Lately on X

I have noticed a trend of posts that I imagine are probably the natural response to 'LinkedIn-brain' posts, which might be the result of the poor job market right now:

"If hard work paid off, the donkey would own the farm"

And if you were to come straight from the slop filled cringe fest that is LinkedIn these days, I can totally understand why you might have this attitude... But I can't help but find myself wanting to tweet about this, before realizing that I don't pay for more than 160 characters. This is why I have decided to write a quick blog post about it.

The argument for working hard

Instead of saying some generic motivational jargon, I'll try to give you a few examples and explain specifically what I mean.

Let's say you work on a team, and your job generally consists of working on tickets that are assigned to you, and you spend some time every day pushing PR's that get reviewed by others and your time is allotted by them: You notice that your CI runs take ~25-30 mins each, and this is mildly annoying but definitely something every developer notices, but nothing anyone does anything about.

When you look at the DAG, you notice that there is no cacheing of build artifacts or dependencies and all your jobs are running serially.

You could spend the ~1hr or so setting up sccache and matrix runners so everything runs in parallel and cuts your CI/CD build and deployment pipeline down to ~3-4 mins, or you could just mind your business and only do what is assigned to you... Maybe someone will think of that, and make a Jira ticket for you to pick up one day.

But if you go out of your way to fix this on your own, every single person on the team, without a doubt, will notice that their build times got cut by 80% and their dev experience improved.

Now you repeat this behavior over the course of a couple years, and it's time for some layoffs at your company. Seems a lot less likely they are going to choose you, if you spent your time making objectively beneficial decisions for the team, instead of only focusing on what you were tasked with doing.

Same idea when you come up for a promotion or a raise... EVERYONE notices this, and choosing to go above and beyond makes you a better teammate, who others will want to work with.

Take initiative on your own. Often times we developers are the 'boots on the ground' and have insight into things like cloud cost savings, potential productivity increases and workflow improvements that PM's and admin won't. In a world where we LLM's are becoming what seems like a threat to this kind of work, don't be ashamed of separating yourself from others by taking initiative and providing value to your team and your company.

I'm not saying you have to work 9-9-6 and have no social life, I'm just saying that it's rewarding to take personal responsibility and ownership over the products you ship and the things you work on. There is absolutely nothing wrong with working hard and taking pride in what you do.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

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