i have almost everything on the list of things that keep you unproductive. 8 months at a job that has an open floor plan (first job like this i've had). people are talking loudly all day, laughing loudly, sometimes playing putt putt. any one can grad your attention at anytime. no notion of at least sending an email with a "hey when you get a minute could you....", no notion of "being in a flow" or how the whole office is a flow crusher. this week we had two flagship products that had great potential, were really something to behold architecturally speaking, just a true pleasure to work on, get shit canned in favor of a sister company's version of the software. theirs is shit, looks like shit, the code was decent but nothing to write home about. why did they choose it over ours? because it was done in a reasonable amount of time and we've been taking forever to meet each milestone and were nowhere close to a release because productivity. these fuckers i find myself working with have been working on something that should have taken about 8 months for 3 years. and still they have no clue. just me and one other dev who have worked in productive, effective environments before were keen to what the problem was. so now instead of architecting our own shit, where doing bug fixes on theirs. bout time to hit the ole dusty trail i think. the author should have added to the list, veteran programmers who are arrogant, adversarial, territorial who had their hay day in C and C++ with no notion of how to do web development assuming authority over a project and over other developers who they consider "outsiders" who are "on their turf" along with apathetic managers who do nothing address massive cultural problems as not only the flow, but morale of the rest of the programmers are crushed without mercy.

mmmm. that's some good code nectar.

I agree. How bout just in general we relax and not have so many rules overall. we want freedom of speech but then impose those little totalitarian pockets everywhere, doesn't feel very free.

Where I work we have 2 teams. one with the monolithic unwieldy style, and they are in rut because of it, and my team with the microservice style, and we are in a rut because of the cons mentioned in this article. we are almost out of the rut due to some key changes in approach and some hard talks we've had to have and compromises made but it's been a long slog.

very nice

As long as the level of abstraction is sufficiently high, like where not talking assembly or or anything super low level and architecture specific, then once you've learned one or two, it's only a matter of hours, even minutes before you can pick up another one. the differences are just syntactical. you can pick up the new language conventions, related api's and design patterns as you go.