Anxiety in product development
andreschweighofer.com
andreschweighofer.com
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the ones I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
For a lot of software products, there is no winning in the long run. You've got good product-market fit and customer loyalty, but your code base is a huge mess and the hard technical problems are solved by third-party libraries. Your tech is a liability and eventually someone with better tech will be smart enough to study your customers, or the students who will eventually replace your inevitably-retiring customers on the front lines and push adoption going forward.
And this is okay. The advantage corporations have over government institutions is that they can be created and destroyed with much less friction.
If you're lucky, your growth curve looks like double-sigmoid table-top. Probably it looks like an asymmetric Gaussian. What it doesn't look like is an exponential. Understand where your product is in its life-cycle, and maximize ROI.
I've had so many discussions with people over the years where someone will say "why doesn't X company/government just do Y". Well, because it's very rarely that easy. Just use black magic, that'll solve all our problems right?
Just look around you, and you see tons of stuff that was done, despite the difficulty.
As a mundane example: "Why don't I just stand up and go to pee? My bladder is exploding." "Well, because you're kind of stupid, you should indeed go to pee." "But if it was that easy, I would have already done it 5 minutes ago!"
Things are never settled and fully in balance. There are constantly surfacing opportunities to do something positive, ranging from straightforward to counter-intuitive.
It's not good to shut down all thinking with "nope, surely can't be done; if it could be, people would have done it already".
Thinking about why a company won't just do X or trying to put yourself in their shoes and come up with ideas is good mental exercise. Not everything is in a perfectly balanced out equilibrium. Otherwise there would be no profit made in this world.
Why bother doing research? If something is easy to discover, why haven't people already discovered it?
Of course I get the sentiment, you should think deeply before trying to revolutionize the strategy of a company. But ultimately the people who do decide on the strategy also don't precisely know what will be best. Nobody knows how one or another decision will actually pan out, in interaction with the real world with all the other things going on etc.
At some point you have to say, I've got enough details now, I'll make a choice. It will never feel completely satisfying. Either way it pans out, there will be a bunch of people who will say "they told you so", even just by pure chance.
Specifically when it comes to systematic change, be that in a code base, a companies organisation or a countries political system. The mindsets of people go trough the spectrum of such systems being as easy to change as snipping a finger (and that doing so is a good idea) to it being impossible or dangerous so you should not even try.
From my perspective, pretty much anything can be changed in any direction. But it might take enormous effort to do so, way more than one could do alone and I might not even be around anymore when the change "finishes". While I could think of a hundred things that I would like to change or actually resist change, I only have the time and energy to focus on one or two at a time.
So for me, having overworked myself in the past, it boils down to consciously think of what I should and can burden myself with, when I should give up something and what the realistic outcomes are to find a good mix between ambition, effectiveness and health.
However, I'm less of a fan of the opening words; it's not so much that this should be magically granted on to us with a wishing wand, it's something we need to consciously work on, from within. Somehow that slogging, gritty aspect is less represented.
You don't say "God grant..." before sure bets; it's implicit that there's some risk of failure and you're gonna need to meet the Big Man halfway.
But if you base your conception of prayer on a sketch from Monty Python or maybe a mentally ill person on the street who uses some christian terms for progressing their own insanity, then in that conception maybe prayer is a way to "magically grant with a wishing wand". But this is not what healthy use of the term is about. I assume the original poster who used this word is not insane and looks at the implicit meaning of the quote, which if looked at in that light, makes a lot of sense.
Prayer's about a lot of things to a lot of people. Regardless of whether you think a way that other people do it is correct or not, it still exists and is a thing. And offering strangers uninvited, prescriptive advice on how a religious practice should be done is a form of proselytization.
I think, in this case, it's more useful to recognize and observe the context. For example, I am inclined to agree that the "God grant me the..." at the start of that particular prayer is typically understood, at least in the community where I grew up, as more of an idiom than an actual request of God. Very much like how neutronicus put it in a sibling comment. Even atheists will use it that way without any sense of dissonance. But there are also plenty of Christians who understand God as being a lot more hands-on about things, and that would support a different understanding of the prayer's connotations, which is every bit as valid.
