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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

#41

Post by ohwellhere »

Here's my advice on the same topic after living through burnout and "blah" several times:

Make your job the union of what you're interested in and what is valuable to the business.

You have to know what is valuable to the business; that knowledge is challenging to acquire but will _always_ help you in any role. It has to be true and verified with stakeholders, not your gut. There are soft skills involved here.

You also have to know what you're interested in, which is also not easy after building CRUD apps for years.

And you have to sell it — more soft skills.

If you can — you can! — the result is a job description or project that you helped co-create, that you own in the most meaningful sense of the word, and that you're more excited to work on. The add on results is that you are more valuable to that specific company, and you've leveled up soft skills and business thinking that makes you more valuable to any company.

I've done this consciously several times in at least 4 companies of various sizes. I've ended up building a new mobile architecture platform and library, a data warehouse and ETLT pipeline, multiple projects in languages I wanted to learn, new frameworks and libraries for various other industry-specific web dev things, and a few rewrites of legacy software.

I still feel blah a lot of the time, and still think my path through this industry has been... non-optimized to say the least, but I have a path that helps me reengage when I have the energy for internal sales.

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

#42

Post by lmarcos »

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.

Sure, but what would be their argument against it? "Dev X is pushing his features on time, he's a nice college, always learning from him, but... Ah yeah, but he leaves work 1h before everyone else. Please fire him".

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

#43

Post by bsedlm »

EddieDante wrote: post #34

Why would I want to be engaged at work? I just want to do my job and get paid. I think that expecting emotional fulfillment or meaning from my job is a trap, a way to con me into working more while accepting less pay than I deserve. Work won't love me back, so why should I love my work? I lost interest in unrequited love back in high school when I outgrew my Young Werther phase.

but I want my work to be engaging...

it seems like I want this out of an existencial instict; one which the modern world has completely disregarded.

I want it, but I know (and I agree with your stance) that I will not find it in any "industry" work; academic work, on the other hand, does rely on this kind of self-motivated engagement much more than industry but has other problems.

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

#44

Post by lupire »

ohwellhere wrote: post #41

Here's my advice on the same topic after living through burnout and "blah" several times: Make your job the union of what you're interested in and what is valuable to the business. You have to know what is valuable to the business; that knowledge is challenging to acquire but will _always_ help you in any role. It has to be true and verified with stakeholders, not your gut. There are soft skills involved here. You al…

Do you mean intersection, not union? Union is kind of a fantasy, getting paid to have your own fun.

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

#45

Post by nixlim »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #33

> make time to be curious. This is kinda dangerous advice, because I've been involved in countless CRUD apps where the developers were bored and made things more interesting for themselves; NoSQL databases, difficult programming languages like Scala, microservices, CQRS, infrastructure-as-code that was never used in practice (it was wishful-thinking-as-code), home-rolled frameworks (one involved the CTO / lead develo…

100% agree and can relate. Part of our "estate" is exactly that type of a project - all that was required was a CRUD app, what we got and have to maintain is an app written in functional style written with 3 layered frameworks using Hexagonal Architecture. In answer to the question "Why?", the response was - "We were bored."

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

#46

Post by lmarcos »

I don't need to feel engaged at work. I feel engaged with my career though. A job is just a temporal contract I do for money. I do my best (thankfully I'm not bad at it since I love my career), but usually I don't give a damn about feeling engaged with my current employer.

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

#47

Post by lupire »

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…

Hypnosis worked for Peter Gibbons.

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

#48

Post by adamsmith143 »

lmarcos wrote: post #42
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.

Sure, but what would be their argument against it? "Dev X is pushing his features on time, he's a nice college, always learning from him, but... Ah yeah, but he leaves work 1h before everyone else. Please fire him".

Sure but I guess depending on the place I'd think unless you had an explicit agreement about leaving early that there would be pushback. "If you have enough free time to leave early you have enough time to pick up another ticket"

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

#49

Post by bluedino »

lmarcos wrote: post #42
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.

Sure, but what would be their argument against it? "Dev X is pushing his features on time, he's a nice college, always learning from him, but... Ah yeah, but he leaves work 1h before everyone else. Please fire him".

An argument could be made that the dev isn't getting either enough work or difficult enough work

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

#50

Post by adamsmith143 »

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…

Totally agree but from a SWE perspective on any kind of Agile/Scrum team I think the expectation is usually that you pick up another task if you finish early and there's still time during a sprint for example.

This also obviously breeds other bad incentives i.e. the faster you work the more work you get.

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