Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Does Your Work Schedule Make You Unproductive?
debingjos writes "Management at my company seems to think that our developers can get extra work done if they work extra long days. However, as one of the devs in question, I don't agree. When I've been coding for eight hours, my pool of concentration is exhausted. Working overtime either fails to produce any extra code, or the quality of the code is very bad. What is the community's opinion on this? This can be broken out further into several questions: What are the maximum number of hours you can work in a day/week and still be reasonably productive? When you absolutely must work beyond that limit, what steps do you take to minimize degradation of quality? If you're able to structure your time differently from the typical 9-5 schedule, what method works best for you? Finally, how do you communicate the quality problems to management?"
You will never change them. Find a company that allows flex hours and doesn't manage by putting out fires with more fires. They are out there.
Now that's just me, but taking a break and stepping back makes a huge boost to my productivity. I also code best late at night because I'm not distracted or disturbed and can get into something without worrying about a schedule. I can do several days of 10-12 hours if needed but not more than that before work quality suffers.
"Does Your Work Schedule Make You Unproductive?" - no but Slashdot and TheChive sure do
Oh come now! You're Slashdotting is counted toward Professional Development. Same as for when the execs slip out for an afternoon of golf.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
In fact, I find that after the distractions of the office are gone, either because I am working at home or everybody has gone home, I can get a lot more done.
Dog is my co-pilot.
1- Manage MILESTONES, not MINUTES ;-)
2- Quality problems are why there is a design spec and QA engineering. If these are too "old school" for your management and methodology, expect the beating to continue. That means code coverage and quality will be measured by your customers.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
When you crank out 100+h/week, you should probably ask yourself question about your life (or lack of thereof)...
Solving problems is like marinating meat. It takes time. If you rush it, you get a quick solution, but not the best. A quick solution might be acceptable for one meal, but not for future meals.
The "Eureka effect" isn't something new.
In creative endeavours like coding, an 8-hour day of actual work is never, ever 8 hours of successful coding, and often results in questionable code that I have to rewrite later because looking busy when you really need a bit of time away from the desk. I think that if I could get away from the desk more without being perceived as slacking off, I would actually get more done.
Get up, take a walk around the block, play a little guitar, or whatever suits your fancy. As long as it gets your mind off the present obstacle. Come back with a fresh perspective and a fresh mind.
It certainly does worlds of good for my own free-time projects, but at work? It seems more like people believe they are paying for time, and not for actual work done.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I recommend a 4 hour work day with same pay as the standard 80 hour work week.
No i sort of jest. You have to figure a few things. Management isn't rated on how well the code is written or how productive the people they're managing are... well in the most cases where you have the upper management who are brain dead. What instead is how much they can push their employees to make them look like effective managers.
Let me give you a basic example. If i work 8 hours a day, and the work i have assigned will take 3 weeks but i only have 1 week to do it in, a good manager will convince you to work twice as fast but not meet the deadline and then complain that they don't have enough resources. A bad manager will say it can't be done to upper management. Guess who is rewarded? The guy who puts on the dog and pony show for the upper management showing they can rally the troops in doing extra whether or not they met their goal.
So back to the point. It doesn't matter how effective you are. It matters how much they can squeeze out of you. Change that mindset and you've won. Good luck though, i doubt you'll change anyone's mind.
By "distraction" do you mean 3 group of people having right now conversation around me ? I hate openspaces...
As a developer, once I'm in the 'zone' I can code until I'm practically asleep... Although if I was forced to code for X hours, I couldn't say if I could 'enter' that zone or not - my guess is I wouldn't considering I would probably be thinking more about how pissed I was.
lol
True. It really varies by the individual, amount of sleep, consecutive days of intensive work, etc.
As a person with an executive function disorder it's much much easier for me to work for extended periods of time because I don't recognize the time passing. I'll go until I can't go anymore. That said it takes me a while to get into "code mode" so a schedule which is interrupted by meetings and other crap means a huge loss of productivity for me.
If I had to work in a cube, someone would die.
I am productive in "sessions", usually lasting about 1.5-2.5 hours. I usually have two sessions a day (morning, afternoon). The remaining time I browse the web (hello, Slashdot!), or go to meetings (does that count as "productive"?). I could easily produce the same amount of quality working 5 hour days, instead of 8 hour days. After 6 hours, I'm pretty much useless, other than answering silly questions.
