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Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

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Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#121

Post by bovermyer »

commandlinefan wrote: post #99
dustinmoris wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software to me is extremely mentally demanding and draining, it requires short burts of extreme concentration, but what is more draining is making up the remaining 4-5 hours looking busy. Well said! I haven't met a single software engineer who hasn't described something similar to me. I'm the same, I like to wake up early, enjoy my first coffee and then I feel the most productive for the first 4 hours of the day. I…

> I feel the most productive for the first 4 hours of the day The same time that the product managers, project managers, portfolio owners, program managers, and stakeholders fill with hour-long "standup" meetings?

I sidestep this problem by getting to work before all of those people are even awake.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#122

Post by atom058 »

rayvd wrote: post #115
lerpoel wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mandate 4 day weeks and see if salaries go down. I would guess not as companies still need to keep their workforce.

What about those of us who want to work more than four days?

Some people work 6-7 days a week already. So if they're working under that arrangement now, it will probably be fine for them to work more than mandatory hours in the future also.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#123

Post by silveroriole »

Expez wrote: post #60

I work 60% now. Instead of having two days off each week I've opted to work 4.5h each day. I can only focus intensely for about 4h each day on coding, so this works out well. It's always been this way for me and to get to 8 hours I'd go through the logs each day (important, but not taxing at all and something better left to an intern most of the time) and attend much more meetings (low intensity but 90% of them were…

I’m aiming to get a remote job and say I’m working full time but actually do this. As you say, if you give these hours the employer gets a fantastic deal. My strength has always been the speed I can work at and I’d love to swap the time I spend looking busy with free time and a bit of Slack monitoring.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#124

Post by Aeolun »

UglyToad wrote: post #21

I'd be interested to know if other software developers feel their current working hours are good/positive? From feedback I've had I'm generally regarded as pretty good at my job and highly productive but my current working hours leave me completely drained, to the point I go home and collapse on the sofa, make dinner and go to bed. And that's off an 8.5 hour day. It's at the point now where it's extremely likely I'll…

Working in an enterprise environment, and currently working probably 8-9 hour days, I think I can shed some light on this.

All hours between 10 and 6 are basically unproductive hours, because they get taken up by useless meetings and interruptions.

Any extra hour I work outside of that time, is worth basically 3 or 4 inside it. So working 10 instead of 8 hours practically triples my output.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#125

Post by joncrane »

sancha_ wrote: post #8
namelosw wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be more than happy to work 1 day per week and live with 20% of my current salary. I believe a lot of people can accept 80% salary for 4 days per week.

My previous company allowed people to work 4 days for 80% pay. Out of 60 people, 3 people took advantage of that.

Probably because opportunity for advancement becomes nil when you're not "all in."

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#126

Post by daveslash »

rootusrootus wrote: post #116
barefoot wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After you collapse on the sofa for a few minutes you then get back to work keeping yourself current, right? A reasonable measure of what it takes to stay current and relevant in this industry is twenty hours of dedicated reinvestment per week. Often times this reinvestment time is not afforded at work and as much as employers want to provide this as a benefit to developers, few offer the resources or time to allow de…

That is insanity. What could you possibly study four hours a day that would be worthwhile? That's just pumping in useless trivia information that will crowd out the useful development knowledge. Is it a web development thing? Framework-of-the-week psychosis? It just sounds like a recipe to get burnt to a crisp in a few years.

I realize that barefoot was speaking about studying things that are relevant to your job, but because you asked "what could you possible study for hours...that would be worthwhile", I'm going to say "study whatever interests you", regardless of it's relevance to your job. There are plenty of things worth studying for hours a day...as a hobby. I'm currently studying HAM radio & GIS systems.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#127

Post by wazoox »

Do you know why work is so much more productive? Because so much is automated away, and relies on machines. Each and every worker works using lots of machines. Of course, the more machines you can make work the more productivity you have.

When a large part of your work can't be delegated to machines, for instance nursing a baby, talking to people face to face, etc (mostly "human relations" things) then your productivity can't augment as much. This is also why "human work" earns less than "things work".

