Hiya
If you’re at all like me, there’s the manic periods of development, where things get done… and there are the lulls. What do you like to do in those lulls? Do you have a bin of fun work shit to do? Do you watch videos? Touch grass? Socialize?
Just curious
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More and more lulls with more and more years of experience. I hit the gym more, socialize more, cook more extravagantly, take walks more often etc. The most important thing was to train myself to not give a damn when people were making stupid decisions at work that were going to bite them N months down the line during those lulls.
One of the things I used to say, probably beginning in my 40s, was “I’m getting too old for this shit.”
There were certainly occasions when I acted on it, but it didn’t really become the heart of a philosophy until well into my 50s. By then it had transformed into just plain “I’m too old for this shit.”
I just retired at 66, and am starting to think that maybe workplaces and social “obligations” would be much improved if more people started living it earlier in life.
How did you train yourself to not give a damn?
A few years ago, back when I still gave a damn (and probably during my most productive quarter in my entire professional career), somebody complained that my language was too curt on Slack, and I was a denied a 20k performance bonus as a result. It was pretty easy to not care after that.
Wow. Since I presume that you didn’t stay there: how curt was your letter of resignation?
I actually stayed there (I’m still there); just finished taking my 2 month paid sabbatical, I now have an 8 hour time zone difference with most engineers so I get to work on my own without distractions, and I have a strong policy of not developing anything bespoke and only plugging together off-the-shelf components (I specialize in Platform and Infrastructure).
With the mindset shift, it’s actually a pretty relaxing job. I make $180k, which isn’t the best salary, but also far from the worst, and I have both an abundance of time and very little oversight (amplified with the timezone difference now that I’m in the US) which means that I can use that salary to pursue things that I am interested in, spend time with my family etc.
I definitely thought about quitting at the time, but visa restrictions (I had just arrived in the US on an L1-B visa which is non-transferable) meant that I couldn’t. Now I’m a permanent resident, so I could leave if I wanted to, but I think that “quiet quitting” is still the right choice for where I’m at in my life.
I see, didn’t think of the case of somebody with visa requirements. I don’t really know how to compare US salaries to my German salary, since taxes and social security and cost of living are different, but for 162k Euro I’d probably also would rather not resignate, but do “Dienst nach Vorschrift” (= doing exactly what your asked for, but not showing extra initiative)
This kind of implies that you’re crunching and then ‘recovering’. That may or may not be something you have any control over - there’s a lot that goes into creating an unsustainable ‘sprint’, and probably 99.8% of it is not related to actual developers or code - but ideally you would be using these ‘lulls’ to try to pull stuff out of the next crunch so maybe it won’t hurt so bad.
In reality, if I’m coming off of a bad crunch, I do anything I can do to avoid burnout. Sometimes that’s ‘fun’ backlog items or research for future features or something else I’m excited about, sometimes it’s studying for certs, sometimes it’s cutting slack (@cianuro@programming.dev watching Netflix feels familiar!). But again - whatever it takes to recharge my batteries and feel less bitter and shitty.
The most ‘sure’ sign that I’m coming off a crunch, though, is that I start reinforcing work/life boundaries. “It’s 5p and I’m logging off and I’m not going to think about work shit willingly until tomorrow.”
I’m at a startup so I rarely have lulls. In previous experiences we even watched Netflix in front of our manager lol. I also used that time to study to get a better job 😉
I normally try and do “fun” work. This largely depends on how autonomous your job is. I was a PhD student doing research for a company and I received very little oversight for 3 years.
The supervision I did receive was great though. They understood needing to take a break and slow down. At those point I would generally read papers, watch PyData talks (highly recommend them, like inspirational ted talks for data people), or contribute to open source to learn about new tools or design paradigms.
Lulls as in nothing to do? No, I don’t have those.