On top of that, I am more productive than entire departments (because I automate those departments!). I saw a graph recently of American productivity versus actual wages. It was quite depressing (for me), though I bet the CEOs were very happy to see it.
6 hours max per 24...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
When you can't do in 100+ hours / week what I can accomplish in 30, you're probably too young for the job. Step aside and let someone with some experience and perspective do the job that you obviously can't. Development productivity cannot be measured in hours, nor in lines of code.
I one took a job for a company developing a Futures Trading system, and they pushed us hard (at least 12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week) in order to meet their imposed deadline.
We finally got the system to pass the entire test suite on a Sunday afternoon.
Monday morning, when I arrived at work, the outer office was full of boxes containing all of the personal belongings of the developers, along with the CFO, who was handing out pink slips.
Amazingly, they actually issued a press release boasting of how they had gotten rid of all of their expensive software developers since they were "done" with software development.
In 3 months, they were out of business.
Hope you fare better!
Any company that measures progress by how many hours your ass is in the chair is not a company worth working for. It's a sign management is not only incapable of measuring real productivity but that they are also indifferent to your well being.
It's not the same thing but I work from home a couple days a week and it's great. I save a couple hours/week on the commute and get to spend some time working in a way that's best for me. And if after lunch I'm tired.. I go hit the couch for 20 mins of shut-eye. Wake up refreshed, far more productive, and in a better mood for when the kids and wife get home. WINNING.
Ever give a thought to a compressed work week of 4x10-hours instead of 5x8-hours? You could also try 3.5x12-hours (3x12 one week, 4x12 the next week) but that kind of schedule works better when you need 24/7 coverage.
My impression is that companies argue (at least to themselves) why do I need to offer 4x10 when I'm already getting 5x10? I'd just be letting them take another day off.
I worked for a manager once that didn't believe that anyone who practiced WFH actually worked when they were at home. His position was, you must be visibly in your cube to be considered to be working. Or, an employee at all. One might argue that just being seen at one's desk doesn't necessarily mean one is working, but I didn't make that argument, because I wanted to keep my job.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Eat your hearts out.
I'm recently retired and loving it.
I'm currently building a kayak rack in my back yard without any deadlines.
Sometimes I just put down the tools and paddle off to check my crab pots.
At the start of every day I sit on my patio overlooking the water, drink my coffee and decide what (if anything) I will do for the rest of the day.
I wish I could have retired 40 years ago.
So long and thanks for the fish.
I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
I much prefer to work from home, provided I have a dedicated work area/machines.
One problem that IT folks often come across, especially with development jobs and especially at startups, is the expectation that long hours produce better results. Large companies also do this -- Google, Microsoft, etc. have on-site everything as a perk for employees, but also to keep them there for the maximum possible time. This works very well when you're just out of college -- you're used to working long hours to finish stuff, the dorm-like atmosphere is inviting, etc. But it really gets old when you're older, more established and have things outside of work like a marriage, family, etc.
Also, employers hate to add staff in IT roles because most of them see the entire function as a necessary evil. If you're in one of these places, you'll never get free of being called to fix stuff out of hours and working like crazy to put out fires. On top of that, many see themselves as "great places to work" and don't think that their workers feel any of this pain.
The one common myth throughout IT employment is that every place is like this. It isn't -- I happen to work for a place that allows flexible hours. And although we're lean in the staffing department and often have to work *a little* extra time, the workload isn't crushing. There are trade-offs, and people who work here know them. Pay isn't at the top of the range, the stuff we work on is typically not cutting edge (but not ancient either,) and the work our department does (systems integration) is very difficult if you don't have the right attitude/mindset/troubleshooting brain. In addition, those flexible hours get cashed in for marathon work sessions on very rare occasions. My company basically says "keep sane hours, make sure you're around for meetings, and we reserve the right to fly you halfway across the world if a disaster happens." I could get a job working myself to death for an investment bank or video game company, but I have a family at home now.
Seriously, not everywhere has a toxic culture. And yes, I'm aware that there are a lot of people who love working insane hours and have very little to do outside of work. That's why different companies have different work styles.
Entirely dependent on the project. If I was intensely interested, I could work much longer.
There is no 'absolutely must'. If you have a limit, it's a limit. It's unhealthy to push past that, people have died.
Four long days followed by three off.
Walk up, say "Hey....
Does code golf count too?
