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Bored People Quit

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Re: Bored People Quit

#121

Post by 5hoom »

mentat wrote: post #84
Hisoka wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anybody did that with me, my respect for them would go up 10-fold.. instantly.

Yes, waiting for someone's real answer because you care can't be turned on if there isn't a relationship there, but it is the most essential show of respect.

Eye contact or lack thereof is a poor indicator of a persons respect. In some cultures it is considered very rude to look your superior directly in the eye, & trying to force the issue will just make people very uncomfortable around you.

Re: Bored People Quit

#122

Post by pnathan »

1337p337 wrote: post #95
rcfox wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds a lot like, "The beatings will stop when morale improves."

It sort of was. At one point, he said to me, "What are you complaining for? I haven't even started the death-march yet."

Ah, that's the point where you start your resume marching....

Re: Bored People Quit

#123

Post by j_baker »

nhashem wrote: post #6

I think another key point is that boredom is inevitable, at least at any company bigger than a startup. Software engineering is about solving problems. You get hired, and solve problems. Time passes and you get better at solving these problems, so they give you harder problems in the same domain space. Eventually you get so good at solving these problems in this domain space that you become The Guy. "Oh you have a qu…

I think another key point is that boredom is inevitable, at least at any company bigger than a startup.

Startups aren't all fun and games either. If anything it's worse because you have a lot of boring work and nobody else to offload it on.

Re: Bored People Quit

#124

Post by gambler »

Call me a cynic, but I think most managers in medium-to-big companies would never believe that there is something wrong with the structure of the work their handing down, so they would never try to fix it. Developer turnaround of X percent is expected and simply factored into the process by making people replaceable. I think that's the root cause of the problem. Not enough people in change really care that their developers are bored.

Re: Bored People Quit

#125

Post by civilian »

matwood wrote: post #86
edw519 wrote: post #5

Axiom: Boring work can never compete with Hacker News. Axiom: Hacker News can never compete with interesting work. Theorem: The interestingness of my work is inversely related to my Hacker News participation. Supporting data: Today I'm regression testing. I'll be here all day, folks. Idea: Employers, monitor your logs for Hacker News. Occasional spikes probably indicate boring, but necessary tasks. Chronic use probab…

My personal axiom: Boring/Uninteresing work leads to me working more on my personal/startup projects. Thus, I should be looking for a job that has nothing but boring work. :)

While I was learning how to code (and taking night classes) I worked data entry. Our machines were ubuntu, so they already had python on 'em. In the last few months there, I was spending ~20% of my work time coding. :D

Now my job title actually says "developer" and I'm kept busy. But I kind of miss all the sandbox time I had. I knocked out so many projecteuler.net problems.

Re: Bored People Quit

#126

Post by civilian »

techiferous wrote: post #38

Relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Hah! It is relevant. My manager thinks that I am annoyed when I am distracted from my task at hand. And that is true, to an extent. But I'm really annoyed when he bothers me with trivial minutiae that derail (instead of complimenting) my flow.

Re: Bored People Quit

#127

Post by eropple »

munin wrote: post #94
ZoFreX wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you could take a valid reason for firing someone to your manager, and they would be fired, I think that would be enough to manage the team right?

in a perfect world, yes. but now you're relying on 2 competent, motivated people instead of 1 competent and motivated person. why rely on 2? why not just give the project manager the authority? is there something about their ability in this regard you don't trust? then, why are they a project manager? the success or failure of the project could impact the jobs of all of the members of the project, and potentially eve…

Project managers manage projects, not engineers. In many cases, project managers are stakeholders in the project. They have conflicted interests. Being able to tell your project manager "no" is important, because it allows engineers to arrest function and scope creep without fearing for their jobs by saying "no" to the wrong person.

.

Where I am right now, we report instead to technical managers, and are allotted to project managers' projects based on scheduling availability, project importance, and a number of other factors.

Re: Bored People Quit

#128

Post by ikarous »

jrockway wrote: post #113
jayx wrote: post #105

I am a college student who is currently doing my summer internship at a megacorp as a .NET MVC developer and I would not say the internship was what I was looking for. I am OK with the technologies they are using, it's just the boredom caused by endless waiting between each process that frustrates me. I got hired because I had spent a lot of my spare time working on my own RoR projects and my web development skills m…

You'll probably look back. Small companies suck too, just in different ways than big companies. Same with startups. Everything sucks; what matters is how you deal with it.

> Everything sucks; what matters is how you deal with it.

Indeed. There are usually positive actions you can take to improve any situation in a big company or a small one. Joel Spoelsky wrote an article about working as a low-level developer in an established team that might not be doing things optimally. His first piece of advice? Just do it.

Search for "Getting Things Done When You're a Grunt." It should be the first hit.

Re: Bored People Quit

#129

Post by nostrademons »

ggchappell wrote: post #101
edw519 wrote: post #5

Axiom: Boring work can never compete with Hacker News. Axiom: Hacker News can never compete with interesting work. Theorem: The interestingness of my work is inversely related to my Hacker News participation. Supporting data: Today I'm regression testing. I'll be here all day, folks. Idea: Employers, monitor your logs for Hacker News. Occasional spikes probably indicate boring, but necessary tasks. Chronic use probab…

> Axiom: Boring work can never compete with Hacker News. > Axiom: Hacker News can never compete with interesting work. I disagree[1] with your second axiom. HN, in limited quantities[2], counts as professional development, I would say. That means that limited HN usage is necessary , which certainly helps it "compete". If I were interviewing someone for a programming job, and I learned that they never read HN or SO or…

Interesting work will teach you far more than HN will. It's very easy to overestimate the amount of professional development you get from Internet websites, because at the end of a session, you can point to an article and say "I learned that". However, at the end of a project, you will very rarely be able to point to something and say "I learned that", but you will have unconsciously absorbed so many problem-solving techniques that you're miles ahead of the guys who sat and read a book the whole time.

I say this as someone who sat on the Internet and read websites about programming all through college. Yes, it was useful - but nowhere near as useful as the time I spent actually programming.

Re: Bored People Quit

#130

Post by Lewisham »

rcfox wrote: post #120
Lewisham wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I was overqualified for the actual job (by my own interpretation, and of the way it was advertised). I was overqualified for their interpretation of the job role. More specifically: I was the only full-time developer on a database which processed welfare payments for a smallish country, to the tune of hundreds of USD a year. This, I think, is not really the sort of system you would call trivial, nor one…

> This, I think, is not really the sort of system you would call trivial, nor one that the government would want a B or C grade student as the only full-time member on. While I sympathize with the rest of the story, I think you place too much weight on one's ability to jump through hoops to get grades. (Disclaimer: My marks were pretty bad, but I was also busy writing games/AIs, and getting into trouble for improving…

Yes, fair enough. I was using it as a "B or C grade" as in "beef grades" in my mind, but I realize what I typed was about actual marks from universities. I totally agree with your assessment :)
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