TickMark
I mean this is still great for someone else. I am not surprised you are Berlin-based, I was at EuroClojure in 2017 in Berlin and was pleasantly surprised by how many Clojure companies existed there, most didn't offer remote work though.
The language itself is great. The ecosystem is fine, you can find most libraries and if you can't you can at time use the JAVA versions. This was at times a pain because Java client libraries for certain services were out of date.
Solving real-life business problems was tricky but ultimately fun and satisfying. As the resulting code is usually very elegant and succinct.
I really loved the interactive programming aspect of it. It was really easy to go from a repl experiment to the actual implementation.
Clojure's cool, I am glad I got to work with it professionally. I did go back to Javascript, but it made me a better developer. It strikes a nice balance between being a pure functional language and being practical.
I thought I was brilliant when I came up with the solution of fixing the time frame and estimating the work that can be done in that time frame. Turns out I came up with sprints, 60 years after they were invented.
The fun solution for this would be to give 'hit dice' estimates for tasks. Assign type of dice and number of them to each eastimated.
How long will this take?
About 1d20 days.
Nobody will be happy with this, but it is the most realistic one. Cause tasks do have that variability to them.
The wises thing said here is: "the reality is that if you can make a probabilistically accurate estimate, then it's likely that the task should have been automated by some other means already. "
Is there an answer to this problem? Maybe abandon long term estimates entirely. Having really short term estimates, with frequent updates.
There's definitely a trend though, it could be that this is the first wave of internet age IT professional hitting mid-life crisis.
I don't see this that often on designer or some other professional forums.
I am not complaining, I am just worried is there some underlying problem with this profession? We are worried about technical debt accumulates in our codebase, we might forget about social debt that accumulates in our life.
At this moment we are fascinated by the thinking fast part of AI. Where AI infers conclusions with astounding efficiency.
We forget the 'thinking slow' part, the data gathering the data filtering, that's the difficult (and boring) part.
Then we introduced a Friday call where we had a casual overview of the week, but mostly talked about what we did or are doing outside work. It helped a lot, people understood each other more. And most importantly got sense of each other's sense of humor and work ethic.
Point being there's a lot more incidental interaction that goes on at an on-site job that helps you get to know people you work with.
As remote work manager, you have to engineer non-work related social interactions if you want to have a cohesive team of people.
In between projects, I try to update libraries or switch to new ones. It really helps if you assemble the boilerplate yourself, cause you know the logic behind every decision.
Of course I looked for inspiration in other people's boilerplates, it took me two weeks for the initial research and experimentation.