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.
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'm definitely not in the same boat as the OP (trying to get away with doing the minimum), but because I hate to be the long pole on a project, I always try to get my pieces done well in advance of when they're required. As I work primarily on infra, I can usually manage to pull this off.
What this means is that often when crunch time hits, I've got excess capacity I can use to help "row the boat" (or maybe bail out water from leaks?). Excess capacity is extremely valuable as lots of folks are really bad at time estimation, so having some more senior "floaters" around can really help get projects completed.
Excess capacity is also useful for longer-term efforts. You need at least a few folks who can get out of the low-level crunch mindset and figure out what needs to be done for sustainability of efforts, or else you just end up in mega-crunch forever.
I've seen something similar backfire for a guy I worked with. He had this idea that he would get his shit done Monday-Thursday and have an easy WFH Friday.
People ended up doing most work towards end of sprint and Friday would usually be really busy - basically he always had to be present and management would offload priority stuff to him since he was done. So he'd end up busting his ass all week. Eventually he got tired and reverted to standard schedule - but this meant his relative performance dropped - I saw him get singled out in a review for performance drop (and not a lot of people noticed when he was going above the norm).
But the end result would have been the same - he wouldn't finish his tasks ahead of time, he wouldn't have spare capacity on Friday - management notices this and thinks he's underperforming
Obvious your mileage may vary, and timeframes matter. I'm talking about getting my pieces done weeks or months in advance of when we need to ship, not days or hours.
>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.
Working in a retail store/break-fix repair/MSP environment, for a small business in a small city, this is absolutely the case. There is nothing more frustrating than having three customer projects on your plate, all of which are important (think "the email server is down"), and then the doorbell or phone rings and you end up spending half an hour walking an old lady through resetting her facebook password. It's an absolutely massive productivity killer, as well as making the day feel longer.
More employees would be the normal solution, but that's not possible here (we've had more in the past, it wasn't financially viable, apparently). Unless of course they started paying commission based on what people actually got done instead of a regular wage, which I'm not a fan of. (Though to be fair, if we did switch to that, the one employee who barely does anything would either get his ass in gear, or leave, so win/win maybe?)
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.
Yep, there was article that recently came up on Hacker News about maintaining some slack in your work schedule so that you can always be responsive when an issue comes up. I'm having trouble finding it because searching for "Slack" on Hacker News turns up a whole other range of things...
I feel like I am in a similar boat to OP. Often feeling like my regular work doesn't take up a full week and not trying to fill up every bit of that 40 hours. I also spend a lot of my time "poking around" and not doing my own work. Seeing what others are working on, learning random things that may or may not be applicable to my job. But performance reviews come around with words like "very responsive!" and "always knows what's going on in the program and can jump in to any project"
I think there's a tremendous value in having insurance/redundancy for supporting existing critical SW projects/infrastructure.
So while day to day there might not be immediate obvious work, much like a fire fighter or life guard; if the servers go down or coworkers leave there needs to be some ballast that can steer the ship.
That said, if you don't actually know much of the companies code base other than stuff you've directly written, you could very much be providing only perceived insurance versus actual insurance.
I used to work a tech support job overnight. Some nights I'd take two calls.
This was expected for the reasons you noted. When there was an emergency someone needed to be idle in the first place so they could immediately respond fully focused.
Same story for me, they just needed someone available for emergencies. As long as I could respond when pinged, they didn't care what I did with my time. My boss came in one morning, saw I was playing Fallout 4 on my (personal) laptop, and just asked if it was any good. I finished a lot of books I wanted to read, and had lots of time for personal projects, but ultimately the boredom and overnight schedule were too much. I'd rather feel productive, personally, but for a certain type of person that job would have been paradise.
If you're available for work you're working. Only taking 2 calls isn't slacking. They're paying you to be available and so they should because they're impinging on your free time.
They can pick up low priority tasks and if something of high priority comes in, it takes the precedence. An employee can also learn new tasks, rotate to different teams, cross train, fix old code / refactor, take a sabbatical-on-call, write documentation, etc which do not get in the way of taking on high-burst high-priority tasks. This is far better in terms of company's productivity than pretend-work that the OP is describing.
I don't think its better for the company as you suggest. It is possible to use good sense of prioritization and still have 'extra capacity'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
FAANG has a much larger presence in Silicon Valley than SF. SF is more biased towards startups. Although it’s true all the major tech companies have SF shuttles.
San Jose’s median house price is $1.2 million. A million will get you a quality ranch.
(I fully appreciate the ridiculousness of presenting a million as “affordable”)
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.