1. There's Christian cultural context regarding the phrase "God grant..." that is necessary to understand the prayer
2. To wit, when Christians use this phrase, it is both an exhortation to self-reliance and an honest admission of personal flaws that may sabotage the pursuit of self-reliance.
3. There is of course also the implication that the Christian theological tradition is the best way to achieve self-reliance in spite of character flaws.
My glib aside was meant to assert that 2. is in fact mostly orthogonal to 3.
Now, I still don't believe in anything literally supernatural. I don't think any quantum woo or mysterious psychic connection or literal sky daddies exist.
The point is, our mind at its core operates in terms that can be best spoken to in such metaphor. Just like we don't "see" wavelengths or spectra, we see color. If I told you that red is high frequency and blue is lower frequency light, you'd probably believe it, if you hadn't learned the opposite in physics class.
We see color and not light frequency, we see objects, we see tools, we see potential paths to walk on, we see handles to grab, we use tools as extensions of the body (with the brain actually mapping out some tools as if they were limbs).
In the same way much of what we experience in terms of emotional/spiritual life (if you don't suppress it and are mature enough) is very religious sounding old-fashioned terms like good and evil, temptation, redemption, salvation, revenge, punishment and forgiveness, wisdom and contemplation, sin and penance, suffering and attainment, grace and humbleness.
10 years ago all the above words meant jack shit to me, just some mumbo jumbo that bigoted old people use to condemn the youthful because they are too old and impotent and envious of the youth.
The thing is, the more you look into philosophy with a more open mind, you see that it actually has content behind it. To put it in more rational terms, you become aware of and able to discuss things that happen in the more animalistic part of the brain, that makes you excited, anxious, sad, joyful. It's easy to believe that all this is just straightforward "bad events -> sadness", "good events -> joy".
If you meditate, if you wind down in the evening and are mature and have some life stories of both success and disappointment, you will see that a lot of that stuff is best processed in spiritual terms and by relating it to archetypal stories. I've been reading Jordan Peterson on this matter, and while I don't agree with his conclusions in many cases, I do find it to be a good bridge between the rational scientific endeavor (you need to know the frequency of blue light to create lcd screens etc.), and the personal/spiritual manifestation of it (the blue handle of a hammer that I'm already preparing to grab in my mind).
It's not that the magic sky daddy gives us the stuff we ask for in prayer, like a vending machine. But for one reason or another, pretending to act out a sacrifice story or "asking god" why something happened can be useful.
You can substitute other words if you have an aversion to Christian terminology, you can say you're connecting to yourself, your higher self, the consciousness of the universe.
The thing is, ideas and insight doesn't come from forcing. Just like you don't pull on a plant forcefully to make it grow, you nourish it from below and with sunlight and air.
Nobody can make themselves have a great idea. In our experience, ideas just present themselves. Obviously they are not magically handed to us, but it looks "as if". Of course it's a complex brain process that involves long term memory, hormones, interactions of various brain parts, etc. Knowing the details of this can be beneficial, but just because you understand the brain chemistry of alcohol intoxication doesn't mean you won't get black out drunk if you drink a lot. Similarly somehow it is deeply ingrained in us to see things in terms of agents and purposeful patterns. One way to deal with this is to label this as a thinking error, an erroneous heuristic making too many false positives, a mistaken overdrive of the empathic part of the brain, something to eradicate. That's how I used to think.
Once you understand all this, you can be capable of discussing, untangling and managing your emotions and the archetypal/spiritual language can be a way to formulate this.
However when things get intense, I like to freshen it all up a bit with reading Zen koans. Zen koans are somewhat like "serious jokes" and confront your overly analytical mind with freezing shocks. They are playful, non-literal, but sometimes literal, or hanging in the air in between.
Just because it is not necessary for you does not permit you to project your opinions on the rest of humanity.
You get value out of peace and serenity, yes? So do I. I take you at your word that you believe in a particular god, I would assume you take me at my word that I don’t believe in any gods.
If both of those things are true, then gods are not required to take value out of the idea of serenity. The only way that this could not be true as if one of us are lying.
A couple years ago, I faced a very tough time in my life. My business was collapsing, my family's finances were in jeopardy, and there was a serious health issue going on.
The emotional stress was incapacitating. I couldn't sleep, let alone focus enough to fix my problems. It was the downward spiral nightmare scenario.
