What I tried is to record my voice and then post-process the transcript. There are solutions which work without internet connection. I am non-native english and mix 3 languages, so transcript is shitty quality. Nevertheless the really good ideas stay with me and can be easily recalled by a few keywords. And you need to do the post-processing shortly after you reached home else it fades away…
Indeed I am night owl. I tried to accommodate myself to go to bad early sleep 8-9h, het up early. Nevertheless, I am energized and happy only when I can get up between 8-9 (Morning;)) Which usually contradicts the social and work expectations…
This is a good advice. Also worth to discuss it with a psychologist.
I had fight similar issues. My excuse to stand up is to eat something. Guess how thin I am… Luckily I changed a lot, it was an 8 year long journey which still ongoing. For me what helped is experimenting, e.g. do some small „crime“ -> experience the lack of arising problem / or that the issue can solved. If you never try just fear, The fear just grows.
For me it was especially hard to accept that I just need sometimes to stare out of the window or draw some graphs by hand, which then ends in the bin. So seemingly unproductive stuff… But in reality this is productive, my brain is working and try to process the topic. Furthermore even just an ordinary discussion with some friend can fire the aha moment.
Oh this hits close to home. At my BigCo I have seen tremendous amount of great tools/product landed in the trash bin, because it was only interesting until somebody get the promotion… Immense amount technical dept and lack of viable business model lead to fast death of great ideas… What a huge waste…
I‘m working in a strongly hierarchical org, whit very high N number. What shocking me and blocked good ideas or solutions is that: The persons in charge, empowered to make decisions are so far from reality. And the outcome of their decisions has no effect on their lives… And not because they are evil, just unable to understand the problem. (Once some guy asked, why we put bugs in the code…) Now I fight to change this doing a half management half coder job. But thats hard, I am close to total burnout…
I‘m working in a strongly hierarchical org,
whit very high N number
The persons in charge, empowered to make
decisions are so far from reality
Yeah. I've seen it happen when managers are literally just a level or two up and don't come from an engineering background.
I think it's inevitable, honestly. I think it's fundamentally impossible for management to really understand or respond to in-the-trenches stuff. That's like tasking the mayor of a large city with sweeping the streets or physically fighting crime themselves, in person. They literally cannot spend enough hours in the shoes of the folks under them to understand that stuff.
And, that's fine. Management just needs to have the humility to understand that, and has to empower people/groups that do have their boots on the ground to fix those problems.
It's not unique to this industry, although I do think the newness and explosive growth of our industry may make it particularly prone to this kind of thing.
I see your point. In my BigCo I don’t see real empowering. I agree with you this is a key factor.
My dilemma should I leave or not? Is it better or worse in other place? My helplessness is, I reached limits where I know I can‘t improve the situation anymore. But I see a general pattern and so I am pessimistic to find a better place…
I always try to avoid to give such KPI toward management. They fall in love with it and then it leads to just KPI limbo... It can be faked, or manipulated to obfuscate reality...
Another funny story : Once our department head was really angry because we wanted to open our Jira board inside the company. :D He afraid of that others would see that not everything is awesome... And it will have negative consequences. Ok this fear is also strengthened by the clueless upper management who has no idea how sw dev is done...
Haha thanks for this comment, this reminds me to that Jira madness I have seen at one group I worked with. (Classical non-sw company). The management have read books about how the software should be developed, designed a nice process, and created a complicated workflow, with numerous different kind of statuses and so on. All this for internal tool development... I was laughing inside. So what happened? The in-progress - review - test (and what else where there I can’t recall) was completed by the developer in a few seconds. :D
And after 3 year and some management change, they improved significantly by reduced workflow. To be honest I am proud of them.
In my experience enforcing complicated processes only improves the creativity how to avoid them...
Don’t missunderstand me, I’m not against processes, but I believe in keep it simple and stupid.
