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good for you, im so proud
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Sep 16, 2019 23:30
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JawnV6 posted:Okay? Good for y'all? I leave in the morning and don't come back until it's time to leave work. I hang up my backpack when I get home and don't take it down until it's time to go to work the next day. I don't work from home ever. I don't care if work is 5 minutes or 5 hours away. Home is home and the office is the office. I will never let the office permeate into my personal space (if I can help it).
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Sep 16, 2019 23:44
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"I do this naturally, without effort. Why would anyone else, from any background, ever have difficulty with this boundary? It's inconceivable and i refuse to imagine the scenario" - actionable advice from forum folks, looking forward to a half dozen more of these super useful posts
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Sep 16, 2019 23:54
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JawnV6 posted:"I do this naturally, without effort. Why would anyone else, from any background, ever have difficulty with this boundary? It's inconceivable and i refuse to imagine the scenario" - actionable advice from forum folks, looking forward to a half dozen more of these super useful posts You explicitly asked for advice. Don't be a dick.
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Sep 16, 2019 23:56
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JawnV6 posted:"I do this naturally, without effort. Why would anyone else, from any background, ever have difficulty with this boundary? It's inconceivable and i refuse to imagine the scenario" - actionable advice from forum folks, looking forward to a half dozen more of these super useful posts It's really just a matter of how you look at things and perspective. For me, work is something I do to make money so my wife and I can live a comfortable life doing things we enjoy. That is all it is. I absolutely loved the 2 months I was unemployed while I had enough savings we could continue to more or less not changing our spending because it meant I got to spend more time doing my number one priority with my life: enjoying myself.
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Sep 17, 2019 00:02
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poemdexter posted:You explicitly asked for advice. Don't be a dick. like i gently mocked, you're just asserting that you don't have any issues with it and can't fathom why anyone else wouldn't be on this golden path. like, have you ever made a million-dollar mistake? have you ever snarled something up and doomed SRE's to late night pages? if you're doing those while cackling madly and ignoring the human impact, i think you're a sociopath. if it's the other way and you're not doing anything of consequence for other humans, maybe the coping strategy of "hang backpack up" would fall short?
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Sep 17, 2019 00:09
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You're really projecting a lot of poo poo onto the posters in this thread.
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Sep 17, 2019 00:12
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You made a generic statement and got a generic response. Stop being so pissy.
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Sep 17, 2019 00:18
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lol at the slapfight. anyway wrt to work boundaries, the biggest issue for me has always been messaging apps. especially in teams that skew younger, people tend to mix work and personal instant messaging and management needs to set the right expectations. i used to work in an org where the CTO would constantly message team members outside of work based on random thoughts he had and I had to constantly remind him not to do it.
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Sep 17, 2019 01:02
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shrike82 posted:lol at the slapfight. Fully agree with this. I'm full time remote, and the biggest thing for me to separate work and home life was getting separate phones for personal poo poo and work poo poo. I have zero work apps on my personal phone, and if I'm not on call, my work phone with slack and work email and everything else that can drag me online is in my laptop bag where I can't see it.
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Sep 17, 2019 01:13
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Work profiles on Android is pretty swell for this; everything segments nearly into it's own section that can be turned off when you turn work mode off.
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Sep 17, 2019 01:17
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Volmarias posted:Work profiles on Android is pretty swell for this; everything segments nearly into it's own section that can be turned off when you turn work mode off. Yeah, dumb corporate policy prevents that from being an option any more, unfortunately. A lot of my coworkers relied on this in the past though. Good call out.
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Sep 17, 2019 01:25
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CPColin posted:You're really projecting a lot of poo poo onto the posters in this thread. oh god, my backpack's just on the floor! how could i be so stupid, clearly elevating it from a hook would've solved everything woe be to those who disregard the solid advice being peddled here. lord knows how briefcase-owners ever find solace?
