161–170 of 235 posts
It helps me because I have a habit of fixating on the team’s mission and ignoring my own happiness, so the monthly check-in keeps me from staying somewhere longer than I should.
For my past several jobs, I've put together a job satisfaction matrix that I fill out once a month. If it scores below a threshold three months in a row, that triggers a job search. It helps me because I have a habit of fixating on the team’s mission and ignoring my own happiness, so the monthly check-in keeps me from staying somewhere longer than I should.
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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.
For my past several jobs, I've put together a job satisfaction matrix that I fill out once a month. If it scores below a threshold three months in a row, that triggers a job search. It helps me because I have a habit of fixating on the team’s mission and ignoring my own happiness, so the monthly check-in keeps me from staying somewhere longer than I should.
Recruiting gives me an idea of how much the company generally cares about their processes. I like when am I given a timeline of the process and steps and now when I get a random call from the recruiter in the middle of a meeting at my current job because the new co didn't ask when I'm free.
Onboarding tells me how much the team is haphazardly shipping vs actually owning their product. The teams that have sucked are the ones where the onboarding doc is heavily out of date (like all covering a now-unused access request system) or I can't even get help from the team within my first week to have someone send me access requests to copy for the things that are missing. The good teams are where my manager already provisioned my access before I joined and immediately addresses any misses when I flag them. Or if they have good enough docs for me to quickly handle it myself.
Career development is another one that takes a little longer to suss out, but if I can have a good first-week chat with my manager where they will explain what my baseline performance expectations are and what I need to do to overachieve and get on promotion/raise track, that's a good flag. The teams I haven't been able to get that early from are the ones where manager usually doesn't care not only about your career but also about app maintainability or anything past their next meeting with their own manager.
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It's not difficult to imagine a number of scenarios where that perspective could bite you in the ass. If you have a false impression of a person's character because you've jedi mindtricked yourself into not thinking the worst of people, you might end up trusting an untrustworthy person. If you are in a toxic work environment, and you convince yourself it's not so bad, you might end up staying in a situation that is a…
> If you are in a toxic work environment, and you convince yourself it's not so bad, you might end up staying in a situation that is actively harming you. I hate a toxic work environment too, but let’s be real, everything is fake at software companies, so there is no “harm” happening if you stay. So what if leadership is terrible, if you can play their little games, take their money, and not tailspin into a depressio…
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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?
CBT can definitely veer into gaslightning territory. But then, if it helps you cope, so what? It is the same with religion. Even though gods objectively do not exist, at least not in a literal sense, it can still help people to cope better with their life and be an overall positive force. Or extremely harmful when abused. The world is pretty depressing. Everyone is telling themselves little lies one way or another ju…
That's myopic. There's only so much "reframing" you can do before the tension begins to rear its head. Serenity now, insanity later.
You can usually find out if a job is wrong for you within days, sometimes hours. You might never know for sure if a job is right for you though.
A good smell test for a job that isn't right for you is whether you ask yourself if it is the right job early on, or if you even have thoughts of quitting in the first year/month/week, apart from being overwhelmed by all the new faces. The only "bad" job that I had was with a very good company (wonderful people, great benefits, just the code absolutely sucked), so that was making the decision very hard to quit. In la…
I'm sort of in this situation right now
Lots of good things about the people, the pay, the benefits
But man
We are a "microservice" architecture with something like 5x more git repos than software devs
It's a nightmare
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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…
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.
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> If you are in a toxic work environment, and you convince yourself it's not so bad, you might end up staying in a situation that is actively harming you. I hate a toxic work environment too, but let’s be real, everything is fake at software companies, so there is no “harm” happening if you stay. So what if leadership is terrible, if you can play their little games, take their money, and not tailspin into a depressio…
There's a mental cost to that. Essentially having to put on a mask and performatively "play their little games" is taxing. Some are better at it than others. But in those quiet moments, don't you ask yourself what percentage of your life you have to be a different person?