Ezekiel 23:20
Management at my company seems to think that our developers can get extra work done if they work extra long days.
Your management's "thinking" is nothing new.
*shrug*
What you're really asking is how to deal with your management.
So here, check out Death March by Yourdon.
This will answer all your questions (as well as things you didn't think to ask), with more wisdom and insight than you're likely to find via "Ask Slashdot."
It will also give you some perspective to make informed decisions about your options.
The reviews on Amazon will tell you if this is a book for you.
In a perfect world managers would just tell their employees
Your job description and duties are those that an average person of your skills can do with a 40-hour workweek. You can set your own schedule and work as little or as much as you need to, just get the job done and be available for meetings on short notice during "core business hours." If you get bored, let me know, there is always more work to do.
There is no such thing as a perfect world.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Pointless telephone calls and stupid 'do you have a minute' conversations waste about half of my day.
I'm with you on working outside office hours and ideally outside the office.
Does code golf count too?
Only if you take three beers out with you. No more. No less.
and the number of counting shall be three...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Noise canceling headphones work as long as you don't mind having to listen to music all your working day.
Sadly they don't stop people from talking to you.
Unfortunately, management is a largely evidence-free space. Research on all your questions, and a thousand more, exists. 99% of managers don't seem to know anything about management nor people. Not in the way anyone else knows anything about their profession. That's largely because few people actually study management, most are something else by profession and were promoted to management positions, and if you're lucky they got two weeks of training.
Your case is typical. Managers don't know about how people work, so they try to manage them like any other resource. But, as the excellent little book "Peopleware" put it: "Adding manpower to a late project makes it later."
If you want to have a good job - leave. A company with that kind of management is unlikely to change.
If you can't or don't want to, buy your manager that book, or some other. Send it to his private address, anonymously. You don't want to embarass him. He most likely knows that he needs help, but he would never admit it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
When you can't crank out 100+ hours/week at max capacity, you're too old for the job. Step aside and let us younger and more capable guys show you how it's done.
If you have to crank out 100+ hours a week on a regular basis you can't do your job.
This is a well-researched topic with hard data available. And it's pretty unambiguously and consistently the case that the hard data show that working extra hours results, not just in lower productivity per hour, but lower productivity overall. Which is why people who start pushing for extra hours can't seem to catch up -- they're making it worse rather than better.
Your managers are trying to find out just how much gasoline they have to pour on this fire to put it out, and I don't think you can reasonably expect them to get smarter.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I worked for a manager once that didn't believe that anyone who practiced WFH actually worked when they were at home. His position was, you must be visibly in your cube to be considered to be working.
Sounds like he was assuming other people would behave like him.
a schedule which is interrupted by meetings and other crap means a huge loss of productivity for me.
Dude - that's the case with anyone - developer or not. Well, the sales guys and such may find them helpful...
Meanwhile, something about those meetings (and especially the excess of them) brings up something: I find that a lack of good design is often covered-up by a mass of meetings. I get that some information can only be correlated/gathered by a meeting, but too many of them I think tends to just make a mess. If your organization is plagued with excess meetings (or individual scrums that drag on for hours), productivity is going to go down the toilet no matter what you do.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Those developers in Bangalore must have it made!
The only thing I've seen them make is a mess.
I work for myself, so no one tells me when to start or stop working. I rent an office and work offsite most of the time so I'm able to come and go as I need to. In some sense I'm the extreme example of someone who is free to work whenever, however, and sometimes whereever I want to. The only complication is that fact that a few of my clients end up schedule regular (very useless) meetings on status. Apart from that I tend to work normal hours - 9 AM to 6 PM. Then, if I have the energy and the appetite I'll work at night and on (usually) several hours on the weekend.
In the end, when you own your own schedule you usually end up emulating a schedule that resembles a normal workday, but the main difference is that there is no one telling you when and where you need to be at what time. I find myself way more productive in this arrangement than I was when I worked at a traditional office job. Here are the side-effects:
1. I work way more than anyone I know, and I squeeze more productivity out of my day. When no one is telling you to come in all night to meet a deadline - guess what? You do it anyway and it doesn't feel bad.
2. If I'm having a bad day or if I want to take a day off, I do it and I don't feel bad about the decision making someone in HR think less of me.
3. I can get into the "zone" very easily because I don't have some pinhead HR jackass telling me to go to the lunchroom to celebrate all of the people with September birthdays.
