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Classic Gerald Weinberg Essay Reprinted
danielread writes "Programmer abuse has been a popular topic recently, especially within the gaming industry. However, excessive overtime and overwork are not new problems for software professionals. Twenty years ago, acclaimed author Gerald Weinberg wrote an essay called 'Personal Chemistry and the Healthy Body,' which is as relevant for programmers today as it was two decades ago. Given this topic's recent resurgence, Mr. Weinberg was generous enough to let developer.* Magazine reprint this classic essay."
Many of us have observed that "geeks" are often anxious in a social situation. Be sure to socialize often; if you cannot, then professional counseling may be in order. Social skills are essential in a business environment. You're only as confident as you feel, and by extension appear to others.
Do you like German cars?
What are normal hours? When programming, sometimes you get into a zone and forget time. This is different from a 450lb CEO sitting in your cubical threatening to sit in your arms - to make you type faster. Or firing you for getting medical treatment.
One is brought about by inspiration, the other is by bad management.
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I want my games way past their origional release date. Most of the time updates have allready come out to fix most major bugs, and game play has been further updated.
Working people extremely hard only introduces bugs and causes your product to have flaws which for the first people to play it will make it an experience that is not worth it.
Give the programmers some rest. They produce better products that way.
cat
WTF? Once in a while I like to blow 300 bucks at the titty bar.
20 years ago it was easy for me to spend 3-4 nights a week at the pub, crawl home at 2 AM, sleep ~5 hours and get to work somewhat refreshed. Now (at 39) I can stay out once a month until 10 PM, sleep ~6 hours and get to work feeling like a bag of shit.
Ah the ravages of age...
Trolling is a art,
tfa seems like good advice. i've known people to whom a regular schedule came naturally, and i envy them to some degree.
i've never felt right getting up before 10, and i've always wanted to stay up late. --ALL-- my life, but admittedly, less so lately as i'm approaching late 20s and for the most part have a daily routine.
i dream one day we'll put rockets in the earth and slow the rotation so that we get 36 hour days. 12 work, 12 play, 12 sleep, THAT would come naturally to me. 8 of each just isn't enough in one day.
A lot of us are simply introverts. It's just who we are. Extroverts seem convinced that we're "broken" and thus must be "fixed" with counselling, or medication, or whatever. I'd rather be alone than with a group of people I don't know. Small group of my friends? Fine, great, as long as it doesn't last forever.
For the extroverts out there, I suggest you read Caring for Your Introvert.
People criticize the pseudo-xenophobic, anti-social nerd culture, but honestly, have you looked around at what's going on "outside?" I don't blame a lot of these guys for getting lost in the glow of a screen.
I have subcontractors I work with. Some of them are brilliant coders and designers, but putting them in the boardroom would create a scene. OTOH, if I had these guys brush their hair and teeth more often and they discovered GURLS, their productivity would likely be exponentially reduced. They might have a more normal social experience, but they'd also likely sacrifice the uniqueness that their antisocial position has manifested that resulted in superior coding and design.
I contend that the ultra-passionate are the ones that really create quantum change in our society, and often this is at the cost of pandering to many other socially-appropriate conventions. I'm not sure whether it's best to try to become more socially acceptable or work to dispell the notion that if you don't look or act "normal" you have no chance for advancement?
Then again, I concede that how we treat ourselves is a reflection of how we treat others. I would have less faith in the code produced by a morbidly obsese programmer who obviously has no personal self control, than someone who wasn't as personally self-destructive and negligent, because you can bet their habits bleed into their work as well.
When I talked to him the next morning he said he'd found the bug within an hour after getting back from lunch.
I will let the reader find the moral to this story.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
10 years in coding/web design. Never had a job where I averaged more than 40 hours a week. Never had a week that I've worked more than 50. It's called comp time and setting boundaries. First time on a new job I'm asked to work late I say "let me check with my wife." and usually it's fine. Then I say "in the future, unless it is a true emergency, I need at least 1 day, preferable 2 days of notice to make arrangments.". Then, later that week, probably Friday, I'll say "I'm leaving early, 'cause I stayed late Tuesday." If they say a problem, I say, "
well, I can take it next week". Note: DO NOT PHRASE THIS AS A QUESTION! Like "can I leave early". Just announce it.
This has always worked for me, and frankly, I have no sympathy for people who work long hours and gripe. It's your choice.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
A few random points:
1) Are you trying to be a prick, or does it just come naturally?
2) The article can be applied to most of those "other professionals working long [shouldbeacommahere] thankless hours". Regardless of the nature of your job--so long as it requires even a modicum of creativity--overworking yourself may be less productive than working according to a sane schedule. In short, it's good advice for everybody, and doesn't amount to coders demanding special treatment.
3) Is it really "getting ahead" if it means we die of stress-induced coronaries before the age of 50? On the bright side, at that point we don't really lose much. A couple of decades of neglect should be enough to dump anyone's personal life down the toilet.
4) I think the major difference between you and me is that you appear to idolize the overachievers who put in 12-16 hour days to "get ahead", and seem to get really touchy when that lifestyle is called into question. Me, I consider them to be a bunch of morons who are driven by a mix of greed and ego.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
This marks my 22 year as a commercial programmer and my 26th as a programmer, and I have worked for many a large multi-national during that period. And I would have to agree with all his points, even today in our ever Politically Correct societies of the western world, appearence and presentation of one self accounts for more than one ability. Now don't get me wrong here you need the ability, but if candidate B is a better presented package externally you may find yourself at the bottom rung for a while.
