[HN Gopher] People don't work as much as they say
___________________________________________________________________
People don't work as much as they say
Author : exolymph
Score : 424 points
Date : 2022-01-29 02:12 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (drmaciver.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (drmaciver.substack.com)
| karmasimida wrote:
| > Most days I can do somewhere between one and two hours of hard
| thinky work. Writing, programming, etc. Good days or easy tasks
| it might be three. It's rarely four, and over a week almost never
| averages more than two.
|
| too accurate
| nhoughto wrote:
| Motivation isn't fungible and I've been in a place where the
| given schedule is true of me, but that's not a good place for me,
| that's me unhappy and clock watching, a sign of bad times. I want
| to do more, solve more, continue . The end of day comes around
| quick.
| longnguyen wrote:
| I used to work pretty long hours (worked 2 jobs - back when I had
| first kid and was still under mortgage).
|
| Now I spend more time with my kids and try to work as little as I
| can (optimize "productivity pulse", while minimize total time on
| computer)
|
| This is my data of 2018 and 2019 respectively:
|
| - https://www.dropbox.com/s/s8881zv58wzve33/2018.png?dl=0
|
| - https://www.dropbox.com/s/55v7g4cn7ol0ix2/2019.png?dl=0
|
| Some personal observations:
|
| - On average, I achieve 75% productivity pulse
|
| - There are some crazy days where I worked over 15 hrs, with
| maybe 10 ~ 11hrs being productive (read: code)
|
| - Since I was moonlighting, I was most productive on the morning
| (9am - noon) and after 10pm (kids went to sleep)
|
| - I don't meditate much, but working out really really help!
| morsch wrote:
| "The details of this are somewhat career specific, and my
| experience is mostly with a mix of software development, writing,
| coaching, and consulting."
|
| Somewhat career specific is a colossal understatement.
| joe-collins wrote:
| I think every service industry worker is laughing their ass off
| at this post. That is, if they can get past the tears and fury
| at the injustice of the world that allowed this post to exist.
| stavros wrote:
| I don't share your sarcasm. Working with your body and
| working with your mind aren't that different, it's just that
| the mind gets tired quicker. It's very hard to be doing
| concentrated thinking for 6 hours straight.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Exactly, but if it has to be an us vs. them kinda thing,
| I'd like to throw in: people who're working with their body
| at least have the luxury of being able to remove themselfs
| from work when they get home. Leaving work as a developer,
| researcher, whatever, means that your stupid brain brings
| problem home and distracts you when you should spend time
| with your family.
| tardigr8 wrote:
| I envy people who enjoy and make a living from social
| interaction or physical work.
|
| I may be wrong, but looking from the outside it looks to
| me like they are improving themselves as a person and
| earning a living at the same time.
|
| I need to set aside time to improve my social and
| physical well being, outside of working time.
|
| Don't get me wrong I work with interesting people that I
| love, but we don't improve our social abilities together
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Rule of a thumb: If a person brags how much he/she works, he/she
| likely doesn't work a lot.
|
| Double, if the same person also an activist fighting for equality
| and 'fair' compensation. In such cases you're likely dealing with
| a hypocrite who should be terminated on the spot.
| partido3619463 wrote:
| 4 hours a day of real work seems low, but certainly not 40 hours
| a week.
| thunderbong wrote:
| As a programmer, I've always felt that, on an average, 4 hours
| of actual work gets done by me on a daily basis.
|
| This does not include meetings, communication etc.
|
| This is essentially the time spent towards a tangible
| deliverable.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| It's still work, even if it's not the work you want to be
| doing.
| Daishiman wrote:
| What do you define as "real" work? In most productive days of
| coding I get 4/5 "real" hours of focused, concentrated work.
| Very, very rarely would I get more than 6 without finishing the
| day mentally exhausted.
|
| Meetings? Doing more than two back-to-back, hour-long meetings
| is an ordeal if you want a productive meeting. You can sit
| there and stare into space for far longer, or just keep minimum
| attention. But intelligent debate with multiple individuals for
| longer than that is hard to pull off, especially if you also
| want to get the productive work as mentioned above.
|
| Meetings of the "just being present" and responding various,
| random emails that need little care? Feel free to spend 10
| hours a day on those, for sure.
| jakey_bakey wrote:
| But it's like marketing though. You're productive for 50% of
| the time, but you can't know which 50%. Scheduling one's self
| 4-day work weeks seems great in theory but you can't force
| the flow state to happen
| emptysongglass wrote:
| 4 to 5 hours of real, focused, concentrated work is
| impressive. I take a long time to recover from a meeting and
| they're usually in the middle of my day, almost every work
| day, and often there's more than one. They're also exhausting
| so I'll have lost some vibrancy by the time I do get back in
| the flow of actual work.
| Daishiman wrote:
| 4 to 5 hours is achievable and easy if you are aligned with
| your work and team and find it energizing. With a bad team,
| bad money, or bad product, downright near impossible to
| care enough for it.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Meetings themselves are the problem and what I'm
| suggesting are the problem. I don't think team alignment
| is related to the disruptive havoc caused by meetings. We
| have a lot of evidence that it takes a long time for a
| mind to refocus on a task once disturbed.
|
| I say it's impressive you can crank out that level of
| focused work because I can't get a long stretch of
| uninterrupted time that you can. Maybe you have fewer
| meetings?
| Daishiman wrote:
| It's two 2-hour work blocks a day, one in the morning and
| one in the afternoon. Yes, you have to aggressively block
| other activities. Working in small teams with similar
| goals and prescheduled sync points has helped a lot.
| deepsun wrote:
| > Despite having over 10 years of experience, some of my
| colleagues feel the need to explain basic concepts that I already
| know. I'm assigned the easiest tasks. No one comes to me for
| help, although I'm the most knowledgable. No one takes my
| opinions into consideration.
|
| I'm a white straight guy with 18 years of experience (although
| Slavic), but exactly the same things happen all the time in
| office. Not saying his story might be different, but often people
| attribute struggles to race/gender/nationality, while it's
| actually just competition or just how things are.
| pmichaud wrote:
| I guess I'll add my anecdote.
|
| For me this really depends on whether I'm "into it" or not. When
| I'm doing what I need to do but my heart isn't in it, I mostly
| match the "a few hours of real work per day" descriptions, doing
| my tasks in between some reading and chatting or whatever. Push
| it too hard, and I start getting into burn out territory.
|
| But when I'm excited and really enjoying myself, watch out, I'm a
| fucking productivity monster. I can work cheerfully and with high
| energy basically nonstop, like I have to force myself to eat and
| sleep. I can do this many months in a row--empirically for the
| better part of a year before I chill out and go back to baseline.
| During these times taking a break is just annoying, I really want
| to be working, my mind is still there more or less no matter what
| I'm doing.
|
| -
|
| One thing that may be interesting to note is that the degree to
| which I can do this partially depends on the type of work. I've
| done lots of different types of work in my life. Here's a tiered
| list in order of how nonstop I can go when I'm into it:
|
| * S Tier -- I go from the moment I wake until I drop from
| exhaustion, cheerful, high energy the whole time * programming --
| one exception that drops this to A tier sometimes is if the work
| is particularly intellectually demanding, like tricky math / comp
| sci stuff, like when I'm trying to do some kind of novel game dev
| or something * physical labor (eg. house construction)
|
| * A Tier -- I can only do something like 10 hours/day of the main
| event, rubber-on-road work, while the rest of the time is spent
| thinking about and planning the main event stuff * art --
| stopping this one feels more like fatigue, like the spirit is
| willing but the flesh is weak. I have to reset by low effort
| learning or browsing-with-intent-to-learn other artwork * writing
| -- this feels different, where after some thousands of words the
| "spirit isn't with me" anymore, like I know what I would write,
| but the verve is gone somehow, even though I have plenty of
| energy for outlining and planning
|
| * B Tier -- I can do this similarly to S tier, wall to wall, high
| intensity work, but only for about a week to 10 days at a time. *
| people stuff (eg. group facilitation, mediating conflict,
| personal coaching)
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| aside fun on S, A, B...
|
| https://gaming.stackexchange.com/a/172006/46542
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| I do believe you can work 18 hours a day, since that's what I'm
| doing lately.
|
| But i don't think you can repeat it successfully every day. Since
| the biggest problem is being able to focus.
|
| I normally start with something very trivial that takes like 3
| minutes and low effort and then I hope to be "launched".
|
| If it was a difficult/stressing day at work, it won't work.
| [deleted]
| hyldmo wrote:
| I have an extension in VS Code that tracks time spent coding, and
| sends me a weekly summary. While I'm unsure how accurate the time
| algorithm is, on my "home office with no meetings" days it says I
| get around 5 hours of code time, which sounds about accurate.
| Interestingly it claims the the global average is 52 minutes,
| which I can definitely get on days with many interruptions.
| nunodonato wrote:
| Can you share that?
| cercatrova wrote:
| I believe it's this one, searching online
|
| https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=software.
| ..
| mejutoco wrote:
| How do you measure if you are coding in the extension? I wonder
| if it counts activity (keystroke, mouse) or uf having the
| window focused (while grabbing a quick coffee, for instance)
| counts.
| capableweb wrote:
| I'm not the parent you're replying to, but get similar stats
| on the average. I use RescueTime together with Neovim, and it
| works by activity. So if I leave for a coffee it stops
| logging the time I spend, and the window needs to be in
| focus. I also have the browser extensions setup, as to
| separate the time spent in editor compared to in browsers.
| The git repository is also logged, so I can see how much time
| is spent with what repository (normally use multiple repos at
| the same time). Not affiliated with RescueTime in any way,
| just a happy user.
| bloqs wrote:
| No, the productivity pareto principle here is very clear, 20% do
| 80% of the work. This is unbelievably consistent across human
| organisations. This percentage applies roughly to many things,
| including sexual partners at college, money earned, academic
| success, and health issues.
| tardigr8 wrote:
| Working 80 hours a week is unhealthy and a bad idea. I don't
| think there is any solid argument against that.
|
| Until recently I was a dev manager for about 20 devs (not all
| direct). I did work 80 hours a week, still do. I know I am
| unhealthy. I don't like doing things that are not technical. I
| get uncomfortable and bored quickly.
|
| My work gives me complex tech problems constantly. So I feel
| better working. But I attribute this to an unhealthy grip on life
| that stemmed from somewhere.
|
| All my devs wanted to also work 80 hours a week. I had to keep on
| top of their own hours to tell them to go home and find a
| girlfriend.
|
| DONT work crazy hours because someone else in your sphere is
| doing it. Only do it if you can honestly say you are unhealthily
| obsessed with it and can't actually have a normal life.
| albertopv wrote:
| 80h seems really a lot, I guess you don't have a family. Do you
| sleep? Do you commute? Do you eat, have a shower?
| peakaboo wrote:
| Kudos on the self insight there buddy. Not everyone bothers to
| self reflect about why they do the things they do. But they
| should.
| underwater wrote:
| 80 hours a week is the equivalent of 8am to 10pm six days a
| week. That sounds completely unrealistic. Either the work is
| trivial, you're destroying your health, or you're over
| estimating the time you're actually spending.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| I would not call it trivial, but I found that, as a manager,
| you often have to be a psychologist and spend very large
| amounts of your time listening to the more personal issues of
| your colleagues. When I was manager over 400 people (there
| were managers between me and them but I was 'the top level'),
| I spent 80+ hours a week doing my work; 60+ was easily
| absorbed by motivating people and listening to their stories
| about imminent divorces, dying parents, spouses or kids, and
| so on. Then 20 or so hours to do my actual work. It is not
| for me... I do not want such a position again.
|
| I did 80+ hours as well when I was just writing code and
| managing servers; about 40/60 respectively. It was more than
| 80 hours and I missed things, but I was young and made up for
| it. I would not want to do that again either.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| TBH I know people who really only code and have no other
| life. Seven, rather than six days a week.
|
| I am not entirely sure what is wrong with them. Only one case
| can be attributed to money. The rest looks like a weird
| psychological addiction.
| tardigr8 wrote:
| "Weird psychological addiction" that's where I would place
| it too.
| treszkai wrote:
| Sometimes it's easier to code all day long than how easy it
| feels to improve your life. Especially if one excels at
| work and lacks a social network in life.
| tardigr8 wrote:
| 100% agree.
|
| If you are good at coding, then you code for a day and
| create something you are proud of. +1 to self worth.
|
| You send it for code review or deploy and you get
| positive feedback. +2 to self worth.
|
| A junior dev in house or browsing your open source
| project loves your code and asks for advice. +3 to self
| worth.
|
| Compared to.
|
| Go out to a social event for lunch, struggle through the
| social interactions.
|
| Maybe drink a bit too much because you are stressed.
|
| Get caught in a difficult spot when you tell someone they
| are wrong (which they were, but you were being rude).
|
| Hang around for the whole afternoon / evening because you
| told yourself you have to make this work and get a life.
|
| End your day without any self worth reward and struggle
| the next day due to the alcohol or paranoia of reliving
| the previous day.
|
| This is the life of a few socially awkward (and usually
| high iq) people I have had the pleasure of meeting. And
| myself.
|
| I think it is healthy to take the second option, get a
| life, learn to make relationships.
|
| But it's the hard option. Sitting at the IDE and being
| good at what you are good at, is much easier.
| redisman wrote:
| If it's so painful to hang out then you could do
| something else. Go for a run/bike/hike, woodworking,
| gardening, gym, learn a new skill, etc. heck so drugs and
| play video games. It's good to have something other than
| work in your life or one day you'll have a crisis when
| things go poorly with work
| heurisko wrote:
| > End your day without any self worth reward and struggle
| the next day due to the alcohol or paranoia of reliving
| the previous day.
|
| There are definitely ways to mitigate this way of
| thinking, one being understanding the "spot light effect"
| the "phenomenon where people tend to overestimate how
| much others notice aspects of one's appearance or
| behavior."
|
| Also to do more structured based social activities.
| maccard wrote:
| it doesnt matter if the work is trivial, youre still working.
| if im dealing with slack pings at 9pm, thats work, even if
| they just need a thumbs up.
|
| > six days a week.
|
| Anecdotally when I was doing that much work, it was 7 days a
| week. When I woke in the morning my phone was full of emails
| slack pings and build issues, and it was closer to midnight
| when it stopped than 10pm. There is no down time whatsoever
| in an environment like that, everyone is constantly stressed
| and overworked and it just makes it worse
| redisman wrote:
| Why do it though? You're ruining your life and halving your
| normalized hourly rate. There are plenty of companies where
| 40 hours of effective work is a top performer and things
| aren't breaking every week
| maccard wrote:
| > You're ruining your life and halving your normalized
| hourly rate.
