Comment by nickd2001 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickd2001 | Hacker News Reader

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In my experience as a developer, nearly any time I behave "lazily" (holiday, long weekend, time off work without thinking about it), or even just in the middle of a WFH day go for a walk, swim, other leisure activity, get ahead on 10 mins worth of chores etc, then I tend to solve a tricky technical problem , or learn something / understand it much better. The times where coding work gets pushed aside for a while often lead to to better coding output, results even viewable that same week. Sometimes at home I'll have a day when I'm not really into it, distracted by other stuff, so I go and do something else, then later my conscience says "Hmm that wasn't really a full day of work , you might need to make some up", but at the same time "Wow what a productive day, turns out not tiring yourself out actually delivers more value to your employer". It is said that 27 hours a week is optimal in tech, less than that you could get more done, but more than that you add no extra value, over 40 you produce negative value/bugs. So , moral = some idleness is ironically actually better for productivity !

> It is said that 27 hours a week is optimal in tech, less than that you could get more done, but more than that you add no extra value, over 40 you produce negative value/bugs.

That's probably true for typical people. There are exceptions like John Carmack and Jon Blow, who can code for 10-12 hours a day and who are running a mini-crusade on Twitter against generalizations like that. In general, I think you're right though - if you're such exception, it should be fairly obvious to you that you're exceptional in this regard and the rule does not apply to you.

Even supernaturally productive people benefit from idleness. Consuming art serves as inspiration for creativity; as productive as he is, Carmack wouldn't have made Doom if he hadn't read Snow Crash in a moment of idleness.

The exception occurs because they are having a strong vision of where they want to end up, and it is pretty far ahead so working hard will be required, yet they are able to feel they are little tiny bit of the way every day.

Still they probably have idle time too that really defines those moments of N days at 10-12 hours.

They probably live a way that Bertrand Russel would approve of.

My former CTO was a work machine, capable of digesting an insane amounts of highly skilled tasks over crazy long hours. Absolutely incredible. A rare kind, very inspiring and also surprisingly balanced in his life.

But he was also a terrible manager, as he was thinking/expecting the rest of the world to be as performant as he was.

There don't seem to be a shortage of people like that, but they are generally terrible to work with unless you have equal equity/enthusiasm.

I used to be like this.

One of my greatest friends and associates lives for life itself.

When we first collaborated on a project I had gotten a head start on it and was investing crazy hours.

As if it were the rule, I burnt out after the core implementation was done.

That's when his super powers kicked in.

While I had been toiling and feeling like a solo dev for my "heroic" commitment, he had been intimately learning my code and was fresh to build all the required features on top.

I learned a really valuable lesson about the nature of teamwork. To this day, if someone slightly lifts a finger or sounds the quietest of utterances, they're still doing more than I should ever expect.

> There are exceptions like John Carmack and Jon Blow, who can code for 10-12 hours a day and who are running a mini-crusade on Twitter against generalizations like that.

I strongly doubt that either Carmack or Blow are told by management to work 10-12 hours/day. That they feel like doing it is another matter.

That's an odd take to me. I don't know about Carmack, but what makes you think JBlow want's people to code crazy hours? From what i hear from him he's mostly angry about the waste that goes on in "enterprises" and the focus on complex niche features over getting shit done.

You don't track his Twitter closely enough then :) He was explicitly angry at people who say that it's impossible to be productive in coding for more than 30-40 hours a week. He felt that it's ingraining low expectations in young people, some of which have a potential to work really hard and do and do great things.

Maybe if he took more idle time he would be as successful as Bertrand Russel.

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