When work is your second family

Good day.

When you have been working on the same project for three years, on the same team, it hurts to leave it and it is more like leaving the family than the ordinary dismissal of an ordinary employee. If you give a metaphor - when you start, you think "here she is, my only one and all my life", and when you finish - "all women are the same."

This is clearly not a format and differs from my previous notes, but where else can I find so many technical guys who can get an opinion?

On Monday, I had to, despite my wife’s pregnancy, close the contract and resign from the position of technical director of the project. Welcome to the unemployed club! Now, flipping through vacancies on hh / mycircle, it is difficult to believe in them and it seems that similar problems are hidden behind them and it is quite difficult to restore faith.

There will be a retrospective couple of reasons under the cat about how I got to such a life, albeit in a week to pay rent / I need to buy bread. Here, personally, my pain, not quite the format, but suddenly this one will lead someone to some thoughts. In any case, everyone perceives this world through their own colored glasses.

Hyperresponsibility is good, but you have to be careful

Perhaps this is only my case, and some of my friends are programmers, but I noticed the following - no matter how programmers try to seem cold cynics, who are guided only by logic and calculation, most of them are kind guys and they have faith in good things.

Maybe this will pass with age, but at the moment I just can’t relate to the projects I’m working on as “just another in the queue”. Service gives 503 - the knife is stuck in the heart. The bug passed QA and went into battle - a blow under the breath. I didn’t provide for the expansion of architecture in one place - it’s a pity that you can work only 24 hours in a day, and not an hour more.

And if you also work remotely, this is all compounded by guilt. I am very pleased memo Scott Henselmana ( translation) It is a pity that I read it quite late. In short - it seems that you work too little and blame yourself for it. Although comparing with office work (coffee / conversation) etc - people work on average more on remote work.

There is an opportunity to abstract and this does not interfere in cold-blooded execution of commands by raising the postgresql cluster from ruins, but there are still emotions behind this mask. Therefore, here I can try to give two tips:

• Programmers - relax . Although I was proud (to some extent) that I can track for 12-15 hours of pure time, saying "I'm strong, everything is fine, I understand what burnout is" - the body and mind will take their toll. Any little thing that you would not have noticed in normal mode, in this - will push you to hasty decisions. And, perhaps, if the last day off were not in November, this note would not have been.
• The one who hired the programmer - there is no need to put too much pressure. If a person has been working for 10 hours, then tolerate 8 hours of sleep. He will wake up and fix the bug / make a new filter / prepare an answer about the operation of the api. No need to build a tragedy out of this. Each has its own ultimate strength. Yes, it is tempting to take advantage of responsibility, guilt and close the tactical task - but sooner or later it will end.

And what does this lead to - instead of getting a predictable vacation for which it was possible to prepare both for the company and for me personally - negative emotions and unwillingness to come back. And so - when you work for 15 hours (speaking in private time, at a conference, a couple of days ago, which took time even to sleep), and in the morning, waking up, already tired - “you are a bad worker” - it’s sad.

Therefore, it is imperative not to forget that there is life outside the IDE. And company owners should not forget that programmers are also people who need free time.

Nobody listens to anything (c) maximalism

Quite a lot of people agree that programmers are kind of creative people. And thank God that in this period of time this profession is paid pretty well. Therefore, it is possible in the choice of work to go to the top of the pyramid - self-actualization. Work not because you are trying to get out of the pit, but because you want to be able to realize yourself in some way.

About 5-6 times over the past year I heard from those with whom I interviewed a similar phrase - “I left my previous job because I wanted to establish processes, but they simply didn’t let me.” And from colleagues, too, similar words.

I can just give a few examples:

If you do not refactor this piece - in a week we simply will not be able to write code further. Do not fix backups - we may lose hundreds of gigabytes of data and close. Subtract the week of vacation from the salary (the first overtime in two years) from our Go programmer - I have to fly to the planet from interstellar for a month.

If you enter simultaneously tracking hours + story points + ping in skype every half hour - everyone will be sad. If we do not engage in technical debt now - in a month or two, everything will become very bad. If you do not fix the flaws in the infrastructure - 503 service unavailable.

“I don't understand anything about that.” Are you a specialist, tell me how to do it right?
- That's right.
- I disagree

And well, if it were taken into account. So no - when something naturally does not work, then I personally did not want to roll the conversation into the plane "but I said." Therefore, it is simple - ok, we are correcting it. And in the future, the motivation for talking about these problems generally falls. Which leads to a deterioration in product quality.

If you say that you trust the programmer, trust. At least in technical terms.

Another uninteresting reason

I wanted to make a note on two hundred thousand characters, but it makes little sense. Everything else is just a variation of the previous one, it was written about this by many and different people. Briefly - does not mean bad. Therefore, I would just like to ask questions that are very important to me, as guilt has not gone away.

Why do you continue to work as programmers? Are there any companies that practice distributed work and in which there is no relationship “you are just a Russian freelancer when it’s profitable, and regular employee when you need to make work from 10 am and 10 minutes for dinner is a tragedy”, but do they understand why a person works and even a little appreciate? Or should you just treat it like selling your skills for money?

I will be glad to any comments, thanks.