27 ms·

Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls (2013)

196 points by cvwright 3y ago

juujian 3y ago
I'm conflicted in this. Ok the one hand, a lot of things here ring true, and AIC (Ass In Chair time) is a relevant indicator for work except... When it's not. Quality is definitely a thing, and it's hard to measure. Sometimes you work for a couple hours on something, and your revisit it later and realize the quality just isn't there and you have to do it over. Then how much did those hours you put in really count.
- Noumenon72 3y ago
  Usually, this shows I needed the extra hours to fully understand the problem. Or that I needed to waste those hours to make myself realize when I can and cannot productively work extra hours. Sometimes, I'm sure surfing TikTok for those three hours would not have made me sit down and produce quality code on the first try. Other times, I do the surfing and am like, "I needed that."
  - juujian 3y ago
    Yeah, often a good idea not to be too hard on yourself, i think that's what the article is missing
threatofrain 3y ago
Going to the bathroom is productive. It is not “fucking” around. This is just a blog post of a guy fawning over John Carmack and dealing with feelings of not measuring up.
- gizmolo 3y ago
  I think he strikes a chord with a common theme around programmers. We’re talented, and it’s easy for us to abuse that talent b/c what we’re doing is often hard to track for more functional folks. As such the burden of responsibility falls on our own internal mechanisms (i.e. self-discipline). Early in my career I had an issue of not getting things done. I later learned about myself that I just have some needs to make sure my values are aligned to the work which required a pivot to another company. But everyone has their own reasons for not being “better”!
- jonahx 3y ago
  This is uncharitable to the point of seeming like a deliberate misread. The bathroom anecdote is just a memorable illustration of Carmack's mindset: only work counts as work. Neither Carmack nor the author thinks you should avoid the bathroom or feel bad about pissing. This is a self-aware blog post of a guy who worked with John Carmack and was able to use that to honestly assess his own productivity, and the amount of time he wasn't focused.
  - paines 3y ago
    Work count as work ?!? Soooo, anacdote time. I had this boss who walked into my office and saw me sitting in front of my computer, reading the screen and not typing. He asked me: "what are you doing?" I said: "thinking about how to solve problem X." he said: "okay, but why aren't you typing?!?!" For him it was working as a software engineer is only when you type.....
    - jonahx 3y ago
      Just to be clear: your boss was a moron. Neither I nor Carmack nor the author of this article is arguing that “thinking doesn’t count”.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- indigoabstract 3y ago
  This was written by Brian Hook, who worked with John Carmack at id during the Quake 2 & 3 era.
- itsacomment 3y ago
  Calling bathroom visits 'productive' is exactly the kind of lie to yourself the article goes on about. So your product is time spent sitting around and shitting in a bowl? Then go ahead and optimize for number of bathroom breaks.. Breaks are necessary, and paid time, certainly - I'm not masochist enough to deduct every small break from my work time - but neither is John Carmack, nor is the author arguing for that.
  - Noumenon72 3y ago
    Coming from a factory background, bathroom breaks are something you have to find time for. If you were to just take one during a changeover, you would see a lot of productivity go into the scrap box. So to me it makes sense to count them as part of the "paid 15-minute break" a factory employee gets. I mark my personal timesheet as not working then too.
courseofaction 3y ago
I encounter daily young people who are so stricken by anxiety about productivity, because they can't explain how they will actually benefit from the outcomes. Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy.
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  > Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy. That’s called being an employee. Don’t like it? Start your own business. I do not get this attitude at all. It just smacks of entitlement. How about this for an answer “when the company makes money, they can pay your salary?”. Now, there are many more reasons why an ambitious young person should be invested in their companies success, but any employee should be doing their best if they want to stay employed.
  - kcplate 3y ago
    Exactly, it’s an alien attitude to me too. I’ve worked really hard and help make some people wealthy, but looking back over that time I certainly haven’t suffered at all. I traded labor for a regular paycheck. They took a financial risk and spent quite a few years of no income from it for a bigger payoff later.
    - godelski 3y ago
      I think there's a miscommunication happening. I'm happy to make people wealthy from my productivity and labor if I'm also gaining wealth. Their gains can even far outweigh mine. But if they are making excessive wealth off of my labor while I am struggling to make ends meet, I -- just like any other mammal (not even just humans) -- would be resentful. Very few people are "just happy to have a job" but we might also recognize that these attitudes are far more common in highly competitive areas and that there is a large tendency for these regions to not be the most prosperous. If everyone is struggling, it is easier to struggle.
