Boring work needs tension

https://iaziz786.com/blog/boring-work-needs-tension/

by iaziz786 • 10 months ago

140 71 10 months ago

ian-g• 10 months ago

Or maybe, sometimes it's just flat out dull work. And it has to get done, you're the one with the capacity to do it, and you just have to grit your teeth and do it.

datadrivenangel4• 10 months ago

Unless you work on a dysfunctional team and any non-tracked work is forbidden, and any work you try and get tracked requires 6 pages of justification and takes 10 weeks to get prioritized enough for someone to work on...

marcosdumay3• 10 months ago

You have a funny definition of "dysfunctional".

wavemode2• 10 months ago

How so?

datadrivenangel4• 10 months ago

You can either laugh or cry about it. Laughing is more fun.

This is nearly the norm for ENTERPRISE software development, and it's such a tragedy.

ramon1563• 10 months ago

My team isnt dysfunctional but I always get hit on the head for doing work and not making a ticket. I don't get it, if I see something bad I'm not going to search which ticket would best fit this issue. Just reviw my PR !

Also, so far most of our projects start simple but end in chaos and deadlines on the minute. I feel like we could always do better.

schneems• 10 months ago

I’ve been on both sides of this equation. If someone is dinging you for doing extra work, it could be a sign that your priorities are not aligned.

Like, if you’ve got a tight deadline coming up, it’s not the time to spend a week making CI slightly faster. On the other hand, if someone is telling you to not do work (right now), then they also need to help be responsible for finding time to do that work and understanding the impacts of that work never gets done.

I explain this to people as the tension between important urgent work. Some work is important but never（rarely) urgent. And if you ignore important work (like maintenance) it might become urgent at a very bad time.

DJBunnies• 10 months ago

It takes like two seconds to write a ticket and then tag your commits with it.

You get credit for fixing the issue, avoid giant fix-along-the-way PRs, and future credit for people (maybe even you) understanding why you those changes were made.

dakiol3• 10 months ago

Doesn't that work against you? Like, I imagine that at some point you want to get a raise, so your manager has to sell your work to other managers... and they are not gonna pass around links to your pull requests/commits. They most likely want to see epics/tasks in Jira or something similar.

I mean, finding a Jira epic/project where to fit my ticket is not the hardest part of the job tbh. Also, depending on the team and your experience, loosely fixing things here and there can be a red flag or totally the opposite (e.g., I've seen how juniors or people in general with less than a decade of experience get punished when they start fixing random things here and there. On the other side seniors or staff engineers get kudos for fixing also random things but in less volume and usually more tricky ones).

Having a ticket to back up your work is never going to hurt you, though.

apwell23• 10 months ago

why do you want to do work and not get credit for?

One of the biggest career mistakes is doing things on your own that are not aligned and approved with the management chain. Even if makes 100% sense.

They might look past it once or twice but you will get managed out eventually. Doesn't matter how good you are.

luckydata• 10 months ago

yeah but it's hard for others to know what you're up to, you force everyone else to do investigations and waste time. Just open a ticket and be a good team mate.

mat0• 10 months ago

anyone reading this comment: don’t do this. this is not the way to work on a team.

i’ve seen so many random prs of engineers that thought this was the time to go on a rabbit whole and fix some random error they found. worse, i’ve seen regressions introduced on random “fix” PRs that had no description, no ticket, nothing. this is not team work. if you see an issue and you know how to fix it, by all means, fix it. but create a bug ticket with explicit current and expected behavior that people can read and test. if you don’t have time to create a ticket, then you don’t have time to fix random bugs

fnord77• 10 months ago

Disallowing non-tracked work isn't necessarily dysfunctional.

Let's say you're working on spaceflight software where lives are at risk.

kbar13• 10 months ago

who's working at a boring job nowadays as a software dev? everywhere i see devs are wearing like 10 hats bc we have the combination of being capable yet still at the bottom of the totem pole.

dakiol3• 10 months ago

I just landed a new job, and I thikn it's a boring one. At my previous job I was fixing Java's memory issues, migrating databases and riding Jira epics. At my new job I'm fixing button's padding/marging, deploying and deploying stuff on Vercel. Paycheck is the same, though; so I couldn't care less.

tayo42• 10 months ago

Those 10 hats can be boring.

I do alot, all of it is meaningless and tied up in corporate politics.

Another poster got it right, meaningful work isn't boring.

tra32• 10 months ago

I feel like "tension" has negative connotations. Maybe it's just me. I like "friction" better in this context.

There are so many opportunities for improvement, I'm never bored. My aim is to leave this place better than I found it. Even tiny improvements compound over time.

sfink• 10 months ago

It's a callout to the concept of "dramatic tension". See also all the talk of stories, movies, etc.

https://fiveable.me/key-terms/introduction-creative-writing/... is as good a source as any.

To me, friction is more negative. It's always there and it only serves to slow things down (by definition!) Tension can be released, and in fact creates anticipation for the release.

eschneider• 10 months ago

Your CI/CD takes a huge amount of time because you forgot to leverage caching.

