The Monotony of Excellence
The Spiff engineering team places minimal extrinsic requirements on you as a developer. This is intentional because it lets engineers do their best work by choosing their own constraints. One of the side-effects of this though, is that work can feel monotonous. There are no insane death-marches toward a release date and no heroic late night coding sessions to bail ourselves out.
This lack of drama keeps us focused on constant, repeatable progress. Disciplined performance beats dramatic heroism in the long-run, but it can be a bit bland at times. Weeks and days blur together when there’s no team-wide anticipation. If you are feeling bored as an engineer at Spiff, you might try:
- Playing a game of foosball with Travis Ashby
- Adding a constraint to your work flow (see Dan Kubb around 8min30sec)
- Set a deadline for your own project
- Spend an hour reviewing support tickets or sitting with a support person taking calls from users
On a serious note, if you are ever approaching the point of burnout, please talk to someone about it. Burnout happens to all of us and the best thing we can do is face it head on and deal with it. Find a way to work on something different, take time off work, learn how to knit dog sweaters. Your approach will be your own, but not doing anything is definitely not going to help.
Overall, your happiness at Spiff will be most affected by your own choices. Even lottery winners and people who become quadriplegic don’t change their happiness levels as much as you’d think. Happiness is affected by the social norms around us, so we try to make work a positive experience mostly via the use of gifs (always pronounced with a hard “g”).