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posted by martyb on Thursday July 27 2017, @09:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-just-stand-there dept.

A bit over fifteen years ago, developer Joel Spolsky wrote:

It makes me think of those researchers who say that basically people can't control what they eat, so any attempt to diet is bound to be short term and they will always yoyo back to their natural weight. Maybe as a software developer I really can't control when I'm productive, and I just have to take the slow times with the fast times and hope that they average out to enough lines of code to make me employable.

What drives me crazy is that ever since my first job I've realized that as a developer, I usually average about two or three hours a day of productive coding. When I had a summer internship at Microsoft, a fellow intern told me he was actually only going into work from 12 to 5 every day. Five hours, minus lunch, and his team loved him because he still managed to get a lot more done than average. I've found the same thing to be true. I feel a little bit guilty when I see how hard everybody else seems to be working, and I get about two or three quality hours in a day, and still I've always been one of the most productive members of the team. That's probably why when Peopleware and XP insist on eliminating overtime and working strictly 40 hour weeks, they do so secure in the knowledge that this won't reduce a team's output.

But it's not the days when I "only" get two hours of work done that worry me. It's the days when I can't do anything.

The writer reckons the key to a productive day of writing software lies most in just getting started at the beginning of it. Do Soylentils have tried-and-true tricks to getting into the flow of writing code, or is it always catch-as-catch-can?


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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday July 27 2017, @02:12PM (3 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Thursday July 27 2017, @02:12PM (#545175) Journal

    Actually I had hints that mental marathon people can't muster the peak IQ needed for many complex things.

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  • (Score: 2) by rondon on Thursday July 27 2017, @07:13PM (2 children)

    by rondon (5167) on Thursday July 27 2017, @07:13PM (#545352)

    That may be generally true, but I would not agree that it is always true. I've met mental marathon type folks who accomplish some fairly impressive and complex projects but they do it on their own timeline and often in their own unique way.

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday July 27 2017, @08:56PM (1 child)

      by kaszz (4211) on Thursday July 27 2017, @08:56PM (#545428) Journal

      Point is some people are genius some days and retards others. Some people are quite good all the time but never genius or retards. Work environment is tailored around standardized work units not people that are uneven in performance.

      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday July 27 2017, @10:31PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 27 2017, @10:31PM (#545493)

        Probably varies day to day among some people (and workloads, too)