|
| Agreed.
|
| > Why do it though?
|
| It was a boiling frog situation. When I joined, things
| were good. 35-40 hour weeks, interesting work, great
| coworkers. The team grew, and all of a sudden I was a
| knowledge holder in areas. It started with an occasional
| message from a co worker who had a deadline, and then the
| deadlines were every 2 weeks, and it wasn't just one
| coworker, it was multiple coworkers. Then it was other
| people working late nights and me replying on saturday
| mornings to their issues because I wasn't really working,
| it was just a slack message. Then it was me fixing issues
| on a sunday morning because it was the only time my
| mailbox wasn't bursting. Around that point I realised
| what was happening, so I scaled things back to working
| hours, and started getting negative feedback and comments
| about "not trying as hard as others" from other managers
| (not my manager though). My annual review came back as
| negative because other teams were reliant on me being
| available, so i went back to being always on for about a
| year before I got another offer and left on good terms.
|
| It genuinely took me about a year afterwards to realise
| how bad things had gotten (everyone checks their work
| email precautionarily at 11pm on a saturday night so they
| can sleep without worrying, right? That's normal.) I'm
| much better off now.
| agumonkey wrote:
| To an extent, if you function this way, its not even unhealthy.
| People give me strange look when I work because I love going
| fast (in smooth precise way). To them it's abuse, to me it's
| joy (granted I can stay in my own limits). To me their slow and
| bored ways are unhealthy. I start twitching.
| tardigr8 wrote:
| Yes I am the same. Work sets me goals that I obsess about. I
| like playing golf, but I can't obsess about getting my
| handicap down. I also can't obsess about a hobby project. I
| can about a product that I know has a user base. Then the
| brain goes fast, dopamine kicks in and I can keep going for
| long hours.
| maccard wrote:
| > I did work 80 hours a week, still do
|
| > All my devs wanted to also work 80 hours a week.
|
| > DONT work crazy hours because someone else in your sphere is
| doing it.
|
| Do as I say, not as I do. The culture of being always on, and
| working these insane hours comes from management allowing it or
| leading by it. It's utterly meaningless for you tell your
| reports to not work crazy hours only to show them that you need
| to do it.
|
| Being a manager puts a power dynamic at play; it's one thing if
| a team member is working silly hours but if your boss is, it
| sets the expectation that you can too. By working you are
| setting the precedent for your team
| tardigr8 wrote:
| I agree. And I tried it too. In the end I couldn't find
| anything else to do in my downtime. So I went home at 5 and
| worked from there. Got up early and worked before coming in.
| I work from home now so the above is moot now.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I think for a very short period that it can work, such as a
| critical deadline. We've all been there, adrenaline flowing,
| target hit, etc. but if that is normalized then no it will kill
| you in the end.
| dilawar wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. I am probably in the same boat. I feel
| miserable when not working. I managed to improve my situation
| though
|
| - 100 km running minimum per month. I take this seriously. -
| Writing notes about work in a notebook. Not publishing but
| that's the only way I can stay away from other work and not
| feel bored. - Spending more time on two hobbies:
| hardware/circuits and cooking.
|
| Things are improving!
| agumonkey wrote:
| Do you feel time running gives you more opportunity for new
| ideas ?
|
| I used to take 15min jog cuts, it made me have just a few
| more thoughts ready when I was back at my desk.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I've been reading some variant of this, for many years.
|
| One of the reasons that I _hated_ being a manager, was because
| the job involved a _lot_ of sitting around, waiting for stuff to
| happen.
|
| I couldn't work on my own projects (because I was on paid work
| time), and it would have been irresponsible, in the extreme, to
| put myself into the critical path (because it was no guarantee
| that I would be able to reliably work). I sometimes tasked myself
| with projects for work, but they were almost always ignored by my
| company, and that hurt.
|
| I've heard that being a soldier in a combat zone is long hours of
| idleness, punctuated by short periods of terror and stress.
|
| That pretty much describes my time as a manager, without the
| "terror" part (and the bullets and explosions).
|
| It sucked.
|
| I now work at home, on my own technical tasks. I get a _lot_
| done. My personal productivity is through the roof.
|
| I take a lot of breaks. Sometimes, I even nap.
|
| But I don't have a time clock. I will often start coding, at 6AM
| (sometimes, before I even get in the shower, after my morning
| exercise), and will continue to code, until I hit the sack. I
| often test my software, while I'm sitting in bed, and will enter
| issues, from my iPad.
|
| When I have a problem that I'm chasing, or I am in the middle of
| a big implementation phase, I can work for many hours, straight.
| I will barely come up for air, and I feel absolutely exhausted,
| when I finally step back (nap time!).
|
| I'm not particularly concerned about a measured life. I get a lot
| done; _far_ more than I ever did, when I was being paid.
|
| And I'm having a blast.
| austincheney wrote:
| > I couldn't work on my own projects (because I was on paid
| work time)
|
| The only problem here is an employer claiming ownership of a
| personal project, assuming the personal project isn't
| interfering with employee product delivery and isn't violating
| employer security policies.
|
| My solution to this is dual employment. My secondary employer
| has trouble differentiating work time from personal time so
| they end up with the most liberal IP assignment policies I have
| ever seen. Everybody, corporate IP attorneys, know this.
|
| So, unless it's making money or an employer wants to lay down a
| provision patent they won't fight you on it. They are fully
| aware the alternatives are moving to another company or to stop
| innovating. As a result most employers with silently bless the
| personal projects even on company time. They won't bless these
| efforts directly because personal projects on company time or
| property are ethical violations that legally compel the
| employer to take ownership and shut it down. That is the last
| thing anybody wants.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| It was that (my employers had _very_ good lawyers -especially
| wrt IP), but also, I felt a great deal of Responsibility
| towards my company. I know that my attitude is often derided
| in this crowd, but it was what it was. I did a great deal of
| work on the side. The job wasn 't super-demanding, and I
| often spent time at my "day job," thinking about the side
| work; though not actually tapping on a keyboard. Technically,
| that was a Bozo no-no, but no one got hurt. In fact, a great
| many people, all over the world, benefitted from it.
|
| I was careful to keep my side work to stuff that did not
| interfere, or compete, with my corporate employer, so there
| was never a problem.
| austincheney wrote:
| My primary motivation now for personal projects is a silent
| anti-Dunning/Kruger.
|
| As a JavaScript developer everybody wants to tell me how
| it's done, what the right way is, and so forth. It's not
| worth arguing over because the most incompetent developers
| tend to be the most vocal ones.
|
| I have been writing JavaScript full time for almost 15
| years and most corporate JavaScript I see is complete
| garbage. How do you know what excellent code is? Numbers.
| Code size, execution time, maintenance time, defect
| resolution time, test automation capabilities, new feature
| delivery time, and so forth. For example if your app takes
| 4 seconds to load and mine takes 50ms I will just assume I
| am less wrong, but you can't advocate for that because will
| cry about code style and frameworks and other bullshit. So
| silently I write my personal project.
| mywacaday wrote:
| Well done, sounds like a great setup you've created for
| yourself. I'm a manager and looking for a financially viable
| way out/back. I haven't coded since I left college and and have
| some small ideas for some side projects, has anyone here hired
| offshore coders for small projects like an addin for outlook
| etc?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| It was a long time coming. My stint as a manager helped me to
| make some great relationships, and I know that I helped a lot
| of other ICs have great careers, and great personal lives.
| None of us got rich, and there wasn't a whole lot of crazy
| (until the last couple of years, when we worked with an
| American startup, and I couldn't shield my team from the
| dysfunction).
|
| One of my dreams, was to be in a place, where I could create
| and craft my own work, without having others take steamers
| onto it. It's personally gratifying, to know that all the "I
| could do this better if..." stuff was absolutely right.
|
| These days, I have to keep the scope small, and, still, no
| one is getting rich, but I am pretty chuffed with what I'm
| doing.
|
| Can't put a price on that.
| _n_b_ wrote:
| As a manager, your main job is to make your ICs effective at
| doing their work.
|
| That means you need to be dealing with poor performers,
| rewarding with outstanding performers, trying to improve uneven
| performers, managing expectations from your management and
| shielding your team from the vicissitudes of your bosses as
| much as possible, fighting for things your team needs while
| shielding them from the demoralizing realities of working for a
| big company where HR and IT etc. don't give two shits about the
| actual mission (if applicable), keeping an accurate budget,
| making sure your team is individually recognized for their
| success but that you take the blame for their failures,
| responding to changes in direction and getting your team on
| board, being the face of management even when that's unpopular,
| and doing all the other little things required to keep the team
| going as effectively as possible.
|
| There's a lot of work to do there, and it can be incredibly
| rewarding when it's going well and incredibly frustrating when
| it's not.
|
| It can also mean you have days when your team is working _all
| out_ to deliver and the only thing you can do is order pizza
| and keep distractions away. Those are boring, often frustrating
| days.
|
| It's not for everybody, but that's what I think a good manager
| does. I think it's often easier when you manage a team and
| aren't an expert at what they do (although you still need to
| understand at a relatively deep level), since that minimizes
| the chances of you trying to dive in and solve the problem.
| city41 wrote:
| I agree with all of this. But I can honestly say in my entire
| career I've only had about two good managers. One of the
| biggest issues in my experience is knowing who the bad/good
| performers are. Most managers have no idea. I've seen bad
| performers just let be, and I've seen great performers fired
| for seemingly no reason at all. Both kill team morale.
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| I think management is like sorcery. There is no fixed rules
| and most of it is interaction between people. I fully
| understand why many technical people shun management work
| (even when it pays more).
|
| Good management is really rare. One in five or even ten
| maybe.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I'll add that if a good manager works with an
| underperforming IC and makes a meaningful difference, it is
| VERY UNLIKELY the IC will acknowledge this in a timely way,
| or perhaps even know it happened. The best case scenario
| I've ever experienced is several years after the fact.
| That's a long time to wait for some positive external
| validation.
| city41 wrote:
| Oh for sure. My first comment is pretty much me bagging
| on managers. But in their defense, it's a really hard
| job. So hard I've never taken it on because I'm positive
| I wouldn't be good at it. I think my experience of most
| managers not being as good as I'd like largely boils down
| to the job being extremely difficult.
|
| I'm not surprised to hear a manager's work can go
| unnoticed. That's unfortunate :(
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah, I agree with all of this.
|
| Doing this well also requires building relationships with the
| team and trust. Recognizing little things like how people can
| be afraid of a project (and that fear can lead to spinning),
| and how to break things down/prioritize.
|
| In software I think there are also system changes that can
| make individuals happier (often stuff described in books like
| the Phoenix project and working effectively with legacy
| code). A lot of which enable the things you described.
|
| People are happy when they're productive and goals are
| clear/make sense (and they have the space to focus on the
| work for them) and they get recognized for it.
| thorwawayrus53 wrote:
| > As a manager, your main job is to make your ICs effective
| at doing their work.
|
| Its a lie manager making dev's effective at their job. All a
| manager needs to do is communicate the requirements properly
| most preferably in a written document. That is the only
| useful thing. Everything else like motivating are just BS
| which has become very clear in the post covid WFH situation.
|
| Now looking back i can feel the needless interference by
| managers that slowed down the progress of work. The other sad
| thing is they assume they have power to fire people to some
| extent which usually junior engineers believe for the first
| few years.
|
| Before concluding i had a bad manager, let me say i have had
| over 10 managers in the past 20 years and its not manager's
| fault its the job that's BS.
| rahimiali wrote:
| Let's say that's the manager's only job. But "communicating
| requirements in a written doc" is serious hard work, the
| same way "typing code in a text editor" is a lot of work.
| To do the former requires negotiating with other teams,
| understanding the limits of the audience, estimating
| effort, and basically developing a rough sketch of the
| solution in your head to make sure the request is
| reasonable.
| thorwawayrus53 wrote:
| > But "communicating requirements in a written doc" is
| serious hard work
|
| Precisely. Hence managers delegate this to devs to figure
| it out themselves and make documentation easy enough for
| them to understand on a higher level so they can make it
| look like they understand whats going on. This is what
| been exposed with WFH.
|
| The important thing that pisses me off is the salary of
| manager is about 50% higher than IC's. IMO it should not
| be 70% of IC's salary considering the skills it requires.
| Manager does not have more responsibility than IC.
| Manager never takes responsibility for projects failure,
| its always blamed on IC. Its easy for a manager to get
| away because usually about 5 IC's will be in a project
| and one or two failure to deliver features are tolerated.
| Combine this with attrition its so easy for a manager to
| not take any responsibility.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Yeah, well...the consensus seems to be that I was a decent
| manager. I hated the job, but they kept me for 27 years, so I
| guess something went well.
|
| Glad it's behind me, though.
| deltaonefour wrote:
| Many managers are bad but can keep the job for a long time.
| This is because it's not the people that you are managing
| that judge your performance. So you can very well be a bad
| manager and still keep your job. The key here is that you
| only need to be a manager that delivers results. You don't
| need to be a manager that is good.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Well, many of my employees chose to give me testimonials
| on my LinkedIn, and they had nothing to gain from it.
|
| Here's a couple:
|
| _> Chris was the best manager I 've ever reported to.
| Period. He was supportive of his team, always motivating
| us to deliver excellence, even under daunting schedules
| set by the people above him. Because of Chris' support
| and commitment to his team, he fostered a deep loyalty
| and respect from our department. _
|
| _> Chris is passionate about developing software and
| about technology in general. This means he is always in
| touch with the latest trends and best practices in the
| industry. However, he is careful not to introduce a new
| process or methodology to his group unless it has clear
| benefits and he has considered the input of everyone
| affected.
|
| Chris has always been very well-respected by his
| engineers because his management style allows their best
| skills to shine. It's not simply a hands-off approach;
| he'll look to remove roadblocks where he can and offer
| help in any way possible. He is good at identifying an
| inefficiency and reaching out to help improve it.
|
| More than just management skills, Chris is a kind,
| understanding, sensible and fair human being. At one
| point, we had a six-year run where no one left the group.
| I hadn't really noticed or appreciated this stability
| until someone from our HR department pointed out how
| remarkable it was. This could not have happened without
| someone like Chris managing the group._
|
| But, what do they know? I'm sure they were mistaken. BTW:
| One of them was from a chap I laid off.
| deltaonefour wrote:
| I never said you were bad. I'm just saying being kept
| around for a long time doesn't mean someone is a good
| manager.