TheAlchemist 3y ago
That resonates a lot with me. Some silly takes, like the one about the bathroom, but overall this pretty much describes me during some periods of my work life - and I think the advice here is pretty good. I also believe a lot of it has to do with the profession - there is a million ways to do something, it can be hard to evaluate if something is good enough or not, and there is usually no blueprint. When you build a house, you can see the progress being made, and you also have a clear path on what steps need to be done. In software / research it's very different - you can spend hours or days working hard on something that's not moving the project forward in a meaningful way.
doitLP 3y ago
> And if I'm really productive in the morning and afternoon and feel like I can go home at 4pm with a clean conscience, I do that too, so I don't burn out. This is the part that is difficult for me. Clean conscience? Because your upbringing or your employer has instilled some limit where you have to push hard before you feel like you deserve a break? For years I worked too hard, too long, and in my zeal, too often on the wrong things. I burned out hard and even now have to psyche myself up to do all but the most interesting tasks. Everything is hard these days, and so I can no longer rely on my inner Protestant to tell when I’ve done “a good days work”. I have to do the hard work and evaluate it against everything else on my never ending backlog before I feel like I can go home.
sublinear 3y ago
I don't understand this perspective, but I hear it often. The way I see it productivity should always be measured against the actual result and how long it took, not a mere impression based on how much of that time was spent in front of the keyboard. I'm willing to bet John Carmack has thrown away the vast majority of the code he's ever written. Everything I've read about him seems to indicate he's a "hands on"/"external thinker" kinda guy which would be why he was so dedicated to keeping track of his time according to this story. Not everyone has that need. It actually sounds exhausting and pitiable. Was it really productivity being witnessed, or just a man desperate to get back to his computer so he can play around with the code some more? Some of us do most of our problem solving when we're away from the computer living our lives. Sometimes I don't have an answer until the pressure is off and the clock says 5PM. A tide of relaxation often drags in the answer that was just past my reach 15 minutes earlier. Writing code is not typing. It's thinking. We all do it differently. I prefer a beer and a nap. All that really matters is that you don't stop thinking about the problem.
- jonahx 3y ago
  Your perspective isn't mutually exclusive with the one in the article. I take the article, and the Carmack stories, as an argument to be scrupulously honest with yourself about when you're fucking around. If you do your best thinking taking a shower or a 20 minute walk in the sun, that's fine, because you're working, not fucking around. But if you're browsing facebook, not thinking about the problem, and telling yourself it's part of your process, you might be in denial.
  - sublinear 3y ago
    No sorry I'm saying something else. Regardless of what you're doing, yes even browsing Facebook, what matters is that the code was delivered on time or faster and doesn't suck. The typing of the code is trivial.
    - jonahx 3y ago
      In that case I think you might be straw-manning the message of the article. It's about being honest with yourself about how your practices relate to your actual productivity versus your potential productivity. Of course at the end of the day only the output matters, and if you're super productive by browsing facebook 4 hours a day and focusing the other 4, good for you. The article asks: Are you selling yourself short by doing that? It's possible the answer is no, and that you simply need to work that way. But it's far more likely that you are selling yourself short. Most people surfing facebook for 4 hours a day are not productive geniuses with an idiosyncratic process. They really are just fucking around.
shove 3y ago
Tell me you don’t have family responsibilities without telling me …
dang 3y ago
Related: Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16529481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16529481 - March 2018 (84 comments) Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364908 - March 2014 (54 comments) Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5383650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5383650 - March 2013 (59 comments) I'm guessing this ongoing thread is also loosely related: John Carmack on shorter work weeks (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36360980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36360980 - June 2023 (284 comments)
- jatins 3y ago
  Is the GitHub link by the same author or someone is plagiarising their content?
  - dieulot 3y ago
