roachpatrol:

nianeyna:

etirabys:

@spiralingintocontrol reblogged the post I made about brain freeze at my last job with a link to a blog post they’d written about the same thing that struck eerily true. And if it’s anywhere near as widespread as it seems to them, I – this is worrying??? (bolded mine)

You’re isolated. You’re not talking to anyone about your work. You don’t really want to talk to anyone about your work, and as days pass, you want to less and less. Why? If you talk to someone about your work, they’ll realize you’ve been banging your head against the wall for weeks. They’ll know.

For now, though, it’s enough to make you miserable that you know: You’re not getting anything done. Your goals don’t make sense to you, you’re not sure what direction to go in, and you don’t really have the power to move the project in any particular direction. You get a few things done each day, but feel demoralized by their sparsity and their insignificance. And the longer this goes on, the less you want to ask for help or input of any kind.

Some people call this a symptom of impostor syndrome. I don’t think so. To call it “impostor syndrome” implies that it arises out of a mistaken belief, when, in truth, it’s not mistaken. You’re not wrong to think that you’re not getting things done, and that you’re not very good at your job. Of course you’re not—yet! You’re very new to it, and being good at your job involves plenty of soft skills you didn’t pick up before your first (or perhaps second, or even third) professional programming job.

For another thing, this isn’t all because of you, either: Your supervisor isn’t prompting you to ask questions, and isn’t bothering to get more detail from you on what’s going well and what isn’t. They’re not making sure you’re not blocked, or spinning your wheels.

The trouble arises when you get into a cycle: you feel bad about not knowing what to do next, so you don’t ask for help, so you try to do everything yourself; you don’t have a lot of success, so you still feel bad and don’t want to ask for help; next thing you know, it’s been a month and you haven’t spoken to another human being, except to tell your boss “Things are going okay,” with a glossed-over description of your progress so far.

This is not healthy.

anyway this is a good post and the subsequent advice is also good.

My boss talks a lot about “psychological safety” (he’s such a nerd… I love him) which is basically feeling like you can ask questions, even really “stupid” questions, and be vulnerable in front of the group in that sense without feeling judged, or preferably you should actually feel REWARDED for doing this. Because asking questions not only helps you, it also helps other people on the team to understand what you’re working on, which helps them as well. Or maybe they don’t even know the answer, but you can find out together and BOTH learn something. And this is the most important and key thing you can do for the productivity of the team, is to cultivate that environment. I agree with that blog post like, if people habitually shut you down and act put upon when you ask questions, or even if no one else seems to ask for help ever so you don’t feel like you can… you should get out of that situation asap. Not only is that bad for both your professional growth and your mental health, it also means your team is probably shitty and unproductive because everyone’s wasting time feeling individually miserable trying to figure everything out by themselves. It just doesn’t work.

You spend 20 years in school being conditioned to do everything on your own or you’re Cheating, and the people in authority actually refuse to tell you things that they know because you’re supposed to “figure it out”. This is all bullshit that needs to be unlearned as quickly as possible. Real grownup people who are actually trying to Get Shit Done WANT to tell you the things that they know so that together you can Get Shit Done twice as fast. Anyone who feels like you’re wasting their time by asking questions is honestly not very good at their job, cause… that means they think they don’t need your help, and it just ain’t so.

to my surprise, i was actually praised the other day at my studio for just this. “i love roach,” the instructor said, “because they say everything the rest of you guys are thinking. i always know when you’re lost because roach raises their hand and says so.”

my studio skews towards the young and the male: kids just out of highschool, and men who don’t want to look dumb, and the minority population of girls that really really REALLY don’t want to look dumb. but i’ve been out of college for six years and am comfortable being seen as a clueless amateur, so i ask the instructor to clarify points and repeat demonstrations all the time. and pretty much no one’s exasperated or contemptuous of me: everyone, even the instructor, appreciates it. 

it’s really tough, initially, to risk looking dumb in front of other people, but it’s worth it. after awhile you learn that asking questions is pretty much a public service, not a personal humiliation.