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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

When people are doing a physical task, it’s easy to assess how hard they are working. You can see the physical movement, the sweat. You also see the result of their work: the brick wall rising, the hole in the ground getting bigger. Recognising and rewarding hard work is a pretty fundamental human instinct, it is one of the reasons we find endurance sports so fascinating. This instinctive appreciation of physical hard work is a problem when it comes to managing creative-technical employees. Effective knowledge workers often don’t look like they are working very hard.
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I would submit that the appearance of hard work is often an indication of failure. Software development often isn’t done well in a pressurised, interrupt driven, environment. It’s often not a good idea to work long hours. Sometimes the best way of solving a difficult problem is to stop thinking about it, go for a walk, or even better, get a good night’s sleep and let your subconscious solve it. One of my favourite books is A Mathematician’s Apology [wikipedia.org] by G. H. Hardy, one of the leading British mathematicians of the 20th century. In it he describes his daily routine: four hours work in the morning followed by an afternoon of watching cricket. He says that it’s pointless and unproductive to do hard mental work for more than four hours a day.

To managers I would say, judge people by results, by working software, not by how hard they appear to be working. Counter intuitively, it may be better not to sit with your developers, you may get a better idea of their output unaffected by conventional/intuitive indicators. Remote working is especially beneficial; you will have to measure your employees by their output, rather than the lazier option of watching them sitting at their desks 8 hours a day thumping away at an IDE, or ‘helpfully’ crowding around each other’s desks offering ‘useful’ suggestions.

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