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I think a lot of this comes down to what you want in life. In my experience, if you’re a reasonably intelligent and experienced software engineer, and make som
by trevyn 9y ago
I think a lot of this comes down to what you want in life.
In my experience, if you’re a reasonably intelligent and experienced software engineer, and make some smart choices about where to focus your effort, you don’t need to put in much of that effort to live what most people would consider an enviable life. So you do that, become envied, get the validation, and feel generally pretty good about yourself.
But there is this nagging sensation that you could do more.
And it’s true, and that’s what this article talks about.
And underlying that, I think it’s important to look at the tradeoffs, and make a conscious decision about your life goals. As awesome as Carmack is, I’ll bet not many have sat down and thought about what it would be like to be Carmack and not themselves.
Of course, the magic is figuring out how to get as many of the benefits with as few of the drawbacks.
- nouveaux 9y agoTo me, the article is more about the delusion of how productive some people think they are. It's one thing to know that you really put out 2-3 hours of good code and be satisfied with it. It's another to think I've worked 10 hours a day while being distracted by Slack and surfing the web. The best take away for me is to have a good measure of productivity and I think 'pausing the CD is a great idea.'
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- hinkley 9y agoThere’s another delusion around spending 20 hours on the wrong code and declaring success. You were efficient but not effective.
- slededit 9y agoIts been an interesting change over the last decade. Programmer oriented forums used to be all about becoming a super coder. Now inevitably 50% of the time there will be a comment saying, "You know you really could get away with caring less". I suppose that's true - but then why even read the article.
- prepend 9y agoI fear that there’s some secret forum where are all the supercoders live and I’ve been left behind because I’m too dumb. 20 years ago it was all people trying to maximize. Now it’s about people wanting work life balance and such. My alternate theory is that pretty much only really dedicated developers were in web forums in the 90s so it was a lot of self selecting. Now the industry is much larger and the Internet is the default and everyone is online.
- marcosdumay 9y agoThe industry got older. There was a massive growth on at the late 80's and earlier 90's, but although the number of people on IT kept growing, it is much slower now.
- trevyn 9y agoWe’re all secretly ambitious, but get beat down by being assigned to building CRUD apps. :-)
- hacker_9 9y agoYeah it's all trade offs, the OP mentions he works until 8pm at the end of the article; I wonder what social life that leaves for after work exactly? Also if he doesn't get his work done, he skips his fitness (ju jitsu) training and works instead? Does he think this is actually a healthy attitude?
- Unkechaug 9y agoFor someone in search of the almighty self imposed productivity metric, in sure it seems healthy. But for the rest of us, it's stupid.
- ahtu123 9y agoI agree and working at a place like id Software is definitely not the place to get complacent. Lots of big enterprise companies are totally fine with that type of work though and you can easily get through your whole career without ever working super hard - or maybe you work hard when you start, get kinda burned out and then don't anymore.