131–140 of 177 posts
> But it does mean, push yourself to go faster than you think is healthy I really disagree with this. Aiming for something you actually think is unhealthy means you either think you should be working unhealthily ( :( ) or you don't trust your measure of healthy (in which case recalibrate that).
Efficiency is also more important than it seems. You can have lots of low quality, half-baked output. How much forethought do we put into what we will work on to begin with? Some projects and ideas are not worth the effort. Or an alternative solution to a problem is preferable over one you’ve been hammering away at for days, and would be easier to implement. And in the realm of programming, it’s often easy to take sh…
Not every product is maintained for years. In many cases it's good to be able to choose between a quick solution and a good solution, as long as these are concious decisions and some record of accrued technical debt is kept.
Technical debt manifests in a code base, most generally as various forms of pain that occur when trying to add features. That's how the company "pays interest" on the technical debt. Coding so that you can always change your mind, however that is accomplished, is the key there. (This is one place where the "Law of Demeter" really shines!)
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Rarely if ever in the beginning of the project it's 100% sure or guaranteed how long the project will be maintained. There might be some estimates, but in the long run upper management might change their minds at any time and then you are fucked if you didn't build robust architecture from the start. At least according to my experience and everyone I know in the industry.
But there are so many counterexamples to that too. I worked on a project following CI practices with a release every two weeks, and I can think of plenty of examples where we developed a feature, tested it with users, and scrapped it within a month. That team leaned toward strict practices, and we wasted so much time on code review and documentation of small details which only existed for a couple of weeks. I also th…
What if there's no automated testing worth a damn, and the penalty for a bug is very high? Been there, done that, and I have to say, you don't ever want to stay there!
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True. Too much of anything is bad. I keep this mode on for as long as I don't get mentally tired. Usually, that's a span of 2-3 hours. Surprisingly, at the end of the day (typically after two/three of these zones) I feel more fresh, satisfied and productive. But that's just me.
Too much multitasking and producing software for years has made me feel this weird thing: Which is that all accomplishments are meaningless in the end. And we are just getting older. Once a person dies they aren’t experiencing any stuff that came as a result of their effort. They may as well have just messed around and had a family sooner, or traveled, or not. It’s all meaningless anyway. I can’t shake it. Anyone fel…
I think starting your own project or startup can fall into that category, too. It can be very intrinsically fun and rewarding, and the idea is to do stuff that's intrinsically fun and rewarding while we're still alive, I think. Writing 2.0 of BigCorp's latest TPS management app carries none of that, and so it seems like a complete waste in the grand scheme of life.
Another option is to do things that really will have a significant positive impact on people's lives post-death, and despite the fact that you won't be able to see, feel, or appreciate the impact you caused after you die, it will still feel very worthwhile for the entire duration that you're still alive. Like helping fight global hunger or disease, for example. You'll forget that TPS 2.0 app a few days after you've quit that job probably, but if you quit a non-profit helping fight hunger and you made something that actually tangibly helped, you'll probably think about that your whole life.
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The question is, if the project you worked would be a mess from the beginning, would it allow your company to test and scrap features fast? Yes, it's possible, but at what cost? E.g. long hours, unhappy devs, implementation taking too long.
The point is there's a balance. I think it's perfectly reasonable to allow a certain amount of technical debt to accrue, especially when prototyping new features, and treat it as a priority to clear this debt by the time said features become a dependency to other parts of the project. It takes a bit more nuance to get a team to work that way rather than just enforcing Best Practice(tm) always , but in my experience i…
The point of code quality is to enable the company to change its mind or add new features. Over-perfectionism that gets in the way of this is going too far. At one company I worked for, the policy was not 100% strict DRY. Instead, we waited for 3 uses of the same idiom before we put it in the library. This prevented the collection of too many trivial methods, while still giving the benefits of DRY.
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Too much multitasking and producing software for years has made me feel this weird thing: Which is that all accomplishments are meaningless in the end. And we are just getting older. Once a person dies they aren’t experiencing any stuff that came as a result of their effort. They may as well have just messed around and had a family sooner, or traveled, or not. It’s all meaningless anyway. I can’t shake it. Anyone fel…
I used to feel this way, a little bit. Then I had a family and was glad to have the financial security to provide for my family compared to so many others. So, consider your heirs, and work long enough to build a nest egg cushion the devote time to having a wonderful spouse, making babies and enjoying them.
Working fast can be good, solving the right problem at any speed is better.
Personally I have not found my speed matters so much as my mental state. When all the things come together, I know what problem I'm solving, I know how to solve it, I have time to focus on it for many hours... That is when I can enter a state of flow and build a great head of steam productivity-wise.
Finally I think continued long-term attending to something can trump speed and overcome all kinds of obstacles that prevent progress at all let alone progress at some arbitrary sense of fast.
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Yeah I get the sarcasm, but I really don't understand people who accept capitalism and also accept that their hard work is worth more than what they receive in compensation. Like, shouldn't they be upset and trying to find a way to twist the system for their benefit, just like the people using them?
Capitalism isn’t about value of work: you aren’t paid for what you deliver. Free markets are about supply and demand: is someone else willing to deliver the same value for a lower cost. We are all consumers behaving like this, looking for the best deals on products. Don’t expect employers to behave differently.
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Yeah I get the sarcasm, but I really don't understand people who accept capitalism and also accept that their hard work is worth more than what they receive in compensation. Like, shouldn't they be upset and trying to find a way to twist the system for their benefit, just like the people using them?
I don't think most people have the mental bandwidth to balance rotting away in an 8 hour job, managing family life, and having some semblance of self esteem just to add on how to escape. I think the pressure release of the weekend is the only satisfaction people can afford due to the momentum of work completely eroding their concept of life. There are plenty of people who do though I imagine.
It seems like this should work the other way too? If you want to break a habit, add a delay. This seems like a good idea for a browser extension. Maybe sometimes you want to undo the work that the website did making things go faster?
That might be a really good idea. Over the years I've tried multiple website blockers, but I keep turning them off (no judgment please...). Artificially slowing down those time waster websites instead might do the trick. Not so slow it becomes unusable (or I'll turn it off) , but slow enough that over time I start associating it with a bad experience.
One goal is to quit something completely. For that, you probably want delay across the board so that it eventually saps the joy out of the experience.
Another goal is practicing moderation. With social media as an example, maybe you want to stay up to date on something, so 20 minutes a day is fine, but you don't want to fall into the trap of killing 3 hours on there. So, you could make it full speed for 20 minutes of daily usage, then gradually degrading from there. By the time the speed degrades, you've probably done all the truly appealing parts anyway and it's easier to walk away when nudged.