Great recipe for mediocrity. Do not follow OPs advice. (Source: 23+ years at NVIDIA).
Doing nothing at work
91–100 of 168 posts
Re: Doing nothing at work
#92Great recipe for mediocrity. Do not follow OPs advice. (Source: 23+ years at NVIDIA).
Lmao cringe, 23 years at NVIDIA is supposed to be, what, a credential?
Re: Doing nothing at work
#93> 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…
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Re: Doing nothing at work
#94> 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…
what you should put in a frame is "put in a ticket"
Re: Doing nothing at work
#95> 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…
I learned this early in a conservative org. Preventing things is risky. Just keep the solution ready for when things go wrong because then you'll get approval.
Anecdotally I know of an engineer in the Excel team. They would keep around a list of low priority security bugs. When they wanted to do improvements on the system they would attach it to one of the security bugs “nearby“ because the change would become approved much more easily than just fixing the problem itself.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#96Great recipe for mediocrity. Do not follow OPs advice. (Source: 23+ years at NVIDIA).
HN-tier flex lol
Re: Doing nothing at work
#97This is a good post, but once again incentives rear their ugly head.
> 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.
Time and time again at many companies, including well-reputed ones, I have seen that preventing issues gets you no recognition, but building a giant pile of kindling and then putting out the inevitable fire will get you recognition twice. Even in "good" orgs.
I've never been able to commit to the game theory politics enough to intentionally ship garbage fast and take that credit - I take too much pride in my work - but I have spent 5+ years managing and growing a framework designed to eliminate classes of issues that plagued the last version of our product and watched as partner teams who ship garbage code and cause outages get public credit for fixing those outages and my team, despite attempting to advocate, get no credit for not having such outages because you can't measure that.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#98I'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.
I love having no task assigned. Means I finally have time to do code maintenance. Upgrading dependencies, fixing bugs (there are always some), clearing TODOs left in code, improving performance, improving dev tooling or monitoring configuration, cleaning up unused code, improving documentation, ...
And the best part is that since it's not an assigned task, nobody is waiting for it, so I'm under zero pressure.
Sadly it doesn't happen that much as we're always pushing for more new features out.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#99This is a good post, but once again incentives rear their ugly head. > 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. Time and time again at many companies, includi…
The game theory should make is that those teams that recurring lay lose customers due to issues will be punished accordingly. If they aren’t, then maybe the problems that result from shipping fast don’t impact customer retention as much as might think.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do agree with you, and most jobs have a "and other duties as assigned" for that reason. But I'll equivocate by saying there are exceptions. If you work a union gig (technically a contract), you have to be careful to stay in your lane unless you want a grievance filed. If you are a licensed engineer and your boss tells you to design/stamp something outside your domain of competence, you have a duty to say no. But th…
Yes I sincerely doubt that the court of opinion, or the real court, would see the difference between "I use MySQL not MSSQL! you cant make me write this analysis" versus sometihng understandable like, you are a for example, a aging and lovable secretary who is being tasked to clean radioactive material from a jobsite because there are no calls coming in. As for unions - yeah thats what got them kicked out of the conv…
I don't think you need that dramatic of a strawman for the point. I think a more plausible one in a grey area could be a structural engineer who has experience in low rise commercial buildings being asked to quickly approve a steel scaffolding for a concert venue in the coming weekend. To the uninitiated, it may seem like a reasonable request but to those in the domain it's far enough outside the area of competence to be questionable.