;)
Additionally I have seen very capable people passed over time and time again, because they have painted themselves into a corner by making themselves, or the perception, indosposable in that possition. How many times have you worked with someone senior in position who hold all his/her cards close to their chest, never relinquishing any information. because as long as they are the keeper of information they are superior. Yet after a few years you are their manager!
Then their are those with all the talent, and NFI on how to act, or should I say interact. The only reason they even have a job or are tollerated is their technical prowess, yet they seem to wonder why they are overlooked when it comes time to advance. I wonder.
All in all a good article and a good read.
Because unions usually force collective bargaining and oppose pay for merit. Programmers are mostly individualists and think that they're worth more than the next guy.
Employers don't value employee rights unless there is a viable threat from a large number of employees suddenly stopping all work.
Some do, some don't. Often employee treatment differs from one manager to the next in the same company.
Unions take money from your paycheck to pay their own staff and to (often illegally) siphon money into left-wing political programs. They are a net drain on the economy.
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the article seemed to me to be mostly about one small point: you'll be far better off if you keep yourself healthy. It's not a matter of being accepted per se. It's noting that 1. being accepted is a great big part of rising in whatever area you work in and 2. being (and looking) healthy go a great way towards being accepted. Hence 3. Being healthy is rather fine start towards whatever other aim you might have.
That's not ironic. Morals can exist without an omniescent being dictating them.
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That's fine with me.
I've worked as a software engineer for organizations with sales people that range from "great" to "nonexistent". The organization with the nonexistent sales force, FSF, didn't pay me any money, although I got lots of other rewards (including subsequent jobs based on that work).
So my choices are:
(1) Do a job I like with no sales people and no deadlines and no money.
(2) Do a job I like with sales people that get more salary, stock, and bonuses that I do, but I still get plenty.
(3) Switch to a job that I don't like and would probably not be as good at, in exchange for more money.
But globalization has turned brains into a cheap commodity.
Briefly, sure. Engineers in California said the same thing after Promontory, when suddenly educated men from the eastern seaboard came flooding into an area which previously had been dominated by prospectors. Suddenly, Californian engineers weren't rare and precious, and in fact weren't even any longer the unquestionable best; nationalization had, in their eyes, made brains a commodity.
Thing is, it didn't last. That people could be shipped place to place didn't change the need for brains, nor did it change the commonality of brains among people; it just more evenly distributed the pressure difference between supply and demand.
An easier example was the inflow of Korean, Thai and Indonesian programmers into Japan in the late 80s, when it was chic for an American to look down their nose at the Japanese resistance to immigrant labor as racist, citing our own history (as if the H1-B sentiments these days are somehow different.) In economic terms, their situation paralleled our own: a wealthy nation with an artificial work shortage created by the collapse of a bubble and the unwillingness of domestic labor to take realistic salaries (my friend is currently bitching that he's leaving a $120k/y web design job for a $100k/y design job; he sits on his ass all day playing video games at work) sees an abundance of bright, educated people in a poorer nation willing to work themselves to the bone in order to get what are to them preposterous foreign salaries. It was as frequent for Indonesians to work five years in Japan and retire wealthy, which Americans thought was smart, as it currently is for Indians to do the same, which Americans think is dirty pool. (Absconding with Japanese economy is witty; with American economy it's cheating instead.)
Lawyers have law-school quotas for example to protect them from a flood of cheap foreign legal geniouses
Uh, no, law schools have quotas to protect their reputations as difficult-to-reach goals, allowing their name to become a point of pride and therefore a valuable commodity when getting a job, in turn allowing the school to inflate the price of tuition drastically. You'll notice that second-rate law schools, such as the law school at your local pretty-good university which doesn't focus on law, rarely has such a quota in an undergraduate program. (Everyone has those quotas on graduate programs, but for different reasons: you really do need to control the number of graduate students, to make sure faculty have the appropriate amount of time to cultivate them into professionals; a faculty member frequently struggles with a third graduate. As my father's a college professor, I'm not speaking from ignorance.)
It's pretty standard issue scarcity tactics to inflate demand and therefore price. Ask a Nintendo sales rep how it works; they are the unchallenged masters of the tactic. (Note please that their central DS factory line was complete in October, and is currently cranking out more DSes per week than were demanded during the holiday season; nonetheless there was a holiday demand so bad that lines were hours long and some people simply couldn't get the toy. There was no need for that; Nintendo had the production capacity to fulfill almost triple the actual demand. However, if they were easy to get, nobody could brag that they had one first, and then fewer kids would want them as a social point, dropping console sales dramatically. This is also the basis of Sony's marketing attack on the Dreamcast, wherein the specs for the PS2 were announced the day before Dreamcast sales opened.)
If they can have protection from raw cheap-labor foreign competition, why can't we?
I'm not sure how capping input into law schools prevents foreign lawyers; you do not need to have gone to law school to take the bar. Any person with a good local library can become a lawyer relatively easily; one of my friends became a patent lawyer in order to register so
StoneCypher is Full of BS