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Four Hours of Concentration

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Re: Four Hours of Concentration

#81

Post by robertk »

Detrus wrote: post #57
SilasX wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most developers hardly ever actually do anything legitimately hard in their day-to-day work. I might agree with that in an absolute sense. But if we're going to talk about percentiles, and relative to the human population, very few people (percentage-wise) can even do the "easy, boring" part of programming you're referring to.

It is hard to learn. But once you learn it, not that hard to do CRUD day to day. When you have to learn some new framework/library it gets harder again.

Well, as a mathematician, I can say the same is true of mathematical research. Climbing Mount Bourbaki is a difficult endeavour, but from the top the pastures are relatively peaceful to explore. Most papers are not groundbreaking theoretical sledgehammers, but minor updates on footnotes of a vaster theory.

Re: Four Hours of Concentration

#82

Post by robertk »

Detrus wrote: post #57
SilasX wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most developers hardly ever actually do anything legitimately hard in their day-to-day work. I might agree with that in an absolute sense. But if we're going to talk about percentiles, and relative to the human population, very few people (percentage-wise) can even do the "easy, boring" part of programming you're referring to.

It is hard to learn. But once you learn it, not that hard to do CRUD day to day. When you have to learn some new framework/library it gets harder again.

Well, as a mathematician, I can say the same is true of mathematical research. Climbing Mount Bourbaki is a difficult endeavour, but from the top the pastures are relatively peaceful to explore. Most papers are not groundbreaking theoretical sledgehammers, but minor updates on footnotes of a vaster theory.

Re: Four Hours of Concentration

#83

Post by rayiner »

axiom wrote: post #45

Unbelievable, 40+ comments and not one contrary opinion. Alright, I'll be that guy. I have no trouble doing more than 4 hours worth of mentally strenuous work in a day, and neither do most of the people I work with. Frequently enough I've put in sustained 12-16 hour days for weeks on end to meet a tough deadline. You'll generally find that the most successful people who are best at what they do have no trouble with t…

Anecdotal example: I used to work for a small company where the programmers did both algorithmic design and the implementation. Looking back on that work, I could write code to sling bits from point A to point B all day (and did the 12-16 hour weeks you mentioned for months on end). But there is no way in hell I could do algorithm design for 12+ hours a day for weeks on end. It's extremely dense work. There's no mental breaks while waiting for the linker to run, or long stretches of babysitting the program in the debugger, or breaks of mechanically typing out something you've already thought of. It's just you and a pad of paper, thinking the whole time.

The article refers to mathematical work, which is by its nature very dense, much more dense than other intellectually-demanding jobs like programming. As a programmer, you might spend half an hour now and then thinking through all the potential race conditions in a parallel algorithm. But you don't do it non-stop all day, day in and day out. Most of your time is spent on things that require far less concentration.

Re: Four Hours of Concentration

#84

Post by riazrizvi »

vidarh wrote: post #72
axiom wrote: post #45

Unbelievable, 40+ comments and not one contrary opinion. Alright, I'll be that guy. I have no trouble doing more than 4 hours worth of mentally strenuous work in a day, and neither do most of the people I work with. Frequently enough I've put in sustained 12-16 hour days for weeks on end to meet a tough deadline. You'll generally find that the most successful people who are best at what they do have no trouble with t…

If I were to hire someone, and he claimed he can put in 12-16 hour days for weeks on end, I'd be inclined not to hire, based on the expectation that it means that he's either bullshitting me, or does not understand his own limits. In 17 years of managing many dozen staff, mostly developers admittedly, in a variety of different settings, I've never seen a someone that managed to be productive with mentally strenuous e…

I think the only thing we might say with confidence is that physically fit and keen-to-impress types are able to sit in their chair for 12-16 hour stretches.

