tc7

Really seems like I should be better at golf, then. :tear

Is this (wage stagnation) true for tech? It seems a special case.

I wonder what the exec-pay/wage/productivity growth charts look like if we exclude tech. (Less disparity? More? Less productivity?)

Offering 4-day weeks: Do you see this often? Just curious -- I feel like it's rare, so my guess would be the opposite. (I do know several people that work 4 10hr days as machinists or window installers).

My intuition is also the opposite of yours on affordability :), at least in tech...

Woof, timely. I'm doing all of these bad-initial-traction-methods on my side project right now, and feeling quite burnt out, thinking about moving on to the next thing.

Perhaps especially when building on the side a couple hours a day, easy to get wrapped up worrying about what the max return on my time could be, and just default back to code... and writing these cold emails always takes me sooo long :D.

Does this work best if your work is well-planned by someone else? E.g., you have a list of prioritized tickets with requirements complete, and can just code down the list?

I work 32h/wk (mon-thu), and I feel happy with my productivity, but also recognize that I spend tons of time in meetings, clarifying requirements, helping other devs, etc. These aren't all really my role, so I could theoretically optimize them away and hope the invisible tasks get picked up successfully by someone else, but I know we'd have worse outcomes if I wasn't involved and "just" did my explicitly assigned tasks.

Can someone with team lead/management responsibilities optimize for 'job done' this aggressively?

Lovely writing!

In May, myself, my wife, our two kids (8, 6), are amtraking from Chicago to San Francisco in a family sleeper. I'm excited. We've enjoyed our (much shorter) amtrak trips from Ashland, VA to DC.

Hmm, I think I'm reading this differently.

There are fun and less-fun parts of programming -- building a new feature? Fun. Analyzing requirements, or doing code review, or spelunking through a crappy and undocumented 3rd party API? Less fun. But all can be part of the same 'job' of developing a feature.

The article is saying the amateur is the one who skims off the fun parts, and avoids the others, whereas the professional does the entire job -- gets to done-done, vs just 'it works'.

On golf: You are correct that Tiger Woods did not pick up the ball on the putting green when playing amateur tournaments. I don't think the article's making a point about the official USGA definition of 'amateur'.

Yep, this resonates a lot. Not fun.

I think it's something in those steps, starting with "What to do next", that leads down that rabbit hole.

Maybe try working backwards -- "what do I want my life to be like in a year/2 years?" I think working back helps narrow down the infinite immediate options - some things become obvious must-dos, others not so much.

Years go by really fast. This sucks on one hand, because anxiety and lack of direction can easily suck up a whole year with nothing to show for it. But it's also awesome to view things on longer scales, because you don't have to "be" anything next week, or next month, just slightly better than the week before, and at the end of a year, a lot has changed.

Best of luck!

Thanks very much! I'll definitely move this up. I've spent a lot of time rewriting/moving/mangling copy in the past few weeks -- reasonably sure I've made it worse. ;)

Yeah, agree there's a perspective shift there.

I also find that typing doesn't work as well as hand-writing for me. I think my brain is in a different mode (publish), so it's judging/editing things as I type -- vs handwriting, where maybe the mechanics are so unconscious the brain can mull the thought over instead of trying to edit it. Maybe talking out loud has the same benefit.

Thanks! I appreciate the comment, and the good wishes :).

Very valid, thanks ;). I just added links, should be updated momentarily.

Hi all, founder here -- does this problem resonate with anyone else?

I feel like I've been on a lot of projects that kinda blew up (in a bad way) at the end, and the PMs seemed surprised. But it was kinda predictable, to all of the devs, in a vague way. And there wasn't a great way to raise these vague concerns _during_ the project. :/

I think honest 'feelings' feedback from dev teams up to PMs could help. Track responses, see if confidence is trending down -- if things look bad, at least PMs know there's a problem.

Let me know what you think!

Frames per second.

True, and good points!

Lambda itself may be fine, I can't judge it specifically (and appreciate Austen engaging :)).

That said, I agree that if they come in with "enough experience to start contributing code [etc]", that's a good benchmark!

But for the school to be successful, they don't really _need_ to go that far, which is my point about incentives: They just need them to look good enough on paper to get in the door, and know just enough that someone will take a chance on some percent of them, and rely on the fact that firing is hard -- in this model, their 'incentive' is to just churn out as many grads as possible, with the nicest resumes possible.

After writing that, though, I think I'm being more cynical than needed, prob based on some sub-par bootcamp grad interview experiences. I hope Lambda is really committed to good education, and I wish them the best, it's a worthy ambition and a hard problem.

Isn't the incentive here to choose the most buzzwordy and low-barrier-to-entry technologies, and spend just enough time/effort to get the students through an interview so the bootcamp can get paid?

Incentives are hard in this space. Not sure how for-profit companies who get paid by students can ever be exactly incentivized to focus on honest evaluation and strong fundamentals.