The bane of my existence are CI/CD systems that get caching 99% right. Chasing down the problems from that last 1% of strangely busted...well, lets just say that if you want TENSION at work, good way to get it. :/

arccy• 10 months ago

with github actions... often caching is slow as well

truelson2• 10 months ago

I disagree. Boring work needs meaning, not tension. Some times boring, done consistently, is where the truly great things come from.

Tension is, imo, ephemeral. If you keep chasing it, you are chasing dopamine loops. Little good comes from this.

But meaning is different. When you can remind yourself a truly great "why" you are doing something, can re-frame it, it can help.

Most importantly, boredom, irritation, and anxiety are temporary. They are emotions. They do not define us or the work. It was a joy when I realized that all these emotions will pass. They really do. You can sit with it. You really can. You can't make it go away, but it will pass.

treve• 10 months ago

Different people are motivated differently. My work is meaningful but it's not enough to feel like I'm having fun every day. Some dopamine is basically critical for me to function. It's always a bit wild when people feel they can generalize their own experience and assume it must be the case for everyone else. This needs more I statements.

cestith• 10 months ago

This needs more I statements.

This is one statement that’s true of an overwhelming number of stories.

patates• 10 months ago

Some times boring, done consistently, is where the truly great things come from.

I used to tell myself the same thing. Then one day, a customer misconfigured their NetScaler, and all hell broke loose. We had half-delivered CSS files, misfiring form handlers, random blank screens of death, and a buggy front-end library that would bombard the backend with requests if it received the wrong status code with no back-off logic! There were hundreds of bug reports. You name it, we had it.

Debugging everything was just wild, especially with the constant tension of "What if it's our fault?" In the end, it wasn't! We got paid for our time, and we were able to close a massive number of tickets. It was one of the best weeks of my professional life.

brailsafe2• 10 months ago

Hell yes, sometimes fighting a figurative wildfire successfully is what carries you for a year

em-bee• 10 months ago

i too strive in such a situation, but it still makes a difference whether the work is meaningful or not. especially when you get to sleepless nights. it makes difference if that customer is a hospital or some other meaningful industry, or it is something meaningless like an online game, other entertainment or worse, gambling. i wouldn't work overtime for the latter (unless the pay is worth it or the team is good)

i can definitely confirm that meaningless work is more boring.

ytpete• 10 months ago

There's a huge difference though between short bursts of intense activity – which are thrilling, and in my experience can forge longlasting team bonds – and an ongoing, constant sense of pressure. The latter you can't maintain excitement about indefinitely, and inevitably the continual stress just leads to burnout. Or apathy: after all, if everything's urgent then nothing feels urgent or special after a while.

jm__87• 10 months ago

Personally, I find how I spend my time outside of work has a big impact on how motivated and productive I am at work, regardless of how meaningful my work tasks are. Obviously basic things like sleep, diet, exercise are important, but I have also found that spending too much time on things like video games, streaming shows/movies or social media really leaves me feeling depleted and unfocused during work hours. The more I avoid screens outside of work hours, the more productive I am during work hours when I have to look at a screen.

brailsafe2• 10 months ago

Tension is, imo, ephemeral. If you keep chasing it, you are chasing dopamine loops. Little good comes from this.

A lot of bad can come from this, especially if you're working on farming these loops from others and that's where you get your kick/money. But if there's no dopamine loop, ideally in addition to having some meaning, then there's just burnout.

But meaning is different. When you can remind yourself a truly great "why" you are doing something, can re-frame it, it can help.

Ya, but it's easy to get too caught up in meaning. Meaningful meaning is scarce, and it's a bit naive to couple your paycheck to it. Most times work is just work and it needs to keep going as long as you need money. Meaning is fleeting by comparison, even for nurses and people actually doing something useful for society. When you can get it, great, but when you can't, don't go quitting your job impulsively, not in this market.

CobrastanJorji• 10 months ago

I think that "Boring work needs meaning, not tension" is a great explanation of bad bosses.

Any work will go a little faster when your boss puts an arbitrary deadline on it and screams "We need this by Friday, we're gonna tell the VP that it's late and it's your fault!!" But it's hugely demoralizing and stressful.

But if you say "this work will get the client's hospital equipment monitoring suite out sooner; if it works reliably, they'll be able to deploy it sooner, and it'll save the lives of some sick kids," then that'll also get the work done a little faster, and it'll make you feel good about doing it.

Arbitrary tension is a patch that you put on work that has no meaning. "We want you to go faster because it will make our metrics go up which might raise the stock a few percentage which might make our investors a few extra millions" has no meaning, which is the root problem.

Bolwin• 10 months ago

Most people already aware of the meaning of their work though, it's not something you can deliver updates on.

Whereas tension is easy to manufacture

liquid_thyme3• 10 months ago

But if you say "this work will get the client's hospital equipment monitoring suite out sooner; if it works reliably, they'll be able to deploy it sooner, and it'll save the lives of some sick kids," then that'll also get the work done a little faster, and it'll make you feel good about doing it.

