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The most brilliant thing about remote work is that you can remain constantly productive without deviating from the subject matter of employment. I was never ab

The most brilliant thing about remote work is that you can remain constantly productive without deviating from the subject matter of employment. I was never able to do that working in an office without serious ethical violations. Never have I, in my development career, been so overloaded with assignments as to be continuously engaged with actual work. So, what about the rest of that time? I suppose I could read research papers while at the office, but to be a better developer I actually use that time to write original software to solve real problems from real life. What makes working from home different? Personal equipment by personal learning not restricted by employer policies.

Inityx 2y ago
> Never have I, in my development career, been so overloaded with assignments as to be continuously engaged with actual work. You must not have been working for Amazon then.
bryanlarsen 2y ago
> Never have I, in my development career, been so overloaded with assignments as to be continuously engaged with actual work. This blows my mind. I don't know if I've ever been so surprised at an HN comment. The last time this happened to me was during a college internship where my role was fairly well boxed, and that was 30 years ago. There's always something to do to make the product better. I've never been in a situation where the backlog doesn't grow faster than it is dispatched. I've never been in a situation where assigning "P3" to an issue didn't essentially mean saying "never", because P0, P1 & P2 consume all available resources. (Not quite true because you always opportunistically deal with P3's when they overlap with higher priority issues). Is this a big company thing? I've only spent a few months working at one of those.
- austin-cheney 2y ago
  > Is this a big company thing? Yes, kind of. There seems to be one universal quality that defines both developer productivity and quality of output: ownership. When developers have no ownership, no liabilities, and no penalties they are free to largely turn their brains off. Yes, they have to do some work but there is no pressure to do more than just survive and no motivation. Large employers prefer this for reasons of candidate identification, zero cost retention, and employee predictability. From a psychological perspective the target is low openness but moderately high intelligence. The output is people who are really fucking boring and cowardly. Yes, the openness metric of OCEAN accounts for about 80% of cowardice and bravery which is the flip side of creativity. In my experience startups aren’t much different. Management moves faster and pivots more frequently which results in churn that keeps developers more busy, which is not the same thing as high productivity.
- austin-cheney 2y ago
  So, I was thinking about my previous comment. Busy is not productive. So, how do you define productive and increase productivity? This is going to sound really counter-intuitive, but productive people are the ones not doing work. In theory if you spend 10% of the time actually doing work compared to the next guy then you have 90% availability to do additional work. That part is obvious, but its not about work. Its about what you deliver. If the output is superior quality it will require less effort to maintain and feature dramatically less risk of regression, and these factors mean less work. So, if person A performs 10% of the work compared to person B then person A is 10x more productive than person B if they deliver the same quantity/quality of output. If person B delivers lower quality output then person A is even more productive. That is how you get 10x developers, and you don't even have to be a good programmer to be a 10x developer. I have been a 10x, or much greater, developer multiple times and I am almost never the smartest programmer in the room. That is why creative people are important, but they are more important mathematically than it sounds. Creative people tend to get bored quickly and tend to not want to do work just for the sack of qualifying their existence, but creative people tend to really loathe being bored. That means they aren't going to waste time on repetitive tasks and will instead look for something else to fill that time. If they know more repetitive tasks are coming then they will work harder up front to prevent the occurrence of repetitive tasks in the future. In the world of software that can mean writing a new tool or creating a new process. But, its more than that, because creativity is marginally contagious. Non-creative people are scared shitless of new things, those fucking cowards. However, they really enjoy having more time available for enjoyable things like everyone else. That means non-creative people will not become more productive of their own initiative and will actually sacrifice productivity in proximity to creative people until those creative people demonstrate a superior solution. In the presence of a superior solution the non-creative people will increase their productivity as a result of using that new solution. This is actually a repetitive cycle. To add to that non-creative people are repulsed and emotionally aggressive when confronted with original things. That is more reason why creative people will work less hard in the office and instead keep their solutions to themselves until it means not losing their jobs or directly eliminating more effort. Even more counter-intuitive is that to some degree higher intelligence, on its own, is actually harmful to productivity. Organization and industriousness are products of conscientiousness, which is negatively correlated to intelligence at about -0.27. You can't even survive in upper management if you are in the bottom of the population with regards to conscientiousness, much less do anything original. Openness and creativity are highly correlated to intelligence at about +0.4, but you also need persistence and diligence, which is where conscientiousness comes in.