|
| Testimonials from employees are a good indicator for a
| good manager.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| 27 years is a long time to stay in a job you hate.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I'm an engineering manager with only 4 years in the role,
| and I think it's more of a lot of things I hate with
| intense periods of excitement, joy and satisfaction. You
| might be able to get 20+ years of that, depending on the
| details. That's why the OP's original analogy of a far
| less dangerous, corporate version of military combat
| resonated with me.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Yup. But it wasn't all hate. I worked for a company that
| I believed in, was a peer with some of the finest
| scientists and engineers in the world, ran a team of
| _very_ high-performing engineers, and was proud to be a
| member of that brand.
|
| I felt good about what I did, even though I didn't enjoy
| it.
|
| _> 27 years is a long time to stay in a job you hate._
|
| This statement shows that we are in a privileged place,
| indeed. We get to have a career, where we can do work
| that we enjoy, and make a lot of money at it.
|
| The great majority of people don't get that. Most of my
| friends don't like their jobs. Some, are very good at
| what they do, and make a lot of money.
|
| The job was relatively easy. I liked the company I worked
| for, and my peers. I felt a great deal of Responsibility
| towards the company, my peers, and my employees. I made
| enough to live on, and save. I could have made a _lot_
| more money, elsewhere. Despite the obvious sneers and
| judging that I get, I 'm actually no slouch.
|
| Nowadays, I work for free, on software that helps others.
|
| WFM. YMMV.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "trying to improve uneven performers"
|
| How do you do that? Apparently I'm an inconsistent performer
| now.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >"trying to improve uneven performers" >How do you do that?
| Apparently I'm an inconsistent performer now.
|
| I'm unsure if you are asking for advice on how to improve
| because your current manager marked you as inconsistent or
| if you think GP is calling all people "who are trying to
| improve as inconsistent"
|
| I'm a manager. I want to improve ALL of my team. To
| rephrase, I want each of my members to work on things that
| benefit themselves (they improve) _and_ benefit the team -
| if we can 't do that, I zoom out: how can they benefit the
| team, department, the company, the industry, the world. You
| might notice this means I _may_ find a better place for
| them on a different team or even outside the company. All
| of this. ALL OF THIS is trying to help the person in an
| area that he /she wants to grow in.
|
| Growth opportunities are very diverse: coding a new
| language, learning at a seminar, _teaching_ at a seminar,
| side projects, art, games, mentorship
| giantg2 wrote:
| I was marked as inconsistent.
| deltaonefour wrote:
| The earlier guy you replied to was a "bad manager". This
| guy you just replied to is a good one. He gets it. Note
| how I said a good manager very much assigns the right
| task to the right people.
| _n_b_ wrote:
| It's hard. At least for me, this is the hardest classes of
| employees to manager---it's much easier to get rid of
| somebody who is clearly failing or reward and further
| develop a high performer.
|
| When I say uneven, I'm thinking of somebody who either: (a)
| is excellent at certain key aspects of their jobs but
| clearly below expectations in others to the point that it's
| an issue, or (b) somebody who performs well but doesn't
| always put in enough effort. In both cases, it's subjective
| and difficult to determine that it's to the point where
| intervention is required, because that's usually an
| uncomfortable conversation. Often, you're the first manager
| ever telling the person that they need to improve---even if
| you're not the first person to think there's an issue.
| Typically, the other person will think you're an asshole.
| As another commenter said, they may recognize later on that
| you were right but normally in the near term, you'll have
| strained the relationship. (That's why managers avoid those
| conversations. Sometimes it's cowardice, sometimes it's
| deciding that the juice isn't worth the squeeze today.)
|
| As for how to work on improvement, that always has to be
| case-by-case considering the issue and the personality.
| Sometimes the "stop doing that" conversation is enough.
| Sometimes coaching or mentoring or development experiences
| can help. If those don't work, can you shift
| responsibilities around or find a different role that is a
| better fit?
|
| Normally you try to gently do those things anyway before
| you have the direct conversation, and then hope the direct
| conversation provides some motivation/insight to take it
| more seriously.
|
| If you're on the receiving end of that conversation, I
| guess my advice would be to try to critically self-reflect
| and see if you can understand where your manager is coming
| from. If you can, then you've both got a common place to
| start from towards improvement. If you can't, or you think
| they're just being unreasonable about expectations, then it
| is probably time to move on or hope they move on quickly.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Thanks. Basically I'm told that some stories I complete
| quickly while others drag out. I'm on a team that works
| with multiple systems (10ish), multiple languages,
| multiple stacks/architectures, and am expected to be full
| stack.
|
| The "improvements" I've been told to make is to document
| why stories are slow - mostly context switching from prod
| support, context switching from my role as ASC, and of
| course just being slow when working with a system or
| language that I haven't worked on in a while.
|
| So my perspective based on the feedback is, this isn't a
| performance issue (if it was it would be under
| communication instead of speed). It solely addresses
| visibility of the switching. I have requested consistent
| work, like being full stack in a single stack. The whole
| point of specialization of labor is to increase speed and
| quality, yet it seems this management tenent is wholly
| missed by my organization. You want consistent speed?
| Give me consistent work.
|
| The best part is I got a 4.5% pay cut, yet they say they
| want to retain me. All while the company is talking about
| across the board increases (which I won't be eligible
| for) and having trouble filling roles that typically stay
| open for 6 months. Which is it - do I suck, or do you
| want to keep me?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Time to find a better role at a new org.
| deltaonefour wrote:
| I can assure you that much of underperformance is a
| perception and miscommunication issue. If the employee is
| motivated and not stupid then if he's underperforming
| it's because objectives were not communicated or the
| manager failed to realize that the assignment was
| impossible not to underperform due to missing some
| challenging detail.
|
| Many managers don't realize this. Even managers that have
| a ton of experience, all they do is fire or have harsh
| conversations with people who "underperform." The truth
| of the matter is a good manager is rare. 1 out of 10
| literally and it's not an experience issue. A good
| manager is one who is highly highly unbiased and people
| are generally not like this.
|
| The person you replied to is not a good manager. Based on
| his reply he is actually below average.
|
| Basically for these managers good employees are those
| that can predict what the manager wants and how he
| thinks. If the person is able to guess and predict what
| his manager wants on a consistent basis, then objectives
| are more clear to this employee and as a result he can
| achieve them. These people are then perceived as "good
| employees".
|
| Due note that a good manager makes objectives for each
| task unambiguous and crystal clear. A bad manager leaves
| a lot of room to fuzzy concepts like "quality of work"
| because he himself isn't clear about what he wants.
|
| I have seen it many times. Employees who are basically
| geniuses fired because the manager wasn't able to realize
| how smart the person was. Instead the manager left the
| employee with vague instructions and expected him to just
| "get it." The manager didn't know that the employee is an
| expert in infrastructure and deployed him on writing
| algorithms...
|
| This is an unwise and inefficient deployment of
| resources. It is the managers job to determine what each
| of his employees like and what they are exceptional at
| and deploy resources accordingly. It is also the managers
| job to understand in detail the nature of the assignment
| given to an employee so tasks can be handed out
| efficiently.
|
| Bad managers tend to throw random people at random tasks
| without fully understanding the task or the person. In
| these cases there is an element of luck involved. How
| hard the task is versus if the person assigned to the
| task is suited for that task. An employee who handles the
| task well or is able to temper the expectations of the
| manager through communication is perceived as "good."
|
| These managers are easily recognizable. I will tell you
| how to identify them. They perceive the world as
| employees who are "underperformers" and those who are
| not. The person you replied to put the world in 3 tiers
| lol. The world is very nuanced and it is impossible to
| divide people into three buckets like this. He is the
| quintessential example of "bad manager."
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > The best part is I got a 4.5% pay cut, yet they say
| they want to retain me. All while the company is talking
| about across the board increases (which I won't be
| eligible for) and having trouble filling roles that
| typically stay open for 6 months. Which is it - do I
| suck, or do you want to keep me?
|
| They want to keep you, they just don't want to pay you
| (more than they have to).
|
| After you leave, they will have to hire a new person and
| give them 120% of your current pay. (And the new person
| will be less productive, at least at the beginning,
| simply because they will be new.)
|
| But the company is making the bet that you will stay, at
| least for a few years, because apparently most people do.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I feel you in terms of the hacker lifestyle you're describing.
| I often work from home too (1-3d/w). Fully emersed and free,
| getting a lot done. But I've found going for a >1h walk a day
| really helps. The body feels more awake, my eyes are more
| relaxed, my thoughts are reordered and some new inspirations
| and ideas emerge.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I start each day, with a 2-mile walk (not today. Lots of
| snow, but I'll be getting my exercise, later).
|
| I use the time to triage my day. Works a charm.
| soldeace wrote:
| I have a blast being a senior data scientist, and I've recently
| turned down a manager role precisely because of the points you
| raised, despite the better pay. Your comment made me glad of my
| decision.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > One of the reasons that I hated being a manager, was because
| the job involved a lot of sitting around, waiting for stuff to
| happen.
|
| As a manager-of-managers, when I hear that a manager is doing
| "a lot of sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen", it's
| usually a sign that something has gone wrong.
|
| Don't get me wrong: I don't expect everyone to be productive
| 100% of the day, but if managers are reaching a point where
| even they feel like they have too much free time then one of
| two things has happened:
|
| 1) The company has grossly over-hired for the workload at hand.
| If all the tasks are done and the manager couldn't find
| anything to do if they tried, it's possible that the company
| just hired way too many people or greatly under-shot their
| workloads.
|
| This really does happen at some companies that get so big and
| profitable that executives start chasing headcount and having
| the biggest department they can get away with. You end up with
| so many managers that most of them spend their days sitting
| around or, even worse, inventing new and unnecessary work for
| their teams just to fill time. It's not good.
|
| 2) Or: Managers have too narrow of a view of what their job is.
| Speaking generally (not accusing the parent comment) - This
| often happens when developers who haven't experienced good
| management or managerial mentoring get promoted into their own
| management positions and assume their job is literally just to
| delegate to the engineers and then check on them until it's
| done. In non-stagnant tech companies, there is always more for
| managers to be doing: Reviewing/updating documentation, helping
| with hands-on testing of the product, observing or interacting
| with customers to get a deeper understanding of the problem,
| coordinating with the sales team to get a better understanding
| of their domain, and the list goes on. Many of these tasks
| aren't immediately obvious without proper managerial
| mentorship, and they might be downright foreign if your only
| experience with managers has been of the delegate-and-wait
| variety.
|
| Personally, my experience was that I was far busier as a
| manager than I ever was as an IC. IC work is more narrowly
| scoped and easier to constrain to specific time limits, or get
| targets and deadlines shifted according to however much work
| could be done. As a manager, the amount of work that could be
| done was both never-ending and also extremely varied,
| comprising tens or maybe hundreds of possible tasks that often
| needed attention in parallel, combined with the inter-personal
| demands of managing people and constant hiring.
| rdtwo wrote:
| There is always more stuff to do but a smart person would
| quickly notice that only things that show up on metrics or
| are personally fulfilling are worth doing. The managers I've
| seen promoted chase metrics only and don't sweat the other
| stuff. The good ones also take care of the people. The
| terrible ones try to do everything and anything that they
| think might be good for the company and ultimately piss
| everyone off and burn themselves out.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| And it's NOTORIOUSLY hard to attribute effective metrics to
| IT.
|
| From a security standpoint (because that's my wheelhouse),
| if you're not under attack, your metrics suck, if you chase
| tickets, a lot of them get closed without effective
| resolution.
|
| We're not manufacturing widgets, and can't earn that bonus
| by making 10% more widgets.
| Grustaf wrote:
| > smart person would quickly notice that only things that
| show up on metrics or are personally fulfilling are worth
| doing
|
| In other words, only stupid people have a work ethic?
| rdtwo wrote:
| If you want to word it that way... seems a bit crude you
| can have work ethic and channel it towards metrics
| instead
| vp8989 wrote:
| "2) Or: Managers have too narrow of a view of what their job
| is. Speaking generally (not accusing the parent comment) -
| This often happens when developers who haven't experienced
| good management or managerial mentoring get promoted into
| their own management positions and assume their job is
| literally just to delegate to the engineers and then check on
| them until it's done. In non-stagnant tech companies, there
| is always more for managers to be doing: Reviewing/updating
| documentation, helping with hands-on testing of the product,
| observing or interacting with customers to get a deeper
| understanding of the problem, coordinating with the sales
| team to get a better understanding of their domain, and the
| list goes on. Many of these tasks aren't immediately obvious
| without proper managerial mentorship, and they might be
| downright foreign if your only experience with managers has
| been of the delegate-and-wait variety."
|
| Big companies tend to hire "specialists" to do all those
| tasks you mentioned, which I think is a mistake. If the
| purpose of those tasks is to improve the function of product
| development, which can be rephrased as "make the coders more
| effective" then each of those people require a high bandwidth
| communication channel to the coders. You can only have so
| many people that you communicate a lot with, and so the
| effectiveness of those people in improving the effectiveness
| of product development is limited. Their job is to make sure
| the devs arent working in silos but they all just end up
| forming their own silos because its simply not practical to
| have high bandwidth communication with all these different
| groups of specialists.
|
| Im talking about designers, product managers, project
| managers, user researchers, data analysts etc ...
|
| My broader point is that I agree with your vision of what a
| manager should do but IME it's not how larger companies tend
| to be structured.
| taormina wrote:
| Even then, the manager needs to reaching out to those
| specialists, coordinating and nurturing those
| relationships. No one says the eng manager needs to be all
| of those roles, but as the member of the team without a
| "real workload" they should absolutely be the liason to the
| rest of the org.
| bikingbismuth wrote:
| I am currently a manager and the few times where I have said "I
| am going to write part of this solution my team is working on."
| Were the times that I got a big pile of management work and
| blocked the team. I have since learned my lesson.
| analog31 wrote:
| As a manager, I quickly realized that trying to be a technical
| contributor was a subtle and insidious form of micromanagement.
| Also, I could give myself my pick of the coolest tasks, which
| was unfair.
| brightball wrote:
| One of my favorite jobs was managing about a dozen Python
| programmers for 3 years...because I don't know a lick of
| Python and it forced me to focus on the team more than the
| tasks.
|
| I got a lot of joy out of helping everybody develop, find
| their groove and helping them coordinate and learn from each
| other.
|
| The business demands I was shielding them from were extremely
| stressful though. A million things that everybody wanted done
| yesterday in wildly different directions.
|
| At some point in trying to make concessions on the business
| side I started losing the support of a couple of senior guys
| on the team though. After a couple of months it was pretty
| clear there was no getting that confidence back. When the
| demands from both sides became too high to resolve, I didn't
| have any choice but to move on. Really frustrating too
| because I gave so much to that job and team, but you can tell
| when you've lost people and there's no easy fix like
| refactoring the code to make it all better.
|
| As a manager, trust is the only thing that allows you to be
| effective; when your team knows that you are really looking
| out for them.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| It sounds like you were trying to be too nice and were
| trying to appease both sides; that's a losing proposition.
