Maybe pair programming doesn't look so bad after all?
Pair programming was definitely more productive for me. But it’s also exhausting to a point where I can’t do more than 3 days in a row.
People don't work as much as they say
31–40 of 313 posts
Re: People don't work as much as they say
#32Working 80 hours a week is unhealthy and a bad idea. I don’t think there is any solid argument against that. Until recently I was a dev manager for about 20 devs (not all direct). I did work 80 hours a week, still do. I know I am unhealthy. I don’t like doing things that are not technical. I get uncomfortable and bored quickly. My work gives me complex tech problems constantly. So I feel better working. But I attribu…
80 hours a week is the equivalent of 8am to 10pm six days a week. That sounds completely unrealistic. Either the work is trivial, you're destroying your health, or you're over estimating the time you're actually spending.
Re: People don't work as much as they say
#33I spend a significant part of my day working synchronously (engineering / product / etc. meetings, mandatory unplanned calls to fix some crappy system that is failing in production...) as opposed to working asynchronously (reviewing someone else's PR while they work on something else, reading some spec, etc.). I work as much as it seems, but I do it in a wildly inefficient way due to my employer's work-hard-not-smart…
Hey, at least you have a paycheck. There are tons of people out there who work 50-hour weeks (artists, musicians) who get less than a decimal of that pay, none of the benefits, and all of the stress.
Re: People don't work as much as they say
#34Some people do work a solid 8 hours or whatever per day. Mostly those in more manual jobs as they basically sell their bodies. But in our line of work it's not quite like that. I both work less than 8 hours a day, or more, depending on how you define "work".
The thing is, I'm not paid for my body or my labour. I'm paid for my mind. My employer pays for me to engage myself with the business. My mind never fully disengages. When I start work on Monday I don't "start again" like a rebooted machine. In addition, the mind never fully switches off, even when sleeping. I'll often crack a problem in my sleep and realise it during my morning cleaning cycle.
So no, I might not "work" as much as you think I should, but if you find that surprising then I'm probably far more engaged than you would imagine too.
There are, of course, those who don't work much and aren't as fully engaged. That will always happen. It's important to measure the value people are delivering (and help them improve) but it can't be done using any single metric and certainly not "hours worked".
Re: People don't work as much as they say
#35I am now in 2 projects in parallel and most of the work time is consumed by meetings. Meetings eat up so much energy that I have none left to utilize the time-slots in between meetings to get things done.
Re: People don't work as much as they say
#36I spend a significant part of my day working synchronously (engineering / product / etc. meetings, mandatory unplanned calls to fix some crappy system that is failing in production...) as opposed to working asynchronously (reviewing someone else's PR while they work on something else, reading some spec, etc.). I work as much as it seems, but I do it in a wildly inefficient way due to my employer's work-hard-not-smart…
Hey, at least you have a paycheck. There are tons of people out there who work 50-hour weeks (artists, musicians) who get less than a decimal of that pay, none of the benefits, and all of the stress.
Artists and musicians specifically get a lot of social prestige. Similarly for actors.
That's part of why many people are willing to have a go at these careers despite the well-known abysmal earning expectations.
It's just a lot of very willing supply and rather limited demand that depresses monetary earnings for labour in these sectors.
Compare also pay and conditions for programmers in the games industry vs those working on in-house corporate CRUD applications.
Re: People don't work as much as they say
#37> Most days I can do somewhere between one and two hours of hard thinky work.
Wow. Once I start doing this kind of work I both have a hard time stopping (as I find working on such problems addictive, both in good ways and in bad) and feel like it takes at least a couple hours of loading state into my brain before I could even begin to be working "at speed" on a hard problem, which means I actively try to schedule my life such that I either can spend a solid zero hours in a day working on hard mental tasks ;P or make myself ready to work until dawn (at which point I simply feel bad I am still awake sometimes more than truly feel like I am ready to stop).
Re: People don't work as much as they say
#38I have an extension in VS Code that tracks time spent coding, and sends me a weekly summary. While I’m unsure how accurate the time algorithm is, on my “home office with no meetings” days it says I get around 5 hours of code time, which sounds about accurate. Interestingly it claims the the global average is 52 minutes, which I can definitely get on days with many interruptions.
Can you share that?
Re: People don't work as much as they say
#39I have an extension in VS Code that tracks time spent coding, and sends me a weekly summary. While I’m unsure how accurate the time algorithm is, on my “home office with no meetings” days it says I get around 5 hours of code time, which sounds about accurate. Interestingly it claims the the global average is 52 minutes, which I can definitely get on days with many interruptions.
How do you measure if you are coding in the extension? I wonder if it counts activity (keystroke, mouse) or uf having the window focused (while grabbing a quick coffee, for instance) counts.
Re: People don't work as much as they say
#40I don't think people who say they work 14 hours a day are lying. They just count in everything that is somehow related to their job, like reading about their business in the newspaper or thinking about work in the shower. And that's the crux of the matter, in jobs that don't have clearly assigned shifts or where attendance is measured, the boundaries between work and leisure become blurred. And then again, comparisons of who works how long are completely useless.