If management is really interested in increasing productivity tell them to "Fuck off, and stop treating us like managed cattle." If you do that, you'll probably find yourself fired (which honestly might not be the worst thing in the world).
I worked in hospital IT several years back. Hospitals routinely schedule doctors and nurses for 12 hour shifts 3 days a week.
While I was there a report was released that said that after extensive study of doctor and nurse patient care habits throughout their work day, they determined that the quality of patient care dropped sharply after 8 hours. During hours 9-12 the risk of being misdiagnosed (incompletely or inaccurately), administer incorrect medications (patient allergies or medication contraindications), administer incorrect dosages of medications, etc. The risks were almost double compared to the previous 8 hours. After hour 12 the risks got even worse. The study estimated that preventable accidents would fall over 75% by changing to four 8 hour days.
Unfortunately, the attitudes of doctors and nurses were that the quality of their patient care was just fine, and nobody wanted to give up the schedules that they currently had. The medical field has a culture of overworking yourself and working while tired, so they are highly resistant to change even in the face of such profound data revealing how destructive their behavior was to patient well-being.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
He isn't, but I'd be pretty surprised if you weren't.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I much prefer to work from home, provided I have a dedicated work area/machines.
Ditto - I found that I was way more productive when there wasn't a stream of folks interrupting, ambient noises, etc. As long as everyone at home knows to leave you be unless the house is on fire, working at home is awesome for productivity.
OTOH, it does make things harder for you in regards to office politics and all the intangible bits that can make or break your career...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Or you're being expected to do more then just YOUR job.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
If this is news to you, you must be new here...
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
Soon you will be spending hours in daily "progress meetings".
While managing milestones is important, in Australia it just seems well recognised that after 8 hours of work, people's brains have often turned to mush and the quality of people's work goes down, so we have, in general, the 38 hour week and even strict rest stop and log book requirements for truck drivers.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
Cut full time down to 32 hours a week or less.
Also there can be some dead / down time in jobs where you are just waiting for stuff to happen or others to sign off / work there end.
Also to many jobs have all of this face time BS as well.
Good point about distractions. Good managers or team leads will make sure their coders are not distracted. Someone mentioned phone calls and silly questions taking up half of their work day, but interruptions are worse than that: interrupting a coder who is in "flow" even for one minute can easily cost half an hour or more of that coder's productivity. Even worse: nudging a coder out of flow several times a day for an extended period of time will lead to severe fatigue and, when under pressure to deliver, a high risk of burnout.
Working coders need to be left alone. Not because they are prima donnas, just because of the nature of their work and the mindset required for it.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Why? Most programmers are most productive in 45-90 minute sprints with 30-45 minute breaks in between. Slashdot is a great way to fill those 30-45 minute breaks. Other good ways include walking, conversations with co-workers, lunch and bathroom breaks. There's no reason that when used in moderation, Slashdot can't be part of a very healthy development process. However just like you can't eat only cupcakes and be healthy, you can't only spend your time on Slashdot and be productive.
Having worked in cubes and open spaces, I'll take my cube any day. Inadequate privacy to concentrate in is much better than no privacy.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I was once on a project that had 4 or 5 large companies working together to bid on a NASA RFP. At one point we had 40 hours a week of scheduled meetings. It was actually very liberating, because everybody recognized that there was no way anybody could do any work if we all went to all of them, so there was the 15 minute daily status meeting in the morning and then you could blow off anything where you weren't actually needed.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
When you can't crank out 100+ hours/week at max capacity, you're too old for the job. Step aside and let us younger and more capable guys show you how it's done.
If you have to crank out 100+ hours a week on a regular basis you can't do your job.
I used to work for someone who thought that spending less than 100 hours on the job was slacking off. She kept a mat in the closet to take naps on the floor so she didn't have to go home. What she actually did to keep busy during those 100+ hours, however, was instructive. She'd butt in on phone calls with clients. Clients respected her business skills, but privately begged us not to bring her in on routine matters. She'd spend hours re-arranging icons on the desktop or fiddling with the file managers. It was a lot of sound and fury, but it didn't really mean that much.
I spent a "72-hour Friday" attempting to get a massive data download via 56KB modem, sanitize the data, run it through the mainframe and ship out a tape. The data came down with horrible errors. The sanitizing took many long hours. We were strictly on our own, as the 9-to-5 infrastructure was already gone for the weekend. And when all was said and done, it was all for naught, because the last flight out had come and gone and it was going to have to go out with the normal workload anyway. And there we were, tired out before the new week had ever begun.
