Boring Work Needs Tension
16 comments
·September 15, 2025datadrivenangel
ramon156
My team isnt dysfunctional but I always get hit on the head for doing work and not making a ticket. I don't get it, if I see something bad I'm not going to search which ticket would best fit this issue. Just reviw my PR !
Also, so far most of our projects start simple but end in chaos and deadlines on the minute. I feel like we could always do better.
schneems
I’ve been on both sides of this equation. If someone is dinging you for doing extra work, it could be a sign that your priorities are not aligned.
Like, if you’ve got a tight deadline coming up, it’s not the time to spend a week making CI slightly faster. On the other hand, if someone is telling you to not do work (right now), then they also need to help be responsible for finding time to do that work and understanding the impacts of that work never gets done.
I explain this to people as the tension between important urgent work. Some work is important but never（rarely) urgent. And if you ignore important work (like maintenance) it might become urgent at a very bad time.
datadrivenangel
Also there is value in having an audit trail of who did what when and why, both for operations and system evolution, and for all the compliance junk. Not so much value that a tiny bit of cleanup needs a huge amount of overhead though.
marcosdumay
You have a funny definition of "dysfunctional".
datadrivenangel
You can either laugh or cry about it. Laughing is more fun.
This is nearly the norm for ENTERPRISE software development, and it's such a tragedy.
kylecazar
I'm relieved this wasn't about manufacturing tension within your team when the work is dull
eschneider
> Your CI/CD takes a huge amount of time because you forgot to leverage caching.
The bane of my existence are CI/CD systems that get caching 99% right. Chasing down the problems from that last 1% of strangely busted...well, lets just say that if you want TENSION at work, good way to get it. :/
arccy
with github actions... often caching is slow as well
tra3
I feel like "tension" has negative connotations. Maybe it's just me. I like "friction" better in this context.
There are so many opportunities for improvement, I'm never bored. My aim is to leave this place better than I found it. Even tiny improvements compound over time.
kbar13
who's working at a boring job nowadays as a software dev? everywhere i see devs are wearing like 10 hats bc we have the combination of being capable yet still at the bottom of the totem pole.
ian-g
Or maybe, sometimes it's just flat out dull work. And it has to get done, you're the one with the capacity to do it, and you just have to grit your teeth and do it.
Unless you work on a dysfunctional team and any non-tracked work is forbidden, and any work you try and get tracked requires 6 pages of justification and takes 10 weeks to get prioritized enough for someone to work on...