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bluefirebrandHNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

In my career, none of these have ever paid off

… In my career, none of these have ever paid off. Every time I've crunched this way on something dramatically urgent like this, it has turned out that the "if we can deliver this, this huge moonshot sale is a sure thing" turns into a no-sale The sales person never seems to get cut loose for diverting the entire R&D towards a longshot for months and burning people out, though And you can bet the sales person isn't putting in weeks of overtime for the duration, either I basically refuse to do overtime anymore unless I'm working extra to make up for my own screw up. I'm not putting in extra to hit some other assholes unrealistic deadlines ever again

Original discussionMental health in software engineering426 source comments · at import
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DV
dvasHN

I think it is so important to be able to disconnect from whatever it is that we are doing, even for a very short period of time. Go for a walk, brew a coffee or simply close your eyes and breathe. Many times, stress is created artificially. It hurts our performance and deteriorates our ability to think. Encountered numerous situations where work was "urgent" and would likely land a contract or sales for the company, and everyone would be a superstar if they delivered this "crunch". After 2 months of pulling all-nighters and sleeping for 3/4 hours, we deliver the project ahead of time. Apathy begins to set in after management/decision makers keep on giving these gifts we call "crunches". To help the company and go the extra mile is something most of us have done in the past and will possibly do in the future. However, it's like the story of the boy who cried wolf, if everything is urgent …

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NP
np-HN

Agreed. Even if by some miracle you do deliver, and are considered a superstar, then what? What do superstars get? Probably just even more crunch work, since you've proven you're willing to do it.

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JA
jajkoHN

Absolutely 0 had ever paid off. Probably worst was trusting too much a colleague perceived by everybody as Oracle/plsql guru, when troubleshooting vendor's abysmal performance of DB queries during some bigger migration (up to half an hour easily, for trivial 30 million rows). He didn't see any issue on DB side, pointed to useless oracle hints, crappy JDBC drivers, spring's jdbc templates, possibly my not-optimal code etc. I went over my head, did probably the most complex code in my life, massively parallel, over weekends and evenings. That wonderful cathedral didn't move performance a zilch, just made debugging and further changes much harder. After few hours of actual debugging afterwards he found out vendor defined responsible DB table in such an obscure and bad way way that we had to literally copy whole table to another more sane one, and perform all the work there in maybe 5% of th…

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