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Comment by nikomen | Hacker News Reader

I've had both jobs where I could mostly work when I wanted to and also where I had to be in the office basically the entire day. I found that at the job where I had flexibility, I produced better output, and I didn't have a lot of time where I would surf the net to overcome boredom.

In the inflexible environment, surfing net locations that were somewhat work related was the only thing I could do to pass by time when I knew I wasn't going to write quality code or when I was too mentally tired to accomplish the task that was at hand. I had many times where going home and returning in the morning was the best thing for trying to solve a difficult problem.

Unfortunately, many employers don't care and want to fit development staff into the typical 9-5 mold even if it means reduced productivity.

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Employers still fail to understand that they need to monitor results, not people.

It is commonly held around here that the best programmers are 10x more productive than the typical programmer. Assuming that is true, how are the rest of your employees going to react when a handful of developers only have to put in 1/10th of the time?

Managing people is more about trying to make things appear fair to everyone. Disgruntled employees are a great way to bring down the entire organization.

> Managing people is more about trying to make things appear fair to everyone. Disgruntled employees are a great way to bring down the entire organization.

I agree with your second statement, but your first statement sounds too cynical. If this is what you're learning from the person managing you, I would encourage you to do what you can to move to a different manager.

I think the 10x productivity thing might be true in unrestricted settings, where everyone is their own boss, but I doubt it holds up in heavy corporate environments. The reason is because you often have to justify your actions to other engineers, wait for feedback, etc. And commit procedures can be long and painstaking. So while some are certainly more productive than others, I doubt it's 10x.

It really can be. The least productive people are not only producing less work in more time, they are also producing work that needs to be reviewed more thoroughly, needs to be redone, or causes bugs whose fixes take more time than the original implementation took. Add all these up and you can easily exceed 10x productivity compared to a developer who gets it right the first time, producing code that's clean, easy to maintain, and easy to adapt to changing requirements. Not only have I seen it first hand, I've seen it over and over, and I expect to continue to see it throughout my career.

The problem is that it's self-reinforcing pattern. People are being monitored, which puts more stress on them, which leads to inferior results. So bosses think "the poor results show that these people are lazy, we need to keep better tabs on them".

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