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Programmers need to start meditating

jacob.gold

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Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#61

Post by memoriyato3 »

bragh wrote: post #13
senfiaj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, same thoughts. And this industry is becoming so volatile, I'm not sure what will happen tomorrow. I mean it's highly unlikely that AI will replace developers at least in the next 10 years, but I'm not sure what will "software developer" become. Certain people love to work with details. If AI is taking away this joy, I'll rather retire as early as possible from this volatile industry.

Maybe we just aren't far enough in the vibe coding side of things and there are still too many people in the industry who still pay attention to details, so no major catastrophes haven't happened yet because of vibe coding. So the people who pay attention to details are still carrying their organizations, but I do wonder how long it is going to be sustainable. When it comes to joy killers because of AI, then it is di…

programmers were always against "software patents" - the idea of copyrighting algorithms and implementations

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#63

Post by bartvk »

testfrequency wrote: post #35

I was so stressed at work a few years ago. Burnt out. Exhausted. I started meditating. Shared with my manager that I started, and it’s been helping me process all the chaos at work. He told me that wasn’t normal, and I shouldn’t have to meditate just to function at work :’)

What a strange opinion. If it helps you do better at work, why wouldn't it be something to encourage?

Was he a judgmental person in general? Or do you think he had an aversion to meditating?

I do have to say, if you were encouraging him to ALSO start meditating, I'd hate that too.

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#65

Post by ebu87 »

inigyou wrote: post #25
jahala wrote: post #8

Meditation - «getting used to» A most elementary form of meditation, is getting used to placing your attention on a sensation and keeping it anchored there - even when other sensations or thoughts arise. Following the breath- place your awareness, your attention, on the sensation of air passing through your nostrils. Count one inbreath and outbreath cycle as «1», and count until 10 or 21. Decide before you start, how…

Why 21?

Because is half of 42

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#66

Post by testfrequency »

bartvk wrote: post #63
testfrequency wrote: post #35

I was so stressed at work a few years ago. Burnt out. Exhausted. I started meditating. Shared with my manager that I started, and it’s been helping me process all the chaos at work. He told me that wasn’t normal, and I shouldn’t have to meditate just to function at work :’)

What a strange opinion. If it helps you do better at work, why wouldn't it be something to encourage? Was he a judgmental person in general? Or do you think he had an aversion to meditating? I do have to say, if you were encouraging him to ALSO start meditating, I'd hate that too.

He was a smartass, but also very blunt - unsparingly.

I did not encourage him to, this was just during a weekly 1:1 where I was sharing with him how I’ve been coping with the amount of workload and chaos happening among the team/myself.

He was wanting to empathize me that it’s not normal to have to do that to be functional at work, acknowledging how rough things were at the time.

I kept doing it, but fell out of practice. Also left and no longer work there, due to stress and poor support. Shocker.

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#67

Post by coffeefirst »

gb2d_hn wrote: post #20
senfiaj wrote: post #10

>> I’m clearly much more productive now. I’m doing five things at once very effectively, switching between multiple agent sessions from morning to night. Joel Spolsky disagrees here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switche...

I feel like it depends on the task, and that's why people seem to disagree on this. Think about a manager managing 5 devs. If he is working on planning and managing work for his dev team, we don't say he is task switching, he's just taking a management role where he takes a high level view of the task at hand and then delegates the deep dive. Where it differs for devs is that we could in theory run multiple agents co…

Uh, I am an EM, and you have to treat context switching as the enemy or nothing gets done.

There’s a bunch of different tactics for this. Some people hold office hours. I block off 9am for code review any only do it once per day.

The programs we call agents are nothing like people.

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#68

Post by lobibi »

I’ve started doing mornings without any llm assisted work, and keeping it only for after 11. I find it gives me back the joy of designing my systems in a highly focused state, while keeping the later part of the day for persisting those well thought out ideas into code.

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#69

Post by coffeefirst »

senfiaj wrote: post #10

>> I’m clearly much more productive now. I’m doing five things at once very effectively, switching between multiple agent sessions from morning to night. Joel Spolsky disagrees here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switche...

Also neuroscience disagrees.

This really isn’t a debate. OP is wrong.

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#70

Post by cyclopeanutopia »

memoriyato3 wrote: post #62
cyclopeanutopia wrote: post #45

There is also a simpler approach: just stop using AI. And if you can't, THAT should be a big red warning sign for you.

that's like "stop using a car, you can walk between cities and its healthier"

So far I see it more like "you buy a car to take you between cities, but you end up routinely driving even just 1 km to a store, +50 kg overweight and then prematurely dead due to a heart attack."

But sure, if the most important thing is to mass produce tons of shitty code, it's your life - just don't give people dumb advice on what they NEED to do. :)

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