Look at this like playing Tetris. If you're at the bottom on a fresh screen, you can lay out nice layers and drop that vertical in for four-liners at a pretty regular pace. Optimal results, and you can handle the less-convenient pieces and unfortunate sequences predictably. Get in the middle ground, though, and it gets stressful to keep it under control. You make mistakes which worsen the problem. Once you're stacked near the top there's not much that can save you.
So it is with the time you allow for scheduled activities. You want quality and predictability? Slow down.
I like your analogy, but how do you find the perfect balance? I mean, you can play tetris at level 1 forever, but it is not ideal for productivity (unless you are really at level 1). You have to reach the level that you are comfortable enough with the speed of the falling pieces.
Is it experience? You have to review the tasks periodically? You use some kind of metric?
Sometimes I think I'm too slow, and sometimes I'm too overwhelmed and I only acknowledge it after some non-trivial time passes (or, at least, that is my perception).
Well in the classic Tetris community, this used to be the central aspect to pay attention to during plays: how conservative (burning often to play low) vs how aggressive (building high to maximise Tetris rate) people play. This is traditionally impacted by the score difference: you play dangerously to catch up to your opponent. This probably translates to a useful productivity metaphor.
But in recent years there's been an escalation in agressivity, mostly due to hypertappers. This probably translates to the modern wide spread of hero coders; the analogy continues with hypertappers getting their hands burned out young.
The real interesting change in classic Tetris is with rolling (distributing the load on 4 fingers), which allows people to play even higher and more dangerous but without destroying their hands. I don't really know what metaphor this brings us though.
One way the analogy breaks in an interesting way is that you _know_ when you're able to hypertap, whereas it's pretty easy to convince yourself you're a hero coder for long enough to leave those who follow a total mess.
Main idea: we should be tasked with less volume of work.
And the author suggests that since less volume -> less stress -> higher efficacy, there won't actually be a drop in net productivity.
He's not necessarily wrong, however I can't help but think he's missing the meta we're all playing within: profit is the motive (not human flourishing).
It's profitable to drastically overwork people, such that you cull the bottom 10% and get fresh blood in the revolving door. While that costs money as opposed to retaining, it makes more to push the other 90%.
Several bosses have explicitly told me they intentionally set an unrealistically aggressive delivery date because of the phenomenon of people taking as much as time as they're given. So push hard, inevitably fall short, make some cuts at the very end, ship it, profit.
This is the behavioral model which has produced so many successful businesses. Imagine "slow productivity" in a startup? They'd fail. Now imagine no startups.
Lol no, then the estimators learn to pad their estimates in order to maintain some semblance of an orderly process and management just ends up managing having completely screwed up their scheduling measurements as a predictor of anything. So that practice leads to management in the dark about wether a project is actually at risk for completing on time.
Edit: if you want trust and fast quality execution you can help the team develop best case, median, and worst case timelines.
It's disgusting how people drive away from truth and it causes other people to have to make wild corrections to manage the lies. It snowballs into meaninglessness.
I once gave a detailed estimate of a project I thought would take 2-6 months. I called out the major blockers, explained the highest variability parts of the project, and made suggestions about how we could reduce variability.
Rather than address any of the points I made, the managers focused on nailing me down to a single estimate. Presumably they had to sell it as a quarter-long project.
I sat in the office of the engineering manager, and explained that any single estimate would be a lie. He told me that it wasn't a lie, it's just my best guess. I said my best guess is 2-6 months. He asked for 3 months. I said he can use whatever he wants, but my estimate is the same. I think they ended up using 3 months.
The ordeal complete drained my energy and the project went no where. My future estimates went through the roof and they eventually stopped asking. Now projects don't have any believable plans.
In such case I would recommend to under promise and over deliver. Your estimate conveys that it's risky selling it as a 3 months project and risk free as 6 months. It's in your best interest to sell it as 6 months and have a chance to complete it in 3. You could bargain 5 months by taking few risk. Nonetheless a good manager should have understood your estimation range and act accordingly.
I don't want to belabor the point, but I had been ignored on previous project estimations as well. Management was going to use whatever estimate they wanted.
There are many more issues with deliberately misleading employees:
- Some workers will see through the lies and adjust while others won't. The general version of this problem is that there are many lies but only one truth, and lies don't have any self-correcting mechanism built in, resulting in more variance, and in extreme cases, chaos.
- If you mislead people into always-on crisis mode, they will get desensitized and won't trust you, which is especially important when there is a real crisis. The general version of this is crying wolf.
The fact that a cultural phenomenon is irrational and self destructive is perfectly compatible with success, because of noise. Cultural norms do not converge towards optimum quickly, there are too many other factors at play, and social evolution is veeeeery slow. Evolution is probably the most misapplied theory ever proposed.
But at what cost? Don’t get me wrong. I fully believe that what you described here is the rationale used by most management types to make decisions.
But the thing that gets lost is the overhead and time spent on the quality problems created by this model.
I often wonder how much more profit could be realized if teams remained focused on delivering quality and predictable output instead of inevitably evolving into firefighters who can’t innovate because all of the past shortcuts and aggressive timelines have made that impossible.
If I could summarize all of this, I would pose it as a simple question: Has anyone proven that the current model actually delivers better profits than the alternative? We hypothesize that it does, because money is being made, but rarely if ever take a step back to confirm that this is true.
Not long ago, most employers also felt strongly that employees must be in an office to be productive.
It's not actually about profits. Each worker is trying to maximize their status while minimizing risk.
I'd venture to guess most software teams could be replaced with a team of talented engineers 1/4th their size. However, that will never happen. Why? Shrinking your team psychologically signals to your boss that you're less important. Also, you want extra redundancy because that makes each team member more replaceable.
You also don't want to accelerate development too much, otherwise you might end up with a pace that is unsustainable. This risks missed deadlines. It's better to keep engineers occupied with firefighting and rally the troops only if you need a burst of productivity.
I'm not saying I support this but this is what I've figured out in my time as a software developer on a wide variety of teams.
It's wild to me that this is the case, but my observation is the same. So many people are employed just to keep team sizes up and prop up dead projects.
I spent all 2021 working on a project with 10 other developers plus management. Another team was building a replacement at the same time. The existing project was a non-starter for technical and political reasons.
The existing project didn't have many real deliverables. The majority of the work was refactoring that would only pay off if we had years of usage of the original product.
Maybe it makes sense that it was better to throw literally millions of dollars at that project to keep the developers busy until the new project was ready to scale up.
If they don't spend money then their budget shrinks and their empire shrinks.
It's a total waste of money but it doesn't matter as long as they have an excuse that works for their boss. It's all about plausible deniability.
Plausible deniability is also why higher-ups will buy expensive, bloated, enterprise software/hardware. If something goes wrong they can at least claim they bought "industry standard software". Which is something that can be fed to non-technical C-level execs and board members.
Prioritizing profits (capital) over well-being is probably a very strong reason in favor of the labor movement. I am glad that Starbucks is unionizing: more unions for the service industry is desperately required.
It's profitable to drastically overwork people, such that you cull the bottom 10% and get fresh blood in the revolving door.
Indeed, supermarkets, hospitals, meat packing plants and other key parts of production have run on this. The covid crisis has meant that door has stopped being as willing to revolve. But still nothing has changed 'cause this society runs on profits and these places, using this strategy, wind-up being the key profit centers.
> Several bosses have explicitly told me they intentionally set an unrealistically aggressive delivery date because of the phenomenon of people taking as much as time as they're given.
That's because even the "non-aggressive, realistic delivery dates" are actually an under-estimation of the amount of work. Practically all deadlines are too soon, and how much you allow to stress out employees parametrizes how much too soon.
