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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?

#991

Post by milofeynman »

BTCOG wrote: post #435
milofeynman wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still remember one guy who did that and he'd pass work to me I complained to my manager and nothing happened. I work a lot and am super driven. Don't like people like that.

I can assure you, the feeling is mutual. If you are the type who overachieves, would complain to a manager, and enjoys meetings, you should realize those fed up with banality and fake niceties of corporate office work that do just enough to get by really do not like you, either.

I don't overachieve or like meetings? I work normal hours and get stuff done. You're reading a lot into me without knowing anything about the situation. I don't have time to overachieve I have children and a wife with a career. Also smd

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

#993

Post by odonnellryan »

selcuka wrote: post #737
_clhx wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not upper management. Most upper management gets paid way too much for the value they bring. But, when you have the opportunity to work under an excellent CEO or CTO you will learn that they do bring 10x or even 100x the value you bring to the team.

> But, when you have the opportunity to work under an excellent CEO or CTO you will learn that they do bring 10x or even 100x the value you bring to the team. The same can be told about OP who claimed that they work 5-10 hours a week but their performance reviews have consistently ranged from mediocre to great. The point is, the hours you work is not an indicator for the value you bring to the team.

I absolutely agree.

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

#994

Post by odonnellryan »

mbrodersen wrote: post #970
_clhx wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not upper management. Most upper management gets paid way too much for the value they bring. But, when you have the opportunity to work under an excellent CEO or CTO you will learn that they do bring 10x or even 100x the value you bring to the team.

I have never seen that happen in practice. Can you give an example of a CEO who delivered 100x value to the company you worked for?

Yes. They do this in a lot of ways.

- Connections: industry, hires, investors

- Investing themselves into the company (bringing capital to help you grow)

- Domain specific knowledge. Hopefully they know the industry better than anyone.

- Management. Do not underestimate how far good management can go. It can really be a productivity multiplier - but the other way is true, too. If you have bad management, you're going to kill productivity.

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

#995

Post by odonnellryan »

viceroyalbean wrote: post #694
odonnellryan wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The normals? Come on guys. Plenty of software devs are actually working during the day. What are you guys doing if you're not working? Reading articles? Playing Halo?

I didn't interpret the comment to be about not working, but rather about the non-linear nature of programming work. If you have 100 documents to process then you are halfway through after 50 and it will presumably take a similar amount of time as the first 50 did. When writing code you might have written 10 lines of code in the past week, but the next day you write 200 because you've been thinking about the structure…

Agreed. I probably think about the problems I am trying to solve during most of the day. However, I don't think that is really work. That is just my brain not being able to shut off. And it isn't concentrated work - it is off and on.

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

#996

Post by odonnellryan »

MaxDPS wrote: post #700
odonnellryan wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The normals? Come on guys. Plenty of software devs are actually working during the day. What are you guys doing if you're not working? Reading articles? Playing Halo?

I mean ya, reading articles and documentation is a higher part of the job. But I’m this context, it’s not actively writing code.

Oh yeah totally. By articles I meant not work related stuff (like HN posts or something).

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

#997

Post by redisman »

ADHDBrain2 wrote: post #510

The facts are these: I work for a Fortune 100 company. Everyone reading this knows the company. In my entire time at the company (>5 years, I think), I've written maybe 30k lines of code. I'm terrible at responding to e-mail. Whatever you think this means, I'm worse than that. I skip meetings all the time. Sometimes I just don't dial in. Sometimes I say I have a conflict, sometimes it's true. I probably attend a tota…

What’s the company? Asking for a friend

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

#998

Post by redisman »

dx034 wrote: post #853
asmos7 wrote: post #196

I 100% notice when ppl are slacking - especially at the levels you mentioned. I'm a team lead - it's to much of a pain in the ass to fire people so it's easier to just keep them and give them the minimal salary increase possible. If someone is from a protected class 100% forget about firing them but I realize not all companies are like mine but I suspect a lot are.

Are you sure you notice? I don't think there's any way to tell how long a coding problem really took to solve, unless you're literally standing behind them the whole time. The same bug can sometimes be super fast to fix, sometimes take ages, depending on the ideas I have while tracking it down. No one apart from me can say if I really was as fast as I could've been.

It’s pretty easy to tell. One mid level dev on my team will work on a trivial change to a PR for a full day when it would take me literally 15-30 minutes. Trivial stuff like changing a few names and adding a basic test case. It’s kind of annoying to make multiple deploys of useful things per day and then get given more work when other people can maybe get a small thing out every few weeks. I’m trying to scale my effort back since it’s not really noticed

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

#999

Post by matt_morgan »

This sounds like what I did in high school and college, where I did pretty well for grades etc. By grad school I was doing funner things, and then the first 15 or so years of working, I worked pretty hard and was productive. Since then I don't think I can measure what I do in terms of productivity; I'm a manager (every day) and strategist (on good days) and if I have a good idea, it's rare and unpredictable.

So I would ask, are you providing value in some other way? In school I got a lot of informal extra credit, or at least good will, by participating in class a lot even when I hadn't done reading or homework. I'm sure that alone caused teachers to bump me up a half-grade or better. And then after 30 years of working I still do kind of the same thing by being useful at meetings and in figuring out what work can and should be done, defending and supporting my colleagues and staff, and otherwise being a good influence around the office. What I'm saying is you might have other skills you're not recognizing.

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

#1000

Post by mbrodersen »

odonnellryan wrote: post #994
mbrodersen wrote: post #970

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never seen that happen in practice. Can you give an example of a CEO who delivered 100x value to the company you worked for?

Yes. They do this in a lot of ways. - Connections: industry, hires, investors - Investing themselves into the company (bringing capital to help you grow) - Domain specific knowledge. Hopefully they know the industry better than anyone. - Management. Do not underestimate how far good management can go. It can really be a productivity multiplier - but the other way is true, too. If you have bad management, you're going…

I would love to see an experiment where a single CEO competes with a group of 100 experienced software engineers, sales people, product managers etc. I have a feeling that close to no CEO would win that one.
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