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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?

#811

Post by markb139 »

ploxiln wrote: post #717

> Do people regularly run into coworkers like me during their career and simply ignore it because they find it too awkward to criticize them? Have I just been incredibly lucky and every boss I have had is too incompetent to notice? Do I have imposter syndrome and I am actually a 10x developer whose laziness makes them a 1x developer? Lazy developers don't really bother me, if you do a couple hours of high-quality wor…

I’ve worked with a genuine 0.1x developer. Not only were they unproductive (which is fine if you are new or inexperienced in an area), but they actually reduced the productivity of others in the team. I think sometimes this was deliberate as a plan to get the team reassigned. Luckily I was a contractor and could largely ignore the politics and just get on with work.

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

#812

Post by neilk »

10hr wrote: post #768
neilk wrote: post #84

Please indulge my curiosity. This might be wildly unrelated but... how attractive are you, physically? Are you thin? Are you taller than most people in your peer group? Do you more or less resemble the "dominant" demographic where you live? That is, the same gender presentation, ethnicity, etc. as most of your government and business leaders. Are you a citizen of the country where you live?

I'm not OP, but I am similar to him in that I cheated/got carried through CS, have produced very little, and now have ~$900k in my 20s. I'm short, male, not physically attractive, but not overweight. People enjoy having me around on the team; I'm a citizen of the country, so not worried about getting kicked out if I'm canned I've also never stayed somewhere 2+ years I almost exited the industry this year, but I'm goi…

Well, good on you for getting so far so quickly.

Did you accumulate 900K in wages, options, or through blockchain speculation? Not sure how you could get to 900K so quickly.

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

#813

Post by throwaway254370 »

omnicognate wrote: post #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, a…

I see myself very much like the person in the original question.

For me, I try to do put in sheer effort on a regular basis. It is just that more day than not, I just can't bring myself to do it. I end up spending more time berating myself for not working, slacking off, writing this answer on HN, etc, than actually working.

The sad (or perhaps enlightening?) thing is that it has always been like this. Since school, I would always do work at the last possible second. The only save is that I actually do a good job at the end, so it goes unnoticed. But the process is excruciating, and looking back at week after week of something like 5-10 hours per week is frustrating.

Like the original question, I also "lie" in standups. I get why people say it is unethical, but I can't bring myself to saying I wasted the whole day yesterday on reddit.

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

#814

Post by ed_elliott_asc »

ploxiln wrote: post #717

> Do people regularly run into coworkers like me during their career and simply ignore it because they find it too awkward to criticize them? Have I just been incredibly lucky and every boss I have had is too incompetent to notice? Do I have imposter syndrome and I am actually a 10x developer whose laziness makes them a 1x developer? Lazy developers don't really bother me, if you do a couple hours of high-quality wor…

Massively agree with this, either do nothing or do it right. I’m a contractor and change around a fair bit and when I join a project you can tell if it is good or ok or terrible.

My current project is terrible, the people who set it up tried but have that real lack of understanding what is required (they have clean code but no tests) it is really hard to debug and takes forever to deliver anything. If they had just done nothing I could have set it up properly when I started and we could have been done months ago.

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

#815

Post by DeathArrow »

It depends of the work I am tasked with. If it is boring and tedious, I tend to become lazy. If I find it interesting, I tend to work more.

If I am tasked with design and implementation, I tend to enjoy more so I tend to work more. If I am tasked with just the implementation, I tend to work less.

It also depends on teams. I worked in teams where the product owner wasn't very pushy and the all team mates tried to work as little as possible and I worked in teams where high pressure was the norm, the product owner was very pushing, team mates committed to over work and kind of pressured their pears to overwork, too.

In the low pressure teams we had less code of higher quality, in the high pressure teams we had tons of code of less quality which kind of needed rewrites.

If someone asks me, I don't think either of the extremes is good. A team or developer should produce a reasonable amount of work of good quality.

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

#816

Post by bodge5000 »

Your situation sounds similar to mine, especially not understanding all the technical terms that are thrown around, although I didn't go to university and am self taught (which I always thought explained the lack of knowledge of technical terms, but perhaps not).

> Do people regularly run into coworkers like me during their career and simply ignore it because they find it too awkward to criticize them?

In my experience and guesses, I dont think anyone (or at least the majority of people) in this industry (or possibly any industry) is entirely sure of their own competance, so they're worried about the same thing from you.

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

#817

Post by lewisjoe »

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…

While this is true, I strongly doubt OP is talking about this case. In your example although it did look like you didn't work from the outside, but in your mind you were still thinking about the problem, technically speaking, working.

The case in discussion is how we developers do just the bare minimum consciously (or unconsciously) and the fake away the rest. Even with this perspective I don't consider it wrong at all. Our developer brains can be in "the zone" for not more than 2-5 hours everyday. If we force ourselves to be in the zone more than that, we are just damaging our runway and heading towards a burnout.

That said, the only thing we could do is - learn how to increase our zone hours. John carmack went to the extent of measuring his bathroom breaks as a way to extend these focus zones. While that is a bit extreme. generally as developers our antidote should be to optimize our focus zones to what fits us.

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

#818

Post by conradludgate »

I was chatting with my partner about tech work the other day, and how from the outside our jobs look really so easy, and that anyone can learn it and achieve the same output as any of us.

I also think I don't work too hard, but I realise that I'm limited by how fast my brain can connect ideas. But it's always working in the background. In between work I scroll HN/Twitter and participate in programming forums. This is a personal endeavour but it helps my brain work on the ideas in the background. I've had plenty of 'Eureka' moments throughout my programming life.

Besides those, part of my job is just having knowledge. The experience to already have a good understanding of the inner workings of a process, or to intuitively understand a problem from the beginning. To know what parts will be hard and what will be easy.

The knowledge we have is very hard estimate. I think that's why we have such a big problem with our hiring systems at the moment.

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

#819

Post by i2shar »

derekp7 wrote: post #730
what_is_orcas wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 time needed to produce the deliverable of that work. I would say that I do this too. There's a lot of stuff I can more or less do on autopilot and stuff that requires actual attention and finesse , for lack of a better word. I feel like management thinks that I'm good at my job for all of the a…

The way I explained it to my boss, is to give him a list of numbers to add up in his head and come up with a total. He looked at the list for a couple minutes, then gave me the answer (I framed the whole thing as a riddle). I then looked at him and said it looked like he wasn't working on the problem for the last couple minutes. He replied that he was thinking during that time. My reply back is "That is what I have t…

If you have to explain that to your boss, you are working for the wrong person. We are in a creative field, he shouldn't have to be explained this.

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

#820

Post by spc476 »

bartread wrote: post #86
pydry wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large companies have a tendency to throw up all sorts of impediments to actually getting shit done. Simple tasks can take 3 weeks because there are 7-9 dependencies throwing sand in the gears. This not only provides plenty of cover for not getting stuff done it also saps the motivation to get it done quickly. Like, if X team sits on your request for a week that prevents Y feature from getting out are you really gonna…

Wow. A mere 3 weeks to get something done. I worked somewhere once where it took 8 months to implement a two page sign-up process, and I counted about 60 people involved. A colleague said I didn't know the half of it and that there were actually more than 100 people involved. I didn't last very long.

It took us five years to get our customer (the Oligarchic Cell Phone Companies) to add some additional information to one SIP header we consume.
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