[dead]
Doing nothing at work
51–60 of 168 posts
Re: Doing nothing at work
#52If you want to collapse just run a system at 100% for baseline, there's no slack, there's no capacity to meet new demands, you're just running a permanent failure mode if there's any perturbation in the system.
Except ... the collapse never happens. Once your engineers burn out or age out you just hire fresh meat and the cycle repeats. The issue I have with these types of articles (and books like Peopleware / Slack) is they never provide any actual metrics that may convince the beancounters to try a different approach.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#53Sigh. This article is obviously completely correct, but I don't think the people who actually need to read it will care.
Running anything at constant 100% utilization means you are going to be working in crisis mode all of the time. Even in factory labor, the Toyota Way is several decades old now, and it involves making sure everyone has at least a little breathing room to step back and think about what they're doing. And obviously this is even more important for "knowledge workers" or anyone whose output requires any amount of creativity.
High functioning organizations have a good (not too much, but not too little) amount of slack in their work pipelines. Pretty sure there is not a single person with an MBA (or, lol, any consultants) that knows this anymore.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#54I’ve had a half-written blog post in this vein for a while now using a fantasy RPG analogy: if you play a character that uses mana in any of these games, you’ll learn fairly quickly that using it all up all the time on trivial battles and running around empty leaves you with none when you genuinely need it. Your mental energy deployed at work is not so dissimilar: keeping some in the tank gives you the option to depl…
One thing I've noticed myself, if you are not sufficiently challenged for a while it can be extremely difficult to surmount the next challenge. Peak "abilities" for me in whatever categories has always been when I had enough work in front of me to just chug away like a machine, and enough trust where I didn't need to stop and constantly explain myself but could just work uninterrupted towards the goal. Skills would grow like wildfire and tasks would be completed sooner than expected.
Unfortunately very few jobs are structured to take advantage of that. So many blockers and distractions from you getting into actual deep work.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#55> Second, preventing or mitigating an incident early (even by just knowing the right feature flag to turn off) can save huge amounts of money: both immediate lost revenue during the incident and future lost revenue from customers who would have pulled their business or refused to sign pending contracts. Not to be sarcastic but just to offer an observation: in a sufficiently large or bureaucratic organization, prevent…
Also, disaster is a good signal to the higher ups that there are problems in your org. If you keep putting out every fire with heroics, your boss will know (maybe), but his boss's boss's boss will see that your org is doing great and everything is all code green.
If you let a few things burn down, your boss's boss's boss will notice the fire, and things may improve. It's perhaps the easiest way you have of communicating with them.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#56I've been "Doing nothing" at work for a couple of weeks now, and it's freaking me out. Yes, I have asked for tasking, but the guy in charge is ... I just don't know.
Could you fix some bugs? Please?
Why? The moment you touch the code you become responsible for it. Can't count how many times I fixed something on a goodwill and then became responsible for it.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#57This is written as if you have actual control over the volume of work given to you and/or deadlines.
Are you working in mines of Uganda? No? Then you do have actual control.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#58> I also believe that being too helpful leaves you vulnerable to predators. Tech companies are full of people who want to extract uncompensated work from software engineers4. This is different from work that arrives via normal channels, and for which you’re compensated by promotions, bonuses (and just your normal salary). I’m talking about work that arrives via backchannels, from people who don’t have the ability or willingness to ensure that work is formally recorded under your name. For instance, a product manager from another organization messaging you to say “you’re so good at querying data, would you mind pulling some statistics for me about X?”, or an engineer from another team asking you to “pair” on a piece of work that will ultimately involve you writing all the code and them quietly submitting the change under their own name.
Put this in a frame.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#59If you want to collapse just run a system at 100% for baseline, there's no slack, there's no capacity to meet new demands, you're just running a permanent failure mode if there's any perturbation in the system.
Except ... the collapse never happens. Once your engineers burn out or age out you just hire fresh meat and the cycle repeats. The issue I have with these types of articles (and books like Peopleware / Slack) is they never provide any actual metrics that may convince the beancounters to try a different approach.
Age out?
Re: Doing nothing at work
#60> Second, preventing or mitigating an incident early (even by just knowing the right feature flag to turn off) can save huge amounts of money: both immediate lost revenue during the incident and future lost revenue from customers who would have pulled their business or refused to sign pending contracts. Not to be sarcastic but just to offer an observation: in a sufficiently large or bureaucratic organization, prevent…
Also, disaster is a good signal to the higher ups that there are problems in your org. If you keep putting out every fire with heroics, your boss will know (maybe), but his boss's boss's boss will see that your org is doing great and everything is all code green. If you let a few things burn down, your boss's boss's boss will notice the fire, and things may improve. It's perhaps the easiest way you have of communicat…
What if my boss's boss is the root cause of the fires and he just blames the "team" if his boss ever sees a hint the of issues?