[HN Gopher] Embrace slow productivity
___________________________________________________________________
Embrace slow productivity
Author : prostoalex
Score : 180 points
Date : 2022-01-11 16:33 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| giantg2 wrote:
| Tell it to my boss
|
| So tired of the distractions, non-value adding work, and context
| switching.
| spacemadness wrote:
| I'd tell it to your boss but they'd probably put multiple
| meetings on your calendar to discuss then give you a bunch of
| "action items" to fix the issue yourself. Sound about right?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Or fire me
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| If your manager reacts negatively to candid discussion of
| how they're preventing you from being productive, then you
| don't want that job anyway. Prolonged work under managers
| like that is what burns people out.
|
| Yeah switching jobs is a pain, but it's peanuts compared to
| switching careers.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I don't have a career, just a job. I need the income to
| support my family.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Programmers trained to make everything as efficient as possible
| but managed by people working hard at the opposite.
| Smoosh wrote:
| The other irony is that those same managers will be
| pressuring the programmers to meet deadlines.
| [deleted]
| elpakal wrote:
| Maybe sharing some research from GitHub will help?
| https://github.blog/2021-05-25-octoverse-spotlight-good-day-...
|
| > In our study, going from two to three meetings per day
| lowered the chances of developers making progress toward their
| goals from 74% to just 14%. And developers who average just one
| meeting per day have a 99% chance of knocking out high quality
| work -- it really is about getting focus time and connecting
| with our colleagues to brainstorm ideas.
|
| > With minimal or no interruptions, developers had an 82%
| chance of having a good day, but when developers were
| interrupted the majority of the day, their chances of having a
| good day dropped to just 7%. By minimizing distractions and
| creating focus time, we not only get work done, we create
| better and less stressful days for ourselves.
| yosito wrote:
| I've been working remotely as a developer for 11 years, and
| I'd quit any job that requires an average of more than 3
| video calls a week. It's just not possible to get things done
| in that environment, and if management can't protect you from
| that level of unnecessary distraction, it's a red flag that
| the company has bigger management or trust problems.
| elpakal wrote:
| even daily standups? or do you mean 3 video calls outside
| DSU?
| Frost1x wrote:
| Stand ups are just peer pressures on productivity with
| management oversight. I better have something to say at
| the standup or say X was completed or it'll look bad at
| me, not the effort.
|
| In theory standups are great because the team works
| together to solve blocking problems and doesn't worry
| about productivity. In practice it's just another
| mechanism to push productivity.
| datavirtue wrote:
| And yet, this ritual is key to propping up people that
| actually accomplish nothing for long periods of time.
| yosito wrote:
| Daily standups are far too much. There's simply no need
| to discuss so much. It's a waste of everyone's time. I do
| one video standup per two week sprint, with a daily text
| status update and the end of each work day that's
| something short, sweet and human like, "Hey, I worked on
| automated testing all day today. There were some tests
| that were flaky in Safari, but I finally figured it out.
| Will start on the Firefox bug by mid-day tomorrow.
| Feeling slightly behind on this sprint, but I think we'll
| still manage to get everything done on time as long as I
| don't run into more problems with the tests."
| Trasmatta wrote:
| My personal experience is that daily stand-ups are mostly
| pointless, distracting, and a detriment to productivity.
| IMO, if you absolutely need them, you should prefer doing
| them in a daily Slack thread, asynchronously.
| bmeski wrote:
| Daily standup might be the worst offender.
|
| People end up waiting until standup to ask questions,
| creating a culture that doesn't simply message one
| another for simple things. If something is brought up in
| standup, now product and project mgmt will want to
| understand and weigh the value of something that could
| literally be as simple as, "I need access, how do I
| generate a key?"
|
| Also I hate being interrogated every morning about what I
| did the day before.
|
| Daily standup removes the need to remember anything, or
| even picture the system/ product in your head because you
| can just ask someone else every day and get what you
| want. No need to think! Process over people!
| datavirtue wrote:
| Stand-ups in general are cancerous enough to warrant an
| outright ban. That way, if you do have them they have to
| be conducted clandestinely and very quickly.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| There's just so much evidence that extensive meetings are a
| detriment to software developers. Despite that, companies
| still hire developers, pay them a lot of money, then prevent
| them from actually doing quality work with constant meetings
| and interruptions. I don't get it. If you're a dev manager,
| you should be doing everything you can to protect your team
| from wasteful and pointless meetings. Any meeting,
| particularly standing ones, should require a very strong
| justification for its existence, because the impact on
| developer productivity is huge.
|
| At my current job (and most previous ones), the default
| answer for any organizational problem seems to be "we'll just
| schedule another meeting" or "we'll open a new Slack channel,
| and invite everyone to it".
| peakaboo wrote:
| I tried doing this and my team said they are not "code
| monkeys" and want to be involved in every meeting and
| discussion.
|
| Go figure. :)
| Trasmatta wrote:
| If the alternative is that you're excluding them from all
| decision making and planning, then yeah, they're going to
| feel like code monkeys, and that sucks. There's a middle
| ground between "we have lots of meetings where all
| planning and decisions are made, and everyone has to be
| present" and "our devs don't come to any planning
| meetings, and we just throw all the work to them when the
| decisions are made".
|
| A good first step is having more asynchronous
| discussions.
| Frost1x wrote:
| It's also not a good idea that all of your time is
| related to a codebase or two (i.e. don't put all your
| professional eggs in one basket). Imagine if those
| projects go poof or something critical happens. When
| you're 100% invested you're seen as 100% responsible when
| the baby management blame game comes. Give me some
| meetings, give me some non-software soft tasks. If all
| you do all the time ever is code, good luck changing
| careers should you ever want to, you're going to have
| limited other experience.
|
| Also, if your entire job is mopping floors and the floor
| is dirty, you're going to get shit for any and all dirt
| on the floor, regardless of how reasonable the
| expectation is that you could have gotten to the specific
| mess observed at the specific time. Youre 100% on floors
| so why didn't you fix this unreasonable request.
