Martin Hähnel

Journaling? In this Economy?

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[I thought I'd try write a post that is a little more journal style this time around. I noticed that I have become a little too focussed on writing posts with a point, although I actually enjoy reading posts that just let us follow along with someone's day more. I assume that's why I like WhileDo posts as much as I do. But the WhileDo is more focussed on talking about programming while programming. The journal blog post is maybe the more generalized version of that. Writing about life while you live it.]

I just came back from a work trip. The small company I'm working for tries to get everyone together once or twice a year and so after skipping the last two years for various reasons I was able to make it this time. As I am the one who lives furthest away - Oulu (Finland) to Freiburg (Germany) is about 2200 km - it took quite some time and effort to make it happen. The trip lasted from Wednesday to Sunday: I stepped on a plane in Oulu, went on another plane in Helsinki and in Frankfurt I took a train to Freiburg - and then the same thing back on Saturday (I arrived around 1:30 am Oulu local time).

On Thursday I had a whole day to work in the office, which is always kind of fun: As somebody who works from home otherwise, the contrast is stark: Just as you'd imagine some things are easier to do - give (or receive) help, have a little bit of a fuller picture of the people that you work with and being able to observe how others are interacting with each other (which in 1 on 1 calls is harder to gauge) - it also made it obvious though what I like about working from a distance: I am an introverted man and the way I tend to engage with the world is through sincerity and authenticity. This is generally a good thing: I tend to say what I mean and I am not one to say things just to say them. I am also, as I said, pretty introverted though - which I know from experience always comes as a surprise to people as I am pretty outspoken in a context that is maybe a little more structured or about something than just in a supposedly lower stakes social setting. And that means my energy to engage in all the BS that social life offers is extremely draining to me.

This was especially apparent again on Friday. I was part of a group of people presenting about working with LLMs: In this case how I use Codex with skills, where I felt like I had something to contribute and say[1]. One point I really tried to make: If it is true that we can generate code quicker than we can write it, that doesn't mean that this generated code is somehow also better (or better understood) and that depending on your "altitude" of looking at it, it may or may not be true that we finish the ticket in front of us quicker (maybe even below estimated time), but probably at the cost of more code churn (i.e. more bug tickets down the road).

I had a couple of interesting conversations around this topic of code quality in times of our industry's infatuation with "AI". One thing I took away is that even though I am (obviously) using them as coding tools (and feel like that they are helpful in this context) AND I am even invited to share what I've learned while working with them with everybody, that I am still a lot more skeptical than many in my company. Apart from being a contested and difficult to assess topic, I enjoy thinking about these things and what they do mean for the situation I or my company finds myself/itself in.[2]

So that part I found interesting and worth thinking about. It motivated me and made me feel like I was living in alignment with what I had written here before: That many of us have to engage with LLM coding tools and therefore those of us who have hearts also should.

Where I found myself somewhat unable to participate in a meaningful way was the "party" part and I got reminded how little self-efficacy expectations I have[3] by comparison in social settings like this. We were invited to a "Krimi-Dinner" (murder mystery dinner) - basically a kind of humorous play that is given between courses of the meal. The topic was "murder at a single party" (as a once long-time single not one of my favorite eras of my life). The play was extremely cringe inducing as there were elements in which the audience needed to take part. As somebody who is already struggling in social settings like this I had a really bad time and was feeling extremely anxious about maybe having to get up and perform this or that embarrassing thing. Thankfully, I wasn't chosen and my actual conversations with the people at my table went mostly ok (although I was a little too argumentative I feel like). What somewhat surprised me though - and that even though I knew that this kind of stuff is not my forte - how completely socially burnt out I was after a day of social obligations and especially a dinner in which I needed to be in a forced good mood even though I was feeling anything but good inside. It was great to see everyone, but I gotta admit that for my temperament it's good that I do not need to live through all the little and not so little social problems that working close by brings (even just declining to go to lunch together - as I did on Friday - felt somewhat aggressive). In this sense working at a distance works just way better for me.

Finally two more short things:

  1. I have been reading Hartmut Rosa's Resonanz using my new eReader and managed to get more than 6 hours of reading time in in the days of my trip. Very nice.
  2. And reading Rosa while visiting Freiburg made me realize how much more I am a child of the world of things (to which I also count books and texts, videos and podcasts) and how little I ultimately care about the social world: I care more about its products and how they do tend to tell us something about the social sphere (as they are part of it) as I do care about gaining expertise in acting within that social sphere itself. I find the world of non-humans (even if they are ultimately products of humans) to be more relatable. Which might be an interesting angle to "Loving from a distance".

The great thing with these journal type posts is that I don't need to make a point. So for now I'll just end it there. Maybe I'll talk more about this tomorrow, maybe I won't. I guess we'll find out.

  1. Everyone installed a version of a skill I had developed, which felt good. This one actually consisted of a non-AI script that downloaded relevant ticket data from our ticketing system and allowed for some cleanup and improvent before telling codex to read the prepared ticket context file and work on filling out a "deliverables and implementation" section which then could be used to further discuss the approach with the agent before actually working on the solution of the ticket. ↩︎

  2. Which is to say: It is... weird. It seems to me that in many ways we (as a company) are reacting to where the industry is going and that means I am reacting to how the expectations of my company are chaning. ↩︎

  3. In German you call this "Selbstwirksamekeitserwartung" and it describes a learned expactation towards if acting in a certain context leads to a desired outcome or not. If I have self-efficacy expectations, I observe my world to be moldable and resonant, whereas if I don't expect to be able to do much, I will feel like the world is dead or hostile to me - or I'm to it. ↩︎