
Expectations vs. Reality at Work - kartickv
https://medium.com/@karti/expectations-vs-reality-at-work-4f58b3a2f5c8
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poulsbohemian
I've been developing software professionally for 20+ years, the past ~7 as a
freelancer. My own experience is that the level of professionalism, respect,
communication, and collaboration continues to drop such that I'm very tired of
working tech and looking to change careers in 2020. All I want to do is use
this huge collection of skills I've developing in a positive way to create
business outcomes, yet every project I encounter seems to be getting weirder
and weirder with the amount of dysfunction. Again, just my personal
experiences but have been reflecting a lot about this topic lately. One
wonders if the social and political turmoil is leaking into behaviors in the
professional world.

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commandlinefan
> huge collection of skills I've [been] developing

One thing I've noticed about that is that if the skill was developed more than
about 5 years ago, it's frowned upon, if not outright rejected. I'll be
presented with a problem that's a perfect fit for, say, a relation database,
or a cron job, or a shell script - but the simplest solution is rejected as
being too archaic. Instead they insist on some workflow management tool, or
Spark, or a GraphQL database that doesn't fit the problem, just because it's
newer and must be "better".

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6gvONxR4sf7o
There are different kinds of skills. Postgres vs spark is one kind. C++ vs
python is another. Statistics vs networking is a third. The top of the skill
pyramid changes quickly, but the fundamentals change slowly. A tool might be
outdated while the solution it implements is not. (But “ooh shiny new thing!”
can still be a problem)

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MuffinFlavored
Expectation: everybody I work with should be competent and should want to
achieve as much as possible every day

Reality: moodiness, ego, lack of effort

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theamk
This seems very personal, describing a single person’s expectations and their
experience in a single narrow subset of programming jobs.

Many of the “expectations” were not something that people were really
expecting. Many of the “reality” parts are not always true, too.

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cosmie
It is anecdotal in nature, and should be interpreted as such. But they're
still pretty useful for those without much experience or for individuals that
have a difficult time with this type of situational awareness.

While they're certainly not always true, they're conditions that one should be
aware of the possibility of. One particular anecdote in the article:

> Disagreements are often about the underlying fundamental assumptions and
> world views that are so core to a person he can’t articulate them, any more
> than a fish can see water.

Has been a fundamental component of my career. I've spent time working in
virtually every major business function (from marketing to software
engineering teams), giving me a very well rounded understanding of the (often
very) different lenses that different types of people and different job
functions view things. Now, I spend more and more time getting pulled into
client servicing work, as I'm able to jump down the rabbit hole with any
stakeholder that ends up in the room, using the same viewpoint and thought
process they do to assuage and concerns they have.

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hizxy
Expectation: People know what you do. Reality: No really knows what you do.

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steve1977
Expectation: People know what they do. Reality: They have no clue.

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hizxy
I liked this until I read the author’s idea of “user experience”.

