[HN Gopher] Unproblematize
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Unproblematize
Author : BerislavLopac
Score : 27 points
Date : 2021-08-31 07:21 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (glyph.twistedmatrix.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (glyph.twistedmatrix.com)
| netcan wrote:
| Interesting read.
|
| Re: the former half of the blog... I know this is "obvious," but
| reading it just now has made all sorts of lights go on in my
| mind.
|
| It's as if software projects start perfect, getting infested with
| bugs and problems as soon as a programmer starts programming it.
| Many/most of these "issues" are simply the multitude of
| complexities that we hadn't thought of yet.
|
| Start with " _jira-like system that emphasizes achievement and
| positivity_. " That broad idea is perfect, bug free. As soon as
| we put flesh on those bones it accumulates issues.. failures and
| failings.
| zarp wrote:
| I didn't know how bad I needed this until I read it. Thank you.
| brundolf wrote:
| A trick I use is to shift my mental framing of things away from
| this binary "should" and "should not". There's a mental
| oversimplification some of us do where we place _expectations_ on
| the world, our product, ourselves, etc, and anything outside of
| those is unacceptable, intolerable, broken. This
| oversimplification is not sustainable in a messy, flawed world
| (or product (or self)).
|
| Instead I reframe things as "how they are" and "how they could be
| different" (possibly better, but not in a way where their current
| state creates cognitive dissonance). Things can be made better,
| and better, ad infinitum. But it's not a sprint (!) to some
| idealized destination; it's a migration, in a direction.
|
| Anyway, this helps me, hopefully it's helpful to someone else.
| elevenoh wrote:
| Cool to see you do this & mention it.
|
| Majority of online culture's default is conversation-stopping
| 'moral shoulds' + binary stances.
| noir_lord wrote:
| On the specific issue of "done items been removed from a list".
|
| With Jira I have a confluence page that only shows _done_ tickets
| from the projects I 'm working on - that way when I feel
| overwhelmed I can go look at the massive amount of work the team
| I run has gotten done, it's a psychological trick of looking at
| it from the other side "That problem/issue/story/bug is just one
| of many amongst many".
| vector_spaces wrote:
| I wish people in tech (in the US anyway) would stop making this
| particular claim
|
| > But software engineers are more likely to have mental health
| problems than those who perform mechanical labor, and I think our
| problem-oriented world-view has something to do with that.
|
| I've heard this said before, and as someone with lifelong mental
| illness, and having spent a solid decade and a half of my life in
| low-wage "mechanical labor" roles prior to becoming a well-paid
| software engineer, I've always found this assertion to be very,
| very bizarre, and extremely out of touch. It's so clearly wrong
| given just a little bit of thought or research.
|
| I don't want to minimize anyone's mental health situation.
| Techies suffer from mental illness too, it's true. But the
| reality is that, at least for most people suffering from mental
| illness, having your agency restricted exacerbates symptoms. And
| nothing restricts your agency like being low income. And to be
| sure, most (certainly not all) people in "mechanical labor"
| professions are low income.
|
| When you're low income, you're forced to work jobs where you have
| to tolerate abuse from customers and managers, your work is
| largely not valued because you're completely fungible so you are
| treated like shit, and in some cases you have to endure
| operational abuse/humiliation like having to ask permission to
| use the bathroom. You have to endure long commutes, unpredictable
| schedules that change from week to week, and unstable/dangerous
| living conditions. And that's hardly the half of it.
|
| That's not even to mention that being low income in the United
| States means it's somewhere between extremely challenging and
| impossible to 1. afford therapy/mental healthcare, 2. get time
| off from your job to go to therapy/psychiatric sessions.
|
| Anyway, I'm glad that a source was finally cited this time. The
| source cited in turn cites this source
|
| http://www.ijhssi.org/papers/v3(2)/Version-2/G0322052056.pdf
|
| Namely, an Indian paper which compares software developers with
| railway laborers and hospitality workers in India. I think it's
| pretty obvious that the findings here can't be safely generalized
| to the US -- there are serious economic differences and not to
| mention cultural differences at play here.
|
| Anyway, I think it's an attractive fantasy among American
| engineers that low-waged workers are happy and uncomplicated and
| untormented by the same demons that torture the more
| sophisticated souls that sling code for a living. But it's
| absolute bullshit, and doing a small amount of research on this
| (not to mention talking to low income folks in your life about
| mental health) will show you that it's dead wrong.
| zestyping wrote:
| Thank you.
| southerntofu wrote:
| > Anyway, I think it's an attractive fantasy among American
| engineers that low-waged workers are happy and uncomplicated
| and untormented by the same demons that torture the more
| sophisticated souls that sling code for a living.
|
| Overall, i agree with you. However, having worked both IT and
| non-IT jobs, and residing in a very low income neighborhood in
| western Europe, i have the feeling (nothing
| objective/scientific) that non-IT folks have a class
| consciousness that they're being screwed and they should worry
| as little as possible about work-related problems as long as
| they have a roof over their heads. Workers are usually
| conscious that the boss/manager is an exploitative asshole and
| that customers can be abusive entitled brats (however if the
| situation in the USA is 1/10th as bad as US TV shows suggest,
| then i can say for sure the situation here in Europe is really
| different and outside of luxury shops, workers eg.
| cashiers/waiters are expected to be treated with respect and
| the customer is not royalty).
|
| While in the IT world, there's a devotion to the entire
| capitalist apparatus and a denial of exploitative/abusive
| relationships, which appears to lead to greater mental anxiety
| and cognitive dissonance. I've seen plenty of people suffer
| from work-related injuries and handicaps, but in other fields
| than IT, i've never seen people _willingly and consciously_
| overwork themselves to that point.
|
| That's a very subjective, limited view of the topic, and i
| don't mean in any way that IT jobs aren't more comfortable than
| manual labor. But not every IT job is comfortable and the
| startup/company culture makes it very hard to say no to your
| boss, ensuring a culture of self-exploitation leading to
| burnout. In other fields, we have strong unions and habits to
| make the boss' life miserable by stealing supplies or
| sabotaging work... i don't hear of so many equivalents in the
| IT industries.
| square_usual wrote:
| I picked this up a while ago. I first started with one of those
| mood tracker apps on a lark, because for a while I'd been
| thinking that my general mood was heavily seasonal and I wanted
| some data to back that up. Eventually I got tired of seeing
| streams of frowns on the tracker, so I switched to text, and
| because I wanted it to be completely private it's an org file
| that I sync with git to a private server.
|
| Apart from taking the time to think about the good as much as the
| bad, one understated benefit has been that it's helped build a
| general _sense of self_. Thoughts are so... ephemeral, we hardly
| remember the things we thought or felt a day or a week ago unless
| it 's persistent. Noting down what I felt during the day sort of
| hardened it in my brain, and then reading it a couple weeks later
| when I remembered it in context established a sense of
| _continuity_ in my mind. It 's been wonderful for my personal
| development
|
| One tip, or rather, opinion, from my side: I've generally found
| that prompts, like the ones in TFA, felt too restrictive. They're
| good to start with, because I suspect a lot of us (myself
| included) generally don't think about how we feel most days. But
| being more freeform has unlocked a broader set of emotions that I
| now write about.
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