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One of my manager once told me: Sometimes you are unproductive all week and then you push out two weeks of work in a day. It's not always this extreme, but I w

• AndrewDavis 8y ago
  +1 Especially in a discipline that requires solving new problems. One can appear unproductive, because it is hard to get a metric on thinking about a problem. It might take a few days of writing junk then deleting it, no commits coming for review, whiteboarding the problem, slowly learning best how to solve it. Then a week later light bulb comes on and you can solve it. Code then gets written at high speed. And your manager thinks you're lazy, but worth keeping you around because when you work it's fantastic. But really, you've been working all along. That writing of code was only possible because of the time it was took to think about a problem.
• mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Uggh, reminds me of daily “standups” where I have to make yesterday’s work sound important even though half of the days are a firefighting crapshoot/standstill.
  • mcv 8y ago
    If it's a firefighting crapshoot/standstill, then that's what you say at the standup. That's exactly what it's for; not to justify how you spent your time, but to share problems and delays.
    • mixmastamyk 8y ago
      Yes, but it has to be presented in a manner to avoid blame, which is exhausting over the long haul.