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There was a post today about Stanley Kubrick, which got me thinking: programming is like making a movie in many ways. So you can tell your boss: "if I were a fi
by mojuba 11y ago
There was a post today about Stanley Kubrick, which got me thinking: programming is like making a movie in many ways. So you can tell your boss: "if I were a film director and you knew I'm busy at the film set making a feature film for you, with some Hollywood stars, would you be calling me out for your shitty meetings as often as you do otherwise?"
Or: "If you were Stanley Kubrick's boss, would you interrupt him as often?"
- sitkack 11y agoTIL, I am Stanley Kubrick!
- cookiecaper 11y agoI don't think this will get through to anyone. The only reason people can respect the time used up by a director is because every minute of filming has a massive directly attributable dollar cost to the company. In normal employment, the company is going to spending that money on either yourself or your replacement, so there's not an obvious, immediate economic incentive in allowing you to do what you consider "real work" (building something) instead of allowing the manager to do what he considers "real work" (sitting around and talking about stuff).
- dragonwriter 11y agoThe problem with this argument is that it presumes that your manager agrees with the film director - programmer analogy and shares an understanding of film making that would reveal the practice to be bad in that context. There are good arguments (and, IIRC, even a bit of research) on why continuous blocks of time are much better for efficiency of programmers; and meetings for them should generally be minimized and, when necessary to have, coordinated to avoid breaking up work blocks as much as practical. But that particular analogy is close to the worst way to make the argument to most bosses.