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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

> git status takes 10 seconds on average

> running these commands multiple times a day reduces the total productive time engineers have every day

I love the attention paid to this. Often opportunities to prioritise seemingly small efficiency gains are neglected.

At 10 seconds per command, an engineer that uses git status 50 times per day spends ~10 minutes per day waiting; an entire work week per year!! Well above the threshold warranting optimisation, and that doesn't even factor in distractions and context switching.

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It’s actually even worse than that I think. If something takes over a certain amount of time, then I’m more likely to go do something else while I wait, like check Hackernews. And there goes 20 minutes.

I created a `beep` alias that just does `echo "\x07\x07\x07"` which triggers the system notification sound three times.

Then if I have a command that will take a while, like a stupidly long `git status`, I do `git status && beep`.

I'm hoping at least you acknowledge this is _your_ problem, rather than a tooling problem or the like. You just can't expect everything to give you immediate feedback after a couple seconds.

This is something that's really a degradation of the newer generations of engineers, since I clearly remember the time where these "somethings" would never take less than a couple minutes, and people did not immediately flee to their nearest distraction, but actually planned their time around it. In fact, if you go further back, these "somethings" would have taken hours, and the older generations still got work done.

That's a lot of drama, existential angst, and nostalgia around the equivalent of "sometimes during the commercials I go to the bathroom, and when I do I sometimes miss a minute of the show because I don't get back in time."

I used to work at a place where git status would take 2 minutes (or more). You just stop using it and rely more on your memory, or run in it parallel while you continue working on something else, etc.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks that way. Even ~3s every git status is driving me insane now.

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