| You are working with adults, and adults should be able to
| handle bad news (if handled properly), and a good manager
| should be able to bring the bad news but at the same time
| give enough context so that everyone understands.
| brightball wrote:
| Maybe. It was my first time being full time management
| only. Balanced it effectively for the better part of 3
| years. There were a lot of unique challenges (in the non-
| exaggerated sense) and learning experiences in that job.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| Each hour put in as a manager is many times the return of you
| as an IC (for better or worse). As technical work is an
| endless pit of time, it's very difficult to be a hands on
| manager that's effective.
| ahelwer wrote:
| Very entertaining to read a thread of managers telling
| themselves they shouldn't do any work, and then
| simultaneously describing not doing any work as "many times
| the return of you as an IC" (presumably counting themselves
| not interfering with the people doing the actual work as
| equivalent to doing the sum of that work).
| caseysoftware wrote:
| If you think "hands on keyboard coding" is the
| primary/only form of work that matters, then you've
| missed out on a lot.
|
| Of the best managers I've worked for, one of the most
| obviously important things they did was keep other teams
| off our backs. Constant interruptions, shifting
| priorities, "just a quick question", and the like do more
| to destroy a team and its progress than anything else.
| Their name doesn't get attached to lines of code or
| completed items but a lot more things get completed as a
| result.
| ahelwer wrote:
| If you want that then hire someone to stand outside your
| office with a stick and reply rudely to emails. We don't
| need to give them hiring/firing/promotion/rewards
| authority.
| BigRedDog1669 wrote:
| As an IC you can't tell other teams managers or higher
| ups or PMs to fuck off if they call you directly and tell
| you they think what you are doing isn't good. Or if they
| ask for unreasonable stuff. At least without fear of
| getting fired. A manager needs to prevent this from
| happening
| ahelwer wrote:
| So the problem managers solve is the problem of there
| being other managers?
| sulam wrote:
| Your imagination is very far from the reality of what
| managers do. I'll give you a run-down of my day:
|
| 1) reading emails. These emails generally consist of a
| few categories of things -- stuff I need to be informed
| about, questions, asks for permission (a special form of
| question), documents (generally decision and decision
| docs, or stuff from Product), and meeting requests.
|
| 2) meetings. These meetings generally consist of stuff
| that couldn't be handled over email, but is a lot of the
| same stuff. It's also status updates, not from my staff,
| but with my peers. 1:1s and staff meeting (mine and my
| manager's) are the balance.
|
| 3) There is no 3. Really, it's a full time job to do 1
| and 2. Every now and then I will carve out some time to
| write a document myself, but in general that gets
| delegated because I will do it more slowly than someone
| who doesn't have a pile of time-sensitive email and
| meetings to deal with.
| ahelwer wrote:
| You are mistaken, this is literally - word for word - my
| imagination of what managers do.
| sulam wrote:
| Well then you are mistaken in your characterization of
| this not being work.
| ahelwer wrote:
| Replying to emails and sitting in meetings thinking of
| the best way to tell other people how to do the actual
| work isn't work, no.
|
| Oh I forgot - we give the people who do this control over
| the employment of the people who do the actual work. Very
| weird system.
| sulam wrote:
| And yet one that billions of people participate in. You
| are either a genius of epic proportions or just wrong in
| your thinking here. As long as people in coordinated
| groups get more done than individuals, I believe you are
| wrong.
| ahelwer wrote:
| People in coordinated groups do not necessarily require
| someone to sit around in meetings and send emails telling
| the rest of them what to do.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| Managers do work. They decide you what need to be done,
| when it's due, they coordinate processes inside and
| outside the team, they (hopefully) review what gets
| implemented, make sure the team has the physical things
| it needs, build budgets and roadmaps, isolate the team
| from organizational bullshit, work on hiring and more.
|
| It's quite simple - you as a manager can only do the work
| of one IC but your are responsible for multiple ICs. If
| they sit idle, make the wrong decisions, are demoralized
| or leave the company, you hurt the org much more than
| help by technical contributions yourself.
|
| I'd put the cutoff at about a team of 6. Below 6 you can
| do technical work yourself, above 6 you're better off
| taking care of your team.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I don't especially care what people think of the job I
| did, or how I did it. I made enough to be where I am,
| today, and I like it.
|
| It was what it was, and it is what it is.
|
| I just wrote about my own experience, and my own feelings
| about that experience, as opposed to rendering judgment
| (look through my posting history, here, and you'll find
| very little judgment of others. I am too old and tired to
| fight. I have better things to do with my time, other
| than TCP/IP posturing).
| jzwinck wrote:
| Why did you feel that making direct technical contributions
| was micromanagement?
| goodpoint wrote:
| Because you either manage people / goals / interactions
| with other teams or do front line work.
|
| If you cross the barrier the people in your team will be
| put under pressure having to do things like for example
| disagreeing with technical decision or debating something
| in a code review with... the same person that has the power
| to promote or fire them.
|
| It creates a power gradient in every day activities.
|
| That's "stealth" micromanagement regardless of the good
| intentions and technical skills of the manager.
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| Not the person you replied to, but it's because manager's
| will never truly fit into a project. Most people don't want
| to go against the manager, or question decisions made by
| the manager.
|
| Even if the manager specifically says "Hey everyone, give
| me some feedback. Be open and honest" - That's a trap. No
| one will ever actually do that, because if you bruise your
| manager's ego, they have the power to make your life a
| living hell.
|
| As someone who has worked with managers who did tried to
| get too involved in projects, they just become a dictator.
| Since the manager will play an oversight role in the
| project, any small issues will be visible to them at all
| times. Normally, the team could work out small roadblocks
| on their own to keep stress low. If the manager is
| involved, they'll often try to "make themselves useful" and
| slow things down. Let's not even mention manager statements
| like "Hey guys, let's keep a note of this so we can work on
| restructuring our processes in case this happens in the
| future"... (Because everyone loves redrafting SOPs every 2
| months, right?).
|
| A good manager is one that stays out of the way and lets
| you do your job. Having a manager on a project kinda feels
| like that episode of The Office when Michael comes to Jim's
| party and everyone was just kinda standing around
| awkwardly.
| indymike wrote:
| I've been a hands on contributor and manager for long
| time. I do three things that seem to make this a lot more
| functional:
|
| 1) I pick what I'm going to work on after the rest of the
| team picks their tickets.
|
| 2) I fix one bug per day, not matter what.
|
| 3) HIPPO (HIghest Paid Person's Opinion) is not an
| acceptable reason to make a decision.
|
| It's worked well for me, your milage may vary.
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| At least that's what you think. I'm sure your direct
| reports have a lot of opinions on that setup that they'll
| never reveal. I say this with 100% confidence.
| indymike wrote:
| > I'm sure your direct reports have a lot of opinions on
| that setup that they'll never reveal.
|
| Then I'll never know how to make things better. It's
| dysfunctional when you can't communicate safely and
| equally dysfunctional when problems are hidden for fear
| of a manager's ego.
| 88913527 wrote:
| There's been times where it's the right thing to get
| involved, and other times when it's not. For example, we had
| an issue with full ticket completion: sometimes 3 of 5
| requirements would get complete, and then the work was
| merged. I wouldn't review line-by-line, but I would cross-
| check the features and note if I found something missing. To
| be clear, I would not dictate how to do the work. In the
| meantime, we instituted processes to ensure work was
| completed in full, and once the team norm'ed around the new
| process, I stepped back.
| Ntrails wrote:
| The alternative is you give yourself the low priority low
| probability work. The 'noodle around this nasty thing nobody
| wants to touch' work that delivers tech debt reduction or a
| velocity win. It can be very fulfilling, but no critical
| path, no OKR or delivery date etc etc
| convolvatron wrote:
| this is right. no, you don't get the big win. but you do
| get to put in that cleanup that everyone is always talking
| about. and you get to actually write the tests that no one
| else has time for.
|
| you kind of have to do this. idk how I could function
| effectively if I didn't have a reason to be looking at the
| code all the time.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| yep, The self-assign for many managers should be boring
| spikes, documentation and execution tasks. You will need to
| get your tech fix somewhere other than your day-to-day.
| aprdm wrote:
| I pick boring tasks that have been sitting on the backlog for
| a very long time usually .
| paulcole wrote:
| What's the point of earning the money?
| blorenz wrote:
| It's for another day. Currently his happiness is in exactly
| what he is doing. He is building and creating.
| paulcole wrote:
| Do you know the commenter I replied to personally or are
| you guessing?
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| > I sometimes tasked myself with projects for work, but they
| were almost always ignored by my company, and that hurt.
|
| Experienced this on multiple occasions especially recently and
| it does indeed hurt - especially when you know what a
| difference it could make to users or fellow developers and it's
| ignored or ignored and then some higher up miraculously
| suddenly invents an identical idea several months down the
| line.
|
| Bonus points if it's a whole team effort for almost two years
| that gets more or less scrapped despite the obvious need for it
| as a dependency for multiple teams.
| aprdm wrote:
| As a manager I feel my days are always short, I work in a big
| company and have 1:1s with other departments to develop
| relationships, to try to influence other team's roadmaps , to
| check how other people are doing that used to be on my team and
| how can I help, to talk with end users, to mentor junior
| developers... I can pick and choose what I feel has more impact
| on above.
|
| I also have a vision of where I want the team and the company
| to be and try to get strategies to achieve it. For example,
| increases pay bands justification, promotions, career ladder,
| more training budget, paying for software, approve open source
| usage requests that are blocking someone etc.
| int0x80 wrote:
| I spend most of my time thinking what needs to be done, and how
| to do it. Then I make the simplest possible prototype/POC and re-
| check my ideas. Then I think about use cases (test cases,
| actually) and keep iterating making small modifications (usually)
| to the code and finding more edge cases. My point is, the actual
| amount of time actually doing code-writing is very small, most
| time is spent figuring things out (thinking on the high level
| design/algorithm), writing out the ideas as code is usually the
| least part of the work. Finally I do cleanups/refactor, which are
| quite simple to do, but take non trivial amounts of time,
| including writting more documentation (e.g. code comments and
| descriptions for the PR for reviewers and for later reference).
| drakonka wrote:
| I am sure this is true for many people, but it doesn't resonate
| with me at all. I usually end up working way more hours (focus
| working, not browsing HN or Reddit between PRs) than I'm supposed
| to. It is so easy for me to get sucked into a task and not be
| able to put it down until I'm done, and then get sucked into the
| next task even if it it's after-hours. And once I have momentum
| it is very difficult for me to stop until I feel some sense of
| completion, even though the task is expected to be spread out
| across several days. I think it is a sign of workaholism and it's
| something I am trying to work on.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > between one and two hours of hard thinky work
|
| Bertrand Russell once observed that philosophy is really hard;
| even very good philosophers only spend a few minutes per year
| doing it.
| jimmyvalmer wrote:
| tldr; _Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I 'm
| working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd
| say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of
| real, actual, work._
|
| Office Space (1999)
| [deleted]
| nnoitra wrote:
| Is this true for everyone or is this a special specimen "Most
| days I can do somewhere between one and two hours of hard thinky
| work."?
|
| 5 - 10 hours of deep work per week required to get a Phd from
| Imperial. That's impressive.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Like the author says, I think this is pretty normal. Deep work
| in a flow state is easily 10x more productive than when you're
| messing around.
|
| 10hrs of deep work a week is also a significant amount of time.
| I doubt most people spend that much time doing deep work each
| week.
| SaberTail wrote:
| My PhD, in physics, was a mix.
|
| When I was building the physical apparatus itself and plumbing
| it up, I was working 70 hour weeks because it was more or less
| mindless physical labor.
|
| When I was writing software to operate the experiment or
| analyze data, I settled into more of a few hours a day of deep
| work pattern. Part of that might be the nature of science;
| after I implemented an idea, it might be hours before the
| experiment fully responded to my changes or the computers
| finished crunching numbers. And I needed that feedback to
| inform what I'd do next.
|
| Writing my dissertation was somewhere in the middle. The actual
| writing required focus, but a lot of it was tracking down
| references or making figures, which required some thought but
| not too deep. That's probably the closest I came to a 40 hour
| week.
|
| Based on other replies, it sounds like other people have
| experienced similar relationships of the nature of the work to
| their capacity to do it.
| f6v wrote:
| PhD studies can be very different. Wet-lab students who do
| experiments can spend 12 hours a day in a lab cutting mice. But
| that's somewhat mechanical work where you repeat the protocol.
| PhD students are also less experienced and spend a lot of time
| making mistakes and learning. When I got my fist full-time
| developer job I spent day and night working as well. After 5-7
| years, I was something like the author because I could do non-
| trivial tasks quickly. It felt like the code was writing itself
| in the back of my mind while I was drinking coffee or browsing
| HN.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Some people do work a solid 8 hours or whatever per day. Mostly
| those in more manual jobs as they basically sell their bodies.
| But in our line of work it's not quite like that. I both work
| less than 8 hours a day, or more, depending on how you define
| "work".
|
| The thing is, I'm not paid for my body or my labour. I'm paid for
| my mind. My employer pays for me to engage myself with the
| business. My mind never fully disengages. When I start work on
| Monday I don't "start again" like a rebooted machine. In
| addition, the mind never fully switches off, even when sleeping.
| I'll often crack a problem in my sleep and realise it during my
| morning cleaning cycle.
|
| So no, I might not "work" as much as you think I should, but if
| you find that surprising then I'm probably far more engaged than
| you would imagine too.
|
| There are, of course, those who don't work much and aren't as
| fully engaged. That will always happen. It's important to measure
| the value people are delivering (and help them improve) but it
| can't be done using any single metric and certainly not "hours
| worked".
| sdze wrote:
| I am now in 2 projects in parallel and most of the work time is
| consumed by meetings. Meetings eat up so much energy that I have
| none left to utilize the time-slots in between meetings to get
| things done.
| jaggederest wrote:
| Yeah mentally I estimate the dead time created around meetings
| as 2x the length of the actual meeting. A "quick checkin"
| actually kills an hour, an all-hands meeting may well write off
| the entire day.
| dqpb wrote:
| > Most days I can do somewhere between one and two hours of hard
| thinky work.
|
| He then goes on to list all the hours of other stuff he does.
|
| So it sounds like his main point is that he doesn't spend 40
| hours per week on pure "hard thinky work".
|
| I don't see why that matters. All the other inter-personal and
| logistical work is also work.
|
| More importantly, he doesn't mention any of the time outside of
| work that he spends mulling things over in the back of his mind.
| That's also work.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Have spent a lot of my life doing manual labor, and still
| slightly in that boat now but do have a proper office job
| (receptionist). it was incredible for me to experience my first
| office job and realize this general fact. Not only was my body
| not sore everyday, but my day was suddenly largely my own, my
| "labor" was suddenly not defined necessarily by constant action.
| I dont even really have to think as much as I did working in a
| kitchen, say.
|
| Its just important to realize that this relationship with labor
| is a privilege, because trust me, its not "everyone". If that
| privilege is obtained because you provide something more
| "skilled", ok, I guess I understand that. There is still an
| instinctual level where it still feels unjust to me. But thats
| just my emotions, I understand economics trumps them.
| wpietri wrote:
| It's a huge privilege! In high school and college I worked a
| bunch of random jobs, including factory worker, McDonald's
| cook, and convenience store cashier. It helped me really
| appreciate the cushiness of office jobs.
|
| But in some ways, it's the source of ongoing frustration.
| Office culture IME is not very interested in getting direct
| work done. When I was on the McDonald's breakfast shift, I had
| a solid block of hours where people knew not to bother me
| unless something was literally on fire. I could get into a
| glorious flow state. Even managers, even visiting execs knew to
| button their lips until the time was right. But these days?
| There are so many people who are happy to put 30 minutes on my
| calendar or interrupt me on Slack. They mean well; they just
| don't know anything else. How I wish they did!
| Ntrails wrote:
| The only thing in an office that gets close to the buzz/flow
| of a busy service, is dealing with an outage/incident. I miss
| elements of it, for sure. I do not miss working _hard_ for
| 50+ hours a week at less than minimum wage (woo salaried).
| Strs2FillMyDrms wrote:
| I was at a construction site as field architect and the field
| work of a manager is nothing compared to that of the actual
| workers. So.. I tried coding at work, as I had a "lot" of spare
| time... and it was impossible. The stressful state of mind
| makes it impossible to make anything related to coding... the
| sun, the heat, the stress. Non skilled jobs, that are also
| menial and with this constant uncertain output, are a doom to
| those who work them(jobs) because they offer aboslute no
| progress to those who's lives depend on them. Intellectual and
| economical progress. Yet I've found people obsessed with field
| work..
