Ask Slashdot: What Practices Impede Developers' Productivity?

nossim writes "When it comes to developers' productivity, numerous controversial studies stress the differences between individuals. As a freelance web developer, I've worked for a lot of companies, and I noticed how some companies foster good practices which improve individual productivity and some others are a nightmare in that regard. In your experience, what are the worst practices or problems that impede developers' productivity at an individual or organizational level?"

Comments

The Number One Impediment is MEETINGS

[Press2ToContinue]

Meetings are how people who don't know what they are doing suck the productivity out the people who do.

Re:The Number One Impediment is MEETINGS

[Anonymous Coward]

Some meetings are necessary obviously... I'm in my first senior developer position now and I've instituted hard limits on meetings because it frustrates me to no end when idiots discuss minutiae for valuable hours of my team's time.

Re:The Number One Impediment is MEETINGS

[schlesinm]

Some meetings are necessary obviously... I'm in my first senior developer position now and I've instituted hard limits on meetings because it frustrates me to no end when idiots discuss minutiae for valuable hours of my team's time.

The issue isn't meetings, it's bad meetings. Each meeting should have a set agenda and a time limit for each topic. When I was a senior developer, I would have a weekly status meeting with my team. The meeting always started off with basic status reports (what did you do, what are you stuck on, what do you need help with), followed by project updates from other teams (where pertinent) and finally a free topic session to discuss any issue. If something took more than a couple minutes to discuss, we'd table it for a separate meeting with only the people that needed to be there. Meetings should exist to make sure everyone's on the same page and so people who need something have a forum to ask for it. Without a firm agenda (which is aggressively held to) meetings lower productivity.

#1 visiting slashdot

[Nadaka]

#1 visiting slashdot

Wouldn't that be......

[3seas]

...software patents?

Another Big Impediment

[Anonymous Coward]

Anytime the process boils down to "if it's not a new feature or an emergency bug fix, you are not allowed to spend any time on it. And if you do spend any time on something like fixing spaghetti code so that implementing new features and emergency fixes don't take an act of God, we will refuse to promote it to production, as our policy is to not promote changes to anything that 'already works.'"

Also: any environment that promotes code ownership (either explicitly or, more often, implicitly) so that you can't make any changes without it almost immediately becoming an HR issue.

Re:fix it later

[sunderland56]

you're already having trouble meeting a deadline

Artfical deadlines imposed by management are a major suck of productivity.

For me, it's a distracting environment

[Anonymous Coward]

I might be in a minority, but having a cube-less environment, where everyone is sitting in a huge room, behind a desk and can see and hear everyone else, is the worst. I feel like sitting in a 60's call center. The "goal" of this arrangement is "collaboration". The result is distraction and irritation.

Multitasking between unrelated activities

[QilessQi]

It doesn't matter if we're talking about bouncing between meetings and coding, coding and documentation, or just coding too many unrelated modules -- every time there's a substantial context switch, it takes a little bit for you to get your bearings and get up to speed. Sort of like a vehicle making sharp turns all of the time.

And then there's the PAY

[AliasMarlowe]

Some meetings are necessary obviously... I'm in my first senior developer position now and I've instituted hard limits on meetings because it frustrates me to no end when idiots discuss minutiae for valuable hours of my team's time.

Agreed, but the actual time spent in meetings exceeds the required time by a significant factor at some workplaces.

Then there's the pay structure. It's almost as if some places want to pay as much as possible for work (paid overtime for panic fixes) or intend it to take as long as possible (long unproductive unpaid overtime). A better approach would be to pay for results, and damn the work time spent to achieve them, provided they meet the schedule. A 20 hour week can be as productive as a 40 hour week, and more productive than a 60 hour week.

Re:And then there's the PAY

[tnk1]

Or people start getting the idea that if you can finish work in 20 hours, they can thus give you double the work.