What kinds of metrics are used for planning and operations? Productivity sinks?
I view engineering teams as a collection of highly driven professionals whos productivity levels are by default at 80% max daily.
Their productivity is impacted by bad planning, bad developer experience, bad documentation, meetings without agendas, 1:1s with no support or actionable feedback, individual recognition instead of team recognition, etc.
It's the engineering manager's job to remove the things that impact team productivity, measure the impact, report the issues affecting productivity, and plan to make them not happen again in the future. These are external to the team, things soaking up their time and making them stressed.
When you try to measure an individuals productivity of any role, you are now impacting productivity and should be removed to allow them to do their best work.
Use surveys to gather feedback from teams and allow teams to weed out, or help to reduce, internal productivity blockers.
And please communicate this to all members of a team, it's one of the primary internal to the team stress sources I've experienced;
role != authority
Roles are a collection of responsibilities, they do not grant additional authority.
From my experience what I've mentioned above would certainly make my day to day alot less stressful.
Pay off my mortgage, only 100k to go! Then I won't "have" to work.
Buy an acre close by to grow vegetables on to eat and share, I'll do this after I pay off my mortgage.
Exercise more, I'm lazy and I'm trying to get up earlier to exercise and play video games before my wife and daughter wake up.
Do a 4 day work week to spend more time growing vegetables.
I'd love to figure out what area of the technology stack I enjoy most, for now I'm a full stack engineer looking into backend engineering as a primary focus. Not systems level, but business logic level, and not frontend I'm a "that's good enough" guy, not a perfectionist. I'm learning Go.
Other than that I'm good I think. My work compensation vs responsibilities are perfect right now, I don't want a promotion. I like where I live, close to both of our families, hospitals, schools, and entertainment. Weather could be better but it's not the worst.
My note taking system is a single "donelist.txt" that sits in a GDrive/onedrive/xdrive on my machine. Entries are:
9.11.22
scrum
working on stry1234
meeting X
- do a thing
lunch
created PR for stry1234
meeting Y
8.11.22
scrum
working on def4321
lunch
created PR def4321
meeting Z
meeting A
...
This is good enough for me although I'm still figuring out how to plan ahead better. Maybe I should write down how I expect the week to go, goals and schedule, on Monday and update from there.
That's more or less what I did as well. But it got a bit messy at the end so I started to use EasyOrg [0] which gives some more structure so it is easier to search on and you also get a useful Agenda/Calendar view where you can plan future tasks and see old completed tasks.
Incredible, I've been scrolling through these comments thinking of my own passion which is Final Fantasy VII speedrunning. Fell in love with the game as a kid and only recently discovered the FF7 speedrunning community who are amazingly kind and generous. The runners themselves are incredibly helpful and can be found on Twitch. There's also a Discord where technique, glitches, and skips are worked on and improved.
I'm working on running in the 100% category which currently has a world record of 17 hours 38 minutes, it's a marathon of concentration. I'm not a young single person so finding the time to do a run has been the hardest part.
For casual players there are a ton of mods that make the game more challenging, updates for the graphics, and tons of other really interesting modifications. I love the New Threat V1.5 mod and the Chibi style character model updates.
I wish this would happen to food production, local growers setting up small operations of good quality organic food. I can imagine multiple tiny operations enabled by automation and hydroponics growing food to supply their town. I feel like this will happen but not in my lifetime.
We already have alot of unit and integration tests as high coverage was a primary metric from the start. I'm not convinced on the value of alot of the tests though so this could be somewhere to focus on.
I have introduced E2E/UI testing using TestCafe which benefits the relationship between Devs, Quality Analysts, and Business Analysts. Mainly because it forces all three parties to work together to define the UI level testing up front which acts as a contract when signing off completed work.
If you don't have, or don't think you have, a concrete reason for your insomnia then try this.
When you yawn or feel drained go to bed, take a nap, or find a quiet toilet cubicle and close your eyes for ten minutes. Don't ignore your body.
If your at home and have the option to sleep what I find works for me is lying flat on my back. Then relax, in sequence, your forehead, shoulders, upper arms, lower arms, fingers, chest, stomach, groin, upper legs, lower legs, toes. Take around 1 minute to relax your whole body. If you can't relax something tense it up, then release it.
Once your fully relaxed close your eyes and clear your thoughts. What works for me is trying to focus on a spot in the dark directly in front of me. As your mind wanders pull it back to focusing on the spot in the dark. Sometimes I need to repeatedly relax my forehead and eyes while doing this, just let your eye sockets go limp.
Occasionally when you are pulling yourself back from your thoughts to focusing on that spot in the dark it can be jarring. Just keep trying. Eventually I fall asleep.
I've noticed recently that this is meditation, except without the sleep part.
- go to bed only when sleepy( I am not sleepy anymore once i get into bed)
- melatonin
- counting sheep
- sleep sounds, sleep talking youtube videos
- ambien ( sigh)
- clean sheets
- low room temperature
- body pillows, weighted blankets
- daily excersise / yoga
- Ice cold showers/ hot showers / no shower
- no food after 8 pm, no coffee after 12 pm
- no alarms/alarms
- no screens
None of these had any consistent results, you simply cannot "trick" your brain. Then I observed my (then new) girlfriend how she would fall asleep in < 2 mins. I realised I had strained relationship with sleep at some point in my life and never corrected that relationship. My problems started when I was teenager in residential school where you had to wake up at 5 am.
