3-2-1 Quotes 8-6-20
A difficult lesson to learn: Your most persistent distractions will seem justified to you.
This is something that I think is absolutely true with me. There’s several things that I justify spending time on (for example, shooting 50 shots when I need to focus my mind or something) that definitely is just a distraction from what I actually should be doing in that moment, but I justify it to myself. I need to challenge every thing that I do very regularly, and think carefully about whether that thing is worth the time that I’m spending on it.
“When feedback is immediate, clear, and concrete, people learn quickly. When feedback is delayed, abstract, and opaque, people rarely learn.”
Honestly, this is probably one of the biggest differences between my time with Theorem vs. my time with Amazon. With Theorem, even though I didn’t get a whole lot of constructive feedback, with PRs and consistent review cycles, and working with Josh much more regularly than I am working with Balaji, I got more feedback on my code-writing and development than I’m getting at Amazon. The reasons for the discrepancy are two-fold I think. The first is that inherently, my work at Amazon has been less problem solving through code and more of setting up infrastructure for code, so I’ve definitely have less changes for writing interesting code and getting feedback for it. The second is that my personal productivity also hasn’t been as high as when I was working for Theorem (probably a combination of the team not being as interesting to me, also concurrently doing EE 16B, and being the second internship over the summer and getting a bit used/complacent with the internship lifestyle).
uid: 202008060818 tags: #quotes #productivity