I’ve found that having a boss I don’t experience those things too much, it’s more about doing the standard, expected stuff.
Yeah, when you do things for yourself, you need to switch between the “boss mode” and “worker mode”. They require completely different approaches.
In the boss mode, you need to think strategically. Sometimes the most productive thing is to say: “Actually, let’s not do this, it is a waste of time. Let’s do X instead.” (Where X can be making a different thing, or deciding to buy/rent something instead of making it for yourself.) You also need to look for new opportunities.
In the worker mode, you need to do what needs to be done. Then proceed to the next thing in your backlog, until hopefully everything is done.
Even if you can do each of these separately, it is difficult to switch between them, because you risk getting stuck somewhere in between, which is a completely unproductive place. The place where you do something for 10 minutes, and then get second thoughts like “maybe I should be doing this differently, or I should do a different thing instead”, and then you just can’t focus on the work fully anymore.
The separation of roles is easier when one person is in the boss mode all the time, and the other is in the worker mode all the time. (The risk of this approach is that now important information is split between two people, so neither sees the full picture.)
I wonder if it would help to separate these roles temporally, something like: on Sundays you are in boss mode only (you are not allowed to work on the project, you can only make decisions and document them), and the rest of the week you are in worker mode only (you implement the backlog, then take a break; and strategic thoughts you can only note on paper that will be processed the next Sunday).
And… this might be also the problem some retired people have: having to play both roles, for the first time in their lives, after spending decades practicing something else.
I had about a 3 year gap in my resume as I self-studied and started a (failed) startup and it seems to have really hurt my ability to find jobs.
This depends on country a lot. (From European perspective, the American job market is just brutal. You guys work lots of overtime, barely get any vacation; women get a 15-minute break for childbirth. And when you get sick, you get fired for low productivity, which means you lose your health insurance, which means you lose all your savings to pay the medical bills. I might have exaggerated a bit here.)
I was also punished for a gap in my resume, but not too much. I spent 5 years as a high-school teacher, then I realized this job also sucks (the work is 10% teaching and 90% babysitting), so I might as well return to the profession that sucks but at least pays well. Finding the first job was difficult; it was the worst programming job in my life: most stressful and least paid. But after a year my resume was like “yeah, I had a 5y gap, but that was in the past, now I am a developer again”. And after that, my resume is like “these are the three or four most important jobs I had, there were also a few minor ones I didn’t list here, feel free to ask”, and no one asks.
Hm, I like that idea of boss mode vs worker mode. I think it’ll help me and I’m excited to give it a try.
Interesting to hear about your experiences as a high school teacher. Teaching is one of my favorite things to do and a part of me in the back of my mind whispers, “Maybe you should just go be a teacher since you like it so much.” But I have a pretty strong impression that like you’re saying, and like most things that people are passionate about, things change a lot once it’s a job.
I like how you worded that, “now I’m a developer again”. I think that’s exactly what I’m working towards right now. I spent 1 year on self-study, 2 on a startup, then this past year was a 3 month contract, some freelancing, and some more self-studying. Now I just started a job and am 1.5 months in and am looking to get that “I’m a developer again” status.
Teaching, and being a teacher, two different things. I used to make some extra money tutoring math, and I enjoyed the experience. Once in a while I taught groups of adults; I liked that too. Sometimes I gave lectures on various topics.
Being a teacher means less autonomy on choosing what to teach (you need to follow a curriculum). When the teenagers are unmotivated, they won’t hesitate to remind you about it all the time. If half of the class is interested in the topic, and another half is bored, you spend most of your energy dealing with the other half. (When someone wasn’t paying attention to me, and read a book instead, I pretended not to notice, because it was much preferable to actively disrupting.) Then you have to do the paperwork, teach classes for your absent colleagues (on subjects you don’t know, so it’s often just: “kids, read the book”).
Here are some articles from a teacher in UK, where the situation seems exceptionally bad, but it’s a difference of degree: 1, 2.
