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Boring work needs tension

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Re: Boring work needs tension

#31

Post by patates »

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…

> Some times boring, done consistently, is where the truly great things come from.

I used to tell myself the same thing. Then one day, a customer misconfigured their NetScaler, and all hell broke loose. We had half-delivered CSS files, misfiring form handlers, random blank screens of death, and a buggy front-end library that would bombard the backend with requests if it received the wrong status code with no back-off logic! There were hundreds of bug reports. You name it, we had it.

Debugging everything was just wild, especially with the constant tension of "What if it's our fault?" In the end, it wasn't! We got paid for our time, and we were able to close a massive number of tickets. It was one of the best weeks of my professional life.

Re: Boring work needs tension

#32

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

The most important properties of real audit trails are that they are side effects of the actual work, created during or after the fact without interfering with how the work is done.

The thing about work tickets is that they have none of those properties. Besides almost every developer insists on working with a complete audit trail that is just ignored because people don't want to look at it.

Compliance guarantee is a different beast, that isn't improved in any way by work tickets, but may need more work than the audit trail.

Re: Boring work needs tension

#34

Post by pflenker »

Find joy in the craft, don’t rely on the outside world to feed you excitement. A well-crafted wooden box can spark as much joy as a well-crafted piece of software or a well-written document.

Taxes are boring, no kid at kindergarten states they are going to be tax advisors when they grow up, yet tax advisors exist and they do not all despise their jobs, because doing your job well can be intrinsically motivating.

Re: Boring work needs tension

#35

Post by AfterHIA »

In the 1950s through the beginning of the 1970's the government (ARPA) was paying young scientists and innovators to do their PhD thesis' in computer design to create the next generation of human oriented computer interfaces. Now we have articles talking about how shit it is to work with computers. What the fuck man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_(computer_system)

Re: Boring work needs tension

#36

Post by jm__87 »

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…

Personally, I find how I spend my time outside of work has a big impact on how motivated and productive I am at work, regardless of how meaningful my work tasks are. Obviously basic things like sleep, diet, exercise are important, but I have also found that spending too much time on things like video games, streaming shows/movies or social media really leaves me feeling depleted and unfocused during work hours. The more I avoid screens outside of work hours, the more productive I am during work hours when I have to look at a screen.

Re: Boring work needs tension

#38

Post by brailsafe »

patates wrote: post #31
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…

> Some times boring, done consistently, is where the truly great things come from. I used to tell myself the same thing. Then one day, a customer misconfigured their NetScaler, and all hell broke loose. We had half-delivered CSS files, misfiring form handlers, random blank screens of death, and a buggy front-end library that would bombard the backend with requests if it received the wrong status code with no back-off…

Hell yes, sometimes fighting a figurative wildfire successfully is what carries you for a year

Re: Boring work needs tension

#39

Post by masijo »

pflenker wrote: post #34

Find joy in the craft, don’t rely on the outside world to feed you excitement. A well-crafted wooden box can spark as much joy as a well-crafted piece of software or a well-written document. Taxes are boring, no kid at kindergarten states they are going to be tax advisors when they grow up, yet tax advisors exist and they do not all despise their jobs, because doing your job well can be intrinsically motivating.

I used to feel this way until management made AI tools mandatory.

Re: Boring work needs tension

#40

Post by brailsafe »

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…

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

A lot of bad can come from this, especially if you're working on farming these loops from others and that's where you get your kick/money. But if there's no dopamine loop, ideally in addition to having some meaning, then there's just burnout.

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

Ya, but it's easy to get too caught up in meaning. Meaningful meaning is scarce, and it's a bit naive to couple your paycheck to it. Most times work is just work and it needs to keep going as long as you need money. Meaning is fleeting by comparison, even for nurses and people actually doing something useful for society. When you can get it, great, but when you can't, don't go quitting your job impulsively, not in this market.

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