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How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

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Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#131

Post by rxtexit »

Vespasian wrote: post #50
farts_mckensy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, some studies show that mildly depressed people have a more accurate model of the world. So what if you were right about your job initially, and the CBT is basically just gaslighting you into spinning things in a positive way?

Assuming that is true, does a more negative way of viewing things actually benefit you (even if it would be slightly more "accurate")? If one has a choice (that means if there is no case of clinical depression): At least anecdotally a bit of optimism improves my life quality a lot and results in a higher productivity, proactive solution finding and a more pleasant work environment. Constantly looking at the negative…

It isn't true, it is obvious bullshit.

It is like making the argument that the most accurate view of life is doing nothing because we are all going to die anyway.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#132

Post by lazide »

auggierose wrote: post #128
lazide wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a flip on the framing, and a non trivial one. One is love what you do - which assumes regardless of what you’re doing, love it. The other, do what you love - means choose things that make you love them. They’re completely opposite in what choice they’re telling people to make.

No, it doesn't tell you "regardless". It tells you, if you do something, you better love it. So if you start doing something, and it turns out you don't love it, you better stop doing it, and do something else instead. As an extreme example, take Nazis managing a concentration camp. If it turns out you are not a bad enough person to love it, you better stop doing it.

That is not at all what ‘love what you do’ means. You’re talking about ‘do what you love’. That means what you are talking about.

Both of these sayings can of course be applied to evil as well as good, and be either positive or pathological in impact depending on the situation.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#133

Post by bustling-noose »

mettamage wrote: post #130
bustling-noose wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. While depression and negativity leads you to see things practically rather than in an optimistic and hopeful way, the quality of life and satisfaction in a little optimistic world is much better. I am yet to read Daniel Kahneman but he talks about optimism a lot.

I recommend Martin Seligman. I've read some of Kahneman's academic work. Martin Seligman changed my life with Learned Optimism.

Sounds like my next read. Thinking fast and slow was something I just started but it seems like something I want to read when I’m functioning better.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#134

Post by auggierose »

lazide wrote: post #132
auggierose wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it doesn't tell you "regardless". It tells you, if you do something, you better love it. So if you start doing something, and it turns out you don't love it, you better stop doing it, and do something else instead. As an extreme example, take Nazis managing a concentration camp. If it turns out you are not a bad enough person to love it, you better stop doing it.

That is not at all what ‘love what you do’ means. You’re talking about ‘do what you love’. That means what you are talking about. Both of these sayings can of course be applied to evil as well as good, and be either positive or pathological in impact depending on the situation.

I think we both interpret the mere words in specific ways. It is just that my interpretation is more logical, and also more general, than yours.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#135

Post by a_c »

profsummergig wrote: post #119
sour-taste wrote: post #38

This isn't at all a rebuttal of the post, more a different perspective. I started a new job while basically deeply depressed. It colored all my opinions of the company and my coworkers. As I'm coming out of that through a combination of medication and intensive CBT I'm realizing that a lot of the negativity I felt towards my job was the result of the depression. As things improve I'm realizing that the job is mostly…

Steve Jobs said it most profoundly: "love what you do". This is the opposite of "do what you love". I wish I understood where he learned this. It's very profound (and true).

Smile more, you will be happier. On how long to know if a job is right, it depends how much you know what you are looking for.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#136

Post by zbentley »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #21
__s wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked with Ruby. It was a delight. But it has to be maintained, dynamic typing loses upfront safety & allows for a mess where you have to analyse the whole program to have any idea what some function is expected to take in & put out I'm glad static typing came back

Analyze the whole program? I steadfastly refused to ever attempt do that. "method(:foo).source_location" from the Rails console and I've got the only answer that matters. Most functions were monkey patched at least once anyways, so you'd never know by searching for the implementation where it was.

But like…this is very telling, no? If major conventions in a language involve runtime debugging/printing actions to just find out where a method is defined (and your approach here is the norm in every Ruby codebase I’ve worked on; this isn’t an attack on you in the slightest) that doesn’t say anything good about the Ruby ecosystem.

