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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?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday July 27 2017, @11:57PM (2 children)
The thing is, if you're salaried, you are *by law* not paid by the hour. That's the flip side of not getting paid anything extra when you have to work longer hours to get something done - you also don't get paid any less if you work fewer hours.
It's down to the culture of the individual business whether they try to "encourage" a 20, 40, 60, 80, or 100 hour week - you get paid the same regardless of how many hours you put in. A smart business will pay you based on the value you provide - a dumb one (aka most of the big ones) will tend to instead preferentially reward the employees who put in regular 60-80 hour weeks, despite the fact that copious evidence shows that they are almost certainly accomplishing less per week than if they were only working 30-40 hours.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 28 2017, @02:08AM (1 child)
Untrue. I've seen those studies too and that's not what they say. They say productivity drops after a normal work week, not that it goes negative.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday July 28 2017, @02:01PM
Check again - I've seen several claiming that *weekly* productivity consistently drops as the number of hours *normally* worked climbs beyond 40. Occasional pushes don't have the same effect - you still get diminishing returns, but you don't have burnout reducing your baseline productivity.