| Meanwhile, if you clean floors half the time and clean
| windows the other half of the time, you have a valid
| excuse as to why the floors aren't perfect, at least in
| some peoples skewed perspectives of expectations. This is
| why I always advise people have a little split up of
| their time but not an extreme amount. It gives a clear
| out to unreasonable expectations. If you wanted the
| floors so clean I wouldn't do windows half the time, and
| so on (just be careful not to convince someone it would
| be a good idea to commit you 100% to a task).
| blooalien wrote:
| It's positively _painful_ to try to get people to understand
| this incredibly simple concept for some reason. People just
| can 't wrap their brains around the idea that this type of
| work _requires_ focus, and that breaking that focus derails
| the whole activity for a period of time.
| dvtrn wrote:
| _"for some reason"_
|
| Are they the ones having to do this kind of work?
|
| Probably not, right? At least in some cases?
|
| There's at least part of the answer.
|
| Question in my mind becomes: how do we get the people who
| aren't doing this work to understand and empathize with the
| productivity needs of those who are?
|
| I'm out of answers because everything that probably can be
| said about it HAS been said about it from people far
| smarter than I am-from blog post to published airport book
| to published academic studies-and yet here we are still
| having this conversation amongst ourselves as developers
| and engineers.
| elpakal wrote:
| I just don't think it's possible unless the people making
| the distractions have once been the people being
| distracted, and even more so there are people whose
| livelihoods depend on meetings happening (scrum masters
| for eg). Just IMHO there will always be friction between
| people who cant afford to be distracted and those that
| need to be distracted when people like this work
| together.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Maybe we need to get rid of the managers and instead take
| turns being manager.
|
| I'll focus three days a week and manage one day a week.
| The other four members of my team do the same. The fifth
| day is for meetings, and if we don't need all day for
| that, it's for going outside.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| Good managers should be asking you what you need and
| removing organizational roadblocks to make that happen.
| They should be in a lot of meetings because they're
| shielding _you_ from meetings, filtering the important
| things and bringing them back to the team in some sort of
| regular format that isn't a daily meeting.
|
| Most managers are not good managers, however.
| datavirtue wrote:
| As the article mentioned, managers are dumping management
| tasks on subordinates (because they themselves are
| overworked).
|
| I just got a big dose of this at a client I just left
| (because they were working us way too hard). They have a
| career track that includes not being a manager but
| instead a principle engineer or whatever. The managers
| were punting management work to these principle
| engineers. People who had already decided they were not
| managers and were not going to focus on those skills.
| They were basically forced into it, micromanaged people
| like crazy, burning everyone out.
|
| This, after rebooting the project a few times because
| they couldn't get traction. As soon as the project got
| traction and was getting accolades this happened. Their
| senior lead developer (at the cusp of being forced into
| management) left the same time I did. I would be
| surprised if the project is not in crisis mode soon.
| not2b wrote:
| I am fortunate enough to have this kind of manager.
| dvtrn wrote:
| * Most managers are not good managers, however*
|
| There it is.
|
| I deliberately chose to step back from management and
| went back to being an IC despite getting feedback from my
| former direct reports that genuinely almost made this
| cynical fucker cry about what a great manager I was for
| them.
|
| Truth be told, as much as I really enjoyed the presence
| of, and admired the people reporting up to me and what I
| was able to do for them, and how they made ME a better
| manager and engineer, I never want to be a manager ever
| again.
|
| By my own standards, I'm not good at it and the stress it
| brought, eh. Just not compatible. Glad I learned that
| lesson. I'd much rather be on the doing end, the next
| time I find myself in management will be when I finally
| have the means to cut loose and work for myself full
| time.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| The people distracting (PMs, Managers) are often the ones
| charged with getting the most out of the people being
| distracted, and honestly I don't even think it's their
| fault. They don't see the work happen unless they are in
| a meeting where it's done, and their schedule is mainly
| meetings so that is their impression of doing work.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Tomorrow I have 6.5 hours of meetings. Today was about 4
| hours.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Estimate the salaries of the people in the meeting and
| calculate the cost to the company. Fun to think about while
| listening the two managers argue about a detail while the
| rest 8 people wait politely.
|
| Come to think of it, if you have 8 people in an hour long
| meeting, then the meeting will cost at least the lowest
| paid participant's daily salary (assuming 8 hour work day).
| ejb999 wrote:
| I actually sat in a meeting a few years back as a
| consultant - with 6-7 other consultants and 1 or 2
| employees of the company we were assigned to - all
| billing $150 to $500/hr - as we discussed which cost
| center we could bill the $35/month SAAS tool we needed to
| use for the project we were developing.
|
| We probably spent 3-4 years with of those SAAS fees in
| that one 45 minute meeting discussing which cost center
| should be billed.
|
| Client (a fortune 50 company) didn't see any issue with
| this.
| tpoacher wrote:
| A tiny thing, and I'm probably alone here, but one thing that
| absolutely wreaks havoc on my concentration is the simple act
| of 2FA for every little thing.
|
| Say I need to check an email relating to the code I'm working
| on. By the time I - open firefox - go to
| outlook - open keepass (because yes I care about security
| and delete cookies) - fill in my keepass master password
| - find the relevant entry from keepass - fill in my
| password via keepass - wait to be greeted by the
| authenticator message - grab my phone - use my pin
| to unlock phone - go to the authenticator app - use
| my pin to unlock the authenticator app - accept the
| authentication token for my email - confirm
| authentication via my phone's pin - search for the email
|
| I no longer even remember what I'm coding anymore, let alone
| what I needed that email for.
|
| This is particularly true if, like me, 2FA pisses you off, and
| your focus is replaced by rage.
| phonon wrote:
| Use a yubikey plugged into your computer instead?
| Shared404 wrote:
| It seems like the solution for this specific instance is to
| not use web mail. Is there a reason you're locked into
| outlook?
| [deleted]
| darepublic wrote:
| Yes I basically prevent my computer from sleeping to minimize
| these 2fa interactions
| jrockway wrote:
| I suppose to some extent, work is more than just typing in
| code. As software engineers, we bring a lot of the
| distractions, non-value adding work, and context switching upon
| ourselves.
