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Wellness Wednesday for September 7, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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As an engineer, I've worked under several different principals and every one of them had a different set of specialties, priorities and quirks.

My favorite was very "wild west" and valued constructability and cost for the client above typos, minor errors, unclear language. One of my most eye-opening experiences with him was catching him on the phone leaving a deposition for a lawsuit with tens of millions in the balance. He non-chalantly told me not to worry about this technical question I had because the risk was low and the factor of safety would more than account for it. This was the highest ranked chief engineer in one of the largest companies in our niche in the world.

My second favorite mentor was more or less the opposite and fit the mold of your overly-detail oriented, micro-managing engineer. His emphasis was on details, specificity and minimization of liability at the expense of client goodwill. The right answer is the right answer, after all, feasibility be damned.

Any way, that's a lot of lead up to say that you're missing another interpretation of the situation: you're not necessarily better or smarter than your leads, but have gained some kind of detail-orientedness from your last one and eventually may learn something yet from your new lead (hard to say, but maybe delegation to technician types? Alternatively, he could actually be useless, not enough info to determine). TL1 may have this trait in over abundance and TL2 may not have it at all, in which case having a healthy-but-not dysfunctional quantity of this trait may make you a better, well-rounded programmer than either. Have a little self awareness and communicate with TL2 and this may work to the benefit of both of you.