I'm glad you cut back and realized that your health is more important. I haven't had a TV since I was in high school. I don't really play video games. It's the notion of "work" in western society that is a distraction from self-compassion. Some of it is fulfilling, some of it is soul-sucking.
I think to implement self-compassion more effectively, we need less of these soul-sucking jobs. Everyone is different though. To some, chopping wood may be fulfilling, to others not so much. So perhaps, we need more fulfilling notions of "work" and making a living.
Jobs are just one way of living. I feel like there are more efficient ways to implement prosperity. Or have less suffering keeping the level of prosperity the same.
What is a job? Is it really beneficial? This reminds me of David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs lecture. Too many people are suffering because of their trust in systemic inefficiency.
Reminds me of a documentary called "Medicating Normal". Try being self-compassionate when you have unholy side effects of benzos, anti-depressants, and anti-psychotics prescribed to you.
Normal by "western" standards is unhealthy. We need a renaissance of self-compassion but it has to be protected from the systems that be.
Feels like we live in a society where self-compassion is not tolerated. How can we be kind to ourselves if there are mechanisms in society that keep us distracted from ourselves?
Big Pharma uses this heavily to bias research in academia for their marketing purposes. It used to be that academic research was rigorous and objective. An academic title had prestige and respect. Now it's so watered down.
This heavily biases in favor of lone wolves in college. I was one myself. I'd say we are rare. Most people are social and learn by collaborating with others. It's the more natural approach. Evolution has groomed us to be social after all.
Agreed. How consensus is achieved varies. As an engineer, I am biased towards numbers because numbers are easy to compare. Use data to guide you on what the desired state is and getting to it.
gRPC docs do need some tlc. Cloud providers providing support for gRPC also need to do better documenting their support for gRPC.
AWS Application Load Balancer is advertised to work with gRPC but we've been seeing sporadic errors. Keepalive isn't the issue, we set the IdleTimeout to the max (4000 seconds) and use server side keepalive to gc old connections.
Before you judge it, I implore you to ask whether your organization is actually doing Agile/Scrum correctly. I doubt most orgs are and I suspect most negative opinions come from doing it incorrectly/ineffectively. I think the core principles of agile are well-intended. It's the desired state we want to achieve. However, most of us are still trying to reconcile with our current state.
There are many pitfalls. For example, giving product owner and even manager roles to the lead engineer or architect, daily standups devolving into telling people what ticket number they have in progress as opposed to blockers they are seeing or actually working on, product owners not showing up to backlog grooming sessions leaving engineering to make their own priorities, product managers being the engineering manager and leading retrospectives making everyone biased to say what went well but not things to improve on, agile release trains having teams that don't really interact with each other leaving engineering teams tuned out during system level PI planning and demos. The list goes on.
The current state of an org implementing agile/scrum can easily lead to what David Graeber calls Bull*hit jobs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kikzjTfos0s. The onus is on the organization's leaders to take everyone to the desired state. However, all too often the actual leaders of an organization are the engineers themselves and would much rather get work done than to micromanage.
To be fair, it is sometimes not our fault we are "condescending assholes". It's the environment we are in. It could be from management and/or HR not hiring for the right skillset, to underspecified design details from even more condescending assholes called architects, to leadership not leading but just delegating important decisions (and thus covering their own asses) to engineering teams.
I wonder how well this idea translates to other engineering disciplines and if there is something about software that makes this idea easier.
What kind of liability is there for engineers asking for help and working in FinTech for example? The attack surface here for social engineering gets bigger.
> Devs constantly hammered as not doing things quickly enough by the same people who don’t do actual work other than above checklists.
I can relate to this. There's no one qualified to lead engineering teams where I work. Each team has to somehow dig for internal requirements that aren't socialized across engineering.
The decriminalization wave helped me find minds like Paul Stamets, Hamilton Morris, and Will Hall. Then I started asking more questions and found writers like Johan Harri, Michael Pollan, and Robert Whitaker. Following Whitaker's work after reading his Anatomy of an Epidemic, I also suggest watching the "Medicating Normal" movie.
I think to implement self-compassion more effectively, we need less of these soul-sucking jobs. Everyone is different though. To some, chopping wood may be fulfilling, to others not so much. So perhaps, we need more fulfilling notions of "work" and making a living.