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Sep 17, 2019 01:26
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When not at work you want to avoid both physical and mental interruptions related to work. In the former case this means taking no work materials away from work, such as any paperwork or learning material. It also means reducing or removing communication, as previously mentioned, so that you can't be contacted after hours nor are you tempted to just "check your email while you're at the computer" or on your phone. The latter case is more difficult, particularly if you enjoy exercising your creativity at work and solving difficult problems. You may find yourself thinking about those problems when you're not at work. By itself, a flash of insight may not be much of an interruption, but you must develop a habit of writing a quick note for yourself and then moving back out of work mode very quickly. You cannot just "sit down for a few minutes to write down this code while I'm thinking about it" because invariably you'll still be there an hour later. If you have an idea that requires research, then send yourself the idea so you can research it when you show up for work the following day. During your commute you should also not be looking up things for work, reading things related to work, or fleshing out ideas so that you're ready when you get to work. Instead you should be reading for your own pleasure, about other things that interest you personally, or solving your own problems. I have a number of personal projects that require a great deal of creativity and mental effort, and in my free time I think about the next steps on those projects. In fact, I sometimes get flashes of insight about those projects while I'm at work. If you're part of an on-call rotation, then there are periods where it is impossible not to take work home. You want to understand your actual SLA if you get paged, so you can respond appropriately. In particular, you need to know which activities might be interrupted if you get paged, and whether or not you have to be ready for that. For example, if you need to take a shower do you need your pager with you? I still go running when I'm on call, but I need to have the pager with me; if I get paged I can get home fast enough. If I'm checking mail or taking out recyclables, I don't need the pager with me because I'll be back in three or four minutes anyway. Likewise, if I'm preparing a meal or something, I don't really need to constantly know whether or not I'm getting paged; as long as I notice in the next ten minutes it's fine. In some cases I'm worried about being able to reply fast enough, and then I make sure that the laptop is on and logged in so that I don't have to rush to do those steps if I do get paged. Of course I must ignore the temptation to do anything with the laptop unless I get paged.
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Sep 17, 2019 01:56
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For me, the biggest thing that helped me set good boundaries between work and home was managing my ADHD
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Sep 17, 2019 03:05
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JawnV6 posted:oh god, my backpack's just on the floor! how could i be so stupid, clearly elevating it from a hook would've solved everything If your coworkers are as passive aggressive as you are, they probably gently caress with your off time because they hate you and your lovely attitude.
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Sep 17, 2019 05:06
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find a job you don't care about to help you switch off at the end of the day
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Sep 17, 2019 11:33
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JawnV6 posted:oh god, my backpack's just on the floor! how could i be so stupid, clearly elevating it from a hook would've solved everything 
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Sep 17, 2019 11:36
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You should probably give zero shits about your job. Don’t check your emails, don’t check Slack or Teams or whatever when at home. Your company probably does not give a poo poo about you, even if they say they do, so pay it back in kind. If you ask a question and your response to people’s answers is ever to deride them, perhaps you should either grow up or have a bit of introspection. A healthy attitude goes a long way especially in the workplace. Even if you don’t give a poo poo about your job and do the bare minimum to collect a paycheck, people will still like you.
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Sep 17, 2019 12:54
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In my team we bullshit on weekends (or whenever tbh) in WhatsApp but try to keep slack for the workday. I've had similar "separation of message apps" in the past and I think it helps. I mean, assuming you have coworkers you want to chat with about not work.
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Sep 17, 2019 13:48
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Re: million dollar mistakes and letting teammates down - I agree. If you create a problem in off-hours and don't jump in to fix it, you're an rear end in a top hat. So my strategy is not to make off-hours problems. I used to be on a team that would have these kinds of problems and it was because there was a culture of "move fast and break things" (bad), firefighting (worse), and the worst of all, rewarding firefighters by calling them "rock stars". I have since moved to a team that skews older & married with kids and surprise surprise, we just don't have major outages because we invest time upfront into resilient systems and avoid doing things that could cause problems, like Friday deploys. Almost all of our infrastructure is automated and we chose a stack that, while not ancient, is at least mature enough to not cause breaking changes all the time. There's a lot of root cause analysis when problems do happen. I work remotely, usually from my home office, which theoretically would make it hard to "switch off" at the end of the day. In practice I don't find it too hard. A big part of it is that I try to be very deliberate with my working time, because after I finish my work, there's no "butt in seat" time to fill - it's all my free time. So every morning when I drink my coffee I decide what I'm going to get done that day. I try not to do busywork or pseudo-work like checking email and instead to identify exactly what would be my best contribution. If I finish that early, great. Once I'm working, I try to be constantly aware of how much I'm actually getting accomplished, because towards 4pm I tend to start slowing down and making errors. I find it's best to stop while I'm ahead.
