4 ms·
It's a decent idea in principle, but I'm not sure how well this would work in practice. I can think of two problems. The first is distraction. When I am work
by Dove 17y ago
It's a decent idea in principle, but I'm not sure how well this would work in practice. I can think of two problems.
The first is distraction. When I am working on a difficult problem, it's true that I often need periods of inane distraction interspersed with periods of extreme focus. In theory, taking care of a child and hacking could be combined; where I go for walks or play video games now, I could be playing patty-cake. But those breaks need to occur when I intellectually need them, not when the baby needs them. When I am madly coding something I understand well, I very much need to avoid distraction. When I am mulling over something I don't understand, I very much need to embrace it. So I suspect this would not work well in practice.
A second problem arises from simple physical compromise. I am presently seven months pregnant, and--much as the admission grates on me--I have found my performance slipping throughout. Sometimes because I am tired, sometimes because I am forgetful, sometimes because I am more excited about the coming baby than the current project, sometimes because half a dozen random things are wrong with me physically and discomfort is . . . distracting. I had hoped to keep working at full capacity, and while I've kept working full time, I have to be honest: I haven't been as effective as I once was. Where I used to produce a couple brilliant ideas a day, now it's more like one or two a week. I don't see that improving just after the trauma of birth, during the subsequent hormonal adjustment, and what with the excitement and distraction of having a baby around.
Programming is an activity that depends so much on mental sharpness; where caffeine and sugar are performance-enhancing drugs, insomnia and strange hormones are remarkably destructive. On a bad day, I can spend 8 hours not-quite-achieving what should be half an hour's work. Mundane programming I can usually still do, but great hacks? Not so often anymore. Nor do I see them recurring with regularity for a while. No doubt about it, being a mother is a sacrifice intellectually. All indications are that it's well worth it, and I wouldn't do otherwise. But it strikes me as unrealistic to suggest that it's a light side-activity that one can casually combine with a serious commitment to work. Even very intellectual work.
- DaniFong 17y agoVery good points, I suspect that programming and other forms of concentrated work will require a phase shift in order to continue a high level of productivity, and the type of productivity won't be the same. But, as DHH of 37signals points out, people don't typically use their hours well anyway. If raising a child left only two hours a day to work, that's still 10 hours during the week -- as much time as DHH spent coding basecamp and rails his first year. If you add to that time you can spend planning, communicating, and thinking about the problem (to fill the time when you're more likely to be interrupted) you can optimize those few hours even further. So far as I can tell, this is the pattern my mother used while she was caring for me and working her way through journalism school. I had colic. But she'd do her interviews in the intervening time, and she'd collect all the information she needed, and wrote fragments she wanted to include. When she got the chance, she sat down and wrote the whole article in a single sitting. PS: Thanks for being part of this community. I started to read your comment page, and you've contributed many wonderful insights I've had to copy to remember for later :-)
- Dove 17y agoThanks for your kind words! I follow a similar pattern at work these days. Having amassed a large amount of technical knowledge, I can spend time I can't spend innovating in teaching, documenting, cleaning up code, running test cases, doing research, doing arcane analysis. And while one or two brilliant ideas a week isn't what I'm used to, it's not nothin' either. But oh, for those two-day coding runs of yore, during which it seemed I could move the earth . . .
- tptacek 17y agoBad diet, physical injury, family crises, financial problems, selling a home, divorce, and burnout also cause developers to work below their "potential". We make minimal concessions to those problems. A good manager is going to cut a late-term-pregnant developer a lot of slack, because "below potential" is not the same as "net negative value", and because proven developer talent is very hard to acquire and even more expensive to ramp up. You worry about performance changes that are long term, systemic, and corrosive to the project. You worry less about easily explainable short term problems that you have 2-3 fiscal quarters to plan for and that run on a set time frame.