Read Henry Ford's autobiography. You'd think he'd agree with you. He'd want to overwork his employees to produce more cars. But, actually, he was much more of a perfectionist around all the things that go into producing things efficiently. And over-working employees certainly wasn't efficient, partly because turn over is high and also work place injuries go up. (For example, he introduce a 40 hour working week https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/01/24/henry-ford/.)
There is certainly a culture of over-working employees in some businesses. But is it really a _universal_ rule of capitalism that overworking people is profitable? Look at Germany. Highly productive economy, very strong labour laws and no (/limited) culture of overworking.
Have you not missed the 'meta' the article is talking about: that it's an Americanism to think that more hours == more product.
"Image 'slow productivity' in a startup" - what? How long did it take the inventor of bluetooth to invent bluetooth? How long did it take scientists to develop the internet? How long did it take the people to develop computers and electronics? People talk about "fast" productivity in start-ups because there's money involved and investors are greedy and no-one wants anything slowly. But, you know what, plenty of good products take 10 years to make or more. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/21/good-software-take...
Successful businesses aren't merely defined by being profit maximising. It's fine to create a good business slowly that has a positive net impact on society. That's in some ways better than a business that abuses everyone to make a small circle rich.
If you judge the success of a business merely by it's profitability, you're a fool. There's more to life than profit.
"I can't help but think he's missing the meta we're all playing within: profit is the motive (not human flourishing)." No, we are not all playing within that 'meta'. We reject that. Playing purely for profit is often sick and deranged. Get a life. Experience something more meaningful than just profit. Reject those procrustean views.
Yes, we all need to make enough to get by, and that means making some profit. But no, we don't have to define or constrain ourselves to being trapped in a pure-profit game. That's for the foolish.
Perhaps my tone was lost, but I was describing the typical American tech company, not what I think is right. I'm agree with your values, but I don't think the economy is setup to support those values.
Looks like Henry Ford discovered that profit was affected by overworking. He was still maximizing that function, no?
Sometimes that function includes making the worker happier, but sometimes it is inversely related.
re: startups, my point was that they have near zero chance of succeeding against large incumbents by moving at a leisurely pace. Sure, great technologies can be invented slowly. But once great tech is given VC money, it's a race. That race has created such a lead between the US and every other country in the tech world.
Sure. Yeah, I apologise if I was aggressive. I agree with you that yeah profit maximising has no necessary relationship to the happiness of workers. But, I was surprised when I read Ford's biography that a lot of (aggressive) practices I thought 'hey this is just bosses being bosses', actually might be poor management.
Re, VC money creating a rat-race, I think you're probably right.
Though I think there must remain a slice of the market that's not determined by the rat race. But it could well be the slice of the market that VCs aren't interested in funding because it's not big or fast enough. I guess I would cite something like Linux as an example. It's not really a start-up but by not being fuelled by money, and being open-source, it was able to under-cut and out-compete Microsoft and a bunch of other OSs in the hobbyists -> server -> mobile. But I suppose it became a platform that a bunch of other businesses like Redhat and Android were able to launch off.
But yeah I guess the general trend is profit invites competition, and competition is amoral.
> But once great tech is given VC money, it's a race. That race has created such a lead between the US and every other country in the tech world.
Let's be clear, it's access to capital rather than technology that has made US startups more valuable (which is weird, given that the easiest way to make a startup more valuable is to invest more money at a higher valuation).
If you look at (almost) all of the recent tech giants, it was the capital they got that allowed them to outcompete the rest of the world, not the technology (which is mostly available to the whole world).
It is expensive to constantly hire new employees and waiting for them to get up to speed. Having a stable group of expert employees who know the systems inside out, and know how to work well together, is a huge competitive advantage. Pushing employees beyond steady state is a clear sign of incompetent management.
> Several bosses have explicitly told me they intentionally set an unrealistically aggressive delivery date because of the phenomenon of people taking as much as time as they're given.
Some people call this “phenomenon” planning against the deadline.
I think a lot of the real world occurrences of this phenomenon are actually due to bad incentive structures though. For example if you finish early (or go under budget) on a project you can generally expect the next project to have a tighter deadline/allowance.
A friend of mine was a postal worker for a brief period a couple decades ago, and at that time (in his location at least) he was told to make sure he took the full day to complete his route, because if there was a consistent pattern of finishing early they would lay off some of the workers.
It's not always possible to make sure incentives are well balanced, but managers should at least take a minute to put themselves in the shoes of the employees. If finishing early has only negative consequences, then maybe that could be addressed directly instead of just setting impossibly early deadlines
Shouldn’t you plan to get the job done as quickly as you can while meeting quality expectations?
If I have 10 hours to make a car trip, but it only takes 5, I don’t drive at half the speed limit. Sure, there may be some extra bathroom and snack breaks, but probably not 5 hours worth.
I see people underperforming due to low expectations quite often, possibly following the classic 80/20 rule. I think this “planning against the deadline” behavior is one of the difference-makers between a hungry startup that outperforms, and the legacy player that barely keeps up despite having 10x the staff.
No, you should treat people like adults, set a deadline, and let them execute to that deadline. Many people balance multiple tasks, objectives, and goals and so taking 10 hours for a task that was assigned 10 hours is perfectly reasonable. If you keep planning 10 hour car rides and they continuously come in at 5 hours, you're bad at estimating.
So you're ultimately saying people should be given 5 hours for the car trip, even though giving them 10 would only result in a ~6-6.5 hour trip with healthy bladder relief?
No, I’m saying if you have 10 hours to do something that can be done in 5, but is optimally done in 6.5, take 6.5 hours and use the remaining 3.5 to do something useful. Maybe you’ll go on a sightseeing tour at your destination; maybe you’ll resolve a customer-reported bug you didn’t think you had time for this release.
> A natural fear is that by reducing the amount of work each employee tackles at any given time, it might reduce the total amount of work an organization is able to complete, making it less competitive. This fear is unfounded. As argued, when an individual’s work volume increases, so does the accompanying overhead and stress, reducing both the time remaining to actually execute the tasks and the quality of the results.
This is a central pillar of Newport's argument, and it doesn't hold water.
Anyone who has actually built and managed knowledge work teams knows that a "heavy burden" of work from the perspective of one employee might be "child's play" to another employee. Perhaps this is less true with blue-collar jobs, but it's emphatically true with knowledge work. Hell, it's even true with the same employee across time. (Coding work that would have overwhelmed me as a junior developer would bore me to tears today.)
If we're strictly talking about optimizing for market competitiveness, the onus is on Newport to explain how lowering the work burden for employees who can't sustainably do N units of work per week is a better idea than simply replacing those employees with others who can do N units/week.
They are proposing that the amount of work on a worker's plate at any one point in time should be reduced so they aren't always stressing about their backlog. They are not proposing that workers have less to do overall (otherwise, their claim of "increased productivity" is incoherent). The action from management would then be to organize the queuing and distribution of tasks and projects to shield workers from the administrative burden of recording an prioritizing it as it's launched at them via email or Slack. This is pretty basic work that I expect a manager to do.
Managers are generally pretty terrible at doing that without significant input from their reports, though. So you end up with small teams that managers can effectively do that work for... but then you end up with armies of lower-level managers who must then be managed by legions of mid-level managers, and so on. Controlling the flow of work to "producers" has a high organizational cost in bureaucracy.]
IMO the problem isn't "a lot of responsibilities", it's "a lot of things to worry about without the autonomy/authority necessary to resolve those worries". Big orgs tend to have more to worry about while also reducing autonomy and concentrating authority.
