Practicing Developer
Posted on
What is the most challenging part of your daily work that doesn't involve coding?
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Latest comments (52)
As someone 3 months in their first web dev internship, it's still very challenging to relearn everything I know about work productivity. I have a call centre background, so my worth as an employee was very clearly calculated in the amount of calls/e-mails I handle per hour. Now, as a developer, it's actually hard to consider myself working if I watch a tutorial or only write a few lines of code by the end of the day, after spending hours just researching the concept. I find myself wide awake in the middle of the night thinking "Oh, tomorrow I'll do more lines, or what if they think I'm just wasting time" etc etc. It's hard to just "chill" and accept that my work style is just as valid, and developer work value!= lines of code.
Communication between the teams.
For me it's managing 'up'. It's overcoming ridiculous business expectations and deadlines. It's trying to work in an agile team within a waterfall business. It's the frustration when the business doesn't allow me and my team to do things 'the right way'.
For me it's definitely the people aspect of the job that's the most challenging. I can zone in and program for hours and days on end but dealing with people takes away all my energy.
I often find myself having to work really hard to "sell" my ideas when, in my head, I don't think I should have to work so hard at that. I try to pick the ideas that will benefit the corporation as a whole but yet I still have to convince people. The amount of resistance I'm met with baffles my brain. A lot of "old-timers" at my corporation that are very scared of shifting the way we do business.
The book To Sell Is Human is really good on this topic.
Another good one is Switch.
But if you're trying as best as you can and still can't change things for the better, thinking about whether or not the environment you're in is right for you long term would be a good idea.
Good advice, I will check out those reads.
The place I'm at is good for now but I have definitely asked myself the question many times whether or not I can make change in the long term. The jury is still out on that but I will keep trying.
Understanding and being understood. AKA communication :)
Absolutely. There's no limit to how much investment is worth putting in here, as our work is to a large extent applied communication in the domain of human problem solving.
A big list of books that help with that:
how to explain people to connect their hips into punches. ohh and cleaning the apartment.
eating garbage, not preparing meals, eating the easiest junk to grab.....
Doing meal prep in batches on days where you are less busy, and finding a handful of dishes that you can easily assemble from a handful of base ingredients you keep stocked goes a long way.
It is hard to build the habit, but pays off greatly when you can stick to it, and is easy to follow once you find a repeatable menu that works for you.
I know man, at the root of it is stress and lazyness....i can feel when am more distressed doing something simple feels like moving a mountain... Stress is our biggest enemy on this field
These books might help:
One small step could change your life
The Power of Habit
Atomic Habits
(They are all available as audio books if you don't have time or energy to sit and read, and they're all helpful)
But based on their ideas, and as a suggestion for one tiny step you could take on this, think of one very simple healthy snack you could pack that'd take almost no effort to prep. Could be an apple or a banana. Or a small thing of veggie sticks or whole wheat crackers and some hummus.
Start having that as a snack whenever you're hungry first, before going to grab junk. See if that helps get you started, and build from there.
The better you eat (and the easier you make it), the less stressed you'll be.
Finding the right people for answers
This is a very real and often underestimated challenge!
One thing I'm working on for a client is meant to solve this in large orgs by building a relationship map that ties together people, work, and goals and lets you see what is connected to what.
But even in tiny companies, this is always a challenge. At the smaller scale, some checklist type documentation that helps people figure out "Who to go to talk to about what" which then gets refined over time to fill in the various gaps can help somewhat.
I'd be interested in hearing how you're tackling this.
At my current company, our org tree has a field where the employee can enter what they work on but most people don't do it or the data there is stale.
It always ends up being a game of human routers.
That is exactly the problem this particular client is working on.
Unfortunately this stuff is all currently in active development and hasn't been publicly released yet, so I'm limited in what I can share at the moment. ☹️
Doing things that keep my fresh and happy. I manage to get to the gym at least 5 times a week, but I do struggle with the sleep as a consequence.
Getting there... i have to drive 15km to my work daily. I work at home thurdays and fridays. Other than that... the daily coffee break.