"If something sounds unfamiliar to you, celebrate because that means you have an opportunity to be better than you were yesterday." - ???
"But it turns out that the people trying to teach me were just doing a bad job. Those books that dragged me through a series of structured principles were just bad books. I should have ignored them. I should have just played." - J Somers
" It’s called Internal Success before External Success in my book, and it means simply: get your shit together before you try to sell it to someone." - Mad Ned
This is what keeps me up at night. Not having a solid story or reason behind the product we're working on. Just a good reminder (this whole story) that make sure you have support internally as well before you go for it. Few are going to support something that doesn't look secure.
"The 40-hour work week is a relic of the late 1800s" - Nick Moore, SourceGraph
I'd love 3 day weekends to just work on other things, working harder (or more effectively M->TH to handle that). Work smart and effective, not long. Who cares how long you work if there's no output?
“Time-spent-at-desk is the worst measure of efficiency in software engineering.” - Loïc Guychard, engineering manager
As long as you get it done and your manager can reach you when they need to, what's the pain?
I came from my first "big" job requiring us to be in our physical seats from 8 to 5 PM, with it intensely frowned upon to leave our seats, look not busy, etc. I also came from a culture where you don't dare leave until your boss leaves.
"Growth demands a temporary surrender of security." - Gail Sheehy
Once you surrender your pride and your safety net, things can happen.
"Many opportunities seem exciting but actually give you less of the life you want." - J. C
Agreed. I usually entertain ideas because they sound good, but the time commitment/responsibility don't usually settle in until much later.
"Slowing down enables you to act in a high quality way. Kind rather than curt. Polished rather than sloppy. It's hard to be thoughtful when you're in a rush." - J. C
This is going to be the primary theme of 2022. Slowing down. I hit my head, hurt myself, and hurt others when I go fast. Also, I end up wasting more time and being more frustrated in the end.
“Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.” (bell hooks)
Treat yourself well too. If you treat yourself poorly, don't expect others to treat you well to compensate for that.
Stop saying sorry. Unless you really are sorry. - Me
Yeah, I say sorry too much. Until my SO, friends, and etc all tune it out.
"Money is replaceable, TIME with family and friends is not."
Time is a currency we can't earn or take back. Money helps us navigate things better, but it isn't the solution to everything.
Teaching what you think you know really makes that knowledge stick. (me)
I hate telling people the wrong thing, so this works for me.
"A right solution might only benefit you. Solutions often require change. When there is change, others may feel like they lose something. Unfortunately, solutions that involve people don’t work this way. Appreciate the shades of grey .." (Patrick Kua)
I experienced this recently at work. An integration had gone live, and I am in disbelief (still) since it obviously was working at literally 1/10th of it's potential. To be fair, it was before I had joined the company, so I had my hands tied. We had a team call just last week to discuss this, and even though we, as a team, agreed that yes, there was an issue - ultimately, they didn't want to agitate the customer/partner. And the partner was "happy" that things were working. So why stir the pot?
I get it. Obviously, we want the best for us AND the customer. And if there is a potential where raising the alarm and pointing the finger could lose us everything, why would we do that?
"Debating creationists on the topic of evolution is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon -- it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory." (a random amazon review, found on reddit)
In other words, it doesn't matter if you are right if the person you are debating or talking with fundamentally isn't on the same page as you. I want to be able to identify such moments and extract myself from them before I spin my wheels trying to make progress in such a situation. If you want to play a good game of chess, you need to find a player who understands the rules rather than trying to extract a victory from somebody who doesn't know what chess is.
"The simplest way is to focus on improving yourself instead of others." (Dale Carnegie & Associates)
This is my life's work after having messed this up so terribly in my youth. In my quest to make everyone like me, I had forgot that I myself wasn't a person worth liking. Logic doesn't work. Repeated reasoning and incessant pleading doesn't outright change a person no matter what you do. You can really only make strides by improving yourself.
"People who look for reasons why things won’t work, struggle to take action. People who look for reasons why things will work—and solve problems as they arise—make things happen.” (J. Clear)
I'm a problem solver by nature - and even with that, sometimes I surprise myself with how much BS I can cook up to avoid taking action. One instance, I was trying to enter the building (having left my apartment key fob) and I gave up early. But had I just tried the door, I'd have found out that somebody had left it slightly ajar... I have to trust and try everything. That's how things happen.
"It’s better to rest than to climb the wrong mountain.” (J. Clear)
I feel like this is in part why I don't "finish" stuff. I detect early or feel that it's the wrong mountain to climb. But is that just an excuse for being lazy? Who determines whether the climb is wrong or not? Perspective and situation will change.
