I would stop showing up to work if the paychecks stopping coming
a job is a job. if a company tries to convince you that it’s more than that (a “family”; a “calling”) that’s a red flag — that gets used to get you to donate time
I like working with people who enjoy their jobs, but there’s a HUGE difference between “I am well compensated for my work and take pride in doing a good job” and “I derive my value as a person from my code”
people who are so passionate about coding that they tie their entire identities to it are honestly kind of a nightmare to work with, tbh
if I was going to do what I’m PASSIONATE about and willing to do without a paycheck we all know I’d be trying to find out how much melted cheese can fit inside of one man
I’m seeing something interesting in this debate, which is that I think in a lot of cases people are violently agreeing with each other
so maybe it’s worth defining how I’m using the word “passion” because human language is a context nightmare
I think some people are saying “passion” to mean “I enjoy code and I would do it as a hobby, even if I wasn’t getting paid” — me too!
others are using it to mean “I take pride in my work and I want to continually learn to be the best I can be” — I feel this way, too!
the definition of “passion” that I’m I’m taking about is the problematic definition I see more predatory companies use: “if we only hire people who tie their entire idea to their jobs, they’ll make personal sacrifices for the company and that means we spend less on compensation!”
here's a great example of how this goes wrong: if you're not fully willing to suffer for your job or you want to set boundaries for yourself, you're a "traitor" somehow
⭐ I’m a frontend dev. I work mainly w/HTML, CSS, & JS
last year I built stuff that doesn’t sound like frontend work:
- custom APIs and DBs (both GraphQL & REST)
- user dashboards
- video manipulation
but it all *felt* comfortable & within my skillset
how? a thread: 🧵
I do all sorts of demos and "hello world" projects, but I want to focus on real-world apps only in this thread. specifically, I'll talk about this production project:
✨ Jamstack Explorers 👩🚀
this is a load-bearing app that a lot of people depend on
to build Jamstack Explorers, we needed:
🗄 a custom database to track mission progress
📝 a content management system
🔐 user authentication
🎬 video manipulation
we were a small team of frontend devs and we needed to ship quickly — this was a daunting todo list 😅
This is a Good Tweet™. I’ve seen a tendency to only count certain parts of our jobs as “real work”, which leads to trying to do the rest outside of business hours so we can really “make the work hours count”.
There are subcategories of work for tech workers (let’s use a hypothetical developer):
First, there’s writing code, which is the part we usually call “real work”. If a developer goes through a whole work day and doesn’t write any code, the instinct is to call that day a waste.
But what about everything that has to happen before the code?
We have to figure what we should be coding. This typically involves a combination of email, meetings, Slack discussions, writing/reading planning documents and specs, talking through desired outcomes with other teams.
I’ve had a few conversations about work stress lately & I’ve seen a common thread that’s really heartbreaking: It’s so, SO easy for someone to feel like any mistake will be the end of their career. And I think a lot of this fear comes from poor leadership and management. <thread>
A huge problem I hear in a lot of these stories is that people don’t get feedback unless it‘s negative.
If we, as leaders and managers, don’t take the time to remind our teams that we value them, we’re letting people’s imaginations fill in the gaps. That’s a recipe for stress.
Something we should really focus on in leadership positions is giving consistent feedback.
It’s really easy to adopt a “no news is good news” policy as a manager/leader, and only provide feedback when something goes wrong. But this is a bad idea on multiple levels.