All those parents who are forced to work but always wanted to stay back and provide best care for their kids but couldn't do so.. feeling a gut punch.
Parents who chose career path and gets the slap in the face moments every time they realized that they could have spent more time with the kids instead of the work.
Yeah but you've got to learn to let things go. I'm temporarily single parenting with a full time job and it doesn't have to be that hard. Like kiddo usually eats microwaved meat & vegetables plus a pasta/rice that I cook twice a week. Is that worse than a cooked from scratch meal? Everyone will say yes, but he's getting the macronutrients and vitamins he needs so what difference does it make? Kind of applies to everything. Some days he doesn't get a bath, the house gets wild, I put a movie on because I'm tired of his shit and so on. But I'm 80-90% of ideal but that's enough for 99%+ of the benefits.
I've seen reflections of OP in a lot of parents in my life. They fall into two categories:
Type As that direct this sort of extreme level of effort to anything they do.
Anxiety/OCD that just can't let that little bit of benefit go combined with satisfying their complusion of controlling everything.
A long time ago, when I had only one child I made a joke to one of my coworkers that had twins. It was something like that child care was O(N), so she had the double of problems.
Now I have two small children (and a big one), and now I'm convinced that it's at least O(N^2). [In my case O(5) not O(9), because the old one is old enough.]
It's not really about the amount of work needed to parent. It's more about letting go until the amount of work matches your capacity plus some time for other things.
For the people in my life that sound similar to the OP they do the reverse. They add parenting work until their capacity is full. If you gave them and extra 3 hours in the day they'd still be just as busy.
The philosophy I try to follow (which I borrowed from someone else) is: sometimes eat the cake, sometimes have it. Meaning if I’m trying to develop my career for a promotion or new job, I’ll adjust the priorities to achieve that, I.e. spend enough time with the kid, sacrifice me-time, sometimes a bit of sleep, etc. And once I achieve it, then “cool off” a bit, meaning spend all my spare time with the kid, finish work at 5, don’t hesitate to take PTO, etc.
I am wondering what would have happened if the committee chooses another idea instead of Compton's. Would Compton leave the committee? Would Feynman resent the decision? Or they wouldn't do that that is why they are called "great men"?
Feynman is impressed because the committee remembered the best argument and got to the right decision without Compton having to insist on himself. Compton made the best argument, once, and won.
If the committee didn't choose Compton's idea, it would just be an average lame committee where quality of thought isn't a priority.
There's a reason "design by committee" is an epithet. People thinking in groups normally suck at it.
Over the years, I am convinced that agile process falls into the bullshit jobs category. At one point of time I stared asking a routine question, if we finish all of this work by next week, how long it would take for this to go to production? There is always several weeks of gap (unless it is really critical, then there is no agile process anyway).
At the end it is very inspiring to learn that Andre chose tennis on his own to become the number one on his own terms. But somehow it feels very ironic that he chose what he was already good at! Perhaps his father saved him a lot of time by choosing for him and using that time to make him skilled at tennis. It just feels like a perspective change. He could have simply said now I understood what my father was trying to do. Because no one really knows what Andre would have chosen and done by himself.
There's a tragic irony/flaw in the use of agassi in this article.
His "enlightenment" moment didn't result in him walking away from his father's world (or the money, or the emptyness of living a life to play tennis). in many ways its the opposite lesson of the article.
It helps to remember of course that the whole anecdote and narrative is likely just more commercial promotional fiction. everyone likes a redemption story, especially when it's somehow a redemption story that doesn't result in recognising the emptiness of fans and fame and money and professional sport but a kind of self- congratulatory reawakening that involves no actual change. This allows the commercial engine of a professional tennis players life to keep turning and draw in new fans and retaining old ones... presumably the whole actual point of publishing his "autobiography".
I'm guessing of course agassi didn't write his biography either. I'm sure his pr team/managers just hired a ghost writer.
I've got nothing personally against agassi, just for he record, don't even know or care much about him. I'm sure his father probably was overbearing: that's the harsh reality of professional sports preparation. But it does well to read these things with a critical eye and recognise the reality behind them rather than the image. At the end of the day, he's still a guy that hit balls back and forth for money just like he was brought up to.
Yes, it almost sounds like Agassi sort of showed his father was right to force him to play tennis. If I suddenly "chose tennis", it wouldn't do me much good because becoming a world class tennis player requires decades of training starting from a young age.
Try strategizing in a mid-sized non technical mid-sized company. Here is where engineers are treated like mechanics at pep boys. You are either ignored or put to your place about the kind of work your are supposed to do, with the exception of crisis scenarios or 'no-one is interested in the outcome' scenarios.
In large companies strategy is mostly about helping power brokers to do their bullshit jobs.
In my experience, only opportunity for engineers to contribute to a meaningful strategy is in a small team with business person as CEO/Owner and they really want to listen to the engineer's opinion.
Maybe in tech companies engineers might have different experience.
> Maybe in tech companies engineers might have different experience.
Of course they do!
At non-tech companies, tech is a cost center. The only strategy that will be valued is a strategy to cut costs.
At tech companies, tech is the product, so it's a profit center.
If you want a fulfilling career as an engineer, don't work in a cost center.
> In my experience, only opportunity for engineers to contribute to a meaningful strategy is in a small team with business person as CEO/Owner and they really want to listen to the engineer's opinion.
That might be true at very small companies. At large tech companies most engineers will never meet the CEO, but they still have input on strategy. Of course that means developing some credibility and trust within the organization before people will listen, but that's true in all industries.
> If you want a fulfilling career as an engineer, don't work in a cost center.
You can definitely still have a fulfilling career. Somewhere along the ladder the right CTO or VP can make all the difference in how that branch of the organisation operates (and lo and behold, somehow that branch is particularly effective too).
>If you want a fulfilling career as an engineer, don't work in a cost center.
By that definition, I guess the above article is not a help to a whole class of engineers out there. Now I really doubt if they even be called engineers?
The idea that one can 'manage' another seems very primitive to me. Every one that did good job for me did so because they genuinely wanted to do a good job, not because I 'managed' them somehow. All I did was to steer the work towards the goal. If they didn't like the work to begin with or didn't have enough skills and inclination to learn, no amount of 'management' would have corrected that situation.
I am wondering if Aditya didn't respond the way he did (using corporate lawyer's langauge), Greg would have not reached to this conclusion? I am a bit surprised by the entitlement he was showing. Why would anyone use those words despite sending a nonsense patch! What kind of defence he was thinking he had among a group of seasoned developers other than being honest about intentions? I wouldn't be surprised if his professor doesn't even know what he was doing!
When I was kid, I remember my parents yelling at me playing 'useless' games at the end of the street with my 'good for nothing' friends.
When I was a teen, I remember them not liking me watching "too much" of TV and grumbling about reading 'no good' fiction magazines.
Now this.. "get off the phone" advice.
The key is, the choice must come from with-in, like Diogenes of Snopes[1] tells Alexader the great to stand out of his sun.
Until the kids are capable of making the choice or until the kids turn into adults, parents and schools must create an environment that shows descent maker's alternative to phones. This needs lot of work on behaf of schools and sacrifices on behalf of parents.
