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>Taking breaks to play games, chat around coffee, or taking a few minutes to walk around the office is a non-existent element of life. An 8 hour work day is exa

• deleted 9y ago
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• deleted 9y ago
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• SolarNet 9y ago
  I mean yea, take breaks. But when I do contracting I'll take an exactly X minute break before resuming and still work for 8 hours.
• komali2 9y ago
  I guess when you're paid hourly it matters, but ya, my work day is a bunch of 20 to hour long blasts of coding, interspersed with wandering around the office or bouncing on the giant yoga ball they gave me instead of a chair. Dunno how someone could keep on the screen for more than a couple hours straight.
  • meric 9y ago
    You can take a break by looking up the next ticket.
    • komali2 9y ago
      Oh hey it's my project manager, I didn't know you were on here.
  • BigChiefSmokem 9y ago
    The only place I ever actually coded for 8 hours straight was a place in which I loved the work and I actually felt valued on a day to day basis. During crunchtime (which only happened once or twice every few months) my manager would wait around after-hours so we could leave together and I wouldn't be the only one left in the building while the cleanup crew went to work. In hindsight I now acknowledge this behavior as his way of showing support even if it meant him just catching up on news and Facebook or writing boring emails while waiting for me to be done coding for the day. He taught me a lot about managing people, and in turn I taught him a lot about being on the cutting edge of our industry. This was a very small company trying to modernize itself in the face of daunting competition. This was the best position I ever held and was my first role as a lead. The CEO did not know much about technology but seemed to have an innate trust in me that I appreciated greatly. Granted this gave me the ability to use whatever technology I wanted so I was having a lot of fun with the day to day coding. I wouldn't even eat lunch some days just so I can finish up the task at hand before sundown. Sounds horrible but was (and still is) an incredibly exciting experience. On the other side of town, however, where I worked for Fox Studios (yes I'm calling them out!) I and the rest of the Contractor Army would be critiqued and yelled at by executive management on a weekly basis, like clockwork. Even though they gave me all the money and resources in the world, I hated coding every second I spent at that job. Instead, I spend a lot of time walking around the lot in hopes of meeting movie stars or something. I always figured it was the domain you worked in that made it fun or boring, but I'm starting to realize it's a lot more about the environment and people you are around that can make or break your work life.
• bluedino 9y ago
  Are you doing a personal project or are you just going down a list of features that you have to implement? For a CRUD app it's fairly easy to just trudge through the list since you aren't making creative solutions or passionate about what you're doing.
• reillyse 9y ago
  Thinking about how to solve a work problem is work.
• Jach 9y ago
  Yesterday I had about 5 hours of straight work within the usual 8 hour window (different from the "you only get x < 8 hours of not necessarily continuous productive work per 8 hours" some people like to claim), not even getting up from my chair once. I had to psyche myself up for it after lunch though. The reason is I had to work on finding a solution to a deep and complicated bug, and I knew it would take a long time. (I had to work on it some more today to fix some issues with what I settled on last night.) But I was able to devote my entire focus to it and put aside code reviews and doc reviews and email checking and so forth until I had a potential fix. Most days I don't have such long periods of continuous focus. The culprit is usually multitasking. Context switching carries a cost for me. Even if the context is justified (important meeting, hammock-time to figure something out, lunch break) there's a cost. I'm somewhat jealous of people who seem to have such a minimum cost and can go even more than 8 hours grinding away and working very productively indeed, since I can taste that focus on occasion, and it'd be cool to have it always. I probably wouldn't spend most of it on work-work though.
  • ryandrake 9y ago
    I found a super helpful skill to develop is the ability to context switch quickly. Don't be a slave to "the zone". Interruptions happen, and the person who has the discipline to require only 2-5 minutes to get back into the programming zone is more productive than the one who needs 30 minutes after his/her concentration gets broken. I've found the single biggest thing that helped me to work on context switching quickly is having a child--because kids don't give a shit if you're in the zone. They just barge in and interrupt you, and you have to deal with it because family. I mean, so you're super-productive in continuous 5 hour batches?? Great, we all are! But no business on Earth is like that. Are you also super-productive when your day is punctuated by meetings, phone calls, and open-office distractions? That environment seems to be more common in this day and age.
