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Axiom: Boring work can never compete with Hacker News. Axiom: Hacker News can never compete with interesting work. Theorem: The interestingness of my work is
by edw519 15y ago
Axiom: Boring work can never compete with Hacker News.
Axiom: Hacker News can never compete with interesting work.
Theorem: The interestingness of my work is inversely related to my Hacker News participation.
Supporting data: Today I'm regression testing. I'll be here all day, folks.
Idea: Employers, monitor your logs for Hacker News. Occasional spikes probably indicate boring, but necessary tasks. Chronic use probably means your devs are bored. Bored devs probably means you better take a deep hard look at everything else.
- maratd 15y ago> Supporting data: Today I'm regression testing. I'll be here all day, folks. There's an interesting gem here. No job is 100% excitement, all the time. More to the point, that kind of a job would burn you out. The key is having a proper ratio.
- MaurizioPz 15y agoKind of like with games. You need to balance challenge and routine in your work. Otherwise you will be bored or stressed
- alexgartrell 15y agoHacker news participation can also indicate compilation, as it does for me right now.
- PaulHoule 15y agoCompilation is a form of boredom ;-)
- wpietri 15y agoNo shit. I would much rather spend $10k in hardware than have a developer bored while waiting for something to finish. Part of the problem, though, is tools. A lot of things are built for resource use minimization. That made sense 20 years ago, but now I have 8 GB of RAM and 4 fast cores on my desktop, and most of that capacity just sits idle. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm typing and the compiler isn't already running then it's missing an opportunity.
- Lewisham 15y agoI'm not sure if you're joking or not, but this is entirely true. I'm sat here watching a data mining job. It's wasted time, largely brought on because the job doesn't have unit tests, so I have no confidence it'll actually complete correctly, so I need to watch the log and see what its doing. This not a good use of my time, and I hate seeing that console, and I feel bad for being on HN when I could be productive.
- paulbaumgart 15y ago./data_mining_job && growlnotify -m "Success!" || growlnotify -m "Failure :-(" (season with while, read and grep to taste)
- Lewisham 15y agoHah, if only it was so simple! The integrity of the job is the problem. It's been coded to failover problems (as the original data integrity its mining from isn't good), so it will happily do something stupid for hours. That's why I have to watch it, and make sure its not doing something stupid. Unit tests would ensure stupidity was not a possibility, and regressions could be tracked. Too late for that, unfortunately. So I watch.
- paulbaumgart 15y agoWhoops. Too late to edit, but a correction: growlnotify -m "Success! " (the space tells bash to treat the exclamation point as text)
- bartl 15y agohttp://xkcd.com/303/ http://xkcd.com/303/ ?
- keeran 15y agoOr a long-running test/spec suite :)
- lars512 15y agoThat's one of the legitimate reasons to switch to an interpreted language, or else Go. Unless you value your compilation off-time :)
- andrewcooke 15y ago(1) joking aside, please don't monitor logs like this. instead, treat your employees like real human beings and understand what they feel. not only is it more efficient than trying to reduce complex humans to a few "metrics", but it will allow you to detect more than just "boredom". (2) if you're thinking "how can they be bored when everything is so busy and there's so much to do?" maybe you are one of those over-managing bosses that doesn't delegate enough and, surprise, ends up running around being busy while everyone else is bored and lacking responsibilities. [i considered posting this anon, but it's not aimed at my current employers and, if you know me, you'd know i'd have said it to their face if it were...]
- ora600 15y ago(2) It is very easy to be super busy and bored. Having lots of boring work does not magically add up to become interesting all of the sudden.
