4 ms·
The "deadly trio" of open office plans for programmers: 1. We are very often judged by superficial appearance by others because they have no idea what we do or
by edw519 13y ago
The "deadly trio" of open office plans for programmers:
1. We are very often judged by superficial appearance by others because they have no idea what we do or how we do it. This can include our own managers and influential others.
2. We can appear to be doing absolutely nothing (or worse if on the internet) when we are actually thinking. In this mode, we are often contributing much more value when it appears we are slacking off.
3. Conversely, we can appear to be very busy typing into an IDE when we are just spinning our wheels and getting nowhere. We don't know what to do but feel compelled to act instead of think because people are watching.
- hga 13y agoIndeed; I once lost what might have otherwise been a good job at a startup because the other non-founder programmer, who got his job through nepotism, was a constant fury of coding and debugging. Compared to him I appeared to be a slacker, I spent a lot more time thinking, much less time coding, and very little time debugging. And produced a lot more working code per unit of time. But this was in 1984 using PCs with no server, there was no way to objectively measure what I was accomplishing vs. him.