Inityx 2y ago

> Never have I, in my development career, been so overloaded with assignments as to be continuously engaged with actual work. You must not have been working for Amazon then.

bryanlarsen 2y ago

> Never have I, in my development career, been so overloaded with assignments as to be continuously engaged with actual work. This blows my mind. I don't know if I've ever been so surprised at an HN comment. The last time this happened to me was during a college internship where my role was fairly well boxed, and that was 30 years ago. There's always something to do to make the product better. I've never been in a situation where the backlog doesn't grow faster than it is dispatched. I've never been in a situation where assigning "P3" to an issue didn't essentially mean saying "never", because P0, P1 & P2 consume all available resources. (Not quite true because you always opportunistically deal with P3's when they overlap with higher priority issues). Is this a big company thing? I've only spent a few months working at one of those.

austin-cheney 2y ago
> Is this a big company thing? Yes, kind of. There seems to be one universal quality that defines both developer productivity and quality of output: ownership. When developers have no ownership, no liabilities, and no penalties they are free to largely turn their brains off. Yes, they have to do some work but there is no pressure to do more than just survive and no motivation. Large employers prefer this for reasons of candidate identification, zero cost retention, and employee predictability. From a psychological perspective the target is low openness but moderately high intelligence. The output is people who are really fucking boring and cowardly. Yes, the openness metric of OCEAN accounts for about 80% of cowardice and bravery which is the flip side of creativity. In my experience startups aren’t much different. Management moves faster and pivots more frequently which results in churn that keeps developers more busy, which is not the same thing as high productivity.
austin-cheney 2y ago
So, I was thinking about my previous comment. Busy is not productive. So, how do you define productive and increase productivity? This is going to sound really counter-intuitive, but productive people are the ones not doing work. In theory if you spend 10% of the time actually doing work compared to the next guy then you have 90% availability to do additional work. That part is obvious, but its not about work. Its about what you deliver. If the output is superior quality it will require less effort to maintain and feature dramatically less risk of regression, and these factors mean less work. So, if person A performs 10% of the work compared to person B then person A is 10x more productive than person B if they deliver the same quantity/quality of output. If person B delivers lower quality output then person A is even more productive. That is how you get 10x developers, and you don't even have to be a good programmer to be a 10x developer. I have been a 10x, or much greater, developer multiple times and I am almost never the smartest programmer in the room. That is why creative people are important, but they are more important mathematically than it sounds. Creative people tend to get bored quickly and tend to not want to do work just for the sack of qualifying their existence, but creative people tend to really loathe being bored. That means they aren't going to waste time on repetitive tasks and will instead look for something else to fill that time. If they know more repetitive tasks are coming then they will work harder up front to prevent the occurrence of repetitive tasks in the future. In the world of software that can mean writing a new tool or creating a new process. But, its more than that, because creativity is marginally contagious. Non-creative people are scared shitless of new things, those fucking cowards. However, they really enjoy having more time available for enjoyable things like everyone else. That means non-creative people will not become more productive of their own initiative and will actually sacrifice productivity in proximity to creative people until those creative people demonstrate a superior solution. In the presence of a superior solution the non-creative people will increase their productivity as a result of using that new solution. This is actually a repetitive cycle. To add to that non-creative people are repulsed and emotionally aggressive when confronted with original things. That is more reason why creative people will work less hard in the office and instead keep their solutions to themselves until it means not losing their jobs or directly eliminating more effort. Even more counter-intuitive is that to some degree higher intelligence, on its own, is actually harmful to productivity. Organization and industriousness are products of conscientiousness, which is negatively correlated to intelligence at about -0.27. You can't even survive in upper management if you are in the bottom of the population with regards to conscientiousness, much less do anything original. Openness and creativity are highly correlated to intelligence at about +0.4, but you also need persistence and diligence, which is where conscientiousness comes in.