Better ways to write asynchronous code in Node.js
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How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?
141–150 of 200 posts
Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In India slightly over a quarter of the population are illiterate. Most of them still aren't homeless. They somehow have a house to live in. Most illiterates still don't go for a loan to educate their kids, they try to educate with hard cash although they do not get very good education but loans are a big no no(mostly)
I recently read an excellent book on the lives of the extremely poor, Poor Economics, Abhijit Bannerjee and Esther Duflo . The authors are development economists at MIT. If you think that poor people don't borrow money you should really read it. Anybody who's secure enough to make it a blanket rule not to borrow money is well above the kind of insecurity that those living on less than a dollar a day deal with. As far…
> it's common for migrant labourers in India to sleep on the street
but not all poor are migrant workers. Most poor people live in villages made by their forefathers.
Poor people borrow money but they do not have to give their house in return and become homeless in case of non payment.
> who's secure enough to make it a blanket rule not to borrow money is well above the kind of insecurity that those living on less than a dollar a day deal with.
But in the US, even people with degrees from good colleges become homeless because of debt. I will be surprised to see many people in India becoming homeless because of education loan.
edit: Just to make my point clear, there is a difference in mindset of people in India and the US. Indians do not risk taking huge loans just to be able to have a job at the end of college or take huge home loans to live a posh life and later become homeless in case of a job lay off.
Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?
#143Few can do real programming work over 30h a week. If you force people, you'll get fake work. Specific individuals can work more, by themselves (challenge, pride, try to show whatever, etc.), but are the exception. And of course, that effort level can not be sustained forever.
Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?
#144I 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…
This is my sentiment exactly. The stuff I produce in the 30-40 hour segment is significantly worse than the first 30.
Also, meetings/helping out is perfectly fine, but maintaining 3-hour chunks are still crucial to productivity.
Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?
#145I 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
I am the same. I'll just fiddle around with boilerplate code or procrastinate off other tasks, but that is only semi-consciously. What I am really doing with like 60% of my focus is trying out different designs/architectures around a problem. This might take a few days until I figure out a design that fits the task, but once I'm satisfied, it's usually only a few hours to code the thing.
Worth noting, this process can be significantly sped up if you have a set of peers (or smarter) people to discuss with.
Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And yeah, 25-30 hours is probably a maximum, and it needs to be done in three-hour chunks at a minimum. There's a fascinating corollary on "effective working time" research. I've seen the numbers multiple times in Finnish press, but have hard time even finding them now - and can't recall ever seeing these figures in English media. According to work wellbeing research done (at least partially) in Finland, knowledge…
I think there is a problem defining what is effective when talking about creative work.. I did some contract work a few years ago and while I worked from home and tried to be on task during working hours I was not always at the keyboard during that time. Sometimes I sat on the couch with my eyes closed, and I went for a walk on the beach regularly but I was always thinking about the way in which the code I was writin…
This is why I want an MBA. I know and respect these things.
Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?
#147I 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…
You have a door: there's your 50% productivity boost.
Seriously. Every day I go in I think about how much more productive I could be if I could literally shut out distractions with a real live door.
Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?
#148A: you hire young one that have no idea what they're doing and jump into problems both feet without thinking a path ahead and for every programmer claims to work that much, you also get two of them complaining on the costant shit the overworked one produces and have to fix strange bug half their time eventually the software becomes a mess of tangled issues and advancement grinds to an halt irregardless of amount of t…
There may be a few exceptions, but by and large a young inexperienced programmer's 80 hours will be worth an experienced programmer's 40 hours... plus the cost of the fact that the inexperienced programmer will make mistakes which will cause your code to quickly become unmanageable without oversight. Churning out code is quite a bit different than churning out good code.
I am 27 and am fighting those same 24-year olds that want to code before they think.
They call it refactoring, I call it fixing a design issue. The code is no longer fit to fulfill the requirements of it's task and must be altered.
Of course hacks are fine, but they must be reserved for when the fan is blowing shit. It's not for cramming in just one more meaningless task into the sprint.
Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
There may be a few exceptions, but by and large a young inexperienced programmer's 80 hours will be worth an experienced programmer's 40 hours... plus the cost of the fact that the inexperienced programmer will make mistakes which will cause your code to quickly become unmanageable without oversight. Churning out code is quite a bit different than churning out good code.
I am 27 and am fighting those same 24-year olds that want to code before they think. They call it refactoring, I call it fixing a design issue. The code is no longer fit to fulfill the requirements of it's task and must be altered. Of course hacks are fine, but they must be reserved for when the fan is blowing shit. It's not for cramming in just one more meaningless task into the sprint.
on the other hand, I'm fine with hacks and shortcuts as long as they're hidden behind a sane, non-leaky interface. Not everything needs to be utmost perfection, especially on the outer layers of the app
Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?
#150Answer: 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…
I live in Sweden myself, having emigrated from the Netherlands. With the proceedings of my relatively modest house in the Netherlands I could buy a 21 hectare farm in Sweden, no mortgage needed. Mind, this is after I paid off the remaining mortgage on the Dutch house. That house was in one of the least popular 'cities' in the Netherlands, the scare quotes around the word city are because many people consider the place (Lelystad) to be a failed city - it was an experiment in city planning in the 70's, a totally new city concept built on totally new (reclaimed) land. The place feels like an agglomeration of suburbs without a real 'living' centre.
The point of this is that I wonder why Swedes get into so much debt. Housing is (apart from Stockholm and Göteborg and some popular areas in other cities) affordable by my Dutch standards. Wages are on par with the Netherlands, taxes are comparable (both are high-tax countries for wage earners), cost of living depends very much on your life style but is comparable to or slightly higher than the Netherlands. Still, Swedes seem to take on enormous loans for some unfathomable reason. Unfathomable, because it certainly is possible to live free here, without that yoke of debt. It might be a status thing, people want to live in those expensive areas even though you can get more space for half the price only a few kilometres away.