If I didn't have dependents (wife + 3 kids), I might have withdrawn into depression. Instead I was forced to fix my emotional state...
I constructed a personal prayer...
I am the man in the dark room.
In here, I am my loves, my principles, and my ideas.
Who I am cannot be changed by circumstances outside this room,
My loves are my legs which carry me to life outside this room.
My principles are my shield from the burdens the world assaults me with.
My ideas are the sword with which I shape my life.
When I return to myself in this room, the world remains outside, and I evolve to be better prepared tomorrow.
To sleep, I found I could play the audio from old familiar TV shows to drown out the worries to fall (and stay) asleep - it was a surprising turn-around.
These two things changed my life. Hope this helps someone else.
I'm not saying that to take away anything from the well-being brought by this interesting personal prayer, because it holds some insights about resilience. Only adding some context for the people out there whose depressive disorders, schizophrenia, or brain injuries, could leave them on the curb when it comes to these thoughts. Those people might need surgeries, medical treatment, or external support, before being able to strengthen themselves with this sort of thought.
But nothing of all that totally helped; I still had this sadness and anxiety and lack/absence of self confidence.
Then many years later turns out I have an illness, hypothyreosis, that causes this. And medication (levothyroxine) made all this go away, and I'm a different person nowadays.
> who you are can absolutely be changed by [...] circumstances [...] illnesses
That's very correct. I've been two different personalities — one sad, anxious, withdrawn, another happy and social. It's weird what hormone levels can do to the brain and who one ... who one is? one's personality.
Anyway, if someone has depression and anxiety feelings, and meditation and self help books won't make that go away — then, a blood sample test, it's just 5 minutes. (Well, plus bus / subway / something to the health clinic.)
Yes, but that's focusing on the very unlikely external circumstances and defeating the point. 99.99% of the daily stuff that seems important actually is not and it's healthier to live a model assuming it's not important rather than worrying that everything could be that devastating brain tumor or IED taking out your bus.
I would invite you to seriously challenge the formulation of your idea: it's not that 99.9% of stuff "seems important and it's not", it's that not 99.9% of people have the ability to deal with it through just the one therapeutic aspect of self-talk. Moreover, there is a propensity to share these words because they are inspirational, yet there is very little put forward for the people who do need more than that - and who, in turn, tend to suffer from ailments which in many cases could be alleviated if as a society they were more acknowledged.
If you re-read my message, I hope you do see that I am appreciating the original words, and simply highlighting additional options to people out there who need more than that. That's all.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/traumaticbraininjury/get_the_facts.html
[1] https://www.rightdiagnosis.com/h/hypothyroidism/stats.htm
[2] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/schizophrenia.sht...
[3] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/generalized-anxie...
Those of us fortunate to have good health and the ability to improve our circumstances should be glad for those opportunities, not take them for granted, and try to extend them to others.
> Those of us fortunate to have good health and the ability to [...]
And it's not easy to see from the outside if that's the case for another person -- I think often they'd want to hide things like anxiety and depression. Or me, when I had those anxiety and sadness problems -- I spent most time at home alone
@pathseeker wrote: "very unlikely external circumstances"
But it's not just 1 - 99.99% = 0.01% that needs medication and other help than "just" meditation. Looking only at hypothyreosis, it's more like 2% or 5%.
@cmehdy it seems to me that you 1) work with health care, or 2) you have something like hypothyreosis or GAD yourself or people you know? or 3) you're a researcher? or 4) TBI happened to someone you know? (If it's too private then obviously no need to reply : ) And best wishes with your work)
I just think it's time we as a society accept and understand that having support and medication for things that relate to our mental health is fully part of the toolbox of healing, and not a fringe thing that remains on the sidelines for an insignificant proportion of people.
Most people will spend some amount of time in a hospital or clinic in their lives, for a broken bone, a disease, or some functional change to their teeth, or whatever else. It's all pretty accepted, nobody thinks that it's a fringe thing.
We should accept that the way we look at psychiatry or targeted support for mental illnesses should be similar to surgery for broken bones: if you have a sprain just take good care of things at home with basic knowledge, but if there's a chance you have a fracture you won't make your bones heal well by praying or by finding a blog post, you need professionals for however long that situation lasts. And there are way more mental fractures out there than people like to admit to themselves and each others.