That's easy. And works well on an individual level or when you can pick and choose your workers (or they formed the company around those workers knowing each other in the first place).
When I had way more work piling up for my team than I had time to work on a lot of my time was spent in meetings or slack conversations in handling competing priorities and dealing with fallout from unhappy people. Be it on the worker or other side (product people, customer service people etc.). This is true both for the team members and myself as well.
Queue holiday time where we deliberately planned not to plan for so much. Also coincided with the newer team members having learned more of the ropes. Suddenly I don't spend 80% of my time on those ultimately unproductive things and I can concentrate on prepping work item properly for my team members, which enables them to do better work and I also have time to pull in extra items from the backlog.
This assumes that you have workers that will naturally do what I described above. The term I have heard thrown around for this before is to be 'value driven' vs being 'deadline driven'. Unfortunately it seems that most people are deadline driven. So if you can only use one blanket approach or you are deadline driven yourself you will use that approach. It sucks for us value driven people.
If you give me an unrealistic deadline for example you have a problem on your hands. We won't be friends and you will know it. If you don't and just work with me on getting whatever you need done done as quickly and efficiently as I can then we will do just that. And if I run out of work I find new work and start on it.
Example: our product owner told one of the stakeholders that we probably wouldn't be able to roll out a certain feature on time because of bugs we discovered that they wanted fixed before rollout (nevermind that they were minor edge cases that could have been fixed a week after release). I love our PO. Awesome guy. Turns out some big meetings were canceled a bit later. Picked up the bugs aand fixed all of them. We can release on time.
Now you will say this isn't your example. I say: to an observer would I not have seemed liked someone that wasn't able to do N units of work/week? And was this not simply a result the overall system I was stuck in? And isn't it true that many of us are stuck in metrics driven development teams where nothing but the N units of work per week metric count?
To quote the article, this was me:
When you’re tackling too many such projects concurrently, however, the combined impact of all of the corresponding meetings and messages can take over most of your schedule, creating an overhead spiral of sorts in which you spend significantly more time talking about work than actually getting it done
Maybe this is kind of the right place to ask. Does anyone else feel completely unproductive in their career? I have been employed full time as a software developer making six figures for nearly a decade now, and I literally cannot point to a single piece of working software being used today in production that I was responsible for. It seems like every new job hires me to work on some exciting new project that gets canned or dies off within a year or two. Mind you my performance reviews have always been stellar and I have been consistently promoted and given raises at every job I've had. Is this normal? I feel completely useless.
I chop a bit of wood every morning to heat my office space. All that chopping work is burned. I don't have an expectation that my wood or code will last very long. I enjoy both chopping and coding.
At least the wood is definitely being useful - it's keeping you warm. Same for cooking a meal (it's eaten afterwards, was it useful?), cleaning your room, etc.
The problem with coding jobs is when they're not even _temporarily_ useful - which is a common occurrence in my experience on bigger corps as well, and (I suspect) is a big factor for engineer burnout)
And the older me is more appreciative of people who share their way of not wanting more, but appreciating the less. But I have to concede, painkillers and the internet is nice too.
> I've had. Is this normal? I feel completely useless.
This is all by design in my view. You're at an organization that is in maintenance mode, all talent has left and the only folks remain are to keep the lights on. Your one or two year projects are facades to keep the sheep from bailing. Leadership needs to keep new folks coming in and old folks from getting bored but the only real priority is to just keep. the. lights. on. Hence, why you get A+++ reviews for warming a seat and most importantly, answering a pager at 3 AM.
This perspective resonates strongly with me. If I'd read this comment two years ago I would've brushed it aside as an overly cynical take but it rings true to my ears now.
In the last two years I've joined and left a bay area tech company that was operating exactly as you described: a maintenance mode org that lost all its former glory and the execs were happy to sit and see the hamster wheel churn; slowly squeezing out whatever is left of the market. Even with strong quarterly marks and plenty of time to piss away I couldn't endure the overwhelming boredom and purposelessness of it all and had no option but to resign.
I think perhaps I was too hopeful and optimistic back then. If I'd understood early on that it was by design that nothing ever got done, I would've optimized for getting the most time/happiness out of it. Live and learn I guess.
I work in government contracting, and have been doing it longer than you. On one project recently, some teammates were complaining about some unproductive thing we were doing, and I said "hey, this project is actually getting deployed and used by somebody, which automatically makes it more worthwhile than 75% of the other projects I've been on".
While I sometimes think that it's mostly a government thing, I figure big companies probably do the same.
Yup. Sometimes it's a Manhattan-project-esque "try every approach and we'll run with the one(s) that work the best" (this was the philosophy behind methods for enriching fissile materials during the war). Sometimes it boils down to organizational ineptitude, especially a lack of situational awareness such that the project becomes, in military terms, overtaken by events.
Note that sometimes things run the other way, where inertia keeps a project going when the hard decision to pull the plug should have been made long ago.
This is part of the game. Embrace it; the vast majority of jobs produce no real-world value but few pay as well as SWE. At least you aren't part of a democracy-destroying behemoth.
I feel this. What I think you can do is try to look at the journey you made, the achievements you have, and the things you built from the work you did.
Along the journey, what kind of people have you met? Where are they now? Do they, and how are they living in your memory, and how could you live in theirs?
During the career, what were the high points? What were the high points that were recognized, like something you did for a client, and what were the ones where you, only you knew the kind of shit that would have hit the fan, if it weren't for you?
Looking around you, are you surrounded by things that you bought from the money you earned along the way? How was your life at the beginning and how is it now?
The thing I'm trying to get at, is that you're much more than your productivity in your career. Maybe your job is the most useless shit ever but it puts food on the table, enables a lifestyle you enjoy, opens gates for you or lets you provide for a family. And those things can have the value you're missing. Just as an average day doesn't really matter in the grander scheme of things, small slices of your existence might not matter too, and that's okay. It's what we build from these insignificant things that count.
I'm not sure it's "normal", but I've heard similar things from enough folks that I think it's at least "common" amongst 'full time corporate' devs. I work more in the freelance world, and there's usually not quite as much of that sentiment, as there's usually more self-direction, but freelance comes with its own set of problems as well.
I had a similar feeling at my last job: I'm building software no one uses :(
I made sure to probe about related details when I was looking for my next (current) job. I found a company with a strong customer relationship, existing production software running, and more in the pipeline. Things worked out well and I got to be happy about seeing my code running in production, helping people do "stuff".
My one piece of advice is to focus on this aspect during interviews whenever you decide it's time to move on. After a certain dollar amount, optimizing things like this that you value will likely lead to a happier result compared with a bigger paycheck.
Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
I quite like my current job, but this really resonated:
> By volume, I’m referring to the total number of obligations that you’re committed to complete—from answering a minor question to finishing a major project. As this volume increases past a certain threshold, the weight of these efforts can become unbearably stressful.
I have this happening to me RIGHT NOW. I am on 4 different projects, PLUS I am expected to on-board a new engineer onto our team.
The thing is: I also have a ton of meetings I am forced to attend.
I'm sinking! I'm going to have to work late for at least a week! It is stressful for no reason!
Please, please do not work late. If your managers have assigned you too many projects for you to complete in the week, that is their fault, not yours. Respect your own time and talk to your manager about this.
Depends on what position you're shooting for, in C-level I only wanted people who tried to think through projects while I tried to finish them. The different attitudes brings about best product.
> I'm going to have to work late for at least a week!
That's one option. Another is just get less done. Cowards get pushed until the brink of collapse. Your only duty is to communicate to leadership that less is going to get done and it's their job to then adjust priorities and/or higher more staff.
Feel free to turn down meeting invites. If you really don’t need to be there, or the meeting could be an email, simply say so. If people have a problem with you not attending some meetings, discuss with your manager.
