101–110 of 322 posts
I was like the author of the article, then I realized that I was solving problems that were created by other peoples' incompetence. Sure they were challenging, fun but they didn't bring anything postive overall. The incompetent people are still there - causing more problems. So I decided to find a worthwhile problem that deserved my talent. And I did. And I am now even more happy than before.
One of thing I have noticed of good software engineers is while they are trying to solve problems, they also communicate with clarity to upper management chain. The clarity they bring to the table was always appreciated and also puts them in the career growth path easily.
Every good engineer is an excellent communicator. Everyone who is not an excellent communicator is not a good engineer. Everyone hates that this is true but it remains true. A lot of people are very good programmers who have mistaken that for being good engineers, however.
Which is not really different to what we're already doing, translating human requirements to machine code. Just that communication skills will become an even bigger part of the job.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I frame it not as turning a dial down, but as switching channel from practical problem-solver to emotional problem-solver. Often when someone wants to talk about a situation involving difficult feelings, they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective. You can help by being curious about what they're say…
> they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective. If you’re speaking to a rational person with good intentions and good self-management this can help a lot. If the other person doesn’t have good emotional regulation and is prone to catastrophizing, exaggeration, or excessive self-victimization then vali…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel more useful now more than anything. The amount of ai generated planning and fluffy workloads that I've been able to just delete from the team has saved the company many engineering hours. Not least of all in bugs. Value your expertise and experience. It's only greeting more valuable, not less.
It's great that this is a case for you. I actually enjoy process of writing code, understanding deeply the system I work on, finding elegant solutions to business problems - not just a list of checkboxes with features for a given sprint that agent churns in background. Sure, practically I understand that business doesn't care how well something is written as long as it works somewhat reliably. I might eventually adap…
Sometimes I feel that if I said tomorrow that we need to have our own operating system, they would say "sure! go ahead! just make sure to send the expense reports if you need to pay for more tokens with the company's credit card".
> I don’t mind the ways in which my job is dysfunctional, because it matches the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional As a fellow traveller, I offer one caution: learn to turn this down in personal relationships as it can be counterproductive. It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. Some times people just want to be heard. It b…
I get stuck on asking “why am I solving this problem” too much. I am surrounded by technical problems that it would give a dopamine hit to solve and I’d feel the pleasure of helping my fellow man, but 99% of them feel like they shouldn’t even exist and solving them doesn’t really lead to any meaningful progress beyond providing me job security and money. (How) do people deal with this?
Deciding which problems should be solved, identifying where there is business value in solving them, is pretty much the definition of business leadership. I think the only real answer is moving into management, where you can more effectively argue against spending effort on things that aren't worthwhile.
giving a like for quoting Gogol and Akakiy Akakievich (I wish you could understand this russian wordplay and what's meaning about that nicknames and why they were chosen)
> I think in Russian this is supposed to be an obviously silly name, like “Poop Poopson”. Is this correct? From the footnotes.
> I don’t mind the ways in which my job is dysfunctional, because it matches the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional As a fellow traveller, I offer one caution: learn to turn this down in personal relationships as it can be counterproductive. It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. Some times people just want to be heard. It b…
> It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. This can become toxic in itself, though. Some times venting and being angry is what someone wants to do, but in a workplace environment that’s not a good thing to implicitly condone and support. I’ve had some team members who just wanted to vent but not discuss solutions and (again, in a w…