I believe the point of the last sentence is exactly that your experiences in the external world can change you. But the difference is that you should decide how it changes you. You should decide how you can bring smarter nuance to you principles to avoid the exhausting emotional drama in the world, and you should decide how to alter your ideas/strategy (the sword) to better shape your life to meet your life's goals and serve the people you love.
This is the ideal - it is often not a reflection of our very human reality. ...but it is, through years of practice, something that can be closely attained. The prayer is the acceptance that we are flawed emotional humans - and it is just a simple tactic to remember to aspire to being in control of our emotional state - rather than letting it control us.
We can identify our self-worth according to who we are inside (our principles, thing love we have, and the goals we have), rather than passively allow the world to beat us what it finds useful.
Mental illness falls outside the scope of this prayer. If someone has mental illness, then this (or any) prayer isn't going to solve their problems and they should seek professional help.
I too had to go through a time like this, for different reasons, but I lost and fell into depression. I didn't have dependents unfortunately and my self-esteem was completely shattered.
I recovered and became productive again since a while now. But I'm still haunted by anxiety sometimes.
I'm in a state of extreme productivity and self-confidence right now, but part of it is feeling chased by my failing in the past, as if I have to (or could) catch up.
At the same time I know that patience, focus and time are key to do the right thing(s). This is also being addressed in the linked article.
My strategy is to talk, be open about my feelings (which I had to learn the hard way) and to take time to meditate and appreciate silence, deep focus, my loved ones and the beauty of nature.
Mantras and prayers are like magic tricks: You condition yourself to focus on a positive, powerful thought and with time you can activate that state with little effort as you described.
Ill be contemplating some of the thoughts in your prayer. Some of the phrases are very powerful, tangible metaphors.
Thank you, genuinely.
I've spent a lot of my career working to correct projects that have been in a terrible state and had the privilege to mentor and help pull people out of bad situations.
One of the big things I try to do is to get people to think about what they care about and how much they care. Good people do a lot of harm to themselves by caring about the wrong things: they want to be the hero in their story, but forget that six months from now nobody will remember the sacrifices they made.
One part of this is to accept the amount of work that needs to be done is only impacted in a small way by the work you've done today. If you work 8 hours or 16 hours there's still going to be too much work tomorrow.
Working longer hours generally does nothing than hide structural issues. By encouraging teams to cut their workload from 60+ hour weeks to 40, you are forcing these issues into the open.
For those that are ever in a bad situation I'm happy to listen (my contact details are in my profile), sometimes you just need somebody with an external perspective.
Time, how brief my allotment
Fate, how small my roll to play
Self, all that can be mastered
To my surprise I found that I actually enjoy delivering food more than writing code. As long as the customers get the food they ordered delivered in time, everyone is happy. And once I'm done, I'm done. No more lying awake at night going back and forth over some design decision and worrying about consequences from choices already made.
It's not as mentally stimulating, and I earn way less money, but I'm finding it harder and harder to find the motivation to go back to writing code.
But, money and easy to find a job.
You're only there for 2 weeks, you know you're only there for 2 weeks and everyone knows you're not going to get the terrible end of the stick unless they're specifically going out of their way.
I delivered a lot of different food in high school and it honestly was one of the worst jobs of my career, I'd much rather work in retail or clean pools. All of my income went into gas and repairing my car. If I got a tip it was a few bucks and back then we had the 30 minute delivery thing that caused so many drivers to get into wrecks I'm pretty sure it was eventually banned or made illegal (or they all just dropped it).
The car is provided by the restaurant, and it's large scale corporate customers so no tips.
I make enough money to survive, a chance to make people happy and get free food. I've been doing this for several months now.
It is a relaxing job when it's going well and not rushed. I like driving around aimlessly.
LOVE this.
Without any kind of specifications or design meetings beyond a 5 minute chat here and there.
It was your idea? What did they say, they were surprised?
The guy who's running the restaurant together with his wife is/was an engineer, he hasn't done any coding but he knows enough to be aware of the specification problem.
I'm curious about if you get paid / if you charge software developer rates when working in the restaurant?