Re: Four Hours of Concentration

#85

Post by the_cat_kittles »

mercuryrising wrote: post #21

I don't intentionally try to structure when/where/how I think about things, but after 23 years, I've gotten pretty in tune with knowing how things 'feel' inside. I know if I'm going to have a shitty day or a great day the moment I wake up, the first interaction I have with a person (knowing this may make it more likely to happen, but short of that...). I know when my brain is running on all cylinders, and when it's c…

You have to be careful not to give too much weight to something that can have self fulfilling prophecy effects- i.e. "I'm going to have a shitty day" sets you up to have a shitty day. I'm not saying its bad to listen to your internal compass, but you have to make sure that you aren't just giving yourself excuses. In my experience, I found that sometimes I have done exactly that, like I have something difficult to do and all of a sudden "my mind is tired, now isn't a good time."

Re: Four Hours of Concentration

#86

Post by the_cat_kittles »

jonmc12 wrote: post #62
axiom wrote: post #45

Unbelievable, 40+ comments and not one contrary opinion. Alright, I'll be that guy. I have no trouble doing more than 4 hours worth of mentally strenuous work in a day, and neither do most of the people I work with. Frequently enough I've put in sustained 12-16 hour days for weeks on end to meet a tough deadline. You'll generally find that the most successful people who are best at what they do have no trouble with t…

I think you may be missing most interesting point of article which is about the cognitive limits of enhancing skill through deliberate practice. There was an academic paper a few years back "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance" ( a nice summary here - http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3881908748/tldr-summary-the... ). The paper breaks down 3 types of activity: work, play and delibe…

Absolutely right on the money, very well put. To me, mental practice (where you are really growing) feels just like going to the gym. You work out, and your body becomes exhausted. At that point, its counter productive to continue to work out. You rest for a while, and you come back stronger.

Re: Four Hours of Concentration

#87

Post by SilasX »

robertk wrote: post #81
Detrus wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hard to learn. But once you learn it, not that hard to do CRUD day to day. When you have to learn some new framework/library it gets harder again.

Well, as a mathematician, I can say the same is true of mathematical research. Climbing Mount Bourbaki is a difficult endeavour, but from the top the pastures are relatively peaceful to explore. Most papers are not groundbreaking theoretical sledgehammers, but minor updates on footnotes of a vaster theory.

This matches my experience about technical, "it's complicated" knowledge in general: the hard part is catching up to what everyone knows, but once there, contributing and improving are surprisingly easy and obvious.

Just recently I was given a task of debugging a major problem with our website that was causing frequent emergencies -- and apparently, was mystifying the developers.

My lead realized I'd need to understand the website's infrastructure first, so he took about 45 minutes explaining how it all fit together and where the problem occurred. But once I got to that point, my reaction was, "Wait -- wouldn't the problem go away if you just ... didn't do $STEP at that point?"

Turned out to be the entire solution to the problem.

Re: Four Hours of Concentration

#88

Post by tasuki »

coffeeaddicted wrote: post #70

Do we have any idea what it actually _is_ what is getting depleted when we start to run out of energy or concentration? It's something I've wondered about already a few times - I mean I can pretty much feel running out of steam myself. Which means there is some way in which my mind is able to measure whatever it is that it causing this.

Coffee.

Re: Four Hours of Concentration

#89

Post by SilasX »

Detrus wrote: post #57
SilasX wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most developers hardly ever actually do anything legitimately hard in their day-to-day work. I might agree with that in an absolute sense. But if we're going to talk about percentiles, and relative to the human population, very few people (percentage-wise) can even do the "easy, boring" part of programming you're referring to.

It is hard to learn. But once you learn it, not that hard to do CRUD day to day. When you have to learn some new framework/library it gets harder again.

Hey, I'm not the one you need to convince. You should be talking to VCs about your great idea to save money on programming by hiring burger flippers and turning them into mediocre programmers.

Re: Four Hours of Concentration

#90

Post by qu4z-2 »

SilasX wrote: post #89
Detrus wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hard to learn. But once you learn it, not that hard to do CRUD day to day. When you have to learn some new framework/library it gets harder again.

Hey, I'm not the one you need to convince. You should be talking to VCs about your great idea to save money on programming by hiring burger flippers and turning them into mediocre programmers.

Perhaps you missed the part where he said it was hard to learn.
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