51–60 of 136 posts
This is a collection of points PG has made before in other essays and comments. If the ideas are new to you, you may want to check out the others: http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html > Perhaps the optimal solution is for big companies not even to try to develop ideas in house, but simply to buy them. What's good for YC is good for the country!
> Oddly enough, scheduled distractions may be worse than unscheduled ones. If you know you have a meeting in an hour, you don't even start working on something hard. God, how I wish more people understood this. It might seem like programmers overreact to even the most minor demands on their time---"What's the big deal? It's only a half-hour meeting!"---but a half-hour meeting can easily kill several hours of producti…
Awesome essay, Paul. You really nailed this whole phenomenon. It's the first time I've read all these things in one place and it is so very true in my experiences. At my old company, one comment you'd always hear from team members with a new idea was "Hey, I thought of this in the shower this morning, and I think we should ..."
Management has decided the sprinkler system in the dev room will be activated and remain on until further notice.
Kujoy
Very good essay. The only part I don't really agree with is the implicit condemnation of programming done by large companies. Yes, their methods result in mediocre software, but that's often what you want. There's a reason they try to treat programmers as interchangeable cogs, and resist having an entire program in one person's head. To use the tired "building a house" metaphor - you can get a renowned architect to d…
> Oddly enough, scheduled distractions may be worse than unscheduled ones. If you know you have a meeting in an hour, you don't even start working on something hard. God, how I wish more people understood this. It might seem like programmers overreact to even the most minor demands on their time---"What's the big deal? It's only a half-hour meeting!"---but a half-hour meeting can easily kill several hours of producti…
There is also another issue that seems to be overlooked, people create their own disruption. When I wrote about Gloria Mark's finding on working spheres ( http://nuit-blanche.blogspot.com/2006/07/designing-collabora... ) I was surprised of that finding as it would seem counterproductive to the need to having to load up the "code" in the brain's RAM. Another explanation is that what she described is a typical cubicle/large organization workflow that would be counterproduictive to the Hacker's brain (replace hacker by researcher and you have the same symptoms).
Igor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ha! I've got a Fang is from a They Might Be Giants song.
Hmmm... maybe I should name my band, er, startup We Threw Gasoline On The Fire And Now We Have Stumps For Arms And No Eyebrows (a NoFX song) :~).