    Neither, it’s placeholder content used as part of a collection of web layout experiments, hence the weird URL. https://waivek.github.io/website/ https://waivek.github.io/website/
photochemsyn 3y ago
If you're doing something that you absolutely love doing and are completely aligned with the overall goals of the thing you're engaged in, well, count yourself as extremely lucky. Maybe game designers, research project workers, etc. fall into this category, and they naturally adopt this kind of approach to work, because making progess towards the goal is just win, win, win on every front. Most people end up doing jobs they are indifferent about because somebody wants to extract value from their labor. So they don't give a shit about the outcome, only the paycheck. Yet somehow their bosses think they're going to adopt the above work ethic! Hilarious.
EdwardDiego 3y ago
I feel attacked. I also feel seen. Hmm.
faizshah 3y ago
This is an exhausting perspective on life. The guy who wrote 80% of the codebase is always going to be more productive than someone who wrote 2% of it, that doesn’t mean they are 10x smarter than you. I noticed this hyper obsession with productivity in our industry from measuring yourself against how you perceive others productivity. But there’s much less focus put on how your peers became productive at their specialization. That’s the real secret sauce, is to become productive at some specialization in software engineering you need experience + a deep mental model of your codebase and a mental model of your dependencies. The reason a task that should have been 4 hours takes 4 days is because you had to debug, read documentation and try things. If you immediately could predict why an issue was happening because you had a deep mental model of the OS, the runtime, your architecture etc. you would be able to solve any issue you run into in several orders less time. That’s how you actually become more productive as an engineer in your field. This obsession with grinding and hyper productivity is out of hand, your physical and mental health are way more important.
- raincole 3y ago
  > I noticed this hyper obsession with productivity in our industry from measuring yourself against how you perceive others productivity. Carmack doesn't measure his productivity against someone else. He measures, with the "CD player trick", against himself. A less productive person, like the author, measures against the top performers. But the top performers measure against themselves. This is the real insight of this article for me (maybe not even the author realized it).
  - deredede 3y ago
    The less productive person would also benefit from measuring against themselves. On a day-to-day basis, there are no metrics that make more sense. (Or not measure at all, which is fine -- but if you do measure something, that's what you should be measuring)
  - condortg 3y ago
    > A less productive person, like the author, measures against the top performers. But the top performers measure against themselves. I think that is doing the author a disservice. My read is not that he measured his self against top performers per se, rather he happened to observe his performance relative to others and it was a wake up call that allowed for the self reflection that is necessary to improve.
nivertech 3y ago
> because you finished in one hour what should have taken all day How do you know that it should have taken all day? Who said that it should've taken 1 day? Was it your own estimation, your manager's, or Scrum Master's ;) Maybe the same or similar task took 1 day in the past? Even if you really got lucky on one task in the project by saving 7 hours, you might got bitten and stuck on another one, which will take weeks more than was estimated. Software time estimation isn't an exact science, and it's more like statistics, i.e. you need lots of datapoints, and look at them in the aggregate (e.g. run Monte Carlo simulation).
_a_a_a_ 3y ago
I've certainly run into the yak-shaving problem of having to chase a hundred things down to get one thing fixed (this current job of mine is full of that shite) but the real productivity killer when my path is clear is myself; the stupid ridiculous little bugs I introduced by accident that I can't see because they're my own they can cost me hours. And I generate very regrettably large number of them so I'm constantly tripping over myself. I keep reading what I expect to see, not what is there. If anyone has some advice on how to be less stupid in this aspect, I greatly welcome it.
MrDresden 3y ago
I stopped reading as soon as the author suggested it to be "hardcore" to think of bathroom breaks as slacking off. How far has corporate brainwashing taken people that they actually start believing this is a normal way of thinking about time management.
- archerx 3y ago
  I can understand a little bit this mentality if you're working for yourself as a one person start up with your runway quickly drying up but to sacrifice your life for a soulless corporation who couldn't care less if you died the next day is very puzzling.
  - MrDresden 3y ago
    I wrote that as someone who is currently bootstrapping a company while working a part-time job alongside. In the situation of a single person startup then you need to be smart about where to put the time and effort, rather than burning yourself out by overworking. Since who will sustain the effort in the long run if you wont be able to?
