A Programmer's Work-day | Hacker News Reader

A Programmer's Work-day

climbing-the-hill.blogspot.com

33 pointsr11t15 comments

Schedule of a bipolar programmer (me):

Spent N days working 12 hours a day and enjoying it as hell.

Spent next N days watching sitcoms, playing Quake 3, chatting with people, learning new technology (passively), and being generaly apathetic and depressed.

While not a programmer per se (I do data "stuff" like assembling reports, analyzing correlations, split tests) when I need to write code for an analysis I just come in extra early (0630) or stay extra late (2300) otherwise the meetings/phone calls/IMs/blah just completely kill my focus. That one day every couple weeks is where I get 50% of my real work done. I think it is far better to work one day with 5 hours more work than 5 days with 1 hour each. Otherwise any one of my numerous bosses may stay an extra hour late and interrupt my work flow when I'm actually trying to get stuff done.

I rarely sign on to IM while I'm working and if I do, I make sure to do it as invisible. It's just too much of a distraction.

Back when I worked in an office, my boss was pretty good about keeping me off the phone and out of meetings. Being self employed these days, meetings aren't as much trouble.

The phone still gets me sometimes, but it's usually something important.

I have to sign into IM at work, it is what we use to talk to each other when we are too lazy to get up :)

While I don't have a job per see, I once did a 30 day experiment of time-boxing and scheduling.

I did 4 hours every day. So each week, I clocked 28 hours per week. The hours were choked full of coding effort.

Mostly, I encountered difficult obstacles that would slow me for a day or two. I couldn't just solve it siting around so I go around to coding different projects.

It was actually a little understatement. I did a programming session in the middle of the experiment when I tried to develop a game in 48 hours for a contest. By the time I finish the project, I have a hard time protoyping newer versions of the game so I got something like last place.

I did a the same thing for a week back in the beginning of April. I ended up releasing a new version of a game I made but I worked really late. Mostly it is because I procrastinate until the last minutes. So quality of life suffered due to that. So I learn to not only time-box but also schedule my time so I don't end up hacking at strange hours.

I got time management down to a few set of tools that allow me to do a lot of solid coding. I can't get much better than that.

The actual major hinderance is the fact that I am extremely slow in term of programming speed. Veteran hackers can complete trivial games even with unit tests in mere hours while it takes me days or even weeks to accomplish the same feat.

At first I thought this was a very accurate article, but then I realized it made no mention of sharing hilarious youtube videos.

I feel lucky to have never worked long-term in an environment like this.

Quite often middle management doesn't feel the need to know what the process is (or rather, they can't grasp what goes on, so they become defensive), and so they lose touch and cause this despondency..

I think management in these places needs to wise up to how developers work. That way us devs are kept happy and stimulated (and don't spend all day on HN/digg/reddit), and they get results.

But alas, I'm sure nothing can break habits like sending emails in 12pt comic sans.

"If you really need to have an 8 hour work day for some reason, you'll only find that the extra two hours ends up going into work-place play or dawdling"

Either you don't have enough to do or aren't passionate enough about what you're working on. What a shame. Start a business and have the opposite problem. There won't be enough hours in the day.

Maybe he's passionate about spending time with his family?

Well, you're here on HN...

With 13347 karma, 2190 comments and 1245 submissions! :-)

I can't talk much about the passion here, but working short days is not a sign of having too little to do. I would argue that if you absolutely have to work all the time, you've got too much to do. Sometimes less is more.

Consider if you say yes to everything: every new feature, every manager who wants a shorter deadline, every bad idea, EVERYTHING. You would be faced with too many features, too little time, and a poor product.

Short days might mean too little to do, but I think short days mean that a programmer is working on all the right things and none of unimportant things.

speaking as someone who hasn't seen the correct side of a 70 hour work week in quite some time, I strongly disagree.

Burn out is real; I'm working 40 hour weeks as a contractor, then I come home and try to finish my book or manage my business. What has kept me going so far is that I can hire 2 guys who are smarter than I am and buy all the servers I want for what I'm getting in those 40 hours.

But my god I'm ineffective. I bet I'd get more real work done if I worked 10 hours a week. Maybe read some books or something. Do you know how long it's been since I've read a book for fun?

Sure, 'passion' can carry you for a few months. but 70 hour work weeks are just unsustainable, and many of the really good people I know really do have about 4 good hours of work in them a day.

Usually I find that there's plenty of non-programming, semicognitive work to do that hits another part of the brain. E.g. testing strategies, good ways to properly document a system, etc.

Coding's just one part of the brain. Other parts are still ready to go.

It's really simple.

Once the money starts flowing, it's hard for it to stop. Hence, laziness.

Getting it started flowing is the tricky part.

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