291–300 of 446 posts
I've been contemplating the issue in the headline, as pertains to my value. When I help somebody in 40 mins with something they've been stuck on for 3 months, my value is clear to everyone. When I work there the whole time, and nobody ever gets stuck for 3 months, my value is unclear. Don't know how to deal with this paradox.
I've been contemplating the issue in the headline, as pertains to my value. When I help somebody in 40 mins with something they've been stuck on for 3 months, my value is clear to everyone. When I work there the whole time, and nobody ever gets stuck for 3 months, my value is unclear. Don't know how to deal with this paradox.
Security/insurance paradox: when you do some jobs perfectly, it feels like you're doing nothing. Sadly, the only (ethical) way to counter such narrative is to spend a good amount of your time making reports showing how well everything is working and how it's not something you can just operate autonomously without disaster (to answer the inevitable "well the job is done, what are we paying you for?)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I should have, but it would have been obvious that I pulled a fast one on them as the fix was really quite simple. Instead of building a Hadoop cluster I replace a sql sub query with a bitmask. It really only took an hour to figure it out but they let me charge the whole day.
How much was it costing them? Also, can you describe the problem? It sounds interesting.
The UI had options to check some categories and exclude others, this was mapped to sql with a nested query IN (…) and not in (…). I noticed that there were less than 64 categories and always will be so I figured pack the category membership into a 64bit ints and use bitwise operations. The UI query generation would map to use bitmasks instead. They didn’t even let me implement it, just agreed that it would work and took it from there. I think they were quite embarrassed by it. It ended up being 10K faster.
I've been contemplating the issue in the headline, as pertains to my value. When I help somebody in 40 mins with something they've been stuck on for 3 months, my value is clear to everyone. When I work there the whole time, and nobody ever gets stuck for 3 months, my value is unclear. Don't know how to deal with this paradox.
If you don’t have such a manager, perhaps find them. Or become them.
I've been contemplating the issue in the headline, as pertains to my value. When I help somebody in 40 mins with something they've been stuck on for 3 months, my value is clear to everyone. When I work there the whole time, and nobody ever gets stuck for 3 months, my value is unclear. Don't know how to deal with this paradox.
The educational system i was put through was set up to teach that outcome scales more or less linearly with effort and time. The first lesson after graduation is that this is not so. Increased effort and time most likely primarily yields more effort and time being expected of you with lagging compensation. Value and opportunity are chaotic processes in effort and time. All we can do is to try to maintain the levels o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Easy - half a$$ your code and when it breaks - swoop in, "fix things" (actually do it right) and play the role of hero! (I've seen so-called "Rock Stars" at places I worked do this over and over)
That's literally how promo packs work in FAANG (minus the N) and other adjacent tech companies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The solution is to be a shameless self-marketer of all the work you do.
This does seem like the antithesis of useful, productive engineering work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's possible to phrase the value proposition to align with what you want to deliver. You can phrase it as "I help teams deliver on time by making sure they don't get stuck." Or "I increase a team's velocity by preventing mistakes that stop work." It's how you sell yourself and then, how you tell the story of what happened. Being able to tell a compelling story is important.
The issue is how do you provide the evidence for that. In other terms, how do you differentiate your effect from that of Homer Simpson's Bear Patrol and Lisa's tiger-repellant rock [0]? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw
It is easy enough to 'measure', a good lead would value how you benefit the team and enhance your co-workers productivity and seek to understand this part of your contribution. He or she could just ask your peers, it is not science.
If this does not apply to your situation at all, then leave because no amount of evidence will ever force your superiors to accept it, it will only antagonize them. You do need to make your case sometimes, but the level of proof should not be that high, you need some trust in order to function as an org even if it is exploited sometimes.
However, if the number of tickets gets too low over some period of time, well, management gets ideas that you have free capacity. ;)
Another variation on the problem is the over-allocation of resources to preventing problems which actually happened once, versus those that are more severe but haven't happened yet. This is a management problem, because no-one wants to be accountable for a repeat incident even if it was rational to be working on something else more important.
I spent a miserable year trying to convince people that they were over-reacting to an outage and there was a very simple solution to the exact problem that occurred. But when senior managers see their jobs at risk because of a repeat, they'll mandate that the entire department review their code for similar issues and remediate. They'll also listen to the loudest voices who somehow come up with massively over-engineered solutions.
Another example, we had a password expire which caused an outage on our trading stack. The amount of effort that went into stupidly convoluted hand-crafted solutions ensuring this "didn't happen again" was laughable. And in the end, after more than a year of work, the whole thing was abandoned in favour of a much simpler centralised solution that should have been done from the start.