This very might well be their one thing already... but the risk of failing your "one thing" is so paralysing because then who are you without that?
In that regard the second part is good advice: "diversifying the portfolio of who you are as a person". It might not help finish the thesis, but will help life feel more whole if they don't.
As a game developer working in managed languages (aka Unity/C#) this problem is one of my biggest headaches. I was hoping the article would provide divine insight, unfortunately the recommend solution doesn't really solve the problem (as I see it).
Whilst 2n array alloc is better than 3n, both are creating short lived memory objects. Do that in a hot code path and suddenly you've got tremendous garbage pressure your garbage collector is going to choke on.
One can optimise this by calculating results into a cached array, but that creates opportunities for bugs (results of previous caches persisting). I would dearly love to see a solution that allows me to code in a functional style without sacrificing performance.
This reads to me as a failure of imagination. Any mid size game development shop is going to feel this pain - not just giants like Microsoft and Google. I believe the Unity Game Engine has a user base in the millions? Even a subset of that may be small in comparison to the entire developer population but by no means microscopic.
This starts off as another "let's bash standups" article, but after I read further down I found myself nodding more and more.
It put into words something I've seen first hand - how blockers are actually unmade decisions. And then gives useful guidance on how facilitate this from a project management point of view.
I've often seen how three people around a white board can make more progress than months of discussion and decision paralysis. Also the article states how standups can be useful towards the end of a product lifecycle when most decisions have already been taken. This was a new way to think about for it me, but I have to agree.
There seems to be lots of pragmatic real world earned wisdom in the article, unfortunately it's hidden behind a clickbait opening.
In that regard the second part is good advice: "diversifying the portfolio of who you are as a person". It might not help finish the thesis, but will help life feel more whole if they don't.