salixrosa

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Setting aside all the imposter syndrome, confidence, etc stuff...

The only devs I've known who I thought were legitimately bad were the ones who thought they weren't. The devs who couldn't accept that their code was overly complicated, because in that moment they had no problem reading it. Or who would come out of the end of a project without any ability or desire to think about why or how the project went wrong.

Some devs dig deep into the language and libraries, some don't. There's need for both kinds of devs out there, even if there isn't at your company. Some devs know every design pattern out there, some don't. I often prefer the devs who don't -- my goal is to quickly build software that is easy to debug and easy to add on to, and people seem to usually get caught up in putting whatever type of factory where a factory shouldn't be and...

Really, though, we all suck. I've got senior devs from Amazon and Microsoft who don't know or care about dependency management or how to write integration tests or... whatever.

What do you want to be good at? Intentionally pick a thing. Not "programming" but do you want to be the best at debugging your team's software? Do you want to know all the gotchas and tricks of your team's language & framework(s)? Do you want to own a particular bit of your company's business logic? Pick a small thing you want to be the best at, figure out what that actually means, and then master that thing. Even if "that thing" is just being able to quickly add simple, not-awful-to-maintain features. Grade yourself on that, not every single thing you might see some particular other developer do better at than you.

It's always... interesting... To look at SF on Zillow. There are a few nice-looking options in the ~1.5M range, mostly foreclosures, and it seems mostly in not-so-great areas. I don't know if there are any great areas in SF proper though.

I strongly disagree with your opinions on premed students, but that's based off my experience as a Biochemistry major at a large state school. So much partying, so little reading of assigned materials.

It's super hard for me to not respond too strongly to this, as I'm currently having trouble with a particularly junior dev who just cannot wrap his mind around maintainability issues...

But really, I feel if "you" are spending the majority of time setting up new projects and familiarizing yourself with new technologies, that doesn't leave much time to get really GOOD at anything. Sure, we live in an amazing time where the simple act of adding a new technology to a problem can grant huge business benefits in a lot of places. But that's almost never the end-all, be-all of it. You don't just get to hook up GraphQL and ring your hands of it; as the company grows and begins to rely more and more on the new technology you set up, issues like whether or not you're getting source data efficiently start to really matter. How you set it up, and the design patterns you instituted for that technology, could very well make for the success or failure of a company. And it'll definitely effect the mental well-being of the the devs you leave behind.

It's easier to hit the ceiling of how successful you're going to be when you're working on your own. If you're someone other people want to work with/for, there are a lot more opportunities that can be taken advantage of.

I've often thought that if everyone, or even a majority, said "no", then we could have better policies. As it is, I've been the only person at my last two workplaces to object, and there's no way they're going to put in the effort to work with me.

So it is that I've given permission to confiscate my personal cellphone in the case of a breach. Otherwise, I literally couldn't do my job -- not because of anything particular about our field or technology, but because it was easier to set things up the way they are. We could spend a few days changing our alert structures, etc, and no-one would have to have "sensitive" data on their personal phones. But that's not going to happen for one employee.

> If you try and peel back a layer of what you think is most important, but they don't care about it at all, you won't find anything worth hearing.

I came looking for someone who'd already said this. I think you hit the nail on the head.

Even the stoners I worked with in food service could have some interesting perspectives on, say, why different video games have such different communities.

I mean, yeah, I get it. Kids make me downright uncomfortable, and that alone is often a huge chunk of what people talk about. There are quite simply differences in interests. But then the question is, what are you trying to get out of an interaction?

In this context, I'd say, find out what that person's goals / difficulties are. Are they trying to switch to a different department? Are they trying to get their kid into a particular private school? Remodeling their house? I think keeping track of this sort of information, checking back in on how their efforts are going or giving any small useful anecdotes/advice ("Yeah, I really got screwed by that moving company -- I wish I'd packed my TV more carefully,") does way more, I think, thank talking about sports.

And the great thing is, even if we were all machines, those would be great things to talk about. I've gained incredibly useful information about home ownership just from listening to my coworkers.