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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?

#541

Post by Apocryphon »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #334
jollybean wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" This is both normal and mostly acceptable, in my professional opinion. " It's definitely not acceptable. It's a form of White Collar / 1st World Corruption. Taking money from people with expectation of value, while not providing that value is Fraud. Just because we don't always have great oversight, does not abnegate our responsibilities towards trying to do a good job. This notion of 'I Can Get Away With It' and '…

"It's a form of White Collar / 1st World Corruption" Dear lord, is this The 'first world corruption'? With corporate profits at record high? Amidst *checks lists' rampant corporate tax avoidance, runaway climate change, balooning executive pay, unaccountable executives who's create Boeing Max or 2008-style events every few years Money in politics Survaliance capitalism, exploding house prices, (add whatever else both…

Don’t forget wage theft!

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

#542

Post by dennisy »

ConfessionTime wrote: post #227
cattown wrote: post #132

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…

>However! I will say that this way of working and living comes with some significant hazard to your mental health. Doing something you don't like, care about, or believe in for decades long periods of time can really mess with your sense of self worth and happiness in life. You only have one life, do something with it that is satisfying. Get out of the rat race. This is where my comment about remote work comes into p…

> I can't imagine ever returning to an office in which there is more pressure to spend 8 hours a day sitting in front of my computer.

But this is what you are paid for. Do you not feel that this is what you should be doing in the time you are contracted to work?

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

#543

Post by pdimitar »

ztratar wrote: post #538
pdimitar wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when delivering 10x more code is objectively a better performance?

Perhaps not objectively, but PRs will often be reviewed during performance review season. So seeing someone at 10x less than someone else is a major red flag, as long as the quality of PRs is roughly equal.

I get where you are coming from but I still disagree that we should try and game the system like that. Instead our peers and CTOs should grow the "realism" brain lobe.

This hits even closer home to me because I am about to get evaluated this Monday and my PR performance has been pretty sub-par in the last 3-4 weeks -- I've been put in a project that has been abandoned for like 3 years and only recently picked up again and 90% of what I do is documenting and taking notes and creating GitHub issues; coding is sadly still a low priority activity because there's still chaos.

But you know what? I don't care anymore. Let them fire me if they use broken metrics. I am doing my work very diligently and I am making sure the project will be in a better shape after me. If they can't appreciate that then I am not bothered by such people viewing me negatively. They are in the wrong, not me.

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

#544

Post by strken »

oakfr wrote: post #305
medvezhenok wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is to embrace minimalism / the FIRE lifestyle and hopefully skate by long enough to not have to work by the time the company folds and live off of investments -> then into retirement). I think most "underwork" on the job is a motivational issue and stems from one of a few overlapping reasons: 1) No way to promotion/advancement (dead end job) 2) Overqualified and bored 3) Unclear goals, no feedback, an…

I've read about the FIRE theory time and again. For some reason, I don't buy it. I fail to believe in the plan that consists in building enough FU money to then "be free". Free to do what? What was the plan originally? I think the real meaning of life is to do what you care about today, _with the constraints you have today_.

Firstly, being able to walk away from a job or career with your income secure can be psychologically valuable even if you never do it.

Secondly, what I really want to do is exactly what I'm doing right now, except for three days a week while still supporting a family. That means supplementing income with investments and owning a home to cut down on expenditure.

The opinion that the meaning of life is to be laser-focused on a single goal for a hundred hours a week is common, but I disagree with it. I don't think I'm productive or happy working even 40 hours, while in 32 or 24 I get much more done and can take better care of myself.

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

#545

Post by pdimitar »

khazhoux wrote: post #539
pdimitar wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when delivering 10x more code is objectively a better performance?

If we're talking about point samples, then no, it's not a good measure of performance. You may spend weeks fixing a single line in the kernel, meanwhile someone else cranks out hundreds of lines of verbose but straightforward UI code every week. And also, we can all imagine a developer who cranks out gigantic commits by padding their comments, or just being verbose, or writing bad complicated code, or even just by mo…

I completely agree that using a median LOC over 12 or so months is much more representative. My point was that many times, especially when you are a senior programmer, you have a ton of other stuff to do like making or curating issues in Jira / GitHub, produce or edit documentation, make onboarding guides, introduce dev tooling, and many more. Normal coding can seriously take a back seat for literal months when you are senior and yet you still produce a lot of value.

So yep, with your clarification I am fully with you. As long as we measure people over a long enough timeline then yes, LOC can be an accurate metric. But a lot of other things have to be taken into account as well.