My girlfriend associated sleep with cozy, warm, relaxing happy space,I associated it with stressful battle. I've had good success trying to mend my relationship with sleep. Ironically the thing that worked the best for me is 'sleep restriction', sleeping less and less everyday till my brain associated sleep with something it needs to chill, not something foisted on it by a strict schedule.
The hardest time I have getting to sleep is when I know I have to get to sleep because I have to get up early the next morning for an important meeting or to catch a plane. Ironic.
Same here and I tend to sleep for long stretches if I can (this usually ends in me getting up barely rested after a 10h night).
I'm planning on moving my wakeup time to some super early hour like 6am so that I'll have more time after work.
The hardest thing when I try to fall asleep is to stop thinking. My SO also falls asleep in 2m where it takes me well over 30m unless I'm listening to an audiobook or music that I know well, then it's closer to 10m.
I tried a mostly similar list, with little success. I've since found some success (not perfect, but much better), so if you are still willing to experiment ...
- 10,000 IU of Vitamin D3 before 10am
- 400-1000 daily milligrams of Magnesium chelate (or magnesium citrate, if you are ok with liquid stool for a while until you adapt)
- Make sure you have sufficient protein in your diet - rule of thumb is 1gr protein for 1kg of body weight (or 0.5gr per 1lb). That's often more than non-athletes are getting.
Do your own research about D3 and Mg - both are way above the RDA, and some people will tell you that D3 in this amount is bad for you (and they'd be wrong unless you spend all day in the sun, but don't trust me on that - do your own research)
I still have the occasional 3-4 day streak of unable-to-fall-a-sleep a month, but this combination has reduced it from 25-30 days a month ...
A 100kg person (so 220lb) would require 80gr protein with this RDA; so 1gr/lb would be 3 times RDA (whereas 0.5g would be 110g protein so only 1.4 RDA)
The 1g/kg is easy to remember, as is 0.5g/lb ; they are 120-140% of recommended for a sedantry lifestyle, but only 60-80% of what’s recommended for an athlete - so I use them as an easy to remember back-of-the-envelope numbers.
RDA is much less precise and scientific than one would think; it basically means “we know there are no serious defincies or overdoses if you keep this forever” - but they are not optimized for anything else; e.g. higher dose vitamin C was shown to shorten common cold recovery, and higher dose vitamin D with generally better everything.
- listen to a (i.e. scientific, technical) podcast
Just go to bed and start a podcast. Turn the volume down, use a sleep timer so that the podcast will not run for 2 hours and close your eyes. Listening to people talking will clear your brain of trying to wander around.
I have had some luck with this method [0]: "The trick is reportedly used by the US army to help them fall asleep when in situations that are less than peaceful, such as on battlefields." It has some similarities to yours, but some interesting differences as well. I've modified it a bit to say “don’t think, don’t think, don’t think” to myself over and over for a minute or two instead of 10 seconds
The thing I've found works to calm me down when I'm trying to sleep is to take a series of deep breaths. Long and slow in and out, but not awkwardly so. Usually on about the 5th breath the nature of it changes quite a bit and I can feel the tension drain out of me. From there, falling asleep is usually not far off.
>If your at home and have the option to sleep what I find works for me is lying flat on my back. Then relax, in sequence, your forehead, shoulders, upper arms, lower arms, fingers, chest, stomach, groin, upper legs, lower legs, toes. Take around 1 minute to relax your whole body. If you can't relax something tense it up, then release it.
This sounds like shavasana, a yoga asana (pose) normally done at the end of a yoga session, after various other yoga asanas (including active and passive) have been done - at least in Hatha Yoga.
>I've noticed recently that this is meditation, except without the sleep part.
About the rest of your comment, yes, it is similar to a meditation technique.
Interestingly, the Wikipedia article about shavasana:
[ After so much time being bound to the actions of the body, the practitioner's awareness is hopefully turned inwards and purified of sensory distraction. Shavasana then becomes the beginning of deeper, meditative yogic practices. In a state of sensory withdrawal, it becomes easier to be aware of the breath and the state of the mind itself.
Though not the best position for prolonged meditative contemplation, Shavasana dulls the mind enough that the discernment necessary to achieve deeper meditative states becomes more difficult. This reclination can be a successful introductory practice for those practitioners who are not yet ready for formal meditation. ]
What you are describing is effectively two aspects of the first step of traditional buddhist meditation Shamatha - awareness on chosen object and awareness on present signals of the body, so yes, meditation is is.
There was a post on HN a few days ago from someone who wrote a book called "The first 100" or something similar. Could be helpful? I'll try find the link...
What kinds of metrics are used for planning and operations? Productivity sinks?
I view engineering teams as a collection of highly driven professionals whos productivity levels are by default at 80% max daily.
Their productivity is impacted by bad planning, bad developer experience, bad documentation, meetings without agendas, 1:1s with no support or actionable feedback, individual recognition instead of team recognition, etc.
It's the engineering manager's job to remove the things that impact team productivity, measure the impact, report the issues affecting productivity, and plan to make them not happen again in the future. These are external to the team, things soaking up their time and making them stressed.
When you try to measure an individuals productivity of any role, you are now impacting productivity and should be removed to allow them to do their best work.
Use surveys to gather feedback from teams and allow teams to weed out, or help to reduce, internal productivity blockers.
And please communicate this to all members of a team, it's one of the primary internal to the team stress sources I've experienced;
role != authority
Roles are a collection of responsibilities, they do not grant additional authority.
From my experience what I've mentioned above would certainly make my day to day alot less stressful.