    - skeeter2020 3y ago
      I strongly agree. If you're in a limited resource/time scenario it's not about doing more but ruthless prioritization. You will not do very important things; make it intentional.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    Very true and Carmack very much was working on his own startup on a passion project
- Claude_Shannon 3y ago
  But they are technically slacking off, aren't they? It doesn't matter what the reason is, but you're not getting anything done in that time. Why should you consider that as a time you worked during?
ughOk 3y ago
I do something similar to the CD trick: I'll set a timer and tell myself I have to do focused work for that amount of time. I pause the timer for any interruption (including bathroom breaks). I'll often just do an hour. At the end of the hour I can check Slack messages, look at Twitter, etc. I'll only do this once or twice a day. Otherwise, I just work "normally". For me, it's less about hardcore grinding and more about making sure I'm holding myself to a reasonable standard. It's an hour - is that too much to ask? I've found 3 big benefits: 1. Personally, I focus better with the timer. I don't know why. But I'm less distractible. I'm an order of magnitude more productive in that hour. 2. I'm the type of person that feels guilty when I'm not productive. I find that, because I've met a productivity goal (and have been genuinely productive), I don't feel that guilt. I'm both more productive and less burnt out. 3. You'd be shocked at how long it takes to get through that hour sometimes. That's probably the biggest benefit: it teaches you how you're managing your focus time. Everyone thinks they're good at time (and focus) management but nobody measures it.
autonomousErwin 3y ago
I think it's important to make the differentiation between hyper-productive and context-hyper-productive, I suspect most devs fall into the latter category. The context-hyper-productive dev is an individual who seems 10x more productive compared to everyone around them but it's often the case it's the CTO/single-dev of a startup who's entire tech they've built from the ground-up and know every nook and cranny of the codebase so can seemingly solve bugs magically by just knowing where to look immediately, thereby leap-frogging a logic chain most standard devs would have to take.
ivansavz 3y ago
> Commit to getting something done every day. [...] Stay as late as you have to in order to finish. This is a really good tip. I find external commitment works better for this. If I commit to self, there is a chance I might flake out at the end of the day (due to being tired or lazy after lunch/dinner), but if I make the promise to an external "authority" I don't seem to "get tired" after dinner and I'll push through until the day's task get shipped. You would think the next day you'll be tired because I worked until late, but I noticed the opposite—I'm feeling more energized because of the momentum of having shipped something. For the last couple of months, my friend and I have been exchanging progress reports on our work (we're both writing) and it seems to help with productivity. Once in a while I'll flake out and be like "sorry, I've failed and I will miss this deadline" but most of the time it works. But it's a fine line between "pushing yourself" through the difficult uphills once in a while, and pushing yourself all the time getting burned out... I've been writing/coding for many years, and I still can't quite tell the difference.
skeeter2020 3y ago
It seems funny that, in an article where the holy grail is promoted as "measure productivity on your own scale", much of the conversation is about how your actions will be interpreted by an external audience.
Pahiro 3y ago
I'm not clear on why one needs to be hyper-productive. If you've been in the industry for long enough, you start to realize that everything functions in a cycle and they're just slapping a new fancy name and methodology on a problem that's existed for decades. My approach is to slowly shift my career into a direction that aligns with my interests. My latest KPIs, for example, include "Practical AI use-cases in the developer space". Gotta love getting paid to mess around with LLMs and see if I can get consistent real world applications out of it. My point is, do what you love and pressure your boss to pay for training that aligns with your interests. Also, if you really want to be hyper-productive then start contributing to open source projects. Corporates don't reward working yourself to the bone. Corporates only reward assertive behavior. That's why you get idiots in managerial positions, because they're assertive and they take the lead. I can't tell you how many times I've been made recommendations as an SME and been over-ridden by a manager that doesn't know what the hell they're talking about.
mkl95 3y ago
> instead of banking the surplus (i.e. moving on immediately to your next task), you spend it relaxing and screwing off because, whew, you just earned a small vacation by busting shit out in an hour that you thought would take all day. I'm perfectly OK with this. In fact at many countries you will be entitled to some paid time off after you log some overtime.

