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Arguably, time spent reading HN is a legitimate part of becoming/remaining a good developer. Certainly, spending time socializing with coworkers is a required p
by decasia 10y ago
Arguably, time spent reading HN is a legitimate part of becoming/remaining a good developer. Certainly, spending time socializing with coworkers is a required part of work, many places. Spending some amount of time unwinding at the office is arguably required for mental health and therefore a functional component of remaining a worker -- does that count as working?
"Working" is an ambiguous category, it seems to me. One definition of work (call it "productivist") says that we're only working when we're literally producing something valuable. A more organizational view might hold that "work" is whatever you're socially (often implicitly) required to do to keep your job (whether measurably productive or not). And a third more holistic definition would include stuff like exercise or professional development that are not always directly "required" by anyone, but that you might go crazy without doing...
- austenallred 10y agoI'll be honest; I don't think using HN is anything close to what I would consider "working." At best it's marginally optimized random browsing.
- rl3 10y agoWhile it isn't work, reading technical articles regularly on HN can be very beneficial. In fact, the first thing I tell aspiring developers is to start reading HN on a regular basis if they already aren't. It confers a sort of broad awareness of various stacks and ecosystems over time that's hard to obtain otherwise.
- jrs235 10y agoDepending on what articles one is reading, this activity could fall within "sharpening the ax" (which is also beneficial for the company).
- scorpioxy 10y agoAbsolutely and if keeping up with technology is not work then what it is "work"? Is it just typing out the code? What about when your IDE auto-completes your code? It's a little silly to think about it this way. I try to keep my distractions to a minimum level but I've often encountered comments and articles on HN that have been of great benefit to my work and my clients. Things like a service I've never heard of, a library being used in a way that I haven't seen before or even just personal experiences. Hell I even use HN to minimize distractions such as reading only the comments section about some new product Google/MS/Apple released(or is killing) just to get an idea of what's out there in the market and if it is of any use to me.
- decasia 10y agoYeah, learning the culture of your profession -- with a broad awareness of different ecosystems and things -- isn't "immediately productive," but it's a simple form of professional development. (And in my opinion, enlightened employers understand that decent professional development is a really important part of the work process.)
- jrs235 10y agoIt falls into the important but not urgent quadrant of Stephen Covey's Time Management Matrix.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ferentchak 10y agoAnecdote: I found AWS had a hosted Elastic Search that had just been released. This knowledge enabled the team I led to solve a problem that was challenging my team with what was relatively a small amount of work. There is no amount of heads down work that would of attained this amount of benefit. We were not thinking about the search problem much and the one of our engineers just kept spending more and more time trying to enhance our failing custom solution. Making sure you are informed about what other people are making is useful and is part of your job as an expert. Now if I can just find an application for the CRISPR enhanced crypto sea-monkeys that I learned about yesterday that should really help us out.
- Imagenuity 10y agoI've learned a tremendous amount from reading HN. Sure, there's lots of posts that are time wasters, but so much good information for a developer is concentrated in one place makes it valuable and useful.
- psyc 10y agoArguably, time spent reading HN is a legitimate part of becoming/remaining a good developer. Almost spit out my Coca-Cola brand carbonated soft drink. Thanks for the laugh!