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All programmers here know how hard it is to get work done when you need to focus and are in a disruptive environment. It's much harder to get work done when you

by maym86 8y ago

All programmers here know how hard it is to get work done when you need to focus and are in a disruptive environment. It's much harder to get work done when you're dealing with a lot of overhead.

JanisL 8y ago
Absolutely, given the huge decrease in capacity from disruptive environments it's just insanity that people create work spaces filled with distractions. When framed from the perspective of "hey do you want to have every employee in your company be one standard deviation less capable" the true costs become much more apparent.
weddpros 8y ago
This is my concern with the article: maybe the impairment doesn't necessarily depend on scarcity/money... Maybe it's more a matter of bandwidth, in which case blaming Poverty only sounds quite ideological. 1- Does the bandwidth problem go away when you fix poverty (costly but easy to measure)? 2- Does the problem go away when you lessen perceived stress instead? (teach meditation/auto-hypnosis and measure if it helps) 3- Solutions to this problem should have applications in the teaching world, when exam-stress can reduce bandwidth, yet we can't just make exams easier "It's much harder to get work done when you're dealing with a lot of overhead": sometimes the opposite is true, like when you decide to burry yourself with work to escape hardships... It's a matter of mind state, so learning to control it should help.
- JanisL 8y ago
  Anecdotally, reducing poverty has greatly improved the ability of me and some people I've known in similar economic situations to be productive as professional software developers. Being distracted by issues arising due to having no money has never been a benefit to productivity in my experience (and I'm specifically talking about the psychological side of things here, obviously if you lack the money to buy things that are productivity boosters poverty impact is much more tangible). Stress on the other hand has a different effect which is sometimes positive and sometimes negative. The way in which stress operates is fundamentally different. Specifically the notion of getting into a state of flow is very much about having the optimal amount of arousal/stress, too much leads to overwhelm and too little leads to boredom and disengagement. The issue with scarcity (of which poverty is a form) shows through even when you are working on something interesting because it's more of a background annoyance. Meditation definitely helps you feel better and widens the window in which you can get into those states of concentrated flow (because it increases your capacity to focus) but it's a bit orthogonal to the scarcity issues. Meditation greatly helps with stress levels and focus but not so much bandwidth. (I've found meditation only really helps bandwidth in the cases of pathological stress where the stress gets to the point where the brain starts to shut down but that's a different category of stress to day-to-day stress and perhaps is better described with a different wording)
- maym86 8y ago
  "Learning to control it" ("it" being the stress of poverty) just sounds like another overhead you are expecting people to deal with that people in a more stable situation don't have to worry about.
  - weddpros 8y ago
    Stress of poverty is only one form of stress, of which there are many: I'm almost 47, I've suffered poverty but also infidelity, a stroke, the loss of my dad and rejection from family. Maybe you think poverty is "easy to fix", with money... but you can choose to take control of all forms of stress instead, and get prepared for worse than poverty.
shagie 8y ago
As a developer, our job is making decisions (about code / requirements). This is directly related to decision fatigue ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue ) - the "not wanting to think about other things when you get home. If one has the resources to reduce the cognitive load of other decisions (eat out rather than have to do meal planning), well... that's the advantage of having a well paying job. The flip side is where problems occur. When someone is dealing with other REALLY IMPORTANT decisions (pay rent? pay food? pay utilities? medical bills? - pick two or three), making other decisions for a white collar job becomes harder to get and harder to keep. This then leads off into tangents of basic income, guaranteed housing, universal medical care, etc... All of those things reduce some of the difficulty of making those really important decisions.
- maym86 8y ago
  Exactly my point. Thanks for adding more detail.

by maym86 8y ago

All programmers here know how hard it is to get work done when you need to focus and are in a disruptive environment. It's much harder to get work done when you're dealing with a lot of overhead.

JanisL 8y ago

Absolutely, given the huge decrease in capacity from disruptive environments it's just insanity that people create work spaces filled with distractions. When framed from the perspective of "hey do you want to have every employee in your company be one standard deviation less capable" the true costs become much more apparent.

weddpros 8y ago

This is my concern with the article: maybe the impairment doesn't necessarily depend on scarcity/money... Maybe it's more a matter of bandwidth, in which case blaming Poverty only sounds quite ideological. 1- Does the bandwidth problem go away when you fix poverty (costly but easy to measure)? 2- Does the problem go away when you lessen perceived stress instead? (teach meditation/auto-hypnosis and measure if it helps) 3- Solutions to this problem should have applications in the teaching world, when exam-stress can reduce bandwidth, yet we can't just make exams easier "It's much harder to get work done when you're dealing with a lot of overhead": sometimes the opposite is true, like when you decide to burry yourself with work to escape hardships... It's a matter of mind state, so learning to control it should help.

JanisL 8y ago
Anecdotally, reducing poverty has greatly improved the ability of me and some people I've known in similar economic situations to be productive as professional software developers. Being distracted by issues arising due to having no money has never been a benefit to productivity in my experience (and I'm specifically talking about the psychological side of things here, obviously if you lack the money to buy things that are productivity boosters poverty impact is much more tangible). Stress on the other hand has a different effect which is sometimes positive and sometimes negative. The way in which stress operates is fundamentally different. Specifically the notion of getting into a state of flow is very much about having the optimal amount of arousal/stress, too much leads to overwhelm and too little leads to boredom and disengagement. The issue with scarcity (of which poverty is a form) shows through even when you are working on something interesting because it's more of a background annoyance. Meditation definitely helps you feel better and widens the window in which you can get into those states of concentrated flow (because it increases your capacity to focus) but it's a bit orthogonal to the scarcity issues. Meditation greatly helps with stress levels and focus but not so much bandwidth. (I've found meditation only really helps bandwidth in the cases of pathological stress where the stress gets to the point where the brain starts to shut down but that's a different category of stress to day-to-day stress and perhaps is better described with a different wording)
maym86 8y ago
"Learning to control it" ("it" being the stress of poverty) just sounds like another overhead you are expecting people to deal with that people in a more stable situation don't have to worry about.
- weddpros 8y ago
  Stress of poverty is only one form of stress, of which there are many: I'm almost 47, I've suffered poverty but also infidelity, a stroke, the loss of my dad and rejection from family. Maybe you think poverty is "easy to fix", with money... but you can choose to take control of all forms of stress instead, and get prepared for worse than poverty.

shagie 8y ago

As a developer, our job is making decisions (about code / requirements). This is directly related to decision fatigue ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue ) - the "not wanting to think about other things when you get home. If one has the resources to reduce the cognitive load of other decisions (eat out rather than have to do meal planning), well... that's the advantage of having a well paying job. The flip side is where problems occur. When someone is dealing with other REALLY IMPORTANT decisions (pay rent? pay food? pay utilities? medical bills? - pick two or three), making other decisions for a white collar job becomes harder to get and harder to keep. This then leads off into tangents of basic income, guaranteed housing, universal medical care, etc... All of those things reduce some of the difficulty of making those really important decisions.

maym86 8y ago
Exactly my point. Thanks for adding more detail.