My wife does live production (AV) for big shows and concerts. It's a stressful job; for a lot of it, you're on tight timelines and have one chance to get it right. Any mistake you make is pretty clearly obvious to all of the people in the room. You plan the shit out of it ahead of time: one missing item on a truck can be a (pardon the pun) show stopper.
But like you said, at the end of the night, when the trucks are all packed up, you get to go home and never worry about that particular job ever again. If something went wrong, there might be a post-mortem the next day with lessons learned for next time, but it's over.
Some days I am thankful that I don't have her job. Some days I am jealous that she gets to walk away from it all at the end of the night.
I could be wrong though. If you end up just genuinely being a restaurant person, maybe occasionally doing some coding to supplement your income, that's fantastic. There are many things I loved about the restaurant industry.
Some years back, I started a company with an excellent product manager, one very focused on actual user impact. One of the first things we did is build a tiny, cheap usability lab; every Tuesday we'd have 4 users in to try things out. We rigged it so engineers could watch the sessions remotely, and for the sessions we didn't watch, he'd share key bits. It was really satisfying to see stuff getting used, what worked, what didn't.
Later, as we grew, we still kept the user tests, but added on a slick system for experiments. All of us were involved in thinking about what to test next, how we could make things better. My cofounder was definitely the best at that, but we all made contributions. We all were engaged. We all paid attention to what we were doing for users.
And it helped that despite being a startup, we were big on automated testing and pair programming. When my mom got sick, I took two weeks off and everybody was fine without me. They carried on releasing a few times a day, trusting in each other and in the safety net we had built for ourselves.
It seems to me that the average development process, which is generally about building whatever people with organizational power want, is emotionally corrosive. It wears us down, because it isn't satisfying on a human level. Which, IMHO, makes it way less efficient.
This was freelancing though; I had full freedom to do things my way, which is how I ended up working for two weeks to learn about their problems.
And I still prefer delivering food to working on the software. Thankfully, they're super happy with it and there's not much left to do.
It’s been difficult for me to reconcile these feedback loops and whole-team involvement with the current online push for asynchronous workflows. In my experience, the developers who want to isolate themselves at home or in their office, pull tickets out of a queue and submit a PR at their leisure were the least likely to succeed at improving the product. The developers who never hesitated to jump into a discussion or meeting with the rest of the team or get involved with the product planning sessions were the ones who moved the product forward the most.
Don’t get me wrong: There’s a time and place for isolated, heads-down work. Frivolous meetings and endless planning sessions must be minimized in favor of action. However, the current online mentality in favor of asynchronous work, minimal real-time in-person interaction, and strict “not my job” separation of developer/product manager roles is swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction, IMO. Everyone, from developers to customers, tends to be happier when they’re all included and active in the decision making processes.
For what it's worth, I've worked with a couple teams that were remote and great at this, so it's not impossible. One was a small startup. The developers had worked together in person for years and were really well bonded. Once they added in some remote pairing, it was fantastic. The other was a Mozilla team where they put a lot of emphasis on close collaboration. Between the two, I have a fair bit of hope.
Maybe one of the silver linings of this mess will be that people are more familiar with screen sharing software after this.
Two screener tricks that I recall:
One is getting in a little market research. Add a few questions that you've been wanting to know anyhow.
The other is including plausible-sounding answers that let you reject liars. For example, we had a grid section that asked, "How often do you use these sites?" One axis was frequency, "several times a day", "daily", a few times a week", etc. The other axis was the name of a bunch of sites, including popular things like Facebook and Amazon. But we'd also make sure to include more obscure things, and a couple of entirely fake ones.
When I left the store at night, every customer had been served, every piece of equipment had been cleaned, the money had been counted. I was just done. It felt great.
I solve problems every day, I never get done, every day its something new that needs fixing. Every year that passes I feel more and more that I'm just not made for this kind of work :(.
The only stressful parts were getting there on time after work (because I tend to linger at work doing that one last thing) and the parking tickets because it was so limited and some spots required top-up payments (before apps). I ended up in tennis-wear because a mature person giving frank opinions of how things look on people (mostly women shopping) seems effective. Anyway I lasted longer than most of the younger hires and gave it up part way through the winter because driving/parking in that was just too much. Maybe something like that but outdoors might be a great thing to try.
