Another pair of eyes

People say when you are part of a system you don’t observe the changes it brings it in you and how the system itself changes, unless you are good at taking frequent stops and reflecting or someone else from outside making that observation.

I found an addictive game to play called circle the cat which I used to play whenever I got a chance. This was so disruptive that I was waiting for build to happen for my commits to play this game. When I joined the project, the build used to take only 2 minutes, but over the course of few months it steadily climbed to be 12 minutes. My commits became complex because I had to wait longer for every commit but I was enjoying the break to play a game.

One such day when I was waiting for the 12 minute build to get over, my tech lead who came out of a tiring tech discussion watched me playing this game and I could see he was very angry. I enquired how he is doing, was the discussion tough. Instead he said that he was angry on me that I was playing using build time as an excuse instead of trying to fix the slow build.

He was right, I never realised that I was sitting on a problem which could have been solved and made me and my team much more productive. It did not matter how others were thinking, I was thinking I was doing a good job and pushing code as much as possible. If he had not pointed out, I would have never attempted to fix. I tried to find the root cause and I ended up reducing the build time to under 2 minutes within the time I took to play one game.

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Originally published at dino.xyz/Recruiterbox