31–40 of 81 posts
Not being disturbed. Being able to stay focused.
I suspect that open offices cost more on productivity than they save.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's basically my job now. Absolute technical freedom with absolute responsibility. It's made me very cautious about adopting any 'new'/'shiny' technology, I'm sticking to things that already have mass market adoption and a proven track record because I simply don't have the time to disappear down rabbit holes. I keep a scratch list of "this looks interesting, check back in a year" and sometimes even then it goes b…
Besides for research projects or your own company, in my opinion this should always be the case. I see people literally screwing their employers by introducing ‘shiny X’ (usually seen in a frontpage post on HN...) saying it will be faster. It never is in the greater scheme of things and it always costs more because it will have issues.
Outside of work on my own time I play with things I think might be useful or worth using a year or two from now, if they are fantastic, if not I learnt something and had fun.
At work it's PHP (I inherited that project sadly), C# and Java, On my radar in the next year are Kotlin and F# (Kotlin particularly since we have java applications in production on industrial handhelds and the codebase previous dev left on those is...worrying).
As for people screwing their employers by picking unproven new shiny, I think in the main part that's because of mismatched goals, Employer wants reliable software but doesn't understand what dev is doing and Employee wants a resume that will get them hired so skates to where the puck will be on the ooh shiny.
I've been programming since I was a kid in the 80's and the one thing I've learnt (often the hard way) that no language/framework/library is a substitute for thinking things out, that and everything is a trade off in some direction.
A 5mm square A4 pad and a pack of decent coloured pens has saved me thousands of hours over the years.
Not being disturbed. Being able to stay focused.
This. I've found a pair of 3M Peltor Optime III do a pretty good job at keeping people away while I'm working. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Peltor-Optime-Earmuffs-Headband-Bla... North American equivalent appears to be: https://www.amazon.com/3M-Earmuff-Protectors-Hearing-Protect... https://www.amazon.ca/3M-Peltor-Optime-Earmuffs-H10A/dp/B000...
You have to let them know why you are doing it.
- Designers spending hours on particular pages with no consideration on how it affects other areas of the site.
- Need some tools but the process of justifying and convincing management that we need them leads to just buying them myself.
- Sharing common code snippets between team members
- Forced to stay online and be receptive on Slack while attempting to focus on code
- Open plan offices and the constant deluge of inspirational talks/events (I work in an "innovation space")
- No time between projects. One's done then it's another, and another.
- Crappy Jira tickets with little information.
- Jira
Apologies, this may have been mostly a rant. It's been that kinda morning.
Working with other Developers.
Requirements that are extremely unclear.
Working with other Developers.