Getting my task completed at my own pace makes me feel good. Often that is fast and on time. In my heart, when I touch the keyboard, I feel like a greyhound dog with a little Bob Ross afro - it can be a race, a competition, but it is also an expression of my art.
This article makes me feel bad because in the authors world, people like me are relegated to worker bee monkies trying to please the bossman due to pathology or some such delusion. I work this way because it pleases me. Doing my tasks diligently and in a timely manner affords me more time to relax, review what I have created, and enjoy it rather than drag myself to the next task.
A bit off topic but as of late there is this creeping normalization of intentionally subpar or less optimized results I'm noticing in our industry but also general society.
When did we become so not only complacent but also discouraging of any genuine effort? It is as if everyone is so aloof that if you show any effort or appreciation of your craft that you're societally acknowledging your own serfdom or that you're serving "the man".
That is not at all what the article was about! It was never stated that you should be late or take too much time in doing tasks… it was about using more wisely your time (if the sizing claimed the task needed 5 days to be done and you are done in 2 maybe you could have spent more time thinking about the design or if everything is ok try to using the extra time to generate value in other ways instead of rushing towards the next task)
Who establishes that sizing? I’ve yet to see anyone who can accurately estimate their own tasks let alone someone who can estimate that for others.
In agile, I think a great time for reflection is between sprints.
Also, I’m super fast but I’ll instead take frequent small breaks in the middle of work (read hacker news, write up documentation etc). There are other times to reflect than between tasks.
I had a colleague that can be considered brilliant engineer and I believe could be doing all kinds of exciting hard projects and work in the top tier companies. When our manager decided to leave the company, he went along, for a job which in my view is nowhere near his maximum abilities (although he might argue otherwise), quoting the 'Be as particular as you can in the selection of your supervisor.' rule from the above book (which is relevant to the other thread in this topic).
Concepts like story points and processes like agile sprints are intended to create a more realistic estimate of the work a team can deliver. The process comes with tradeoffs; it won’t work for everyone. So then it’s up to them to bring it up during retrospectives and decide to either change the process or… not.
It’s important to understand that working on a team means that you just don’t get to have all the nice things that you would working individually. You gotta approach it with that mindset.
And you ask the "stakeholders" you are producing for.
If you still want some perfection, ration it out on an easier schedule and use incremental perfection as "treat" for the stakeholders over time while you get something for it at each incremental delivery.
Outsourcing task estimation to the team still doesn't solve the estimates are broken issue. I've not seen estimates get meaningfully better in an environment where the team collaborates on establishing the expected time for a task.
It’s not perfect, and importantly doesn’t claim to be. It’s something in the absence of other ways of estimation. Use whatever works best for your team.
Nit: It’s not “outsourcing” in any meaningful definition of the term to have the team responsible for executing a task come up with estimates.
I’m not a big fan of the term IC since you’re rarely delivering anything truly individually (on the average, yes there will be outliers). IMO “software engineer” is just fine as a role.
> This article makes me feel bad because in the authors world, people like me are relegated to worker bee monkies trying to please the bossman due to pathology or some such delusion.
Is this a new kind of brag? Maybe an “offense brag”? This article makes me, a very conscientious and productive person, feel offended because it tells me that I should chill out a little. (Except that’s not what it says; more on that later.)
> Doing my tasks diligently and in a timely manner affords me more time to relax, review what I have created, and enjoy it rather than drag myself to the next task.
From the article:
> If you can meet these expectations in fewer hours than you are supposed to work, then you shouldn't just find more to do. Instead you should do something different.
Completing tasks in a speedy manner makes it so that you don’t have to rush to the next task. Seems in line with the article.
> When did we become so not only complacent but also discouraging of any genuine effort?
From the article:
"""
If you optimally fill your time at work doing 'work' work, then this means that you are likely:
- Not developing other skills
- Not building your network inside the company as well as you could
- Probably working less efficiently than you could
- Unable to respond to new or changing demands without working longer hours or stopping something else that you think you need to do. See the ongoing supply chain crisis for why you should have some slack in your system.
"""
Two of those points are about working on other things than whatever narrow task that you are assigned. So apparently it’s not about being complacent at all.
Don’t fret. This is HN. We are all A-type, elite white collar workers at this place.
> Doing my tasks diligently and in a timely manner affords me more time to relax, review what I have created, and enjoy it rather than drag myself to the next task.
This looks like what exactly the author says in the article to me
> affords me more time to relax, review what I have created, and enjoy it rather than drag myself to the next task
This is exactly what the author is promoting. A hypothetical so-called "worker bee" would indeed be moving on to the next task at the fastest possible clip.