|
| One problem is that we get away with being specialists, leading
| to an organization full of specialist teams. That means to get
| anything done, high-overhead communication among the
| specialists is required. A specialist that understands the user
| tells you what features to work on, then you write some code
| and ask the security team for input, then you need to deploy
| this thing to production so require the help of the operations
| team. Finally, the testing team finds a bunch of bugs you
| missed, and now you have to go back and fix them. The
| alternative is to just do all those jobs yourself. That is what
| most 2-person startups do, and they can do a lot.
|
| I think this is just an anomaly in the job market. You try to
| hire "software engineer" and get 1% of the candidates you were
| hoping for, so you can't say "also you need to know security,
| operations, and testing". The result is a slowdown for
| everyone, as you staff up with specialists to support that one
| software engineer that actually applied for your job. (My
| strategy here is to know all these things myself, and teach
| them to my team, so we can be as self-sufficient as possible.
| But there's pushback; the time spent learning is time not spent
| getting through the bug backlog. And, why learn more skills
| when you get paid the same knowing only one? The market doesn't
| support the strategy of being a generalist, but it does support
| the strategy of having a lot of teams, and team leads to
| integrate them.)
|
| Ultimately, I think this is just a fundamental law of the
| universe. One person can do a one person project. Four people
| can do person twice as big. Eight people can do a project 3
| times as big. I think this is just how society works, and it's
| not something that can be changed. Software engineers are
| "weird" in the sense that most of us are self-taught, so we
| have a very good handle on how much work one person can do; all
| of our projects were one-person projects until someone invited
| us to undertake a project that's 4 times as complex as that
| (and thus requiring 16 people). There is some debate as to
| whether this is exponential or quadratic, but the idea is the
| same; your value as an individual is much lower when you're
| working on a big project. At some bigger organizations, it's
| pretty much zero. So if you do more than zero work each day,
| you're ahead of the curve. (It of course takes 7 hours of
| meetings to determine what code you should write in the
| remaining hour. If you didn't do that one hour of code, then
| your output is actually 0, and you get fired.) None of this
| feels good, but it's just how the Universe and humans work, I
| think. Gravity pulls you down to earth, and needing to do a two
| person project means you have to talk to another person instead
| of programming. It's the law.
| jimmyvalmer wrote:
| The lengthy and pointless verbalizing of the above is a good
| example of what we're up against.
| serverholic wrote:
| The work is broken up by meetings and the meetings are broken
| up by work. Everything is so damn fractured it drives me crazy.
|
| If we are starting a new epic then we should spend a day or two
| figuring out what exactly what we're building, then go build
| it. Instead planning itself is fractured 1 hour here, 15
| minutes there and it's hard to keep track of what the hell
| you're planning on doing.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yep that's basically why I'm slow. I got a bad rating and an
| effective 4.5% pay cut this year.
| jimmyvalmer wrote:
| Agree: a 32-hour week is not nearly enough time to write
| software.
|
| Agree: interspersed talking and coding for eight hours pales in
| yield to coding for 4 hours with no talking.
|
| The problem is clients and their wranglers need the talking to
| justify their existence. And without clients, there's no money.
| ChanningAllen wrote:
| > A natural fear is that by reducing the amount of work each
| employee tackles at any given time, it might reduce the total
| amount of work an organization is able to complete, making it
| less competitive. This fear is unfounded. As argued, when an
| individual's work volume increases, so does the accompanying
| overhead and stress, reducing both the time remaining to actually
| execute the tasks and the quality of the results.
|
| This is a central pillar of Newport's argument, and it doesn't
| hold water.
|
| Anyone who has actually built and managed knowledge work teams
| knows that a "heavy burden" of work from the perspective of one
| employee might be "child's play" to another employee. Perhaps
| this is less true with blue-collar jobs, but it's emphatically
| true with knowledge work. Hell, it's even true with the same
| employee across time. (Coding work that would have overwhelmed me
| as a junior developer would bore me to tears today.)
|
| If we're strictly talking about optimizing for market
| competitiveness, the onus is on Newport to explain how lowering
| the work burden for employees who can't sustainably do N units of
| work per week is a better idea than simply replacing those
| employees with others who _can_ do N units /week.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| They are proposing that the amount of work on a worker's plate
| at any one point in time should be reduced so they aren't
| always stressing about their backlog. They are _not_ proposing
| that workers have less to do overall (otherwise, their claim of
| "increased productivity" is incoherent). The action from
| management would then be to organize the queuing and
| distribution of tasks and projects to shield workers from the
| administrative burden of recording an prioritizing it as it's
| launched at them via email or Slack. This is pretty basic work
| that I expect a manager to do.
| lvl100 wrote:
| I don't care about slow productivity. I care more about FAKE
| productivity. Talking about people who schedule emails at odd
| hours or people who are there to cheerlead. That's basically 80%
| of white collar workforce.
| kache_ wrote:
| Welfare for the unproductive high class through government jobs
| & connections.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| It's not like government has a monopoly on unproductive
| workers. I'm sure us corporate folks have all seen slackers
| and inefficiencies.
| kache_ wrote:
| That's the connections portion, you're right. Saw a lot of
| pretty bad stuff at IBM.
| Wonnk13 wrote:
| I'm going to add an emoji reaction to this comment so that
| everyone on Slack sees that I'm online and "working". </troll>
|
| Fake productivity is absolutely why I will never ever work in
| any other white collar sector other than tech. The "butts in
| seats" culture of consulting and banking is so outdated and
| cannot end fast enough imho.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| We fake productivity because there just isn't enough to do. I
| can do my job in about 2 hours a day most days. My company and
| clients still receive the same amount of benefit whether I work
| 2 or 10 -- and actually, probably more out of 2 because I'm not
| making up work that I'm roping other people into.
| ejb999 wrote:
| >>I can do my job in about 2 hours a day most days.
|
| I often wonder how many people I work with that have 1 or 2
| additional full-time jobs that they are just faking busy at.
| People that are 100% dedicated to the project you are on, but
| for some reason are never available for meetings or ever
| deliver anything on time. Just show up once in a while at a
| meeting, give some song and dance about how busy they are and
| then disappear for days at a time.
|
| One coworker just disappeared for ten days - not a peep for
| him - shows up on day 11 with nothing new completed, but lots
| of stories about how hard he is working.
|
| Not sure this remote working is going to last for a lot of
| folks given the abuse I see everyday.
| jrockway wrote:
| I wrote a short story about this as an HN comment over the
| weekend. It got downvoted to 0 and someone replied asking me if
| I was on drugs. (I guess drugs make you write long paragraphs?
| I can do that without any assistance, it turns out.)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29858533
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| That isn't a long paragraph. That is a formidable wall of
| text.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| It's ok, but it's no Victor Hugo
| https://bookstr.com/article/the-longest-sentence-that-
| victor...
