61–70 of 78 posts
Allow me to counterpoint. Every creative engineering profession needs interacting (not just 'talking and listening', but also observing and even acting into the user domain to understand and feel the needs and opportunities). Every solution design needs modeling and thinking and sometimes things benefit from being written down in other forms than code (even though code that is written to be understood can be infinite…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Grinding out web apps is a desk job. If you're lucky enough to have one of the software development jobs which involves pushing the boundaries, a lot more time is spent thinking, planning and problem solving than typing.
Bingo. It's like saying you want to be a painter, but then get stuck painting walls for a living. You're still painting, but it's not the same. Unless painting walls is your thing; that's cool too.
There is no substance here at all. Making software is still very much a desk job and author only mentions "ergonomics of thinking" without giving any concrete ideas at all. If it is news to you that making software requires thinking then I am very worried what you have had delivered before this. As others have mentioned the reason why developers optimize for ergonomics of coding instead of thinking is because that is…
Grinding out web apps is a desk job. If you're lucky enough to have one of the software development jobs which involves pushing the boundaries, a lot more time is spent thinking, planning and problem solving than typing.
But you can easily convert me be telling me about these "ergonomics of thinking". How does one make thinking more ergonomic?
I tend to do a lot of my problem solving laying awake in bed at night. Either I can't sleep or I wake up in the small hours of the night, and I'll chew on some problem that's been bugging me until I solve it and go back to sleep. This was part of what made me want to start my own company. I'm not doing my best work until I'm so immersed in a project that my brain's working on it round the clock in the background, and…
I tend to do a lot of my problem solving laying awake in bed at night. Either I can't sleep or I wake up in the small hours of the night, and I'll chew on some problem that's been bugging me until I solve it and go back to sleep. This was part of what made me want to start my own company. I'm not doing my best work until I'm so immersed in a project that my brain's working on it round the clock in the background, and…
I'm reminded of a thought along the lines of "never go to sleep without giving your subconscious something to work on for you".
I tend to do a lot of my problem solving laying awake in bed at night. Either I can't sleep or I wake up in the small hours of the night, and I'll chew on some problem that's been bugging me until I solve it and go back to sleep. This was part of what made me want to start my own company. I'm not doing my best work until I'm so immersed in a project that my brain's working on it round the clock in the background, and…
Yes to night thinking. Once I was involved in hunting down a tricky bug. We spent days and weeks trying various things. One night I woke up, not with a clear solution, but three new things to try. Tested the first one, and it worked. Told my boss that it had come to me while sleeping, and he told me to charge at least six hours for productive sleeping.
This text succinctly summarizes what I struggled to express to some of my colleagues. It doesn't offer a solution but it neatly highlights the problem. A lot of attention is being paid to things like keyboards, mice, software used to write code and I never understood that fetish. These are just tools, tools aren't the job. Pretty much every dev I know has a history with or knows of a manager who optimized metrics tha…
This text succinctly summarizes what I struggled to express to some of my colleagues. It doesn't offer a solution but it neatly highlights the problem. A lot of attention is being paid to things like keyboards, mice, software used to write code and I never understood that fetish. These are just tools, tools aren't the job. Pretty much every dev I know has a history with or knows of a manager who optimized metrics tha…
I've never ever in my long career heard anyone claim that ' These cherry red's will improve my code by 10%'. To then draw a parallel to bad management metrics seems to me a bit of a stretch.
This text succinctly summarizes what I struggled to express to some of my colleagues. It doesn't offer a solution but it neatly highlights the problem. A lot of attention is being paid to things like keyboards, mice, software used to write code and I never understood that fetish. These are just tools, tools aren't the job. Pretty much every dev I know has a history with or knows of a manager who optimized metrics tha…
I agree. I know people that spend hundreds on keyboards, for example. I also think the debates about vim vs IDEs falls into this same category. It's just a tool. I really don't type all that much as a percentage of my work day.
The defining property of desk jobs is that they're not strongly tied to location or equipment to preclude doing them at a desk. So out of convenience we use desks.
Do you think every desk job other than software is just rote mechanical behavior that happens at desks, but only software is clever enough to need to think about what they're doing?