a codebase, despite the company being super young and giving engineers actually a lot of freedom.
Damn, during our latest "tech team meetup" event a "senior" backend dev just gave a talk about how he used ChatGpt4 to help him write code to parse xml in Scala, "since regex is suboptimal for this case". Nobody except for a jr dev asked him if he ever heard about external deps and their magical ability of helping people avoid reinventing the wheel.
This is not to bash on unskilled people in the industry, it's just that they're the product of a capitalistic machine that works so well, and so much on a plane that's completely detached from reality, that work doesn't even matter anymore. It just feel like we're all forced to turn into NPCs at some point.
I'm almost speechless to the accurate adherence of the content of this blog post with my current feelings, stemming from my latest work experience. The hardest part of my job has become the soul crushing endeavour of having to keep up with dysfunctional business organisms filled with every kind of clueless engineers and their day to day crap. I have to attend "api architecture" meetings where people have zero clue of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry but no. What you see in corporate environments has nothing to do with risk management or product delivery, it’s often just pure ineptitude and useless people artificially trying to justify their existence.
You are attributing something to malice that can be adequately explained by stupidity. Few people are out there actively misleading stakeholders about why they're important. If that was the case, businesses would be rushing to fix that problem. What you're seeing is simply overly complex, highly inefficient product delivery pipelines, which have been grandfathered in, and would be too expensive and too risky to fix.…
The fact is, most of the people on the corporate world just don't need to be there. They add nothing and slow things down.