salixrosa · HackerTrans

4 jaar geledendiscuss

I strongly disagree with this "both sides are the same" BS. One side has made it illegal to refer to Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a war, the other has not. Yes, it's virtually impossible to reports news without some bias affecting that presentation. But it's a disservice to the world to claim that those are even vaguely the same thing.

salixrosa

4 jaar geledendiscuss

Thanks for the reading recommendation! Learning about the Cynefin framework and thinking about those kinds of problems led me to James Scott and to Hayek, but I haven't come across Sanford's work before.

salixrosa

5 jaar geledendiscuss

Sadly, from what I've read the commission-based approach often leads to worse long-term results, especially in software engineering. It depends on the kind of work, of course. The metric I use (and in this case I have no idea how others look at the problem) is the number of decisions the person has to make, especially having long-term effects or effects on other parts of the company. It's hard to make the right choice for the org when you stand to make a bigger chunk of money right now from the other option.

salixrosa

5 jaar geledendiscuss

I don't really have enough information on the specific's of OP's job and what they're doing with their spare time. Reading tech books sounds like learning to me, but otherwise I don't know.

I think that it's really difficult for a lot of people to see the value they're providing outside of the proper business tasks they're assigned, and once there are tasks assigned to fill up all the time, everything breaks down. It doesn't matter if your task is something as irrelevant as "provide documentation regarding this vendor relationship," once it's on the board it can't be dropped and so you're no longer available to try the new tool people are looking for feedback on, or whatever.

The other thing doesn't even have to be high-priority, but if you're at a large enough organization, there are lots of things you'll realize can't be done well because too many people need to be involved, even if it's just a little bit of time. My org can't make any movement on, for example, API clients or API documentation because there are lots of different needs, but by the time you've gotten through the initial conversations it's a six months later, because people weren't available. There are many efforts we can't get done because that effort isn't priority for the team's involved, but requires time from people on those teams.

Ideally, of course, we try to minimize those things. But I've yet to hear of a sizeable org that has none of those kinds of things.

salixrosa

5 jaar geledendiscuss

This sounds like it might be good thing for the company. Having employees who have extra capacity is incredibly important for an organization that wants to get things done; if you're constantly hard at work on something important, when something else comes up (someone has a question, there's a bug or an outage, whatever), you either have to delay the thing you're already working on, or delay the thing that came up. This tends to have a cascade effect on most kinds of work, locking up all your people resources.

Plus, those other things you're doing sound like they overall, in the long-term, probably give you a wider range of knowledge, improving your usefulness.

Just wanted to add a voice against that sort of Taylorism perspective on work.

salixrosa

5 jaar geledendiscuss

I think these things are important to have as tools in your life, regardless! Life can get overwhelming in all kinds of different ways; knowing how to put your head down and take care of yourself in these ways is incredibly valuable.

Unfortunately, after a while doing all the above and more, I realized my feelings towards my coworkers and company had nothing to do with burnout. Sometimes you realize everyone is miserably bad at their jobs and you don't want to keep dealing with an increasingly shitty work environment.

Another valuable thing is putting yourself in the position to be able to leave.

salixrosa

5 jaar geledendiscuss

lol I was just sitting here thinking I miss my Python job and not having trouble with IntelliJ detecting changes in dependencies and how frustrating it is to invalidate caches and reindex the whole project multiple times before I can run tests for the dependency change. I regularly miss the testing libraries we used, too -- it was so absurdly clean and easy to build robust mocks in our DJango stack (and I set up that tooling, largely on my own iniatiative, based on my team's feedback, so it's not like I'm just like wishing other people had already done the work). Now I work with a bunch of Java devs who use to work for Amazon and somehow use that as an excuse for not caring about tests, our ci-cd tools, and all these other things I'd gotten use to thinking of as standard in my past life as a Python dev.

Code style! Hah. First day on the job I asked about that and was told nobody cared and everybody had their own preferences.

... I'm very bitter today. I'm working on it.

salixrosa

5 jaar geledendiscuss

What I've found recently is that the thing is impossible within the scope of the bureaucracy we're working in. For example, it's impossible to get this 3rd party hardware working in another 3rd party's network because none of the people who understand the product are being given access to the system in the ways needed to figure out what's going wrong. It's impossible to build a particular feature because that part of the tech stack is officially another team's territory, or because the process to approve the new feature hasn't itself been approved yet.

Ugh.

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