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This isn't surprising, because devs have a tendency to focus on the hard bits of coding as being their work. Why not, right? It's probably the most satisfying t
by lordnacho 6y ago
This isn't surprising, because devs have a tendency to focus on the hard bits of coding as being their work. Why not, right? It's probably the most satisfying too, so we forget the bits where we document, explain to colleagues, organize, etc. Don't forget that a lot of "not working" such as browsing a certain orange-and-beige website actually IS work as well: you wouldn't be updated on what's going on in the tech world if you didn't read some new things regularly.
However consider that there's entire classes of people who never do anything as satisfying as coding during their day. All they do is communicate in some way: making powerpoints, schmoozing with customers over lunch, sitting in meetings to discuss what the business should do. Typically you'll never find one of those people saying they don't do much. In fact, many of them feel compelled to sit in the office - face time - to look busy. If you were to narrowly define their work like I've done with software devs, many people would end up with maybe a couple of hours a day, mainly reading some docs to decide what their business unit should do.
- ianai 6y agoYes, people should be more like lawyers. Bill for that time you spent in the shower thinking about your clients case. That reads sarcastic, but in today’s workplace you really need to know the legal framework you’re working within or you’ll probably be fleeced or worse. How lawyers charge actually is instructive.
- me_me_me 6y agoI am running out of fingers to count how many times i concluded/fixed a design or a problem while showering.
- jjk166 6y agoBut can I write off my shower as a home office tax deduction?
- jksmith 6y agoI wrote a whole sqlite wrapper while in my hot tub carrel. I call that time "meditubbing." I read a story somewhere a thousand years ago about Gustave Flaubert's work habits. As I recall, at a dinner party: Woman: "Was your day fruitful?" Flaubert: "Yes, very." Woman: "How many words did you write?" Flaubert: "None."
- kthejoker2 6y agoYou can find the same passage and line of thinking in every great author's memoir: small, consistent, disciplined, focused effort and writing, no matter what the result; buoyed by long bouts of thinking, living, experiencing, observing - to find the "peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet", as Flannery O'Connor put it. > “The time we have alone, the time we have in walking, the time we have in riding a bicycle, is the most important time for a writer. Escaping from the typewriter is part of the creative process. You have to give the subconscious time to think. Real thinking always occurs at the subconscious level.” - Ray Bradbury > "When the manuscript had lain in a pigeon hole two years I took it out one day and read the last chapter that I had written. It was then that I made the great discovery that when the tank runs dry you've only to leave it alone and it will fill up again in time, while you are asleep -- also while you are at work on other things and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebration is going on." - Mark Twain > ‘I didn’t stir out yesterday, but sat and thought all day; not writing a line; not so much as the cross of a t or the dot of an i. I imaged forth a good deal of Barnaby by keeping my mind steadily upon him; and am happy to say I have gone to work this morning in good twig, strong hope and cheerful spirits. Last night I was unutterably and impossible-to-form-an-idea-of-ably miserable.’ - Charles Dickens
- torstenvl 6y agoBilling time is the absolute worst thing about types of legal practice you're talking about, and absolutely nobody should adopt anything about that system. Economic pressures eventually force granularity of a tenth of an hour. There are no circumstances under which I would ever willingly return to anxiety over whether a bathroom break might take longer than three minutes.
- darkerside 6y agoLawyers don't live in anxiety of that. They accept that is part of work and find ways to bill for it.
- tiahura 6y agoTry billing 2000 hours a year in .1 increments. It’s not so much the bathroom breaks that lead to anxiety, it’s things like: kids’ soccer games, doctor’s appointments, and anniversaries.
- jjk166 6y agoYou don't need to anticipate how long those things will take, you bill after the fact. Yeah if you don't keep good records of your schedule and just try to guess what you were doing at 2:39 last tuesday it might be stressful, but that's a problem with the record keeping, not the billing.
- darkerside 6y agoThis is a much better argument than bathroom breaks. I do think it still comes down to an ability to self manage, which is going to vary widely by individual.
- username90 6y agoLawyer job is to argue, they don't live in anxiety over it since they know they can handle any argument that can occur.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- robjan 6y agoI was once forced to do that by a client and the result was having to bill additional time for logging and investigating what everyone on the team was doing. It probably added an additional 10% to the billed hours for engagement management.
- Demonsult 6y agoI had a lawyers suggest I drive him to court. This turned out to be a trick so he could "justify" billing me for the commute time. It was like Uber, except the driver pays the passenger $500.
- jksmith 6y agoA buddy of mine just leaned out that whole issue and just charges by the day.
- paulcole 6y ago> that there's entire classes of people who never do anything as satisfying as coding during their day. All they do is communicate in some way: making powerpoints, schmoozing with customers over lunch, sitting in meetings to discuss what the business should do As someone who finds coding completely unsatisfying and who instead chose to have a career sitting in meetings to discuss what the business should do, I find this pretty funny. I can’t imagine anything being as satisfying as communicating well with another person.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoWhen people say they "aren't working" they are talking about chitchat and watching YouTube, not doing the engineering part of software engineering.
- waheoo 6y agoThis is a very subjective claim to make. I regularly catch myself thinking and telling my wife I've had a very unproductive day and didn't work much when I spent the majority of it working through internal memos, email, and otherwise just getting caught up on the company happenings. It isn't really work. It's squarely in the bullshit side of "bullshit jobs". I don't really miss label other things like documentation, research, testing or project spiking but those too very regularly get forgotten and don't feel significant to bullet point in my daily standup.
- arcturus17 6y ago> never do anything as satisfying as coding What a narrow world view. There are “schmoozers” who are completely satisfied and coders who dread their work lives... There are also schmoozers who create value beyond anything many single coders could ever dream of: by raising capital, creating multimillion sales, persuading and inspiring others, etc. And I say this as someone who switched from a management job to designing and coding because I personally find it much more fulfilling.
- LockAndLol 6y agoYou're taking one single phrase out of context and getting bent out of shape. Just assume the people you're writing to aren't all idiots. If you really think OP meant what you thought, ask them.
- arcturus17 6y agoThey completely - and I mean completely - changed the comment from what I read this morning. The original quote or calling non-coders “schmoozers” (their words, not mine), are in fact, no longer there as far as I can see. It wasn’t taken out of context, there was not that much nuance to the sentence I quoted.
- LockAndLol 6y agoAh, I see. I had completely forgotten editing comments was possible. Apologies.