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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?

#121

Post by p_l »

notJim wrote: post #103
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 adv…

Sometimes that feeling has been beaten out of us by various means.

I had a ton of ideas in many a job, rarely if ever I could get into conditions where I could even start working on them - usually the interesting stuff happened in secret side projects, off the company time.

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

#122

Post by tacostakohashi »

There is a book about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

Yours sounds like a textbook case. Reading it may give you some understanding of what's going on, and possibly what to do about it.

Perhaps you are a "duct taper" - your main job is actually to just be around ready to jump in when something goes wrong, not to ever actually change, fix or build anything.

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

#123

Post by rizkeyz »

It's a matter of motivation. I had project flushing in speed, with correct, tested code, happy clients and I also had other assignments, where a feature that that should take a week took a year.

That's insane about our field, the sheer variance in so many things we do.

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

#124

Post by julianlam »

notJim wrote: post #103
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 adv…

I could be completely wrong on this, but I think there's a bit of positive punishment at work.

If you do something quickly, and it is of high quality, it will probably get noticed, and your reward in addition to a sense of satisfaction, is more work. The satisfaction high won't override the punishment of more work, although salary will. However, salaried employees don't get paid more to do more work (bonus notwithstanding.)

Knowing that, it's not a far jump to realize that you can minimize your work but keep your salary, so long as your work output doesn't dip enough that you get fired.

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

#125

Post by fernandotakai »

oceanghost wrote: post #112
ckaygusu wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poincar%C3%A9 > He never spent a long time on a problem since he believed that the subconscious would continue working on the problem while he consciously worked on another problem. This is definitely a thing. Intellectual labor just isn't physical labor.

Most of the best ideas I've had in my career were in the shower before work. The problem is making that a regular occurrence.

ha! my wife once asked why i was speaking english while showering.

i told her that 1. i can only think in english when thinking about work and 2. saying stuff out loud helps me organize my thoughts and this is specially easy while showering because i don't really have to concentrate.

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

#126

Post by aresant »

There are two elements that I've observed drive acceptance in an organization to software developers "5 hour workweek"

(1) deep institutional knowledge - code debt / knowing how to work with peers in company system to get things done / understanding business objectives / etc

(2) ability to think dynamically and react quickly within institutional systems - edge case bugs / outages / competitive feature response

It's like having a fully staffed fire station in a small town

Most of the time the guys are there playing foosball, turning out for events, and saving kittens in trees but boy are you glad to have them when the shit hits the fan.

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

#127

Post by Kranar »

abledon wrote: post #101
Kranar wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No idea; most people I worked with drank coffee but never once was I exposed to performance enhancing drugs. At Microsoft I worked on IronPython and the people I worked with were productive not in the sense that they churned out 1000s and 1000s of lines of code a day, but they were productive in the sense that they were constantly outputting fairly novel solutions.

A similar thing was true at Google, I worked in the platforms division there (storage systems, BigTable, Linux kernel tweaking), and it was mostly about identifying bottlenecks and coming up with interesting solutions to squeeze out more performance. Most of this work wasn't like massive lines of code, but you had to really understand the problem at a deep level and have the kind of rigor and discipline to make changes to large systems without breaking anything in the process. That last bit was very hard to do, since coming up with optimizations that don't break anything is surprisingly difficult.

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

#128

Post by timwaagh »

I often struggle with starting. And then when I have started often I get stuck. It's not an easy job where you can just keep going. There also things like building that can take ages. Sometimes I need to wait for questions. We might not call this waiting working but since I still need to watch the screen I think it qualifies.

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

#129

Post by hpoe »

p_l wrote: post #121
notJim wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 adv…

Sometimes that feeling has been beaten out of us by various means. I had a ton of ideas in many a job, rarely if ever I could get into conditions where I could even start working on them - usually the interesting stuff happened in secret side projects, off the company time.

I think this is a big one, there comes a certain point where the bureaucracy simply squeezes the ambition and desire out of you. I hit that at some points, I just didn't want to work anymore excelling at my job made no difference to me or anyone else because even if I stood out and did excellently it wouldn't matter because I had to go to other teams or get other approvals to actually acomplish something.

I found myself spending time on leetcode, or learning emacs because I could justify those as improving my abilities. To quote Office Space "I have 4 different bosses, my only motivation is to not get hassled, that and fear of losing my job. But you know what Bob, that gets someone to work just hard enough to not get fired."

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

#130

Post by paxys »

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.

At Microsoft at least that wasn't my experience at all. I knew several people there who hadn't done any real productive work for the last 7-10 years, probably longer.
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