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Sep 17, 2019 13:49
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Xguard86 posted:In my team we bullshit on weekends (or whenever tbh) in WhatsApp but try to keep slack for the workday. I've had similar "separation of message apps" in the past and I think it helps. Yeah, if you have work friends you like, definitely add them on a not work-centric messaging app if you want to chat about games or whatever.
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Sep 17, 2019 14:04
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I’m of the rule that you should put into your company what they put into you and what they would keep giving you if things got rough. Loyalty to people is fine as well. And lastly, both companies and people can change but companies are by definition a function of their people. Business is business, but there’s a world of a difference in how you’re treated along the way across different companies. The culture that matters around bugs and incidents is how mistakes are handled and how to balance prevention and reaction. We shouldn’t glorify people working late but we should acknowledge their efforts at the same time. We don’t need to blame people as much as conditions, yet people should be willing to own their contributions to problems in order to make progress. Somewhere in the spectrum of attitudes that seems right is critical optimism - be positive, but don’t sweep problems under a rug either.
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Sep 17, 2019 14:25
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JawnV6 posted:that was not, as i would characterize it, "advice" It sounds like you work at a place that doesn't do good practise with deployments because they just expect staff to hang around after hours and fix it if it goes bad. You should be actively trying to change that culture, and if you can't, then hunting for a new job.
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Sep 17, 2019 15:06
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code:
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Sep 17, 2019 15:17
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Am I just the biggest stereotype in engineering if I feel like I've never worked with a product manager that knows what their job is? Perhaps this is my fault: I've worked in professional dev for 5 years but really only had 2 jobs. My understanding, though, is that engineers are responsible for implementing the business' needs. Product people define what those business needs are, and how a product meets them, and are in charge of prioritizing the work. Engineers make the application do what the Product Manager says it should do and are responsible for reporting on their progress so that Product can continue to make decisions about priorities on an ongoing basis. Is this inaccurate? I feel like 99% of the time, my job is to do both of these jobs and my PM is mostly responsible for ferrying questions about the business' needs to the stakeholders who have those needs and prioritizing. They are never able to tell me how the product should work. It's becoming a real source of friction and I'm wondering if most/all engineering orgs are actually like this or if I should be looking for a new job. Example: We have a business process that's mostly done by actual humans and stored on a spreadsheet. We want to automate it so we can go faster. I expect my PM to know which parts of the sheet need to be automated. I expect my PM to know how the human that currently does this task goes about completing it so I can program a computer to do that same thing. I expect my PM to know which parts of the sheet are the most difficult for the humans so that we can attack those first and start to provide value for the business. Am I expecting too much? negativeneil fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Sep 17, 2019 |
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Sep 17, 2019 19:01
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No. There are a massive number of garbage PMs out there.
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Sep 17, 2019 19:10
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Correct. Just yesterday we had a meeting to lay out issues found in the first three weeks since a Forever Project that just went out after over a year of delays. During the meeting, it came out that the customer wanted a certain class of its users to be locked out of a certain feature. The PM had never captured this basic requirement, so it went unimplemented during the two years of implementing this project and unnoticed and uncorrected during the two-week soft roll-out. Fortunately, when the PM turned to me and started asking if we could correct this and that, I was able to drop a hint to my boss and my boss picked it up and said we would need to make a formal change request with the "new" requirements in writing and get it signed.
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Sep 17, 2019 19:36
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I had to do 3-4 "missed requirement" projects at my previous job. The worst part is, the PM for the original projects was once a developer with the company, so he should know better what exactly needs to be conveyed.
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Sep 17, 2019 19:44
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And to be clear, I don't expect my PMs to be omniscient or infallible. I'm saying it seems like my PMs don't know that this is literally what their job is.
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Sep 17, 2019 19:57
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negativeneil posted:And to be clear, I don't expect my PMs to be omniscient or infallible. I'm saying it seems like my PMs don't know that this is literally what their job is. So like 50% of all PMs out there?
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Sep 17, 2019 19:58
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Look at these people, with PMs and poo poo.
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Sep 17, 2019 20:06
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Ok yes this is what I am wondering. Given my relatively narrow experience, do I have abnormally bad PMs or are PMs often times completely useless. I guess my plan to eventually move into product management just got a lot more attractive if this is the baseline of expectations.
