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Software development isn't a matter of sitting down and generating a fixed amount of code per hour. The rate of writing code is hugely variable. It's not unusua

Software development isn't a matter of sitting down and generating a fixed amount of code per hour. The rate of writing code is hugely variable. It's not unusual for most of my "productive" (as in typing actual code) time to be concentrated in a few particular days in a month. The time not spent typing (or being in meetings, doing admin, etc) isn't actually "unproductive" though. It's mostly spent solving problems, and a lot of that effort happens below the level of consciousness. A lot of it actually happens during sleep. It's effort, though, and it costs. You can't do an infinite amount of it in infinitesimal time. I suggest 2 tests to see if you're lazy or dumb: 1. Try to be more productive by sheer effort of will. Just say to yourself "this month I will write more code than usual" and set to it with a positive attitude. If you succeed you were being lazy and now you know how to not be lazy. If, as is more likely from what you've said, you fail, then you're not lazy. You're working at your maximum capacity but you have a poor understanding of what constitutes "work" in the job you do. 2. If, by the above test, you are not lazy, then look at how well you do relative to your peers. If you're holding your own (as you say you are), you're not dumb either.

soneca 5y ago
Well, they said they don’t do anything some days and bullshit their way to the next standup. It is clear to me where they stand at.
- jjav 5y ago
  > Well, they said they don’t do anything some days and bullshit their way to the next standup. It is clear to me where they stand at. But it's the agile standups that force the bullshitting. If you spent a day background thinking of best ways to achieve the goal while resting in your backyard hammock, there's no way you can say that out loud at the standup. So you're forced to come up with some random bullshit to fill your standup minutes. That's why daily status reports are so incredibly toxic in any creative or intellectual field. Progress doesn't happen in neat daily chunks like that.
  - soneca 5y ago
    > ” If you spent a day background thinking of best ways to achieve the goal while resting in your backyard hammock” There is absolutely no part of OP that warrants this charitable interpretation. My interpretation is that they just spent the day playing video game or something like that. You are reading things that are not there
    - ninjanomnom 5y ago
      Playing video games for many people is exactly as relaxing as hanging out in a hammock, with all the same background processing. I see no difference here between the hammock and video games here, it just depends on the person.
      - Twisol 5y ago
        For me, there have been many times when I've been playing Rocket League in almost a fugue state, where I'm only half paying attention to the game. (Like how you can drive for a while in your car in a half-daydream, and snap back to reality and wonder how you missed so many miles going by without getting in an accident. If you've never experienced it, yes, it's a thing; no, it's not epilepsy.) I tend to make a lot of progress just organizing my thoughts during those times; it's like the act of doing something else distracts the part of my brain that would get in the way of the processing I needed to do otherwise. Strangely, I also tend to play Rocket League pretty well, even though I'm not fully focusing. Again, probably something about just doing vs. thinking about how to do. I don't switch off from work very well, though, so this invariably happens when I should be enjoying my personal time but I'm still thinking about work. The exact opposite situation from the OP's.
        loup-vaillant 5y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis
      - azinman2 5y ago
- blitz_skull 5y ago
  Which is where? If they deliver X, and the expectation is X; OP may call it "bullshitting" but his point is that he's delivered expectations and now he's coasting which is totally fine. He delivered on expectations.
  - soneca 5y ago
    > ” If they deliver X” What make you think they deliver? Certainly not the OP. I think everyone is reading OP as an “anti-agile champion”, a “hero against meaningless jobs”, but the way I read it they are just a lazy person lying their way around to trick companies into paying them for work that they are not doing. At all. Not even willing or trying to do. Just lying to people.
    - blitz_skull 5y ago
      All I can speak from is observation and experience. And in both, I have never worked under a manager so stupid that they can’t spot laziness. To be honest, if you’re a manager who can’t spot incompetence or laziness, then you deserve every bit of it. Same with upper management who hires managers who can’t spot incompetence. It’s really not hard at all. I don’t get why OP is the bad guy when he literally meets ALL expectations per their manager’s own words.
- mmsimanga 5y ago
  Maybe the problem is the need to have feedback at the stand up. This assumes writing code is linear and is something that can be routinely managed through a stand up.
mrozbarry 5y ago
