| > you shouldn't go look for company priorities to fix, to be a hero The "to be a hero" is the problem, you can always feel good about solving hard problems and finding your boundaries, but "avoiding a crisis" is a thankless job & we should thank those people more than the "only I can fix it" people. The core problem for me is that the constructive "avoid crisis" people are baked out of these sort of events, rather than born risk averse in the first place. > Just look around you, see what's going on, and do good shit. One of the biggest side-effects of WFH was that this whole "who's around" mechanic has faded away without a proper replacement. Most of my satisfying work came from random interactions like this (not the most impactful or the most purposeful). I was a principal engineer and most of my 10 AM to 2 PM was taken up by meetings which mostly involved prevention of work duplication or to stop someone driving down to where I knew there was a dead-end (like, "I see you're using alpine docker images, why?" or more management boundary stuff like "the difference between these two ideas is ~140k over a year for all customers - can we agree that the expensive one is better for customers, because they don't see a 12$ month bill and it costs more than 140k$ to build the cheap one in NRE?"). Most of that work is tiring and always unproductive - the actual work is done by smart people who answer my questions carefully, the dumber the questions, usually the better the results. But sometime around 3 pm, I'd be line to get a coffee and I would run into a PM or someone from support or dev who would have a question for me which sounds nonsensical at first - but having an hour & half to go down that rabbit hole looking over someone's shoulder usually ended up with mostly "hey, I know what's happening, I've seen this before" or the classic "hmm, that's strange, how could that even happen?". Six to ten weeks later, I would be in a meeting where I would get some sense of "deja vu" when someone describes their approach and reach back to that day & that problem, to ask "how would you detect X" (something like "machine reboots, comes back with same hostname, but different IP" - would you restablish connections to IP or hostname, what about krb5 ... yada yada). That part is the real value as an engineer, but entirely unappreciated from the management's point of view. With WFH, I would go get a coffee, go for a run/walk and as good as it was for my state of well being, I would eventually get pulled into these crisis situations Thursday at 9 pm instead of Tuesday at 3. I like WFH for the work I actually have to do, but this sort of temporal serendipity is not easy to recreate on Zoom. |