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Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

I'll be honest; I don't think using HN is anything close to what I would consider "working." At best it's marginally optimized random browsing.

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While it isn't work, reading technical articles regularly on HN can be very beneficial.

In fact, the first thing I tell aspiring developers is to start reading HN on a regular basis if they already aren't. It confers a sort of broad awareness of various stacks and ecosystems over time that's hard to obtain otherwise.

Depending on what articles one is reading, this activity could fall within "sharpening the ax" (which is also beneficial for the company).

Absolutely and if keeping up with technology is not work then what it is "work"? Is it just typing out the code? What about when your IDE auto-completes your code? It's a little silly to think about it this way.

I try to keep my distractions to a minimum level but I've often encountered comments and articles on HN that have been of great benefit to my work and my clients. Things like a service I've never heard of, a library being used in a way that I haven't seen before or even just personal experiences.

Hell I even use HN to minimize distractions such as reading only the comments section about some new product Google/MS/Apple released(or is killing) just to get an idea of what's out there in the market and if it is of any use to me.

Yeah, learning the culture of your profession -- with a broad awareness of different ecosystems and things -- isn't "immediately productive," but it's a simple form of professional development. (And in my opinion, enlightened employers understand that decent professional development is a really important part of the work process.)

It falls into the important but not urgent quadrant of Stephen Covey's Time Management Matrix.

Anecdote: I found AWS had a hosted Elastic Search that had just been released. This knowledge enabled the team I led to solve a problem that was challenging my team with what was relatively a small amount of work. There is no amount of heads down work that would of attained this amount of benefit. We were not thinking about the search problem much and the one of our engineers just kept spending more and more time trying to enhance our failing custom solution.

Making sure you are informed about what other people are making is useful and is part of your job as an expert. Now if I can just find an application for the CRISPR enhanced crypto sea-monkeys that I learned about yesterday that should really help us out.

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