I think this 2-question test is very accurate. To add to this, even if for a time, you can increase your productivity, sometimes that's not sustainable. There's nothing wrong with having ebbs and flows. On days when you have a larger workload of smaller tasks, you may find yourself to be incredibly productive, and days when you have smaller workloads, or larger tasks, and you may be less productive. The thing is, if your boss is happy with your pace and work, then why be worried? It is literally your boss's job to notice if you aren't pulling your weight, and to ensure you are compensated fairly for your work. The work-place hierarchy (hopefully, and usually) is set up so you don't have to govern whether you are working at the proper pace, that is the problem of your superiors, it's only up to you to accomplish the tasks you are given, or give advice about those tasks if they are wrong.
- shinryuu 5y ago
  It's certainly not your boss's job to ensure that you are compensated fairly.
  - icedchai 5y ago
    Often the opposite. They get kudos for keeping costs down.
  - mrozbarry 5y ago
    Perhaps I worded that a little badly. They are responsible for making sure you are getting paid, or if you get fired.
khazhoux 5y ago
> Software development isn't a matter of sitting down and generating a fixed amount of code per hour. The rate of writing code is hugely variable... The time not spent typing (or being in meetings, doing admin, etc) isn't actually "unproductive" though. All true statements, but that's not what we're talking about. OP recognizes that he works 5-10 hours a week, and effectively blows the rest of the day off. Reminds me a bit of an engineer who reported to me a few years ago. He would describe every week in our 1:1s and during team meetings how he was solving this tough thread-synchronization problem. Because we trusted each other, we trusted that the problem was difficult. Then when he finally submitted his code, it was a single line. A single trivial line (as in, read the python `multiprocessing` docs for 5 minutes and the solution is right there). OK... sometimes it can take a long time to find that one-line fix, I get it. But then I looked into his commit history, and it turns out he was averaging a few lines of code a week -- on a good week, and sometimes even zero. When I confronted him, he said "You can't measure my productivity by lines of code!!!" OK, sure, but how far am I supposed to excuse an engineer who has committed 100 lines of code in 10 months? What a statistical oddity, that every single task he took on turned out to be a single-line-fix dragon!
- omnicognate 5y ago
  I don't disagree, but I never said there was no such thing as slackers or that OP definitely isn't one. I provided a test to tell if they really are one or not. The point I'm making is that some people in our profession think they are slacking when they're not, for the reasons I described. OP's description doesn't convince me that they necessarily are. In particular the comment at the end about having spent the years prior to the pandemic "pretending" to themselves that they were working hard sounds to me like somebody who's never really understood their own mental processes and has encountered a different perspective by doing the job in a different environment. I might be wrong, but that sounds more likely to me than that they have been getting away with minimal contributions throughout what they describe as a 20 year career. Your report didn't get away with it - the evidence is always there in the commit history, and the 2-5 year job length OP mentions is, contrary to their assessment, plenty of time to judge a developer's productivity. Another hint is the fact that this person is seriously proposing the idea that everybody else is slacking off and lying too. This indicates that they don't think their actual output is less than other developers'. As I say, I may be wrong. I don't know this developer - these are just some thoughts based on what they've posted. Unlike some here I'm not assuming I know the truth.
dragon96 5y ago
For me, I think I could tell myself to be more productive for 1 week and succeed at it, but I'd feel a lot more stressed or cynical about work as a result. I feel I'ma lazy person because I know I'm not doing what I could when I try my best, but I also feel wellbeing and health is more important in the long run.
throwaway254370 5y ago
I see myself very much like the person in the original question. For me, I try to do put in sheer effort on a regular basis. It is just that more day than not, I just can't bring myself to do it. I end up spending more time berating myself for not working, slacking off, writing this answer on HN, etc, than actually working. The sad (or perhaps enlightening?) thing is that it has always been like this. Since school, I would always do work at the last possible second. The only save is that I actually do a good job at the end, so it goes unnoticed. But the process is excruciating, and looking back at week after week of something like 5-10 hours per week is frustrating. Like the original question, I also "lie" in standups. I get why people say it is unethical, but I can't bring myself to saying I wasted the whole day yesterday on reddit.
- throwaway934876 5y ago
  Same here, I really recognize this. There are times I really peak. Most times I really don't do much. I don't lie in startups really, maybe I'll say I'm working on something when I just opened a doc and glanced at it. Which is lying, ok... But I do often finished the work in time, but just in very intense sprints. I recognize a lot in this thread.