196 points by cvwright 3y ago

I'm conflicted in this. Ok the one hand, a lot of things here ring true, and AIC (Ass In Chair time) is a relevant indicator for work except... When it's not. Quality is definitely a thing, and it's hard to measure. Sometimes you work for a couple hours on something, and your revisit it later and realize the quality just isn't there and you have to do it over. Then how much did those hours you put in really count.

Noumenon72 3y ago
Usually, this shows I needed the extra hours to fully understand the problem. Or that I needed to waste those hours to make myself realize when I can and cannot productively work extra hours. Sometimes, I'm sure surfing TikTok for those three hours would not have made me sit down and produce quality code on the first try. Other times, I do the surfing and am like, "I needed that."
- juujian 3y ago
  Yeah, often a good idea not to be too hard on yourself, i think that's what the article is missing

threatofrain 3y ago

Going to the bathroom is productive. It is not “fucking” around. This is just a blog post of a guy fawning over John Carmack and dealing with feelings of not measuring up.

gizmolo 3y ago
I think he strikes a chord with a common theme around programmers. We’re talented, and it’s easy for us to abuse that talent b/c what we’re doing is often hard to track for more functional folks. As such the burden of responsibility falls on our own internal mechanisms (i.e. self-discipline). Early in my career I had an issue of not getting things done. I later learned about myself that I just have some needs to make sure my values are aligned to the work which required a pivot to another company. But everyone has their own reasons for not being “better”!
jonahx 3y ago
This is uncharitable to the point of seeming like a deliberate misread. The bathroom anecdote is just a memorable illustration of Carmack's mindset: only work counts as work. Neither Carmack nor the author thinks you should avoid the bathroom or feel bad about pissing. This is a self-aware blog post of a guy who worked with John Carmack and was able to use that to honestly assess his own productivity, and the amount of time he wasn't focused.
- paines 3y ago
  Work count as work ?!? Soooo, anacdote time. I had this boss who walked into my office and saw me sitting in front of my computer, reading the screen and not typing. He asked me: "what are you doing?" I said: "thinking about how to solve problem X." he said: "okay, but why aren't you typing?!?!" For him it was working as a software engineer is only when you type.....
  - jonahx 3y ago
    Just to be clear: your boss was a moron. Neither I nor Carmack nor the author of this article is arguing that “thinking doesn’t count”.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
indigoabstract 3y ago
This was written by Brian Hook, who worked with John Carmack at id during the Quake 2 & 3 era.
itsacomment 3y ago
Calling bathroom visits 'productive' is exactly the kind of lie to yourself the article goes on about. So your product is time spent sitting around and shitting in a bowl? Then go ahead and optimize for number of bathroom breaks.. Breaks are necessary, and paid time, certainly - I'm not masochist enough to deduct every small break from my work time - but neither is John Carmack, nor is the author arguing for that.
- Noumenon72 3y ago
  Coming from a factory background, bathroom breaks are something you have to find time for. If you were to just take one during a changeover, you would see a lot of productivity go into the scrap box. So to me it makes sense to count them as part of the "paid 15-minute break" a factory employee gets. I mark my personal timesheet as not working then too.

courseofaction 3y ago

I encounter daily young people who are so stricken by anxiety about productivity, because they can't explain how they will actually benefit from the outcomes. Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy.

lll-o-lll 3y ago
> Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy. That’s called being an employee. Don’t like it? Start your own business. I do not get this attitude at all. It just smacks of entitlement. How about this for an answer “when the company makes money, they can pay your salary?”. Now, there are many more reasons why an ambitious young person should be invested in their companies success, but any employee should be doing their best if they want to stay employed.
- kcplate 3y ago
  Exactly, it’s an alien attitude to me too. I’ve worked really hard and help make some people wealthy, but looking back over that time I certainly haven’t suffered at all. I traded labor for a regular paycheck. They took a financial risk and spent quite a few years of no income from it for a bigger payoff later.
  - godelski 3y ago
    I think there's a miscommunication happening. I'm happy to make people wealthy from my productivity and labor if I'm also gaining wealth. Their gains can even far outweigh mine. But if they are making excessive wealth off of my labor while I am struggling to make ends meet, I -- just like any other mammal (not even just humans) -- would be resentful. Very few people are "just happy to have a job" but we might also recognize that these attitudes are far more common in highly competitive areas and that there is a large tendency for these regions to not be the most prosperous. If everyone is struggling, it is easier to struggle.

