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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?

#61

Post by garmaine »

jeffalbertson wrote: post #47

you're not alone. I probably work the same amount as you. I ship stuff the org feels customers love, I get promotions, and get paid well. I could grind so much more but I like to spend my day in other ways. I like to read the news in the morning, clock out at 5 etc. We have the ability to "work" this little and still be valuable because writing code has a very high barrier to entry. That 5-10 hrs of work took years o…

> I ship stuff

This is the key point, I think, and the only thing that matters. Does OP ship stuff too? If so, he's got imposter syndrome.

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

#62

Post by cblconfederate »

I work for myself and most of my days are lazy. Today i spent most of it on reddit. Programming is the job of automating your job, if you do it right you shouldn't have much work. In an office environment, i easily tune into the collective LARPing of being busy.

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

#63

Post by syspec »

giantg2 wrote: post #49

I got a bad rating this year for being slow. We have about an average of 4 hours of meetings everyday. I'm not sure when they want us to get work done. I'm tired of working hard and not it not paying off. I work, but don't go too fast. So I have been called out and punished for it.

I'm with you on this, the additional problem with the meetings is that they are sprinkled throughout the day.

I know if I have a meeting starting in 30 minutes, I am not able to go into the deep thinking required to solve difficult problems.

If I am in a flow state, and the meeting is an 1 hour away, it tends to break that and I look up at the clock once in a while to make sure I don't miss it (which can happen in flow state!)

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

#64

Post by dsr_ »

I've hired people like this by accident, and let them go as soon as I figured out they weren't going to change. I have not noticed them having trouble finding other jobs -- almost always at much larger companies.

On the other hand, I assume that people typically have 2-4 hours of good thinking in them per day; that it takes time to learn complex systems; that a smoothly running system should not need attention every moment of the day.

"I have probably bombed more tech interviews than I have passed." This is perfectly normal for almost everyone.

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

#65

Post by hindsightbias »

I have always said Tim Ferris is a workaholic. That comes down to time of hard thinking and creative coding.

The other 50 hours a week is process, support, debug, test, documentation, attending meetings… We’re not paid for ESLOCs, we’re paid for all the crap around it.

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

#66

Post by pictur »

dang wrote: post #26
pictur wrote: post #13

You have very serious ego problems. I think you should focus on that.

Please don't cross into personal attack. It just makes everything worse. Perhaps you don't feel you owe people with "ego problems" better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Have fun with your crappy community rules. You can permanently delete my account.

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

#67

Post by abledon »

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 first was driven mad by people like this... 5 days work and 2 lines of java code committed modifying class visibility etc. then I slowly became them after realizing busting my ass everyday for a corporation was not worth it. (also reading gervais' piece on losers/clueless/sociopath triad in orgs)

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

#68

Post by celticninja »

i_dont_know_ wrote: post #18

I think there's also something to be said for passive processing. Sometimes I'll know I need to write some code or some function and I'll just think about it in the back of my head while doing other things, sometimes for a whole day or two. Then I'll sit down and write it in like 20-30 minutes. Did I work 20-30 minutes, or have I been working for a day or two? I would say a day or two, and the 20-30 minutes was the t…

I agree, I used to think I was like OP, coasting in between being quite productive. One day I took a bath, ended up thinking about my ticket, got out of the bath and did the ticket in an hour. The thinking time was definitely work just not in the traditional sense. And yes I could have done the ticket without the bath, it may even have taken the same time, but the code wouldn't have been as clean and there would have been a few more commits.

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

#69

Post by penjelly »

countvonbalzac wrote: post #56
ALotOfBees wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

50 lines on a legacy system is much harder to write than the equivalent just jamming out new stuff. Also it's hard to compare lines cause it's not a language agnostic measure.

agreed on both counts.

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

#70

Post by pvarangot »

byoung2 wrote: post #5

Imagine a security guard at an office building. 90% of the time might be sitting in a booth watching monitors. The other 10% of the time is buzzing people in or making rounds. But that 90% of the time when they are sitting around is important, since they are on call. So you are like a security guard. Your employer gladly pays you for the 90% of the time you are doing nothing, because they need the comfort of having a…

I think if that was his situation he wouldn't have to "bullshit through standup". Just say "nothing showed up" or "having a creative block" or whatever and then either get help or something.

It's not like the security guard at all, the security guard is not lying or consciously giving a false sense of what his contributions to the team are.

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