| It makes me happy to see folks not dogpiling on you. I'll try to be similarly gentle. It seems to me maybe you've got the hero mentality. That sacrifice == hours spent grinding == commitment to the job. "Effort" to you is a measurement of love. That totally described me in my 20's and 30's. One day, after acquiring the necessary skills, I woke up and learned that it didn't make sense to grind like that anymore. Also, long hours is bad for the mental health. I switched to "work smarter, not harder" mode and learned about TDD and Agile. I got better at my craft and earned respect from my peers for encouraging them to get better too. Finally, I had a really eye-opening experience with an older developer a few years ago. He was a contractor and owned a gym. He always took off at 3pm to go train his folks and work his other business without asking/telling anyone. He was gruff and a little bit intimidating physically. He even had terrible typing skills: he typed with two fingers like a kid! Not sure if that was a dexterity handicap or if he just never learned to type, probably the former, but it still pissed me off because he was SOOO SLOW! It surprised me a bit when he rolled off that he lasted his whole contract and didn't wash out sooner. It surprised me at the time he had such deep networks in the company: VP's knew him and worked with him years earlier and they had lively random conversations. It surprises me now that his contributions to the codebase have endured - he just got a lot done in less lines of code. I think fondly now at the conversations we had, not just on coding, but on parenting, politics, physical health and strength training, military service, and just ... diverse, weird thoughts from my parent's generation. Think of yourself and your beloved company as The Borg. Your job is to incorporate the technical distinctiveness of aliens into your collective. If people you run across are turds, and you have a culture of hard-charging success, they'll wash out pretty quickly. Just let go of effort and efficiency as metrics - beancounters can concern themselves with that. Focus on winning over the long term. |
I have learned that putting in more hours does not result in the benefits one would hope for very early on.
Thanks for your comment though, it made me understand why everyone is super freaking pissed about my comment. Have I understood that earlier I would have edited it to avoid all this mess