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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?

#31
The Pareto distribution applies to software development.

And aggravated in my experience because:

- Its really hard to work with multiple people on the same project ( and when you do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law )

- People Managers usually think they are buying bus-factor insurance and throughput for each additional developer. Additionally they want more devs to indicate they are an important team.

So this all conspires to you being in the 80% doing the remaining 20% of the work without getting payed less or being called out.

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

#32
post #20

> I am actually a 10x developer whose laziness makes them a 1x developer? You're capable of being a 4-5x developer compared to what you're doing currently (if you think about 5-10 hours versus 40 hours a week). But perhaps you lack mechanisms for motivation and continuing to explore spaces that benefit your team/org and might lead to faster promotions/career growth. I.e., just haven't figured out as many intersection…

I think it's important to consider that an "hour" out of a 40 hour week might be vastly less productive than an "hour" in a 5 or 10 hour week.

Flow state is a thing. You can't fake it.

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

#33
post #4

i monitor my work using a plugin and usually get 2-5 hours of code a day... and i have to do all kinds of communication work as well (JIRA, investigation, prepping QA test cases, documenting PRs) i looked back and was getting 1k lines merged every 2 weeks on average. nothing crazy I know but theres much more then just coding to my job, thats just reality. Days/weeks where i dont get a certain amount of code done i fe…

1k lines per week sounds like quite a lot. I'm a dev whose role is mainly supporting legacy systems and sometimes I write probably ~50 lines in a week and feel incredibly productive due to the issues I've resolved.

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

#34
I had monthly promotions ( pay) when shit hit the fan at my previous job because the CEO only sold ( a lot ) without planning and without taking normal hours into consideration.

It's a dystopian feeling when you go Friday on 21:00-22:00 ( tired) and say to the boss: "we need to talk on Monday" and just leave the office a couple of times. ( I was also working on the weekends at home, had my laptop when I went swimming Sunday morning and when/if I went out fyi ).

Those promotions were directly valued to the value outputted. And were then transferred to my new job with normal hours.

Conclusion: it's not about the hours. It's at the value you create and that ( eg. For small companies) they can count on you more than someone else. But ofc. There is a limit, which is why i happily left my previous job.

Fyi: To me, It seems so obvious when people are slacking. I get that people have an off day, but spending 8 hours and they don't even know yet which component they need to adjust is a no-brainer about their effort after working in that project for a year. ( When I saw that, we went to the html and there it is: the name of the angular component "" -> 1 minute. Ugh)

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

#35

> Do I have imposter syndrome and I am actually a 10x developer Yes, after 20 years of doing it, I believe you've at last discovered that you're an incredible talent.

Smart people generally understand hubris a bit better. Are you going exclaim how humble you are next?

Not sure about your intelligence IQ but your emotional IQ is in the gutter.

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

#36
post #25

This varies a lot on the job. I can guarantee you’d spend more time at my current place. In fact, half of that time you’re currently spending would be at least on interviewing people - and another half would be on the mandatory meetings. You’d easily spend a lot more time on the projects. Many of my coworkers work nights and weekends. It’s not uncommon to see people starting around 8-9am and logging off around 7pm fo…

why

Why so much work? Understaffed orgs and exceedingly high expectations of engineers. A lot of management has no social life or life outside of work - so they expect the same of their subordinates.

I’ll move on after a year or two. I just wanted some name brand recognition and to give the company a chance. I was tired of going with unknown places.

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

#37
I think about this every time i see someone talking about how their particular workflow is great because they have a hotkey that saves them having to lift their pinky to a different key, saving them almost 1 second per day.

There probably are people like that out there but i strongly suspect they're very much the minority.

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

#38
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.

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

#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, and a lot of that effort happens below the level of consciousness. A lot of it actually happens during sleep. It's effort, though, and it costs. You can't do an infinite amount of it in infinitesimal time.

I suggest 2 tests to see if you're lazy or dumb:

1. Try to be more productive by sheer effort of will. Just say to yourself "this month I will write more code than usual" and set to it with a positive attitude. If you succeed you were being lazy and now you know how to not be lazy. If, as is more likely from what you've said, you fail, then you're not lazy. You're working at your maximum capacity but you have a poor understanding of what constitutes "work" in the job you do.

2. If, by the above test, you are not lazy, then look at how well you do relative to your peers. If you're holding your own (as you say you are), you're not dumb either.

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

#40
If I have a story to complete during a sprint, and I spend an hour looking through the specifications and looking at the existing code and APIs etc., the company would probably be worse off if I immediately began coding a solution. I have two weeks to do the work, so why rush it? The company will be better off if I implement a better solution.

We're not flipping hamburgers or soldering widgets on an assembly line. We're constantly adding to systems that get increasingly complex over time. The UX that the product manager sees is just a small percentage of the work. Haste makes waste, and a stitch in time can save nine.

There are times I have spent a day banging on some problem, and I am up to even 1 AM trying to fix it and I give up and go to sleep, after a few hours of hitting my head against a brick wall. I wake up in the morning relaxed, and am hit with an epiphany, I go to the computer to code it and it works. I don't know if I am dreaming up a solution while I sleep, or a couple of seconds of a clear head beats hours of tiredly banging my head against the wall, but it has happened more than once to me, and I have heard the same from others.

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