When work is your second family

Good day.

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

This is clearly not the format and differs from my previous notes, but where else can you find such a number of technical guys from whom you can get an opinion?

On Monday, I had to, despite my wife’s pregnancy, close the contract and leave from the position of the project’s technical director. Welcome to the unemployed club! Now, scrolling through vacancies on hh / mokrug, it is hard to believe in them and it seems that similar problems are hidden behind them and it is rather difficult to return the faith.
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Under the cut there will be retrospective a couple of reasons about how I’ve come to life like that, even though in a week to pay rent / you need to buy bread. Here, personally, my pain, not quite the format, but suddenly this will push someone to some thoughts. In any case, everyone perceives this world through their own colored glasses.

Hyper responsibility - good, but you have to be careful

Maybe this is just me and some of my programmer friends, 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 good guys and they have faith in good.

Maybe it will pass with age, but at the moment I just can’t treat the projects I’m working on as “just next in line”. Service gives 503 - the knife is stuck in the heart. Bug passed QA and went into battle - a blow in the gut. I did not envisage the expansion of architecture in one place - it is a pity that in a day you can work only 24 hours and not an hour more.

And if you also work remotely - this is all aggravated by guilt feelings. I really liked Scott Henselman's note ( 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 / talk) etc - on remote work, people work on average more.

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

• Programmers - rest . Although I was proud (to some extent) that I can track for 12-15 hours of pure time, saying “I am strong, everything is fine, I understand what a burnout is” - the body and mind will take their toll. Any little thing that you wouldn’t have noticed in normal mode, in this one will push you to hasty decisions. And, perhaps, if the last day off would not be in November - this note would not exist.
• Anyone who hired a programmer - no need to push too hard. If a person has been working for 10 hours, then be patient with 8 hours of sleep. He will wake up and fix the bug / make a new filter / prepare a response regarding the operation of the api. No need to build from this tragedy. Everyone has their strength. Yes, it is tempting to take 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, to which both the company and myself could be prepared - negative emotions and unwillingness to come back. And so - when you work for 15 hours (speaking in private time, at the conference, a couple of days ago, it took time even to sleep), and in the morning, waking up, already tired - “you are a bad employee” - sad.

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

No one is listening to (c) maximalism

Quite a few people agree that programmers are partly creative people. And thank God, that in this period of time this profession is paid pretty well. Therefore, there is an opportunity in the choice of work to move 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 in the last year I heard from those with whom I conducted an interview a similar phrase - “I left my previous place of work, because I wanted to adjust the processes, but I was simply not allowed”. And from colleagues, too, similar words.

I can just give a few examples:

If you don’t refactor this piece, in a week we just can’t continue to write code. Do not fix backups - we can lose hundreds of gigabytes of data and close. To subtract a week of vacation from salary (the first overtime in two years) with our Go programmer - I will have to fly to the planet from inter-tellarate for a month.

If you simultaneously introduce tracking hours + story points + ping in Skype every half hour - everyone will be sad. If we do not deal with technical debt now - in two months everything will be very bad. If you do not fix the flaws in the infrastructure - 503 service unavailable.

- I do not understand this. You are an expert, tell me how?
- That's right.
- I disagree

And it would be fine 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 “I told you” plane. So just - ok, fix it. And in the future, the motivation to talk about these problems in general falls. Which leads to a deterioration in the quality of the product.

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

Another uninteresting reason

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

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

I would welcome any comments, thank you.