6/21/2023 0 Comments Dont starve together stage handWhen I go out there and perform on stage, there are many times when I feel like I'm doing just meh. I'm a dancer and I am very critical on my own skill as a dancer. This isn't unique to a given situation either. The reason I said earlier that holding this mindset is a bit narcissistic is because you are failing to recognize that your vantage point is not even close to how your audience sees things. You know when something goes wrong in production, but typically, your audience is none the wiser. Like a stagehand behind the scenes, you know when you or someone else messes up. The reason I call it Stagehand Syndrome is tied back to ASB, but ultimately rings true for many scenarios.Īt the heart of it, Stagehand Syndrome is the tendency to unfairly judge your own work or the work of others more critically because you are bias by the privileged knowledge you have access to, while at the end of the day, the audience of said work is not affected. I have a psychology background, and I still don't know if there is someone that has labeled this phenomenon before, but personally I've started recognizing this pattern in my life as Stagehand Syndrome. Gluckmann, and this fear of being mediocre is mostly self inflicted. The users are your audience, your peers are a projected version of Mr. I want you take a step back, because whether or not you see it, you as an engineer are part of the ASB of your product. When people clapped, when people came up to us and appreciated what we've done, we knew that we had done something good, regardless of the MANY mistakes we knew we had made.Īt this point you might be asking yourself "Bryan - what the flip does this have to do being an engineer?". It wasn't until it was done that we felt proud at what we had accomplished. Once it was going on, everyone was on edge. I remember Gluck yelling more than a few times to fix or completely redo things and from our perspective, the production was hanging on by a thread. The entire time, my fellow ASB friends were scrambling to get things working and it was visibly stressful. Go back a decade to my homecoming: there was a particular time where we built a 30 foot (10m) tall stage pyramid in the gym so that the homecoming court could emerge from the pyramid door. Gluckmann, would not accept a mediocre show. It was a production and my teacher and ASB advisor, Mr. The music needed to be hand picked, and the MC could not miss a beat. The flow of the activities needed to be smooth. When I say there were TV grade high school assemblies, I am not exaggerating putting these assemblies together was super stressful. We were known for putting on very extravagant assemblies. The first time I really materialized thoughts on this was when I was part of the Associated Student Body (ASB) in high school. Even more than that, this is incidentally a narcissistic mindset to take. That they'd complain that this app wasn't good and that the "fact" that it wasn't good would fall squarely on my shoulders because the code was bad.Įven though I still fall victim to this line of thinking, I am here to tell you that if you too fall victim to this, you are wrong. Then there was this secondary, less strong feeling that the users would somehow know that this was shit code. This wasn't even necessarily for myself, but it sprung from this fear that others would read my code and think "What the hell? This is clearly a use case for xyz pattern. Regardless of logic though, it made me feel like crap as a craftsperson. I recognized that the business need was greater than the technical merit and sometimes I just had to go with the "lesser" approach. Even worse, I've not only played the poor employee, but I was the frustrating "boss" at times too. Have you ever felt like this? I know I have. So you sigh again, sink into your chair, and get to typing with just a bit of bitterness in each keystroke. "This is a stupid solution".īriefly, you consider going rogue and doing what you know to be the better decision, but retreat knowing that you don't want to strain relationships. Shortly after though, the scope-cutting scythe stepped in and reaped any hope of "ideal solution" and you are left with what you know to be a suboptimal approach.įrustrated, you feel like you are tasked with writing "shitty code". You just had a long meeting with your boss, fighting for what you believe to be the optimal solution to a problem your team was tasked to solve. You come back and sit down at your desk with a deep, long sigh.
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