The hustle never ends and I'm so over it

I asked, "Why was the 2 weeks so important? Are there any customers waiting for it? Is the company going to lose money? Why is the CTO saying one thing and you are saying something different?"

There was no clear answer to it. Turns out, the managers have designed a game where they assign percentage points for things completed by the end of the quarter. My manager was getting lower points because I was exercising caution - as requested by the CTO.

It is these BS management games that made me realize that the industry is broken beyond repair. I no longer hustle to make managers look good.

Quiet quitting on exploitation is a fair trade. I ain't sacrificing my personal life for BS games.

if the fire started due to something you helped create and you have even a smidgen of impostor syndrome, fighting fires is about about saving yourself and cleaning up the messes you've made. the only way to prevent this is to build a team with a strong sense of collective ownership/responsibility and a healthy attitude towards mistakes.

Except when I'm doing it as paid work for someone else. That drains the fun out of it for me. As a result, I have to have my fun by programming when I'm off work, too.

Why are we sprinting… ALL. THE. TIME. Can’t we at least mix in some brisk walks every now and then a la high intensity interval training?

Following the fitness metaphor, the concept of periodization is an overwhelmingly common training strategy. Periodization turns fitness plans into smaller cycles that include active and passive periods of rest.

It’s recognized that these rest periods are where performance improves - the grind that came before was simply tearing the body down to induce the body to rebuild itself fitter and stronger than before. These rest periods are not a vacation, but rather a reduction in intensity and training load and often include cross-training and other activities that give the athlete a mental and physical break.

I’ve always been surprised some enterprising Agile consultant hasn’t jumped on the same concept to push the concept of recovery sprints, like like an Ironman triathlete will have a recovery week baked into their plan. I’ve heard of sprints that might be focused on technical debt or experimentation, but nothing about a reduction in velocity or anything like that. I think it would be an interesting experiment to try to help mitigate the endless grind.

Additionally, two-week sprints weren’t originally the norm. I left software for a while when four weeks was the most common sprint length and when I came back , everything seemed to have settled on two weeks as the magic number. I never got an explanation why.