Every new system an organization takes on requires maintenance, training, etc. This takes time from the coders and is frequently not taken into account.
Developers stay at companies for 1-2 years, so it seems like you get frequent resets.
I've been at the same place going on 8 years. My father in law has been at the same place for 30.
tbh same. I'm great at what I do, but I still very much miss the restaurant environment / more directly helping people.
At the time, I simply couldn't understand that. Sure, I hadn't been writing code as long as he had, but I couldn't imagine enjoying anything more than that. I absolutely loved twiddling bits and watching mechanical systems do what my code told it to.
Fast forward to now. I still really enjoy software/hardware/mechanisms/coding/design etc., but if I had to give it up tomorrow, I know I could find something I love just as much.
It's a really big world and there are a lot of sandboxes to play in.
Literally. This is another reason why meditation is important.
Anxiety is always accompanied by patterns of muscle tension. It can be relieved by mechanical relaxation of the tissues. Relaxation is achieved by awareness, which is fostered by meditation.
A calm, clear mind flows from a calm and relaxed body.
- - - -
In my career I've observed that business is a kind of theater for people's ego trips to play out within, and the form and methods of a business reflect the karma, if you will, of the people running it. It's one of those things that sounds trivial once you type it out.
Anyhow, it reminds me of Conway's Law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
> Within psychology, researchers sometimes colloquially refer to traits like ‘‘conversational turn-taking’’ and ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ as aspects of what’s known as psychological safety — a group culture that the Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’’ Psychological safety is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’’ Edmondson wrote in a study published in 1999. ‘‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-lear...
My takeaway is you need to be nice, be respectful, and fire toxic people even if they do jump through all the right hoops.
Maybe improv classes or subsidizing employees to exhibit art or publicly perform music?
The problem is when people tell themselves "that's just how I am" and don't have a high enough EQ to notice that they're coming across as jerks.
Everyone is different and everyone requires a personal touch. It's important for people to understand how to get along with those who aren't exactly like them.
Some ppl have a whole life behind them with insecurities and bullying and traumas, and
... Itll be hard for improv classes for a week to have much effect compared to that
But still it's an interesting idea, I suppose if the more shy ppl in the company got to do impro, that'd be good for the company (and them too)
+ Can be teambuilding too
Maybe the improv world is different, I've never done improv (yet)
I've been talking (with my friends) about how all development is 'fear driven development' for quite a while now.
Of course I don't mean just software development, but the way it manifests in software is instructive.
The different fear responses range from formal methods to FOMO but in general we latch onto something as a source of comfort.
Conway's law expanded to how you communicate with yourself.
Do you have examples of fear-driven and non-fear development approaches? And what flavors of "non-fear" development are possible?
Look at all the early software pioneers do they look like they were suffering from constant anxiety vis how productive they have been for decades?
Can you please clarify?
Conway's law is an adage stating that organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure.
In a sense, your own self is an organisation whereby we communicate with ourselves in fearful and anxious ways, so the systems we build can only be a reflection of that fear and anxiety.
Frankly, I'd be outright horrified if say the people responsible for autonomous driving weren't anxious about mistakes, since I'd either have to assume that they just didn't care or - perhaps even worse - do not realize the potential consequences of their actions.
1. Ambiguous or no deadlines, frequent check ins, "crunches" when their deliberately poor planning doens't work, keeping an air of uncertainty around everything.
2. Giving the same tasks to multiple groups and deliberately pitting them against one another in a kind of unhealthy competition. Constant fear of obsoletion.
3. Little or no positive feedback, only give feedback when things are wrong. Deliberately vague about future career prospects or growth, holding the carrot out but with no promise to deliver.
The problem is that each of these are tied into natural "sources" of anxiety that are likely to happen with or without the company actively promoting it, but the company promoting it can make people work even more frantically. The problem is they don't realize people produce their "best" work when they have creative freedom from anxiety.
2. Again this could be incompetence rather than cunning
3. Most great bosses and a lot of rubbish ones aren't great with positive feedback. Have you read Steve Job's biographies or Shoe Dog? Not much praise there. One guy I really respected once told me I wasn't a great programmer, but I got the job done and that was probably the nicest thing he said about anyone...I was pretty happy with that!
I agree with all of your points, but maybe not your reasoning behind them.
