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by exratione 3455 days ago
Everyone has been put in the position of coming to a dead halt on some aspect of the work that just won't yield. Or at least not for the combination of you, your knowledge, and your resources at that given time. This never goes away. Signs of maturity as a developer involve how you deal with the existence of this phenomenon. E.g. box your time, know when to seek alternatives, and know how to find solutions that exist already, and especially know when to pull in help - and how to find useful help in your network.

The driving overall concern is avoiding points of grinding minimal efficiency for individuals, and in near all cases that can be avoided via some combination of simple strategies, even when you are the only person on your own personal project. Development is such a huge space that no two people will overlap completely in skills and experience on a team, and pulling in other people to alleviate your dead ends is a part of how you learn specifics needed to avoid that dead end in the future. But it is knowing to pull people in or seek another path that is the important part, not the specifics.

Working to an absolute dead end is only useful in the sense that you then understand better the incentive to avoid doing it again if you can.

An alternative view on the same problem space:

https://www.exratione.com/2016/01/paid-a-great-deal-to-be-te...

1 comments

> box your time

What exactly does that mean. I'm not saying this isn't a real thing (I really have no idea), but the only time I've heard the phrase used in person was by people who get ahead by posturing.

When someone uses it sincerely, what do they mean? What does it look like, as opposed to not boxing your time? What specifically does it solve?

>When someone uses it sincerely, what do they mean? What does it look like, as opposed to not boxing your time? What specifically does it solve?

A technical analogy would be depth-first search of a solution space, e.g. in a simple chess AI.

If the search has a cut-off depth = deterministically bounded length of search time = time-boxed

If the search does not a cut-off depth = unbounded (potentially infinite) length of search time = not time-boxed

I've always understood it to mean that you put an arbitrary deadline on the issue. ie "If I have not solved this by 12:15, I'll get help/move on". I'm not sure why it's called "boxing time" and I could be totally off base, but it makes sense.