"You can't make anybody trust you. All you can do is behave in a way that allows them to make a decision to trust you." (Rich Diviney)
Not to toot my own horn too much, but I always wondered why people would gravitate to me in times of problems (back in the day, not so much now). I certainly wasn't the most skilled, or the most knowledgable. But what I did present (unfortunately, not recently) was taking a deep breath, a clear sense of calm but still urgent, focused while bringing the people back to the root problem in an attempt to triage. For me, flailing is (and still is) worse than death.
But yeah. Agreed with this. I can't say - "trust me". It's their choice, based off of how I have acted in the past and how I act now.
"If you trust your manager, tell them your goals" (Emily Stark)
Prefacing this with the fact that not everyone is lucky enough to have a good manager. But my current rapport with my current (and prior) managers were all pretty good.
I just want to have the freedom to hack away at cool things, skill up / learn more about anything, and be the "helpful advisor" in times of trouble.
"If you really want to achieve your goal, it’s useful to step back and ask the question, “What could possibly go wrong?” (Patrick Kua)
I always think about what can go wrong. But never in the context of "achieving", more of "trying not to disappoint/cause failures" ... I suppose it's just a context change!
If I really wanted to be successful long-term in my habits, for instance - I should keep myself healthy (as being sick deters me from doing a lot of what I'd normally do well) and combine reading / thinking about them with actual practice (as neither can survive without the other).
"High impact projects are more valuable than perfect execution on smaller scale projects" (R. Panja)
Was reading some more stories on reaching staff engineer, and this quote hit home. Better to deliver high impact now on the small project rather than perfection when your team has nothing to start off of. Of course, in a larger, more grounded company with a legacy stack - this wouldn't necessarily apply.
"What is the biggest non-work related contribution you can make today?" (J. Clear)
Right. Uh. Not everything is about work. I work... and brain is off. Now what? Yeah. I need to find a hobby. I do like cooking! And uh.. taking care of my SO! But there must be more to it, right?
"The course of action that could provide greater happiness, meaning, or satisfaction in the long run may not make you happy in the next 30 minutes." (J. Clear)
So many choices I've made for this.. ah. As an example, my current rent situation. Yes, I could hypothetically move myself up to LA to quash the naysayers. Then what? Maroon myself for a year until I manage to luck out? I'd be happier with a roof over my head and stability, so that's what I want.
"And the answer needs to go beyond writing things down. A good example is how, to learn to skate, you cannot just rely on reading books about skating." (Pragmatic Engineer)
You need hands on experience dealing with an outage or a disaster or a problem or in general, just learning. You can read about it in theory forever, but you have to put it into practice to really understand and create that pattern.
How we handle ourselves in a situation is "tacit" knowledge. Explaining exactly how you reacted the way you did is muuuuch harder.
"The only certain thing about outages is that they will always happen. Everything else is up to us. How much effort do we put into preventing them, or into mitigating them quickly, or learning from them?" (Pragmatic Engineer)
Amen. Rather than fighting fires daily, spend the bulk of your time preparing and preventing the fires so that when they do happen...
This is real. A lot of incidents are not in fact tech problems - they are communication issues, gaps in understanding, failures of process, human error.
"Choose the right field of competition." (J. Clear - Atomic Habits)
I'm still finishing up Atomic habits, and this is a biggie. To be frank, I'm not tall. Didn't do so well as school. I liked games because the more time you spent on it, the more you typically could show for it. Dedication to the game meant more cool weapons, armor, and prestige. I hated clubbing and socializing events in college. I'd always hang out in the corner with the other "people who didn't fit". I love organizing and planning. I worry and think about scenarios that might happen, and prep for them.
I'm not going to easily become a banker on wall street, or an engineer at the big tech firms in silicon valley unless I figure out where to put my stake in the ground. But we have to try!
"I'd also do a lot of programming with pencil and paper, until I could get access." (Walter Bright)
This came from an article I was reading. Back then, if you really loved programming, you'd have to line up / queue up to pay for mainframe access. You had to plan ahead on what you wanted to run / calculate. not like today, where we casually open up our IDE, get a coffee while the cursor is blinking, and sit there staring at the various classes/modules in our project while thinking about what's for lunch. I feel that the constraints of the past really helped mold a whole generation of programmers who prep and plan ahead, which has now sort of been lost with how readily available we can run code. Heck, I can open google chrome, go to the console, and I can type in rubbish that doesn't even get interpreted right and pay basically nothing except the price of my curiosity..
"The strategies that made you successful in the past will, at some point, reach their limit. Don't let your previous choices set your future ceiling. The willingness to try new ideas allows you to keep advancing." (J. Clear)
Trello worked for me in the past in the day to day. But gradually, it's more of a tool that helps me organize my thoughts, and I'm still breaking out of that habit of shifting cards around meaninglessly.
