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At what time of day do famous programmers work?

ivan.bessarabov.com

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Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#151

Post by dahart »

atq2119 wrote: post #144
dahart wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The confusion was my fault, but I think is mostly gone now. I initially described it as commits when I was thinking of pushes, partly because I’m lumping both git and Perforce experience together. I edited my comments to be more clear, and it seems to have helped. The question asked is valid, and we do commit often, we only avoid pushes to shared spaces at night, so some commits may have representative time stamps. A…

This isn't entirely correct. Git commits have two timestamps: the author timestamp and the commit timestamp. Git only shows the author timestamp by default, and that timestamp definitely survives `git commit --amend` and other operations like rebase with squash. I've had commits where the author timestamp was many months older than my last modification to the commit before finally pushing it upstream. Unfortunately,…

> that timestamp definitely survives `git commit --amend` and other operations like rebase with squash.

You're only talking about the first commit in a squash, and assuming that there aren't multiple squashes, right? There isn't only one timestamp in a squash, so you lose all but one of them.

> I've had commits where the author timestamp was many months older than my last modification to the commit before finally pushing it upstream.

Right, exactly, this illustrates why looking at timestamps isn't a good proxy for work time.

> TFA doesn't discuss which timestamp is being looked at

Here's the relevant portion of the script from the article:

    git log --author="Linus Torvalds" --date=iso

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#152

Post by irishcoffee »

dahart wrote: post #125
erikpukinskis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can’t count on commit times to demonstrate anything. Very extreme stance! Especially for so deep in thread. Sometimes it’s nice to make your ideas more specific as you go deeper in conversation, not just radicalize and double down.

Interesting; I don’t consider what I said extreme or radical at all. I’ll rephrase it into a question: what do you claim that commit time demonstrates, considering that commit times can and do in practice very often change immediately prior to push?

How can a commit time change?

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#153

Post by jimmaswell »

dewey wrote: post #149
numlock86 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, why does it matter? Underrepresented? Who is? The people that are not different but yet are different? I don't get it. I see a couple of people with their commit times being analyzed. If there were black and/or females in that list, great. I did not waste a single thought about it and wouldn't have even if there were some or many in it. Why would I? It's just some people. Forcing a quota on certain "types of peo…

I'm not the person making the original argument but I agree that they have a point. Someone creates a list of "famous programmers" which only includes whites males. This just further cements the image of programmers being white males, when in reality the field is more diverse and when it isn't people are trying to make it a bit more diverse through various angles (mentoring, removing biases from hiring, etc). I'm not…

The only people who come to mind when I think of famous programmers are John Carmack, Grace Hopper, and Linus, maybe Ada Lovelace if you want to include her. Though Grace and Ada didn't use version control so they wouldn't be able to make the list anyway.

Who are the other famous women/minority programmers that people don't know about?

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#154

Post by haykmartiros »

dahart wrote: post #126
kragen wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're attempting to defend the relevance of your comments to an article about the development practices of, among other people, Linus Torvalds, by saying, "Most devs in my experience are not git experts, and they don’t always use git in best practices kinds of ways." Perhaps you are not aware that Linus Torvalds originally wrote Git, and did so specifically to mechanize what he considers to be "best practices". Edit…

Thank you, yes I’m well aware that Linus wrote git. I’m not sure what made you so angry, but I’m up for continuing this discussion if you’re really open to discussion, as opposed to proving me wrong no matter what. It currently feels like the latter, but I think you’re not listening or understanding what I’ve said. It seems like you’re making assumptions. Maybe you missed that I pointed out above that Linus makes a l…

For what is worth kragan is entirely right here.

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#155

Post by dewey »

jimmaswell wrote: post #153
dewey wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the person making the original argument but I agree that they have a point. Someone creates a list of "famous programmers" which only includes whites males. This just further cements the image of programmers being white males, when in reality the field is more diverse and when it isn't people are trying to make it a bit more diverse through various angles (mentoring, removing biases from hiring, etc). I'm not…

The only people who come to mind when I think of famous programmers are John Carmack, Grace Hopper, and Linus, maybe Ada Lovelace if you want to include her. Though Grace and Ada didn't use version control so they wouldn't be able to make the list anyway. Who are the other famous women/minority programmers that people don't know about?

As we are 2 days away from the 50th anniversary of the moon landing (and I just finished a Podcast about that topic, so it's fresh on my mind) I'd say: Margaret Hamilton

- https://www.vox.com/2015/5/30/8689481/margaret-hamilton-apol...

- https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2/episodes/downloads

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#156

Post by spullara »

dahart wrote: post #65

Personally, I’d be very cautious about assuming that commit time has anything to do with work time. For at least 15 years I’ve had a policy - and so have the people on my teams - to avoid merging or committing to public branches at night or just before & during weekends so that you don’t accidentally hose other people on the team, who rely on automated builds & testing. We write code at all hours, but wait to commit/…

Commit time and push time are not the same time.

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#157

Post by filoleg »

tuna-piano wrote: post #64

As someone who generally works a 9-5 job at a company where most people are expected to work 9-5, can anyone explain if there are any norms or rules that enable someone to work such abnormal hours at their companies? Do companies like Google not care as much about work hours? I can't imagine anyone showing up at 2pm at any of the places I've worked, regardless of how productive they were.

As others have already mentioned, it depends on the manager and the company, but I noticed that most tech companies are super lax about it and don't care when and how much you work, as long as you get expected work done, are responsive during a good chunk of the day (i.e., still have a lot of schedule overlap with your teammates, so that they can reach you out for help), and are able to participate in team-related things like code reviews/meetings/etc.

For example, some of my teammates do 8 to 4, some noon to 8, and others do 9 to 1 then go to gym/do chores/whatever, and then 4 to 8. As long as you deliver and communicate well within your schedule, no one cares.

I personally like it, because some days I might not feel good at all in the morning, so I get in late, but then I get a weird burst of energy around 7pm when I get home, so I sit down and end up writing some code.

Keep in mind, this is a double-edged sword, because you might end up working late at night to get some burning feature done or fix a nasty bug blocking the rest of the team.

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#158

Post by simplify »

anaphor wrote: post #27

From John Carmack: > I often worked nights and slept during the day, but I almost always got 8 hours of sleep. There are still 112 hours left in the week! https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/932718658366857216

Happy to see this being pointed out. Sleep is the single most important factor in code quality & correctness https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1119709859979714560

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#160

Post by mandelbrotwurst »

testvox wrote: post #138
inlined wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of us do a “squash merge” (use git rebase to compress to meaningful points in a CR and again before merging to master or feature branches). This creates a clean history at the expense of not being able to stalk others work at high granularity or get as large a score on github’s tracker.

Git rebase interactive with fixup or squash will combine the commits into the first one. So the timestamp will still be somewhat reflective of when work is done (on average).

Are you sure?

It seems fairly likely to me that the average time of day that someone makes the initial commit on a new branch would be quite different from the average time of day that they make commits generally. Am I misunderstanding?

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