I think there are some people who plan meetings because they don't know how to really be productive. So a meeting becomes a bad proxy for productivity. I always try to turn those down. A few clues:
- People tend to use the meeting to 'collaborate' on work that should have already been done. E.g., filling in spreadsheets, drafting emails etc.
- If a standing meeting seems to bring up the same issues over and over without any movement towards resolution
- If you tend to be a fly-on-the-wall and don't have much input to the discussion, it might be better to just not attend ask for meeting notes instead
- If there's no clear agenda or action items, or it seems to devolve into discussions that should be one-on-one
> I'm going to have to work late for at least a week!
Don't work for free. Stick to your contracted hours, and if there aren't enough hours in the day to complete everything you're expected to, that's a failure of your manager(s), not yourself.
Since I went self-employed, my workload dramatically reduced.
One of the most important benefits is that I can follow impulses. There's always time and energy to explore ideas, clean up my work or build something else.
Likewise, there's always time to use good weather, so my work schedule tends to work around it. It leads me to work on what feels right.
It's a bit like planning a road trip. You need plenty of buffer space for unexpected detours good and bad. There are always unexpected opportunities (and issues) along the way. You can't predict those by looking at a map.
Overview for whoever doesn't want to read the article or just react to the headline:
The author is a professor of computer science at Georgetown who has authored numerous books on how to do well in school and career by minimizing distraction and increasing focus. He's arguing against the California 32-hour work week bill, which he says will be counterproductive on its own without addressing the core problems of excessive coordination and multitasking that is what he believes is truly burning out knowledge workers more than sheer volume of hours.
He is calling this "slow productivity" in honor of a movement from Spain dedicated to cooking instead of eating fast food, which takes longer but is ultimately more enjoyable and rewarding.
How on earth this gets interpreted as media damning right wing work ethic is maybe one of the more bizarre things I've seen happen on HackerNews recently.
Cal Newport is a good writer and worth listening to, but most of his advice applies only to himself. I work 9-5 for a company that uses Slack, email, alerts, etc., like most of HN. I'm not a tenured professor with a lot of clout that can shut himself from the world whenever I please.
I've learned from Newport and apply some of his stuff to my own life, of course, but it's been over ten years of listening to him telling us we're doing it wrong, when most of us have no choice.
Why? A good Slack culture means as an engineer you can find tons of historical context on discussions / decisions without someone needing to forward you a bunch of emails or historical docs. It also means you can get relatively quick answers to tribal knowledge questions while also have an async option for everyone on the answering side to shut down Slack for focus time.
Of course if you're only optimizing for your single productivity measured in lines of code written then I can see your point, but software engineering at scale is a team sport, and Slack has traits that make it better than email/in-person discussion/phone/zoom/in-doc comment thread.
I've found slack to be a pretty poor tool for knowledge sharing like this in comparison to a more document-driven form of communication. We previously used a wiki-tool for this (I don't think it really matters which one), but in recent years we've used Basecamp for this.
I'm completely sold on decisions being driven by a doc of a few paragraphs with the conversation around it co-located in the comments. It's easy to scroll through a list of such conversations in the message board and read through the context with discussion. In comparison, finding a previous conversation is slack is much more difficult.
Even if I can find the conversation, I think that the chat-focused nature of slack encourages short, loosely worded messages. This is great in the moment but the lack of context a few months on is pretty tough to deal with.
All fair points, and I agree there are theoretically better solutions. It's just that in practice I've specifically seen Confluence and Basecamp fail due to lack of buy-in, and comment threads are good in Google docs/Quip but proliferation of docs is a problem. In my experience Slack has just been the least-bad in many cases, not that I think it's optimal. YMMV.
That’s very fair - I’ve seen the same thing with confluence. Maybe having slack as a suboptimal knowledge store in these situations beats the alternative?
I am in a similar boat. Working in an agency that's part of a global tech/consulting firm and having multiple clients with multiple projects to juggle I know a bit about meetings and context switching.
Being involved in the Slow Food movement I also see the inspiration for slow productivity.
But I can't agree with the negative, somewhat fatalistic point of view.
I believe we need voices like Newport to someday be heard by people at the top running companies that are plagued by middle (project) managers that need to be seen as doing something.
I have seen the value of great client and project management first hand (albeit these were far and few). And I have seen the productivity it provided for the teams involved by providing goals, guidance and a map as well as trust and keeping distractions away as best as possible.
And I have seen busywork, work simulation and the simulacrum of work.
I value uninterrupted time to get stuff done. And I learned to be okay with days filled with meetings that also pay the rent. I know what I enjoy most, though.
> I believe we need voices like Newport to someday be heard by people at the top running companies that are plagued by middle (project) managers that need to be seen as doing something.
My cynical view is that execs don't care because, well... startups still IPO, get acquired, they get rich, etc. Profits still go up. I know most startups don't and companies still fail, but the point is nothing is affecting the people with power to change things.
I can't decide to use Rust at my current job, but there are a lot of people on HN for the last ten years telling me that I'm doing it wrong with memory-unsafe programming languages. I still think this is interesting and useful information. Perhaps if I'm making a new company or starting a project, I might choose Rust if it makes sense for me.
A way that I look at Newport's writing is, he's making claims that most organizations are leaving money on the table by not adopting better work methods. I can't unilaterally go Newport-style at my current job. But this is a forum with lots of entrepreneurial people on it, and maybe someone would like to test his theory and smoke the competition by starting a company that values Deep Work/Slow Work/etc.
To nitpick here: many tenured professors also use Slack, email, alerts etc. There's also often an (implicit) expectation that they can get stuff done in the evenings, on weekends etc. (e.g., paper reviews, grants, references, etc.). So I don't think it's quite as easy for modern-day profs to just 'shut [themselves] from the world'.
Yea, I like reading him but his suggestions are myopic. He's an idealist and has clearly never faced the full-time profit driven work world that the majority of us inhabit.
I would say it still is damning the Protestant work ethic in that it doesn't assume leisure is slothful. The fact the author references Spanish people cooking instead of eating fast food should be a hint as to what worldview that drives such a behavior (Catholics don't see work the same way as Protestants do).
Because while I don't believe a strong work ethic is a right wing thing, I do believe that believing a strong work ethic is a right wing thing is a right wing thing.
HackerNews has reached the point where it's visible enough that it's being consumed by those with the most time.
Honestly, most (decent) older programmers I've worked with are dramatically more productive than most (decent) younger programmers I've worked with. Both in terms of functioning systems and in terms of lines of code.
They waste less time writing unnecessary duplicates. They waste less time writing, fixing, and troubleshooting bugs. Their code tends to work when it goes out the door, rather than requiring multiple round trips. And when they want to brute force something, they break out a small code generator / write a small tool and blow past multiple younger eng-years worth in terms of LoC... and that's before accounting for them having written the tens of thousands of lines of foundational code that the others are working within.
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edit: since the parent is more focused on pace than productivity... it applies to pace too. they're often spending far more (too much) time in meetings and mentorship and whatnot comparatively, so day-to-day pace can seem slower, but if they get a chance to focus they tend to be miles faster in every single way. Hundreds+ of working lines of code in a day is totally reasonable if that's what the problem calls for. It's why you see older engs disappearing for a week and building git. Or unix. Far from small projects by literally any measure.
^This. Over the years, I invariably take a little more time in my assignments than the junior engineers, but that apparent "slowness" is actually much faster because I rarely ship bugs, have fewer reworks/redesigns, fewer review comments and overall ship more "work" per quarter.
