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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?

#971

Post by mbrodersen »

throwaway1777 wrote: post #113
batmaniam wrote: post #22

The same could be asked about upper management. They earn 10x our pay, so their output is 10x more value than our work, and they work 10x harder, right? In our normal 8 hour work day, they must work 80 hours. Except a full day is 24 hours. Why is the onus always on the bottom workers to be honest? Why are we trying to feel guilty about our working hours vs how much we're paid? Because it's clear salary is not tied to…

The whole point is the compensation is not based on how hard you work but the value you provide and what the market will support. Of course upper management works roughly the same hours as everyone else, but they also have far more responsibility.

They in general seem to accept credit for other peoples work and delegate blame to others as well. I don’t call that being responsible.

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

#972

Post by cutemonster »

rootusrootus wrote: post #239
snarf21 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also depends on the company. I've worked at companies where the #1 project can change weekly and by that I mean the previous project is completely abandoned for the new shiny. If you've worked at a place like this (there are lots of them), you have to not burn yourself out. It is very demoralizing to give your all to a UI just to have it literally thrown away. Sometimes slow rolling can let you move things forward…

With my current manager this has become a skill I'm honing. He's senile and asks for all sorts of things he will have forgotten about in a few days. So I slow roll any new idea he gets excited about until it has percolated for at least a week or two. The trick is figuring out how to wait long enough to avoid doing throw-away work without waiting long enough that he feels ignored. But, like I said, he's senile, so tha…

> He's senile

Figuratively speaking, right? (Or did you mean literally? Dementia? If so, is he old)

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

#973

Post by cutemonster »

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #790
sidazhou wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

let talent=0 then productivity = (time * effort)^0 = 1 = 100% Sounds about right

Yup! Time and effort absolutely count. But the "star line" folk out of Heinlein's Beyond this Horizon are the ones that catapult the entire species forward. The Wright brothers, the Norman Bourlags, the Nikola Teslas, the Alan Turings.

What about charismatic poor decision makers, pulling everyone in the wrong direction? Or evil geniuses

Maybe multiply with sign(talent)? And the exponent could be abs(talent):

    sing(talent) *
       (effort * time) ^
                 abs(talent)

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

#974

Post by mmsimanga »

soneca wrote: post #106
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…

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.

Maybe the problem is the need to have feedback at the stand up. This assumes writing code is linear and is something that can be routinely managed through a stand up.

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

#976

Post by marstall »

jollybean wrote: post #247
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…

" 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 '…

but let me get this straight. It's OK for the monopoly-seeking/having company shareholders to become billionaires off the labor of their workers while sitting on their asses?

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

#977

Post by marstall »

ryanmercer wrote: post #322

Man, that must be nice. I've already worked about 62 full time weeks this year and we aren't 52 weeks into it, I just worked my 16th thanksgiving in a row too and even with all of that OT I won't even make the median household income for my state this year (which is lower than the federal quite a bit). Meanwhile my CEO went from 11 million to 54 million in compensation over the last 2 years. Every second of my day is…

thanks for offering this perspective, which is much more normal and common than the experiences offered here in the software engineering bubble!

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

#978

Post by siproprio »

Well, to be honest, reading those comments, everything seems to fit together!

On my first internship, it seems like all my bosses were like this!

Now, I don't know if those are the norm, or if I just had bad luck and worked at a shitty place for my first internship!

But yeah, I constantly feel like an imposter.

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

#979

Post by throw_this_one »

Same here and there's nothing wrong with it. Do what you gotta do to get what you want. Sometimes your team's goal line up with yours, and sometimes they only line up 30%.

My goal personally is to get a promotion to Senior, a solid 20% salary bump and then cruise control like you are.

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

#980

Post by usrbinbash »

>Are most of us secretly lying about how much we are working?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Coders, Developers, Software Engineers, etc. (use whatever term you want) don't function like most "working" people. We don't work by filling in spreadsheets, shuffling papers and sorting cards, we also don't fix screws or talk a lot or cut hair.

A lot of our work is a) absorbing knowledge b) experimenting with things c) thinking about things. This then culminates in short but productive bursts of what non-coders would perceive as "actual work", aka. punching code into a keyboard. This btw. is the reason why hackers and "it guys" are always portrayed in movies frantically typing on a keyboard...its the only way of telling the vast majority of mankind "this person is doing stuff".

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