    • Jach 9y ago
      I'm not a fan of the sink-or-swim approach to gaining skills because when people advocate for it they discount the probability of sinking. I know some people who had kids and tried working from home, every one of them couldn't build the skill to be as or more productive as they were before kids. And some of these people have kids that are now entering middle school, it's not like they haven't had years of practice trying to do it. But it's fine, we don't need to be highly productive let alone super productive all the time like the catfish. If you treat meetings, calls, socializing with your coworkers, etc., as part of "work" instead of distractions from "real work" (that you do best in "the zone"), then it's possible to be pretty productive like that too. My context switch time depends on what I'm switching to. I haven't figured out a good way to switch from deep coding -> meetings -> deep coding efficiently, but I can switch from code reviews -> meetings -> pinball -> meetings -> emails -> direction clarification... pretty well. It's improved with practice, sure. But what I find more useful is to plan around what type of day I'm expecting to have, then it's not that hard to be productive in the context of that day or week. Most days I don't even try doing any serious coding before the morning standup, so it's a great time to do other needed things, and depending on what the rest of the day is and what I need to prioritize right now I may or may not have some good coding sessions intermixed with other things. Days of pure zone are rare, which is why I cherish them (at least with positive usages, the bug-zone days are kind of bittersweet because things shouldn't be this hard and probably wouldn't be in a non-legacy system), but I don't need that to be productive. I don't even need to do serious coding as much as I want, a lot of work is just gluing things together and revisiting existing logic flows to make them work slightly different for some new feature. Overall my average day is productive enough that I'm overall happy enough (even if unhappy I can't code in anger as much as I want) and people in charge of judging my output seem happy enough. I think about how careerism seems to work at a lot of places, most dev roles involve more than just programming, even if programming is the single most valuable thing you could do right now, the incentives don't align with that. It's rather annoying personally. But that's probably why the Lonesome Bottom Feeder catfish is at the bottom, and not even a salaried employee but a contractor. They can make really good money, but not always, or as much as those climbing the ladder. The incentives favor the type of "productive" that goes with broad multi-tasking, directing, and a few deep dives. Even a non-catfish non-ambitious dev can do this and advance, though of course the non-bottom-feeder invasive catfishes will do better. Do it for enough years and your average depth across a broad spectrum is deep enough that it would take a while for someone fresh to reach your level with intense focus, catfish productivity or not.
• PeterisP 9y ago
  Writing code is different than reading code, it suits different work patterns. One is dealing with software architecture and the other is doing software archaeology. In the described catfish role, you don't get to spend any meaningful amount of time thinking about how to best implement the next thing; sure, you do some of that, but almost all the time gets spent trying to understand how the heck that thing was implemented (and why) (and why??????), and that means that (a) you don't really get progress unless you're looking at or touching that artifact, and (b) you really want to avoid context switching; if you've spent three hours building up a vague picture in your mind about what something large and weird is supposed to mean, then you'll have to repeat half of that if you take a lunch break and talk about other matters. When you do figure that out, though, the fix or rewrite generally is quick, easy and routine.
  • dizzystar 9y ago
    This is a perfect description of what I was expressing. I like the archaeologist angle (knowing nothing of archaeology, of course). So much of the work is browsing files and reading, which is different than creating. It's a different challenge: enjoyable in its own way.
  • douche 9y ago
    This is maybe one of the greatest advantages I have gained in my years of experience at one company. When I started, I was inheriting the code of other people, with all the baggage of trying to understand it and keep the mental model intact when I needed to make changes. Over time, I've largely rewritten all of the products that are still current, as requirements and dependencies have changed. I'm reminded of the probably apocryphal story of Nikola Tesla and Henry Ford[1] [1] http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp
• krylon 9y ago
  I agree. I had some of my best ideas in cigarette breaks (or, alternatively, at night when I was just about to fall asleep). Also, going to the bathroom can do wonders if your mind is stuck on some problem. Seriously.
• twothamendment 9y ago
  8 straight? I've done it if you don't count the lunch my wife put in front of me that I didn't remember eating. There is also some value to taking a break. I've walked away from some problems that made may head hurt - only to solve them while playing foosball. Once I was playing foosball while the site was down. Someone walked in, quite unhappy about seeing the dev team playing when he thought we should have been fixing. Explaining that we couldn't do anything about it - ops had server issues that we could not help with. There is a time to work and a time to play. I find I'm best with 2-3 hours of work without distraction.
• mangofoobar 9y ago
  You don't work 8 hours straight as a 100% Remote Catfish. You use Toggle or some stopwatch like an athlete does to time everything. My hours a day as a Catfish takes me until 8pm to finish or later (walk my dog, cash rent cheques from tenants, make lunch, pomodoro breaks, yoga/workouts). Sometimes it burns into my "weekend". But every day is the "same", and I wouldnt have it any other way. Expect all your billable time to be tracked, scrutinized and be able to fully back all tradeoffs and progress. Thank God I don't need to groom and dress for my boss and commute to some open office plan where people constantly come up to your desk. Fuck that.