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > part of his skill was in lying to management
|
| I once worked in the warehouse at a (unionized) manufacturer of
| printer's ink. I was told-off by the Father of Chapel (the union
| organizer) for working too hard. This was unskilled labour; so
| the skill I had to master was how to avoid being fired by
| management for laziness, while not getting told-off by the FoC
| for excessive zeal.
| twirlock wrote:
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| It depends on the age. At 20 something I could easily pull 16
| hours of straight hard coding. Now? Forget about it.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| So could I. The caveat being that I was only a fraction as
| productive. roughly guessing, 16 hours was probably worth about
| 3 of today's.
|
| most of the difference is just the ability to go more directly
| to the right solution or implementation versus when i was
| younger I often found out late that something was off and had
| to change _everything_ to cascade the refactor.
| toss1 wrote:
| Excellent distillation of the problem.
|
| What strikes me most is that it reminds me of reading about
| studies of hunter-gatherer societies who pretty much spent 4
| hours 'working' each day. Seems like these limits might be fairly
| hard-wired.
|
| And, sure, I can do massive crunch-time sprints with the best of
| them, but only for limited times.
|
| And management guidance & feedback that aligns with these
| realities is critical to prevent the environment from becoming
| toxic.
| skybrian wrote:
| Maybe pair programming doesn't look so bad after all?
| f6v wrote:
| Pair programming was definitely more productive for me. But
| it's also exhausting to a point where I can't do more than 3
| days in a row.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I don't see how you can reach this conclusion.
|
| You have peer pressure to keep working longer, you get little
| done and you're wasting your brain power.
|
| It makes sense if someone is junior and learning from the
| other.
|
| Otherwise it's just an employers' tool to get people to squeeze
| in more hours of half-assed work (and then work more alone to
| actually get something done to have something to show for).
|
| Async PRs reviews are way more efficient and less taxing on
| people.
| skybrian wrote:
| When I did it (a long time ago) we worked for seven hours or
| so and went home tired but feeling like we actually
| accomplished a full day of work. Peer pressure was more about
| keeping to the normal schedule and taking breaks than putting
| in more hours.
|
| But the startup died due to not paying enough attention to
| business issues. Programming productivity isn't everything.
|
| Then I went to Google and my productivity got a lot worse,
| for many reasons but waiting on code reviews was one. To some
| extent I could compensate by making unrelated changes in
| parallel, or even working on a stack of patches and fixing up
| later patches when earlier ones needed to change. It felt
| like it was fighting a system that wanted to slow me down,
| though.
| twistedpair wrote:
| Funny, I find the opposite. Maybe it's a desire to feel
| efficient, but if asked "how long did that take you", I feel like
| saying 2/3 N hours rather than N hours. Then again, I'm a full
| time employee, so I'm not billing by the hour, like lawyers that
| get $100 for responding to your email.
| jug wrote:
| While this blog post and reading about his opinions may be
| interesting, ultimately it's an opinion piece and I strongly
| dislike when people write opinion pieces and make it sound like
| they did a study in the title!
|
| For all we know, he may be completely wrong! Maybe he is the
| outlier and people generally, in fact do perform more "focused
| work" than two hours a day...
|
| Maybe he isn't overly enthusiastic about his work place, maybe he
| is in a remote work environment where he isn't inspired to work
| more efficiently through his peers. Maybe there is a little of
| everything and he's just trying to warrant this one hour focused
| work days through "insights".
|
| The reason I'm questioning this is because I have procastrination
| issues at work and take several short mental breaks, but even I,
| once I get going and in "the zone" (often later in the work day),
| I can often do focused work at least twice as long as him. He
| really gives nothing to go by as for his bold title, which I ask
| why it's not at least the more undeniably accurate: "I don't work
| as much as you think".
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The OP does mention "being in the zone" as a possibility. He
| just says that it's rare, inherently not applicable to many
| kinds of work, and requires optimal conditions that generally
| don't apply. It's very much the exception, not the rule.
| dgeiser13 wrote:
| People who talk about how much they work don't work as much as
| they say.
| neptunedesert wrote:
| Great article. I relate to the author's points. Worth a careful
| read.
| mkl95 wrote:
| I spend a significant part of my day working synchronously
| (engineering / product / etc. meetings, mandatory unplanned calls
| to fix some crappy system that is failing in production...) as
| opposed to working asynchronously (reviewing someone else's PR
| while they work on something else, reading some spec, etc.).
|
| I work as much as it seems, but I do it in a wildly inefficient
| way due to my employer's work-hard-not-smart culture. The fact we
| work 50 hour weeks to do things we could do in 35-40 is hilarious
| and infuriating at the same time.
| basq wrote:
| Hey, at least you have a paycheck. There are tons of people out
| there who work 50-hour weeks (artists, musicians) who get less
| than a decimal of that pay, none of the benefits, and all of
| the stress.
| eru wrote:
| Artists and musicians specifically get a lot of social
| prestige. Similarly for actors.
|
| That's part of why many people are willing to have a go at
| these careers despite the well-known abysmal earning
| expectations.
|
| It's just a lot of very willing supply and rather limited
| demand that depresses monetary earnings for labour in these
| sectors.
|
| Compare also pay and conditions for programmers in the games
| industry vs those working on in-house corporate CRUD
| applications.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| _Artists and musicians specifically get a lot of social
| prestige. Similarly for actors._
|
| No, they - in general - do not. A few get this. A few more
| lucky folks make a living off of it. In the case of an
| artist, you are probably doing commissions and spend a lot
| of time on social media, in the post office, and such
| things just to tread water. Comic artists and animators
| you've never heard of go about their day in invisibility
| while they destroy their wrists, elbows, and shoulders for
| your enjoyment. (a number of these are contract jobs, too,
| which means no benefits).
|
| Most musicians are pretty local or fly under the radar.
| Band teachers are usually musicians, and i'm pretty sure
| there isn't a lot of prestige there. Lots of "musicians"
| are working in such jobs, many are touring local circuits,
| picking music for commercials, and things like that.
|
| The most common sort of artist or musician, though, is the
| unknown one. There are way more artists and musicians than
| we have space for in our minds. I'm not sure what sort of
| prestige you think folks are getting. Even worse, I'm not
| sure why that would be a substitute for decent pay. Supply
| and demand obviously aren't the constraints on wages people
| make them out to be.
| eru wrote:
| To remove some of the weasel words:
|
| Posing with a guitar will help you get laid. Even if you
| don't play remotely well enough to make any money, or for
| anyone to really care about your music.
| notefaker wrote:
| > Most musicians are pretty local or fly under the radar.
| Band teachers are usually musicians, and i'm pretty sure
| there isn't a lot of prestige there. Lots of "musicians"
| are working in such jobs, many are touring local
| circuits, picking music for commercials, and things like
| that.
|
| > The most common sort of artist or musician, though, is
| the unknown one. There are way more artists and musicians
| than we have space for in our minds. I'm not sure what
| sort of prestige you think folks are getting. Even worse,
| I'm not sure why that would be a substitute for decent
| pay. Supply and demand obviously aren't the constraints
| on wages people make them out to be.
|
| I've been working professionally as a music creator for
| nearly 20 years. I think what separates the musician
| types you're referring to from actual professionals is an
| understanding of how to make money with art and when to
| pivot one's career, e.g. "live gigs are paying me
| nothing... how else can I make money with my music?" I'd
| be miserable if I'd stayed in live music beyond my early
| twenties or believed that teaching was an adequate
| substitution for being paid to create for a living.
|
| Most hobbyist musicians never work beyond the genre or
| instrument they initially learned, like a "programmer"
| who learns HTML as a kid but fails to take their
| expertise further. It's a severe lack of business acumen,
| self-awareness, and desire to evolve.
| jseban wrote:
| > No, they - in general - do not.
|
| Yes they do. I'm both a musician and a software developer
| and the difference in social prestige is night and day,
| depending on how I present myself.
|
| You're trying to refute the statement that musicians and
| artists get a lot of social prestige, by stating that
| they make little money and do work that's not glamorous,
| and that's irrelevant, it's rather actually part of what
| gives it prestige.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| That's true yet still feels rosy ;-)
|
| There's a lot of waiting tables, and if lucky, teaching
| gigs. Paid performance gigs are rarer and not that rosy
| either, eg, boring wedding music or sporadic & low-paid
| pop-ified club gigs. In COVID... yikes.
|
| Prestige includes a lot of 'when will you get a real
| job?'
|
| Even for the rare folks who 'make it', there's often a
| lot of weirdness, especially around the one-hit wonder
| commercial music circuit. Unlikely and hard to get there,
| and often ugly if you do.
|
| Sound rough? Even worse in visual areas because even less
| money. Gallery scene is basically charity from upper
| crust and whatever small grants, if you're lucky. More
| likely, still waiting tables or some other day job. There
| are commercial gigs, but rarely related to your art: an
| artist's exploration of abstract oil painting is far from
| say musclebound video game characters for adolescents.
| Even if someone likes your aesthetic style, commercial
| versions for say a big hotel/ commercial/product are
| dead/generic for accessibility reasons.
|
| I was around a lot of this in my early 20's. The
| entertainment industry is at odds with art. Happy to be
| away from it, and empathy for artists pushing through it.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It sounds like the main rewards aren't financial. Why do
| people pursue these careers?
|
| It's hard to try and make money on something lots of
| people do as a hobby, it's the same situation in
| professional sports.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> > Artists and musicians specifically get a lot of
| social prestige. Similarly for actors._
|
| _> I 'm not sure what sort of prestige you think folks
| are getting._
|
| Groupies, maybe? I've encountered them hanging on even
| celebrity impersonators (in Los Angeles) and cover bands
| (in Las Vegas), not just originals. Not to mention
| authors and visual artists. Most artistic scenes seem to
| attract them.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| So whose fault is it that they're pay is not decent, if
| it's not a matter of supply and demand?
| tester756 wrote:
| >The fact we work 50 hour weeks
|
| 50?! but why?
| saurik wrote:
| > Most days I can do somewhere between one and two hours of hard
| thinky work.
|
| Wow. Once I start doing this kind of work I both have a hard time
| stopping (as I find working on such problems addictive, both in
| good ways and in bad) and feel like it takes at least a couple
| hours of loading state into my brain before I could even begin to
| be working "at speed" on a hard problem, which means I actively
| try to schedule my life such that I either can spend a solid zero
| hours in a day working on hard mental tasks ;P or make myself
| ready to work until dawn (at which point I simply feel bad I am
| still awake sometimes more than truly feel like I am ready to
| stop).
