lowlystatsguy

Yeah, I actually don’t disagree with you. I’m speaking from my experience of being told that we don’t even want to modularize the code. It’s just slap the keyboard and make it work literally as fast as possible. The craft is anticipation of user requests, and not building it out in the moment, but knowing how to build it so it’s a smooth transition to the next feature. When you lose the ability to think (what I equate to focus time) before doing, you end up with unhappy developers, users, and managers. Every time I have tried to advocate for thinking first vs. doing first in my circles, I’ve met strong resistance akin to the perfectionistic claims. Even unit tests are seen as developers simply wasting time to make a product perfect despite said product already having hundreds of users and processing millions of dollars daily.

I notice more and more product manager responsibilities being foisted upon engineers because everyone thinks we need a corporate kool aid mustache of “impact.” Instead, I think we should return to the idea that engineers are craftsmen. They care about doing good work and honing their craft. It is a leaders job to align the goals of the business annd the craftsmen. Unfortunately, our capitalistic society does not have a reward function that aligns with the craftsman’s, in general.

I think AI has poisoned the waters here a bit. It’s brought a fear of relying on AI tools and losing pure skill versus raw productivity. Business folks used to be fussy about timelines, but now they feel even more empowered to push back because AI has brought code to their level. If AI can write code that fast, why can’t you?

The article reads like if someone in the C suite was trying to tell me how to work who has no idea what actually goes on in my day-to-day or willfully ignores my pleas for better system stability and security in lieu of only taking the highest “impact” work (I.e. money). It’s just a greedy algorithm: almost always guaranteed to be suboptimal, but any effort to chart a different, more measured approach is seen by leaders as perfectionistic or even sabotage.

I’m not jaded; you’re jaded.

I have a great community at work. People I would hire to work with me in a heartbeat. I work in a very high impact area. I am constantly challenged by having to learn new things to accomplish my tasks…

You would think management hates us though. My manager has told me that unit tests are a waste of the company’s time. That we should leave them to the software team (I am a data scientist), despite us repeatedly fixing bugs easily identifiable via unit tests in the wee hours of the night during a managerial meltdown. Several of my teammates have advocated for a think first type second approach to our development only to be told by the higher ups that “at this company, I’m known for getting shit done and I won’t let you stop me.” I’ve heard that anyone hired after 2020 doesn’t really know how to work hard because they’ve been “soft” on us since then (they are reeling back in control with RTO). Company surveys show that people are wildly unhappy on my team, yet managements response is to shrug and say “you need to own your experience at this company.”

Maybe I’m removing myself from potential sainthood, but no amount of abuse is worth taking for meaningful work. Companies like to tout their meaningful work as a glorified guilt trip much like sports teams often like to underpay analytics folks since they’re relying on your innate interest in the position as a reason not to pay you market value. As the article states, meaningful work can be found anywhere. Do not let your company define meaningful work for you.

100%. This is not a headshot service if this is the case, this is a data acquisition service where you pay to have your data taken!

Perhaps, but in my experience they are much more difficult to find for those who do not come from a religious upbringing. Even coming from a religious upbringing, depending on the denomination, you may have missed entire swaths of material due to it not aligning with a given particular brand of Christianity. I am generally skeptical of most modern material aimed at a general audience as it has become too “influencer”-y; it’s about who has the best catchphrases and the signal to noise ratio drops off a cliff.

It’s because of that I felt Tim Keller’s recent passing so much more.

There is nothing statistical about this analysis. The core of statistics is uncertainty, and I see no reporting of it within this post. Further, no statistician worth their salt would ever be their own hype man; they would understand just how many times a “stunning result” was really just a logical error or explained by confounding factors.

Both the content and rhetoric in this post was disappointing enough for me to make an account just to say this.