- Lewisham 15y agoI worked for a 30 person database consultancy for my first job out of uni. Their Intranet home page contained a large and prominent link to "Internet access by user", which listed the amount of bandwidth being consumed by each person through their HTTP proxy. I have no idea who instituted that policy, but I instantly disliked the company . You could download large binaries for only so long to cover your tracks, so I just ended up running a constant SSH session to a Lynx browser, so casual passersby would think I was working. I quit about 6 months later for many other very good reasons, boredom being a huge one. A couple of months earlier I had asked if I could transfer to a new role (from developer to admin), which was flatly denied. When I announced I was leaving, one of the three senior management came up to me and said that in the last management meeting he had said I was bored and that they needed to find something more for me to do. Apparently he was shouted down (metaphorically). The last I heard of the company was that as a result of my departure, they would no longer hire graduates with A grades. They would look for B or C grades from now on. I can't imagine a worse lesson to learn, but there you go.
- cema 15y ago
- mechanical_fish 15y agoRands covers this, more generally, when he talks about "changes in routine". What you're looking for isn't the absolute value of, e.g., HN participation, it's the first or second derivative.
- gvb 15y agoI know my rate of karma increase decreased substantially when I quit my previous job and started working for a small company (a startup, for a loose definition of "startup"). I don't know if historical karma values are readily available, it would be interesting to plot the rate of change over time.
- MattBearman 15y agoI can vouch for this, as boredom at my job has gone up, so has my HN usage, I'm probably over an hour a day right now. I'll be handing in my notice as soon as possible.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Sukotto 15y agoIt works the other way too. According to rescuetime, I've been spending a LOT of time lately on HN and links to articles. It kind of crept up on me and I didn't realize just how bored I've been at work lately. Definitely time to figure out why and how best to return to a happy-nonbored state. (Quitting isn't really a viable option right now)
- keithnoizu 15y agoQuitting no, switching is always an option though. I.e put feelers out, silently pick up a second more interesting offer and give notice. If you have a large amount waiting to vest you may be able to get a match from another employer.
- matwood 15y agoMy personal axiom: Boring/Uninteresing work leads to me working more on my personal/startup projects. Thus, I should be looking for a job that has nothing but boring work. :)
- civilian 15y agoWhile I was learning how to code (and taking night classes) I worked data entry. Our machines were ubuntu, so they already had python on 'em. In the last few months there, I was spending ~20% of my work time coding. :D Now my job title actually says "developer" and I'm kept busy. But I kind of miss all the sandbox time I had. I knocked out so many projecteuler.net problems.
- ggchappell 15y ago> Axiom: Boring work can never compete with Hacker News. > Axiom: Hacker News can never compete with interesting work. I disagree[1] with your second axiom. HN, in limited quantities[2], counts as professional development, I would say. That means that limited HN usage is necessary, which certainly helps it "compete". If I were interviewing someone for a programming job, and I learned that they never read HN or SO or Proggit or /. or anything like that, then I would have some serious reservations about them. ----------------- [1] Okay, being a mathematician, I know that an axiom simply is; one doesn't agree or disagree with it. But this does mean that your theorem has limited applications. [2] HN in large quantities, on the other hand ....
- dennisgorelik 15y agoInteresting work counts as professional development too. So there is no contradiction here. If work is boring then HN reading is the must to compensate in professional development.
- nostrademons 15y agoInteresting work will teach you far more than HN will. It's very easy to overestimate the amount of professional development you get from Internet websites, because at the end of a session, you can point to an article and say "I learned that". However, at the end of a project, you will very rarely be able to point to something and say "I learned that", but you will have unconsciously absorbed so many problem-solving techniques that you're miles ahead of the guys who sat and read a book the whole time. I say this as someone who sat on the Internet and read websites about programming all through college. Yes, it was useful - but nowhere near as useful as the time I spent actually programming.
- ggchappell 15y agoInteresting work gets you in-depth knowledge of whatever you need for that specific job. Reading widely (e.g., HN, in small doses, and taken seriously) gets you breadth. I think we need both.
- mahmud 15y agoFuck Hacker News. Yours truly, CiteSeer & Google Scholar
- metaprinter 15y agocurrently reading this bored off my ass on my phone. my development computer is being used to give a presentation! i'm outta here in 2 weeks folks.