There's a way of work in our org "Move slow to move fast" that is taught to junior engineers who are always eager to ship more code than to think and ask questions early on.
It can be a little easier to ignore the ongoing pressures as well when you are more senior. You’ve seen it all before and know how it ends, not to mention being able to switch jobs more easily. I see a lot of junior engineers very stressed out about not delivering “on time” regardless of how ridiculous “on time” is. I find myself fixing these “on time” deliverables regularly.
That is false. As you get older your pace of work slows but its because much fewer motions are wasted. A good engineer should be like a strong swimmer with no wasted or frantic effort. Smooth, controlled, powerful. In large orgs or complex domains this can really only be accomplished with experience.
The issue in this evolution is not how many hours you’re now asked to work but the volume of work you’re assigned at any one time...The central goal of Slow Productivity is to keep an individual worker’s volume at a sustainable level.
I wonder: is the expectation that young people work at a more frenetic pace part of the reason anxiety and depression trend up from adolescence until mid-adulthood?[1] If so, maybe we should rethink the idea that young people should be working at a faster speed.
[1] "A slight trend for an increase in the severity of both anxiety and depression from adolescence to middle adulthood, and then a slight decline in older adulthood was found."
You can be a lot picker on what you work though, and know better to avoid pitfalls and wasting time.
When you are young, you are running like a headless chicken, trying to learn/do everything you can, and usually not have the right filters to see what is more important.
In my 20s, learning new things could be overwhelming (there is so much to learn!!), and now it is not, because I avoid the distractions and learn what is important and needed.
Not sure if it's an industry-wide trend but in the last decade, I have seen a continuous growth of unmanageable levels of work and expectation of productivity in the various places I've worked in Silicon Valley. This is made worse by inexperienced managers who are now offloading management and project management responsibilities to their direct reports. Maybe it's just the teams/companies that I'm working for but I don't see how people can raise a family and/or have a life these days working in the tech industry. Being able to make work your life has become a competitive advantage.
> This is made worse by inexperienced managers who are now offloading management and project management responsibilities to their direct reports.
I thought this was just the currently orthodox management style in startups. Senior people manage themselves, junior people are guided by seniors, projects get managed by the people executing them. Management limits themselves to higher-level strategy. I've seen this from most of the managers I've had in the last, say, 5+ years. I prefer management that keeps in touch with the work that their reports are doing and knows enough to raise concerns, make suggestions, and make decisions when the team can't reach consensus, but I don't think that's how most people see the job of managing software developers right now.
It's certainly not limited to the Valley. Employers of all kinds are putting the squeeze on workers, with productivity up, but not giving us much to show for it, wage-wise [0]. What can you do? Individually, probably not much, but communication is always key to set expectations and prioritize your deliverables.
I have friends who burned out at AWS after a stressful launch. Believe it or not the effects are still there a whole year later. Many are just doing the bare minimum required to stay alive. My conclusion is there is a constant optimal pace which maximizes total work produced.. mind you there are probably other ways to mode effort as a function of time which maximizes total work done over a fixed time interval.. for example there could be a short amount of high intensity work but then you burn out and don’t get anything done for the next six months. The net output may be the same, of course the toll on physical and mental health may not be optimal
Is this unique to amazon? I've read other stories like this and, anecdotally, I know a guy who worked at amazon for a couple years and was burned out by the experience and didnt work for at least 6 years.
A natural fear is that by reducing the amount of work each employee tackles at any given time, it might reduce the total amount of work an organization is able to complete, making it less competitive. This fear is unfounded. As argued, when an individual’s work volume increases, so does the accompanying overhead and stress, reducing both the time remaining to actually execute the tasks and the quality of the results.
The real question is whether these conditions produce a 20% reduction in productivity that would equate to the productivity of a 4-day work week. I'm not convinced, and have not come across compelling studies that quantify productivity increased of a 4-day work week.
In particular, my own anecdotal experience where my organization works 4-days a week during the Summer is increased stress due to fewer hours to complete a set of tasks that do not decrease with the the decreased office time. I instead often find myself feeling nervous about tasks unfinished and often end up putting in time during the 3 non-work days.
Alternatively the author implies that simply assigning less work could be the answer, but to address that and related issues:
I am not saying that a 4-day work week shouldn't be considered, but I am skeptical that it could be implemented without increasing employee headcount accordingly. That complicates things then as increased salary costs impact product prices-- a regressive increase that impacts lower paid workers more than others. So increased wages could also be necessary, but that (hopefully to a lesser extent) feeds back into those same increased labor costs. Working out these issues is a package deal.
I've been embracing this for a long time! That's why I feel like I haven't made any progress at all, and despite having done a ton, our startup is just "stuck" compared all the sky high valuations elsewhere.
On one hand I don't want to get completely burnt out, but on the other hand, it feels like I'm not treading water hard/fast enough to even survive, let alone thrive
A related thing I wish all businesses would embrace is limiting work in progress. Lean has been around for decades and this lesson still hasn't landed.
The key resource is mental energy rather than time worked. I'd accept some trade off between hours worked and the context switching and fire-fighting I do in those hours. An hour spent working at my least professional gig is as exhausting as 5 spent at the most well-run.
> “It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either ‘lost time’ or a class privilege.” At Ford’s own admission, however, the five-day workweek was also instituted in order to increase productivity: Though workers’ time on the job had decreased, they were expected to expend more effort while they were there. [0]
It is kinda interesting because it seems we're coming full circle to this. I'm not sure why it also doesn't make sense to many. Our economy is highly dependent upon consumerism. That's exactly why economics trickles up but also why it is important that the lower classes have wages for luxury items. Because capital must flow in a capitalist market. People won't exercise their capital if they don't have the wages or the time. Ford discussed how the shortened workweek increased productivity and led to more people buying his cars. We often revere him for this and it is a frequent talking point. Something every American knows when they learned about the Labor Movement in school.
So why is this idea so difficult to combat? We have plenty of historical evidence. We have current evidence suggesting that we can continue to push the bar down and maintain a functioning economy. So what gives? We see articles like this at least once a month and many seem on board. So who is going to be Ford? It'll have to come from a big company. Google? Facebook? Amazon? Netflix? Microsoft? I'm sure many of you could benefit from the PR (especially FB). Who's going to pull the trigger first and set things in motion?
Here's the thing. Work in progress limits have been around forever. If you ever wanted to learn about kanban on a Saturday afternoon, you'd come by the term of "WIP limits" and a reasonable number like 3 at a given time.
I think the author is jumping the gun a bit based on their previous work "A World Without Email" in which he hints at the "hyperactive hive mind" being an entity in which everyone is fighting for each other's attention unknowingly.
This article somewhat assumes that because we're part of this hive mind, we don't actually get time to actually work deeply on one thing at a time and thus "slow productivity" is the solution so we can actually complete things.
> The autonomy that defines the professional lives of those who toil in front of computer screens has led us into a trap of excessive work volume. We cannot escape this trap by expanding the weekend. We must ultimately brace ourselves for the larger challenge of slowing down the pace of the workday itself.
Want to know the secret to these things? Read books.
Seriously, some of the best books on this topic are by the very author of this article.
Read High Output Management, The Effective Executive, Deep Work, Four Thousand Weeks, Thinking in Systems, An Elegant Puzzle, etc.
These books should empower you to take back control over your work life balance and hold others to a higher standard. Most of the time the "hyperactive hive mind" is simply your line manager and some middle manager's todo list sitting in your inbox because you're the one who can actually do anything about it. Yes, the very same boss who always changes your priorities last minute is surprise just serving their selfish needs through you.
