Interviewing for "programming" roles

 I've been reading Erik Dietrich's blog, and it's reinforced a lot of things that I either already knew, or had bubbling below the surface on corporate politics.  I'd highly suggest you give his blog a read, and his book is pretty good too.  I'm going to focus on what he says about interviewing on this post (and maybe more, depends on how long this runs), then I'll try to address the larger issues of corporate politics that he scrutinizes and how I see them.

Let me put up front that, though I too hypocritically use the same techniques when I've had the occasions to interview people, I think that he's spot on in his assessment of the process, and there has been at least one study (it's the 3rd question in, and there's no data just high level on what they found, the second link provides slightly more data) and many more anecdotal agreements with him (or he with others, I don't know or care which came first).  Erik's suggestion: "Just don't do it".  I haven't had to interview for a few years now, and the last one I did have thankfully didn't include any of the interviewing anti-patterns, though I've had more than my share of those over the years.  Erik expounds on his advice in case you get stuck in one of these anyway.  I haven't tried any of his tactics, but if I ever go through one of these again, which isn't likely at this point, I'll be sure to let them know that "I’m afraid that your company isn’t a great fit for me at this time.  But if you wind up brushing up on your interviewing process and making improvements, feel free to reach out to me again for consideration."

Working Remotely - 2

 In my previous post I mentioned timers, something I personally have found useful is the pomodoro timer.  You don't need to buy a (not so) fancy tomato timer, just something that you can use as a 25 minute timer.  This fits well with flow and getting up twice an hour.

Have a routine

I start my day off with my morning rituals (brushing teeth, grooming, shower, coffee, etc), then I do my morning interval run, and some stretching/calisthenics before I settle in for work.  I take my lunch at the same time, and have a schedule for meetings.  Try to have a structure to your day, this makes following your get out of the chair timer a little easier as well.

Have a good great chair.

This one is critical if you have a screen time job.  If you're going to be spending 8 hours of your day sitting in a chair, it makes sense to have a great chair.  IMO this is highly personal and anything I recommend is really not going to help you.  Personally I've looked at and tried the Aeron chairs and I'm not a fan, though a lot of people seem to be.  You need to go to an office or furniture store and sit in them before you pick one.  This will take time, but it is well worth it to have a chair that you are comfortable in.

Try a convertible standing desk

Anything that keeps you from sitting for long periods is good, but I've seen research that standing on one position for long periods isn't much better, which is why I said convertible.  It doesn't have to be the whole desk, if you've already got your office furniture there are converters that will raise your monitors and keyboard/mouse just as effectively as the moving desks will, and may be more convenient.  I'm not personally a big fan as the experience I've had with the full desks has been negative (they seem to break easily), but if either solution helps you go for it.  Personally getting up every 30 minutes and walking around does better for me.

I think I'm going to wrap up there, as anything else I can think of seems to be highly situational and won't necessarily apply to a majority of people,  if I think of more later I'll do additional posts to cover them.

Working Remotely

 Hopefully this will end up as a series of posts, I know lots of people have been writing about this since the advent of COVID-19, but I've been doing this for about 6 years running now, so hopefully I can offer some more insight and what works longer term.  I come from doing this as a programmer, so if you're in another industry and see something that may work differently for other areas please leave a comment.  I will also include what I feel is the obvious in order to make this a hopefully complete recommendation.

Have a separate space where you work

This is probably the most obvious and most stated piece of advice, but also likely the most important.  If you want any kind of "work-life balance" then you need to, well, separate work from life.  If you're working in the spaces where you do the rest of your life, it will be hard to stop working.  If that's your thing, hey, go for it, but after doing that a long time I can say there is a definite benefit to being able to finish work and leave that space behind for the rest of the day (whatever your day may be).  People working in office have an obvious separation, though work has been creeping more into life in that respect lately as well with on call, having to be available for production issues, your boss just feels like calling or texting for whatever reason.  I would highly recommend you still set definite boundaries in this area, i.e not taking work calls after hours when your not on call and addressing them the next time you are in "work hours".

Keep your work space separate

Don't do things in your work space like eat, sleep, play, whatever.  Keep that area for work.  It will be tempting to do these things (except maybe sleep, but I've done that too), but that makes for the slippery slope effect.  Strive for what astronauts do in space, "clean separation", keep your work shit in the work zone, everything else outside.

Keep your work area clean

Hopefully you did this when working "in the office", and you should continue to do this in your home office.  It will help keep you in "professional" mode, whatever that means for your job.  Take some of the time you save every day from eliminating your commute and use it to keep your office clean.

Get up and move

This is a tough one for me personally.   As a programmer I get "in the zone" and I can and do ignore everything until I finish what I'm working on, if that's 20 minutes or 6 hours.  Sitting for long periods is terrible for you physically and you need to keep yourself active.  I try to (work in progress, still) get in a short interval workout early in the morning (after my other rituals, coffee, stretching, etc).  Use some kind of timer, and DON'T IGNORE IT.  As soon it goes off, whatever you're going, GET UP.   If you condition yourself to ignoring your timer, you're not going to do what you need to, and you need to get out of the chair at least every 30 minutes.

And my timer just went off, so I'm going to end this post here and continue another day :)