It's funny to see people still posting about this. It's been so well known for so long. One of JoelOnSoftware's biggest rants is about this topic all the way back in 2000. Yet, sadly, managers continually ignore and pretend like it's not true. Managers that were once programmers themselves somehow manage to flush this simple truth from their brains. It's awful.
My work is constantly pushing group-wide IM. I don't want to be on group-wide IM. 95% of them aren't going to be useful or apply to me. It'll just be constantly bothering me and ruining my focus. The few times I've tried using it I've last about 20 minutes before closing it.
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.
This is so damn true, especially if you are learning to code while at school, and other come to ask you for help about their coding issue, and suddenly you have no idea, what you were doing 2 min ago..
That is painfully true. Some days in the office I plod slowly through work I don't really want to be doing, enjoying distractions caused by the open floor plan and colleagues, but suddenly get ten times more productive in the evening. 8pm was my crazy peak the other night.
All of my coding and scripting happens at a Help Desk. Interruptions every 10 minutes. Fortunately, they're normally short and I can get back on task, but still...
10 comments
7 u/wonkifier 11 Jul 2015 05:45
"It's OK, you'll be a technical manager, that means you can still code and do interesting things."
Turns out it means getting pulled into meetings by surprise, which kills everything.
Or being sheduled for 50 minute meetings starting at 9a, 11a, 1p and 2p... ya know, Nothing is going to get done.
4 u/ForgotMyName 11 Jul 2015 06:12
It's funny to see people still posting about this. It's been so well known for so long. One of JoelOnSoftware's biggest rants is about this topic all the way back in 2000. Yet, sadly, managers continually ignore and pretend like it's not true. Managers that were once programmers themselves somehow manage to flush this simple truth from their brains. It's awful.
My work is constantly pushing group-wide IM. I don't want to be on group-wide IM. 95% of them aren't going to be useful or apply to me. It'll just be constantly bothering me and ruining my focus. The few times I've tried using it I've last about 20 minutes before closing it.
3 u/master_blaster 11 Jul 2015 21:50
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.
2 u/zekio 11 Jul 2015 12:56
This is so damn true, especially if you are learning to code while at school, and other come to ask you for help about their coding issue, and suddenly you have no idea, what you were doing 2 min ago..
2 u/flat_hedgehog 11 Jul 2015 17:57
That is painfully true. Some days in the office I plod slowly through work I don't really want to be doing, enjoying distractions caused by the open floor plan and colleagues, but suddenly get ten times more productive in the evening. 8pm was my crazy peak the other night.
1 u/jasotastic 11 Jul 2015 06:57
All of my coding and scripting happens at a Help Desk. Interruptions every 10 minutes. Fortunately, they're normally short and I can get back on task, but still...