51–60 of 72 posts
I am 42. I am still coping with a question I've had since I was young and was able to get my first office job. Why am I paid so much money to basically do data organization. I'm organizing data. There are other people that build houses, grow food, prepare food. Then there are others that are simply entertainers - but that does provide societal value. I mean I guess in order to have entertainment, we have to have this…
I am 42. I am still coping with a question I've had since I was young and was able to get my first office job. Why am I paid so much money to basically do data organization. I'm organizing data. There are other people that build houses, grow food, prepare food. Then there are others that are simply entertainers - but that does provide societal value. I mean I guess in order to have entertainment, we have to have this…
I often wondered why doesn't everyone want to be a construction worker. We've all seen what they can do. Make huge structures appear out of thin air. Change the way space is. It's magic. And all the gadgets. Gigantic hydraulic arms, cranes, tractors of all sizes. Instead we're paid heaps for programming. Which kind of makes sense. In my mind, programming is about making sense of a mess. Untangling all the seemingly c…
I've always described my job as taking a bunch of funny shaped pieces and artfully filling in the gaps so they connect in a cohesive manner. The thinking part is the artful and cohesive bit. Kinda like kintsugi but with made-up languages and scrums and PMs/DMs.
I am 42. I am still coping with a question I've had since I was young and was able to get my first office job. Why am I paid so much money to basically do data organization. I'm organizing data. There are other people that build houses, grow food, prepare food. Then there are others that are simply entertainers - but that does provide societal value. I mean I guess in order to have entertainment, we have to have this…
Whenever anybody gets uppity about scale, I remind them that not only is our 'scale' limited to the physical growth of the company, our job can be summarized as shuffling data around in a database with some touchpoints for human interactions in the workflow so our coworkers can be more productive. Every. Single. Company. around the world could probably benefit for some automated data shuffling, and despite being rote, the multiplier effect on small businesses and local economies is an important second-order-affect of helping build 'boring' LOB software that just shuffles data.
I am 42. I am still coping with a question I've had since I was young and was able to get my first office job. Why am I paid so much money to basically do data organization. I'm organizing data. There are other people that build houses, grow food, prepare food. Then there are others that are simply entertainers - but that does provide societal value. I mean I guess in order to have entertainment, we have to have this…
Working 10 to 12 hours straight with only one or two half an hour breaks is no goal one should thrive for. Neither working 80 hours a week. Heck, it would even be against the law in my country and it favors companies over people... We tried gather.town in my team (we develop web services for a big news site) and dropped it after a week or two. While some people seemed to like it, others disliked it very strongly. I p…
>Working 10 to 12 hours straight with only one or two half an hour breaks is no goal one should thrive for. Neither working 80 hours a week. I work on the thing I love & care deeply about (newscience.org) and I'm most happy when I work 10, 12, 16 hours straight, 60, 80, 100 hours a week. What wrong with that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I often wondered why doesn't everyone want to be a construction worker. We've all seen what they can do. Make huge structures appear out of thin air. Change the way space is. It's magic. And all the gadgets. Gigantic hydraulic arms, cranes, tractors of all sizes. Instead we're paid heaps for programming. Which kind of makes sense. In my mind, programming is about making sense of a mess. Untangling all the seemingly c…
Crane operators are actually one of the highest ranked professions in terms of job satisfaction.
Setting Alexey's personal working style and focus aside, what are people's thoughts on virtual co-working in general? Seems like there is a huge portion of people that have long since discovered that cities are not for them, but still yearn for some kind of group form of working. There's been attempts as far as 2008 in Second Life[1], but also others in platforms such as discord, slack, minecraft. One popular zoom-ba…
I am 42. I am still coping with a question I've had since I was young and was able to get my first office job. Why am I paid so much money to basically do data organization. I'm organizing data. There are other people that build houses, grow food, prepare food. Then there are others that are simply entertainers - but that does provide societal value. I mean I guess in order to have entertainment, we have to have this…
I often wondered why doesn't everyone want to be a construction worker. We've all seen what they can do. Make huge structures appear out of thin air. Change the way space is. It's magic. And all the gadgets. Gigantic hydraulic arms, cranes, tractors of all sizes. Instead we're paid heaps for programming. Which kind of makes sense. In my mind, programming is about making sense of a mess. Untangling all the seemingly c…
But they're looking right back at you thinking the same exact thing, because you get to work on your laptop in an air conditioned office and don't go home smelling like sweat, dirt, and fumes.
There's a great quote from Bud Smith's book Work that has much better wording with the same idea, but I can't find it
I am 42. I am still coping with a question I've had since I was young and was able to get my first office job. Why am I paid so much money to basically do data organization. I'm organizing data. There are other people that build houses, grow food, prepare food. Then there are others that are simply entertainers - but that does provide societal value. I mean I guess in order to have entertainment, we have to have this…
There's a lot of replies about how you're organizing data so others can do their jobs more efficiently, but that's a fairly romanticized view of tech work. I get where you're coming from.