451–460 of 1001 posts
Maybe part of it is that when you do do something, it actually counts. And you don't waste time in perfectionism or ideology.
This would make you a 10x developer, but it mightn't scale up to a 40 hour week, because the non-working time will partly be used to assess what is really necesaary.
> 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 used to be very much in favor of "getting by" and a "good enough is good enough" mentally. After all, it's the rational point of view. Why work more, if you can work less? But the truth of the matter is that once you put your entire being into something, you immediately find value in it. Anything you do fully, however menial, magically becomes worthwhile and fills you with a sense of pride and accomplishment.
Atleast that's my experience. If you want a random person's advice, I'd say try it out and see for yourself.
Also like others said passive processing - chewing on an issue for 4 days and having the breakthrough in 20 minutes - if you only were paid for the 20 minutes it would be completely unsustainable, you would constantly grind and not recieve the rewards for that exponential (and humanly impossible) rise in productivity
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.
But it's the agile standups that force the bullshitting. If you spent a day background thinking of best ways to achieve the goal while resting in your backyard hammock, there's no way you can say that out loud at the standup. So you're forced to come up with some random bullshit to fill your standup minutes.
That's why daily status reports are so incredibly toxic in any creative or intellectual field. Progress doesn't happen in neat daily chunks like that.
I've been a software engineer and managed software engineers for 20 years and worked in all kinds of businesses. This is both normal and mostly acceptable, in my professional opinion. Doing just as much work as your employer requires and no more is way less of a problem than employees who actively steal, commit fraud, bring drama and distract other team members, or are introducing defects because they've faked their…
No, I never lied. It was exhausting.
Most of us developers and our managers perfectly understand that it’s not a paper-turning job and they really have no better options out there. In practice there is no supermen, only idiots who break things eventually in various ways. (Sorry if you, reader, are a rockstar developer. Nothing personal, but I’m tired to clean out these Augean stables)
The only exception is the flow, when I can shut the door and code straight through a day in a field that is completely my competence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Throwaway for this one... It's possible that you've got cause and effect the wrong way round: consider maybe that your self worth is derived mostly from your extracurricular activities because you're failing at work. You put almost no effort in, achieve very little, are almost entirely disengaged, but, since you're a normal human, being a loser doesn't fit your self-image so you look to find meaning elsewhere in area…
> consider maybe that your self worth is derived mostly from your extracurricular activities because you're failing at work. You say that like it's a bad thing. I would much rather my self worth be derived from the things that I choose to do, versus something I have to do in order to survive.
The bottom line is, you have to find a way to get satisfaction from somewhere to be mentally healthy, and if have to work anyway, getting some satisfaction out of it is preferable to not getting any.