If you prize delivering short-term value by chugging through the task pile faster than other people can, then sure this article is not aligned with your ideals.
That is not what I would call high performance; I would much rather be someone who can take a razor/lawnmower to that pile of tasks and do exactly the subset (down to potentially none at all) which delivers the most marginal value for the units of time I think are warranted for the project as a whole - then repeat until the goals are met.
> When did we become so not only complacent but also discouraging of any genuine effort? It is as if everyone is so aloof that if you show any effort or appreciation of your craft that you're societally acknowledging your own serfdom or that you're serving "the man".
People perceive (perception being more important than reality in this case) growing inequality, and see that society as a whole isn't moving toward any goals they care about, so they just grift as be they can, coast and collect their paychecks. Society used to dream of a future of abundance and robot house-maids, now we picture the future being scarcity and catastrophic climate change and nuclear fallout. Am I wrong? Please tell me I'm wrong. I want to hear what future dreams society is persuing other than moving money around and making investment portfolios grow.
You're wrong. These concerns, in many forms, have been present for years, however we were once instilled with the instinct to overcome, but now frailty is more valued because even in failure you can not criticize those who are less able. Those appearing less able while still managing to overcome, even when due to random chance, results in more peer accolades and ironic fanfare in the face of adversity or some other disadvantage. The privilege industrial complex continues.
> These concerns, in many forms, have been present for years, however we were once instilled with the instinct to overcome, but now frailty is more valued because even in failure you can not criticize those who are less able.
Actually I think you are totally off base here. I know in my cohort of age 30+ millennials there is a strong sense of doom. Many people have the attitude of "why should I have kids when they'll be born into a hellscape" or "why bother trying to save for retirement when the world will probably collapse before I reach 70." These are very real and very pervasive thought patterns I have seen in younger people in particular. It has nothing to do with frailty and your take smacks of boomerisms.
My 10 year old feels this way. His depiction of the future is far more pessimistic than mine was at his age, and the conditions under which I grew up were objectively worse compared to his present circumstances (he has his own room, multiple electronic devices, gaming consoles, etc. etc., typical middle-class). There seems to be a persistent message saying “buckle your belts, things are going to get worse” across all social groups, from school to friends to popular media.
There seems to be concerted effort to prepare these kids to expect less than previous generations. Parents can only do so much to block these influences.
Even getting past climate change gloom, present economic situations don’t inspire much confidence. College admissions seem much more stringent than they were a decade or two ago, never mind the rising tuitions, the debt obligations, and so on. Housing prices continue to climb. A lot has happened since the Great Recession.
You realize this has been going on for at least a century, right? At one point we literally confiscated all of the gold by order of government. Whether the overton window is shifting or not, this stuff has been going on since time immemorial.
I’m talking about specifically concerns that the youth would have. And the Overton Window does not refer to things getting worse, nor does it mean things were inevitably getting worse for an American audience until living memory. Certainly ‘90s kids can point at a solid decade of optimism, until it all abruptly ended. To children growing up today, this must all feel like a step back compared to those earlier eras.
The reference to the end of the gold standard is a complete non sequitur.
Globally shocking threats of all kinds which you are powerless to adequately cope with are well, globally shocking.
And some generations are more affected and/or more sensitive, or even more numerous with the shock spread out further.
The threat of further shock can have quite a dampening effect.
For a great many boomers when they were young men struggling to stay in college before student loans became widespread, otherwise facing being drafted for Vietnam service, it was not as comfortable as people sometimes imagine.
Nuclear proliferation was ongoing their whole lives with threats only increasing from a baseline higher than what most living people have had to endure now. It wasn't only the young men who couldn't be so sure anything would be here when 1970 came around. Or if they would reach that milestone themselves regardless.
You could just feel that things were going to get worse before they got better.
Good catch about the gold standard ending in 1971, of course it wouldn't have been possible if gold hadn't been confiscated in 1933, basically two generations earlier.
How did they get away with saying the confiscation was a "continuation" of the gold standard (after the "necessary devaluation of the dollar" was accomplished) anyway?
These were both global financial shocks to two different and separate generations each of whose members had various vulnerabilities.
A lot of the gloom preceding, then manifesting with, events like this, or worse world wars, has got a lot of similarity to the way some people feel worsening insecurity for the future right now.