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| My goodness that was a joy to read aloud. Thank you.
| peakaboo wrote:
| I'm sorry but you need to learn how to format text into
| paragraphs if you expect people to read that. Just honest
| advice.
| jrockway wrote:
| I mean, it should really be one sentence. There shouldn't
| be any pauses to think about how you got from the previous
| fragment to the next. It just keeps going; you start with a
| requirement about what camera to buy and you end up
| airlifting someone to the hospital, and that's just how the
| economy works.
|
| It is clearly not what the weekend HN audience wants (all
| good ideas fit into 140 characters!), but I had fun writing
| it.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| For me, it's time to embrace procrastination, and read this
| article as well as all the comments here !
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Maybe this is kind of the right place to ask. Does anyone else
| feel completely unproductive in their career? I have been
| employed full time as a software developer making six figures for
| nearly a decade now, and I literally cannot point to a single
| piece of working software being used today in production that I
| was responsible for. It seems like every new job hires me to work
| on some exciting new project that gets canned or dies off within
| a year or two. Mind you my performance reviews have always been
| stellar and I have been consistently promoted and given raises at
| every job I've had. Is this normal? I feel completely useless.
| thewarrior wrote:
| Yes the discussion of productivity is often totally divorced
| from any questions of social utility, morality or meaning.
|
| "You show me a guy laying around doing nothing all day and I'll
| show you someone who's not causing any trouble" - Carlin
| jakey_bakey wrote:
| This is part of the game. Embrace it; the vast majority of jobs
| produce no real-world value but few pay as well as SWE. At
| least you aren't part of a democracy-destroying behemoth.
| lowercased wrote:
| I'm not sure it's "normal", but I've heard similar things from
| enough folks that I think it's at least "common" amongst 'full
| time corporate' devs. I work more in the freelance world, and
| there's usually not quite as much of that sentiment, as there's
| usually more self-direction, but freelance comes with its own
| set of problems as well.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| > I've had. Is this normal? I feel completely useless.
|
| This is all by design in my view. You're at an organization
| that is in maintenance mode, all talent has left and the only
| folks remain are to keep the lights on. Your one or two year
| projects are facades to keep the sheep from bailing. Leadership
| needs to keep new folks coming in and old folks from getting
| bored but the only real priority is to just keep. the. lights.
| on. Hence, why you get A+++ reviews for warming a seat and most
| importantly, answering a pager at 3 AM.
| DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote:
| I chop a bit of wood every morning to heat my office space. All
| that chopping work is burned. I don't have an expectation that
| my wood or code will last very long. I enjoy both chopping and
| coding.
| jimmyvalmer wrote:
| I hear you, but that approach, while delightfully mindless,
| would never have pushed human civilization beyond subsistence
| farming.
| herval wrote:
| At least the wood is definitely being useful - it's keeping
| you warm. Same for cooking a meal (it's eaten afterwards, was
| it useful?), cleaning your room, etc.
|
| The problem with coding jobs is when they're not even
| _temporarily_ useful - which is a common occurrence in my
| experience on bigger corps as well, and (I suspect) is a big
| factor for engineer burnout)
| acheron wrote:
| I work in government contracting, and have been doing it longer
| than you. On one project recently, some teammates were
| complaining about some unproductive thing we were doing, and I
| said "hey, this project is actually getting deployed and used
| by somebody, which automatically makes it more worthwhile than
| 75% of the other projects I've been on".
|
| While I sometimes think that it's mostly a government thing, I
| figure big companies probably do the same.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| > I figure big companies probably do the same.
|
| Yup. Sometimes it's a Manhattan-project-esque "try every
| approach and we'll run with the one(s) that work the best"
| (this was the philosophy behind methods for enriching fissile
| materials during the war). Sometimes it boils down to
| organizational ineptitude, especially a lack of situational
| awareness such that the project becomes, in military terms,
| overtaken by events.
|
| Note that sometimes things run the other way, where inertia
| keeps a project going when the hard decision to pull the plug
| should have been made long ago.
| president wrote:
| Not sure if it's an industry-wide trend but in the last decade, I
| have seen a continuous growth of unmanageable levels of work and
| expectation of productivity in the various places I've worked in
| Silicon Valley. This is made worse by inexperienced managers who
| are now offloading management and project management
| responsibilities to their direct reports. Maybe it's just the
| teams/companies that I'm working for but I don't see how people
| can raise a family and/or have a life these days working in the
| tech industry. Being able to make work your life has become a
| competitive advantage.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| It's certainly not limited to the Valley. Employers of all
| kinds are putting the squeeze on workers, with productivity up,
| but not giving us much to show for it, wage-wise [0]. What can
| you do? Individually, probably not much, but communication is
| always key to set expectations and prioritize your
| deliverables.
|
| 0 - https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
| kache_ wrote:
| Create boundaries
| dkarl wrote:
| > This is made worse by inexperienced managers who are now
| offloading management and project management responsibilities
| to their direct reports.
|
| I thought this was just the currently orthodox management style
| in startups. Senior people manage themselves, junior people are
| guided by seniors, projects get managed by the people executing
| them. Management limits themselves to higher-level strategy.
