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Comment by motters | Hacker News Reader

Being super-productive isn't always wise for the black belt coder. In the traditional world of commercial programming if you solve the problem in a couple of hours and then just spend the rest of the day fooling around, reading scholarpedia or working on your own pet projects managers often don't look upon this kind of behavior favourably - they think you're not being productive, when in fact the opposite is the case.

From having spent most of my adult life in the world of software development I've noticed that it's the programmers who make a lot of noise, huff and puff, and spend all day battering a keyboard looking stressed that tend to get pay rises and eventually promotions into managerial positions. This is really just down to the limitations of human psychology. If you look like you're working hard you must be being more productive than someone who did the job without fuss, then went out to get a sandwich.

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I'd disagree with your description of "super-productive", that sounds like normal-productive with time to fool around. Do something productive with the extra time (either more coding or, better, something else business related like running the finished app past someone who might have to use it) and there might be a chance of hitting "super-productive". (fast + time wasted = normal speed)

While I agree with fast + time wasted = normal speed, in reality it is not the wasted time that plays the role. In most companies developers don't have a fixed 8 hour job and most of them work more than 8 hours a day on a routine basis. I have seen managers who valued the total time spent working more than the actual work accomplished. So a developer who works about 8 hours a day was ranked below someone who spent 10-12 hours a day working even though it was the former who was accomplishing more tasks.

What about someone who works 10-12 hours and accomplishes the most tasks? I think you have to understand the corporate mindset without abandoning your black-belt coder-fu. Yes, you have to emphasize how difficult what you did was. You have to point out what you've accomplished. And tie yourself in directly with producing specific pieces of revenue wherever possible.

But this will all be helped if you can program well. And if you want to play office politics, it'll be useful to have the ability to accomplish someone else's job in half the time, if you really can.

It's often hard for a manager to judge how productive a developer is being. Often they're insufficiently qualified to judge the standard of the code being produced or whether one solution is more elegant/reusable than another, and instead are just using heuristics which work for other types of employment, such as estimating how much overall time and effort was put in.

Let me re-phrase that. If you... solve the problem in a couple of hours and then spend the rest of the day fooling around ... then you are as productive as the guy who spent the whole day on it, not super-productive. (The other guy probably spent half the day reading Hacker News anyway.)

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