TheAlchemist 3y ago

That resonates a lot with me. Some silly takes, like the one about the bathroom, but overall this pretty much describes me during some periods of my work life - and I think the advice here is pretty good. I also believe a lot of it has to do with the profession - there is a million ways to do something, it can be hard to evaluate if something is good enough or not, and there is usually no blueprint. When you build a house, you can see the progress being made, and you also have a clear path on what steps need to be done. In software / research it's very different - you can spend hours or days working hard on something that's not moving the project forward in a meaningful way.

doitLP 3y ago

> And if I'm really productive in the morning and afternoon and feel like I can go home at 4pm with a clean conscience, I do that too, so I don't burn out. This is the part that is difficult for me. Clean conscience? Because your upbringing or your employer has instilled some limit where you have to push hard before you feel like you deserve a break? For years I worked too hard, too long, and in my zeal, too often on the wrong things. I burned out hard and even now have to psyche myself up to do all but the most interesting tasks. Everything is hard these days, and so I can no longer rely on my inner Protestant to tell when I’ve done “a good days work”. I have to do the hard work and evaluate it against everything else on my never ending backlog before I feel like I can go home.

sublinear 3y ago

I don't understand this perspective, but I hear it often. The way I see it productivity should always be measured against the actual result and how long it took, not a mere impression based on how much of that time was spent in front of the keyboard. I'm willing to bet John Carmack has thrown away the vast majority of the code he's ever written. Everything I've read about him seems to indicate he's a "hands on"/"external thinker" kinda guy which would be why he was so dedicated to keeping track of his time according to this story. Not everyone has that need. It actually sounds exhausting and pitiable. Was it really productivity being witnessed, or just a man desperate to get back to his computer so he can play around with the code some more? Some of us do most of our problem solving when we're away from the computer living our lives. Sometimes I don't have an answer until the pressure is off and the clock says 5PM. A tide of relaxation often drags in the answer that was just past my reach 15 minutes earlier. Writing code is not typing. It's thinking. We all do it differently. I prefer a beer and a nap. All that really matters is that you don't stop thinking about the problem.

jonahx 3y ago
Your perspective isn't mutually exclusive with the one in the article. I take the article, and the Carmack stories, as an argument to be scrupulously honest with yourself about when you're fucking around. If you do your best thinking taking a shower or a 20 minute walk in the sun, that's fine, because you're working, not fucking around. But if you're browsing facebook, not thinking about the problem, and telling yourself it's part of your process, you might be in denial.
- sublinear 3y ago
  No sorry I'm saying something else. Regardless of what you're doing, yes even browsing Facebook, what matters is that the code was delivered on time or faster and doesn't suck. The typing of the code is trivial.
  - jonahx 3y ago
    In that case I think you might be straw-manning the message of the article. It's about being honest with yourself about how your practices relate to your actual productivity versus your potential productivity. Of course at the end of the day only the output matters, and if you're super productive by browsing facebook 4 hours a day and focusing the other 4, good for you. The article asks: Are you selling yourself short by doing that? It's possible the answer is no, and that you simply need to work that way. But it's far more likely that you are selling yourself short. Most people surfing facebook for 4 hours a day are not productive geniuses with an idiosyncratic process. They really are just fucking around.