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

#546

Post by condorito »

somethoughts wrote: post #377
ConfessionTime wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>However! I will say that this way of working and living comes with some significant hazard to your mental health. Doing something you don't like, care about, or believe in for decades long periods of time can really mess with your sense of self worth and happiness in life. You only have one life, do something with it that is satisfying. Get out of the rat race. This is where my comment about remote work comes into p…

As a SW developer you provide two benefits to the company: - the build phase: develop spaghetti code - the maintain/insurance phase: maintain the spaghetti code and keep it up to date with the software package dependencies required by the spaghetti code In the long term its easier/cheaper to have the person who originally wrote the spaghetti code be around to maintain and add one off small feature improvements to it…

In my experience if the system is important enough, once you ship a couple of features to production you can coast there until the system is replaced. If the features were core the better.

I don´t like it but after 2 decades of coding I have come to accept it as it is.

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

#547

Post by lolc »

littlestymaar wrote: post #524
cvwright wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to point out that this > I truly believed in the mission, worked hard, was paid a lot, achieved great things and was overall very satisfied. and this > used to leave at 5pm sharp are not mutually exclusive. We have this weird thing in tech where we think that, to be passionate, you have to work yourself into the ground. But this is stupid. There's organizational psych research going back decades showing t…

> Just wanted to point out that this > > I truly believed in the mission, worked hard, was paid a lot, achieved great things and was overall very satisfied. > and this > > used to leave at 5pm sharp > are not mutually exclusive. For some people it is actually. I'm an evening person and my personal productivity starts increasing during the afternoon. If I leave at 5pm, I leave right when I reach the peak. So when I ca…

When I work at night I won't be in the next day. Or return in the afternoon to clean the branch for review.

Sometimes I work a weekend. Love the ability to work on the rainy days and go outside when the weather is good.

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

#548

Post by jollybean »

sophacles wrote: post #417
jollybean wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" This is both normal and mostly acceptable, in my professional opinion. " It's definitely not acceptable. It's a form of White Collar / 1st World Corruption. Taking money from people with expectation of value, while not providing that value is Fraud. Just because we don't always have great oversight, does not abnegate our responsibilities towards trying to do a good job. This notion of 'I Can Get Away With It' and '…

If I go to widgetco and purchase a widget for $100, but it only costs them $50 to make that widget (including all salaries, marketing etc), what do we call that? That's right profit. They provided me the thing I wanted for a price I agreed to, and they did so in a way that generated some extra $ for them. Why is it Fraud then when a worker is asked to provide KPIs in exchange for $salary, and meets them in less than…

This is the wrong analogy - this is not a situation where there is transparent exchange of good or services.

The OP indicated lying literally in the title indicating there is a lack of transparency and oversight, probably at a systematic level.

So adjust the analogy:

You are buying 'Medical Grade' widgets for $100 a pop for the last 5 years for your projects.

Turns out, the Widgets you were buying were cheaply made and not up to specification.

Because it's difficult for you to check the integrity of the widgets (i.e. there is a lot of trust in the system), you 'trusted' the source only to be defrauded.

And FYI even at $100 a pop, I'm sure you could care less how much or little profit they were making, so long as the terms were clear. Much like nobody cares if an employee is only working 2 hours a week, if everyone thinks that value is provided.

But that's almost assuredly not the case.

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

#549

Post by MaxfordAndSons »

julianlam wrote: post #124
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…

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 notwithsta…

Indeed, I made the mistake of working too hard early on in my tenure at my last job, and was quickly rewarded with more responsibility than I could handle, leading to burnout. This time around I'm trying to be more tactical in my rate of exertion.

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

#550

Post by analog31 »

dennisy wrote: post #542
ConfessionTime wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>However! I will say that this way of working and living comes with some significant hazard to your mental health. Doing something you don't like, care about, or believe in for decades long periods of time can really mess with your sense of self worth and happiness in life. You only have one life, do something with it that is satisfying. Get out of the rat race. This is where my comment about remote work comes into p…

> I can't imagine ever returning to an office in which there is more pressure to spend 8 hours a day sitting in front of my computer. But this is what you are paid for. Do you not feel that this is what you should be doing in the time you are contracted to work?

In the US, very few full time professionals work under contract. In fact, companies go out of their way to assert that there is no contractual relationship (the "employment at will" principle). They do not count their hours, and are in fact not allowed to do so.

With that said, I'd find it hard to work such a short week. The time I spend that's unaccounted for, I tend to spend helping other people at my workplace, learning new stuff, etc. I enjoy the work. Granted, I don't work as a programmer.

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