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

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

b'

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

\\n\\n

Questions

\\n\\n
    \\n
  1. \\n

    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 :(

    \\n\\n

    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.

    \\n\\n

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

    \\n
  2. \\n
  3. \\n

    Listener Very Verbose asks,

    \\n\\n

    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! :)

    \\n\\n

    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!

    \\n\\n

    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.

    \\n\\n

    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!

    \\n\\n

    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?

    \\n\\n

    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!

    \\n
  4. \\n
'