| I've seen this from most of the managers I've had in the last,
| say, 5+ years. I prefer management that keeps in touch with the
| work that their reports are doing and knows enough to raise
| concerns, make suggestions, and make decisions when the team
| can't reach consensus, but I don't think that's how most people
| see the job of managing software developers right now.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| I've been embracing this for a long time! That's why I feel like
| I haven't made any progress at all, and despite having done a
| ton, our startup is just "stuck" compared all the sky high
| valuations elsewhere.
|
| On one hand I don't want to get completely burnt out, but on the
| other hand, it feels like I'm not treading water hard/fast enough
| to even survive, let alone thrive
| slt2021 wrote:
| as you become old, more experienced - you pace of work slows
| down.
|
| it is okay.
|
| however young people dont need to slow down, they can learn/work
| at much faster speed
| Groxx wrote:
| Honestly, most (decent) older programmers I've worked with are
| _dramatically_ more productive than most (decent) younger
| programmers I 've worked with. Both in terms of functioning
| systems and in terms of lines of code.
|
| They waste less time writing unnecessary duplicates. They waste
| less time writing, fixing, and troubleshooting bugs. Their code
| tends to _work_ when it goes out the door, rather than
| requiring multiple round trips. And when they want to brute
| force something, they break out a small code generator / write
| a small tool and blow past multiple younger engs worth in terms
| of LoC... and that's before accounting for them having written
| the tens of thousands of lines of foundational code that the
| others are working within.
| bumby wrote:
| From the article:
|
| _The issue in this evolution is not how many hours you're now
| asked to work but the volume of work you're assigned at any one
| time...The central goal of Slow Productivity is to keep an
| individual worker's volume at a sustainable level._
|
| I wonder: is the expectation that young people work at a more
| frenetic pace part of the reason anxiety and depression trend
| up from adolescence until mid-adulthood?[1] If so, maybe we
| should rethink the idea that young people should be working at
| a faster speed.
|
| [1] "A slight trend for an increase in the severity of both
| anxiety and depression from adolescence to middle adulthood,
| and then a slight decline in older adulthood was found."
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31190198/
| pcmoney wrote:
| That is false. As you get older your pace of work slows but its
| because much fewer motions are wasted. A good engineer should
| be like a strong swimmer with no wasted or frantic effort.
| Smooth, controlled, powerful. In large orgs or complex domains
| this can really only be accomplished with experience.
| ardit33 wrote:
| You can be a lot picker on what you work though, and know
| better to avoid pitfalls and wasting time.
|
| When you are young, you are running like a headless chicken,
| trying to learn/do everything you can, and usually not have the
| right filters to see what is more important.
|
| In my 20s, learning new things could be overwhelming (there is
| so much to learn!!), and now it is not, because I avoid the
| distractions and learn what is important and needed.
| honkycat wrote:
| Really glad I read this.
|
| I quite like my current job, but this really resonated:
|
| > By volume, I'm referring to the total number of obligations
| that you're committed to complete--from answering a minor
| question to finishing a major project. As this volume increases
| past a certain threshold, the weight of these efforts can become
| unbearably stressful.
|
| I have this happening to me RIGHT NOW. I am on 4 different
| projects, PLUS I am expected to on-board a new engineer onto our
| team.
|
| The thing is: I also have a ton of meetings I am forced to
| attend.
|
| I'm sinking! I'm going to have to work late for at least a week!
| It is stressful for no reason!
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| > I'm going to have to work late for at least a week!
|
| Don't work for free. Stick to your contracted hours, and if
| there aren't enough hours in the day to complete everything
| you're expected to, that's a failure of your manager(s), not
| yourself.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Feel free to turn down meeting invites. If you really don't
| need to be there, or the meeting could be an email, simply say
| so. If people have a problem with you not attending some
| meetings, discuss with your manager.
| bumby wrote:
| I think there are some people who plan meetings because they
| don't know how to really be productive. So a meeting becomes
| a bad proxy for productivity. I always try to turn those
| down. A few clues:
|
| - People tend to use the meeting to 'collaborate' on work
| that should have already been done. E.g., filling in
| spreadsheets, drafting emails etc.
|
| - If a standing meeting seems to bring up the same issues
| over and over without any movement towards resolution
|
| - If you tend to be a fly-on-the-wall and don't have much
| input to the discussion, it might be better to just not
| attend ask for meeting notes instead
|
| - If there's no clear agenda or action items, or it seems to
| devolve into discussions that should be one-on-one
| nightpool wrote:
| Please, please do not work late. If your managers have assigned
| you too many projects for you to complete in the week, that is
| their fault, not yours. Respect your own time and talk to your
| manager about this.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| > I'm going to have to work late for at least a week!
|
| That's one option. Another is just get less done. Cowards get
| pushed until the brink of collapse. Your only duty is to
| communicate to leadership that less is going to get done and
| it's their job to then adjust priorities and/or higher more
| staff.
| bhandziuk wrote:
| There's no sense in calling them a coward
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/ELWTr
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Overview for whoever doesn't want to read the article or just
| react to the headline:
|
| The author is a professor of computer science at Georgetown who
| has authored numerous books on how to do well in school and
| career by minimizing distraction and increasing focus. He's
| arguing against the California 32-hour work week bill, which he
| says will be counterproductive on its own without addressing the
| core problems of excessive coordination and multitasking that is
| what he believes is truly burning out knowledge workers more than
| sheer volume of hours.
|
| He is calling this "slow productivity" in honor of a movement
| from Spain dedicated to cooking instead of eating fast food,
| which takes longer but is ultimately more enjoyable and
| rewarding.
|
| How on earth this gets interpreted as media damning right wing
| work ethic is maybe one of the more bizarre things I've seen
| happen on HackerNews recently.
| bena wrote:
| Because while I don't believe a strong work ethic is a right
| wing thing, I do believe that believing a strong work ethic is
| a right wing thing is a right wing thing.
|
| HackerNews has reached the point where it's visible enough that
| it's being consumed by those with the most time.
| peruvian wrote:
| Cal Newport is a good writer and worth listening to, but most
| of his advice applies only to himself. I work 9-5 for a company
| that uses Slack, email, alerts, etc., like most of HN. I'm not
| a tenured professor with a lot of clout that can shut himself
| from the world whenever I please.
