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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

Fuck it, the entire work environment seems designed to decrease productivity (open plan offices, meetings scattered thought the day, constant changing of task priorities, half arsed documentation of our product).

Why should I bother about making myself more productive when so many factor outside of my control are doing the opposite?

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Why shouldn't you bother?

Lots of things opposing a worthwhile attribute in your life makes your own efforts in that area more important, not less.

I'd rather in control of my own development, even it requires more deliberate effort than if other external things were removed.

Plus, it seems plausible that you will one day find a job which removes those things. Why wait?

Of course, this presupposes that you think being productive is a worthwhile thing independent of your current job.

In economic terms: if your main compensation is a fixed yearly salary, the most efficient use of your time is to expend the minimal amount of effort required to merely retain your job.

These terms are too simplistic: there are other goods to be had. We have emotions, like it or not. Going home at the end of the day feeling proud about something is better than feeling like the day was a minimal-effort waste. Even if you had infinite time, you still have an opportunity cost by trading that time for n $MONEY when you could have n plus happiness.

I agree with you completely. I am referring mainly to the context in which you have practically no influence on your work environment. In such a case, hard effort becomes wasted effort.

I hate to say it because i was trained to rise against forces and give my all 100% of the time, but in an env. Where the economic incentives are simply not correlated to productivity, I will not work more than nec. To not get fired.

Usually by then my efforts go to finding a new job, bc at that point i feel rather imprisoned.

You might be happier. If everything runs on pointless meetings, ServiceNow, and Jira, then learning how to best use your time in between those things would give you more control over your time (even without getting you away from those things).

> You might be happier.

Yes.

Sure, having a nicer environment/project certainly is preferable, but sometimes you can't choose everything, and if you let the shitty outside make you do shitty work, then you might feel a lot more miserable.

I meditate and try not to let work affect me in a negative way any more. I still try and make an effort to do the best job I can in the time given, but it seems pointless trying to optimize specifically for productivity when so many factors going against it. I have also come to the conclusion that being a decent team player and other non-coding skills are probably valued by management as much as coding productivity.

Seriously. It's not just the environment. Most businesses discourage productivity by not rewarding it with raises, promotions, bonuses, stock or similar. In that case, it makes sense to be the least productive as possible. The less you work, the more you make hourly and the more energy, hopefully, you have got other things. Businesses that won't compensate properly deserve it and considering how rare raises are these days (outside big tech), this should be something almost everyone should learn. It's either that or work really hard to make less money than you did last year. It's the employer that's incentivizing this behavior, after all. That's how I've gotten a significant hourly raise without getting an absolute raise.

Being super productive is for people making bank and suckers.

But what about when you get old and wrinkled, and you haven't optimized time for learning skills? You will be deserted, won't you?

I am already old and wrinkled youngster. Most skills that are required these days are just the latest new fad and will be forgotten about in a couple of years anyway.

This is true. Everything new technology seems like an evolutionary improvement on one or a few aspects of programming, like separation of concerns, expressiveness, correctness, etc. None of these things should surprise anyone unless they've been stuck in one of the 1990s 3.5GLs and never learned anything else.

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