91–100 of 200 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have an office. Intermediate dev/ba. I've gotten a taste for it now. I could reluctantly work in a small shared office with other programmers, but I would have to be desperate to ever go back to an open office. That or get paid a lot .
Good headphones work to some extent too.
It's also a sign you're not valued. Let's see how many of you we can cram in there.
I seem to be alone in this, but I actually do about 25-30 hours of actual programming work each week. And that's sit-down-and-concentrate-and-build-shit work. I'm pretty ruthless about declining extraneous meetings and I keep my door closed most of the time. I think it's reasonable to have 25% of a 40-hour week be for meetings, helping other people, eating lunch, sitting in on interviews, and learning/trying out new…
A huge time sink is thinking. I just mentally plan the most effective and long term solution before coding the task at hand, so whatever I write doesn't come to bite me later. From the outside, it looks like I'm fiddling. And most of the time, it goes on even when on in office because the mind can't be turned on and off easily it goes on and on ever at home
Indeed, sometimes I'm stuck "watching" something on the screen (it looks like I'm watching a movie) maybe for extended periods of time. Then suddenly I jump and grab a pen and paper, and in a couple of minutes I get everything I've been building up written down, which helps me in solving the last details.
The opposite is true too, sometimes I'm in a bind and can't get myself to work on some task trying to get into flow, and it turns out fiddling like that (opening random terminals, typing useless commands, navigating some code and skimming through some source file) definitely looks like I'm frantically working.
The "IPO-ing will make me exceedingly wealthy" scenario is certainly one way to get an 60-80 hour work week. The other is to be in a business that the employee is passionate about for intrinsic reasons. If the employee is a "true believer" in the company's mission, that can be a motivator to go above and beyond. Using technology and/or techniques that the employee is interested in learning can be a useful driver. Som…
Some of us are also fiercely competitive. If I had the chance to compete with another company that (in my opinion) is full of idiots, I would probably work day and night to one-up them with my team.
It's very hard
I somewhat agree with the author, but I have some comments. I do agree that programming is a creative profession and that creative "energy" is limited to just a few hours per day/week. However, most programming doesn't require constant creative insights. Even if you have to be creative (IE thinking of fancy features/implementations or something yourself) the most time is spent actually writing code. I tend to think o…
Answer: Be in America where employees are close to slaves, and people are scared of losing their job, so you can force them to do these kinds of atrocious things. My brother lived and worked in North America for 7 years before returning to Australia. He'd been in Australia for a few months when I asked what the biggest change was. He didn't say no snow, he didn't say driving on the wrong side of the road, food or att…
As a country we've slowly-but-surely gotten so many things right, but we have a god damned long way to go, and it just feels like we're crawling. I guess with a population of 320 million it's kind of like trying to turn the Titanic.
Answer: Be in America where employees are close to slaves, and people are scared of losing their job, so you can force them to do these kinds of atrocious things. My brother lived and worked in North America for 7 years before returning to Australia. He'd been in Australia for a few months when I asked what the biggest change was. He didn't say no snow, he didn't say driving on the wrong side of the road, food or att…
Nobody outside of NA are scared of loosing their jobs, is what you believe, because of how enslaved to the system Americans are? Households in Sweden take on heavy debt. If we loose our jobs here some of us fall back for a while on a (voluntary) system which from an angle looks like a basic income but that cover only a fraction of that household's mortage, enslaving us to a system in the same way Americans may seem e…
As an aside, I once saw a homeless man in a Scandinavian country. Someone actually stopped their car to check on them. As a tourist from NA, my mind was blown. Was impressed by that but not having to pay 10 bucks for a cup of tea :p
Work or sitting at their desk? (or staying in office doing 'stuff'). From my experience and some studies knowledge workers peak at around 30-35 hours a week. Astonishingly still many client CEOs ask me how they can make their developers work more, marketing also works 60h they claim.
Some larger software firms try to capitalize their R&D costs by developers to enter timecards. If the CEO doesn't prioritize work culture and labour norms appropriately, it's easy to make the case that developers aren't working hard enough (i.e. >40hrs/week) against anecdotal claims from other departments.
One might think the easy way out of this is to fight data with data and ask the marketing teams to enter timecards. But I've never seen or heard of any marketing department enter timecards, primarily because marketing is considered an operational cost to the busines from an accounting perspective, as opposed to Engineering being classified as a more favourable capital cost.