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Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do?

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Re: Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do?

#101

Post by abledon »

Kranar wrote: post #38
sz4kerto wrote: post #9

I don’t think that what you’re doing is very common, but it’s not uncommon either. What you need to do this is to work in an environment where not being productive is not harmful. There are plenty of environments like this. For example, not doing any work but still getting paid doesn’t do any harm at Google. The company is making money anyway. At a small startup that’s under immense pressure people would realise what…

As someone who worked at both Microsoft and Google... you can get await with doing little work at those companies for maybe a year, two years at most, but after that you're gone. The expectation at those places skyrockets after the first year.

hypothetically, do you think if people weren't allowed to drink caffeine or use performance enhancing drugs (adderall etc..), what % would not make that threshold of performance?

Re: Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do?

#102

Post by poulsbohemian »

wsc981 wrote: post #59

I am a freelance dev and I only bill the hours that I work. But I am quite sure a lot of freelance devs just bill 8 hours of work a day, even if they only work 3 hours. My conscience wont allow me to do this in a remote work situation. Back when I worked in the office as freelancer, I did bill 8 hours a day, since I was expected to sit in the office 8 hours a day, regardless if I performed or not. In the past I worke…

I got to a point where I only offered clients retainer based agreements as I got tired of fighting over hours. Ironically, even when they were being billed by the month they would still try to do these mental gymnastics where they tried to calculate the hourly cost of activities based on rate / hours in a month. It got exhausting. Yes they were often shitty clients. But my point here is, there's a lot of merit in trying to take hours out of the conversation so that I can just get the work done and not have to argue over whether it's going to take me four hours or four hours and fifteen minutes to complete this task.

Re: Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do?

#103

Post by notJim »

syspec wrote: post #55

> Do people regularly run into coworkers like me during their career and simply ignore it because they find it too awkward to criticize them? Yes exactly this, especially at larger companies. I know a few of those developers, and they sit right near me... They find a way to make any task take forever... If it was a smaller company they would be called out, but at my [very, very] large company - its very hard to get f…

> I know a few of those developers, and they sit right near me...

In fact, this is so common that I can name the exact people at several jobs I've had. And I could mention them to my coworkers and they'd know exactly what these people's reputation are.

Our feeling toward them is a mix of being impressed and being embarrassed. Impressed because there's something to be said for someone who works the system to their advantage like this. Embarrassed because it's hard to understand how they couldn't be more ambitious at work. It's not that companies are that great at rewarding getting things done (sometimes they are…), but it's that getting something cool done is rewarding in its own right. Why don't they want that feeling… ?

Re: Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do?

#106

Post by soneca »

omnicognate wrote: post #39

Software development isn't a matter of sitting down and generating a fixed amount of code per hour. The rate of writing code is hugely variable. It's not unusual for most of my "productive" (as in typing actual code) time to be concentrated in a few particular days in a month. The time not spent typing (or being in meetings, doing admin, etc) isn't actually "unproductive" though. It's mostly spent solving problems, a…

Well, they said they don’t do anything some days and bullshit their way to the next standup. It is clear to me where they stand at.

Re: Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do?

#107

Post by icedchai »

pydry wrote: post #75
syspec wrote: post #55

> Do people regularly run into coworkers like me during their career and simply ignore it because they find it too awkward to criticize them? Yes exactly this, especially at larger companies. I know a few of those developers, and they sit right near me... They find a way to make any task take forever... If it was a smaller company they would be called out, but at my [very, very] large company - its very hard to get f…

Large companies have a tendency to throw up all sorts of impediments to actually getting shit done. Simple tasks can take 3 weeks because there are 7-9 dependencies throwing sand in the gears. This not only provides plenty of cover for not getting stuff done it also saps the motivation to get it done quickly. Like, if X team sits on your request for a week that prevents Y feature from getting out are you really gonna…

Yep. Or never mind dependencies: you're simply getting interrupted so many times that between zoom calls, slacks, and emails, that a 2 day tasks turns into 2 weeks.

Re: Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do?

#108

Post by spaniard89277 »

pydry wrote: post #75
syspec wrote: post #55

> Do people regularly run into coworkers like me during their career and simply ignore it because they find it too awkward to criticize them? Yes exactly this, especially at larger companies. I know a few of those developers, and they sit right near me... They find a way to make any task take forever... If it was a smaller company they would be called out, but at my [very, very] large company - its very hard to get f…

Large companies have a tendency to throw up all sorts of impediments to actually getting shit done. Simple tasks can take 3 weeks because there are 7-9 dependencies throwing sand in the gears. This not only provides plenty of cover for not getting stuff done it also saps the motivation to get it done quickly. Like, if X team sits on your request for a week that prevents Y feature from getting out are you really gonna…

> Large companies have a tendency to throw up all sorts of impediments to actually getting shit done.

This. People get tired of the enormous overhead everything has, and gets lazy in the end.

I work for an ISP and I have my days, but some weeks I can't care less. I tried so many times to drill into people's minds how to not get tangled by complexity and then watching them just do the opposite...

Now I'm teaching myself programming so I can get out of this, but It seems I'm only going to upgrade my pay and be bitten by the same problems.

Re: Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do?

#109

Post by trulyme »

neilk wrote: post #84

Please indulge my curiosity. This might be wildly unrelated but... how attractive are you, physically? Are you thin? Are you taller than most people in your peer group? Do you more or less resemble the "dominant" demographic where you live? That is, the same gender presentation, ethnicity, etc. as most of your government and business leaders. Are you a citizen of the country where you live?

Would love to hear your hypothesis, care to share it?

Re: Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do?

#110

Post by josefrichter »

Just the other day I met a friend, a fellow developer. We both worked on fairly large projects with dozens of developers. We came to conclusion that on projects beyond certain size in certain type of corporations it’s actually in nobody’s interest to ever finish the project. That would kill the cash cow. So managers in those companies love people like OP, because they help them achieve the same goal: never achieve the goal..
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