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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

I think the point the OPs was making is you cannot store up miles on Monday that you can then release Wednesday. You can with commits / stashes.

And that distorts behaviour

You can definitely avoid going on longer runs with the intention that you’ll have an easier time tomorrow.

I don't think people actually do that though. Who'd do that? Who would you even be lying to, yourself?

Potentially, the people responsible for deciding your salary.

Even without gamefication I am guilty of storing up commits on "productive" days because I am conscious I may not have the same output the next day.

> Potentially, the people responsible for deciding your salary.

Yikes, yeah I forget some people have that type of workplace that isn't necessarily result driven. If that is the case and does get someone escorted at least there's a chance they'll end up somewhere more engaging.

Assuming your question wasn't sarcasm. Literally everyone lie to themselves about one thing or another... Including me, and probably including you.

I don't understand how it is possible to lie to myself. It requires you to suspend disbelief and say to yourself that something did or didn't happen, that's something I cannot fathom.

Lying to yourself doesn't necessarily require suspension of belief entirely, but convincing yourself whatever you are doing is worth you doing it. Since it's hard (probably impossible) to know the object truth of if something is " right" or not. Then it becomes fairly easy to justify anything, im sure you've done this even if you don't know exactly how to admit it or don't think you're doing it consciouly.

> I don't understand how it is possible to lie to myself.

It’s called bias and its various types.

See House M.D. for details :-)

But you can also be motivated by a streak and do work you wouldn't have otherwise done.

Personally I find streaks are powerful motivators. If this were going to affect my work negatively it would probably be something like "not resting adequately."

Yeah but what if the streak that motivated you was now "improved" - your annual bonus now depended on keeping that streak.

You would be foolish to not have a little dry powder in your stashes. Maybe get a week or so ahead and commit fixes from 5 days back, so that if you hit a gnarly bug today you have five days to fix it for real and your streak is not affected.

There is no simple metric for "doing quality work" and any management that is not "i will sit down and read the code and understand it" is not real management.

And this does not scale. And so quality, creative work does not scale. Hence clusters. And senior staff engineers.

Oh and btw, staff engineers are the executives in software lead companies. any non-coding layers on top should be viewed as financiers - with some interesting organisational implications

I got an Apple Watch in mid 2021. I was a casual runner before then. By the first week, I was watching the 3 rings on the watch, and by the second week I had a streak going. I hit my rings every day for a week. Then 2. Then 3.

The only way to close the 'move' ring goal - 730 calories/day - for me was to run. I could brisk walk some days, but between work and other commitments, running was the only 'fast' way to close the circle. I went to the gym more, or ran around the town near the office.

And then I got to 4 weeks. Then 2 months, and so on. After several months, I didn't want to break the streak. But it gets hard - bad weather, feeling sick, personal commitments. I was doing... weird stuff just to hit the goals.

I got to 1 year. Then... even a bit more. I intentionally stopped on day 400.

I done a couple of small streaks since then, almost accidentally, but am not going to try for a long streak again like that. It started to consume too much mental space, and became a distraction. If I get to the point where I have less going on in life, perhaps that will be a new goal again. I've already proved I can do it, but I've now proved I can stop too.

Before all this, I had set up a goal of 'run min 2 miles every day for a month', and did that too, but my schedule (and weather) doesn't always allow for longer commitments.

But... I also didn't tell anyone about any of these until after I'd hit them. No, not true - I would tell folks in the office sometimes about "oh, I hit day 264 today" and show my watch, but usually only if/when the topic of exercise or apple watches came up.

If someone told me they're striving to achieve 100 days in a row of lying for profit, my first thoughts would be "egocentrism" and "dishonesty". But it's actually just called marketing apparently and it's a job.

To me it leans more in the ego direction if they were using a social network platform to track the running activity so that it can be compared to their friend's activity.

I feel this is really about wether you are doing something for genuine self improvement or to gain social status. It's the latter we tend not to like because when wanting to gain social status you tend to shortcut and "cheat" the self improvement part. However it's not always easy to distinguish the two.

If your code commits are, like running: regular chunks of interchangeable, repetitive, rote, menial labor that an untrained child can do, where the only benefit expected by anybody is your own personal exertion, and making it a static, mechanical routine with no novel output is the very goal for the majority of practitioners?

Then of course nobody would criticize you for aiming for a “streak”.

I might be missing something, since I don't use github that much: Are you implying there's no way you can imagine that someone could cook up something useful enough to commit to a feature branch under development during a day's work?

Maybe if they're working on rocket control firmware or something that's true, but it's not hard to imagine being able to make a small fix/upgrade/refactor to some sort of app every day

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