Veronica's Journal of Madness

[Veronica]

Entry 14: A sigh of relief in the Morning Sun

Current Goals (progress):
100k in Net Worth (-9k/100) -6k
Bodyweight Target: 118 (168) -2 Lb
Target Savings Rate: 78% (Debt paydown phase; ~15%)
Target Resting Heart Rate: 40bpm (63bpm) -8

--Money--
Finally, the last month that I will have to maintain multiple residences.
I'm really looking forward to having a single, more modest, rent payment. A 70% reduction in total cost of living is going to feel
SO NICE. ERE blog readers take note; switching to cheaper accommodations is a no-brainer for saving money. Just don't get caught like me in a situation where you can't end the lease early.

--Job--
Things are really firing up.
I'm starting to get involved in some really hardcore projects, some of which essentially boil down to "this software was incredibly useful to us 2-3 years ago, but eventually it broke and no one had the time to investigate why. do you want to own it and rewrite it from scratch to work again and be more maintainable?".
I actually really enjoy that kind of stuff, but it's always difficult to justify to people how much you've accomplished in such situations because your one "line item" might be more work than another persons 20 accomplishments. It's difficult to strike a balance between "real, high quality work" and "work that ticks the boxes for upper management".
I need to get retired, ASAP. I hate having to do fake work.

--Education--
Can I just share Oreilly books with everyone? This is by far one of the nicest subscriptions that I've ever purchased. It's not the cheapest (50usd/month), but you get access to an unprecedented list of technical books, including oreilly, packt, manning and pearson programming books, as well as the occasional tome from CRC press or similar on physical sciences or mathematics.

If you want reference materials on computer science topics and need something faster than the local library, I wholeheartedly recommend.

-- Typical Routine --
Huge progress in physical metrics. How did I reduce my rest heart rate so much?
1. Modest zone 2 cardio. Maybe 1 hour a day when I do it.
2. REST DAYS. Surprisingly to me, sometimes just taking an entire day off gives you the best performance. Who knew recovery is real?
3. Big. Ass. Salads. Prep it yourself if you want, but I've found great success in just buying the ready to eat mixes at local grocery store, and then adding in grilled chicken cut up into cubes. I've been eating a BAS pretty much everyday, and it's so easy and refrigerates well. You can easily make up 3-4 days worth of eating in a few minutes this way and eat it whenever you get hungry with zero prep time.

That's been the largest takeaway lesson for me; make it easy to make the right choice. Everything else just naturally falls into place.

[Chris]

Can I just share Oreilly books with everyone?

Share this with your manager. Tell them how valuable it is and how much more productive it has made you. Then ask for the company to consider a group or enterprise subscription. It's a relatively small cost for them ($500/user/yr for small teams), but would save you $50/mo.

[ertyu]

Excellent suggestion to get your company to pay for those.

Good job kicking ass, your last post is sounding great.

[delay]

Thanks for your journal update!

Bodyweight Target: 118 (168) -2 Lb

Ok, so I read this as: I weigh 168 pounds wanting to weigh 118 pounds and have lost 2 pounds since the last checkpoint. Is that right?

--Job--
Things are really firing up. [...] I actually really enjoy that kind of stuff [...] I need to get retired, ASAP. I hate having to do fake work.

I thought you're really enjoying the new job until I got to the last line! Why would you need to get retired if you really enjoy your work?

[Veronica]

Thanks for your journal update!

Ok, so I read this as: I weigh 168 pounds wanting to weigh 118 pounds and have lost 2 pounds since the last checkpoint. Is that right?

Yep, you've got it. Trying to make it fast to digest progress over time if you don't really want to read the whole thing!


I thought you're really enjoying the new job until I got to the last line! Why would you need to get retired if you really enjoy your work?

I do actually enjoy the job, at high level! It's honestly what I have dreamed of doing for a long time.

The bureaucracy though tends to sap away a lot of the inherent value I find in the work.
In the same way that some people get a lot of joy out of trying to implement a new system at work because they like making things better, a giant pile of paperwork and approvals to begin implementing it can make an inherently enjoyable task lose all of its joy.

In my case, it's the update meetings. We are measured pretty directly on "number of items completed", rather than a more nebulous metric like "impact/value". Similar to how some IT managers try to use "lines of code" as a measure of programmer productivity.
I can write 5 lines of code that are so beautiful and efficient they get used 10 million times a day, or I can produce 5000 lines of code that only get used once and are never touched again because it's too large to maintain and eventually just gets ignored but sits there, kind of like a rusted bolt that doesn't bear any weight.

If I could find a way to not be "softly punished" for doing good work, I would thoroughly enjoy it with zero qualms.
("wow, you completely refactored that codebase that hadn't been updated since 2017 and it now has 100 daily users? That's great! How many other projects did you do this month? Oh, you only did that one? This level of output after being here for 3 months is highly concerning")

Instead, they praise the output of they guy who did 20 projects, each of which would take 2-3 hours and have well documented processes for how to tackle them and are not being requested by anyone, management or users. I try to ignore it, but I've never been a fan of people doing low value tasks over and over again to try and "keep their job safe. This is unfortunately, as I've come to see at virtually all organizations, one of the paradoxes of modern workplaces.

[delay]

In my case, it's the update meetings. We are measured pretty directly on "number of items completed", rather than a more nebulous metric like "impact/value". Similar to how some IT managers try to use "lines of code" as a measure of programmer productivity.
I can write 5 lines of code that are so beautiful and efficient they get used 10 million times a day, or I can produce 5000 lines of code that only get used once and are never touched again because it's too large to maintain and eventually just gets ignored but sits there, kind of like a rusted bolt that doesn't bear any weight.

Ouch, "update meetings", that sounds demonic. I hope they're not too often.

Usually managers have targets themselves, like "number of items completed per underling". They can't help that. Perhaps you can game the metric? Place yourself in the hierarchy where the boss expects to see you. Or figure out how colleagues deal with it. I remember a place where the underlings had to close a number of tickets per week. When I sent in a hard problem, they asked if I could split it in 4 tickets. From that time we talked about "4 ticket problems". Next year, their targets were doubled so we had "8 ticket problems"

I just read The Gervais Principle (linked from this forum post.) A good read with actionable knowledge, like how the company life cycle predicts the cluelessness increases until the company dies.