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I think I work pretty much the same. Usually get next to
| nothing done, or am extremely productive for most/all of the
| day.
| MathYouF wrote:
| I've found as well that once I get really going on a tough
| problem, it may consume my life for the next several days in a
| row, it'll be all I do or think about. I wish I knew how people
| turn it off after a few hours a day and think about anything
| else.
| scrollaway wrote:
| I'm in the same boat as you, and yet my hours look like the
| post author's. One scenario that leads to this is that I simply
| have other shit to do, and need to hard stop my focus on
| something that I far too often want to keep working on.
|
| This is partly a delegation problem (I'm trying to free up time
| by delegating certain things), and partly just a problem of
| growing up: What interrupts me might sometimes be other work or
| menial tasks, but it's often also just social life or having to
| go to to the ice rink.
|
| I'm super happy with my current work-life balance, though a bit
| unsatisfied at how often I have to context switch. I wish I
| could just schedule as well as you do, unfortunately when it
| comes to social engagements for example I'm often more
| restricted...
| bregma wrote:
| That's great until a PM schedules a quick meeting to make sure
| your progress is tracking their spreadsheet line. And there are
| 4 or 5 PMs. You end up with your days split into 6 or 7
| segments between quick standups and triage meetings and status
| meetings and emergency customer calls where you're brought in
| "just in case" and because it takes at least a half hour of
| concentration just to get back into the zone, your week has
| passed without you spending any productive time doing hard
| thinky work. And you can't even explain at the PM's next quick
| progress meeting that you're behind because her quick status
| meeting has set you back a week, because to her reporting
| status at a meeting of 15 people _is_ how things progress.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> [B]ecause it takes at least a half hour of concentration
| just to get back into the zone, your week has passed without
| you spending any productive time doing hard thinky work. _
|
| And when that half hour itself is semi-routinely[0]
| interrupted, the whole cycle becomes a form of aversion
| therapy conditioning you to avoid even attempting to
| concentrate.
|
| Once you're stuck in that rut, you're really screwed because
| every failed attempt to break out of the cycle just
| reinforces it, and not being interrupted just means you're
| worrying about being interrupted instead.
|
| [0] As with other processes, intermittent reinforcement is
| far more effective than consistency.
| Klaster_1 wrote:
| The article resonated with my experience as as software
| developer.
|
| At my first place, a small outsourcing shop, employees were
| required to log daily activities so hours per day roughly fit to
| 8 and 40 per week. From the beginning and unlike most of
| coworkers, I measured my time precisely with
| https://github.com/Klaster1/timer-5 and soon understood that
| doing 8 hours per day doesn't happen much and often involves
| staying late, so instead I simply adjusted the reported numbers
| to look plausible. In four years, I only received positive
| feedback on my productivity. What was the management thinking, I
| have no idea, just like the article says, this was a farce all
| around.
|
| When I changed the company, the habit to measure productivity
| stuck. Nowadays, I start working somewhere at 9 and finish at 18,
| and result is still the same - honest 8 hours of work activity
| per day happen at best once a month, the average week sums to
| 30-34 hours. Code-related activities never take more than 3-4
| hours per day, that includes both coding and reviews. I get the
| impression that some of my colleagues might spend more time on
| the job, but low productivity was never a topic of my performance
| reviews, management seems content with what they get.
| zo1 wrote:
| Perspective from the management side at a consulting place: We
| don't want or need you to log your time to the minute. It's
| counter-productive and a waste of time. It needs to just be
| representative and not dishonest (please read that sentence
| twice).
|
| An hour long meeting booked, that ended up taking 45mins? It's
| an hour. It's the same reason we don't expect you to stop
| recording time when you to down the hall to make a coffee or
| take a bathroom break. The numbers only really makes sense at
| the aggregate level, and going to a higher level of detail is
| not reliable because of all the noise and different ways people
| measure their time.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| My experience with timesheets is that they _must_ add up to
| the hours you 're paid for (full-time salaried work, not
| hourly consulting). That more-or-less guarantees that
| timesheets are made-up.
|
| My first salaried job was as a salesman; we incurred
| expenses, which we could claim back. It was explained to us
| that the system was there to ensure that we weren't out-of-
| pocket; claims didn't have to actually be _true_ , but you
| did have to have incurred the expense.
|
| I fairly soon realised that this was a lie; the expenses
| system was really a salary-augmentation scheme, and you were
| _expected_ to inflate your claims. Everyone was at it.
| drran wrote:
| 8 hours of sleep can undo less than 4 hours of problem-
| solving activity. Our large brains are already consuming
| too much body resources.
|
| I have CO2 monitor, which I use to estimate is my brain
| working or not: when I'm working, CO2 level raises quickly
| above 1000ppm, so I need to ventilate my room often; when
| I'm idling, e.g. by playing a simple game, CO2 level is at
| about 740-790ppm without ventilation for whole day.
|
| When I'm returning from work, I see at CO2 monitor that my
| head is still working. Yes, I'm able to <<work>>
| sustainable 4h per day only, but <<work related activity>>
| consumes my brain for whole day.
| potions wrote:
| wow. is this room particularly small?
|
| Does this track w/ respiration rate or heart rate?
|
| I've never thought about this - it seems like it would be
| hard to measure w/o a more intense face mask vo2 max
| testing type setup.
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| What happens if you have a peer that clocks 14 hours per day
| and work weekends too, for some reason? At our place they
| started comparing everyone to him. I work like at half his
| total speed. He often break things or have to redo things or
| are late to standup and don't really partake in conversations.
| We've all asked him to slow down and not burn out but he keeps
| going.
| dosethree wrote:
| management should make it clear that working off hours or
| overtime shouldn't be done
| flyinglizard wrote:
| Speaking as a manager, I'd flag this dev as a concern. Very
| few people can work at this rate without one (or more) of
| three scenarios playing out:
|
| 1. They burn out and clock out mentally or leave altogether
|
| 2. They develop psychological issues and destroy their
| personal life, leading to an unbalanced and unsustainable
| situation
|
| 3. They expect something from the org in return, which
| normally the org can't/won't match (either in the way of
| product ownership or compensation or role).
|
| Someone like that needs to be constrained. Keep them on the
| edge and eager to contribute but don't let them free reign.
| If the situation and culture allow, try help out to fill the
| void in their personal life (I ordered one of our guys to
| leave early twice a week to spend time with his girlfriend
| because I knew his dedication to work is destroying his
| relationship. I sent couple of others to weekends in hotels
| with their SO after long sprints).
| redisman wrote:
| > I sent couple of others to weekends in hotels with their
| SO after long sprints
|
| It's a bit odd you're setting your employees up to maintain
| their sex lives but I'm sure they appreciate the forced
| time off after stressful times
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Often times people who work a lot are avoiding serious
| problems at home/family too, so even ordering someone to go
| home might be ordering them to go back to an abusive
| partner or something. I know more than one person who used
| "oh, my job takes so much of my time!" As a socially
| acceptable reason to avoid interacting with abusive people
| in their life.
| register wrote:
| I worked really too much today. I had 10 meetings!!
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Somehow I count meetings as ... meetings and not work. More
| like pauses between productive work efforts.
|
| Same with communication.
|
| Only when I produce something tangible I feel that I'm working.
|
| I know this is kind of silly but I feel like sitting in a
| meeting and getting paid is like cheating. Or replying to an
| email.
|
| In no way I'm suggesting that time and attention are not
| valuable - it's just that these activities feel trivially easy
| compared to the cognitive load of coding.
| watwut wrote:
| Write down notes from meeting for yourself and try to
| remember what was said - the tl;Dr.
|
| It will make you feel more like working. But also, I found
| that actually useful in the long term. I did that as
| experiment and then then some months later I found myself
| using all that stuff. Not everything was useful, but a good
| chunk of it was.
| f6v wrote:
| > I know this is kind of silly but I feel like sitting in a
| meeting and getting paid is like cheating. Or replying to an
| email.
|
| I felt disturbance in the force. As if all the product
| managers in the world screamed at the same time.
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| The author's analysis is so entirely subjective as to what
| constitutes "work" as to be meaningless. I certainly believe that
| most creative workers cannot spend 8 hours a day being creatively
| productive, although even there the variation is enormous. I used
| to observe a factor of 5 or more difference in productivity
| between the most productive and least productive of my
| engineering team, and a lot of that was due to the ability of
| some to stay focused and fully absorbed in creation for hour
| after hour, whereas the average engineer simply stopped producing
| much after a couple of hours. Interestingly, a lot of this was
| attention span limited. Take the person who was good for 2 hours
| of productive coding on a product, and give them two
| significantly separate areas of responsibility, and their
| productivity would close to double, as they could pull off a mid-
| day switch and be fully energized for a second shift at the
| creative keyboard.
|
| But just because you're not doing the highest value / highest
| drain portion of your job constantly, doesn't mean you're not
| working. Good managers know to balance workload and expectations.
|
| And as others have noted, this varies enormously from one
| profession to the next. The nurses in the hospital where I worked
| as CTO worked 12 hour shifts, and nobody in their right mind
| would make the argument that they weren't working the entire
| time. Most worked three 12 hours shifts per week, so they had a
| short work week, but the doctors they worked with routinely
| worked 12 hrs/day, often 5 days per week, and then spent part of
| their 2 "off" days working as well. My daughter-in-law, who
| teaches elementary school, has no "own time" between 8:00 AM and
| 4:00PM, other than a half hour break when her students are at
| lunch, and then works a couple of hours most evenings in
| addition. It's a rare week during the school year when she
| doesn't have 45 hours per week in which she is completely "owned"
| be the job - which is to say, working.
| dpark wrote:
| > _the doctors they worked with routinely worked 12 hrs /day,
| often 5 days per week, and then spent part of their 2 "off"
| days working as well._
|
| I have a lot of trouble believing this. You're claiming that 60
| hours minimum was standard for doctors yet somehow the nurses
| had enough sway to get away with 36 hours.
|
| Ignoring how much of that as "active work", I have trouble
| believing they are even in the facility for that many hours.
| Maybe residents, because they do get worked to death, but post
| residency I can't imagine you could keep doctors while working
| them like this.
|
| > _My daughter-in-law, who teaches elementary school, has no
| "own time" between 8:00 AM and 4:00PM, other than a half hour
| break when her students are at lunch, and then works a couple
| of hours most evenings_
|
| I think you missed part of the article. Much of a teacher's day
| is not hard mental work. Especially for established teachers
| who have done the work to build lesson plans already.
| vorhemus wrote:
| I don't think people who say they work 14 hours a day are lying.
| They just count in everything that is somehow related to their
| job, like reading about their business in the newspaper or
| thinking about work in the shower. And that's the crux of the
| matter, in jobs that don't have clearly assigned shifts or where
| attendance is measured, the boundaries between work and leisure
| become blurred. And then again, comparisons of who works how long
| are completely useless.
| tamrix wrote:
| Almost anyone that brags to others about how many hours they
| work typically count checking their emails while watching TV as
| work.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| That is working though.
| ghiotion wrote:
| Exactly. I spent a decade plus in a job where emails came
| in routinely until 9-10 at night and often the CEO would
| send out something on the weekend. Even if I wasn't
| required to respond or the response was short, this is
| _absolutely_ work. Over and above that, spending a decade
| being literally unable to get away from work in that way is
| like arsenic poisoning. It was like "I'm fine. I'm fine.
| I'm fine. I'm dead." It's insidious and terrible.
| distances wrote:
| But you shouldn't publicly claim 12 hour work days if you
| watch TV during those hours, that's ridiculous. That gives
| a completely wrong impression and may push some who don't
| know better to actually try and work 12 hours.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I agree. I do maybe 6h of clocked in official work, then maybe
| 2-6 additional hours of reasearch, tinkering, learning,
| thinking, taking random notes.
|
| But those hours are very blurry and come in random high bursts
| (,,being onto something"). They're important and effective for
| me but it's difficult to categorize them or even track them.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I alway liken folk who say they work long hours to Intel cpus
| in the megahertz race. Sure it runs at 6ghz but it's useless
| for a laptop. Performance per watt is where the quality is. I
| equate that to be forty hours of work per week.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| high performance per watt is pretty low value for those of us
| who haven't moved our laptops from our home/desk in the past
| 2 years. In fact the whole premise of a laptop has largely
| been erased under work from home restrictions. Most of the
| point was to have a portable machine so your employees felt
| the need/desire to take the device home and continue working
| after hours.
|
| There's maybe a slight argument to be made for meetings, but
| even then you're supposed to be paying attention to the
| meeting, if not then why are you there? One person might need
| to take notes...
| thrown_22 wrote:
| I can double my work if I start responding to all the pointless
| emails I get in my mail box.
|
| I have more important things to do, like doing actual work.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| how about i leave for my office 10 Am and return home 9-10-11
| pm ? usually no sundays. 10 minute commute each side.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Just because you are at the office, doesn't mean you are
| actually working. Just like me sitting at my desk at home
| isn't actually working.
|
| The difference is that in the office people pretend to be
| working.
| Falkon1313 wrote:
| But if you're there, you're working. You can't spend that
| time out at a stadium watching a ballgame, or hiking
| through a forest, or catching up with old friends over
| coffee, or fixing that stubborn door on your house, or with
| your family. You're at work, in work mode and your time and
| energy are alloted to that.
|
| If you work for an agency, and sales is having a tough time
| closing a deal so there's no work for you today, but you
| have to be there anyway, ready to work or finding other
| things to do, maybe upgrading your tools,
| practicing/learning, then that's still work time. It's not
| leisure time.
|
| Just because you don't achieve 100% uptime cranking out
| widgets non-stop at full productivity doesn't mean you're
| not working. We're people, not industrial factory machines.
|
| You can say 'people are pretending' or 'that's not actually
| work', but it is. And saying that it's not is just denying
| reality by casting a moral judgment on it like that.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| In the context of of this post I see working as the
| equivalent of being productive.
|
| I agree with you that sitting at my desk or being in the
| office is work time regardless of what I am doing and
| therefore should also be paid.
| orzig wrote:
| Valuable prospective, but (as is the gist of half my comments
| here): People are even more different than you think.
|
| RescueTime wrote a similar post, but +100 data:
|
| https://rescuetime.wpengine.com/work-life-balance-study-2019...
|
| Look at the second histogram. The average is roughly aligned with
| OP's summary, but there is huge variance. These comments have
| already devolved into people telling each other they are lying,
| or about to burn out - all I ask is humility in the face of our
| messy shared reality.
|
| Thank you for listening to my TED Talk, I guess
| tardigr8 wrote:
| Another study here that uses an estimate for productivity.
|
| https://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf
|
| His models show peak productivity between 5 and 6 hours a day.
|
| In my own experience, I have found productivity more related to
| sleep and exercise than anything else.
|
| Getting 7 hours good sleep (which means winding down for at
| least 30 minutes before sleep, a stretching exercise or
| meditation), and enough exercise every day to get the heart
| rate up.
|
| If I don't do this for a couple of days, I can be unproductive
| from hour 2 after waking! We managed to implement a defect
| metric in my previous team that worked well, my defects went
| through the roof after a couple of days of 2 hours sleep.
|
| There is a lot of literature on this correlation, but just
| thought I would share my own experience.
| ajnin wrote:
| Could you share some details about that defect metric and how
| you implemented it? Sounds interesting.
| tardigr8 wrote:
| Nothing very automated I am afraid, but we had enough
| people who cared to do the admin work to make the figures
| reliable.
|
| We wanted to get a handle on how often work went backwards
| in our life cycle, and why it went backward.
|
| We had a JIRA lifecycle hook that asked for the reason for
| moving from SIT state back to Development state, or from
| UAT state back to Development state etc..
|
| One of which was defect. A defect either being a
| confirmation that wasn't implemented as per the spec, or an
| edge case bug.
|
| Test failures were different, we had automated testing so
| test case failures were picked up before the ticket moved
| on in the lifecycle.
|
| We could also move completed tickets from Deployed to
| Review, if a production error was linked to a ticket. This
| movement could also be tagged as a defect in the same way.
|
| We would then just query the jira database and report on
| it, by project, by assignee etc..
|
| It wasn't a blame exercise, we were more interested in the
| % of tickets that moved backwards, and the relative
| percentages of causes for the move. Another category for
| example was 'Requirements Changed', we worked with banks,
| so we had a LOT of these!
| hyperpape wrote:
| It's been a minute since I read this study, and I didn't take
| perfect notes, but iirc, the top line result is that (among
| munition workers) productivity per hour peaks below 40 hours
| a week, but total productivity peaks above it.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| I'm impressed that you can produce any code at all on 2 hours
| of sleep.
| lifefeed wrote:
| In college I learned that after 36 hours I was coding in
| circles. A fix to package A broke package B. Fixing package
| B broke package A. Repeat.
|
| I went through the loop three times before I recognized the
| pattern, and decided it was a good time to pass out.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I think that you are right to point out the large variance, but
| you could have also have said that the 90th percentile was
| approx 7 hrs of work per workday, and 75th was probably 5-6
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| And that's a self-selected group of people who have enough
| trouble focusing on work that they went to find an app to
| monitor whether they're focusing.
