Jonathan Motes

I 100% agree with what is being said here Not only in software engineering but across the board in all industries

Boss said, "My team is burned out, but they're not even working that much." The real problem was invisible. "They're exhausted," the boss told me. "But most leave by 6 PM." I'd seen this before. "Tell me about their typical day," I said. "Normal stuff. Meetings, projects, the usual." "How many tools do they switch between?" He started counting on his fingers. Stopped at ten. "How often do priorities change?" "We're agile," he said. "We adapt quickly." "How quickly?" "Daily. Sometimes hourly." "Show me one person's calendar," I said. He pulled up his marketing director's schedule. Seventeen meetings in three days. Eight different projects discussed. Zero focused work time. "She's drowning," I said. "But she's only here 45 hours a week." "Hours aren't the problem. Decisions are." He looked puzzled. I explained. "Research shows that every context switch can take over 20 minutes to recover mentally. She switches contexts more than 15 times a day. That's 5 hours of mental recovery time, every day. It's only an 8-hour workday." His face changed. "Your team isn't tired from working. They're tired from switching. From deciding what's actually important. From never finishing anything." "What do I do?" "Three changes: First: One main priority per week. Not seven. One. Written down. Shared with everyone. Second: Batch meetings. All meetings on Tuesday/Thursday. Monday, Wednesday, Friday for deep work. Third: Pick three tools. Kill the rest." They were using Slack, Teams, email, Asana, Monday, Notion, and four others. Now they use three. Total. Six weeks later: "How's the team?" I asked. "Same hours. Completely different energy." "What changed?" "Maria finished a project last week. The whole thing. Start to finish. First time in two years." He paused. "She actually smiled in our one-on-one. Said she forgot what it felt like to complete something." The truth about burnout: It's not always about the hours you put in. It's about where your attention is pulled. You can work 40 hours and feel destroyed. Or 55 hours and feel energized. The difference? Whether those hours are spent starting things. Or finishing them. Most leaders count hours. The smart ones protect focus. Because burnout doesn't come from hard work. It comes from work that never ends.

I sent this message to everyone at Ardan this morning. Good Morning everyone. I want to share this and share some thoughts for all of you to consider for this year. We all need to come to recognize that if your job is to just write code, you will be out of a job in the next year or two. The AI coding agents have reached a level of being very good at writing the code you ask it to write. Notice I said "ask it to write." I need everyone to start focusing on their engineering skills: - Being able to identify what needs to be built and why. - Breaking that down into chunks of work and that be verified and tested. - Knowing how to ask for the code you need written and when you need it. - Maintaining a mental model of what is being built and coded. - Code reviews by yourself and the AI coding agents. This requires you to have a strong foundation in project structure and architecture. Everything I teach in my Software Design class. Without strong project structure, architecture, and design philosophy, these projects will be a mess. Really no different from what happens today without the AI Coding agent. You just get to the mess faster. So now is the time to strengthen these skills and leverage the videos I have. Leverage my existence here and reach out and ask questions. This year you MUST improve these engineering skills to stay employed. You must find an AI coding agent you like and start using it. You must invest in that tooling just like you invest in your laptop. Sourcegraph AMP I think is the best backend dev tooling out there. They have a free version with ads that don't get in your way. This is just 1 of many tools. Try and few and pick one. If you watch my live coding show (especially the last 2 shows) you can see how I use AMP effectively. Some of you can't use this tooling with your clients. But they do have internal models that some tools can use. Push to get access and start using it. Ask your clients what the rules are for using these tools and start using them. Please reach out if you need help getting started or have questions. -- Bill

The Pragmatic Programmer nails it again Absolute goldmine in the AI Coding age

@shanselman This reminds me of the issue I kept having with my MBP seeming to have sticky keys. Only after I upgraded to a new laptop did I finally realize my cat was laying on my bluetooth keyboard in another room 😆

I just spent the last two hours debugging the Bluetooth stack *in anger* because for the last few weeks I've had to re-pair my mouse with my laptop. Every time. Remove mouse, re-pair. Turns out I had two identical mice in my backpack and I've been switching between them. It was me.