The problem is that the smart ones will easily figure out that 'this next version will save lives' is a total lie. If your monitoring product doesn't work, it gets dumped and replaced. In developed countries, if your code has the potential of harming someone you're in a heavily regulated industry. The software in those industries is speced out in enormous detail to avoid this problem.

Arbitrary tension is a patch that you put on work that has no meaning. "We want you to go faster because it will make our metrics go up which might raise the stock a few percentage which might make our investors a few extra millions" has no meaning, which is the root problem.

I disagree. Financial goals are the easiest to understand for people, and also easiest to communicate, and personally for me easiest to reason about how to achieve them. Just hit a number and you're done, collect your bonus and go do something you enjoy. As they say, the best way to ruin something you love doing is by making it your job. IMO people who chase some higher purpose and meaning are destined to be forever unhappy at their job.

Nathanba• 10 months ago

Yes arbitrary tension is one of the most infuriating things that some agile people and bosses do. It's like they treat you as an unthinking machine that merely needs to constantly be prodded and poked to perform. Of course if you have any ability to think you will instantly figure out that it was fake pressure and who doesn't love it? I don't know why they think that this is going to work out for them. Well I do know actually, it's because many people do very little without being poked and asked constantly. That's the other side of the coin but frankly, that's a hiring problem. Such people shouldn't even be in the company.

exogenousdata• 10 months ago

Very well said!

jvanderbot• 10 months ago

I disagree because I think boring work needs discipline. The expectation that everything should be exciting or fulfilling is also false. You can't expect meaning in everything, and your response of wading through discomfort is best.

Or perhaps we should all be taoists, and find find joy in the taste of vinegar because it is pure life that we are tasting, by being alive and breathing and choosing to take on a task that is always new, because even if the work hasn't changed we have.

Or maybe just to quote the dwarves in Majesty: Hard work is its own reward.

Or perhaps the omnissiah demands it and it is not ours to question his will, only ours to ensure the machine spirits thrive.

There's a million reasons to get out of bed and do the work. Maybe the most noble is Meditations-esque "we work because we are humans" and the work must be done.

truelson2• 10 months ago

Loved this. Meditations/Taoism/omnissiah...

Just a great response. :)

gexla• 10 months ago

He does sort of mention "story" several times. The story is the meaningful part. It's just that he says meaning follows tension. Maybe you don't agree with that either (not sure I do) but he does mention this.

pflenker• 10 months ago

Find joy in the craft, don’t rely on the outside world to feed you excitement. A well-crafted wooden box can spark as much joy as a well-crafted piece of software or a well-written document.

Taxes are boring, no kid at kindergarten states they are going to be tax advisors when they grow up, yet tax advisors exist and they do not all despise their jobs, because doing your job well can be intrinsically motivating.

masijo• 10 months ago

I used to feel this way until management made AI tools mandatory.

AfterHIA• 10 months ago

In the 1950s through the beginning of the 1970's the government (ARPA) was paying young scientists and innovators to do their PhD thesis' in computer design to create the next generation of human oriented computer interfaces. Now we have articles talking about how shit it is to work with computers. What the fuck man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_(computer_system)

65• 10 months ago

Good luck convincing your PMs you need to refactor code for two weeks.

josephjrobison• 10 months ago

I always find fun and comfort in imaging my work as part of the lore of a medieval saga. Think of being a character in Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones - no matter how big or small - and the role your actions play in the larger story. Side quests are welcome.

wiseowise• 10 months ago

OP hasn’t been in the industry for long.

shreddit• 10 months ago

I don’t even need tension in movies, more than that i even hate made up (illogical) tension just for the movie to happen in the first place.

daxfohl• 10 months ago

In 2025, if you're bored at work then you're probably expendable, so there's your tension.

Boring work needs automation, not tension. Free up time to work on things more valuable and rewarding. Don't assume that just because you were hired to own service X that it means you can't peek out of your box. If you get it to the point where it's self-managing, look around at other people's needs before adding artificial requirements. You'll learn more, work with more people, get more recognition, and likely be more energized by the work.

mhuffman• 10 months ago

Ah yes, what most jobs these days lack is tension! Too bored? Get yourself worked up over some other task! What an insight!!!

If you can’t tackle these at work, do it in your personal projects.

Just gold analysis. Most people in SWE have plenty of personal projects supported by their work managers and encouraged to implement work tasks into personal projects.

incompatible• 10 months ago

"Watching [movies] is fun because you can imagine yourself resonating with a character."

Perhaps I'm just an unusual type of person, but there are very few movie characters that I "resonate" with. Far more common is thinking "why are you doing that, you idiot?" or "what a jerk! Just tell them the truth."

nickpinkston• 10 months ago

I initially thought this was about boring holes on a lathe where you want constant tension on the boring bar.

I'll see myself out...

j45• 10 months ago

Maybe the perception of boredom is the tension.

Boring work needs tension

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