by on

A lot of have been talked about stress at the workplace, those are visible and bold like toxic managers, unrealistic deadlines etc. A very few people speak about silent stressors that are very much invisible but damages more in the long run as very less is done to eliminate them. When I had begun working, hardware was very expensive. In some companies they used to use the machine across multiple people in shifts. I got a machine assigned to me and over the course of 4+ years it was never replaced. It was impossible to run an IDE so I had to rely on text editors to code. What this meant is a constant loop of editing code, going to the console to compile and come back to figure out errors in the editor by comparing compiler outputs. The days just dragged on in endless loops.

Photo by SHVETS production on Pexels.com

One of the other types of stressors were unplanned working days. At the hands of a novice manager, days get difficult to plan. Developers need unbroken time and reduced ambiguity, but constant interruptions and ambiguity feels like a constant droning in your head. Detachment from family and social life, this stressor builds up slowly and is a secondary stressor often a result of other ones. In my younger days, I have missed many of my friends’ weddings, found it difficult to be at the side sick parents/grand parents at home town and slowly the immediate circle is only acquaintances from the office which is a deep echo chamber.

Identifying these stressors early is a key to good mental and physical health. I did not realise this for a long time, once I figured out and eliminated it then it improved my quality of life. Ask these simple questions, a single no requires you to reconsider what you are doing?

  1. Are you able to finish your work week within ~40 hour window and still find it fulfilling/ having a sense of achievement/ being recognised? (Some lean weeks and some tight weeks will be fine, but the average should be around 40)
  2. Do you find time for friends and family?
  3. Are you able to eat, sleep and exercise well?
  4. Do you like going to your office, is your 1 way commute less than 30 minutes or if it exceeds do you have a commute routine that is engaging (like reading, audio books, podcasts or simply enjoy the drive)

Ask yourself these questions? Find out the root silent stressor and figure out a way to eliminate it. The stressor could be anything from poor hardware, bad planning, noisy environment, gossip culture, poor management, tough competition etc. Don’t cope up with any kind of stress, just remove it.

by on

A doctor whom I met, was upset about dealing with a lot of people coming to clinic equipped with wikipedia and LLM generated knowledge. Years of education and practice puts a doctor in the zone of unconscious competence, but for an expert beginner with no formal education or practice it is just a fact in some context without reflecting what is in hand. The doctor’s intuition will be right and often arrived without conscious thought, asking them to explain in detail may prove counter effective, in some case make the doctor doubt their judgement and end up treating poorly.

Let us take a few other examples from other domain. If you have come across the Monty Hall problem, where a host in a game shows 3 doors to a contestant, behind 2 doors are goats and the remaining 1 door with a huge reward. Once a door has been chosen, the host will open a door which has a goat behind it and give the contestant an option to switch the door if they think they would have made the wrong choice. If we do not think deeply, we think the odds are always 1/3rd irrespective of switching or not. In reality the odds are 2/3 if you switch and that has even stumped degree holders in math.

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com

Another counter intuitive one is bank teller queue management. I read at this blog, which mentions that an average five hour waiting time to service a customer can be reduced to 3 minutes to just by adding one teller extra. That is 90x productivity jump by doubling cost yet a lot of decision makers won’t believe the expert who analyses the situation and recommends them the solution because it does not make sense for a non expert. The example is dramatic but can happen in real situations as well.

When I observe a lot of people with expertise, their unconscious competence helps them navigate with ease without even thinking about it. The moment you question their judgement, their instincts take a back seat and suddenly their competency goes down. I was at a restaurant, I requested a cook for fried eggs. The cook asked if I wanted both sides to be cooked, and I said “yes, but don’t break the yolk”. The cook left out a nervous laughter and when turning the eggs to the other side, the yolk broke. I disrupted the cook’s flow just by doubting their ability.