I used to document tons and tons in Jira. I still feel that is somewhat useful, but it needs to lead to some result. Leaving a paper trail is great, and still important, but there needs to be impact and reason to do so. If nobody is going to read that paper trail, you can be more brief.
I'm cool with prioritizing "ruthlessly", but to the point that we'll never tackle the smaller things... we have to not work on everything that is on fire. There will always be fires. It's better to take a breather, and find root causes.
And on that note - dedicating more time to work made me somewhat successful earlier on. But it's not scalable and I need to work smarter, and take my own personal time very seriously.
"The data are clear that humans are really bad at taking the time to do things that are well understood to incontrovertibly reduce the risk of rare but catastrophic events." (Dan Luu)
We take shortcuts almost always. In the pursuit of revenue or whatnot, we'll ignore the proper process. A larger company may act like a startup to get done what is required. This is a warning light for myself, I suppose.
"when your model and reality conflict, reality is always right." (Will Larson)
This was more in the context of systems thinking, but I believe it could be applicable to the day to day as well. We have an idea of how things should be. But at the end of the day, we need to also yield to reality. And if the door is open and it's freezing, you're likely going to be cold, not warm.
Just because your calculations and thought process led you to believe something doesn't mean it's going to actually always play out that way. Don't get too attached to what you've built - in the end, it's a tool to help you. Reality wins in the end, always! (that's not to say we can't dream, but we have to have to come back to earth)
"The secret to being productive is to work on the right thing—even if it's at a slow pace." (J. Clear)
I've been working on the "right" thing for a couple years now. I'm not the best, but I'm better than before. Consistent technical practice, reading, and steady small projects has built up a pretty strong foundation which is already bearing fruit for my first job.
When people ask me how to help, I tell them to ask people what they need. (Stephanie Land)
The whole article was a whirlwind to read. Once again... I am so lucky to have what I have. The perspective change is something I really need to consider.
https://time.com/6102655/maid-stephanie-land-poverty
You are replaceable at work. You are not replaceable at home. Home is your real life.
I know this. No matter what my folks at work say, I'll be replaceable. They can always find another mobile tech savvy guy like me, heck. But J the human is harder to replace in the context of a friendship or relationship.
I also do a silent day every 1-2 weeks when I don't speak for a day and don't use my phone either. I observed that when I don't speak for a day, I get a lot more clarity in my mind. (some person on linkedin)
I did this once. It was awkward writing everything down on paper or messaging - I suppose I'll have to cut that out too if I repeat this. But it was certainly the experience. I feel that we need to do more listening!
"A good teacher does not teach facts, he or she teaches enthusiasm, open-mindedness and values." (Gian-Carlo Rota)
I agree. We have the ideas behind teaching a bit backwards, now. We insist on ensuring all curriculum is standard so that everyone gets the "same" education, and we do standardized testing. But now, we have a generation (of which I am a part) where we may not think to question, we give up right away when things are not in our favor, and we cling to beliefs that we ourselves do not fully understand...
And it's a struggle to unlearn these. We were stuffed with vocab and memorized many things just to pass tests. In the end of the day, I think our teachers were doing what they had to do, but not what they should have done.
“The question no longer is whether to outsource, but what and how much to outsource.” (Courtney Rogerson)
Pulled this from a work newsletter, but the message is clear. We want to delegate/outsource things that are not our core competencies. If I'm not good at reminders, let your phone remind you it's time to eat. We're not good at remembering many many things, so write it down / email yourself / put it in the calendar. If you tap a generalist for an extremely specific use case, don't act surprised if they have to pass it onto somebody else. Likewise, if you have a mission critical service, you want redundancy and likely multiple (but well managed) points of failure rather than a single point of failure that will result in 100% downtime. If you don't outsource some of this, if it goes down, it goes down HARD.
"I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs." (Frederick Douglass)
Sometimes, you just need to take one step. Can't hope forever!
""You only need to know the direction, not the destination. The direction is enough to make the next choice." (J. clear)
This helped me clarify what I needed to do next. I'll have to use this more often. Just start moving.
“Money is numbers and numbers never end. If it takes money to be happy, your search for happiness will never end.” (bob marley)
Ow. Yup. My happiness is luckily not going to go there. As long as I'm earning at this amount, I should be good for retirement. But it's easy to fall into this trap....
"You always know when you’re doing something for the first time, and you almost never know when you’re doing something for the last time." (david at raptitude, william irvine)
Treat every engagement like it were your last - you actually don't know for certain, right? Your bi-weekly meeting with someone may as well be your last and you don't even know. Seeing your SO next to you ... don't take a petty argument to bed, just avoid having that petty argument to begin with! Your first time eating at a place might be your last! It brings a whole different perspective, and dare I say... patience.