Key developers leave the project for greener pastures, and business people wonder how the project failed despite the fact everyone was working so hard.
And the solution I took was to gently encourage them, but also let them be just a little bit uncomfortable. They need a safe environment they can fail in with no repercussion, but also need to practice overcoming the unknown and being willing to take on some risk.
They're still uncomfortable doing so because they're used to me letting them out, but every so often I let them do their own thing and they eventually find their way out.
Soon it will become habit and they won't depend on me so much anymore.
How does a dog door prevent rodents and other riffraff from coming in?
I don't think rodents and bugs are typically a problem though. People, maybe, but if someone wants to break into your house it's not hard to do so and the lack of a dog door isn't going to stop them.
That being said, I grew up in an area completely surrounded by trees and every animal imaginable (squirrels, rabbits, coyotes, raccoons, opossums, deer, etc). We had a dog door (a simple plastic flap) to our barn. I saw raccoons and squirrels with nests literally 10ft from the dog door. Nothing ever came inside. The barn even had food (dog food, plus a fridge and cupboards with snacks). It was even heated during the winter. Nothing came in. I don't know the reasoning, but that little piece of plastic kept everything out.
Somewhat related, many of my neighbors have had issues with rats. I have seen them on the edges of my yard but never seen or heard one inside. I haven't done anything to prevent them except for having two indoor cats. These are fully domesticated chubby cats that probably couldn't catch a wild rat to save their life, but I suspect their presence deters rodents for the most part.
> ... couldn't catch a wild rat
I'm seeing a possibly different reality
I once came into an app project that was really bogged down. The team was good, but inexperienced, as was the management. The devs weren't doing anything. When I came on they said they told me there were no specs for what they should work on. I found a folder with several folders with ten, twelve page documents for individual features for the app. They would include nice mock ups, documentation including back end features, analytics hooks and so forth. And we are talking features that were generally changes to a screen or a UX widget.
"Why don't we do some of these?" Answer: They needed to go through some executive review meeting. Or, they weren't really specific enough because some lazy team member could say all the edge cases weren't defined. The key was convincing the team that as capable people that if the intent was clear, and important details specified, they were smart enough as a team to figure out the rest. And they were.
Anxiety can also be expressed as a realization that what's being worked on is useless, adds negative value, or just personally unfulfilling or unimportant. Cops firing teargas at peaceful protesters a few blocks away has cause me a good deal of that flavor of anxiety, which I don't think is necessarily a negative outcome. Do you have any insights along those lines?
I've encountered so many younger people in tech, making $200K+ in places that support lifestyles that need less than a quarter of that for comfort, who complain about their jobs and the golden handcuffs that keep them there. They seem to be locked in much stranger and fantastical anxieties than those I understand.
This habitual scroll, scroll, feed, feed, dopamine, dopamine cause the brain to be over active and thoughts hard to control. People get heightened without even being aware. Never-mind if you dont carefully curate your feed.
But that's just something Im mulling over lately.
I only did it for a couple weeks but soon found whole-room artificial lighting at night obnoxiously and needlessly bright. A candle for the room and ~2 candles per person (or equivalent from small electric lights—it's actually hard to find them this dim, though) provide entirely enough illumination to do just about whatever you want, and, crucially, let you get tired.
I strongly suspect a huge proportion of people who are "naturally" very active at night or just "can't" have a normal sleep schedule are in fact suffering from the availability and use of particular technologies.
Me and my team are in the process of delivering a new infrastructure provisioning system that will bring 9 figures worth of equipment online this year. For the most part we're on time modulo the usual bobbles that come from a year-long project this size.
My upper management regularly says We're in a new safe space and there's room to fail, we're trying to be more like Silicon Valley, etc. My new manager told me in our last 1:1 'If you don't take your application stack you're delivering and turn it into a service in the next 60 days, I'll eliminate your job by year end.'
So we're right back to Go Big or Go Home pressure that the company has always exerted on people despite lip service to the idea we've shed our bad old ways. At least it feels that way to me. Maybe I'm overreacting. Maybe I should look for another job. LOL.
Either:
1) You've never been in a safe space with room to fail, you've just been operating under this misunderstanding.