This happens frequently at work. Decision makers who are expert beginners often want to get into the details, what this does is, it interrupts the flow mode of expertise. Explaining the solutions and decision making process which would otherwise be unconscious nature, requires a good deal of effort and often leads to sub optimal solutions. If you have an expertise on some area and are tasked with solutions, then keep in mind that you have to explain your decisions to people who know details at a surface level. People are naturally curious and LLMs feed their curiosity a great deal.

Photo by Julia M Cameron on Pexels.com

For this reason, whenever I come up with solutions, I make it a multi step approach. This is I learnt from many different sources which help you harvest your unconscious competence.

Step 1 – Read the problem statement, re-read and think very hard to solve the problem. Too often no solution emerges, but all of a sudden when you are at a break, a solution emerges and when it happens immediately write it down. Beware, this solution is ephemeral and its details vanishes within a few minutes. Keep noting down the solutions that pop up at odd times like driving, cleaning etc.

Step 2 – Find reference material from internet and previous assignments to back your solutions. If it is a novel solution, dive deeper to explain but do not change the solution because you can’t find explanations.

Step 3 – KYEB (Know Your Expert Beginners) and be equipped with ELI5 answers to anticipated questions to impart confidence of the solution.

Before presenting your solution, establish your credentials which helps setting the right expectation using info from the KYEB research. This helps to present your views as an expert without getting into a loop of explanations and doubts. For the doctor’s case I discussed at the beginning, I recently see a few doctors have a dossier to quickly explain their decisions and cut short the questioning from the patients. We also will be expert beginners at many topics, the best we can help there is to let the experts do their job.

by on

I read the book Maverick by Ricardo Semler and learnt that every one wants to do well by themselves instead of a supervisor telling them what to do and watching them closely. It was a very new concept, though I was not able to influence my managers, I was able to follow this for people whom I had to lead. The results are often that people end up punching above their weight most of the times, people who try to game are often exposed within a few weeks and they themselves are not able to continue to work with our teams. I also stumbled on his second book The seven day weekend, which was more thought provoking on how to approach life in general and not to differentiate work and life as two different identities.

While I was in college, I learnt a lot and read a lot of books even though I spent a good deal of time commuting and playing. When I moved to be a full time worker, I found that my time for reading and learning quickly dried away. My managers insisted that I spend 12 hours a day, 6 days a week in order for me to meet expectations. What I observed was that most of the work got done within a heads down time of 3-4 hours. If I was stuck, no matter how hard I tried, I could not make headway until I got some focus time away or sleep. My attention span also varied throughout the day and throughout the week.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

In the course of time over a few work years, I also forgot about leisure reading, arts/crafts and exercise/sports. This led to only two outlets, food and media. No matter how hard I tried, I was always finding excuses to eat out and binge watch. One fine day, I got to work with a new team. The rule of the team was, we stop working by 6 and go out to play. This was different from what I was used to before, it worked wonders because it forced me to come out of the work mode and unwind and find friends in a non eating/drinking setup. The self formed XP team ensured that the peak productivity window as a team is aligned for team work and the rest individual contribution can come at a different pace.

Photo by Elina Fairytale on Pexels.com

This blended work/life mode was unnerving as there was a feeling that I was not doing enough. At the end of a release we retrospected along with the client on how did we do? Our client said a similar complexity and scope that was delivered by 40 people from another team, this team had done it with just 11 people. As I grew in career, non linear working mode was the norm. I always carried a pen and paper with me, ideas struck me when I least expected, solutions appeared out of nowhere while waiting at traffic lights, cooking, gardening, having coffee….

My experience was also validated when I read the book The pragmatic programmer where the author talks about linear mode and random mode in one of the chapters. Don’t listen to ideas like 996 working style and promise of progress that comes with it, they are not fit for collective knowledge work. It also drains the mind and the body, because of the constant war mode that an individual will live in. As I read in the books and experienced, I have not been able to separate out my life and work as two separate jobs, it is what I am. So instead of talking about balancing two different jobs, I look to plan my days as a whole.