I mean, we've been hearing crisis warnings for decades. When I was a kid, it was acid rain, then styrofoam cups, smog, leaded gasoline, ozone holes. Each, it was promised, would surely destroy the environment for good. And when one didn't cause Armageddon, the next one would definitely destroy the environment any day now. Today, it's climate change, next decade maybe something else. It's the same song, just a different verse. Somehow, my generation mostly escaped the pessimism the next ones somehow got. Not sure what changed--maybe the persuasion tactics are more mature and effective these days, or they're just starting kids on it younger, I don't know.
Ha - those examples are all environmental nightmares that were dealt with because of “songs” that accurately explained the danger we were in as a society. See: Y2K as a non-environmental example.
Agree that it’s the same song and somehow the generations feel it differently … maybe because they really are the first generation to have lower life expectancy compared to their parents. Or maybe because climate change is so much harder than acid rain due to the full-civilizational scale of it…
Kind of ironic, given that "boomers" lived under the 4 decades long threat of total nuclear war. Frankly, as an instance of those "age 30+ millenials", that would instill a far stronger sense of doom in me than the rather gradual, rather benign (compared to WW3 between the US and the USSR) effects of climate change.
Climate change can be mitigated by technological solutions. Sure, you also need political action, but it's a marathon, not a sprint: a chain of bad decisions will make matters worse, but you'll still have a chance to recover. During the cold war, a chain of bad decisions could have led to immediate, full-scale disaster. That you had to depend on "some luck" to prevent the collapse of civilization as we know is terrifying.
The thing about climate change is that it is 100% avoidable yet nothing is being done. Everyone just says "we can fix it afterwards with twice the effort".
Climate change is not comparatively benign. Unpredictable localized calamities can quickly spiral into unpredictable geopolitical conflagrations. There’s no red phone to deescalate the drought that motivated the Syrian Civil War.
> Kind of ironic, given that "boomers" lived under the 4 decades long threat of total nuclear war.
We still live under that same threat, almost nothing has changed... Other than public perception [1] of the dangers.
All the same failure modes that lead to nuclear war that were in place in 1980 are still here, today. [2] All the same kinds of people are in still in charge.
[1] Just because the news has gotten bored of writing about a subject doesn't mean the subject has gone away.
[2] Also, India/Pakistan/North Korea are now nuclear powers, but as someone who doesn't live in Asia, I'm far more concerned about the Russia/US dynamic than any of that. Neither of those three parties can 'end the world' in the same way the latter two can.
>All the same kinds of people are in still in charge.
Very true.
However the quality of those kinds of people has declined further while it has become easier for complete non-leaders to attain leadership positions around the world.
The political & financial leadership shortcomings across-the-board are more disappointing through time since it doesn't seem like there is enough sophistication to avoid war as well and preserve what prosperity there is.
So this is all basically threatening peace & prosperity, that's what really gets people worried.
The pandemic certainly didn't help, why work so hard if you may not even be around tomorrow.
I'm pretty sure I would be more terrified if there was a planned schedule of sending 1 nuke per year and then 2 nukes per year and then 3 nukes per year and so on than if you sent them all at once even though the first scenario is unlikely to kill me any time soon. It's far more benign yet it is scarier.
> When did we become so not only complacent but also discouraging of any genuine effort?
Overcorrection for burnout and other consequences of poor WLB. And because WFH has distilled many white collar remote jobs to their essence shorn of the trappings of the office, causing people to reflect on what work really means.
Given your reading comprehension of the OP, I’m not sure you’d get much out of such a book, seeing as how you missed the point of the article is essentially “work smarter, not harder” and to use excess time at work for career development and continuous learning.
I did not read the article how you read it. It seems to me you are doing exactly what the author is suggesting. You are doing your work and then taking time to do other things.
The author isnt saying dont give a shit. They are saying when you finish your work you don't have to ding a bell and say, "NEXT TASK PLEASE" right away. There are other aspects of work that are important too.
> A bit off topic but as of late there is this creeping normalization of intentionally subpar or less optimized results I'm noticing in our industry but also general society.
> When did we become so not only complacent but also discouraging of any genuine effort?
And these same people are going to expect nothing short of the best of the best from surgeons / plane pilots / car manufacturers / etc.
So they can slack of... But doctors are expected to do the work!
All of whom have downtime and at least one (if not more) backup. Software developers typically don't (strict adherents to pair programming aside). They also spend company hours getting better at their craft, building professional ties. Just like the article suggests software developers do.
>And these same people are going to expect nothing short of the best of the best from surgeons / plane pilots / car manufacturers / etc.
Going under the knife of a surgeon at the end of a 12 hour shift would worry me. I'd like think the pilot of any plane I was on was well rested as well.
