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Always Do Extra

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Re: Always Do Extra

#121

Post by silicon2401 »

deathanatos wrote: post #88
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…

I found and eliminated a $20k/mo mistake once. It was … stunning. In an instant, I paid for myself, and to very little fanfare. Just poking around trying to understand the high level about where the costs were. On the more mundane side, rewrote a script from bash to Python. The change didn't really change the script, in that the original is more less doing its job (just… poorly, and wasting a lot of human time on the…

Awesome job. Makes total sense how switching to Python would improve things. What was your approach to understanding what the costs were, like just looking at memory and space cost, or its cost when running on the actual infrastructure?

Re: Always Do Extra

#122

Post by xupybd »

I've been stuck in trying to do just the tasks planned. Picking up more when there is spare time. Trying to focus on only billable tasks. I stopped learning and burnt out.

Re: Always Do Extra

#124

Post by jiggawatts »

I learned this decades ago from one of the best IT consultants in the city. I was interning with him, and he told me that for every project he does "one new thing". Typically he tries a new product, a new approach, or just picks up a skill like a specific scripting language.

His thinking is that there's always padding in these projects, so may as well fill the spare time with something that will help him grow. Two new things is too many unknowns and could derail the project, but one new thing is "just right".

I've followed that philosophy ever since.

Re: Always Do Extra

#125

Post by cutemonster »

ileight2 wrote: post #68
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.

Everyone knows damn well enough that internal politics can either make this story shine like a diamond, be pushed into a black morass, or everything in between. Internal politics supersedes all best practices in any country, market, or decade

> Everyone knows

New university graduates don't, at least I didn't :-)

And they can stay clueless for many years, if they're a bit shielded from office politics by a caring manager

Re: Always Do Extra

#126

Post by cutemonster »

alienthrowaway wrote: post #96
mek6800d2 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! I think we would all like to come work for that perfect organization where you've found a place. Perhaps I am the only person in the world who has ever heard the phrase "office politics", but, in my experience, as ileight2 says in an earlier comment, internal politics can supersede any other consideration (including money!) in any country, market, organization, and time period. I've found myself, peers, superior…

Communicating your ideas well and convincing people you're right are both valuable skills that can be used or abused (which is when they are derided as "politics"). Engineers who do not master these skills are putting a cap to their career growths, if they desire to be anything other than ICs. I say this as an introvert and as a person who chooses words carefully to reflect my best guess at the truth, which non-engin…

It seems people here mean different things with the word "politics" -- to some, it means ~ manipulation, to others, effective communication?

And then of course people disagree about if it's good or bad or normal?

> Engineers who do not master these skills are putting a cap to their career growths,

Maybe can make sense for an organization to give everyone some practice in communication and presenting ideas -- to give the good ideas better chances (also if the idea person initially wasn't a good communicator)

Re: Always Do Extra

#127

Post by cutemonster »

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.

> what kind of tooling

A private Git repo where all the work happens, and a public repo where everything is 3 months old, but history rewritten so the dates are up to date?

And a cron job and scripts to automate it all

Re: Always Do Extra

#128

Post by shepherdjerred »

silicon2401 wrote: post #118
shepherdjerred wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Exactly! I worked on things that had value for my team and was interesting to me.

I bounced ideas around with coworkers, but I never asked for approval. As long as you’re doing your assigned work I don’t think your manager should care. This will depend on your company/manager of course; I was lucky to have ~3 managers during my tenure who were hands off

Re: Always Do Extra

#129

Post by deathanatos »

silicon2401 wrote: post #121
deathanatos wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found and eliminated a $20k/mo mistake once. It was … stunning. In an instant, I paid for myself, and to very little fanfare. Just poking around trying to understand the high level about where the costs were. On the more mundane side, rewrote a script from bash to Python. The change didn't really change the script, in that the original is more less doing its job (just… poorly, and wasting a lot of human time on the…

Awesome job. Makes total sense how switching to Python would improve things. What was your approach to understanding what the costs were, like just looking at memory and space cost, or its cost when running on the actual infrastructure?

The cost thing was just looking at the bill. I've worked at some companies where engineering didn't even have access to the AWS bill, for example, which is rather unfortunate, since engineering is where the knowledge of "wow, this pie slice shouldn't exist" is. (I do think finance could? should? have noticed that bill, since I in part noticed it b/c the monthly total was too high. But I might have been looking at a more broken-out number than the actual, final total there were some other things that might have gotten mixed in that would have dulled the signal enough to make it plausibly missable.

But after seeing the number, it was a pretty quick task to break it out into various areas over time (like total VM$/time, total storage$/time), find the category that grew, and repeat until the offender was found.

The script thing was mostly about time. Bash's output was only so intelligible (it was basically |grep|awk|grep sort of thing) and engineers would get confused, ask questions, and it soaked up enough time to make me say "let's rewrite this so I never have to answer these questions again".

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