9 ms·

Profession: Software "Engineer" [06:15] First alarm goes off; [06:45] Finally wake up, get out of bed, shower, shave, make espresso for me and the wife [07:1

• 9to5isdead 9y ago
  Find remote work. You can work in solitude (as is natural) and collaborate asynchronously (as it should be). Made the switch a year ago after moving from web developer to tech lead and having all the issues you mentioned. Now I'm just writing code again. Best decision ever.
  • TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Not OP but in a similar situation. Believe me, I'm trying to. Unfortunately companies in my area are not too happy about remote work, and I don't feel ready yet to risk going full freelance (though I'm actively working on changing that).
    • mcjiggerlog 9y ago
      But if it's remote work it doesn't need to be in your area (as long as they are willing to employ you, as opposed to contracting).
      • TeMPOraL 9y ago
        This week I'm trying to negotiate a remote work policy with my employer. Keep your fingers crossed :). The thing is, I actually like my work, and like my company. But due to mostly family reasons, I'd like it much more if I could spend at least 3 days / week out of the office. Long-term, I'll either relocate with my SO back to a major city, or I'll go freelance.
• TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Profession: software "engineer" too. [08:00] First alarm goes off; [10:00] I'm starting to wake up [11:00] Some quick HN checking [12:00] Ok, off to office. [13:00] At the office; talking with customer if needed, otherwise desperately trying to get some work done amidst noise and distractions, including but not limited to people occasionally playing board games for a break. [18:00] All my cow-orkers in the room have finally left for the day. Time to get some actual work done. [21:00] Ok, time to head home. [22:00] Let's eat something quickly and go to sleep. [02:00] That side project is _way_ too interesting; I guess I'll be waking up at 10:00 tomorrow again... So no help from me. The other day, one of my cow-orkers asked me, how can I bear working late hours - it must be very lonely. I desperately tried not to answer that with "that's precisely the point".
  • Etheryte 9y ago
    Your work schedule speaks to mine on a spiritual level. I can't imagine working anywhere where strict hours (9-5 or similar) are required.
    • thatwebdude 9y ago
      It's not necessarily strict; just most convenient.
      • mrkgnao 9y ago
        "Non-strict, not lazy"
    • TeMPOraL 9y ago
      It's mostly hard for me because of... some weird mix of biology and psychology, I guess. Since the end of highschool, I'm incapable of maintaining a "morning person" lifestyle for longer than half a week, full week at best. Nevertheless, I do appreciate the benefits of having some time alone in the office, when I can focus.
      • lotyrin 9y ago
• strictnein 9y ago
  > [08:00] ... work on something I procrastinated on the previous day so that I can have a good standup report lol, me too, I'm afraid to admit. Every dang day.
  • squegles 9y ago
    I want to assume many of us are like this.
  • _ao789 9y ago
    I also read this and though to myself "I didn't know other people do that too" :)
  • TeMPOraL 9y ago
    My equivalent of that, when I have a bad day and/or was working primarily on conceptual stuff, is to find some low-hanging refactoring fruit (like a typo a cow-orker made in a class name) that I can do in 2 minutes and that will touch several files, so there's some movement from me on source control. I tend to notice and note down such "high-noise/low-importance" quick fixes, so that the next time I spend few days grappling with huge architectural issues, I don't hear "you didn't commit anything in the past few days, what's wrong".
    • webvictim 9y ago
      Commits are a really terrible metric when it comes to measuring productivity for this exact reason.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
• radoslawc 9y ago
  Oh I know the feeling. I'll just add to this: - Can I work from home? - No - Why? - Because working from home you might be not as efficient as from office
  • Joeri 9y ago
    I once got my boss to admit that they didn't trust people to do actual work from home, and that's why they didn't allow it. It was oddly satisfying. These days I can work from home when I want, but I don't because it stresses me out not to have a clear separation between home and work.
    • alkonaut 9y ago
      > These days I can work from home when I want, but I don't because it stresses me out not to have a clear separation between home and work. It's really hard. Takes some practice and discipline. One good way is to literally switch everything off (computers phones) at the end of the day. Stops you from "just answering that email" etc. Another good one is leaving the house (drop off kids, buy breakfast coffee, whatever) end then when you are back home you are "at work". Then repeat when leaving work.
• erikb 9y ago
  Many people complain about the usual work chaos. I'm also an engineer and I don't get it. For me, having other people come and ask questions is not distraction but an opportunity to help, learn to know their point of view, learn new things. Meetings are a way to influence the direction of the company however small my influence may be. Other people talking can really distract if it's heavily on topic, but usually also enables a little smalltalk 2-3 times each hour, which provides a lot of the otherwise missing social life between Monday Morning and Friday Afternoon. Even the actual development can happen together with one or two other guys, which increases the speed (since what's hard for me is usually easy for one of the colleagues and vice versa) and makes the solutions smarter (you can't just think off something, you need to be able to argue it as well). In my eyes it's really addicting, and I usually get this after-disco/cinema low when the amount of people in office starts to slow down. What's the actual "engineering work" you are trying to do without interacting with people all the time? Edit: I think most answers can be summarized as "When I'm left alone I get into the flow mode, and that's enjoyable". The same way I mostly get it when working together with a colleague on a problem. Both ways may not always be the most productive, but due to producing a good feeling we prefer these. I see, thanks for showing your points of view.
  • nyrulez 9y ago
    Hmm. How about actually building stuff? For most software engineers, thats a very important part of their job/life/happiness. That requires long focus and flow. And in my personal opinion has a great sense of fulfillment attached to it compared to lot of scattered micro impacts. Ultimately you need to learn to balance both otherwise it gets very frustrating​.