|
| I've learned from Newport and apply some of his stuff to my own
| life, of course, but it's been over ten years of listening to
| him telling us we're doing it wrong, when most of us have no
| choice.
| herval wrote:
| To be fair, many tech companies are moving to 4 day work-
| weeks (eg https://buildremote.co/four-day-week/4-day-work-
| week-compani...) - so 32 hour weeks aren't viable just for a
| tenured professor
| wnolens wrote:
| Yea, I like reading him but his suggestions are myopic. He's
| an idealist and has clearly never faced the full-time profit
| driven work world that the majority of us inhabit.
| stevenally wrote:
| I find it hard to believe that Slack etc would increase my
| productivity.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Why? A good Slack culture means as an engineer you can find
| tons of historical context on discussions / decisions
| without someone needing to forward you a bunch of emails or
| historical docs. It also means you can get relatively quick
| answers to tribal knowledge questions while also have an
| async option for everyone on the answering side to shut
| down Slack for focus time.
|
| Of course if you're only optimizing for your single
| productivity measured in lines of code written then I can
| see your point, but software engineering at scale is a team
| sport, and Slack has traits that make it better than
| email/in-person discussion/phone/zoom/in-doc comment
| thread.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| > A good Slack culture means as an engineer you can find
| tons of historical context on discussions / decisions
|
| You'd think, until your org. decides to deploy a 2-3
| month retention window on all slack content because of
| legal concerns.
| stepbeek wrote:
| I've found slack to be a pretty poor tool for knowledge
| sharing like this in comparison to a more document-driven
| form of communication. We previously used a wiki-tool for
| this (I don't think it really matters which one), but in
| recent years we've used Basecamp for this.
|
| I'm completely sold on decisions being driven by a doc of
| a few paragraphs with the conversation around it co-
| located in the comments. It's easy to scroll through a
| list of such conversations in the message board and read
| through the context with discussion. In comparison,
| finding a previous conversation is slack is much more
| difficult.
|
| Even if I can find the conversation, I think that the
| chat-focused nature of slack encourages short, loosely
| worded messages. This is great in the moment but the lack
| of context a few months on is pretty tough to deal with.
| dasil003 wrote:
| All fair points, and I agree there are theoretically
| better solutions. It's just that in practice I've
| specifically seen Confluence and Basecamp fail due to
| lack of buy-in, and comment threads are good in Google
| docs/Quip but proliferation of docs is a problem. In my
| experience Slack has just been the least-bad in many
| cases, not that I think it's optimal. YMMV.
| WillEngler wrote:
| I can't decide to use Rust at my current job, but there are a
| lot of people on HN for the last ten years telling me that
| I'm doing it wrong with memory-unsafe programming languages.
| I still think this is interesting and useful information.
| Perhaps if I'm making a new company or starting a project, I
| might choose Rust if it makes sense for me.
|
| A way that I look at Newport's writing is, he's making claims
| that most organizations are leaving money on the table by not
| adopting better work methods. I can't unilaterally go
| Newport-style at my current job. But this is a forum with
| lots of entrepreneurial people on it, and maybe someone would
| like to test his theory and smoke the competition by starting
| a company that values Deep Work/Slow Work/etc.
| sdoering wrote:
| I am in a similar boat. Working in an agency that's part of a
| global tech/consulting firm and having multiple clients with
| multiple projects to juggle I know a bit about meetings and
| context switching.
|
| Being involved in the Slow Food movement I also see the
| inspiration for slow productivity.
|
| But I can't agree with the negative, somewhat fatalistic
| point of view.
|
| I believe we need voices like Newport to someday be heard by
| people at the top running companies that are plagued by
| middle (project) managers that need to be seen as doing
| something.
|
| I have seen the value of great client and project management
| first hand (albeit these were far and few). And I have seen
| the productivity it provided for the teams involved by
| providing goals, guidance and a map as well as trust and
| keeping distractions away as best as possible.
|
| And I have seen busywork, work simulation and the simulacrum
| of work.
|
| I value uninterrupted time to get stuff done. And I learned
| to be okay with days filled with meetings that also pay the
| rent. I know what I enjoy most, though.
| peruvian wrote:
| > I believe we need voices like Newport to someday be heard
| by people at the top running companies that are plagued by
| middle (project) managers that need to be seen as doing
| something.
|
| My cynical view is that execs don't care because, well...
| startups still IPO, get acquired, they get rich, etc.
| Profits still go up. I know most startups don't and
| companies still fail, but the point is nothing is affecting
| the people with power to change things.
| gbjw wrote:
| To nitpick here: many tenured professors also use Slack,
| email, alerts etc. There's also often an (implicit)
| expectation that they can get stuff done in the evenings, on
| weekends etc. (e.g., paper reviews, grants, references,
| etc.). So I don't think it's quite as easy for modern-day
| profs to just 'shut [themselves] from the world'.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I've been embracing the opposite and finding success and
| tremendous happiness in life. I work extremely hard, constantly
| and at every opportunity. You'd think based on the current
| zeitgeist that I would be completely mentally messed up but the
| opposite is true. Without doing useful things with what little
| time I have on this planet, I feel like it is depressing and
| would lead me to worst mental health than staying productive.
|
| I've never heard any sort of optimism from the fucking media.
| These words are non-existent and potentially characterized as
| "right-wing" which is so insane to me: hard work, perseverance,
| determination, ambition, unyielding, disciplined, persistence and
| strong work-ethics. These are the values my father taught me and
| I'd rather listen to him than to the stupid media.
|
| YMMV.
| [deleted]
| goda90 wrote:
| People don't generally want to be lazy. They want to feel like
| their effort matters. And even if you have a job that is
| important for society to function and improve, your efforts can
| be poisoned by seeing the vast majority of the value going to
| those at the top, or by constant verbal abuse and breakdown of
| your body. In lots of jobs, lots of stress comes from things
| that don't actually matter, but rather from minutia invented by
| someone else who doesn't trust you to put in effort. Hard work
| with tangible results is satisfying. Stressful work with poor
| pay and physical degradation is not.
