Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by seanosaur 1278 days ago
I've dubbed this "theoretical productivity"[1] and also fall into this trap. I keep thinking that just moving to a different app/system with X feature will make this 100x better for me. That goldilocks app/system doesn't exist and is always a moving target. Spending time on solving these problems mean I'm not thinking/writing/completing the things I really want to, hence the "theoretical" nature.

1: There's a good chance this is already a term with a different meaning. If that's the case I don't mean to rip it off, it's just what sounded good at the time.
2 comments
Waterluvian 1278 days ago
I think I historically suffered from a form of this: I loooooved setting up for a project but didn’t really like doing the project. Whether it was downloading the resources and setting up a workspace for a code project or setting up a physical work area for some electronics work.
link
afturner 1278 days ago
Same! And that's why I'm now a DevOps engineer. In my role, DevOps primarily means automation and pipeline creation, working with teams to build and release their apps reliably and effectively. For me, it really scratches the itch of "setting things up".
link
Waterluvian 1278 days ago
Gosh I love dev ops. Smaller company so I have many hats. I saved a whole week of “clean up CI/CD and make the integration tests 3x faster” as a “treat” for the last week before vacation this year.
link
theLiminator 1278 days ago
Wow I'm glad to hear such people exist. I dread doing DevOps though I really value good DevOps setups. I just want to write my code.
link
Quikinterp 1278 days ago
People like you are heroes in the workplace to me. I hate anything devops related because I feel like it takes time away from the stuff I'm trying to do, so I appreciate anyone who does it!
link
gala8y 1278 days ago
It is also simply called procrastination, bike shedding, yak shaving, fear of success, fear of failure, Forest of the Infinite [0], list goes on... depending on the context.

On the other side, as we are already using computers, we might sometimes want to explore and get lost in this forest of problems and possible solutions and have some fun.

After all, as Douglas Adams put it:

“(..) a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer.”

[0] https://gameweld.medium.com/fractal-tasks-and-the-journey-th...

link