Sure but most engineers aren't working on anything with near that level of importance.
Like sorry but another bugfix on Youtube or the Uber app really pales in comparison to a Triple Bypass or safely landing a plane with 200 passengers during a high crosswind for example.
You obviously didn’t read the article since the author’s point is to work better/smarter, not to work less. For example to improve your skillset rather than to frantically jump from task to task.
Not very conscientious of you to comment without having read the submission.
The theme of the article is not that you should be less productive, it's that stepping back and slowing down can make you more productive. For example you could have saved yourself some offense if you had taken the time to consider the author's point before reacting.
It sounds like you're misinterpreting the article or you did not read it.
> When did we become so not only complacent but also discouraging of any genuine effort? It is as if everyone is so aloof that if you show any effort or appreciation of your craft that you're societally[sic] acknowledging your own serfdom or that you're serving "the man".
In my decades long experience in corporate programming, when people accuse everyone around them of not putting in enough effort one of two things are happening.
The first, which is very rare, is that you are truly in a dead end job with a toxic work environment. If this is the environment you're in and you aren't looking for the first exit and interviewing constantly, frankly, you deserve to stay there and suffer. You may succeed in the short term but only because you'd have to dig 6 feet into the ground to find the bar. Your managers only see you as a resource to exploit before you burn out and fall to the same level as your co-workers.
The second, and this is the most common, is that you are sprinting constantly and have yet to develop any sense of work/life balance. In essence, you're convinced the world itself is insane and you are the only one truly "working". You are on the path to burnout and the people who are "aloof" are actually trying to help you find a path to long term work over decades.
Mind you, maybe you just work in bursts. You find a high pay/high pressure cooker of a job, throw yourself into it till you just can't, and then take a year long sabbatical. I don't know you, but I've seen these sentences so many times and 90% of the time it's the same unawareness and inexperience with maintaining a sustainable level of work.
I'm not trying to attack you here. I am trying to impress upon you that I was once of the same opinion as you. Through the years I've become more open to the idea that that Good Work Ethic is mostly a product of Capitalist Propagandizing (TM) starting as early as primary school.
Even though I maintain and am praised consistently for my "work ethic", I am keenly aware of the constant pressure to produce more value for a vanishingly smaller share of that value. That awareness makes me able to make better decisions about how much and for how long to disturb the equilibrium of work/not-work, and how much time a task takes at both a sustainable pace and at a "crunch" pace.
Burn out and the more obvious visible symptoms take years to set in, and then it takes almost as long to counteract, if you can at all. Some people burn out permanently and never truly recover. It's just better to not get to that point at all.
The ways around this are individual, because what is sustainable is individual. One co-worker works roughly 4 10 hour days and is available-but-not-working on Fridays. Another is very strict about having a 3 day weekend every month. One often works lightly during the week and then works Saturday when they can have more heads down time.
TL;DR: If you feel that everyone around you is telling you you're working too hard, you probably need to assess the sustainability of your level of work. You may or may not need to make changes, but (again, in my experience across tens of years and companies) you almost certainly need to put in place long term plans if you're running net-negative on your burn out battery.
On the other hand, there truly are people who can sustainably work 60+ hours weeks for decades. Some of the Internet celebrity developers, like John Carmack or Jon Blow, are like that. However, they mostly work on their own thing, which must help a lot with sustaining motivation.
It really does! Startup compensation is heavily built around employees having a stake in the company for this reason. A sense of ownership really does increase your capacity.
Unfortunately, with corporations being so blatantly "mask off" recently, you've really seen that sense tank outside of small startups. It's just much more in the employees faces now. It could explain the trend, but I still stand by my stance that a vast portion of American-style Work Ethic is really just propaganda to keep workers undervaluing their labor and mental health.
There is always more to these stories than first meets the eye. Especially so when it is self reported. I remember people lionising Thatcher because she only slept four hours a night. It turned out that she took many naps during the day.
This article makes me feel bad because in the authors world, people like me are relegated to worker bee monkies trying to please the bossman due to pathology or some such delusion. I work this way because it pleases me. Doing my tasks diligently and in a timely manner affords me more time to relax, review what I have created, and enjoy it rather than drag myself to the next task.
A bit off topic but as of late there is this creeping normalization of intentionally subpar or less optimized results I'm noticing in our industry but also general society.
When did we become so not only complacent but also discouraging of any genuine effort? It is as if everyone is so aloof that if you show any effort or appreciation of your craft that you're societally acknowledging your own serfdom or that you're serving "the man".