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| I think you're completely right, however I'd love to see a
| graph of average work time claims on HN plotted against this.
|
| There's no denying that there are far more people claiming they
| work 60-80 hour weeks than would collate with the data that you
| and OP have provided.
|
| I think these people are generally overworked but are also poor
| assessors of their own performance, taking worst cases as
| averages and calling a day in which you finish at 5pm but
| answer a slack message at 9pm, a 12 hour day.
|
| Not to be too sardonic, but: I'm on call frequently but I don't
| tell people I've been working for 24 hours because I got a page
| at midnight, even if it can feel a bit like that by the end of
| the next day.
| tardigr8 wrote:
| We tracked work hours using a custom desktop app in our team
| (made by the team over several iterations to make it not
| burdensome), and insisted that devs log time against the
| downtime category (only during work hours of course).
|
| Some of the more senior devs were very honest about their
| downtime. Some days they would log 4 out of 8 hours downtime.
| Usually after a strenuous week or late night deploy. Examples
| of this are shooting the breeze for an hour, going on a wiki
| binge etc..
|
| We were all surprised by the actual numbers coming through
| and the numbers in the various categories. Emails and project
| admin would average 20% of total team time. "Firefighting"
| which was attending to unscheduled troubleshooting was 15%.
|
| If you don't believe someone who says they work X hours per
| week, you are probably right. We found there is a lot of
| minutiae, and a lot of down time when tired. Which we didn't
| realize until we spent the time to log it.
|
| If you do work long hours, I can heartily recommend
| implementing an easy time tracking system for yourself with
| categories. From our experience, it reduced the hours you
| worked, forced you to get some sleep and exercise, and made
| you more productive in the hours you do work.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I've logged my work time (automatically with time tracking
| apps) for over a decade. I've also done a significant amount of
| hourly-rate consulting where I'm very careful to only bill for
| actual working time.
|
| When I was younger, one of my early challenges was that I had
| been misled to believe that only time spent in the editor,
| writing code counted as "working". There's a somewhat pervasive
| idea among devs that meetings, e-mail, communications, team
| discussions, and other such facts of business do not count as
| work when you're a programmer. It led to some anxiety before I
| accepted that collaboration and communication is also work,
| something that seems obvious in retrospect but was difficult to
| swallow as a young programmer raised on Internet forums.
|
| Some people default to the other extreme, where they seem to
| count every hour as "work" if they did anything remotely
| related to work during that hour. By now, I've worked with a
| lot of people who claim 60-80 hour work weeks simply because
| they check their phone and type out single-sentence replies in
| Slack or e-mails on evenings and weekends. Some of the laziest,
| least productive people I've worked with are the same people
| posting on LinkedIn on Sunday morning about their 80 hour
| grinds every week.
|
| Two better metrics I've found for gauging productivity are
| total hours spent in work mode (in the office, or sitting at my
| home office desk) and total time spent in time wastes (Hacker
| News, non-work Slacks, Twitter, and so on). If I'm accumulating
| more than 30 minutes commenting on HN or scrolling Twitter,
| it's a sign that I'm not really engaged with work and I need to
| shake things up.
|
| I've shared my time tracking tools and techniques with a lot of
| people that I've mentored. It's some times shocking for someone
| to realize that they've been spending _4 hours_ on social media
| (Discords, HN and Reddit are social media) during a what's
| supposed to be a workday. Many of them gauge their own level of
| focus as average or better than average before actually
| tracking it. They might even be surrounded by friends or peers
| who engage in the same amount of distraction during the day,
| reinforcing their own behavior. Usually once they see what
| they're doing as a hard number they can take steps to break the
| habit, but for some it's so deeply engrained that they don't
| understand what they're doing until they see it as a number.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| You and I seem to have a similar history and current
| practices. I'm curious, how do you track your active time on
| your computer?
|
| I use Qbserve on MacOS and I like it, but I haven't reviewed
| options in maybe 5 years. It "just works" so I haven't felt
| the need to explore.
| dpark wrote:
| > _Some of the laziest, least productive people I 've worked
| with are the same people posting on LinkedIn on Sunday
| morning about their 80 hour grinds every week._
|
| In my experience, people who claim to regularly work 60-80
| hours/week are completely full of it. Yes, there's this
| "thought about work for a second, that's another hour"
| mentality. But there's also just a ton of people outright
| lying about the amount of time they actually sit at a desk.
|
| I worked at Yahoo for a while and nearly everyone told me
| they worked long hours, like 10 hour days, every day. The
| vast majority of them were working at most 8. People would
| talk about working late but they came in even late, too.
| Showing up at 11am and leaving at 7pm is not a long day. The
| people claiming to work until 7 were also not actually
| stating that late typically, because if I stayed until 6 the
| place was a ghost town. There legitimately were a few people
| who were working _long_ days, but they very much seemed to be
| the exception. There was an unhealthy culture of pretending
| to work absurd hours, though.
| distances wrote:
| I used to work at a company where we could clock in and out
| if we wanted. If we did, we could keep any extra hours at
| our convenience as a day off. If we didn't it would be a
| full workday by default.
|
| I liked the freedom to work long days every now and then,
| and then take some time off later when I wanted a long
| weekend or so. A colleague decided that's a great idea and
| started doing the same, but stopped after a week or two
| when he realized he's just accruing negative time.
|
| I'm not claiming that I was fully productive with my office
| hours, just agreeing with you that some people really do
| think they work more than they actually do.
| megak1d wrote:
| Interesting post. Would you share your tools and personal
| tracking techniques here?
| Grustaf wrote:
| People keep repeating this but it's really pretty silly.
|
| When people say they work 8 hours they don't mean they are 100%
| focused on doing revolutionary innovative work for 8 hours. Not
| all work is like factory work where you can do more or less the
| same thing all day, and that's fine.
|
| And for what it's worth, plenty of people, including myself, can
| regularly do 10+ hour days of productive work. It's definitely
| not impossible.
| lnsru wrote:
| Work is not work. That's a single data point. I can mention few
| cases I experienced: student learning last week for exam. 100
| hours week is nothing unusual here. Of course it's not
| sustainable and does not take longer than few weeks. PhD student
| writing paper for most important conference of the year - 80
| hours week. Working for your own startup 60 hour a week is imho
| absolutely normal. These are cases for personal gain. Now let's
| talk about salaried jobs when one gets paid for sitting in the
| office or be green in Teams all day. And that's the case where 10
| hours each week of actual work is absolutely sufficient. I am
| pretty sure that productive hours are proportional to gain. Why
| should I do 50 hours a week for the Big Corp when my salary will
| be exactly the same as after productive 15 hours weekly!? There
| are individuals, that like what they do, so they enjoy daily
| tasks and are productive closer to 40 hours weekly. Luckily I
| know few such people, they are very inspiring.
| nathias wrote:
| People don't understand what to call work, some include all of
| the dependancies others think those are just free. For me to work
| 8h means I'm generally working towards some goal, this includes
| getting a coffee and resting.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Like the author, I am usually good for two periods of about 90
| minutes a day of extreme thinking work. I feel fine about this
| because in a sense I am always working, even if I just have a few
| peak periods a day. When I have a job, just about 100% of my
| intellectual life is thinking about the tech that can help my
| employer. If I want to read a tech article after dinner, it is
| just about always about something that might help the business.
|
| I maintain work/life balance by taking a year off work between
| jobs. In these down time periods I both research a broad spectrum
| of things that interest me, and that is when I write my books.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| I can quibble with the specific hours, but this resonates a lot
| with me.
|
| My average day looks something like:
|
| Hour 0-0.5: Get ready for the workday - messages, email, write
| standup report, take a shower.
|
| Hour 0.5-1: standup meeting + offline meetings.
|
| Hour 1-2: meetings or brain work
|
| Hour 2-3: mealtime, active availability
|
| Hour 3-5: active availability, light work, meetings
|
| Hour 5-7: brain work (I do my best brain work at the end of the
| day typcially)
|
| I'd be curious what others schedules look like.
| [deleted]
| zriha wrote:
| I have the similar schedule like you do. I even plan a short
| 0.5 - 1h training between morning and lunch. And like you, I am
| more productive in the afternoon, at the end of the day.
| brabel wrote:
| Let me try as I think I am almost your opposite.
|
| Hour 0-0.5: get back to whatever I left the previous day...
| most productive 0.5 hour of the day with a fresh mind.
|
| Hour 0.5-1.5: meetings, status updates, syncing with others...
|
| Hour 1.5-3.0: more intense coding. May be bug hunting, new
| feature, more testing...
|
| Hour 3.0-4.0: lunch.
|
| Hour 4.0-5.0: typically helping other team members or
| discussing bugs/new features etc. Or doing "research", keeping
| up-to-date reading whatever (software related), including HN.
|
| Hour 5.0-5.5: coffee break, thinking about personal stuff
| usually, have a little snack or something.
|
| Hour 5.5-7.0: more coding. Much lower productivity though,
| typically leave things to finish in the 0.5 hour I am most
| productive the next day. Might read news and non-work related
| things to give my brain a little break every now and then.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| Interesting! Thank you for responding.
|
| What's striking to me is that if we break it down, it seems
| like for you by category it'd be:
|
| Hard task/"brain" time: 2-3.5 hours depending on that last
| section
|
| Light task time (including wakeup time): 2-3 hours
|
| "Active availability" time: ~1 hour?
|
| Personal time: 1.5 hours
|
| and for me by category it'd be:
|
| Hard task/"brain" time: ~2.5 hours depending on my after-
| lunch section
|
| Light task time (including wakeup time): 3 hours
|
| "Active availability" but not working time: 1 hour
|
| Personal time: 1 hour
|
| So even though it's distributed differently, the amount of
| time we spend on the types of tasks are pretty similar.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| I do the hardest thing first thing in the morning, that fresh
| zest.
|
| If I'm not feeling it (motivation) will try blasting
| music/getting pumped then start to slowly get into the flow.
| Usually works.
| Vixel wrote:
| I dont even have the energy to make it through this article
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I think it varies by person a lot but how little people work in
| general affect people expectations in the workforce. Especially
| in a market where firing people is hard (because hiring them is
| expensive) there is going to be a certain leniency towards
| performance.
|
| When I work for myself I can literally code all day, if I'm
| working for a client I'll work as much as it's reasonable to hit
| deliverables, keep the managers happy and keep a good reputation
| in the company. My prices when working per projects were always
| too cheap because I found features to be simple to implement; I
| then switched to what's expected in the industry and charge per
| day and I make way more, working way less.
|
| Similarly, I know people who can work all day and some who can't
| and will burn out if they do. The 10x developers exist, but you
| won't find them at big corp making bank (or if you find them,
| they'll likely slack like everyone else), they'll be building
| their own startups and making bank with that.
|
| We're all wired differently.
| andreisbc wrote:
| The pandemic enabled me to work 3 full time jobs as a software
| dev 12h a day and I'm making tons of cash and I love it. Burned
| down a little but I have ways to keep that under control.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| 12 hours a day doesn't sound like three full-time (emphasis on
| "full-time") jobs.
|
| Three full-time jobs is 120 hours a week or more than 17 hours
| every single day, which would leave you with less than 7 hours
| for food, hygiene, sleep and spending all that cash you're
| making.
| rob_c wrote:
| Again, think of ant colonies, it's not far off
| altacc wrote:
| I'd add a 4th point: accept a wider definition of work when
| counting your hours.
|
| A lot of us are lucky enough to have knowledge based jobs, which
| require mental tasks of solution design and decision making that
| are hard to quantify. I regularly get ideas when walking,
| cooking, driving, etc... and then spend time thinking through a
| work problem and taking notes. Several times a day I go for a
| short walk to clear my head of distractions and regain focus,
| That would be hard to quantify to a theoretical bad manager who
| wanted you to count hours but for many it is an essential part of
| knowledge work.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| There are definitely people who can work and focus for 8+ hours a
| day. I can think of my dentist and family doctor. Waiting room is
| full from morning to evening.
|
| Some of my colleagues work hard. I can see their screen in the
| open space. They are machines. Never a distraction on the screen.
|
| The article should be "some people don't work so much, I'm one of
| them".
| yobbo wrote:
| With admin type duties, people in tech can work at least as
| many hours. That is probably the closest analogy.
| learc83 wrote:
| My wife is an ER physician. It's a demanding job that requires
| a ton of focus, so most of her colleagues only work about 30
| hours a week.
|
| She's also worked as a general pediatrician seeing lower acuity
| patients/well visits. From talking to her, good deal of that
| job is essentially running on autopilot. That's why you can do
| it 8 hours a day.
| m_fayer wrote:
| Yeah, I think we really need to look at the qualitative
| aspect of the work being done when having these discussions.
|
| A pediatrician may really be working 8 or more hours a day,
| where 90% of patients are utterly cut-and-dry AND often
| having pleasant encounters with cute snotty kids and their
| parents. It doesn't stretch the imagination why this is
| possible for 8 hours straight.
|
| The "machine-like" programmers that GP mentioned are likely
| working from cut-and-dry requirements and executing the same
| code patterns over and over with a stack they know like the
| inside of their eyelids. Doing this can be pleasurable in a
| similar way to playing puzzle games. I can see why it would
| be possible for 8 hours straight.
|
| Pleasant, meditative physical work - what's called
| "artisanal" anything these days (cooking, carpentry, etc.) -
| sure.
|
| Then there's programming in a challenging heterogenous
| environment. Perhaps the requirements are unclear, the stack
| is new or undependable, you're often interrupted, or have to
| switch between different kinds of work throughout the day, or
| your technical abilities are so stretched that absolute and
| sustained focus is required. Then, good luck getting to those
| 8 hours in a sustainable fashion.
|
| There are many jobs that are acknowledged to be so difficult
| when in "go" mode that no one expects 40 weekly hours. This
| just hasn't penetrated into tech and adjacent industries,
| that's why we have to engage in these charades.
| vasco wrote:
| Even in normal office jobs. Everyone gets distracted but if I'm
| having 1-on-1s with direct reports, at 30mins each that's at
| least 4 hours of calls filling in a morning, plus another misc
| few calls, like interviewing candidates or whatever, 1 or 2
| random fires and you got 8 hours of constantly happening
| things, and we didn't even look at email or done any actual
| work yet. I wish I knew wtf these managers with nothing to do
| are talking about.