Hell, just finding out what methods can be called from a given code location is something that most Rubyists I’ve met answer either with a runtime debugger or hard-fought and non-transferable memory about a particular piece of code.

Like, I don’t need perfectly accurate programmatically-available answers to those questions in my IDE (though that would be nice). I’m fine reading code and working it out if things are added via reflection/metaprogramming. But if the domain of code to read to determine those things is “who knows/could be anything in the codebase or dependencies”, this is a poor quality tool and/or community.

If you read that and think I’m complaining about one specific instance, codebase, or Ruby community habit, I promise I’m not. It’s not about the 2014 obsession with “DSL”s (that aren’t really DSLs); it’s not about method_missing, open classes, pervasive monkey patching, and so on. It’s about all those things, and more, and the overwhelming enthusiasm (with no small side of smugness) with which the Ruby ecosystem doubles down on them constantly.

Is it the language itself? The community? I don’t know, but I know there are plenty of equivalently capable alternatives to both, and that’s enough for me to avoid the hell out of Ruby and Rubyists for a long time to come.

Is Ruby the worst? No, that honor goes to a multimillion line Perl monolith worked on by far too many not-as-clever-as-they-thought-they-were people over far too long. But all the Ruby I’ve worked on is close enough to that experience to make me question the choice of tool.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#137

Post by detourdog »

auggierose wrote: post #122
profsummergig wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve Jobs said it most profoundly: "love what you do". This is the opposite of "do what you love". I wish I understood where he learned this. It's very profound (and true).

It is not the opposite. If you do what you love, you love what you do. So its more of, "love what you do" is what to aim for, and "do what you love" is one way to achieve this.

I think the subtle difference is "Do what you love" is passive one is not actively doing anything. They have ideal in their head that may not match reality. "Love what you do" in my eyes is being present and actively loving the moment while doing the work.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#138

Post by maccard »

mettamage wrote: post #129
lazide wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a flip on the framing, and a non trivial one. One is love what you do - which assumes regardless of what you’re doing, love it. The other, do what you love - means choose things that make you love them. They’re completely opposite in what choice they’re telling people to make.

My ex-girlfriend [1] did this with us and household tasks, especially cooking. I've gone from hating household tasks to being slightly positive about it. I've gone from hating cooking to loving it. I've tried this with programming. After 15 years, I'm only mildly positive about programming. That has more to do with the culture though, not the activity. I wish there was a business analyst/entrepreneurial programmer hy…

Those roles exist but they’re really senior staff+ into director level roles (at a smaller org). The problem is that they’re really two roles bundled into one - discovery and development . You need to be aware of business impact, pain points, upcoming tech, your competitors, and you need to be able to execute to just the right level of finish.

The bad ones identify solutions that work for huge orgs and try to apply them to everyone and don’t implement them. This is your typical architecture astronaut. Or, they get bogged down in perfection and are massively hands on when they should have stopped long ago. Also your typical micromanaging vp of engineering.

But one or two good ones can be utterly enormous force multipliers.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#139

Post by languagehacker »

Huge yes to this one -- especially on the part about how important this is for managers to get right. I spent two years white-knuckling the wrong job for the wrong reasons. Pretty much every day I am reminded in some way of how thankful I am for having left and found a job with a culture I'm a better fit for.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#140

Post by erikerikson »

pianoben wrote: post #81
throwanem wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the sound of it, your POV working at one big company. The codebases I've worked on that did similar ARR numbers with similar depths of commit history were in Javascript and TypeScript, so "your argument is invalid," right? Why not? It's just what you said and my credentials are better. What's the most in revenue one second of your life was ever worth? For me that's about $35k. But no, you go ahead, try to big leag…

I don't mean to say one of us has better bona-fides, only that there is an existence proof to the contrary of your post. You claim that rails' lack of discipline promotes unmaintainable code shepherded by empire-builders; I claim that this is not always so. I gave the numbers I did to emphasize that rails (and rails shops) can succeed even at that scale. Not sure what I said that came off as an attack on you or your…

I don't see an attack either, FWIW
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