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Always Do Extra

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Re: Always Do Extra

#111

Post by a_imho »

simorley wrote: post #29

Wrong. Business is about relationships. Be competent and do what is minimally required. Do extra networking or befriending your manager/boss/etc. People who get ahead build relationships. The slaves stick around to do the extra work. Competence + relationship > competence + extra work It's so funny how all the business advice is about how to be a good slave rather than what really gets you ahead.

This is one of those things that everyone knows is true, but no one can acknowledge it openly. Without vested interest it is simply natural to put one's interest ahead of the company one works for. In fact, doing extra, or normalizing extra can even make coworkers look bad.

https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2016/12/28/your-employer...

Re: Always Do Extra

#112

Post by killtimeatwork »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #50

Never do more. Never do extra. Always do less. Still homeworking? I recommend playing the piano for the rest of the week after you finished your properly overestimated tickets. Any other instrument will do. You can also cook one new dish a day, work out or learn any other new hobby! Feeling uninspired? Just clean, do a spa day or watch tv. Trapped at work? Read a book! You could also try audio books if reading isn‘t…

This works until you need to find another job.

Re: Always Do Extra

#113

Post by dkarl »

ornornor wrote: post #78
dkarl wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I think doing Extra for personal development is rarely aligned with job performance, and you have to be very, very good and conscientious about creating that alignment. More often people get away with it by tanking the productivity of their coworkers and making the business increasingly reliant on their personal productivity. But to do this you need weak or absent technical management. I think doing Extra, M…

I read that graph differently where doing the work + more/extra/nothing is your 8h day. And so if you do the work + any of these it will amount to 8h. If you do nothing, you’ll still be stuck at the office anyway because if you do the work and leave early you’ll be asked to do more since you have leftover time. You won’t get to spend that time on your family.

If you're working from home and getting your job done to the satisfaction of your employer in six hours, I think you can do what you like with the extra two hours. You may need to be available to your coworkers, but the rest is up to you.

Re: Always Do Extra

#114

Post by rubyist5eva »

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.

In agile/scrum isn’t this just measuring velocity?

Re: Always Do Extra

#115

Post by stayux »

stkdump wrote: post #93
stayux wrote: post #67

Sharing my limited experience. In any way or form I don't imply that my point of view is right. Producing software is complex process that requires constant adjustment and change. I have successfully run my company (middle level web-shop) and delivered results for more than 16 years. In my PM practice I never required my engineers to do "extra". In my view this is not productive approach at all. Creating the adequate…

I think the idea is not to do overtime. The idea is to use some of the slack you have because you finish your normal work early to consider process/architectural improvements or similar. Some people here consider it so obvious, that they even say it is part of your normal work. Well, I would say this mindset is much better than having worker bees who don't ever question anything and you end up with large inefficienci…

I get the idea. I am not sure about the practical implications outside the individual advancements.

I have somewhat anecdotal evidence that the best production environment is composed of different people, in some part of your production you need "worker bees", and in architectural and research processes you need people with natural curiosity and experimental nature.

Even the author has some doubts of his argument in production.

>Shirking our Normal Work in favor of Extra might be more interesting, but it makes us shitty teammates at best, and unethical at worst.

Re: Always Do Extra

#116

Post by lowercase1 »

>And it's with this decision that every reasonably happy, veteran developer I know distinguishes themselves. They all choose Extra.

Selection without causality can explain this. Turns out people who survive either have personality or environment that enable them to feel the Extra work is worth it. Where I'm at, it certainly doesn't.

Re: Always Do Extra

#117

Post by kuratkull »

IanCal wrote: post #101
kuratkull wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Maybe that kind of work is beneficial only if it's done by people who find it interesting enough and thus do it on their own accord? I know a bunch of people who don't like this kind of exploration so including this in their task would probably make them start looking for easier tickets/jobs.

Re: Always Do Extra

#118

Post by silicon2401 »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #23
silicon2401 wrote: post #3

Does anybody have good examples of 'extra' work they've done? I agree with the author's assertion that doing extra benefits one a lot more than baseline or more work. It's essentially a way to inject creativity and studying into one's normal work, as opposed to just flat-out working on a different project or straight up studying documentation. That comes with the benefit of being able to show it off in various ways t…

A lot of my time as an entry level engineer at a FAANG was doing "extra" work. It included: * Migrating our applications from Java 8 -> Java 11. * Identifying that our fleet was way over provisioned and then downscaling leading to a huge reduction in infra cost. * Refactor our infrastructure-as-code package to be more maintainable. Most of those things were useful but not prioritized. I found them interesting or wort…

So you did your regular work and in your extra time during normal work hours, you also thought of and executed on these ideas? Did you ever seek approval or just go for it? By the time I proposed ideas like this in a PR or something, I imagine my manager would question why I'm spending so much time on this kind of thing

Re: Always Do Extra

#119

Post by silicon2401 »

glic3rinu wrote: post #9
silicon2401 wrote: post #3

Does anybody have good examples of 'extra' work they've done? I agree with the author's assertion that doing extra benefits one a lot more than baseline or more work. It's essentially a way to inject creativity and studying into one's normal work, as opposed to just flat-out working on a different project or straight up studying documentation. That comes with the benefit of being able to show it off in various ways t…

Building on the web form example given by the author, there is a lot of extra that one could do: Improve the design, improve user experience, improve performance, format/cleanup the code, add some extra features, add flags to enable alternative behaviour ...

This one is a good, understandable example, though I wonder how I would pitch the value add for these things. Usually my team is so busy I imagine my manager telling me to focus on other work first

Re: Always Do Extra

#120

Post by silicon2401 »

oneepic wrote: post #44
silicon2401 wrote: post #3

Does anybody have good examples of 'extra' work they've done? I agree with the author's assertion that doing extra benefits one a lot more than baseline or more work. It's essentially a way to inject creativity and studying into one's normal work, as opposed to just flat-out working on a different project or straight up studying documentation. That comes with the benefit of being able to show it off in various ways t…

On the topic of 'looking around for potential improvements/optimizations': I pretty much eliminated my team's several-GB memory spikes we got from time to time. We all knew they were a problem from our dashboards, but no one investigated it, or wrote a ticket for ourselves. I felt curious one day during some downtime @ work, checked logs, debugged locally, and submitted a tiny patch with pictures of the memory saving…

Great idea. I had assumed this kind of thing was just due to AWS infra; didn't even think it could be coming from the code itself.
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