How about flipping the script instead? You should give your boss a list of your priorities and tell them to not bother you until they are done. You should hold your boss accountable for the time they steal from you every week to discuss or talk about something that isn't one of those things. And ultimately, you should be in control of what you want to work on. You only live for so long, might as well be on things you actually believe in and can make an impact with, not some nonsense pushed down from the top or your boss's big breakthrough idea that everyone knows will flop.
Ever since I did this, I've been happier, healthier, and more impactful at work. Setting boundaries is fucking hard, but necessary to get anything done at a big company. The IC has the ultimate power. Don't be a doormat.
I don’t care about slow productivity. I care more about FAKE productivity. Talking about people who schedule emails at odd hours or people who are there to cheerlead. That’s basically 80% of white collar workforce.
I wrote a short story about this as an HN comment over the weekend. It got downvoted to 0 and someone replied asking me if I was on drugs. (I guess drugs make you write long paragraphs? I can do that without any assistance, it turns out.)
I mean, it should really be one sentence. There shouldn't be any pauses to think about how you got from the previous fragment to the next. It just keeps going; you start with a requirement about what camera to buy and you end up airlifting someone to the hospital, and that's just how the economy works.
It is clearly not what the weekend HN audience wants (all good ideas fit into 140 characters!), but I had fun writing it.
We fake productivity because there just isn’t enough to do. I can do my job in about 2 hours a day most days. My company and clients still receive the same amount of benefit whether I work 2 or 10 — and actually, probably more out of 2 because I’m not making up work that I’m roping other people into.
>>I can do my job in about 2 hours a day most days.
I often wonder how many people I work with that have 1 or 2 additional full-time jobs that they are just faking busy at. People that are 100% dedicated to the project you are on, but for some reason are never available for meetings or ever deliver anything on time. Just show up once in a while at a meeting, give some song and dance about how busy they are and then disappear for days at a time.
One coworker just disappeared for ten days - not a peep for him - shows up on day 11 with nothing new completed, but lots of stories about how hard he is working.
Not sure this remote working is going to last for a lot of folks given the abuse I see everyday.
I'm going to add an emoji reaction to this comment so that everyone on Slack sees that I'm online and "working". </troll>
Fake productivity is absolutely why I will never ever work in any other white collar sector other than tech. The "butts in seats" culture of consulting and banking is so outdated and cannot end fast enough imho.
I’ve been embracing the opposite and finding success and tremendous happiness in life. I work extremely hard, constantly and at every opportunity. You’d think based on the current zeitgeist that I would be completely mentally messed up but the opposite is true. Without doing useful things with what little time I have on this planet, I feel like it is depressing and would lead me to worst mental health than staying productive.
I’ve never heard any sort of optimism from the fucking media. These words are non-existent and potentially characterized as “right-wing” which is so insane to me: hard work, perseverance, determination, ambition, unyielding, disciplined, persistence and strong work-ethics. These are the values my father taught me and I’d rather listen to him than to the stupid media.
I assume you're young, and this is the right attitude if so. Not that it becomes "wrong" as you age, but many people cannot maintain it, through a combination of burnout, less energy, just becoming jaded, or having other interests and priorities.
I'm past middle age and hard work is no longer its own reward for me. Forget a 4-day workweek -- I work about 4 hours a day. Any more than that and it's just going through the motions, there's no additional productivity. I will still occasionally get really into something and find myself still engaged after many hours, but it's rare these days whereas it used to be common. However I do not think I would have liked this as a 25-year-old. At that age I was excited, still learning, and full of energy. A 4 hour workday would have felt like I was just getting started.
Non-existent? They're hammered on everybody 24/7 by american work ethics and hustler culture - to the point of unhealthiness. And they are also enforced (whether you "find success" or not) at every level, with a cut-throad society and economy...
I think you should talk to your local bartender to get some perspective about how good software engineers have it. It’s hard work but I feel truly fortunate. Perspective is a hell of a thing.
People don't generally want to be lazy. They want to feel like their effort matters. And even if you have a job that is important for society to function and improve, your efforts can be poisoned by seeing the vast majority of the value going to those at the top, or by constant verbal abuse and breakdown of your body. In lots of jobs, lots of stress comes from things that don't actually matter, but rather from minutia invented by someone else who doesn't trust you to put in effort. Hard work with tangible results is satisfying. Stressful work with poor pay and physical degradation is not.
I didn't think it was against working hard. It sounded more like we should avoid distractions and context switching. Sort of mental version of "slow is smooth, smooth is fast".
I think most people can thrive in the situation you describe (extreme hard work) as long as they also feel a sense of control. I am at my peak (in productivity and "feeling alive") when 100% of my work hours demand my focus because I have that much to do. When I have a quiet period I get miserable; I can find plenty of my own ideas to work on, but they often feel either futile or wasteful - that part is my own problem. Similarly though, when I have too much to do (ie when I know that working 100% still won't get it done) I become demotivated - after all, it seems that none of these tasks are important enough to get proper scheduling, so why bother sweating over them myself?
Second point: working full-on as you describe can apply to non-employment too. The drive towards working fewer hours (for the same standard of living) is just a direct response to growing wealth inequality and general unfairness in society, not a softening or growing laziness.
I think the key phrase from your philosophy is "useful things". If you have a full plate of things that are satisfying to do, and accomplishing them brings you material benefit, there isn't really a downside to working a ton (assuming you can mentally and physically handle it, and you're not neglecting other more important stuff).
If your life is more like a skinner box, where some large percentage of the work is baloney and brings no material gain, this probably isn't an optimum strategy. You'd be wasting a lot of energy on nonsense. I think that's closer to the situation the average person finds themselves in, and their effort would be better spent identifying the part of the work that brings the most results rather than indiscriminately powering through all possible work.
"Work smarter not harder" is a saying for a reason. :)
The problem is you are thinking only about yourself which is what right-wingers are frequently accused of. You specifically might be able to work extremely hard, persevere, etc but not everyone can. Work needs to be sustainable especially in the US which does not provide a lot of benefits to workers (healthcare, child care, PTO, etc). Also, you might be able to work extremely hard today but can you do the same 20 years from now or when you are recovering from an illness? I used to work 14+ hours a day but out of the blue got diagnosed with cancer. I still pushed hard during that time but a year after surgery and treatment, I have lost all motivation to work and can barely focus for 4 hours a day.
I'm very curious what your life experience is like on certain axes. Have you chosen your work? Did your father? Likewise, have you had any major unexpected life events (deaths, divorces, illnesses, etc.)?
I ask because I've found what you've said to be true in certain cases.
Working hard and consistently at something is great when it comes to projects and tasks that I choose and that are mostly mathematical or logical. On the other hand, this mode/method completely fails me when it comes to creative or architect level work.
I also caution against holding one worldview as good in all situations. I worked much harder before I got MS, and learning my limits and accepting them was key to preserving my mental health.
If you can live such a directed life, it can be very fruitful, but on the other hand, trying to make yourself hustle even though it's a bad idea is a great way to hurt yourself.
It is similar to exercising for me. If I don’t exercise, I go down the spiral and it becomes really difficult to get back into a good routine again.
Not working or doing something useful with my time feels exactly the same. I am really happy and everything is better when I don’t slack, am demotivated or unwilling to put in the effort.
Life is fulfilling and tremendously fun when I’m surrounded by motivated people that are basically opposite of the HN culture these days. The people of HN are extremely uninspiring and frankly toxic to my own mental health.
That's because the pendulum has swung. A decade ago, HN was full of optimism because we were at the apex of startup culture and the tech boom. Now that boom has receded, there is still a lot of dumb money (for now), but people are burned out and the tech is uninspiring or toxic. People are just tired.
