Monday Links: 40-year Programmer, Work and Burnout
21 Nov 2022 #mondaylinksAnother five interesting links I found in past weeks. This time, I found a recurring theme while reading Hacker News: burnout, caring and statisfaction.
The Forty-Year Programmer
This post contains all the insights of 40-years a lifetime working as a programmer. These are some of my favorites:
- “Advice is expertise with all the most important bits removed.”
- “The work is good. If it stops being good, you’ll stop too. If it stops being good, that’s an emergency: you need to take a vacation…“
- “Don’t confuse work with your career. They’re not the same thing. They’re only barely related.”
Developers Don’t Fight The Last War
This post reminded me about an ex-coworker that says that using the same skills, architecture, and tools is like being an architect who always design the same house over and over. What worked yesterady won’t work tomorrow, I guess.
“…Technology is changing all the time, but developers like to create software with the knowledge and skills they already have.”
How to communicate effectively as a developer
Apart from social interaction, this is another challenge when working remotely. In the old days, we just tapped somebody else’s shoulders. These days of remote and asynchronous working, communication is more challenging. And we’re not teaching that when onboarding new hires. I still get plain “Hello” messages. I just ignore them.
This article shows a solution: “high resolution writing.” But, there’s another challenge with that. Often, we work with non-native speakers of the language used at work (pretty much, English everywhere). And, writing is a separate skill to master. Even for native speakers writing in his native language.
Caring about jobs and enjoyment after burnout
I’ve seen an increasing amount of Hacker News posts about burnout and job-related problems. These are some of them:
Tips to relearn how to care about my job?: “I got a high paying job at a recognizable tech company, but plagued with exhaustion and lack of motivation, which is killing me daily life. Anything you guys have done to dig out of a rut?”
Has anyone managed to find enjoyment in their work after burnout?: “Has anyone come back from being burnt out to love what they do again? If so, how did you manage to do it?”
How to deal with burnout and its consequences?: Speaking about burnout: “I really don’t know how to get over this and how to move past it. I feel quite literally incapable of working…I’m trying to figure out what my future even looks like and how to move past this and any advice would be really appreciated.”
A lot of good adive in there.
What “Work” Looks Like
I think we’ve all been to those meetings where nobody cares or even listens to what the organizer says. Especially, those where the organizer reads a document, he could have shared in the first place. This article shows an alternative to collaborative brainstorming. Spoiler alert: it’s away from computers. Read full article
Voilà! Another Monday Links. Have you experience burnout? How did you overcome it? What’s different about work after burnout? What are you doing to prevent burnout?
In the meantime, check my Getting Started with LINQ course where I cover from what LINQ is to its most recent methods and overloads introduced in .NET6. And don’t miss the previous Monday Links on Time zones and NDC Conference.
Happy coding!