4 ms·

as you become old, more experienced - you pace of work slows down. it is okay. however young people dont need to slow down, they can learn/work at much faster

• ardit33 5y ago
  You can be a lot picker on what you work though, and know better to avoid pitfalls and wasting time. When you are young, you are running like a headless chicken, trying to learn/do everything you can, and usually not have the right filters to see what is more important. In my 20s, learning new things could be overwhelming (there is so much to learn!!), and now it is not, because I avoid the distractions and learn what is important and needed.
• bumby 5y ago
  From the article: The issue in this evolution is not how many hours you’re now asked to work but the volume of work you’re assigned at any one time...The central goal of Slow Productivity is to keep an individual worker’s volume at a sustainable level. I wonder: is the expectation that young people work at a more frenetic pace part of the reason anxiety and depression trend up from adolescence until mid-adulthood?[1] If so, maybe we should rethink the idea that young people should be working at a faster speed. [1] "A slight trend for an increase in the severity of both anxiety and depression from adolescence to middle adulthood, and then a slight decline in older adulthood was found." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31190198/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31190198/
• pcmoney 5y ago
  That is false. As you get older your pace of work slows but its because much fewer motions are wasted. A good engineer should be like a strong swimmer with no wasted or frantic effort. Smooth, controlled, powerful. In large orgs or complex domains this can really only be accomplished with experience.
• Groxx 5y ago
  Honestly, most (decent) older programmers I've worked with are dramatically more productive than most (decent) younger programmers I've worked with. Both in terms of functioning systems and in terms of lines of code. They waste less time writing unnecessary duplicates. They waste less time writing, fixing, and troubleshooting bugs. Their code tends to work when it goes out the door, rather than requiring multiple round trips. And when they want to brute force something, they break out a small code generator / write a small tool and blow past multiple younger eng-years worth in terms of LoC... and that's before accounting for them having written the tens of thousands of lines of foundational code that the others are working within. --- edit: since the parent is more focused on pace than productivity... it applies to pace too. they're often spending far more (too much) time in meetings and mentorship and whatnot comparatively, so day-to-day pace can seem slower, but if they get a chance to focus they tend to be miles faster in every single way. Hundreds+ of working lines of code in a day is totally reasonable if that's what the problem calls for. It's why you see older engs disappearing for a week and building git. Or unix. Far from small projects by literally any measure.
  • darth_avocado 5y ago
    ^This. Over the years, I invariably take a little more time in my assignments than the junior engineers, but that apparent "slowness" is actually much faster because I rarely ship bugs, have fewer reworks/redesigns, fewer review comments and overall ship more "work" per quarter. There's a way of work in our org "Move slow to move fast" that is taught to junior engineers who are always eager to ship more code than to think and ask questions early on.
    • spacemadness 5y ago
      It can be a little easier to ignore the ongoing pressures as well when you are more senior. You’ve seen it all before and know how it ends, not to mention being able to switch jobs more easily. I see a lot of junior engineers very stressed out about not delivering “on time” regardless of how ridiculous “on time” is. I find myself fixing these “on time” deliverables regularly.
  • silentsea90 5y ago
    +1 old engineers kick ass. They're the ones we look up to when we're lost.