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

#1

Post by ConfessionTime » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

I have been working as a software developer for almost two decades. I have received multiple promotions. I make decent money, 3x - 4x my area's median salary, so I live a comfortable life. I have never been fired or unemployed for more than a few months total over my entire career. Through most of that time I have averaged roughly 5 - 10 hours of actual work a week. I'm not even discounting job related but non-coding time as not work. There are literally days in which the only time I spend on my job is the few minutes it takes to attend the morning stand-up. Then I successfully bullshit my way through our next stand-up to hide my lack of production.

No one has ever called me out on this and my performance reviews range from mediocre to great. I'm generally a smart person. I went to a top 30 university, but it's not like I'm a genius or I'm coasting off connections made while getting a Harvard education. I wouldn't consider myself an abnormally talented developer. I often don't understand the technical details other engineers discuss in meetings. I have probably bombed more tech interviews than I have passed. All my jobs have been between 2-5 years so I'm neither finding a place to stagnate or leaving before anyone could judge my production. It feels like I am in the middle of the bell curve in terms of career success. So what gives?

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

These questions have kept popping up in my mind over the last year. Remote work during the pandemic has allowed me to finally be honest with myself and stop pretending I am working when I am not. I want to know if I was the only one pretending.

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

#2

Post by punkbit » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:52 PM UTC

I personally put a lot of effort on everything I do, and usually spend more time working then what I'm paid; Also to study, etc. It's my belief that there are better things to do with life, but there are tasks that require a lot of personal dedication and skill and that requires a ridiculous amount of time.

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

#3

Post by dougmwne » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:52 PM UTC

Shhh.

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

#4

Post by penjelly » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

i monitor my work using a plugin and usually get 2-5 hours of code a day... and i have to do all kinds of communication work as well (JIRA, investigation, prepping QA test cases, documenting PRs)

i looked back and was getting 1k lines merged every 2 weeks on average. nothing crazy I know but theres much more then just coding to my job, thats just reality.

Days/weeks where i dont get a certain amount of code done i feel like actual garbage (like the last 2-3 weeks actually). So i try hard to make sure im moving the ball forward daily. The biggest obstacle to this for me is poor planning upstream, missing/bad requirements, missing APIs that are presumed finished, etc.

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

#5

Post by byoung2 » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

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 developer on call for when something needs to be done ASAP. They won't have to go to Upwork or wherever to find someone because you're already there. As long as you are 10x 10% of the time, you average out to a competent FTE and you are tolerated.

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

#6

Post by camclay » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:54 PM UTC

Other people can probably tell when you're bullshitting, but if management isn't coming down hard on a deadline, it ultimately doesn't matter. Some types of the tech industry like games, I don't believe you can get away with that kind of lack of effort, but other areas its easier to.

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

#7

Post by maaaarkONE » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

I think the need for 10x developers is possible overstated on the internet. In my experience, teams generally figure out how to work around medicore-to-great developers and they're typically not an issue. People online also tend to wear their 40+ hour workweeks like a badge of honor. Many of the people who are 10-20 hour workers like to keep their heads down, both on the internet and in real life, so maybe they're underrepresented.

Ultimately, if no one is taking issue with you, you are getting your tasks done, and you are happy with your pay, then you are exactly where you should be.

To answer the question in the thread title: I don't think most developers are lying about how much work they do, I just think it skews higher online, and the people who work less don't really care to share, or aren't around to share.

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

#8

Post by thrower123 » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:56 PM UTC

Depends wildly on how many meetings I'm scheduled with.

I might work 6-8 hours if I don't have any meetings scheduled.

I tend to work about two or three if the meetings are scheduled in such a way that I can't accomplish anything worthwhile in between them.

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

#9

Post by sz4kerto » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

I don’t think that what you’re doing is very common, but it’s not uncommon either. What you need to do this is to work in an environment where not being productive is not harmful. There are plenty of environments like this. For example, not doing any work but still getting paid doesn’t do any harm at Google. The company is making money anyway. At a small startup that’s under immense pressure people would realise what you’re doing because you’d harm the business.

I’m a big believer in Price’s Law - the square root people produce half the value. If there are 10000 people at the company, you can very well survive in the group of 9900 that does the other half.

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

#10

Post by Daishiman » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

There is an extremely broad range of work and effort put in by software engineers, but there's also an equally broad range of necessary and important work in most orgs.

I was a sysadmin at a company that had things extremely well-tuned and within our team we averaged a couple of hours of work a day, tops.

I've been at companies where there were 50-hour weeks of nonstop which which were necessary, followed by downtimes where almost no work was necessary (it was a very seasonal business).

In my experience most engineers have no more than 4-5 hours of real work in them a day. After that, mental performance drops dramatically and while you can definitely respond to emails and attend meetings and do less intense work, deep thought is just a finite resource and heavily influenced by your mood, anxiety, and motivation. Keep it up for too long in an org that doesn't value clean code and good tests and your performance can definitely be negative.

It's also true that good organizations and teams know and work with these limits rather than push people into unrealistic goals. People can switch around between deep architecture work and planning, managing a sprint, writing reams of code based on well-understood specs, debugging, etc. You can take turns when your personal life gets intense or you feel drained.

I think that most works vastly underestimate the importance of deep work and being strategic about what gets done. The right product spec and the right amount of work researching solutions can easily save an order of magnitude of coding work. It's amazing how little you need to do if you know the happy path for implementing the right solution instead of iterating through multiple broken attempts.