251–260 of 278 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm young, single and without children, and even 40 hours a week feels like a tad much, even when I realistically worked 5-6 hours a day. I can't imagine a life of 60-90 hour weeks be worth whatever carrot they dangle in front of those poor sods.
We aren't "poor sods" or carrot-led horses. We're just motivated by different things than you. In my case, fully mission driven
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Workaholism is an addiction and a mental health problem. I have worked for 50+ hours a week for 4 years and last year I became a manager and have worked 60-80 for the last year. On bad weeks, I joke to my wife that I am headed to my 9-5... because I sometimes work 9am to 5am and get up the next day for another 9am meeting. I am absolutely doing real work, if anything, it's my non-work life that is "theater." I won't…
Have you considered therapy to try to get to the bottom of this? Not being snarky -- you yourself seem to realize that this is really detrimental to your wellbeing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We aren't "poor sods" or carrot-led horses. We're just motivated by different things than you. In my case, fully mission driven
What mission is this important?
Of course this assumes that the 40th-80th hours provide marginal utility (perhaps a big assumption).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the risk of pedantically zooming in on your choice of words: > I only listen to podcasts that are well-produced and edited. Very few actually are. I disagree. Good production is a nice extra, but it's secondary. I'd rather listen to Miles Davis on vinyl, than a mediocre musician on high-bitrate FLAC. Some examples: I recently discovered the Happy Path Programming podcast. It's a good listen as the hosts are knowle…
I think high production value is probably decently correlated to content; after all, people usually won't invest in something they believe to be low-quality. So in that sense it may be good enough a filter for a world awash in crud.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I only listen to podcasts that are well-produced and edited. Very few actually are. There are way too many people who think podcasting is just turning on a microphone and babbling away with a friend or guest for however long they can do it. I only have a few hours a day I can spend on podcasts and I'm not going to waste it listening to some inane meandering chitchat. "Put it on the background then" ...yea, that's whe…
At the risk of pedantically zooming in on your choice of words: > I only listen to podcasts that are well-produced and edited. Very few actually are. I disagree. Good production is a nice extra, but it's secondary. I'd rather listen to Miles Davis on vinyl, than a mediocre musician on high-bitrate FLAC. Some examples: I recently discovered the Happy Path Programming podcast. It's a good listen as the hosts are knowle…
There are very few podcasts that can stay on topic and interesting past the 1 - 1.5 hour mark.
The only exception to this rule are the Christopher McQuarrie Spoiler Special episodes of the Empire Podcast (now behind a firewall). The dude can keep spewing fascinating stuff about his movies longer than the movies' combined runtime =)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The success of the project as a whole is measured, of course. But it's 20 people working on it, from design to sales to ops to customers relations to devs. How could you possibly pin 20% of the profit (not even the turnover, but the profit ) on one guy? Even if he improved the SQL queries and that immediately led to more sales, making the choice to work on that over other things was probably not his.
Nobody is asking to pin all that on exactly one person. That’s a silly overly engineery way of looking at it. It’s a team effort. Being part of the team who did X is enough. You can then talk about your specific individual contribution when appropriate. Just like everyone in an NBA team “wins the championship” and gets to put “winner” on their resume. Or how hockey players say “I won the Stanley cup”, even though the…
There's a big difference between:
1. I optimized SQL queries for Nameless Corp to increase profits 20%
2. I optimized SQL queries for Nameless Corp on a multi-million dollar project.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I made the query for X, an operation that is performed Y times per day, Z% faster resulting in N% increase in Xs performed daily. This meant we could (defer hiring additional headcount|do more per day)." Many teams don't invest in the tooling required to measure this kind of impact, but it's possible to ballpark it.
That’s a good example. The math doesn’t need to be precise, and you don’t need to track it down to lines of code. “Part of team of X developers who delivered product Y that produced $Z in revenue.” is enough for anyone to very roughly ballpark-estimate impact.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not every format is for everyone. I personally listen to podcasts or audio books every day when driving and in my lunch break.
People are different, and I like to learn about other people's methods and the potential benefits thereof. So let me ask ... when you're listening to podcasts, do you ever take anything away from them that is actionable? Do you take notes? Do you summarise? How do you ensure that the lessons in the podcast don't get lost? Do you "Listen with attention" or are they mostly just background? I find that podcasts are ther…
I can answer this a little from my perspective.
There are three major inspirations for tech podcasts that I use personally.
