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by deepGem
695 days ago
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Predictability is great for everyone, from managers to directors to even company investors. What everyone wants to see is consistent yoy/qoq growth. We should all strive for this kind of consistency. However, balancing this consistency with new adventures is where things get a bit tricky. I kind of like Jeremy Howard's approach to learning here. I don't know if it can be applied to a company or a team scale. Spend 50% of your time on predictable tasks, those that you have mastery over and can do comfortably.
Spend 50% of your time on frontier stuff things that break your comfort zone. Over time the some of the latter tasks will get into the former category, thereby leading to automation organically. The ratio of comfort:frontier tasks is personal and let's engineers choose their ratio. Some may want the ratio tilted in the comfort zone (greater predictability ) while some may choose to adventure into the frontier zone (lesser predictability ). An organization should have space for both. Even the same individual can alter these ratios based on their life stages, external circumstances. Put rather simply, a good software engineer can also choose to be a good technician and vice versa. Why should these roles be mutually exclusive ? |
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I think it's terrible for the knowledge worker, causing both great emotional turmoil (at the dissonance of expectation versus how they actually perform) and reducing quality of output greatly (by forcing output when more dweel/pondering time is required).
Hammock Driven Development by Rich Hickey was such a an enormous relief of a talk to run into, back in the day, hit upon so many tensions & frustrations I had because business Taylorism expected consistent output, expected me to know the process from a->b and to be able to say at every point I am x% of the way through the journey. The businesses doesn't know what's happening but cares enormously about making sure it's extracting as much consistent "progress" as it can out of me/us.
HDD talked to how analysis & understanding, how development & problem solving iteration really work. And it works nothing like what a business wants. And what a business wants hurts the quality & doesn't permit ideal outcomes to emerge & surface. https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
And the human factors are that dwell and pondering are essential for creative and knowledge work. Time in the hammock opens possibilities, fuels the muses.
> Spend 50% of your time on frontier stuff things that break your comfort zone.
That would be so excellent. I still get that mandate a lot, but so often I see peers whose whole life is cranking out pre-digestrd ready-to-go tickets. I want to see a world where we raise up engineers & engineering, not just ticket technicians.