[noodletheworld]

The A signals are not A signals in this article, and this:

> You may be wondering where this “extra” time is going to come from. You’re already committed up to your eyeballs. …We’ll talk about time management, task queue management, diff queue management, and other topics that will accelerate your progress.

Is just corporate dog whistling.

If you are over committed, no amount of time management will solve your problem. Using AI wont solve your problem.

You have a fixed amount of time and too much work?

Work. More. Hours.

Thats the real game; spend extra time outside of your normals hours doing extra.

Congratulations, you’re an “A”.

Makes no difference; your resilience against restructures is not correlated with how much respect you have from senior developers.

That shouldn't be your goal.

There are many places that do what they call “data driven” performance evaluation (translation: avoid being racist by looking only at anonymised numbers) and they do, indeed, look at 40 completed tasks and go: we will keep this one.

The strongest advice for a new starter is: at your specific company ask what you will be reviewed on, and do your best to do whatever that is.

Generic advice is a dime a dozen; don't fall in the trap of assuming [generic advice here] will apply to your specific workplace.

[theamk]

Not true at all.. I know people who work strict 9-5 and are clearly A. And I was unlucky to have a coworker who worked extra long hours just to write huge amount of code which did not solve the task required and kept breaking prod too.

[colechristensen]

Eh.

There is a lot to be said about how efficiently you work. This involves making choices about how you solve problems, in what order you solve problems, how you manage people interrupting you, your personal life interface with work, how you advocate for what work to be done... on and on and on.

An easy example: spending 2 days on automation for a task that takes an hour to do manually -- is this a task you have to do once a year or once a week? -- what do you choose to do?

How many meetings do you schedule? How many do you accept? How long do you spend struggling on a problem before asking for help? How often do you not even try something before asking for help?

And on and on and on.

[noodletheworld]

This is self-help nonsense your manager will tell you when giving you too much work.

Companies will smartly balance the amount of work allocated to people.

…and then they will push you to take on more work.

High achievers, across the board, consistently demonstrate putting more effort in.

Its just a bitter pill to swallow for some people.

[colechristensen]

I'm telling you for me being a better more productive engineer had a lot to do with making better choices. I'm not selling you a book or inviting you to my TED Talk.

Not wasting a tremendous amount of time automating something is indeed an important skill to learn (because automating things is way more fun for some people than actually doing the thing).

Coaching junior employees to neither ask me for help the instant they're confused nor spin their wheels for two weeks without asking for help is a COMMON thread.

>High achievers, across the board, consistently demonstrate putting more effort in.

Growing up, in school, I did almost nothing and was consistently at the top of my class until I got older and things started requiring effort for me. The early years of high achievement had literally nothing to do with effort.

These days being a high achiever has a lot to do with managing the perception of your work.

[noodletheworld]

> Growing up, in school, I did almost nothing and was consistently at the top of my class

It is clearly widely and indisputably demonstrated that many high achieving children in this situation are failures as adults because they never learn to put effort in.

Terrace tao is on the record writing about his experiences with it, and how it was only his failure in initial college admission shocked him into achieving what he has.

Ie. The point you are making is widely, clearly documented as the naive experience of someone who has not had to achieve at a high level.

> Coaching junior employees to neither ask me for help the instant they're confused nor spin their wheels for two weeks without asking for help is a COMMON thread.

You're a manager. I am sure you have a predictable set of responsibilities, constraints and want a “high performing” team.

Hows that working out for you?

Most advice I, personally, have seen, like this, comes from managers who want to have high performing teams, not ones that have high performing teams.

Its straight out of Be A Manager playbooks.

Whatever, you do you; but, I will emphasise that you are fooling yourself if you believe your experience is universal.

Most very successful people puts lots of effort in.

I… don't know what else to say. If you don't believe that, you are simply, objectively rallying against an extremely large well documented body of knowledge and work on the topic.

[colechristensen]

I don't know what to say, I'm sharing what has worked for me personally and you're going on about documented bodies of knowledge. I am quite possibly as least motivated by "business books" as it is possible to be.

You're trying to tell me that the advice I should give someone is "work harder not smarter". I'm not really interested in discussing with someone who is trying to convince me that what has worked for me isn't actually working.

[watwut]

> Companies will smartly balance the amount of work allocated to people.

Tell me you never worked in a workplace or was completely oblivious about workload of various people, without telling me.

Also, in my experience, people who consistently spend a lot of time in work tend to be very ineffective with their time. They are in the "overwork yourself, be ineffective, try to compensate by working more, be tired make more mistake, try to compensate" cycle.