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Boring work needs tension

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Re: Boring work needs tension

#21

Post by dakiol »

ramon156 wrote: post #7
datadrivenangel wrote: post #3

Unless you work on a dysfunctional team and any non-tracked work is forbidden, and any work you try and get tracked requires 6 pages of justification and takes 10 weeks to get prioritized enough for someone to work on...

My team isnt dysfunctional but I always get hit on the head for doing work and not making a ticket. I don't get it, if I see something bad I'm not going to search which ticket would best fit this issue. Just reviw my PR ! Also, so far most of our projects start simple but end in chaos and deadlines on the minute. I feel like we could always do better.

Doesn't that work against you? Like, I imagine that at some point you want to get a raise, so your manager has to sell your work to other managers... and they are not gonna pass around links to your pull requests/commits. They most likely want to see epics/tasks in Jira or something similar.

I mean, finding a Jira epic/project where to fit my ticket is not the hardest part of the job tbh. Also, depending on the team and your experience, loosely fixing things here and there can be a red flag or totally the opposite (e.g., I've seen how juniors or people in general with less than a decade of experience get punished when they start fixing random things here and there. On the other side seniors or staff engineers get kudos for fixing also random things but in less volume and usually more tricky ones).

Having a ticket to back up your work is never going to hurt you, though.

Re: Boring work needs tension

#22

Post by dakiol »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #19
DJBunnies wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes like two seconds to write a ticket and then tag your commits with it. You get credit for fixing the issue, avoid giant fix-along-the-way PRs, and future credit for people (maybe even you) understanding why you those changes were made.

Except then you can get your wrist slapped for starting work on a ticket without prioritization. A rigid enough process slowly kills everything.

But then if you cannot work on a ticket because of prio, you cannot either work without a ticket, isn't it? I thought the point here was doing work with or without a ticket.

Re: Boring work needs tension

#23

Post by dakiol »

kbar13 wrote: post #4

who's working at a boring job nowadays as a software dev? everywhere i see devs are wearing like 10 hats bc we have the combination of being capable yet still at the bottom of the totem pole.

I just landed a new job, and I thikn it's a boring one. At my previous job I was fixing Java's memory issues, migrating databases and riding Jira epics. At my new job I'm fixing button's padding/marging, deploying and deploying stuff on Vercel. Paycheck is the same, though; so I couldn't care less.

Re: Boring work needs tension

#24

Post by truelson »

I disagree. Boring work needs meaning, not tension. Some times boring, done consistently, is where the truly great things come from.

Tension is, imo, ephemeral. If you keep chasing it, you are chasing dopamine loops. Little good comes from this.

But meaning is different. When you can remind yourself a truly great "why" you are doing something, can re-frame it, it can help.

Most importantly, boredom, irritation, and anxiety are temporary. They are emotions. They do not define us or the work. It was a joy when I realized that all these emotions will pass. They really do. You can sit with it. You really can. You can't make it go away, but it will pass.

Re: Boring work needs tension

#25

Post by [deleted] »

DJBunnies wrote: post #18
ramon156 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My team isnt dysfunctional but I always get hit on the head for doing work and not making a ticket. I don't get it, if I see something bad I'm not going to search which ticket would best fit this issue. Just reviw my PR ! Also, so far most of our projects start simple but end in chaos and deadlines on the minute. I feel like we could always do better.

It takes like two seconds to write a ticket and then tag your commits with it. You get credit for fixing the issue, avoid giant fix-along-the-way PRs, and future credit for people (maybe even you) understanding why you those changes were made.

[deleted]

Re: Boring work needs tension

#26

Post by wavemode »

dakiol wrote: post #22
datadrivenangel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except then you can get your wrist slapped for starting work on a ticket without prioritization. A rigid enough process slowly kills everything.

But then if you cannot work on a ticket because of prio, you cannot either work without a ticket, isn't it? I thought the point here was doing work with or without a ticket.

Without a ticket, the only people who see that you're working on that thing are the engineers reviewing your code. At many companies, this creates a lot less friction.

