[mlevental]

learning to appreciate monotonous tasks is too zen/enlightened (like someone in another thread weeks ago saying they enjoyed washing to dishes) and therefore sets the bar too high. but learning to persist and endure (by way of coping mechanisms e.g. music, short breaks) is very possible.

[bonniemuffin]

I definitely don't want my team to appreciate boring tasks! I want them to persist, endure, and then automate.

The person who grinds through the boring stuff while thinking about how to automate it so they don't have to be bored anymore, is the person I want to hire.

[WalterSear]

The nature of the work doesn't allow that. Coding takes all your thought - even when it's boring and monotonous.

The comparisons being made to washing dishes aren't realistic.

[bonniemuffin]

Sorry for the ambiguity: I didn't mean literally at the same time like washing dishes while dreaming of dishwashers. I mean, like, do some boring coding drudgery one day/week/month, and then the next day/week/month do a bit of dreaming and whiteboarding of how to automate a better world, and then we can prioritize and make time for the automation work to make the better world a reality.

The important part is noticing and recognizing things that are ripe for automation, rather than accepting the shitty world as it is and continuing to suffer through repetitive work that could've been automated.

[dageshi]

I agree with this, boring & monotonous code tasks are basically excruciating because you've got to concentrate on them hard and yet you'd rather be doing just about anything else.

[nradov]

I've done some refactoring work that didn't take any more mental effort than dish washing.

[WalterSear]

Sure. Is most work like that, though?

[bootsz]

There's also different kinds of boring/tedious though. I'd argue it's much easier to learn to enjoy washing your dishes at home than it is to enjoy slogging through trying to grok horrible legacy code. Maybe that's just me though.

[chrstphrhrt]

I agree. Especially if there are other teammates who defend the bad codebase because of their association to it.

Nobody should claim washing dishes is inherently wasteful or pointless. Legacy code on the other hand, comes with a lot of social pressure to just layer on more debt.

[devonkim]

Maybe I’m just weird but I’ve never really defended my code because I never found defensiveness to be helpful for moving projects forward. In fact, most of the code I’ve put out in my career has been rushed under pressure to deliver something fast so most of the time I’m distancing myself from the work usually saying “that wasn’t written by me, it was my evil twin that comes out at 2 am.” Trying to fix the problems of the past that keeps your codebase from improving at a better pace isn’t something shameful to me as much as a matter of pride - that you have learned from your mistakes and are not above reproach. The best stuff for me is what I do after iterating many times without fear of breaking anything though and that’s exactly what you would hope from a codebase matured through TDD.

[joshdev]

That's fair. When I say appreciate, I mean the results of the grind. Washing Dishes or any type of cleaning isn't fun, but finding coping mechanisms (zoning out, music, etc...) you can enjoy the results.