Live data from Hacker News

At what time of day do famous programmers work?

ivan.bessarabov.com

171–180 of 215 posts

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

#171

TIL who the hell these 'famous' folks are!

Who would you consider famous among currently active programmers that aren’t on this list? I knew about half of the list (mainly the authors of software I use). I could probably name a few who are equally famous, but not many who are more famous. edit: I went back and counted. I recognized 4 of 7 names.

To be fair, every community has its own heroes. Somebody like Bellard is probably completely unknown to most people living in the MS ecosystem, for example.

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

#172
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re describing merges, not commits, or pushes to remotes. One can commit and push to branches all day. Merging them to master without a heads up is a bad idea, except where teams have implemented a process that can handle it

> You’re describing merges, not commits, or pushes to remotes. Both merges and commits can be pushed. I’m not exactly sure what distinction you’re trying to make. Also, btw, I’m using git terminology, but not everyone uses git. I’m including my experience on teams that use Perforce, for example. > One can commit and push to branches all day. Merging them to master without a heads up is a bad idea. Yeah, right, exactl…

Your original comment reads like pushes only goes to master, so you wait to push to a non master branch until working hours.

I found the phrasing abstruse relative to my daily way of thinking of these things

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

#173

I'm a forgetful person, so I commit very often but with label "tmp", and later I squash them all into 1 proper commit before pushing. I'm sure I'm not alone, so commit time can't be used as barometer.

I never saw anyone do this. May I ask what the point is? If it's just going to be in your local version and you later have to do (a very small amount of) work to get it back into one commit, why bother committing random stuff intermediately at all?

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

#174
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?

> Grace and Ada didn't use version control so they wouldn't be able to make the list anyway.

Yeah, this analysis is inevitably going to overrepresent white males today, because it's based on a subset of "programming" (i.e. opensource projects using git) that we already know as overwhelmingly skewed towards that particular demographic.

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

#175
post #173

I'm a forgetful person, so I commit very often but with label "tmp", and later I squash them all into 1 proper commit before pushing. I'm sure I'm not alone, so commit time can't be used as barometer.

I never saw anyone do this. May I ask what the point is? If it's just going to be in your local version and you later have to do (a very small amount of) work to get it back into one commit, why bother committing random stuff intermediately at all?

Ever used a quicksave feature in a video game right before doing something destructive/risky/experimental?

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

#176
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what is worth kragan is entirely right here.

As strawman arguments often are within their own context. That doesn't mean I'm wrong. My point that merge commits were included in the OP's article and data went unanswered by @kragen, and it's directly relevant to what I said at the top; merge commits don't represent work time, but they're being counted here. Code commits also don't necessarily represent work time either, due to squashing, stashing, and general dev…

Your attack on my integrity here is unwelcome and entirely unwarranted; that does make me angry. I regret having given you so much of my time in this thread and having assumed good faith on your part.

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

#177
post #72
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange policy about commits — why just not push at night or during weekends? Why's everyone not working on branches?

> Strange policy about commits — why just not push at night or during weekends? Why's everyone not working on branches That is what I’m saying. The policy is avoid pushes to master. My policy does apply to branches too once there are more than a few people in the branch. Lots of people do work in branches, but everywhere I’ve worked, plenty of people skip branching when they’re making what they think are “small” chan…

a merge to master should only be done after a review, eg. PR is accepted by X reviewers which most likely happens only during working hours. Not sure I understand your policy, people randomly committing/pushing to master without review is not a good idea at any time.

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

#178
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never saw anyone do this. May I ask what the point is? If it's just going to be in your local version and you later have to do (a very small amount of) work to get it back into one commit, why bother committing random stuff intermediately at all?

Ever used a quicksave feature in a video game right before doing something destructive/risky/experimental?

Oh, I use undo in my editor for that kind of thing. But I guess if you want to make large changes, this might be one way of doing it. Pretty sure that's what 'git stash/pop' is supposed to be used for, but I don't use those either so I wouldn't know if that works well.

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

#179
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/…

I would avoid deploys before weekends, holidays, and vacations but you have problems with your pre-merge/pre-commit testing setup if it possibly screws people up when you land something.

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

#180

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.

I've never worked (as a software engineer) at a company that expects their employees to show up at 9am. Now, at the place I where I work currently, most people _do_ tend to show up between 8-9am and leave by 5-5:30, so working at 6pm I often find myself among a single-digit number of people still at the office, but I think such schedules are usually driven by people's life obligations (having kids, mostly) and personal preferences (naturally early risers) rather than company requirements. I myself routinely wake up around 9am, and come in the office between 10:30-11:15am. I've been here for 5+ years, gotten a substantial raise each year since I've started, and recently gotten promoted. In talking with my manager, my working hours have never ever been brought up as a negative (in fact, my current boss tends to get in around 10:30am himself, mostly to avoid rush hour traffic).
Post reply on HN