Ask HN: Does anyone else find switching between tasks draining?

[pipeline_peak]

My job involves a lot of testing. There’s a lot of database copying so those tests can range anywhere between a 5 to 120 minutes.

The only way for me to be productive at this job is to work in something else while this is going on. I find this absolutely draining. Having to switch development environments, switch my mind, I lose so much momentum. Not to mention the pending task can fail anywhere in between so there’s no knowing when to alternate back.

Does anyone else have a role like this? I take at least 3 walking breaks a workday.

[syndicatedjelly]

Something similar happened to me with a client whose codebase took up to an hour to rebuild from scratch. Certain code changes would cause the build system to take anywhere from 5 mins to 45 mins to do a partial rebuild. It was agonizing not knowing how long the code would take to build.

I found that role extremely unproductive, and draining like you describe. The build system was arcane and convoluted (CMake), requiring days or weeks of dedicated study to understand well enough to make improvements. Obviously our team was never given the time to do that, so we were all stuck in this hateful build-test-fix cycle.

I've learned to value companies and clients that place the developer experience very high in the pecking order of things to work on.

[stop50]

We have 2 types of tests: one that runs in minutes and one that we do once every quarter-half year that takes days of manual testing