Interesting about tutoring. I would imagine that even there, a) you wouldn’t really have autonomy about what to teach, because the clients would mostly be students who are taking a class looking to get a good grade, which would usually involve memorizing the teachers passwords, so your job would be helping them memorize these passwords. And b) even if there was no test you needed to get the students to pass, eg. maybe someone learning to code, I’d imagine that usually they’d be interested in something analogous to “getting the code to work” rather than being intellectually curious about deeper stuff.
In which case I would expect tutoring to not be much fun either. Did this stuff match your experiences at all?
My tutoring typically started with “debugging” student’s knowledge. The problems were usually deeper that the student reported, and full solution required fixing the underlying problem first.
For example, suppose the student has a problem with quadratic equations. But after doing some background check, it turns out they are quite confused about what happens when there is a minus sign before the parenthesis. Now of course, if they don’t get this right, then no matter how much time you spend explaining quadratic equations, they are going to get half of them wrong whenever the problem starts with something slightly more complicated, that you first need to convert into the standard quadratic equation.
So I kinda imagine the mathematical “tech tree” in my head, and check the previous nodes first, and so on recursively, if necessary. Then gradually build up the correct knowledge.
In school, this would be one student among 20 or 30. There is no time to do this background check with one of them, and definitely not with half of them, no matter how much they need it. Also, you are constrained how much time you can spend at each topic. If it’s not enough for some students, well, sucks to be them, but we must move to the next topic.
(Currently, there is a reform in math education that tries to get the fundamentals right, even if it costs somewhat more time at the beginning, because then kids can progress faster, while actually understanding everything. One day I would like to write a post about it on Less Wrong, but I am not a teacher anymore, and my contact with teachers who use this method is limited because of covid.)
I see. I find that sort of debugging quite enjoyable.
However, I find that students often are very impatient when it comes to traversing deeper down the dependency tree, and instead impatiently just want to “get it working/get the answer” and move on. There are three separate instances in my life that I can think of where I experienced this recently: 1) a backend dev learning frontend stuff, 2) someone entirely new to programming I was tutoring, 3) a college student taking precalc.
Yeah, when you do things for yourself, you need to switch between the “boss mode” and “worker mode”. They require completely different approaches.
In the boss mode, you need to think strategically. Sometimes the most productive thing is to say: “Actually, let’s not do this, it is a waste of time. Let’s do X instead.” (Where X can be making a different thing, or deciding to buy/rent something instead of making it for yourself.) You also need to look for new opportunities.
In the worker mode, you need to do what needs to be done. Then proceed to the next thing in your backlog, until hopefully everything is done.
Even if you can do each of these separately, it is difficult to switch between them, because you risk getting stuck somewhere in between, which is a completely unproductive place. The place where you do something for 10 minutes, and then get second thoughts like “maybe I should be doing this differently, or I should do a different thing instead”, and then you just can’t focus on the work fully anymore.
The separation of roles is easier when one person is in the boss mode all the time, and the other is in the worker mode all the time. (The risk of this approach is that now important information is split between two people, so neither sees the full picture.)
I wonder if it would help to separate these roles temporally, something like: on Sundays you are in boss mode only (you are not allowed to work on the project, you can only make decisions and document them), and the rest of the week you are in worker mode only (you implement the backlog, then take a break; and strategic thoughts you can only note on paper that will be processed the next Sunday).
And… this might be also the problem some retired people have: having to play both roles, for the first time in their lives, after spending decades practicing something else.
This depends on country a lot. (From European perspective, the American job market is just brutal. You guys work lots of overtime, barely get any vacation; women get a 15-minute break for childbirth. And when you get sick, you get fired for low productivity, which means you lose your health insurance, which means you lose all your savings to pay the medical bills. I might have exaggerated a bit here.)