soneca 5y ago

Well, they said they don’t do anything some days and bullshit their way to the next standup. It is clear to me where they stand at.

jjav 5y ago
> Well, they said they don’t do anything some days and bullshit their way to the next standup. It is clear to me where they stand at. But it's the agile standups that force the bullshitting. If you spent a day background thinking of best ways to achieve the goal while resting in your backyard hammock, there's no way you can say that out loud at the standup. So you're forced to come up with some random bullshit to fill your standup minutes. That's why daily status reports are so incredibly toxic in any creative or intellectual field. Progress doesn't happen in neat daily chunks like that.
- soneca 5y ago
  > ” If you spent a day background thinking of best ways to achieve the goal while resting in your backyard hammock” There is absolutely no part of OP that warrants this charitable interpretation. My interpretation is that they just spent the day playing video game or something like that. You are reading things that are not there
  - ninjanomnom 5y ago
    Playing video games for many people is exactly as relaxing as hanging out in a hammock, with all the same background processing. I see no difference here between the hammock and video games here, it just depends on the person.
    - Twisol 5y ago
      For me, there have been many times when I've been playing Rocket League in almost a fugue state, where I'm only half paying attention to the game. (Like how you can drive for a while in your car in a half-daydream, and snap back to reality and wonder how you missed so many miles going by without getting in an accident. If you've never experienced it, yes, it's a thing; no, it's not epilepsy.) I tend to make a lot of progress just organizing my thoughts during those times; it's like the act of doing something else distracts the part of my brain that would get in the way of the processing I needed to do otherwise. Strangely, I also tend to play Rocket League pretty well, even though I'm not fully focusing. Again, probably something about just doing vs. thinking about how to do. I don't switch off from work very well, though, so this invariably happens when I should be enjoying my personal time but I'm still thinking about work. The exact opposite situation from the OP's.
      - loup-vaillant 5y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis
    - azinman2 5y ago
blitz_skull 5y ago
Which is where? If they deliver X, and the expectation is X; OP may call it "bullshitting" but his point is that he's delivered expectations and now he's coasting which is totally fine. He delivered on expectations.
- soneca 5y ago
  > ” If they deliver X” What make you think they deliver? Certainly not the OP. I think everyone is reading OP as an “anti-agile champion”, a “hero against meaningless jobs”, but the way I read it they are just a lazy person lying their way around to trick companies into paying them for work that they are not doing. At all. Not even willing or trying to do. Just lying to people.
  - blitz_skull 5y ago
    All I can speak from is observation and experience. And in both, I have never worked under a manager so stupid that they can’t spot laziness. To be honest, if you’re a manager who can’t spot incompetence or laziness, then you deserve every bit of it. Same with upper management who hires managers who can’t spot incompetence. It’s really not hard at all. I don’t get why OP is the bad guy when he literally meets ALL expectations per their manager’s own words.
mmsimanga 5y ago
Maybe the problem is the need to have feedback at the stand up. This assumes writing code is linear and is something that can be routinely managed through a stand up.

mrozbarry 5y ago

I think this 2-question test is very accurate. To add to this, even if for a time, you can increase your productivity, sometimes that's not sustainable. There's nothing wrong with having ebbs and flows. On days when you have a larger workload of smaller tasks, you may find yourself to be incredibly productive, and days when you have smaller workloads, or larger tasks, and you may be less productive. The thing is, if your boss is happy with your pace and work, then why be worried? It is literally your boss's job to notice if you aren't pulling your weight, and to ensure you are compensated fairly for your work. The work-place hierarchy (hopefully, and usually) is set up so you don't have to govern whether you are working at the proper pace, that is the problem of your superiors, it's only up to you to accomplish the tasks you are given, or give advice about those tasks if they are wrong.