This really became clear to me two years ago, shortly before the pandemic, when there was a long thread on HN arguing against joining a startup, simply because FAANG pays far better- not just because of crazy stock market shenanigans, but because many startups themselves have been captured by leadership that pursue policies that lead to share dilution. The economics have changed.
First paragraph: I feel exactly the same way, but also definitely feel and sympathize with the article's topic sometimes. I don't think the two ideas are as mutually exclusive as they seem.
Second paragraph: I think you're letting the world's political bullshit get you a little reactive. Those words are championed more often explicitly by the right than the left, and some media outlets unreasonably demonize some right wing things, but those are two separate concepts. Those words are, by definition, positive words in a neutral context.
I think you have a point about the reactionism... A better gambit than pre-emptively complaining about a small difference in political stances on something like work ethics would be to just champion the virtues on their own, and if an actual political ideologue begins to act disparaging about it as being somehow a less positive thing, respond with "Alright, well you and your cohort can enjoy not benefiting from these virtues then".
To me the article seems a lot more focused on specific, concrete issues faced by some workers, and tangible actions and policies to address them.
It isn't making a moral case for or against hard work that I can see. Though I do think addressing the conflation of productivity with virtue is necessary to make meaningful change here.
Anyway yeah YMMV. I don't really get anything from my work except more money and less time so I'm gonna vary that mileage down as much as I can. I can't really follow you into the media and political scope of this though. I don't reject those values that you associate with... someone associating with... right-wing... something. idk man. This isn't a request for further explanation.
>These words are non-existent and potentially characterized as “right-wing” which is so insane to me: hard work, perseverance, determination, ambition, unyielding, disciplined, persistence and strong work-ethics.
>These are the values my father taught me
You just summarized Prussianism [0][1], so you're not far from the truth.
i've been thinking about this comment since you posted it and am now getting back to it. I guess, at the end of the day, the key is finding what brings you happiness and maximizing it. Obviously, for a lot of people work is not it but for some, seemingly like you, it is. The key is knowing yourself well enough to know what makes you happy and then working to maximize your happiness.
> In our study, going from two to three meetings per day lowered the chances of developers making progress toward their goals from 74% to just 14%. And developers who average just one meeting per day have a 99% chance of knocking out high quality work — it really is about getting focus time and connecting with our colleagues to brainstorm ideas.
> With minimal or no interruptions, developers had an 82% chance of having a good day, but when developers were interrupted the majority of the day, their chances of having a good day dropped to just 7%. By minimizing distractions and creating focus time, we not only get work done, we create better and less stressful days for ourselves.
There's just so much evidence that extensive meetings are a detriment to software developers. Despite that, companies still hire developers, pay them a lot of money, then prevent them from actually doing quality work with constant meetings and interruptions. I don't get it. If you're a dev manager, you should be doing everything you can to protect your team from wasteful and pointless meetings. Any meeting, particularly standing ones, should require a very strong justification for its existence, because the impact on developer productivity is huge.
At my current job (and most previous ones), the default answer for any organizational problem seems to be "we'll just schedule another meeting" or "we'll open a new Slack channel, and invite everyone to it".
It's also not a good idea that all of your time is related to a codebase or two (i.e. don't put all your professional eggs in one basket). Imagine if those projects go poof or something critical happens. When you're 100% invested you're seen as 100% responsible when the baby management blame game comes. Give me some meetings, give me some non-software soft tasks. If all you do all the time ever is code, good luck changing careers should you ever want to, you're going to have limited other experience.
Also, if your entire job is mopping floors and the floor is dirty, you're going to get shit for any and all dirt on the floor, regardless of how reasonable the expectation is that you could have gotten to the specific mess observed at the specific time. Youre 100% on floors so why didn't you fix this unreasonable request. Meanwhile, if you clean floors half the time and clean windows the other half of the time, you have a valid excuse as to why the floors aren't perfect, at least in some peoples skewed perspectives of expectations. This is why I always advise people have a little split up of their time but not an extreme amount. It gives a clear out to unreasonable expectations. If you wanted the floors so clean I wouldn't do windows half the time, and so on (just be careful not to convince someone it would be a good idea to commit you 100% to a task).
If the alternative is that you're excluding them from all decision making and planning, then yeah, they're going to feel like code monkeys, and that sucks. There's a middle ground between "we have lots of meetings where all planning and decisions are made, and everyone has to be present" and "our devs don't come to any planning meetings, and we just throw all the work to them when the decisions are made".
A good first step is having more asynchronous discussions.
I think you have to delegate ownership down; "you have total control over everything and we won't second guess your decisions." This doesn't happen, so we just have meetings with the "owners" to try and convince them to do our thing. The result is less stuff getting done.
It's positively painful to try to get people to understand this incredibly simple concept for some reason. People just can't wrap their brains around the idea that this type of work requires focus, and that breaking that focus derails the whole activity for a period of time.
Question in my mind becomes: how do we get the people who aren’t doing this work to understand and empathize with the productivity needs of those who are?
I’m out of answers because everything that probably can be said about it HAS been said about it from people far smarter than I am-from blog post to published airport book to published academic studies-and yet here we are still having this conversation amongst ourselves as developers and engineers.
Maybe we need to get rid of the managers and instead take turns being manager.
I'll focus three days a week and manage one day a week. The other four members of my team do the same. The fifth day is for meetings, and if we don't need all day for that, it's for going outside.
Good managers should be asking you what you need and removing organizational roadblocks to make that happen. They should be in a lot of meetings because they’re shielding you from meetings, filtering the important things and bringing them back to the team in some sort of regular format that isn’t a daily meeting.
I deliberately chose to step back from management and went back to being an IC despite getting feedback from my former direct reports that genuinely almost made this cynical fucker cry about what a great manager I was for them.
Truth be told, as much as I really enjoyed the presence of, and admired the people reporting up to me and what I was able to do for them, and how they made ME a better manager and engineer, I never want to be a manager ever again.
By my own standards, I’m not good at it and the stress it brought, eh. Just not compatible. Glad I learned that lesson. I’d much rather be on the doing end, the next time I find myself in management will be when I finally have the means to cut loose and work for myself full time.
As the article mentioned, managers are dumping management tasks on subordinates (because they themselves are overworked).
I just got a big dose of this at a client I just left (because they were working us way too hard). They have a career track that includes not being a manager but instead a principle engineer or whatever. The managers were punting management work to these principle engineers. People who had already decided they were not managers and were not going to focus on those skills. They were basically forced into it, micromanaged people like crazy, burning everyone out.
This, after rebooting the project a few times because they couldn't get traction. As soon as the project got traction and was getting accolades this happened. Their senior lead developer (at the cusp of being forced into management) left the same time I did. I would be surprised if the project is not in crisis mode soon.
The people distracting (PMs, Managers) are often the ones charged with getting the most out of the people being distracted, and honestly I don’t even think it’s their fault. They don’t see the work happen unless they are in a meeting where it’s done, and their schedule is mainly meetings so that is their impression of doing work.
I just don’t think it’s possible unless the people making the distractions have once been the people being distracted, and even more so there are people whose livelihoods depend on meetings happening (scrum masters for eg). Just IMHO there will always be friction between people who cant afford to be distracted and those that need to be distracted when people like this work together.
Is it possible that some companies with e.g. VC funding behave in a similar way to an employee who counts dollars on the clock, padding time with busywork to make it through another payday?
There may be a much broader culture of unproductivity, which manifests in this and other ways.
When you're operating on the manager's schedule you can do something you'd never want to do on the maker's: you can have speculative meetings. You can meet someone just to get to know one another. If you have an empty slot in your schedule, why not?