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Sep 17, 2019 20:09
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The PM at my last job wasn't even involved in gathering requirements or anything. That was the BA's job. The PM seemed to exist just to run development like a dictator, to the point where she would assign exact tasks we would work on every single day of the 2 week "sprint"(we were pretending we were agile while being anything but), and if the estimates were off and something that was estimated at 1 day of work took more than 1 day you were expected to work as much as was necessary to not let the schedule change.
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Sep 17, 2019 20:20
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Good PMs are like good sales people - there are few technical ones let alone ones that know much about products or management, but if you find one holy crap do they make your life easier. You’ll know when you’ve got a good PM because you get to focus more upon engineering and problem solving rather than wrangling for requirements or working in your ticketing system.
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Sep 17, 2019 20:21
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I've been reading Basecamp's new website/book (https://basecamp.com/shapeup) and it's helped me reframe my frustration with bad PMs who should know better. They introduce the concept of feature development being hill-shaped, with "uphill" work followed by "downhill" work. "Uphill" work is all the requirements gathering as well as context understanding you need to do to be able to develop a complete to-do list of things that need to be changed in code. Once you have your entire to-do list, you are now facing "downhill" and only need to code it all up. Uphill work is always going to be impossible to estimate, whereas downhill work can be pretty straightforward. So at this point, if I see remaining uphill work on a feature, I refuse to give an estimate. "How long will this take?" => "I don't know, I'm still trying to get {a list of permissions / an API endpoint to hit / definition of some buzzword}, which could fundamentally change the feature". This could also be when you say you're blocked. Of course not giving estimates is not received well, but by tying the lack-of-estimate directly to the lack-of-direction, you can at least focus your PM on what you need. It _should_ be the PM's job to walk through the feature and identify vague requirements, but they often don't, so the next best thing is to give them a list of very specific questions and stake your estimate and/or status report on them being answered.
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Sep 17, 2019 21:05
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You know, while I know that paired programming can be useful and that some people really like it, its somewhat baffling to me at my new job that one of the people on my team seems utterly unable to develop any new features without pairing with someone else for the entire development. This seems a bit excessive to me, but then I've never been a big fan of paired programming in the first place.
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Sep 17, 2019 21:40
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Maybe helpful to post this article from SVPG on delivery vs feature vs product team. https://svpg.com/product-vs-feature-teams/ I've def felt pretty stuck as "product manager" or product owner on feature teams and realized it's kind of a nothing job.
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Sep 17, 2019 21:42
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Our product owner has been here for 3 years and still couldn't tell you what a normal workflow is for people who use our product is. He definitely couldn't do anything with the product. We have evolved to basically turn him into a rubber stamp. He will literally just approve whatever we say or do. He doesn't write stories or define requirements or anything. At one point we tried giving him more responsibility and it just backfired into us not having any stories ready for development. Everything we do is based off complaints that come in from the help desk.
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Sep 17, 2019 22:12
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negativeneil posted:Ok yes this is what I am wondering. Given my relatively narrow experience, do I have abnormally bad PMs or are PMs often times completely useless. I guess my plan to eventually move into product management just got a lot more attractive if this is the baseline of expectations. It seems like the role is often poorly defined or defined entirely differently in different orgs, but if you're having to ask your PM questions like "Which parts of the sheet need to be automated?" then it sounds like they just suck at their job. Everyone misses little details here and there, but that's a ticket for a designer (or PM or product owner or whomever) rather than a developer. I have noticed that a lot of people (particularly those disposed to management) seem completely unable to imagine the questions that have to get answered to go from "I want a button that emails dickpics to my entire contact list" to a working feature that scandalizes your entire family. Those people make lovely PMs, unsurprisingly. If you're lucky then their lack of imagination is universal and they don't have any strong opinions about how the thing they were too lazy to imagine should work. vonnegutt posted:They introduce the concept of feature development being hill-shaped, with "uphill" work followed by "downhill" work. "Uphill" work is all the requirements gathering as well as context understanding you need to do to be able to develop a complete to-do list of things that need to be changed in code. Once you have your entire to-do list, you are now facing "downhill" and only need to code it all up. When we have a substantial amount of uphill work associated with a task that needs to be done by developers (usually either because the technical feasibility of something needs some digging or because the requirements are flexible enough to conform to the most reasonable technical approach but the selected approach will significantly change the specifics) we log it as a separate research ticket. I don't know how much it really helps with people being shitlords about estimates, but it at least makes it clear that it's two tasks instead of one.
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Sep 17, 2019 22:51
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