The most important thing when you're working with coding agents: DO NOT DELEGATE YOUR THINKING Not only will this make for worse code, but the muscle you developed that makes you valuable in society, that you fought so hard to improve, will wither and die.

Software Engineers are not paid for writing code. They’re paid for solving problems. The faster you accept this, the better your life and career will be.

@emilykmay The first night, they’ll need their throat moist at all times. Wake them up every 2-3 hours and make them drink water. Other things mentioned here are important too, but I didn’t see this mentioned.

4yo is getting a tonsillectomy + adenoidectomy on Tuesday. Tell me all the things. I have stocked up on popsicles and ice cream but I'm nervous for him 🥺

I really wished that the cocky developers who pride themselves on using a specific stack to get that 5% perf boost could remember how it’s often much better to speak the same language in a group than to be stubborn and fail as an individual

We're going to be exploring all of the awesome stuff @reactjs 19 offers for years to come. New patterns will emerge and old libraries will need to either adapt or be uninstalled. All incremental of course, but I'm extremely excited about the future of React!

“There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.” - @jessephelps If I can’t describe the tradeoffs, I probably don’t understand it well enough yet.

Building the right thing is more important than building it right. Here’s why: A team that builds the right thing poorly may still succeed. They have a market fit, and can iterate based on feedback. A team that builds the wrong thing well is less likely to succeed. They committed to the wrong idea, and now have no useful foundation upon which to iterate. Takeaway: Ship early to validate ideas. Avoid “gold plating” until we know we built something people want. Iterate based on feedback.

@LShalott Could the Lexapro be causing it? Twitching/electric shocks is a common side effect of it.

Having trouble sleeping again because I think my sleep-deprivation is causing muscle twitches/slight jerking motions in my hands, arms, legs, feet. Anyone know how a way to make those stop? I don’t have muscle relaxers.

It is pretty interesting how many miss this point. I have seen people full of hubris about what’s cool or perfection without actually listening to users needs. Products and infrastructure are best when they’re useful.

Problem: In TypeScript, developers often declare needless conditionals. Why needless conditionals are a problem: 🚩 Adds noise 🚩 Hurts readability 🚩 Creates confusion 🚩 Often a sign of a misunderstanding or a logic error Solution: typescript-eslint/no-unnecessary-condition I just used this rule to find and automatically fix 100’s of bad conditionals in a large codebase. Here are 4 examples of bad conditionals it found: 1. The author didn't know that map always returns an array. So the fallback to an array was needless. 2. The condition is already checked on 123, so the check on 129 was redundant. 3. Here it caught a logic error! The "??" was reported as needless. The developer meant to check the array's length. 4. The variable is always defined because it's narrowed on line 90. So, the "?." on 92-95 were all needless. I'm so impressed with this rule! I plan to run it on all TypeScript projects in the future.

If you want to build and maintain open-source software, you'll need to get very good at this. I'll give you an example for React. > "How can I use context for global state?" Who said you need context? What are we building? Actual problem: reading user data in multiple places.

It’s surprising to me when leaders don’t think that morale is their job. IMO, the higher in the company, the more morale and making sure people understand strategy IS the job. I myself don’t always do this perfectly but I always know it’s my responsibility.

Finally

@Cloudflare @Cloudflare We've had sites down all day today because of the API issues. I sure hope you write a very detailed postmortem for today's problems too.

Multiple Cloudflare services were unavailable for 37 minutes on October 30, 2023. Here is a discussion of what went wrong, how the incident was resolved, and the work we are undertaking to ensure it does not happen again. cfl.re/3MpwtxO

@EvyStory I just saw this though, if a bot would work for you: reminder-bot.com

@EvyStory This sounds pretty close to Slack’s remind feature. I use it all the time! But alas, looks like Discord hasn’t built anything quite like it yet: support.discord.com/hc/en-us/commu…

#ADHD #adhdawareness where is the discord accountability bot that lets me tag in a time to it for it to ping me to check in on a specific thing? not a scheduler; an easy input accountability checker. I can't find it, help