I already knew my limitations. I can do about 6 hours of really productive work in a day. More, if I take a long rest in the middle, but that doesn't work well with commuter jobs. The other 2 hours are make-work. If someone needs brain-dead support, I can do that. Just don't ask me to think.
I refuse to feel guilty about my "lack of productivity". Recent studies have been pretty uniform in concluding that once you pass a certain point, you stop moving forwards and start moving backwards, and that for most jobs "multi-tasking" is less productive than taking one thing at a time.
A major problem with the "more is more" management mindset is that they think people are like machines. Run a machine longer, you can get more out of it. Run it faster and you can get more out of it. But that doesn't even always work with machines. Run the hamburger grinders too fast and you get cooked hamburger out of them instead of raw ground meat. People are not designed to run at full throttle all the time. Any management that cannot take that into account is not good management.
Thanks for cutting through the clutter. I read through far too many comments arguing for this set of hours vs that set of hours. No one's family life is the same. No one's biorythms are the same. I've been a programmer, analyst, project manager, entrepreneur since the early 1980's and have learned that my teams performed best if their hours were self-managed. Even within the same individual I sometimes needed to work in small 50 minute increments and, at other times, in huge non-stop spurts with a satisfying 18 hour day.
These days, if I'm productive n hours, that's exactly how many hours I work. I'd make exceptions to this only to honor confirmed appointments and periodic team meetings.
Thanks, again, for a quality post!
Good point. But everyone, and everyday is different. I've had inspired days when I worked 12 hours. My blood was up and concentration was good. I've had bad days when I caught up on email, admin, documenting, etc. no point in trying to code, nothing productive would result.
old school management is a classic fail
There are a lot of jokes about morning and night people, but studies show there is validity to this. I learned to work with this when teaching special ed and later, when I ran my own software company, where I did all the programming, I saw a dramatic illustration of some of those issues.
Morning people get up and are perky and ready to start. However, they're the ones who often need a nap in the afternoon and work well with an 8 hour day, but do not do well with marathon sessions. Night people do not start quickly. They wake up and need time to adjust to the world again and often are not ready to really focus until the afternoon. But they gain in strength and focus over time. They can often work marathon sessions, working all through the night and into the next morning.
I found that when I was coding and could work on my own schedule, I could get some work done in the afternoon and this is when I set things up, did simpler tasks, and caught up on things. But my real work hours started about 8:00 pm, when I could start focusing and I would often work through until sunrise or longer. 18 hour coding sessions were not unusual for me, but, of course, if I did a few in a row because I was working on something difficult, then I'd need several days to just recover. But I might be able to do 5 days straight of mega-sessions if needed. It's also worth noting this was in my 40s, not when I was some over-energetic teen or 20-something. In fact, in one month, when I was over 45, I did more all-nighters (with good code as a result) than I did in all my time in high school and college combined.
It does vary according to the person. Forcing night people to try to work in the morning will always be an issue for them and will not produce the good code they can produce. Forcing morning people who tend not to do well in marathons to stay for 10 hour days four times a week is just as bad.
Corporations don't understand these things, which is one reason I never wanted to be involved with any larger corporations. If you want coders to do their best work, you can't regiment them and dictate how they work. You need to let them find their style. Let them work on their own schedule. If they need music, let them have it. If they need silence, find a way to make quiet places available. Some need neat work spaces, others need chaos.
Good managers or team leads will make sure their coders are not distracted.
Yes, a good manager shields his team from the rest of the company.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Baby boomer here. The word you were looking for is "won't", not "can't". The only reason you work for 100hrs and get paid for 40hr is because your still too young to tell the boss "no" and remain employed. Also at your age I had a real job out at sea that involved heavy manual labour and 35hr shifts with a 30min break every 5hrs. Now go do something useful and stop bragging about how you're being ripped off by the boss, it makes you look silly.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The risks are very different first off. If I crash my computer I don't usually kill anyone, if I crash my double trailer on the freeway there is a good chance that people die.
Second, the fatigue is very different between mental jobs and manual labor. I agree that for the most part humans shut down after 8 hours. That said, Tech jobs are quite a bit like being an artist. You find a groove, and you can make magic. I have done a couple of 20 hour days in the past because A) I really really enjoyed the project I was working on, and B) I was in a groove and everything was snapping together. The 20 hour days are extremely rare, but I doubt I'm the only one that's had a couple of those moments.
