<story><title>Embrace the Grind</title><url>https://jacobian.org/2021/apr/7/embrace-the-grind/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jldugger</author><text>&amp;gt; For example, I once joined a team maintaining a system that was drowning in bugs. There were something like two thousand open bug reports. Nothing was tagged, categorized, or prioritized. The team couldn’t agree on which issues to tackle
&amp;gt; I spent almost three weeks in that room, and emerged with every bug report reviewed, tagged, categorized, and prioritized.&lt;p&gt;Honestly, this is one of those traps a team can fall into, where nobody feels empowered to ignore the rest of the business for 3 weeks to put the bell on the cat. The only person without deliverables and due dates is the new hire. And it takes a special kind of new hire to have the expertise to parachute in, recognize that work needs to be done, and then do it with little supervision.&lt;p&gt;But he&amp;#x27;s right in general, that you can get some surprising things done by just putting in the time and focus. Which is why it&amp;#x27;s so utterly toxic that corporate America runs on an interrupt driven system, with meetings sprinkled carelessly across engineer calendars.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>I did that when I first came to Silicon Valley. I went to work for a company which operated a large, for its day, mainframe data center. (Not IBM, UNIVAC). Each time the operating system crashed, which it did several times a day, a &amp;quot;panic dump&amp;quot; was produced, a stack of paper about an inch thick, with a summary and stack backtrace at the top, and a full listing of the contents of memory.&lt;p&gt;There were two stacks of these, six feet high, waiting for me.&lt;p&gt;It took me most of a year to work through the pile, finding out why the crash had occurred, by tracking pointers through memory with pencil and colored marker and comparing this with paper listings of the operating system. Then I&amp;#x27;d code a fix for that problem, test it (usually around 2 AM when I could take over a mainframe), and nervously put it into production on one mainframe. Slowly, the piles of crash dumps got shorter and the mean time to failure went from hours to weeks.&lt;p&gt;There were very few meetings, and nobody interfered. They were just happy to see the crash dump pile shrink and the uptime increase.&lt;p&gt;After a few years of this, by which time the systems would stay up for months, I got a job in R&amp;amp;D at another company and got out of maintenance programming and into theory.</text></comment>
<story><title>Embrace the Grind</title><url>https://jacobian.org/2021/apr/7/embrace-the-grind/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jldugger</author><text>&amp;gt; For example, I once joined a team maintaining a system that was drowning in bugs. There were something like two thousand open bug reports. Nothing was tagged, categorized, or prioritized. The team couldn’t agree on which issues to tackle
&amp;gt; I spent almost three weeks in that room, and emerged with every bug report reviewed, tagged, categorized, and prioritized.&lt;p&gt;Honestly, this is one of those traps a team can fall into, where nobody feels empowered to ignore the rest of the business for 3 weeks to put the bell on the cat. The only person without deliverables and due dates is the new hire. And it takes a special kind of new hire to have the expertise to parachute in, recognize that work needs to be done, and then do it with little supervision.&lt;p&gt;But he&amp;#x27;s right in general, that you can get some surprising things done by just putting in the time and focus. Which is why it&amp;#x27;s so utterly toxic that corporate America runs on an interrupt driven system, with meetings sprinkled carelessly across engineer calendars.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pbourke</author><text>&amp;gt; Which is why it&amp;#x27;s so utterly toxic that corporate America runs on an interrupt driven system, with meetings sprinkled carelessly across engineer calendars.&lt;p&gt;I agree with this statement and your other points. I’ve noticed a more insidious variant of this behavior: the expectation of interruptions. Some groups have such frequent priority shifts and&amp;#x2F;or a culture of fire fighting or door knocking such that even with a relatively open schedule, one is dissuaded from engaging in longer stretches of work for fear of having it all go to waste when the next meteor strike arrives.</text></comment>