The first two: https://www.interactive.org/Interviews/the_game_makers_noteb...
and https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes
are both in the format of "veterans talk to each other about their careers and the things they've learned". They always roll in the format of two old friends catching up, but in a guided way in terms of their life, experiences and learnings from along the way.
These are the ones that I want to emulate, but with a focus on programming for enterprise, business and startups.
I'm personally most excited in talking to what I think of very respectfully as "cogwheel" or "workhorse" developers. I think developers are vastly under-celebrated when compared to other creatives ... like some person who can cry on demand gets a tiny golden statue and applause ... but the person who re-writes 1500 lines of SQL into a one liner and reduces a week long job down to seconds DOESN'T?! You're telling me I have to go out and buy my OWN tiny little golden statue and play an applause loop on my cellphone?
That's bullshit!
At least that's where I want to start, I've seen some interviews in the last few days with people like
Ton Roosendaal - the creator of blender - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg
After I've developed the interview skills to talk to the people who genuinely make me feel a little like a programming fanboy. Uncle Bob, Douglas Crockford, Carmack, Hanselman, Jeffrey Snover, David Fowler? I've got way too much respect for them to even ask until I look at my own stuff and say "I'm good enough at this to do them justice" (edit, not that I don't respect my friends, but I think I have enough capital with them that they'd do it as a favor and be willing to re-take any technical mistakes)
But seriously ... go up to idle thumbs and listen to the Sid Meier podcast https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/sid-meier-... (four parts!).
Or listen to Ted Price (founder of insomniac games) talking to Amy Hennig https://interactive.libsyn.com/027-amy-hennig-tgmn-v2
Back to your question - I don't actually learn much that I would use in my day to day. Sometimes there are nuggets, but mostly it just gives me a "warm feeling" to listen to masters talking to old friends about their craft.
NEXT there's the other type where I hop on to the GDC vault and download some of their panel discussion videos as audio files: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024856/VR-Best-Practices-Maxi... so I have 48 minutes of industry experts talking about the things they think about when they're designing for VR.
That might be directly applicable in the work I'm doing, or I might have additional questions to ask the next time we start with a VR project. I might have additional possibilities to offer the next time the creative, UX and, strategy teams come to me and say "we want to build for VR, what can we do with a budget of XYZ?"
I'll have a bit of general knowledge on hand for the next time I have to make a decision... or not ... I actually don't do that much VR right now. For some reason the idea of hundreds of people sharing a facemask in a crowded conference hall isn't selling very well right now.
At the very very least, listening to professionals talk about these sorts of things counts to me as a deliberate act of professional self reflection. Asking myself if I'm doing things in the best way I can? Are there better ways to do things? Are there things that I'd like to start working with, but can't fit into the budget of the current projects?
And so on...
Which again, is all stuff I'd like to try to help solve for with this coming podcast.
One other format that a friend and I started talking about being interesting might be to run "architectural differential diagnosis" where we formulate a problem statement and ask 2 or 3 experienced developers to come to a consensus on what technologies they'd use and why.
Though that's unlikely to happen within the first 10 episodes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm young, single and without children, and even 40 hours a week feels like a tad much, even when I realistically worked 5-6 hours a day. I can't imagine a life of 60-90 hour weeks be worth whatever carrot they dangle in front of those poor sods.
We aren't "poor sods" or carrot-led horses. We're just motivated by different things than you. In my case, fully mission driven
But given this is mostly a software-centric message board, software engineering and tech in general I have not observed much correlation at all between amount of input (work) and output (profit, success, happiness, etc). The expanse is wide open, the decision-tree of ways to approach a problem is nearly infinite, and choosing an approach to go down almost always incurs an opportunity cost of solving the same problem in a much better way. I've seen this a lot with lots of founders: They are so motivated and have enormous reserves of energy to "work", and while they are legitimately "working" in a certain sense (writing code, hustling for investment, planning business strategy, etc), it's often work that functions like a greedy algorithm: Stuck in local maxima, stuck in ruts, inflexible, etc and having a very hard time pausing, reflecting, and being judicious with their time, energy and focus. I call this the "Bias of Doing Work"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately saving time/money is not as sexy as increasing revenue. I learned this once by creating a tool at a telecommunications company I was working at. It made it significantly faster for Technical Support to initiate a Remote Desktop session with a customer. We ran reports on how many RDP sessions we started per month; and recorded how much time the tool saved. At the time it was estimated to save about $2.1M…
This is the kind of inefficiency that startups can use to get ahead of established competitors. So don't be sad, this is just a reminder to be an entrepreneur.