shinryuu 5y ago
It's certainly not your boss's job to ensure that you are compensated fairly.
- icedchai 5y ago
  Often the opposite. They get kudos for keeping costs down.
- mrozbarry 5y ago
  Perhaps I worded that a little badly. They are responsible for making sure you are getting paid, or if you get fired.

khazhoux 5y ago

> Software development isn't a matter of sitting down and generating a fixed amount of code per hour. The rate of writing code is hugely variable... The time not spent typing (or being in meetings, doing admin, etc) isn't actually "unproductive" though. All true statements, but that's not what we're talking about. OP recognizes that he works 5-10 hours a week, and effectively blows the rest of the day off. Reminds me a bit of an engineer who reported to me a few years ago. He would describe every week in our 1:1s and during team meetings how he was solving this tough thread-synchronization problem. Because we trusted each other, we trusted that the problem was difficult. Then when he finally submitted his code, it was a single line. A single trivial line (as in, read the python `multiprocessing` docs for 5 minutes and the solution is right there). OK... sometimes it can take a long time to find that one-line fix, I get it. But then I looked into his commit history, and it turns out he was averaging a few lines of code a week -- on a good week, and sometimes even zero. When I confronted him, he said "You can't measure my productivity by lines of code!!!" OK, sure, but how far am I supposed to excuse an engineer who has committed 100 lines of code in 10 months? What a statistical oddity, that every single task he took on turned out to be a single-line-fix dragon!

omnicognate 5y ago
I don't disagree, but I never said there was no such thing as slackers or that OP definitely isn't one. I provided a test to tell if they really are one or not. The point I'm making is that some people in our profession think they are slacking when they're not, for the reasons I described. OP's description doesn't convince me that they necessarily are. In particular the comment at the end about having spent the years prior to the pandemic "pretending" to themselves that they were working hard sounds to me like somebody who's never really understood their own mental processes and has encountered a different perspective by doing the job in a different environment. I might be wrong, but that sounds more likely to me than that they have been getting away with minimal contributions throughout what they describe as a 20 year career. Your report didn't get away with it - the evidence is always there in the commit history, and the 2-5 year job length OP mentions is, contrary to their assessment, plenty of time to judge a developer's productivity. Another hint is the fact that this person is seriously proposing the idea that everybody else is slacking off and lying too. This indicates that they don't think their actual output is less than other developers'. As I say, I may be wrong. I don't know this developer - these are just some thoughts based on what they've posted. Unlike some here I'm not assuming I know the truth.

dragon96 5y ago

For me, I think I could tell myself to be more productive for 1 week and succeed at it, but I'd feel a lot more stressed or cynical about work as a result. I feel I'ma lazy person because I know I'm not doing what I could when I try my best, but I also feel wellbeing and health is more important in the long run.

throwaway254370 5y ago

I see myself very much like the person in the original question. For me, I try to do put in sheer effort on a regular basis. It is just that more day than not, I just can't bring myself to do it. I end up spending more time berating myself for not working, slacking off, writing this answer on HN, etc, than actually working. The sad (or perhaps enlightening?) thing is that it has always been like this. Since school, I would always do work at the last possible second. The only save is that I actually do a good job at the end, so it goes unnoticed. But the process is excruciating, and looking back at week after week of something like 5-10 hours per week is frustrating. Like the original question, I also "lie" in standups. I get why people say it is unethical, but I can't bring myself to saying I wasted the whole day yesterday on reddit.

throwaway934876 5y ago
Same here, I really recognize this. There are times I really peak. Most times I really don't do much. I don't lie in startups really, maybe I'll say I'm working on something when I just opened a doc and glanced at it. Which is lying, ok... But I do often finished the work in time, but just in very intense sprints. I recognize a lot in this thread.