To put it a different way: it's better to ask forgiveness than permission. Creating a ticket is like asking permission (as the project managers will see the ticket and start asking questions about why time is being spent on low-priority things). Just going ahead and pushing code is asking forgiveness - sure, someone might notice after the fact that you did some work that you weren't assigned to do, but by that point it will be considered irrelevant, as long as your other responsibilities were handled on-time.

If you've never worked at a company where these political games are necessary - count your lucky stars!

Re: Boring work needs tension

#27

Post by apwell23 »

ramon156 wrote: post #7
datadrivenangel wrote: post #3

Unless you work on a dysfunctional team and any non-tracked work is forbidden, and any work you try and get tracked requires 6 pages of justification and takes 10 weeks to get prioritized enough for someone to work on...

My team isnt dysfunctional but I always get hit on the head for doing work and not making a ticket. I don't get it, if I see something bad I'm not going to search which ticket would best fit this issue. Just reviw my PR ! Also, so far most of our projects start simple but end in chaos and deadlines on the minute. I feel like we could always do better.

why do you want to do work and not get credit for?

One of the biggest career mistakes is doing things on your own that are not aligned and approved with the management chain. Even if makes 100% sense.

They might look past it once or twice but you will get managed out eventually. Doesn't matter how good you are.

Re: Boring work needs tension

#28

Post by luckydata »

ramon156 wrote: post #7
datadrivenangel wrote: post #3

Unless you work on a dysfunctional team and any non-tracked work is forbidden, and any work you try and get tracked requires 6 pages of justification and takes 10 weeks to get prioritized enough for someone to work on...

My team isnt dysfunctional but I always get hit on the head for doing work and not making a ticket. I don't get it, if I see something bad I'm not going to search which ticket would best fit this issue. Just reviw my PR ! Also, so far most of our projects start simple but end in chaos and deadlines on the minute. I feel like we could always do better.

yeah but it's hard for others to know what you're up to, you force everyone else to do investigations and waste time. Just open a ticket and be a good team mate.

Re: Boring work needs tension

#29

Post by treve »

truelson wrote: post #24

I disagree. Boring work needs meaning, not tension. Some times boring, done consistently, is where the truly great things come from. Tension is, imo, ephemeral. If you keep chasing it, you are chasing dopamine loops. Little good comes from this. But meaning is different. When you can remind yourself a truly great "why" you are doing something, can re-frame it, it can help. Most importantly, boredom, irritation, and a…

Different people are motivated differently. My work is meaningful but it's not enough to feel like I'm having fun every day. Some dopamine is basically critical for me to function. It's always a bit wild when people feel they can generalize their own experience and assume it must be the case for everyone else. This needs more I statements.

Re: Boring work needs tension

#30

Post by serial_dev »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #17
schneems wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been on both sides of this equation. If someone is dinging you for doing extra work, it could be a sign that your priorities are not aligned. Like, if you’ve got a tight deadline coming up, it’s not the time to spend a week making CI slightly faster. On the other hand, if someone is telling you to not do work (right now), then they also need to help be responsible for finding time to do that work and understandi…

Also there is value in having an audit trail of who did what when and why, both for operations and system evolution, and for all the compliance junk. Not so much value that a tiny bit of cleanup needs a huge amount of overhead though.

If you want a trail, there is already the PR. It has description that explains why the change makes sense, code changes, reviewers, if relevant screenshots and videos.

If you want small PRs that contain one meaningful, easy to review change, and that change only concerns the development team, there is no reason to create a ticket for the sake of creating a ticket.

Also, in some dysfunctional teams creating a ticket means it requires prioritization and you will most likely never work on it and ticket will be deleted five years from today when nobody you know with at the company anymore.

Believe me, no sane CFO (or include any person not in the dev team or product team) will look up your Jira ticket explaining why you wanted to refactor the GitHub actions because you had to update 10 files whenever there’s is a new version of a tool used in your pipeline.

Also, usually these changes are so small and straightforward, arguing about putting it in a ticket takes longer than reviewing it and merging it.

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