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Always Do Extra

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Re: Always Do Extra

#101

Post by IanCal »

kuratkull wrote: post #89
IanCal wrote: post #16

> In the end, I hope it's clear that I'm not arguing that we neglect our Normal Work. But you are. Choosing extra is choosing to ignore the prioritised work for something you want to do instead. Just because the estimate was too low this week doesn't suddenly mean there's no more work. While I think what they describe as Extra is valuable, I think there are reasonable paths to it: * Get paid by the project, not the h…

There is _always_ more grunt work to be done in our field. The employer would be happy to let you churn out solutions to tickets forever, but this only serves the company, not you. Doing Extra is acknowledging this and trying to think outside the box for the benefit of both parties. Also, your employer probably already has someone doing good quality Extra work (to move the company forward in the long term), so it's n…

It's not about taking on grunt work, just because you finished some assigned tasks quicker than the person (/team) who assigned them thought it would take doesn't mean the next most important things are grunt work.

If it's beneficial for the company (and I agree that this kind of experimental work is) then make it part of the tasks. Don't only do it when your estimates are wrong!

Re: Always Do Extra

#102

Post by makeitdouble »

oneepic wrote: post #47
pedalpete wrote: post #43

I feel like the people who do "extra", never feel like they're doing extra, they feel like that is part of the job. The example of "creating two screens", you make the screens, and then look at them and think...is this the best I can do? Is there a better way to protect the security? Is there a way I can reduce the boilerplate? Can I refine this so it's easier for somebody else to maintain later? That's the job, as f…

If you follow this path, I think it's important to remind yourself that you're doing extra, otherwise you might just forget that that's one thing that separates you from many of your peers. It can be an important point of pride and continuing growth.

The catch is, depending on your environment that's not the extra distinguishing you, it's the baseline.

I've seen it first hand in some startups where you have to manage yourself, and you'll be the only one to give yourself the time to look back at your work, and make sure you're growing and making better things.

I also hope that the "extra" is done within standard working hours, which is an other argument to just have it set as "part of the job".

Re: Always Do Extra

#103

Post by feldrim »

I started developing professionally on airgapped networks. At night, I was searching stackoverflow for the ideas I had, best practices of what I did that day, how to do things securely, etc. During the day, I cannot access internet because there was just one workstation with internet connection for about 20 devs, DBAs, sysadmins, etc.

And also you cannot copy-paste, so you needed to optimize what you do. Otherwise, you have to write down the exception you had you don't know, then wait for your turn to use the workstation -add log on ceremony with smart cards, etc.

All of those nights, it turns out, I did extra.

Re: Always Do Extra

#104

Post by Buttons840 »

> Extra is finishing those two screens, but then researching a new library for form validation that might reduce the boilerplate code. Or it's learning ways to protect against common security vulnerabilities from data entry.

How about making sure your code doesn't "work by coincide". Ensuring you don't have any dead code, etc. I recently cleaned up a bit of code by straight up just deleting 80% of the lines. It still worked, it still did essentially the same thing. It wasn't a refactor, just deleting lines. 80% of the code before was just leftovers from someone's experimenting to get it to work, as soon as it appeared to work it was, commit, force push, go home (I'm kidding about the force push, probably). That's not good enough.

So I agree with the article, once it works, you're half done.

Re: Always Do Extra

#106

Post by p2t2p »

darioush wrote: post #42
p2t2p wrote: post #39

Not unless I'm getting paid or recognised in some other way for going extra mile. More often than not no one (bug some rare customer probably) gives a damn about you going extra mile. Often it is actually punished, not directly but I've had plenty of examples when people instead of doing extra ventured into doing some fun shit for other teams and uh-oh, cross-team impact, here's your promotion while your actual team…

:) There will be recognition if you perform tasks that continually uplevels your team. There is only so many buttons one can push in a day (doing more). What the author calls "Extra" is often called "Glue" work (think improving test coverage or isolation, creating a bank of interview questions, improving onboarding documents). If you ask for "money first", response will often be "IDK, we're not too sure about that".…

Somehow there’s no gap when people are hired for this positions externally and “money first” doctrine applies. I’m not going to spend my personal time and life on saving few bucks on hiring for some corp. If it is easier to change my job for a promotion, I’ll do that.

Re: Always Do Extra

#107

Post by Zababa »

dkarl wrote: post #41

Oh, God. This sums up one of my coworkers. Smart, productive, generates lots of LOC that almost always do the right thing, but oh my God, the "Extra." Dig into any of his code and you'll always find something Extra, like the front end is built in SomeObscureLanguage.js, or the business logic is expressed in a custom DSL implemented by macros, or some piece of the app seems to be mysteriously absent, until you discove…

My understanding is that you should use Extra to increase the size of your toolbox, but still use them only if they make sense. For example, I recently learned about the different kinds of maps in C++ while going through a part of the codebase that uses them heavily. I didn't use that knowledge directly though. Maybe one day it will come up, maybe it won't. When modifying old code, I try to have a good reason when changing the way things are done. If I'm doing something fancy, I usually try to confirm it with a collegue first.

Edit: another good example of Extra would be to build useful tooling for your codebase. It's usually higher-level work.

Re: Always Do Extra

#108

Post by [deleted] »

alienthrowaway wrote: post #95
glitchc wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I’ve been doing your ‘extra’ for years. While it earns you kudos and respect, it rarely gets you promoted, if ever. Playing politics on the other hand is lot more successful.

You don't (usually) get promoted for doing your job - no matter how well you do it. You get promoted when you doing the next rung up, but don't have the title yet. I learnt the hard way.

[deleted]

Re: Always Do Extra

#110

Post by phyzome »

User23 wrote: post #40
beachy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will work well .... for a month.

It's been done. In one of his books Feynman describes how the scientists on the Manhattan project would "estimate" their results as what they had accomplished in the prior quarter. It's a bit messy to get it started, but once you've got a cadence you can always maintain that three months of buffer. Edit: Now I'm thinking about what kind of tooling I'd want to make the process seamless.

I've had a researcher describe to me how a lot of times they have to submit a grant proposal for what they're already doing, funded by a previous grant. If approved, it will actually be used for the next chunk of research...

(I don't recall why, exactly. Something about how there's a chicken and egg problem, where they wouldn't have enough results to support the grant proposal if they hadn't already been doing the research...)

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