| giantg2 wrote:
| People default to lazy as a self-protection measure after
| being repeatedly screwed over and not seeing their hard work
| pay off.
| goodpoint wrote:
| "lazy" is a moral judgement. You are talking about sound
| business decisions.
| giantg2 wrote:
| How does this relate to the article?
|
| I didn't think it was against working hard. It sounded more
| like we should avoid distractions and context switching. Sort
| of mental version of "slow is smooth, smooth is fast".
| NotVerstappen wrote:
| I think most people can thrive in the situation you describe
| (extreme hard work) as long as they also feel a sense of
| control. I am at my peak (in productivity and "feeling alive")
| when 100% of my work hours demand my focus because I have that
| much to do. When I have a quiet period I get miserable; I can
| find plenty of my own ideas to work on, but they often feel
| either futile or wasteful - that part is my own problem.
| Similarly though, when I have too much to do (ie when I know
| that working 100% still won't get it done) I become demotivated
| - after all, it seems that none of these tasks are important
| enough to get proper scheduling, so why bother sweating over
| them myself?
|
| Second point: working full-on as you describe can apply to non-
| employment too. The drive towards working fewer hours (for the
| same standard of living) is just a direct response to growing
| wealth inequality and general unfairness in society, not a
| softening or growing laziness.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > finding success and tremendous happiness in life
|
| Workaholics can get "high" on dopamine on the endless stream of
| activity. Until it breaks down.
|
| > hard work, perseverance, determination, ambition, unyielding,
| disciplined, persistence and strong work-ethics
|
| This are very empty words as they do not relate to what really
| motivates a person.
|
| You cannot simply order yourself to be determined and
| hardworking, otherwise burnout and depressions would not exist
| in the first place.
| wnolens wrote:
| > YMMV
|
| Precisely, different people are different.
|
| I was once like you. It felt amazing. But then it stopped
| feeling amazing, and suddenly I could relate to the other 99%
| of the world.
| throwaway599281 wrote:
| >These words are non-existent and potentially characterized as
| "right-wing" which is so insane to me: hard work, perseverance,
| determination, ambition, unyielding, disciplined, persistence
| and strong work-ethics.
|
| >These are the values my father taught me
|
| You just summarized Prussianism [0][1], so you're not far from
| the truth.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussianism
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_virtues
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| To me the article seems a lot more focused on specific,
| concrete issues faced by some workers, and tangible actions and
| policies to address them.
|
| It isn't making a moral case for or against hard work that I
| can see. Though I do think addressing the conflation of
| productivity with virtue is necessary to make meaningful change
| here.
|
| Anyway yeah YMMV. I don't really get anything from my work
| except more money and less time so I'm gonna vary that mileage
| down as much as I can. I can't really follow you into the media
| and political scope of this though. I don't reject those values
| that you associate with... someone associating with... right-
| wing... something. idk man. This isn't a request for further
| explanation.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I assume you're young, and this is the right attitude if so.
| Not that it becomes "wrong" as you age, but many people cannot
| maintain it, through a combination of burnout, less energy,
| just becoming jaded, or having other interests and priorities.
|
| I'm past middle age and hard work is no longer its own reward
| for me. Forget a 4-day workweek -- I work about 4 hours a day.
| Any more than that and it's just going through the motions,
| there's no additional productivity. I will still occasionally
| get really into something and find myself still engaged after
| many hours, but it's rare these days whereas it used to be
| common. However I do not think I would have liked this as a
| 25-year-old. At that age I was excited, still learning, and
| full of energy. A 4 hour workday would have felt like I was
| just getting started.
| giantg2 wrote:
| In my experience, it's that I _don 't want_ to maintain it.
| I've seen no real payoff.
|
| Master's degree - worthless
|
| Working as a tech lead and senior dev - no promotion, I'm
| still a midlevel
|
| Etc
|
| You'll only want to work hard if you're not disillusioned.
| MR4D wrote:
| If you want a payoff for working hard, become an owner.
| Also, your boss will always agree with you. ;)
|
| EDIT: "become an owner" could be a startup, a contracting
| firm, joining someone else as an owner, etc.
| id wrote:
| Or inherit stock ;)
| MR4D wrote:
| Ha! Perhaps the easiest way, but you might have to wait a
| long time for it.
| id wrote:
| For employees this is certainly true.
| id wrote:
| >I would have liked this as a 25-year-old
|
| I'm at this age and I turned from super eager to jaded in
| just a few years.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| I think the key phrase from your philosophy is "useful things".
| If you have a full plate of things that are satisfying to do,
| and accomplishing them brings you material benefit, there isn't
| really a downside to working a ton (assuming you can mentally
| and physically handle it, and you're not neglecting other more
| important stuff).
|
| If your life is more like a skinner box, where some large
| percentage of the work is baloney and brings no material gain,
| this probably isn't an optimum strategy. You'd be wasting a lot
| of energy on nonsense. I think that's closer to the situation
| the average person finds themselves in, and their effort would
| be better spent identifying the part of the work that brings
| the most results rather than indiscriminately powering through
| all possible work.
|
| "Work smarter not harder" is a saying for a reason. :)
| Mezzie wrote:
| I'm very curious what your life experience is like on certain
| axes. Have you chosen your work? Did your father? Likewise,
| have you had any major unexpected life events (deaths,
| divorces, illnesses, etc.)?
|
| I ask because I've found what you've said to be true _in
| certain cases_.
|
| Working hard and consistently at something is great when it
| comes to projects and tasks that I choose and that are mostly
| mathematical or logical. On the other hand, this mode/method
| completely fails me when it comes to creative or architect
| level work.
|
| I also caution against holding one worldview as good in all
| situations. I worked much harder before I got MS, and learning
| my limits and accepting them was key to preserving my mental
| health.
|
| If you can live such a directed life, it can be very fruitful,
| but on the other hand, trying to make yourself hustle even
| though it's a bad idea is a great way to hurt yourself.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| It is similar to exercising for me. If I don't exercise, I go
| down the spiral and it becomes really difficult to get back
| into a good routine again.
