101–110 of 163 posts
(Yes, I know it's wrong and I want to be more productive, but I hate the work I do and I hate the culture here. So I want to start my own thing.)
Throwaway for maximum honesty: I am pretty sure I spend at least 75% of my time "at work" not working. HN, Reddit, messing around with side projects or learning a new language or framework. This has been the case for my entire working life. I seem to get as much done as other people (sometimes better) so part of me wonders if I'm not as unusual as I feel. Part of me wonders if I should get evaluated for ADHD, since I…
I had this same issue until I stopped visiting Reddit completely (even in my off work hours) and gave up my addiction to news. It's amazing the difference it has made in my productivity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. So despite the apparent success, your manager put on paper that you were "goofing off and not working"? Did he mention that verbally one or two times beforehand? How did you react? Once things hit paper, I generally start interviewing. Not sure whether that was right. But looking back over my career, I usually should have left earlier rather than later in those cases.
It was verbal vs on paper. What was in the review was that I needed to improve my time management. And oddly enough I left for Sun Microsystems not to long after that, but not strictly because of the review, rather it was that I preferred a work culture that understood what programmers did in addition to understanding what EEs did. And for what its worth, I took it to mean that I wasn't communicating how I was spendi…
During standups, most people are reporting concrete tasks that got done and I feel a bit embarrassed to say I spent the whole day trying something out that's remotely related to the final product but was interesting for the ideas.
It's stressful to have to report those things, I feel like I have to justify them, what's my train of thought, etc, and a 1-minute update has to turn into an essay. Not really sure how to improve on that.
During your time at Intel did you have to report on your work quite frequently?
I have recently gone freelance/self-employed and I have quickly missed the reality of being able to not have to question if I'm actually getting work done every minute of the day. The truth is, I can't do brain-intensive work for more than maybe 5 or 6 hours.
I worked for myself for about a decade (web dev) and always considered getting 6 billable hours in a good day.
working when you feel like you can contribute, billing exactly those hours, and filling the rest of your time with activities of your choice feels very honest and liberating.
if i feel like i can't get things done because of the environment then i don't work, and i don't bill. if i finish a job and they have no more work for me then i say, thanks, keep me in mind, let me know if you have any problems.
not really a capitalist, but the transactional nature removes all the festering emotional complications. and you can be a lot more straightforward about where things are broken.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was verbal vs on paper. What was in the review was that I needed to improve my time management. And oddly enough I left for Sun Microsystems not to long after that, but not strictly because of the review, rather it was that I preferred a work culture that understood what programmers did in addition to understanding what EEs did. And for what its worth, I took it to mean that I wasn't communicating how I was spendi…
I've a hard time communicating what I'm doing in that "research" phase. During standups, most people are reporting concrete tasks that got done and I feel a bit embarrassed to say I spent the whole day trying something out that's remotely related to the final product but was interesting for the ideas. It's stressful to have to report those things, I feel like I have to justify them, what's my train of thought, etc, a…
I think the key to your stress is either that you aren't clear in your head what you're trying to figure out, or your trying to figure out things that aren't actually relevant. In my life what I have done is to do get very very disciplined about what I'm to understand and how that will relate to the final goal. Not surprisingly that is different as a manager than it is as an individual contributor.
If I were your manager, and you came to me with this (and I would hope your relationship with your manager is good enough that you could talk to them about it) I would start with three questions;
1) What parts of your assignment are you completely confident you can build/write?
2) What parts are you unsure of how to build?
3) What things that you are unsure about are between you and building the things you know you can build?
Perhaps you can imagine how the conversation goes after you answer those questions. But lets say for this hypothetical that you were unsure if you could build a database fast enough to respond in time to meet the response requirements of the product.
At that point we'd talk about what steps you could take to understand what sort of performance to expect out of a database, what variables had the biggest impact on that performance, and which databases were designed to be fast. And you and I would agree that you would spend this sprint perhaps developing your understanding of database performance. So at the stand up I'd expect you summarize and article you read, a set of benchmarks you set up, a set of test tables you created in the existing system, or maybe the top 5 blogs/books/videos you've found on analyzing database performance. At the retro I'd want to know what sources gave you the most information for the time invested, what were the time wasters, if you were more or less confident about the database choice and its performance and maybe how you had, or would, quantify your understanding with something objective.
From your perspective you would probably have spent the time 'surfing the web' to find out various sources of information or perhaps prototyping some things on AWS or on a local server.
If instead you came back and said, "I really don't know anything more about databases yet but I learned Rust, and got stuff running in the new Angular release and updated my server to the latest Ubuntu and read a book on containers. Then we're going to have a different talk :-)
Over the first 15+ years of my career as an engineer and engineering manager, I've repeatedly surveyed colleagues and friends in engineering roles about this question. I've asked it of people I consider low-performing, all the way to folks I'd consider 10x developers. I have never met a single software developer who, when pressed to give an honest assessment and when "working" is defined along the lines of "actively…
You should also ask if they feel their manager facilitates their productivity.
Over the first 15+ years of my career as an engineer and engineering manager, I've repeatedly surveyed colleagues and friends in engineering roles about this question. I've asked it of people I consider low-performing, all the way to folks I'd consider 10x developers. I have never met a single software developer who, when pressed to give an honest assessment and when "working" is defined along the lines of "actively…
Significantly less now that I work remotely, on my own schedule, and at a reasonable company. I get 6+ hours a day of real work in, usually more, but try not to overdo it. (For awhile I was becoming a bit workaholic without the boundary between work and not-work, spending 10+ hours at it.) I take breaks and do spend a little time on HN or Stack Exchange to clear my head, but I don't do Reddit, webcomics, facebook, or any random sites during work. That's my relax after work stuff, done on a different PC. So in terms of productivity, I'd say around 75-85% work, 15-25% slack most days.
I previously worked an 8:30-5:30 where management measured productivity by the butts-in-seats metric, scheduled a lot of meetings, and was quite anal about punctuality. I was lucky to get 4 hours of serious work in most days (between all the interruptions, bureaucratic stuff, and having to work based on my manager's sleep schedule). Sometimes I ended up doing more work at home at night than I did while 'at work'. Maybe 50% productivity, often less.
Before that I worked at a 9-5 where we had to record our time per task so specifically that we even had a task to enter the time spent filling out the timesheet. I could have done better there about focusing on solving problems and improving business if I wasn't constantly distracted by the clock ticking and all the estimating and meetings about estimates and deadlines and timesheets. Maybe 50% productivity.
Pre-, during, or post-burnout?