Maybe the FAANG companies should start/fund a bootcamp, but then you'd have to be selective, and you'd end up with something totally different... :/

We sometimes hire mid/jr-level FE developers, which means we get _lots_ of bootcamp applicants.

It feels like the main goal of the bootcamp is to produce portfolios/resumes that make you indistinguishable on paper from developers that learned any other way.

Not necessarily bad, but the quality difference among bootcamp grads (from the same program!) is crazy. Some people understand the fundamentals of what they learned and continue to learn and expand their skills, but some are just copy/pasting code and debugging by typing random character combinations until something works. Both got through the bootcamp with identical group-project portfolios and class assignment personal websites and resumes.

We've recently started sending an at-home coding challenge to all jr. FE applicants, just to cut down on amount of time wasted if we bring them in and they don't know anything. This has worked okay so far.

I'm generally very cognizant of wasting peoples time, so I don't want to do this as a general rule for more experienced candidates. But for junior/first-job candidates, I'm not sure it should be as offensive. Do any of y'all see a reasonable distinction here?

Out of curiosity, if it wasn't the environmental or family differences, and if the cops aren't preventing crime in the higher-income neighborhoods, what do you think caused the first school to be low-performing and the other to be high-performing?

:raises hand: I use it!

If you have no problem with focus, perhaps you don't need it.

I've found it useful at my work (consulting/team lead) where I'm expected to be somewhat responsive to email/slack. Rather than leaving Slack/email open (rookie move, I know), I use Pomodoro (currently at 45/5) just to remind me to open them, check for new stuff, and then close them again for my next chunk of work.

Contrariwise, I just read and loved Deep Work: it's made me more purposeful about directing my attention, and aware of how my environment and lower desires work against this focus.

The journalistic model of doing deep work does seems different than the others, but he's not recommending it, just pointing out that there are outliers who can train themselves to reach intense focus states quickly and do deep work in short periods of time. Not sure why this would bother you -- if it doesn't apply to you, ignore it!

I felt like there was a ton of value here. Recommended for all!

Are Americans outliers in loneliness? I know Pinker mentions this in Enlightenment Now, but I feel like it's glossed over a bit since it doesn't really align with his thesis.

I'm very interested in the reasons for this, though. Loss of community structures without replacements? (Wider spread families for work, not going to church...)

It does sound nice. Once you're an adult, does anyone have these sort of relationships/friendships, or is this a thing that only exists in Seinfeld?

I think there's more implied in 'raising' children than keeping them alive and transporting them to their scheduled activities, which is what I'd expect from a nanny or au pair.

3) When I did "sleep", there was a 50/50 chance I'd wake up with abs that felt like I'd been doing crunches all night long. I don't know what I was doing. I felt rested, but man was I sore.

...So you're saying there's a way to get 6-pack abs _in your sleep_?

Cool, good for you :). I like the world where the internet enables niche creators to live and engage with invested supporters/patrons.

Aside, have you seen the language Jonathan Blow's working on (jai)? Curious how you'd compare the two, goals or implementation-wise. (Given he hasn't released anything yet, no worries if this is unanswerable :))

I'm not really wanting to not work, as such, but to transition from working for someone else to working on my own projects.

So the equation for me is more: Spend a little less time with wife/kids today to improve my future enjoyment of the work part of life.

It's a tough balance, because I highly value wife/kids time -- so when I give up some of that (valuable and well-spent) time for a potential future good, I want to make sure I'm using that time optimally, so that sacrifice is as "worth it" as possible.

There's definitely a balance here; I could make much faster progress by working every night and weekend, but that would be too much of a sacrifice of the good present for the potential better future.

Anyway, I very much agree with/appreciate the point of your questions :).

For me, there's a conflict between long-term and short-term enjoyment. I have a 'goal' of independence from my 9-5, but after I get home from work and play with my kids a bit, it sounds more immediately _enjoyable_ to watch a TV show with my wife rather than spend a couple hours on my side project.

So it does sound ideal to > do things you enjoy, at a pace that you enjoy but I think there's a part of life where you're consciously sacrificing immediate enjoyment for a future goal. And hopefully the future goal is to do just that (enjoy life at an enjoyable pace).

If I can be more productive, that's minimizing the time I spend sacrificing enjoyment before attaining my goals :).

It's not obvious to me that democracy is in decline, or authoritarianism on the rise.

Over what time-frame? Do you have supporting data you can point me to ("In the past 10 years, more countries have switched from democratic to non-democratic government than vice versa")?

Thanks!

Aw man. So much nostalgia. <3

What evidence do you have for such an optimistic assertion?

Wouldn't the burden of evidence here be on someone saying the opposite (that technological progress will stop)? Technology has continually progressed across human history, exponentially so in the very recent past. Do you think it will stop?