|
| Not working or doing something useful with my time feels
| exactly the same. I am really happy and everything is better
| when I don't slack, am demotivated or unwilling to put in the
| effort.
|
| Life is fulfilling and tremendously fun when I'm surrounded
| by motivated people that are basically opposite of the HN
| culture these days. The people of HN are extremely
| uninspiring and frankly toxic to my own mental health.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > basically opposite of the HN culture these days
|
| That's because the pendulum has swung. A decade ago, HN was
| full of optimism because we were at the apex of startup
| culture and the tech boom. Now that boom has receded, there
| is still a lot of dumb money (for now), but people are
| burned out and the tech is uninspiring or toxic. People are
| just _tired_.
|
| This really became clear to me two years ago, shortly
| _before_ the pandemic, when there was a long thread on HN
| arguing against joining a startup, simply because FAANG
| pays far better- not just because of crazy stock market
| shenanigans, but because many startups themselves have been
| captured by leadership that pursue policies that lead to
| share dilution. The economics have changed.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21865065
| happytoexplain wrote:
| First paragraph: I feel exactly the same way, but also
| definitely feel and sympathize with the article's topic
| sometimes. I don't think the two ideas are as mutually
| exclusive as they seem.
|
| Second paragraph: I think you're letting the world's political
| bullshit get you a little reactive. Those words are championed
| more often explicitly by the right than the left, and some
| media outlets unreasonably demonize some right wing things, but
| those are two separate concepts. Those words are, by
| definition, positive words in a neutral context.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _hard work, perseverance, determination, ambition,
| unyielding, disciplined, persistence and strong work-ethics_
|
| Non-existent? They're hammered on everybody 24/7 by american
| work ethics and hustler culture - to the point of
| unhealthiness. And they are also enforced (whether you "find
| success" or not) at every level, with a cut-throad society and
| economy...
| sg47 wrote:
| The problem is you are thinking only about yourself which is
| what right-wingers are frequently accused of. You specifically
| might be able to work extremely hard, persevere, etc but not
| everyone can. Work needs to be sustainable especially in the US
| which does not provide a lot of benefits to workers
| (healthcare, child care, PTO, etc). Also, you might be able to
| work extremely hard today but can you do the same 20 years from
| now or when you are recovering from an illness? I used to work
| 14+ hours a day but out of the blue got diagnosed with cancer.
| I still pushed hard during that time but a year after surgery
| and treatment, I have lost all motivation to work and can
| barely focus for 4 hours a day.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| > I've been embracing the opposite and finding success and
| tremendous happiness in life. I work extremely hard, constantly
| and at every opportunity.
|
| > YMMV
|
| Exactly. I used to be just like you but I changed a few years
| ago and I couldn't be much happier.
| wnolens wrote:
| Main idea: we should be tasked with less volume of work.
|
| And the author suggests that since less volume -> less stress ->
| higher efficacy, there won't actually be a drop in net
| productivity.
|
| He's not necessarily wrong, however I can't help but think he's
| missing the meta we're all playing within: profit is the motive
| (not human flourishing).
|
| It's profitable to drastically overwork people, such that you
| cull the bottom 10% and get fresh blood in the revolving door.
| While that costs money as opposed to retaining, it makes more to
| push the other 90%.
|
| Several bosses have explicitly told me they intentionally set an
| unrealistically aggressive delivery date because of the
| phenomenon of people taking as much as time as they're given. So
| push hard, inevitably fall short, make some cuts at the very end,
| ship it, profit.
|
| This is the behavioral model which has produced so many
| successful businesses. Imagine "slow productivity" in a startup?
| They'd fail. Now imagine no startups.
| pm90 wrote:
| Prioritizing profits (capital) over well-being is probably a
| very strong reason in favor of the labor movement. I am glad
| that Starbucks is unionizing: more unions for the service
| industry is desperately required.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _It 's profitable to drastically overwork people, such that you
| cull the bottom 10% and get fresh blood in the revolving door._
|
| Indeed, supermarkets, hospitals, meat packing plants and other
| key parts of production have run on this. The covid crisis has
| meant that door has stopped being as willing to revolve. But
| still nothing has changed 'cause this society runs on profits
| and these places, using this strategy, wind-up being the key
| profit centers.
| Wavelets wrote:
| > Several bosses have explicitly told me they intentionally set
| an unrealistically aggressive delivery date because of the
| phenomenon of people taking as much as time as they're given.
|
| Some people call this "phenomenon" planning against the
| deadline.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Shouldn't you plan to get the job done as quickly as you can
| while meeting quality expectations?
|
| If I have 10 hours to make a car trip, but it only takes 5, I
| don't drive at half the speed limit. Sure, there may be some
| extra bathroom and snack breaks, but probably not 5 hours
| worth.
|
| I see people underperforming due to low expectations quite
| often, possibly following the classic 80/20 rule. I think
| this "planning against the deadline" behavior is one of the
| difference-makers between a hungry startup that outperforms,
| and the legacy player that barely keeps up despite having 10x
| the staff.
| mcbishop wrote:
| So you're ultimately saying people should be given 5 hours
| for the car trip, even though giving them 10 would only
| result in a ~6-6.5 hour trip with healthy bladder relief?
| NewEntryHN wrote:
| > Several bosses have explicitly told me they intentionally set
| an unrealistically aggressive delivery date because of the
| phenomenon of people taking as much as time as they're given.
|
| That's because even the "non-aggressive, realistic delivery
| dates" are actually an under-estimation of the amount of work.
| Practically all deadlines are too soon, and how much you allow
| to stress out employees parametrizes how much too soon.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Hmm well certainly in education the deadlines are realistic.
| But it's because they've done the same task before.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Lol no, then the estimators learn to pad their estimates in
| order to maintain some semblance of an orderly process and
| management just ends up managing having completely screwing up
| their scheduling measurements as a predictor of anything. So
| that practice leads to management in the dark about wether a
| project is actually at risk for completing on time.
|
| Edit: if you want trust and fast quality execution you can help
| the team develop best case median and worst case timelines.
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