Productivity and the Workweek (2000) • Hacker News Board

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#91

Post by tmorton » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 1:52 PM UTC

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #78

brixon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Scrum Master the final comment bugs me. The Sprint is a team effort, you might have been assigned user stories, but if your velocity is higher than others then you need to improve your estimations and you need to help others finish their user stories. Your scrum team does not sound like a team, but a collection of individuals.

This is exactly the attitude that causes anxiety. You are done with the thing you were working on, now go "help" one of your teammates somehow regardless of whether that will actually increase the amount of value the team is delivering. Baseball is a team sport, but that doesn't mean you have two people swinging one bat.

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 questions, perform code reviews, and generally help the team, that's a valuable contribution.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#92

Post by coldtea » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 1:54 PM UTC

Someone wrote here about whether 3 hours or so out of 8 being productive "is not just peculiar to software work.

There's an old post from a photographer blogger and funny guy if somewhat controversial [1]:

> The Two-Hour Rule is a law of American business which states that "no salaried employee, employed by a business to work in an office, may exceed two hours of actual work in any business day."

> The Two-Hour Rule does not apply to government workers (police, fire, military, libraries, public works, etc.), independent contractors, services billed hourly or apply outside the USA. I'll cover these at the end. The Two-Hour Rule applies to people working at government subcontractors because they are businesses.

> The Two-Hour Rule was created to ensure that American business thrived on efficiency, not on dumb hard work, so that Americans could enjoy the lives they had earned."

https://www.kenrockwell.com/business/two-hour-rule.htm

[1] Naive amateurs with religious feels about photography and its "rules" tend to hate him, for such advice as "just shoot JPEG" (as if shooting RAW, and squeezing that extra quality is not a tradeoff of file size/storage/post processing, but a holy duty of everyone who photographs, even if it's just BS family/travel/pet pics nobody would ever really care about - not even the family/pet).

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#93

Post by youareostriches » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 1:57 PM UTC

Working fewer hours is absolutely required as a practice of degrowth to reduce CO2 emissions and limit ecosystem damage.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#94

Post by muzani » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 1:58 PM UTC

Tech actually seems really optimal for this.

I get assigned a 8 hour task. I spend 4 hours trying to get it done in 4 hours. The next time I get the same task, it takes 4 hours. I can optimize it even further if it happens a lot, get it done in 10 minutes.

I can 'siphon off' time this way, lowering estimates a little, cutting time spent by a lot, then basically reinvesting the saved time into rest or productivity. The other day we had a meeting; I got all the work done before the meeting ended then waited an hour before showing the result.

There are lots of tricks, like figuring out keyboard shortcuts, IDE plugins, or simply refactoring staging/production builds into a single button. It's surprising how much mental effort and time a shortcut like CTRL/CMD + SHIFT + F saves.

The long term goal is to be so productive that I can probably negotiate a shorter work week or more vacation days instead of a raise, as I already get paid a comfortable amount.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#95

Post by malvosenior » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 2:00 PM UTC

brixon wrote: post #68

ckosidows wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a Scrum Master the final comment bugs me. The Sprint is a team effort, you might have been assigned user stories, but if your velocity is higher than others then you need to improve your estimations and you need to help others finish their user stories. Your scrum team does not sound like a team, but a collection of individuals.

As a senior engineering manager and individual contributor, your comment bugs me. You don't realize the value of "slack" and whitespace to allow people to perform at their best and most creative. If someone finishes their tasks early, let them breath and you'll have an amazingly happy, healthy and productive team member! Maybe they won't even quit 1 1/2 years into the job.

Building a team and helping individuals grow is so much more than "maximizing" (not really) every minute of the work day.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#96

Post by UglyToad » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 2:01 PM UTC

barefoot wrote: post #90

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…

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…

Haha, yes, I recognise a lot of myself in this description. My previous job was a start-up and I was working maybe 8.30-6.30 most days with 20-30 minutes lunch and also working on open source software in the evenings (I still do the open source stuff and it's one of the few things I actually enjoy). I also attended regular exercise classes and the job came with crunch periods.

Despite switching jobs a year ago to an 8.45 - 5.30 schedule I'm now so burnt out I'm taking 4 months out and will probably try to change fields. Software is well renumerated but it's a gilded cage, I am under no illusions other people are better off or other jobs are without stress, but trying to be a good programmer has reduced me mentally and physically to the point I can't face the thought of working.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#97

Post by mattrp » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 2:05 PM UTC

dustinmoris wrote: post #70

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…

> 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 agree that morning time is most effective and I’m not a morning person. I also agree that contiguous time is vital - usually 4-5 hours. What I’ve noticed is that once I achieve something in that 4-5 hours it’s very difficult to go on to repeat the feat in the next consecutive time block. It’s far better if I go for a run, bike, golf, hang out for the next time block than it is to sit there and struggle with the next code task. But this has been the case whether I’m coding or doing any other kind of work. That said, there are days maybe once or twice in a seven day period where I will code for 8-12 hours straight and the entire time is productive. I think it comes down to energy conservation. Just like runners can build up to run a marathon they usually don’t keep running marathons every day afterwards (although I knew a guy once who did that for something like 30 days straight). So what should one do in their downtime? I think planning and communicating is often seen as non work. I also think meditation is definitely not seen as something one should do on the clock. Yet when I read about billionaires daily habits, they often take naps in the day, meditate, etc. I think Dr. Dre was said to meditate twice a day during the time he was involved in Beats. (My memory is bad so if it wasn’t him it was somebody like that). Anyway I don’t think pay structure necessarily needs to change but maybe the constant monitoring and feelings of guilt if you aren’t pulling desk time should.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#98

Post by muzani » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 2:07 PM UTC

tmorton wrote: post #91

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the attitude that causes anxiety. You are done with the thing you were working on, now go "help" one of your teammates somehow regardless of whether that will actually increase the amount of value the team is delivering. Baseball is a team sport, but that doesn't mean you have two people swinging one bat.

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 are not vital but stack negative impact.

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#99

Post by commandlinefan » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 2:08 PM UTC

dustinmoris wrote: post #70

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…

> 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?

Re: Productivity and the Workweek (2000)

#100

Post by simplemts » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 2:08 PM UTC

malvosenior wrote: post #95

brixon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Scrum Master the final comment bugs me. The Sprint is a team effort, you might have been assigned user stories, but if your velocity is higher than others then you need to improve your estimations and you need to help others finish their user stories. Your scrum team does not sound like a team, but a collection of individuals.

As a senior engineering manager and individual contributor, your comment bugs me. You don't realize the value of "slack" and whitespace to allow people to perform at their best and most creative. If someone finishes their tasks early, let them breath and you'll have an amazingly happy, healthy and productive team member! Maybe they won't even quit 1 1/2 years into the job. Building a team and helping individuals grow…

Just want to second your wonderful comment. Down-time is critical for productivity... it is not a paradox as one might seem. Just like exercising gives you MORE energy.