At what time of day do famous programmers work? • Hacker News Board

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#71

Post by golergka » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 2:38 PM UTC

tuna-piano wrote: post #64

As someone who generally works a 9-5 job at a company where most people are expected to work 9-5, can anyone explain if there are any norms or rules that enable someone to work such abnormal hours at their companies? Do companies like Google not care as much about work hours? I can't imagine anyone showing up at 2pm at any of the places I've worked, regardless of how productive they were.

Game developer here, most of the companies I worked at had an expectation that you show up around 12 and leave around 8-9. Guess it's a culture thing.

Now that I'm a remote contractor, I can finally live according to my natural schedule and wake up around 5pm.

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#72

Post by dahart » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 2:39 PM UTC

dchest wrote: post #69

dahart wrote: post #65

Personally, I’d be very cautious about assuming that commit time has anything to do with work time. For at least 15 years I’ve had a policy - and so have the people on my teams - to avoid merging or committing to public branches at night or just before & during weekends so that you don’t accidentally hose other people on the team, who rely on automated builds & testing. We write code at all hours, but wait to commit/…

Strange policy about commits — why just not push at night or during weekends? Why's everyone not working on branches?

> Strange policy about commits — why just not push at night or during weekends? Why's everyone not working on branches

That is what I’m saying. The policy is avoid pushes to master. My policy does apply to branches too once there are more than a few people in the branch.

Lots of people do work in branches, but everywhere I’ve worked, plenty of people skip branching when they’re making what they think are “small” changes. And some places I’ve been, the team has decided on a policy to skip branches & merges for single commit changes due to the history noise it causes.

The policy is to avoid breaking changes being committed to master when people aren’t around to notice & fix it.

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#73

Post by paco3346 » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 2:39 PM UTC

tuna-piano wrote: post #64

As someone who generally works a 9-5 job at a company where most people are expected to work 9-5, can anyone explain if there are any norms or rules that enable someone to work such abnormal hours at their companies? Do companies like Google not care as much about work hours? I can't imagine anyone showing up at 2pm at any of the places I've worked, regardless of how productive they were.

I think this really depends on the attitude of the company and specific managers. Each quarter I'm given a list of projects and just need to have them done by the end of the quarter.

Thankfully my boss has seen that I'm much more productive with my abnormal schedule so I'm inclined that this type of freedom probably comes on a case by case basis.

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#74

Post by dahart » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 2:40 PM UTC

kawsper wrote: post #67

dahart wrote: post #65

Personally, I’d be very cautious about assuming that commit time has anything to do with work time. For at least 15 years I’ve had a policy - and so have the people on my teams - to avoid merging or committing to public branches at night or just before & during weekends so that you don’t accidentally hose other people on the team, who rely on automated builds & testing. We write code at all hours, but wait to commit/…

Isn't that what feature or topic branches are for? Commit in your own little world, merge when you are ready to share.

Yes, that is what feature branches are for. The policy I’m talking about is referring to when people share, not when they commit to a feature branch. Sorry, I did initially described it only as “commit”, so that was my fault, not yours.

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#75

Post by cowsandmilk » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 2:41 PM UTC

dchest wrote: post #69

dahart wrote: post #65

Personally, I’d be very cautious about assuming that commit time has anything to do with work time. For at least 15 years I’ve had a policy - and so have the people on my teams - to avoid merging or committing to public branches at night or just before & during weekends so that you don’t accidentally hose other people on the team, who rely on automated builds & testing. We write code at all hours, but wait to commit/…

Strange policy about commits — why just not push at night or during weekends? Why's everyone not working on branches?

It always surprises me that workplaces with automatic deployment don’t have deploy windows. Automatic deployment only occurs 10-3 in your region and you can deploy by overriding outside that time to get out emergency fixes.

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#76

Post by segmondy » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 2:42 PM UTC

Every time of the day, it's like asking at what time does a musician compose, or an artist paint or a author write. Surely, we can consider the physical activity work, but the mental activity is also work and precedes the physical.

The brain churns on the problem at hand most of the time even when we are away from the computer. I would even be bold to say, more so when we are away from the computer and not distracted by typing.

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#77

Post by paco3346 » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 2:42 PM UTC

alexhutcheson wrote: post #56

donatj wrote: post #46

It's interesting to me hearing people in the comments talk about committing after hours of work. I instinctively commit after every maybe 30 loc, especially if I feel it has value. I'll sometimes squash them down if the PR turns out particularly noisy. It would be interesting to compare the average size of commits as well I'd imagine.

In my opinion, the project should be in a working state (everything builds, all tests pass, and the built binary or library would be usable) after every commit. Additionally, every commit should also contain unit tests for the code that's being changed, if possible. Sometimes it's possible to meet these criteria after writing just 30 lines of code, but more commonly it will take 100-300 lines of code and several hour…

Agreed here. I think it leaves the commit history to messy if the commits aren't actually fully functional changes.

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#78

Post by stinkbug9o » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 2:44 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #72

dchest wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange policy about commits — why just not push at night or during weekends? Why's everyone not working on branches?

> Strange policy about commits — why just not push at night or during weekends? Why's everyone not working on branches That is what I’m saying. The policy is avoid pushes to master. My policy does apply to branches too once there are more than a few people in the branch. Lots of people do work in branches, but everywhere I’ve worked, plenty of people skip branching when they’re making what they think are “small” chan…

You’re describing merges, not commits, or pushes to remotes.

One can commit and push to branches all day.

Merging them to master without a heads up is a bad idea, except where teams have implemented a process that can handle it

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#79

Post by breck » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 2:45 PM UTC

kawsper wrote: post #67

dahart wrote: post #65

Personally, I’d be very cautious about assuming that commit time has anything to do with work time. For at least 15 years I’ve had a policy - and so have the people on my teams - to avoid merging or committing to public branches at night or just before & during weekends so that you don’t accidentally hose other people on the team, who rely on automated builds & testing. We write code at all hours, but wait to commit/…

Isn't that what feature or topic branches are for? Commit in your own little world, merge when you are ready to share.

But a lot of teams prefer that you do rebases and have a flat commit history, rather than have merge commits (so your commits would reflect the time of rebase onto master, not the time you first committed to your topic branch).

I still think this a very cool back-of-the-envelope estimate though.

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#80

Post by cptskippy » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 2:46 PM UTC

franciscop wrote: post #42

cptskippy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't most devices configured to adjust automatically these days?

In the blog post it specifies that it uses the Unix timestamp, which doesn't account for timezones.

Yes and that's most irrelevant because we were discussing the device offset as users travel between timezones.

Unix Timestamps are always expressed as UTC/TUC which remain constant regardless of device offsets.

The origianl comment's assertion that users don't typically adjust their offsets is moot since commits are stored in UTC anyways. I was just pointing out that many devices automatically adjust offsets.