Do you know what machines use to work? Energy. In the end, energy availability is the ultimate constraint. Good old thermodynamics. Why can't anything grow forever (and surely not GDP)? because of available energy, and thermodynamics.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#128

Post by zackmorris »

scottlocklin wrote: post #112

Let's reduce economics to its barest rudiments: I'm pretty sure a worker could buy a house and support a family in 1950 on a single, average 40 hour a week salary; this was probably also true even as late as 1970. How many workers in the modern economy can buy a house and support a family on 1/4 of a 40 hour a week salary? Those "productivity" numbers are obviously cooking the books bullshit. Either that or they're n…

It's not a technological problem, it's a political problem. We could have automated things like solar energy production in the early 80s but the powers that be said no. We could have done similar things with mass transit, or organic farming, or wireless telecommunications, but that top 10% with all the money kept saying no. So here we are decades later still paying for the long term costs of technical debt in our economy.

The fallacy is looking at the sticker price of homes without considering the externalities. Planning and zoning put homes too far away from workplaces. Houses are still built of wood 2x4s instead of recycled materials. Heck, we still build homes mostly by hand. Not to mention that land prices are hyper inflated due to the age old power imbalance between land owners and plebeians.

We're basically living in the 1999 economy from the Matrix movies 20 years later. I think it's either going to take a mainstream movement towards some of the democratic socialism ideas from Europe or organizing on a mass scale to solve these problems. Unfortunately politicians and the elite will do everything in their power to stop real progress like that, until (like with solar) it becomes cheap enough that it can be rolled out without government incentives.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#129

Post by crdrost »

muzani wrote: post #98
tmorton wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software development is more like basketball than baseball. In basketball, players do "take off" certain plays. But the most valuable players are still contributing during that time. A good shooter can just stand at the 3-point line. Even if they don't do anything, they occupy a defender and make the whole offense better. A developer won't be cranking out code 8 hours a day. But if they are available to answer questi…

Yeah, honestly, I think soccer/basketball are better analogies. The team remains in formation. Doing too much is far worse than doing too little, because it pushes everything else out of sync. A big part of the work is sometimes just fixing/improving workflow. There are tests to write, documentation, refactoring, warnings to look at, plugins to update, that wonky button padding to fix, all these little things that ar…

There is a much bigger point here, though, about idle time.

Idle time is not just about healing the psyche. It also does that. But you run into problems from not having idle time much sooner than burnout, typically.

What is at stake is that the greedy algorithm for optimization does NOT work for complex systems. “I will make every individual person efficient, everyone is always working on something, look how good of a boss I am”—and you WILL fail to meet deadlines. And you will blame that failure on other people, or on the business constraints, because “well I did everything that I could to make the system efficient, the expectations that were put on me were unrealistic!”

The greedy algorithm is really obvious. Why would every part of the system doing less allow the system as a whole to do more? But it is also really wrong for any system that is large and complex enough to have the right sort of nonlinearities. If you’re managing a call center and everything is very linear—everyone has the same task day-in, day-out, the output of the team is directly changed by the output of every individual on that team—great, you can use the greedy algorithm. But if different people are working on different interrelated tasks then forget about it.

Because if you manage an interdependent system without creating idle time, soon you have every task falling into the proverbial “three priorities: Hot, Red Hot, and DO IT NOW.” You have that because you have chosen to create a system where there are large latencies in response to incoming tasks, so that those tasks are piling up.

I discoursed more on the abstract theory behind this in an answer on the Project Management Stack Exchange:

https://pm.stackexchange.com/questions/26651/why-do-all-the-...

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#130

Post by majewsky »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #49
dtech wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your planning system is bad. This was the original origin of using story points instead of days, because the designers of extreme programming found that the work of 1 "ideal day" (8 hours of uninterrupted productive coding) could be done in about 3 days. And don't get me started on measuring velocity, especially across teams. Your environment sounds like its poisoned by middle management.

It's not my planning system but it was broken indeed even though they brought in a licensed scrum master as a consultant but he was more interested in running things the way middle managers wanted it as that guaranteed his job security. Anyway, thank God I left, but from what I hear from other mates in the industry it's not better in other companies in my area since they're all run by middle managers. Maybe it's a pr…

That's not specific to Germany. Middle managers are politicians inside a company. Their ultimate goal is almost always to accumulate power.
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