shove 3y ago

Tell me you don’t have family responsibilities without telling me …

dang 3y ago

Related: Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16529481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16529481 - March 2018 (84 comments) Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364908 - March 2014 (54 comments) Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5383650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5383650 - March 2013 (59 comments) I'm guessing this ongoing thread is also loosely related: John Carmack on shorter work weeks (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36360980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36360980 - June 2023 (284 comments)

jatins 3y ago
Is the GitHub link by the same author or someone is plagiarising their content?
- dieulot 3y ago
  Neither, it’s placeholder content used as part of a collection of web layout experiments, hence the weird URL. https://waivek.github.io/website/ https://waivek.github.io/website/

photochemsyn 3y ago

If you're doing something that you absolutely love doing and are completely aligned with the overall goals of the thing you're engaged in, well, count yourself as extremely lucky. Maybe game designers, research project workers, etc. fall into this category, and they naturally adopt this kind of approach to work, because making progess towards the goal is just win, win, win on every front. Most people end up doing jobs they are indifferent about because somebody wants to extract value from their labor. So they don't give a shit about the outcome, only the paycheck. Yet somehow their bosses think they're going to adopt the above work ethic! Hilarious.

EdwardDiego 3y ago

I feel attacked. I also feel seen. Hmm.

faizshah 3y ago

This is an exhausting perspective on life. The guy who wrote 80% of the codebase is always going to be more productive than someone who wrote 2% of it, that doesn’t mean they are 10x smarter than you. I noticed this hyper obsession with productivity in our industry from measuring yourself against how you perceive others productivity. But there’s much less focus put on how your peers became productive at their specialization. That’s the real secret sauce, is to become productive at some specialization in software engineering you need experience + a deep mental model of your codebase and a mental model of your dependencies. The reason a task that should have been 4 hours takes 4 days is because you had to debug, read documentation and try things. If you immediately could predict why an issue was happening because you had a deep mental model of the OS, the runtime, your architecture etc. you would be able to solve any issue you run into in several orders less time. That’s how you actually become more productive as an engineer in your field. This obsession with grinding and hyper productivity is out of hand, your physical and mental health are way more important.

raincole 3y ago
> I noticed this hyper obsession with productivity in our industry from measuring yourself against how you perceive others productivity. Carmack doesn't measure his productivity against someone else. He measures, with the "CD player trick", against himself. A less productive person, like the author, measures against the top performers. But the top performers measure against themselves. This is the real insight of this article for me (maybe not even the author realized it).
- deredede 3y ago
  The less productive person would also benefit from measuring against themselves. On a day-to-day basis, there are no metrics that make more sense. (Or not measure at all, which is fine -- but if you do measure something, that's what you should be measuring)
- condortg 3y ago
  > A less productive person, like the author, measures against the top performers. But the top performers measure against themselves. I think that is doing the author a disservice. My read is not that he measured his self against top performers per se, rather he happened to observe his performance relative to others and it was a wake up call that allowed for the self reflection that is necessary to improve.

nivertech 3y ago

> because you finished in one hour what should have taken all day How do you know that it should have taken all day? Who said that it should've taken 1 day? Was it your own estimation, your manager's, or Scrum Master's ;) Maybe the same or similar task took 1 day in the past? Even if you really got lucky on one task in the project by saving 7 hours, you might got bitten and stuck on another one, which will take weeks more than was estimated. Software time estimation isn't an exact science, and it's more like statistics, i.e. you need lots of datapoints, and look at them in the aggregate (e.g. run Monte Carlo simulation).

_a_a_a_ 3y ago

I've certainly run into the yak-shaving problem of having to chase a hundred things down to get one thing fixed (this current job of mine is full of that shite) but the real productivity killer when my path is clear is myself; the stupid ridiculous little bugs I introduced by accident that I can't see because they're my own they can cost me hours. And I generate very regrettably large number of them so I'm constantly tripping over myself. I keep reading what I expect to see, not what is there. If anyone has some advice on how to be less stupid in this aspect, I greatly welcome it.

MrDresden 3y ago

I stopped reading as soon as the author suggested it to be "hardcore" to think of bathroom breaks as slacking off. How far has corporate brainwashing taken people that they actually start believing this is a normal way of thinking about time management.

archerx 3y ago
I can understand a little bit this mentality if you're working for yourself as a one person start up with your runway quickly drying up but to sacrifice your life for a soulless corporation who couldn't care less if you died the next day is very puzzling.
- MrDresden 3y ago
  I wrote that as someone who is currently bootstrapping a company while working a part-time job alongside. In the situation of a single person startup then you need to be smart about where to put the time and effort, rather than burning yourself out by overworking. Since who will sustain the effort in the long run if you wont be able to?
  - skeeter2020 3y ago
    I strongly agree. If you're in a limited resource/time scenario it's not about doing more but ruthless prioritization. You will not do very important things; make it intentional.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  Very true and Carmack very much was working on his own startup on a passion project
Claude_Shannon 3y ago
But they are technically slacking off, aren't they? It doesn't matter what the reason is, but you're not getting anything done in that time. Why should you consider that as a time you worked during?

