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How to feel engaged at work: a software engineer's guide

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Re: How to feel engaged at work: a software engineer's guide

#141

Post by some-guy »

mattlondon wrote: post #67

I want to be less engaged! Leaving work behind both physically and mentally at 5pm is important to me. I want to treat my work as a necessary "transaction" and don't want to devote any additonal energy to it than is required. Save your mental energy for your own life and activities. Sure we all want our work to be fulfilling, but from experience I would urge against getting too "into" your work.

"Fulfilling" work is a huge privilege.

As a high school dropout who eventually did community college to a degree in computer science at a UC, I've worked all kinds of minimum wage, soul-sucking jobs in between. Just having enough money and free time now to do anything else besides my job has been such an amazing gift, and I could give two shits at this point if I sometimes have to deal with a GWT codebase regularly.

Re: How to feel engaged at work: a software engineer's guide

#142

Post by [deleted] »

dangerlibrary wrote: post #39
adamsmith143 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your manager just next level laid back? I feel like most places are going to notice and be bothered seeing the yellow circle on your Teams or Slack status consistently for long periods of time.

If managers are spending their days watching the color of the circles next to their team member's names, maybe the managers need more work to do in order to "stay engaged" at work. Of all the bad heuristics for trying to determine whether someone is being productive, this has to be near the bottom of the list. It's the digital equivalent of measuring engineer productivity by looking around the room and seeing who is…

[deleted]

Re: How to feel engaged at work: a software engineer's guide

#143

Post by lovich »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #37
AlwaysRock wrote: post #22

Eh. These all seem fine. My route? I work less. I have a typical 9-5 but 1-2 days a week I leave a little early and go to do something engaging. Never when I have meetings. Never when I have deadlines. Never when someone is waiting on something from me. But I, and I suspect most engineers, have the capacity to get my work done for a week in less than 40 hours. I used to spend time dicking off on my computer to fill t…

Is your manager just next level laid back? I feel like most places are going to notice and be bothered seeing the yellow circle on your Teams or Slack status consistently for long periods of time.

Manager here. I do the same thing and I suspect a few of my reports are as well.

As long as they continue to complete their work to my satisfaction level I don’t question them on it. I’ve made clear to them that there’s a few core hours they need to make sure they can be available for meetings with other teams and our 5-10 minute standup is about the only checkin I need. I can already see their git commits and jira history so if I really really wanted to follow along as they go I check that instead of interrupting the devs.

My management might want us to work harder if they found out, but every time they’ve tried to get more productivity without increasing pay there’s been a mini exodus of employees and I think they’ve(consciously or not) picked up on the amount of output they are going to get for their salary.

The common opinion I and other managers I know well enough to speak openly with is that this a fantastic event for good managers and terrible for bad ones. The good ones work load has diminished because we as managers no longer have to do performative micromanagement for our bosses or other managers. Good managers also already were managing against plans or results that don’t change whether remote or in office. The bad managers have had their workload increase because micromanaging remotely doesn’t appear to be a solved problem

Re: How to feel engaged at work: a software engineer's guide

#144

Post by bonestamp2 »

wreath wrote: post #136
AlwaysRock wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a manager like this. I eventually got some software to keep my computer awake/active from 7am-7pm. It was stupid.

A long Youtube video should do the “trick”

A youtube video won't work for me -- my work computer goes idle if the mouse or keyboard doesn't send input for more than 10 minutes. A lot of my work involves work off of my computer, so I just bought a USB mouse jiggler to keep my computer awake so I still get instant messages from my coworkers when I'm working offline.

Re: How to feel engaged at work: a software engineer's guide

#145

Post by willcipriano »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #80
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3D printing is a fun hobby that combines engineering skills with actual useful stuff. Just printed a set of tablecloth clamps for camping. Speaking of, camping! Nice to get some fresh air and away from screens for a bit. And I love cooking over an open fire. Speaking of, cooking! Once you get a little practice, you can really dazzle yourself and others with some delicious food. Especially when you realize that cookin…

I’d love to get into 3D printing, but the sheer amount of waste I’d produce is too much for me. I looked into recycling wasted filament into new filament, and all the reviews of different devices made it seem very hit or miss. Is there a good way to not generate plastic waste and still get into 3D printing?

If you print things that you'd buy anyway the packaging would make up for a good bit of waste plastic.

Re: How to feel engaged at work: a software engineer's guide

#147

Post by nunez »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #8

I found this to be an incredibly depressing article. It boiled down to, "think about pleasant things that aren't work." For example, > Pick an activity that you've always wanted to try. Don't have ideas? Try Wikipedia for a good list of hobbies I already have plenty of hobbies, and I'd rather work on any of them than be at work! I've always been very self-motivated. I want to work on what I want to work on. Being for…

Unfortunately, many (many!) people are not intrinsically-motivated like you or I and would rather do other things (unpopular opinion: many people are perfectly fine with doing nothing, and I mean not a DAMN thing). This article is for them.

Having intrinsic motivation for your work is a huge privilege. Be thankful for it!

Re: How to feel engaged at work: a software engineer's guide

#148

Post by afarrell »

digisign wrote: post #91
corrral wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Refactoring and adding tests can be (and very often are) pushed into the backlog, and then never done. "We'll circle back to that after this sprint (narrator: they would not circle back to it) but for now focus on these new features" Bugs are more urgent.

Disagree. This is a misconception junior devs often have... that you need to ask permission to do your job. (Not unless the boss is dysfunctional, in which case it's time to leave.) Tests and refactoring should be done as part of every ticket and typically don't need to be explicitly called out. This naturally pushes "done" so you don't run out of tickets early.

> This is a misconception junior devs often have... that you need to ask permission to do your job

I think this is driven more by junior devs still trying to figure out what their job is.

Re: How to feel engaged at work: a software engineer's guide

#149

Post by nunez »

This article means well but these tips are mostly platitudes. What I want to read is how people who do not care about work (i.e. people who are borderline anti-work) find work that is meaningful.

I do not believe that people aspire to not have purpose. I do believe that many people's work life is misaligned with their true purpose OR they don't know what their purpose is. I'd love to read more articles like that.

(I naturally love the work that I do and tend to invent work by solving problems that people think are worth solving. I cannot relate to people who straight-up don't want to work. Articles like the above would help me understand their mindset.)

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