Comment by rurp
5 days ago
The times I've really had to scramble on something at work describe both some of my best working experiences and some of my worst. I think a big differentiator is clarity. If I know that X needs to be done, and it's important and urgent I'm happy to dig in.
The bad emergencies tend to be scenarios where I'm told OMG we need to fix A, it's an emergency, only to be told a short time later that actually never mind problem B is the real emergency, and then jumping to problem C after that, and so on. That kind of scattered direction can be soul crushing, where I invest in a problem and get far along on a good solution, only to be told that oh actually that urgency was BS, but trust us this new emergency is totally important.
Exactly. In this particular case, it was fun because I recognised the problem and had/took the freedom to get to the bottom of this and fix it as thoroughly as I could. I could easily have decided to accept that the big import process took an hour, but I stubbornly thought it could be faster, and reduced it to 3 minutes. Biggest dopamine boost ever. Still coasting on that. And in doing so, discovered a bunch of bugs, undocumented behaviour users depended on, and ended up addressing all of it in the way I wanted.
That freedom was absolutely key. The same job could have been frustrating and stupid if someone else had been ordered to do what I did.