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by tdewitt 2490 days ago
> I personally have been focused on making positive changes with 15 solid minutes of effort. Because that's all I'm going to have before I'm interrupted. It's annoying and I would much prefer a quieter work environment, but that's clearly not what the org wants.

Doesn't that just feel terrible? I bought noise cancelling headphones because of the open office concept. When that wasn't sufficient, I moved and am now remote. When Slack came in, I used the IRC bridge and setup ignore rules for all the botspam. Now that's gone and I found a web plugin that would do it. Slack changed their code and that no longer works. Every effort seems to be going toward a more disruptive world. 15 minute chunks are no sufficient to do quality work, in my opinion.

We shouldn't spend our days screwing around and our nights on work. If I have to work nights to be productive, I shouldn't have to show up during the day. Even if I didn't have a kid, I'd have a personal life.

1 comments

> Doesn't that just feel terrible?

The depth of the work I've been doing at work has been steadily decreasing. I feel less like a software engineer and more like a manager of SaaS. It's still much more technical than work your average office worker can do but the pendulum of power seems to be swinging back towards employers at the moment.

I don't know if it will ever swing back. I worry that the days of software engineers being able to build up expertise and have that expertise be a vehicle to social advancement are already over. Coders now need to be businessmen to get ahead just like everyone else.

You probably can, but it's like finding a needle in a haystack because the growth of software engineering jobs has been driven by direct business lines instead of the government and R&D focus that drove things early on. Also, salaries are higher, and you have glut of engineers coming in purely for the money and career which breeds a different culture as well.