ughOk 3y ago

I do something similar to the CD trick: I'll set a timer and tell myself I have to do focused work for that amount of time. I pause the timer for any interruption (including bathroom breaks). I'll often just do an hour. At the end of the hour I can check Slack messages, look at Twitter, etc. I'll only do this once or twice a day. Otherwise, I just work "normally". For me, it's less about hardcore grinding and more about making sure I'm holding myself to a reasonable standard. It's an hour - is that too much to ask? I've found 3 big benefits: 1. Personally, I focus better with the timer. I don't know why. But I'm less distractible. I'm an order of magnitude more productive in that hour. 2. I'm the type of person that feels guilty when I'm not productive. I find that, because I've met a productivity goal (and have been genuinely productive), I don't feel that guilt. I'm both more productive and less burnt out. 3. You'd be shocked at how long it takes to get through that hour sometimes. That's probably the biggest benefit: it teaches you how you're managing your focus time. Everyone thinks they're good at time (and focus) management but nobody measures it.

autonomousErwin 3y ago

I think it's important to make the differentiation between hyper-productive and context-hyper-productive, I suspect most devs fall into the latter category. The context-hyper-productive dev is an individual who seems 10x more productive compared to everyone around them but it's often the case it's the CTO/single-dev of a startup who's entire tech they've built from the ground-up and know every nook and cranny of the codebase so can seemingly solve bugs magically by just knowing where to look immediately, thereby leap-frogging a logic chain most standard devs would have to take.

ivansavz 3y ago

> Commit to getting something done every day. [...] Stay as late as you have to in order to finish. This is a really good tip. I find external commitment works better for this. If I commit to self, there is a chance I might flake out at the end of the day (due to being tired or lazy after lunch/dinner), but if I make the promise to an external "authority" I don't seem to "get tired" after dinner and I'll push through until the day's task get shipped. You would think the next day you'll be tired because I worked until late, but I noticed the opposite—I'm feeling more energized because of the momentum of having shipped something. For the last couple of months, my friend and I have been exchanging progress reports on our work (we're both writing) and it seems to help with productivity. Once in a while I'll flake out and be like "sorry, I've failed and I will miss this deadline" but most of the time it works. But it's a fine line between "pushing yourself" through the difficult uphills once in a while, and pushing yourself all the time getting burned out... I've been writing/coding for many years, and I still can't quite tell the difference.

skeeter2020 3y ago

It seems funny that, in an article where the holy grail is promoted as "measure productivity on your own scale", much of the conversation is about how your actions will be interpreted by an external audience.

Pahiro 3y ago

I'm not clear on why one needs to be hyper-productive. If you've been in the industry for long enough, you start to realize that everything functions in a cycle and they're just slapping a new fancy name and methodology on a problem that's existed for decades. My approach is to slowly shift my career into a direction that aligns with my interests. My latest KPIs, for example, include "Practical AI use-cases in the developer space". Gotta love getting paid to mess around with LLMs and see if I can get consistent real world applications out of it. My point is, do what you love and pressure your boss to pay for training that aligns with your interests. Also, if you really want to be hyper-productive then start contributing to open source projects. Corporates don't reward working yourself to the bone. Corporates only reward assertive behavior. That's why you get idiots in managerial positions, because they're assertive and they take the lead. I can't tell you how many times I've been made recommendations as an SME and been over-ridden by a manager that doesn't know what the hell they're talking about.

mkl95 3y ago

> instead of banking the surplus (i.e. moving on immediately to your next task), you spend it relaxing and screwing off because, whew, you just earned a small vacation by busting shit out in an hour that you thought would take all day. I'm perfectly OK with this. In fact at many countries you will be entitled to some paid time off after you log some overtime.