Here's why not:
Taken in context of the essay written, this amounts to optimizing my time due to a lack of my superiors optimizing theirs. Taken on its own, I don't really care how my managers choose to spend their time as managers. But when the power differential surely speaks to the reality that managers will always concern themselves with what I'm doing-perhaps by nature of the manager/subordinate relationship-I think I'm in the right to expect some kind of reciprocity in making time for one another.
Good managers make the time for their subordinates. Average managers stumble upon the free time. Poor managers constantly reschedule.
I'm not against getting to know my coworkers and making time for general socializing as a means of "taking a break", but in the context of "makers schedules" and "manager schedules"...sorry. No.
I don't (necessarily) disagree with the essay (at least not as much as I usually reserve a certain amount of reticence for Grahamisms), but the suggested solution...eh. I need to hear a better motivating reason than this because this isn't about some hypothetical problem between me and people I'd like to get to know via "speculative meetings". This is about managers demanding so much of our time via "just in case we need you" meetings and turning right around asking us to be productive and meet deadlines in spite of said meetings.
I've been working remotely as a developer for 11 years, and I'd quit any job that requires an average of more than 3 video calls a week. It's just not possible to get things done in that environment, and if management can't protect you from that level of unnecessary distraction, it's a red flag that the company has bigger management or trust problems.
Daily standups are far too much. There's simply no need to discuss so much. It's a waste of everyone's time. I do one video standup per two week sprint, with a daily text status update and the end of each work day that's something short, sweet and human like, "Hey, I worked on automated testing all day today. There were some tests that were flaky in Safari, but I finally figured it out. Will start on the Firefox bug by mid-day tomorrow. Feeling slightly behind on this sprint, but I think we'll still manage to get everything done on time as long as I don't run into more problems with the tests."
Stand ups are just peer pressures on productivity with management oversight. I better have something to say at the standup or say X was completed or it'll look bad at me, not the effort.
In theory standups are great because the team works together to solve blocking problems and doesn't worry about productivity. In practice it's just another mechanism to push productivity.
My personal experience is that daily stand-ups are mostly pointless, distracting, and a detriment to productivity. IMO, if you absolutely need them, you should prefer doing them in a daily Slack thread, asynchronously.
People end up waiting until standup to ask questions, creating a culture that doesn’t simply message one another for simple things. If something is brought up in standup, now product and project mgmt will want to understand and weigh the value of something that could literally be as simple as, “I need access, how do I generate a key?”
Also I hate being interrogated every morning about what I did the day before.
Daily standup removes the need to remember anything, or even picture the system/ product in your head because you can just ask someone else every day and get what you want. No need to think! Process over people!
Stand-ups in general are cancerous enough to warrant an outright ban. That way, if you do have them they have to be conducted clandestinely and very quickly.
Estimate the salaries of the people in the meeting and calculate the cost to the company. Fun to think about while listening the two managers argue about a detail while the rest 8 people wait politely.
Come to think of it, if you have 8 people in an hour long meeting, then the meeting will cost at least the lowest paid participant's daily salary (assuming 8 hour work day).
I actually sat in a meeting a few years back as a consultant - with 6-7 other consultants and 1 or 2 employees of the company we were assigned to - all billing $150 to $500/hr - as we discussed which cost center we could bill the $35/month SAAS tool we needed to use for the project we were developing.
We probably spent 3-4 years with of those SAAS fees in that one 45 minute meeting discussing which cost center should be billed.
Client (a fortune 50 company) didn't see any issue with this.
A tiny thing, and I'm probably alone here, but one thing that absolutely wreaks havoc on my concentration is the simple act of 2FA for every little thing.
Say I need to check an email relating to the code I'm working on. By the time I
- open firefox
- go to outlook
- open keepass (because yes I care about security and delete cookies)
- fill in my keepass master password
- find the relevant entry from keepass
- fill in my password via keepass
- wait to be greeted by the authenticator message
- grab my phone
- use my pin to unlock phone
- go to the authenticator app
- use my pin to unlock the authenticator app
- accept the authentication token for my email
- confirm authentication via my phone's pin
- search for the email
I no longer even remember what I'm coding anymore, let alone what I needed that email for.
This is particularly true if, like me, 2FA pisses you off, and your focus is replaced by rage.
Even when you're not authenticating with something, you need to keep your phone within distraction range at all times in case you need to.
And by the time you unlock the phone (thereby seeing your notifications) and open the app drawer you're one tap away from social media, which your brain is probably already thinking about from the familiar ritual.
Yes, exactly. The reverse applies too; having to keep your phone close makes you more likely to be interrupted/distracted by those notifications in the first place, even outside of a 2FA interaction context.
It's like the modern worker experience is designed to destroy focus.
It's what is provided / supported by the organisation.
I tried accessing through local email clients but couldn't get 2FA to work with them - I may be wrong, but as far as I understand it's outlook specific.
I use linux at home, so I haven't bothered installing outlook via wine (nor do I want to, tbh)
I’d tell it to your boss but they’d probably put multiple meetings on your calendar to discuss then give you a bunch of “action items” to fix the issue yourself. Sound about right?
If your manager reacts negatively to candid discussion of how they're preventing you from being productive, then you don't want that job anyway. Prolonged work under managers like that is what burns people out.
Yeah switching jobs is a pain, but it's peanuts compared to switching careers.
The work is broken up by meetings and the meetings are broken up by work. Everything is so damn fractured it drives me crazy.
If we are starting a new epic then we should spend a day or two figuring out what exactly what we're building, then go build it. Instead planning itself is fractured 1 hour here, 15 minutes there and it's hard to keep track of what the hell you're planning on doing.
I suppose to some extent, work is more than just typing in code. As software engineers, we bring a lot of the distractions, non-value adding work, and context switching upon ourselves.
One problem is that we get away with being specialists, leading to an organization full of specialist teams. That means to get anything done, high-overhead communication among the specialists is required. A specialist that understands the user tells you what features to work on, then you write some code and ask the security team for input, then you need to deploy this thing to production so require the help of the operations team. Finally, the testing team finds a bunch of bugs you missed, and now you have to go back and fix them. The alternative is to just do all those jobs yourself. That is what most 2-person startups do, and they can do a lot.
I think this is just an anomaly in the job market. You try to hire "software engineer" and get 1% of the candidates you were hoping for, so you can't say "also you need to know security, operations, and testing". The result is a slowdown for everyone, as you staff up with specialists to support that one software engineer that actually applied for your job. (My strategy here is to know all these things myself, and teach them to my team, so we can be as self-sufficient as possible. But there's pushback; the time spent learning is time not spent getting through the bug backlog. And, why learn more skills when you get paid the same knowing only one? The market doesn't support the strategy of being a generalist, but it does support the strategy of having a lot of teams, and team leads to integrate them.)
Ultimately, I think this is just a fundamental law of the universe. One person can do a one person project. Four people can do person twice as big. Eight people can do a project 3 times as big. I think this is just how society works, and it's not something that can be changed. Software engineers are "weird" in the sense that most of us are self-taught, so we have a very good handle on how much work one person can do; all of our projects were one-person projects until someone invited us to undertake a project that's 4 times as complex as that (and thus requiring 16 people). There is some debate as to whether this is exponential or quadratic, but the idea is the same; your value as an individual is much lower when you're working on a big project. At some bigger organizations, it's pretty much zero. So if you do more than zero work each day, you're ahead of the curve. (It of course takes 7 hours of meetings to determine what code you should write in the remaining hour. If you didn't do that one hour of code, then your output is actually 0, and you get fired.)
None of this feels good, but it's just how the Universe and humans work, I think. Gravity pulls you down to earth, and needing to do a two person project means you have to talk to another person instead of programming. It's the law.
