Episode 263: Why am I bored and ver-boss-ity

Published: July 5, 2021, 7 p.m.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

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    I\u2019m feeling bored and disengaged with my job lately, but I\u2019m pretty sure it\u2019s one of the best jobs I can find: my manager and teammate are great, my compensation is very high for my area, worklife balance/benefits etc are excellent, and the mission and product the company make are awesome and help the world! On top of all that I think the work is technically interesting! But still I\u2019m bored and disengaged :(

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    I can\u2019t tell if I\u2019m just burned out from the pandemic and this is how it\u2019s manifesting, or if I just have a serious case of \u201cthe grass is always greener\u201d and now that I\u2019ve been on this team for 2 years I\u2019m ready just for a change of scenery. I want to fall back in love with this job, but how can I do that? Do you have any advice? Changing teams isn\u2019t a great fit as this is a small office for the company in a \u201c\u201csatellite\u201d\u201d site, with only one other team that I\u2019m not super interested in.

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    I could of course take the patented advice and find a new job that might be equally great, but what else can I do?

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    Listener Very Verbose asks,

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    Love the show! I\u2019m rapidly working my way through the backlog and dread the day that I reach the end and have to wait a whole week for the next one! :)

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    Whenever I write a message to a coworker I tend to start with a huge wall of text, then revise it down to something smaller and hit send. I do this with emails, slack messages, code review feedback, you name it. Even this question I\u2019ve re-written a few times!

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    I feel like I\u2019m over-thinking things, and trying to make sure there is no misunderstanding in what I\u2019ve written. For example, a relatively small piece of feedback for a code review might be re-written many times, because I\u2019m concerned that I will come across as overly negative or condescending if I just send through my first draft.

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    Often, the feedback is positive and they agree with the points that I\u2019ve raised. But they\u2019re only seeing 2 points, when I probably started with 10 and deleted 8 of them that I later deemed to be \u2018too nitpicky\u2019 before sending it through!

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    Naturally, all of this takes time and I\u2019m often wasting more than 20 mins, only to end up sending 2-3 sentences at the end of it. Do you have any tips for helping me get to the point, so that I can be more productive and move on with other work? Do I just need to care less about what they think of me? Should I just skim over the code, say \u201cLGTM\u201d, and suppress the fear that I may have just approved a critical bug to go to production?

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    Appreciate any advice you can give. Unfortunately, I don\u2019t think inventing a time machine to go back 18 minutes after spending 20 minutes writing a message is a reasonable option :) It would take me several decades to be happy with the time machine before I turn it on!

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