I was also punished for a gap in my resume, but not too much. I spent 5 years as a high-school teacher, then I realized this job also sucks (the work is 10% teaching and 90% babysitting), so I might as well return to the profession that sucks but at least pays well. Finding the first job was difficult; it was the worst programming job in my life: most stressful and least paid. But after a year my resume was like “yeah, I had a 5y gap, but that was in the past, now I am a developer again”. And after that, my resume is like “these are the three or four most important jobs I had, there were also a few minor ones I didn’t list here, feel free to ask”, and no one asks.
Hm, I like that idea of boss mode vs worker mode. I think it’ll help me and I’m excited to give it a try.
Interesting to hear about your experiences as a high school teacher. Teaching is one of my favorite things to do and a part of me in the back of my mind whispers, “Maybe you should just go be a teacher since you like it so much.” But I have a pretty strong impression that like you’re saying, and like most things that people are passionate about, things change a lot once it’s a job.
I like how you worded that, “now I’m a developer again”. I think that’s exactly what I’m working towards right now. I spent 1 year on self-study, 2 on a startup, then this past year was a 3 month contract, some freelancing, and some more self-studying. Now I just started a job and am 1.5 months in and am looking to get that “I’m a developer again” status.
Teaching, and being a teacher, two different things. I used to make some extra money tutoring math, and I enjoyed the experience. Once in a while I taught groups of adults; I liked that too. Sometimes I gave lectures on various topics.
Being a teacher means less autonomy on choosing what to teach (you need to follow a curriculum). When the teenagers are unmotivated, they won’t hesitate to remind you about it all the time. If half of the class is interested in the topic, and another half is bored, you spend most of your energy dealing with the other half. (When someone wasn’t paying attention to me, and read a book instead, I pretended not to notice, because it was much preferable to actively disrupting.) Then you have to do the paperwork, teach classes for your absent colleagues (on subjects you don’t know, so it’s often just: “kids, read the book”).
Here are some articles from a teacher in UK, where the situation seems exceptionally bad, but it’s a difference of degree: 1, 2.
Interesting about tutoring. I would imagine that even there, a) you wouldn’t really have autonomy about what to teach, because the clients would mostly be students who are taking a class looking to get a good grade, which would usually involve memorizing the teachers passwords, so your job would be helping them memorize these passwords. And b) even if there was no test you needed to get the students to pass, eg. maybe someone learning to code, I’d imagine that usually they’d be interested in something analogous to “getting the code to work” rather than being intellectually curious about deeper stuff.
In which case I would expect tutoring to not be much fun either. Did this stuff match your experiences at all?
My tutoring typically started with “debugging” student’s knowledge. The problems were usually deeper that the student reported, and full solution required fixing the underlying problem first.
For example, suppose the student has a problem with quadratic equations. But after doing some background check, it turns out they are quite confused about what happens when there is a minus sign before the parenthesis. Now of course, if they don’t get this right, then no matter how much time you spend explaining quadratic equations, they are going to get half of them wrong whenever the problem starts with something slightly more complicated, that you first need to convert into the standard quadratic equation.
So I kinda imagine the mathematical “tech tree” in my head, and check the previous nodes first, and so on recursively, if necessary. Then gradually build up the correct knowledge.
In school, this would be one student among 20 or 30. There is no time to do this background check with one of them, and definitely not with half of them, no matter how much they need it. Also, you are constrained how much time you can spend at each topic. If it’s not enough for some students, well, sucks to be them, but we must move to the next topic.
(Currently, there is a reform in math education that tries to get the fundamentals right, even if it costs somewhat more time at the beginning, because then kids can progress faster, while actually understanding everything. One day I would like to write a post about it on Less Wrong, but I am not a teacher anymore, and my contact with teachers who use this method is limited because of covid.)
I see. I find that sort of debugging quite enjoyable.
However, I find that students often are very impatient when it comes to traversing deeper down the dependency tree, and instead impatiently just want to “get it working/get the answer” and move on. There are three separate instances in my life that I can think of where I experienced this recently: 1) a backend dev learning frontend stuff, 2) someone entirely new to programming I was tutoring, 3) a college student taking precalc.