Tension is, imo, ephemeral. If you keep chasing it, you are chasing dopamine loops. Little good comes from this.
But meaning is different. When you can remind yourself a truly great "why" you are doing something, can re-frame it, it can help.
Most importantly, boredom, irritation, and anxiety are temporary. They are emotions. They do not define us or the work. It was a joy when I realized that all these emotions will pass. They really do. You can sit with it. You really can. You can't make it go away, but it will pass.
Any work will go a little faster when your boss puts an arbitrary deadline on it and screams "We need this by Friday, we're gonna tell the VP that it's late and it's your fault!!" But it's hugely demoralizing and stressful.
But if you say "this work will get the client's hospital equipment monitoring suite out sooner; if it works reliably, they'll be able to deploy it sooner, and it'll save the lives of some sick kids," then that'll also get the work done a little faster, and it'll make you feel good about doing it.
Arbitrary tension is a patch that you put on work that has no meaning. "We want you to go faster because it will make our metrics go up which might raise the stock a few percentage which might make our investors a few extra millions" has no meaning, which is the root problem.
The problem is that the smart ones will easily figure out that 'this next version will save lives' is a total lie. If your monitoring product doesn't work, it gets dumped and replaced. In developed countries, if your code has the potential of harming someone you're in a heavily regulated industry. The software in those industries is speced out in enormous detail to avoid this problem.
>Arbitrary tension is a patch that you put on work that has no meaning. "We want you to go faster because it will make our metrics go up which might raise the stock a few percentage which might make our investors a few extra millions" has no meaning, which is the root problem.
I disagree. Financial goals are the easiest to understand for people, and also easiest to communicate, and personally for me easiest to reason about how to achieve them. Just hit a number and you're done, collect your bonus and go do something you enjoy. As they say, the best way to ruin something you love doing is by making it your job. IMO people who chase some higher purpose and meaning are destined to be forever unhappy at their job.
Whereas tension is easy to manufacture
This is one statement that’s true of an overwhelming number of stories.
I used to tell myself the same thing. Then one day, a customer misconfigured their NetScaler, and all hell broke loose. We had half-delivered CSS files, misfiring form handlers, random blank screens of death, and a buggy front-end library that would bombard the backend with requests if it received the wrong status code with no back-off logic! There were hundreds of bug reports. You name it, we had it.
Debugging everything was just wild, especially with the constant tension of "What if it's our fault?" In the end, it wasn't! We got paid for our time, and we were able to close a massive number of tickets. It was one of the best weeks of my professional life.
i can definitely confirm that meaningless work is more boring.
A lot of bad can come from this, especially if you're working on farming these loops from others and that's where you get your kick/money. But if there's no dopamine loop, ideally in addition to having some meaning, then there's just burnout.
> But meaning is different. When you can remind yourself a truly great "why" you are doing something, can re-frame it, it can help.
Ya, but it's easy to get too caught up in meaning. Meaningful meaning is scarce, and it's a bit naive to couple your paycheck to it. Most times work is just work and it needs to keep going as long as you need money. Meaning is fleeting by comparison, even for nurses and people actually doing something useful for society. When you can get it, great, but when you can't, don't go quitting your job impulsively, not in this market.
Or perhaps we should all be taoists, and find find joy in the taste of vinegar because it is pure life that we are tasting, by being alive and breathing and choosing to take on a task that is always new, because even if the work hasn't changed we have.
Or maybe just to quote the dwarves in Majesty: Hard work is its own reward.
Or perhaps the omnissiah demands it and it is not ours to question his will, only ours to ensure the machine spirits thrive.
There's a million reasons to get out of bed and do the work. Maybe the most noble is Meditations-esque "we work because we are humans" and the work must be done.
Just a great response. :)
Also, so far most of our projects start simple but end in chaos and deadlines on the minute. I feel like we could always do better.
Like, if you’ve got a tight deadline coming up, it’s not the time to spend a week making CI slightly faster. On the other hand, if someone is telling you to not do work (right now), then they also need to help be responsible for finding time to do that work and understanding the impacts of that work never gets done.
I explain this to people as the tension between important urgent work. Some work is important but never（rarely) urgent. And if you ignore important work (like maintenance) it might become urgent at a very bad time.
You get credit for fixing the issue, avoid giant fix-along-the-way PRs, and future credit for people (maybe even you) understanding why you those changes were made.
i’ve seen so many random prs of engineers that thought this was the time to go on a rabbit whole and fix some random error they found. worse, i’ve seen regressions introduced on random “fix” PRs that had no description, no ticket, nothing. this is not team work. if you see an issue and you know how to fix it, by all means, fix it. but create a bug ticket with explicit current and expected behavior that people can read and test. if you don’t have time to create a ticket, then you don’t have time to fix random bugs
I mean, finding a Jira epic/project where to fit my ticket is not the hardest part of the job tbh. Also, depending on the team and your experience, loosely fixing things here and there can be a red flag or totally the opposite (e.g., I've seen how juniors or people in general with less than a decade of experience get punished when they start fixing random things here and there. On the other side seniors or staff engineers get kudos for fixing also random things but in less volume and usually more tricky ones).
Having a ticket to back up your work is never going to hurt you, though.
One of the biggest career mistakes is doing things on your own that are not aligned and approved with the management chain. Even if makes 100% sense.
They might look past it once or twice but you will get managed out eventually. Doesn't matter how good you are.
Let's say you're working on spaceflight software where lives are at risk.
This is nearly the norm for ENTERPRISE software development, and it's such a tragedy.
I do alot, all of it is meaningless and tied up in corporate politics.
Another poster got it right, meaningful work isn't boring.
The bane of my existence are CI/CD systems that get caching 99% right. Chasing down the problems from that last 1% of strangely busted...well, lets just say that if you want TENSION at work, good way to get it. :/
Boring work needs automation, not tension. Free up time to work on things more valuable and rewarding. Don't assume that just because you were hired to own service X that it means you can't peek out of your box. If you get it to the point where it's self-managing, look around at other people's needs before adding artificial requirements. You'll learn more, work with more people, get more recognition, and likely be more energized by the work.
There are so many opportunities for improvement, I'm never bored. My aim is to leave this place better than I found it. Even tiny improvements compound over time.
https://fiveable.me/key-terms/introduction-creative-writing/... is as good a source as any.
To me, friction is more negative. It's always there and it only serves to slow things down (by definition!) Tension can be released, and in fact creates anticipation for the release.
Perhaps I'm just an unusual type of person, but there are very few movie characters that I "resonate" with. Far more common is thinking "why are you doing that, you idiot?" or "what a jerk! Just tell them the truth."
I'll see myself out...
Taxes are boring, no kid at kindergarten states they are going to be tax advisors when they grow up, yet tax advisors exist and they do not all despise their jobs, because doing your job well can be intrinsically motivating.
>If you can’t tackle these at work, do it in your personal projects.
Just gold analysis. Most people in SWE have plenty of personal projects supported by their work managers and encouraged to implement work tasks into personal projects.