The thing is, if you find your groove and work a 12 hour day the bosses need to make sure you get compensated. A 40 hour week does not give much time to rest, and a 50 hour week leads to burn out rather quickly. If your boss does not allow comp time, get the hell out!
Many managers learn who the workers are and never comp, often pushing the workers harder and burning them out quicker. As long as they get their bonus they don't care about the staff they have left next quarter.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Good point about distractions. Good managers or team leads will make sure their coders are not distracted. Someone mentioned phone calls and silly questions taking up half of their work day, but interruptions are worse than that: interrupting a coder who is in "flow" even for one minute can easily cost half an hour or more of that coder's productivity. Even worse: nudging a coder out of flow several times a day for an extended period of time will lead to severe fatigue and, when under pressure to deliver, a high risk of burnout. Working coders need to be left alone. Not because they are prima donnas, just because of the nature of their work and the mindset required for it.
Hamming, a famous programmer at Bell Labs talks about open-doors and closed-doors. The general consensus is that people with open-doors tend to be more successful than people with closed-doors.
It is very important to keep your ears to the ground and know what is going on in the workplace. Those "distractions" can sometimes be very important information that can save you hundreds of hours of works or advance your career. A "minute" talking to a person can reveal what a thousand words cannot.
I've heard it said that sales divides the day up into 1 hour increments as being the smallest atomic unit of work. That is, 1 hour to get to a site, meet with the client, and decompress afterwards. This is why you'll find that meetings are typically scheduled to be an hour long (and end up being 45 minutes or so).
Coders on the other hand divide their time up into 4 hour increments. It typically takes about 30 minutes to get into the zone, followed by 3 hours of productive work and 30 minutes to decompress. Therefore a 45 minute meeting takes 1 hour out of a salesperson's day, and it takes 4 hours out of a programmer's day.
I was whining about the price tag too. Finally I got one and it is the best ever investment (after a Kinesis keyboard and a quality trackpad) ... ....
I was going nuts over ambient noise at the office where I was abroad, plus being winter I had to have the heater on at the hotel.
I first got a "noise cancelling" Sony, that turned out a joke, then tested the Bose QC 15 at Best Buy with the airplane noise simulation
I had various fans at my home office before my Bitcoin miners went water cooled, and without them it was unbearable. As of other noises: it is actually capable of levelling the sound of a (just in front of my open window) lawnmower to a level, where I can listen to music on a really low level and only hear the occasional bursts of RPM adjustments caused by whatever stuff the mower is chewing through...
Trust me. BUY ONE. You won't regret it. I am not a Bose sales person, nor do I like their products too much, but the QC 15 is simply great.. It also sounds really good with movies, music, though it is a little heavy on the bass.
Hope this helps...
Ah! The irony is strong with this one!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Good point. But everyone, and everyday is different. I've had inspired days when I worked 12 hours. My blood was up and concentration was good. I've had bad days when I caught up on email, admin, documenting, etc. no point in trying to code, nothing productive would result.
As a manager of a small dev team (and 'developer' myself more than 'manager'), I recognise this in my team and specifically have different kinds of work available depending on the 'mood' that the guys are in. Someone's having a great head-down-and-churn-out-awesome-code day, I'll let them go at it until they're done. Someone's having a blergh-can't-seem-to-even-handle-basic-refactoring day, they can maybe double-check some documentation, or read up on some new technology that might be useful to us, or something else.
I also recognise that some days the hearts and minds simply aren't in it at all. For this reason, we don't have fixed work hours - come in when you want, leave when you want, do your 38.5 hours per week (and if you do more, you can take it off later as time in lieu).
Yes, this can lead to delays on projects, but that's my job as the team manager to sort out. When I tell marketing/whoever about schedules, it's my job to take in to account that people in my team have good days and bad days. I'll build that in to my estimate (and therefore occasionally finish a bit earlier than 'scheduled', giving us time for a bit of spit-and-polish on some non-core parts; or help out on other projects that aren't looking so good).
Occasionally, I've had some difficult conversations with my management about why they saw my employees engaged in a network game instead of working, but again - it's my responsibility to take care of that and my superiors can't fault us on quality of output. My team of course are generally pretty happy with the work environment and I take that as a matter of pride being the one providing it to them.
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