    • grogenaut 9y ago
      Do you have to personally write every single line of code or are you happy when the whole team builds the code?
      • dasmoth 9y ago
        Not the previous poster, but I'd argue that being able to point to something meaningful (doesn't have to be the whole system, but a coherent component) and say "I made that" brings satisfaction that's hard to beat. This seems tricky to reconcile with the "everything is done by a team" model that's currently in vogue.
• lr4444lr 9y ago
  Profession: Another Software "Engineer" [05:00 - 06:00] Wake up with the sun, and work in bed on side projects on personal laptop; [06:00] Get myself together, spend the only waking time I have with my infant child during the week. [06:30] Gym [07:00] Commute to work [08:10] arrive at desk, have breakfast at desk while picking up on momentum from yesterday, or fixing what problem I was too mind-numbed to see through the afternoon before [8:30 - 9:30] Everyone else streams in. Catch up on non-tech business developments in informal chat. ['til 6:30] Work, work, work + mental breaks on HN. Find 20 minutes for lunch. Tea somewhere around 4:00 - 5:30 PM. Occasionally impromptu meeting with my manager for rubber ducking, feature planning, or architecture question. Can't complain. Tiny start-ups are great when the personalities fit.
  • taurath 9y ago
    You may complain a lot later about not seeing your child grow up for more than 30 minutes a day, but I'm sure you have probably considered that :)
    • lr4444lr 9y ago
      Believe me, I've considered it. For now, I'm content to take over parenting for a good chunk of the weekend, which gives the working mama a break and chance to prep for the next week. I'm banking on a big enough exit imminent before the baby hits 4 years old so that I never have to work again if I don't want to. Failing that rough time frame, it's off to a big firm or government where hours are tightly defined. As you're alluding to, time is too precious a resource to squander. I joined this last company not long ago and I'm very enthusiastic about it, but this is the last start-up I can see myself doing. Unless someone is independently wealthy, I don't see how the commitment it takes is an acceptable sacrifice for a full and satisfying life once kids come into the picture.
  • mikejmoffitt 9y ago
    >[06:30] Gym >[07:00] Commute to work Serious question: How does this work? Do you work out for exactly 30 minutes and jump straight on transport / in the car / etc? 20 minutes plus a quick shower? Is there no time factored in for cleaning yourself up after working out, to be presentable at work?
• artursapek 9y ago
  Get a remote gig ;)
• NoGravitas 9y ago
  Shift it an hour earlier, and that is exactly my day. Except it is public sector, so no one is forced to pretend that it is fun.
• ChuckMcM 9y ago
  When I left NetApp (single office) and joined Google (quad cube) it was quite a shock and very disorienting. However, since it was the way Google wanted to do things I practiced non-listening, which is to say keeping my focus on my screen and project and ignoring my ear inputs. Oddly the best tool for practicing was 'World of Warcraft' as it provided a continual level of required attention so it was easier to practice not listening. It took a couple of months but I got to the point where I could sit in my cube, work on my code and three office mates could be having a conversation around me without distracting me. The interesting side effect is that people actually expect me to be listening sometimes when I'm not. So they will say something, expect a response, and not get it and it will surprise (and sometimes annoy) them. I've been unable to 'selectively' listen to avoid that, its either all on (and distracting) or all off (and not distracting).
  • soneca 9y ago
    Selective hearing was always Superman's superpower that I envied the most. He could hear just exactly when Lois Lane would cry for help, even if not expecting. All else he could just ignore
  • abledon 9y ago
    wait... did Google let you play WoW at work to practice this new arrangement?
    • ChuckMcM 9y ago
      :-) At the time Google was pretty reasonable about people doing what ever it took to become more productive. And it wasn't exactly 'hard core' playing, it was simply a tool that provided the necessary engagement motivation. Not unlike processing all of the works of Shakespeare into bags of words and n-gram vectors and correlation maps to get a handle on how you can slice and dice documents for search. Nobody expected the time spent slicing and dicing Shakespeare would generate useful work product, but it did help train you so that you could generate useful work product. And like the Shakespeare exercises, once the benefit was realized you moved on.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• whalesalad 9y ago
  Same. The bit about headphones kills me. I love being in the office until the cacophony of everyone else begins and the noise is maddening. Sometimes I don't want to need to listen to music to be uninterrupted. I now work from home 2-3+ days per week, even though I live about 20 minutes from HQ.
• bardonadam 9y ago
  SW Engineer as well. Office can get noisy quite quickly, so I wouldn't be able to focus without headphones and Spotify. If music distracts you(vocals are the main suspect), try some ambient noises, or movie soundtracks(Hans Zimmer, John Williams). Also a comfortable pair of headphones is preferable.
  • cerberusss 9y ago
    Earplugs are great.
• Jeremy1026 9y ago
  Sounds like you work at my old job. It's amazing how much some companies can talk about how cool they are. No one gives a fuck how many times you can say you are cool, put up or shut up.
• fazkan 9y ago
  I had the same problem with distraction. At the moment I am writing this, I have just finished working and its 4am, will leave office at 4:30. will crash on my bed around 5am. tough I am reading the art of learning, and I have been trying to train myself to work in a distracting environment. Because you can never control your external factors.
  • whooaaa 9y ago
    there are two counter points in that book he makes though: 1. the best players control the game by directing it towards their strengths 2. take your own playing style into consideration you can write software any where you can take your cpu, pixel grid and network thing me bob