61–70 of 233 posts
The British model of a financialised economy doesn’t work for the many. Just the rich, like YC VCs.
All the questioning “how do you stay motivated “. By retaining your surplus value.
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…
The problem I see is that reducing working time per day doesn't necessarily keep the same productivity. If I'm 3 hours productive in a 7 hour workday, I won't spend 3 hours productively in a 5 hour workday. My productive time is mostly random.
For me the solution is not feeling guilty about slacking 50% of the time, because it's mostly normal, and having a manager that understands that. As a manager in the future I definitely want to keep this attitude and want to be understanding myself and protect my developers.
Also in a 1hour meeting that felt completely unproductive for you, you might make a single comment that turns out very productive for the project overall. And reading up on new tech or watching conference videos on YouTube might feel like slacking, but it also improves your worth to the company.
The interesting thing is that wages have remained stagnant as productivity has increased dramatically. Which means that our labor has been valued less over time. What needs to happen is that the work week shortens while the minimum wage increases in kind. Top execs need to be comfortable making less, as they are the only ones profiting off these productivity increases.
I know that would be the ideal world but... that's never going to happen under capitalism.
I'll die 50 times over before capitalists say "I have enough". While the world revolves around companies, it can't change. Companies have only one objective in mind: increase profits. There is literally zero incentive for anything to change, specially with more and more people in the world.
Edit: wording
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…
People are known to not be good at gauging their actual work hours. So, when people say they work so much, I'd be skeptical of those claims.
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…
For example, what if you play a complex video game that requires skillful choices and mental effort? You might be making split second decisions many thousands of times over an 8 hour time frame.
For me, it all boils down to being genuinely interested in what I'm doing (and you can't fake this). If it's a programming gig that I really enjoy, then I will want to do it from the moment I wake up until I goto sleep and this might be 16+ hours (with reasonable breaks for food, etc.) but there would be multiple productive 4+ hour stretches in that 1 day. The same could be said for a video game that I like.
If anything I feel less drained at the end of those programming sessions because it feels like you accomplished a lot, and you look forward to the next session (it's all positive feedback). It's almost like getting some type of runner's high, except for your mind.
I only find myself feeling drained when it feels like I have to force my way through the work. I have no idea how low level chemicals work in your brain but just based on personal experience I would guess it takes a lot more mental effort to do something you don't enjoy for many hours a day. If your day is filled with mostly negativity, that's going to be very draining. It's might be similar to how if you hang out with someone who does nothing but complain or has a negative spin on everything you end up feeling drained. I struggled with that for a long time (being the negative one). It helped to become mindful of these things so you can reprogram yourself and make decisions that avoid feeling that way.
Just based on what you wrote, you're saying you only work a few hours a day but then waste the rest of the day away in meetings and trying to look busy. I'm no psychologist but it sounds like you're spending a majority of your day in a stressful / negative mindset. It would really suck if you had to "fake work" for 4+ hours a day to look busy so you don't draw suspicion while also being constantly interrupted every time you try to start something. I'm 100% sure I would be drained if my work environment was the same as yours.
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…
The logical conclusion from this seems to me to be "productivity doesn't mean anything". If we all have four times as much stuff as in 1950 (rather than working fewer hours) then where is it? Obviously there have been a lot of amazing technological developments since the fifties but most of them aren't that expensive: if you sold your computer/phone/etc. you wouldn't be four times richer.
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…
I feel the exact same way. I come home and exercise and make food and I feel just beat. All I want to do is sleep by 9pm. I wish I had a few extra hours a day to study or spend time on leisure activities. As it is I study or read until it's time to sleep and if I want to spend time with friends something has to fall off my schedule even though I sit at work and try to look busy most days. Once my work in a sprint is…
The interesting thing is that wages have remained stagnant as productivity has increased dramatically. Which means that our labor has been valued less over time. What needs to happen is that the work week shortens while the minimum wage increases in kind. Top execs need to be comfortable making less, as they are the only ones profiting off these productivity increases.
People need to start seeing the value of unions again.
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…
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. In those first 4 hours in my morning, often exactly between 8 and 12 I get a shitload of work done. I get so much done that it feels like a real milestone every day. The feeling of being contend afterwards makes it really hard to get into the same focused mindset back again after lunch. After I had my lunch meal I often spend no more than 1-2 hours just doing minor post-real-work tasks, email replies, etc. before mentally signing off completely and calling it a day.
Asking a software engineer to work a certain number of hours per week is useless. It's better to agree on a certain scope of work that one would like to see get done and then let them off the hook as soon as it's done. Some people can do a 3 day burst of 8 hours, but then are so destroyed on a Thursday or Friday that they won't get ANY work done. Others like me are productive every day, but only for ~4-5 hours. Either way, only a fool will think that they will get more out of an SE than they are actually able to focus on. They will just say that something took longer, a bug was holding them back or whatever.
Moreover, the salaries which SE get are so high that an employer isn't paying for the time anyway. They pay for the skill which is being applied during that time, so what's the point in making them commit a certain amount of time. Absolutely useless... well... hopefully one day things will change..