Intense productivity with someone looking over your shoulder is great for a day. After a week you'll want to quit. After a month you'll want to kill yourself.
Intense productivity with someone looking over your shoulder is great for a day. After a week you'll want to quit. After a month you'll want to kill yourself.
Also, did your study group have stranger or at least you kind of a bit familiar with them?
I'm not arguing for having a stranger watching you all the times or that you should only think about productivity, just that it shows that there's a margin for improvement that can't be dismissed
Whether it's in-person or with a tool like this, if your employer is creating an unreasonable amount of pressure/stress, then that puts them in a weaker position in the job market than companies that treat their employees well. Give them feedback, and if they're not receptive to feedback, see if you can ask for a raise or find another job.
This is really important. If your manager or PM is constantly bothering you, you won’t be able to get into your flow state, which is important in software engineering.
it doesn't impact my freedom and autonomy because i decide what to do every day, so i set my own goals and only report on how well i achieved them or explain why i didn't (run into a bug etc)
If you get ten times more stuff done than usual, it would be enough to do this one or two times a week.
pair-programming is also exhausting. after an 8-hour work day i am beat. however i can't think of any better way to work, and it it is practiced in several companies successfully.
if people would want to quit after a week or kill themselves after a month of pair programming we would see a lot of backslash against it.
That's been my experience. Even at the few places I've been were some do pair programming it's a very rare occurrence. Occasionally upper management will stump for it, likely because they (a) don't actually program all day and (b) see it as some sort of kale-like super habit. None of my IC have ever pushed hard for regular sessions.
More important than pair programming itself is the willingness to look at what works for the team and how you can improve the experience and productivity together. Most of the time we did traditional pairing, with two keyboards and mice on a dual-monitor PC, and simply signalled each other when we wanted to take over or cede control. Towards the end of the four years there we very successfully "mobbed" on some complex problems, and split up when we had worked out what to do next. We would typically work in different pairs every day, which resulted in everybody knowing the entire system to a similar degree — we didn't even need a handover when someone left, and onboarding basically meant that the more senior employee had to explain a bit more of the context while pairing with the new hire. I found it did wonders to my understanding of how other developers think and especially how to explain my thinking to someone else. But YMMV, and good luck!
There’s also the element that when a stranger (or a subordinate) is watching you don’t just act busy — you act like you enjoy your job, you show off a bit. This is the kind of performance that soaks into the skin and becomes real.
Yes, being "on" takes energy, but it's counterbalanced by the buzz of productivity and working at your peak.
I'd expect to be more tired at the end of day, but also to feel more accomplished.