GoKawiil
Tech News
A career advice piece outlines considerations managers should weigh before asking direct reports to take on additional work beyond their usual duties. It notes that while supervisors can generally direct assignments under broad job-description clauses like 'other duties as assigned,' they should think through the burden this places on employees and what they can offer in exchange.
DBOS engineers debugging a Postgres-backed queue system found that SELECT DISTINCT was their most expensive query, even though it appeared simplest. They discovered that Postgres always scans every row matching a query's predicates when computing DISTINCT values, regardless of indexing or how few unique values exist, making it a poor fit for finding active partitions in a queue workload.
Data from time-tracking tool RescueTime shows the average employee gets only 85 minutes of undisturbed focus per day, squeezed out by meetings, notifications, and constant task-switching. A related Gallup survey on worker engagement found rising workloads and unclear job boundaries are further eroding enthusiasm and creative capacity, especially as companies downsize without replacing roles.