Now you know this, you can correct course and change the goal: instead of trying to deliver the best system possible, your team should focus on delivering the minimum required to meet the goal of having it in 60 days. You can cut scope and reduce quality to meet that goal. They are prioritizing the minimum, not the best long-term option for the company.
You also now know a new fact about the organization: you don't want to be there because it's the type of organization that will change the rules on you and fire you for not meeting (what sounds like) unreasonable goals. You now have a new goal: find a new job. Your manager has helped you re-prioritize, this is priority #1 and your project is relegated to #2. Even if you don't get fired in 60 days, you risk being fired in 65 or 90 days, you don't want to be there one day longer than necessary.
2) You are in a safe space, but your new manager is rogue. Even if this is the case, trying to discover that this is the case, and trying to remedy the situation if it is, has a huge personal risk to you with little benefit.
Your best bet is to look after yourself, not the organization, and start looking for a new job. If you go to upper management and they don't fire him, you're going to have somebody that has power over you that is going to be working against you.
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It might hard advice to hear, and hard to follow, but you should be less stressed about the situation. You now have a clear understanding of what you need to do.
Sorry for the long-winded reply. My contact details are in my profile, I'm happy to be a confidential sounding board if that helps.
Fear isn't really an "emotion." It's a "reaction." It's a temporary state that we are designed to engage when we are in danger, and exit when the danger is past.
And it works very well. When we are scared, our adrenaline amps up, our capillaries expand, our blood pressure increases, our senses sharpen, etc. There's been a gazillion studies on the physiological manifestations of a state of fear.
Our thinking also gets affected. It becomes fairly "binary." Stand very still, or run away. Don't just stand there thinking. Make a decision. Do something. No time to evaluate. No grey areas. It's either good, or bad.
Anger is really a manifestation of fear. The reactions are quite similar.
They are both reactions that are designed to be temporary. Being in either a state of fear, or anger, for extended lengths of time, is corrosive to our health; both mental and physical.
But the really dangerous thing, is that the "binary" thinking is bad; especially in areas where we are making long-term decisions. If we need to make a decision to run, we don't look further than the next bend. That's why a squirrel runs in front of a car, escaping someone walking down the sidewalk (happened to me a couple of days ago. The squirrel was fine, because the driver saw them, and jammed on the brakes).
Many managers work on fear. They like to keep a state of anxiety going. I won't dwell on the reasons, but I feel as if it is a bad thing, for engineers, because it encourages us to take tactical shortcuts and "patch" fixes, as opposed to considered, strategic reasoning, and long-term, "holistic" fixes.
I was a manager for many years, and I feel that one of my most important jobs was to shield my team from the immense pressure that was piled onto me.
I wasn't familiar with it before, but might start using it, as it's unfortunately relevant at work.
The Permit A38 thing was worthy. I imagine someone who's never worked would probably find that segment dull, but I winced in sympathy.
Maybe you could call it "what would happen if Heller and Kafka tried to co-write a novel."
Mixed with weed driven development it seems to get positive results but awful for meetings.
Minor amounts of anxiety when properly channeled isn't a bad thing -- maybe that's just another word for "motivation."
Second, the slowness comes from the fact it takes a lot more time to read and understand code that to write it, let alone trust that it is doing what is doing correctly. If you don't introduce bugs and are very careful you won't have nightmarish surprises. Keep up.
This caught my attention, because out of all the men and women I know who experience anxiety, this was the most typical way the former expressed it.
Who is the benchmark for how anxiety is expressed?
Didn't really connect it all together until after the fact, but it was very much related to the anxiety and uncertainty of a rapidly changing situation.
About a month later, I was feeling pretty relaxed and checked my heart rate again. 50bpm.
I think I read somewhere that people have a hard time focusing if their heart rate gets above 100 or 120 bpm (I don't remember which). Definitely proved true for me. I couldn't think straight for most of March.
I read this a few weeks ago and some things there made a lot of sense, but I still can't envision the whole development process with Risk First being a protagonist.
I think what it really is about is managing uncertainty and talking about risks is one of many tools for that.
Fear of poverty. Fear of shame. Fear of loss.
Maslow's hierarchy suggests there might be a few others, but fear is a big one.
That's only atypical if you consider women to be the default, right people.
CBD is a highly effective tool for the toolbox, imo