| neuroma wrote:
| Can confirm many doctors work insane hours, which are hard to
| even imagine for people who do office jobs.
|
| The notion that you can only do 4 hours of productive work a
| day is frankly a luxury. If you have 10 hours of work to do,
| all of which is essential for people's immediate wellbeing, you
| find ways of being productive.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I've never seen a convincing explanation for why doctors work
| these long hours that didn't boil down to 'the doctors union
| restricts the supply of new doctors and limits the tasks that
| can be delegated to non-doctors'.
|
| As a result, the regular mention of their long hours
| generally just makes me angry at them rather than grateful to
| them, but I guess I'm in the minority.
| Pigalowda wrote:
| Some of it is capitalism. Here's a nice introduction to
| private equity in radiology.
|
| https://www.benwhite.com/medicine/the-private-equity-
| model-i...
|
| Now with surgery? Again there's some capitalism but also
| surgery is hard. Extremely hard. Here's a link to a common
| surgery for orthopedics for example. They have to memorize
| these procedure steps and be very quick. Time on the table
| for the patient matters for money and for anesthesia (more
| dangerous for longer GA cases).
|
| https://www.orthobullets.com/knee-and-sports/12234/acl-
| recon...
|
| Anyways you can be mad about moats and artificial supply
| constraints for things like dermatology but for surgery and
| family practice? Not really.
|
| Another factor is geography. Can you imagine doing 12-14
| years of school and low paid training, have 250-500k in
| debt and then move out to a rural area to practice? Many
| doctors don't want to do that, so the ones that do are paid
| well but are usually extremely busy.
|
| Anyways, there's just a lot of factors that limit supply,
| it's not the nefarious doctors union trying to squeeze
| every last drop.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| You really have to memorize when you have a checklist the
| nurse could read off so you don't miss a step? I wouldn't
| trust my memory to hold a single step of that checklist,
| I'd refer to it every time.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| In "the checklist manifesto" the author suggests one of
| the main benefits of checklists for medical procedures is
| that nurses or other lower ranked people in the room who
| know the doctor is about to kill someone or cut off the
| wrong leg by mistake can communicate this information
| without the Doctor ruining their career for making them
| look stupid.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I don't think there is any country in the world where
| doctors work for 40 hours, regardless of the economic
| model.
|
| The world of human disease places some limitations on
| what can be done. Many people either do not have the grit
| or the stomach to become doctors (I could easily learn
| the theory, but I couldn't cope with all the blood, pus,
| vomit and frequent feeling of helplessness). People
| develop critical problems at 2 am. A doctor should know
| their patients and vice versa; they aren't fungible and
| ping-ponging a sick person between shifts tends to worsen
| the outcomes.
| damontal wrote:
| That plus just having to deal with all of those different
| personalities. Sick people can be incredibly difficult to
| deal with. I was in the hospital for an extended period a
| few years ago. The nurse said she and her colleagues
| liked treating me. I asked why. She said "because you're
| normal."
| neuroma wrote:
| Whilst I agree that there must be better ways for
| healthcare staff to work than at max capacity until they
| burn out... it seems odd to be angry at them for this. Most
| would prefer a healthy work life balance, and patients
| would surely prefer a well rested clinician.
| d12345m wrote:
| This isn't my domain by any means, but one common argument
| for long hours that is that patient handoffs during shift
| changes can cause information loss, and thus cause medical
| errors which lead to worse patient outcomes. The shifts are
| intentionally kept long to reduce the number of times that
| this handoff has to occur.
|
| Again, this isn't my wheelhouse at all. I'm just repeating
| something I hear often when this topic comes up.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| At the plastic factory, I preferred 12-hour shifts to
| 8-hour for this reason. I just got more efficient as my
| shift went longer. I also felt the loss of efficiency
| whenever I took a vacation. The thing I disapprove of is
| the sleep deprivation.
| darkerside wrote:
| I don't think it's as simple as you imagine. Any time
| you're delegating a task from someone who has double digit
| years of training to someone who (perhaps) has only a
| couple, you are likely (but not always) increasing the
| probability of error, and errors in this domain have real
| consequences. This includes potential for malpractice
| lawsuits because "the lazy doctor had their nurse doing all
| the work".
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| This is almost certainly taking a toll on the doctors health.
| They're stuck in that situation because of unions, but that
| isn't the case for an SWE. We shouldn't be expected to work
| at our healths expense.
| dls2016 wrote:
| How are unions responsible for doctors' long work hours?
| According to a quick google there are very low rates of
| unionization and it seems to be a recent phenomenon (I
| didn't know there were any.)
|
| Downvotes for asking a Q?
| faet wrote:
| >For the past quarter-century, the American Medical
| Association and other industry groups have predicted a
| glut of doctors and worked to limit the number of new
| physicians. In 1994, the Journal of the American Medical
| Association predicted a surplus of 165,000 doctors by
| 2000.
|
| Most residencies are paid for my Medicare funds. The 1997
| Balanced Budget Act capped the number of residencies that
| Medicare funds, which led to fewer physicians. Who pushed
| for the cap?
|
| >Lawmakers received cover from the American Medical
| Association (AMA), the Association of American Medical
| Colleges, and other major stakeholders in American
| medicine who endorsed caps on funding for residents and
| other graduate medical education programs. In March 1997,
| months before the Balanced Budget Act was enacted, the
| AMA even suggested reducing the number of US residency
| positions by approximately 25% from 25,000 to fewer than
| 19,000. "The United States is on the verge of a serious
| oversupply of physicians," said the AMA and other
| physicians' groups in a joint statement
|
| https://qz.com/1676207/the-us-is-on-the-verge-of-a-
| devastati...
|
| And also in the past they have lobbied to shut down
| medical schools which led to shortages in the 60s.
| https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMhpr033066
|
| They have recently pushed for more physicians but those
| changes will take time.
| dls2016 wrote:
| The AMA is _not_ a union, nor is the American Bar
| Association, nor is the Society of Actuaries. These are
| professional organizations. They aren 't involved in
| collective bargaining and they don't call strikes
| (putting aside for argument's sake the ethical issues
| with doctors going on strike).
|
| Here's a document from the AMA itself stating their
| stance on unions (implying they don't consider themselves
| a union): https://www.ama-assn.org/system/files/advocacy-
| issue-brief-p...
| XorNot wrote:
| Doctors are highly specialized mechanics for the human body.
| The reason they can work the hours they do is because most of
| what they do is _not_ creative and can be done on basically
| autopilot.
|
| MDs also work in a profession with a fairly unique quality:
| you always get paid more for doing more work, and the work is
| more or less completely prepackaged into self-contained units
| for you - i.e. a GP seeing patients more or less breaks their
| day into a pattern of independently compensated, 15-30 minute
| slots.
| neuroma wrote:
| Not exactly. Only some are paid per session, as this is
| typically private medicine, which is not the normal in most
| of the world. Publicly funded medicine accounts for the
| great majority of work done, and these doctors around the
| World are paid the same regardless of their workload. USA
| has a very unusual system, internationally.
|
| Also, only part of the job is autopilot, much of it is
| difficult and taxing. Experts will manage their attention
| and energy throughout busy days.
|
| The point is that humans can and do work hard and at
| difficult tasks for long periods day after day. The cost is
| eventual burnout though, hence why so many doctors quit or
| go part time.
| dgb23 wrote:
| The author makes a good point but for me personally those numbers
| are off.
|
| I have a suspicion that the amount of healthy and productive work
| depends much on the work environment, the agency and social
| relationships one has there.
|
| If you're a well paid wage slave then you have different
| engagement than an autonomous, respected worker. Excuse the
| platitude but you get the drift.
|
| Discipline is freedom and empathy is purpose.
| polote wrote:
| Honestly it depends. Work can means a few different things. I
| doubt a farmer is working less than what he says. When Musk says
| he works 100h a week, that's probably even less than the reality,
| he is probably working 7*(24 - 7hour sleep) per week.
|
| Not all work needs 100% focus. When you are CEO and you go in the
| kitchen and you smalltalk with employees, is it work or not work
| ? Imagine if the CEO didn't do it, people would say the CEO is
| not talking with employees.
|
| But if the question is : Do people lie ? Yeah of course, like for
| any other subject
| j2bax wrote:
| How much of that 100+ hours includes surfing the internet and
| posting memes to Twitter? Not criticizing him, everyone needs
| time to unwind...
| polote wrote:
| Probably not much, but in any case, this is part of why he is
| successful in business, so you can't remove it as non work.
| manmal wrote:
| I'm not trying to defend Musk, but his Twitter activities are
| highly efficient marketing.
| Avatars wrote:
| My uncle used to work for McDonnell Douglas and regaled me with
| stories of people standing around or hanging out in the parking
| lot, basically getting payed to do jack all. At the time he told
| me this, almost 40 yrs ago now, they were in a slump and were
| laying off. Nepotism in the hiring practice was prevalent. I
| would have fired him, personally. Needless to say one can expect
| most "industries" to be very similar.
| lordnacho wrote:
| My view is as a coder if there is real hard work needed,
| essentially debugging something vexing or a large re-
| architecting, it needs to be done in an undisturbed 3 hour
| window, of which I can realistically fit two in a day.
|
| Minor coding tasks like documenting and preparing a commit can be
| done in any amount of time, but crucially it is time that is
| allowed to be broken up by meals or meetings. Casual skimming
| over the code for ideas is also in this category, eg scanning for
| random TODOs that can be checked off.
|
| I try to gather all my regular calls on the same day, that way I
| get it out of the way with the least amount of context switching.
| alex952 wrote:
| 2 3 hour long windows in a day? That's impressive. Most weeks I
| can fit one of those in. Workings consultancy is not the best
| for focus work.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I don't normally have two long things to do in a day, I just
| have a max capacity of 2x hard things, if that day is not
| broken up by something.
|
| Long term doing 2 hard things a day for a whole week would
| probably not be sustainable, either you run out of motivation
| or you run out of hard tasks.
|
| One of the things you do under "hard tasks" is simplify your
| code so that subsequent tasks fall under "easy tasks". You
| trade your "must not disturb" time for "can be stopped and
| started".
| yobbo wrote:
| Yep. Anyone claiming to be working more than 40 hrs is implicitly
| revealing that their job doesn't require much thinking.
|
| It is possible in crunch time to work harder on difficult
| problems, but not for longer than a few weeks at a time followed
| by a few weeks of rest. Regardless how you account for the time.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| I arrange my work so that it doesn't require much sitting and
| thinking. Instead I come up with a way that I can write code to
| visualize what's going on, iteratively test solutions, or read
| to select from approaches on the Web. I guess you're right,
| when it comes to something I would have to invent from scratch
| I panic about having to think for myself.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I like working all day. When I was a consultant, there was
| basically no other option that didn't involve outright lying to
| and stealing from clients. Not working while being paid to work
| made me feel anxious, and wasn't relaxing at all.
|
| Now that I'm not a consultant for a larger company, I can
| definitely get away with taking significant breaks during the
| day. But, the bigger problem to me is not having the opportunity
| to get as much work done as I want: endless meetings, requests
| for feedback, Slack conversations, etc., make it hard to actually
| get as much done as I've planned to get done. This is the
| "maker's hours" problem.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Eh, I know it's just an expression but I automatically distrust
| awfully presumptuous stuff like "as much as you think". The
| author doesn't have the slightest idea what I think, yet he
| proclaims to know better and tries to correct me.
|
| Rant aside, it is my experience that the vast majority of people
| are useless bums. Pretty sure that's nurture as opposed to
| nature, though. If it weren't learned behaviour, people wouldn't
| be performing all these rituals in the hopes of obscuring their
| very uselessness.
|
| That said, I manage 4-6 productive hours a day. Used to be half
| that at the start of my dev career. Sometimes I do 10, even 12
| hours if I have the energy and motivation.
| acosmism wrote:
| I think you should push for 14 hours like the rest of us
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| You must be fun at parties.
| fleddr wrote:
| Knowledge work is not "work" in the traditional sense. If your
| job is to stamp forms, you can probably be productive the entire
| day. Not so much when your job is cognitively demanding, then the
| job is "thinking deeply", and the human species simply cannot
| sustain that for so long.
|
| As you get more experienced, you may require less deep thinking
| to do your job, which boost productivity. However in our current
| world all fields are changing so rapidly that this is mostly
| wishful thinking.
|
| The other factor is of course whether you're _allowed_ to be
| productive. Even a day with "just" 3 or 4 meetings is
| practically destroyed from a productivity point of view, and this
| doesn't even account for email and chat. So even if willing to be
| more productive, you just can't. This particular problem never
| seems addressed, quite the opposite: "we need to collaborate
| more".
|
| No, we don't. When you have 5 tasks and each task depends on
| others and requires a lot of collaboration then it's a crappy
| task, from a productivity point of view.
|
| Aside from the distractions of professional communication, we
| should be honest about the additional distractions from personal
| devices. When I started work, nobody had a smartphone. Just a
| workstation with restricted internet. So there were few
| temptations.
|
| Now it's unstoppable. It's right there in your pocket, begging
| for attention. Add in email, which the average person checks once
| every 6 minutes, and the conclusion is that we have near-zero
| concentration time.
|
| It's a sad thing. If we would control distractions and carve out
| very clean packages of work, knowledge workers could probably
| switch to 4 hour workdays, 6 as a transition. The rest is fluff
| anyway. Why not double the work packages then, to meet 8 hours?
| Because our species simply can't.
|
| But anyway, it won't happen. Let's just keep telling ourselves we
| work 10-12 hours whilst we piss our life away to a collective
| illusion.
| jakey_bakey wrote:
| I feel this. I am automatically suspicious of anyone who has to
| drop the number of hours they worked a certain day, or frequently
| flexes that they are still working at a late hour. Why do you
| need us to know?
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| It explains why I'm up later.
| i_like_waiting wrote:
| It's quite an unpopular opinion, but it heavily depends on
| person. When I was starting my startup, it was usually solid work
| from 9/10 to 22:00/ 23, 7 days a week. The big difference is,
| that in those moments, work was well diversified, so when I felt
| exhausted by creative part, I went to repetitive tasks, then to
| investigate how legal part works, then to emails etc. It's mostly
| about having a right tactics.
|
| In current work, there are still people who think that boss will
| give them 20% more career progression, when they work 20% more
| than contractual hours. Being quite productive in areas they
| already know.
|
| So it is possible but I don't believe it's most viable strategy.
| I prefer much more to work on personal coding projects after
| work, trying new methods, not on stuff I already know very well.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| It may only be unpopular on Hacker News. I saw an engineering
| account poll their followers on Twitter and this kind of
| opinion was a tiny minority. I would most likely be finding a
| way to think eight hours a day even if I weren't at work.
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