The power of achieving flow state in DevEx | Hacker News Reader

The power of achieving flow state in DevEx

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47 pointstaubek22 comments

I think it's also important to note that many people struggle to achieve flow state when context switching between sleep cycles. There's a natural daily rhythm folks go through, and the older one gets, the more it tends to (but not always) shift earlier in the day. Think about that next time you want to schedule a mandatory synchronous event, especially one such as a daily standup.

Some of your team may already be 2 hours into their day by 9am, while others may be just rolling out of bed and not yet deep into something. And some of your folks are starting to wind down their focus period around 2pm to 3pm while others are ready to go deep into the night.

I'm not trying to assert there's a problem with standups or other meetings. I'm just saying if flow state is a priority for an organization, there has to be compromise made in how scheduling, status checks, and synchronization works.

Maybe a weird take, but I think stand-ups and scrum and such intentionally sacrifice flow state in exchange for visibility and consistency. The small tickets, triage, estimations, stand-ups, are all anti-flowstate. But they allow you to get closer to actually measuring developer performance. It lets you compare teams and "debug" late projects. But all at the cost of potentially faster but unmeasurable devs.

When I was young I read that Vonnegut wrote most of material before the fam woke up. Around 4 to 7am. As a young night owl it was bonkers to me. Now I get it.

There’s a book called ‘Daily Rituals: How Artists Work’ that details the daily routines of famous creative folks. The early morning work session is common, but so is the late-night session. Strict routines are common, but so is spontaneous creation on a whim. It’s cool to see all the ways people create; very neat book.

I had a professor in college who extolled the virtues of his unique sleep schedule - going to bed at 7 and waking up at 3am. He said he loved those few hours when everyone else was sleeping and got all his best work done during that time.

Sure but by this logic there is no best time for everyone to meet, so there's no point even debating what time to choose, any will do.

I think it's more a warning that you're never going to be able to find a standup time that's the most efficient for every attendee

What is DevEx? Maybe I missed it but they don’t seem to say anywhere in the article what DevEx is. A company? An IDE? A development methodology? Something else?

DevEx, or DX for short, stands for developer experience; patterned after UX or user experience. It is the hipper, developer-focused version of developer productivity which sometimes carries negative, managerial connotations. Think "What can we do to improve the developers' experience?" versus "What can we do to increase productivity?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience#Developer_expe...

Ah, thank you!

There is also PX, which is even more hipper than DX, but narrowed to programming experiences.

I've actually been working on something new, it's called PmX. We cut the entire process right to the bone and focus only on what matters. The project management experience.

I’m not sure if that is a joke or not. I doubt you’ll get an academic conference to form around the topic.

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3595878

For me it is a interesting consequence of our modern ways of communication which is characterized by being always-online and always expecting immediate response that people turn to giving the new name of "flow-state" to what is essentially just "uninterrupted work".

The concept of a "flow state" is useful in responding to the retort "So what if you have interruptions?"

The problem is flow state is understood only by those who can reach it.

You can wave business or research articles at them.

https://hbr.org/2014/05/create-a-work-environment-that-foste...

And they’ll throw some random metrics garbage back at you…

Im glad flow state is becoming more talked about but am sure that any new measures to improve it will eventually become corrupted, misunderstood or implemented completely wrong by the hands of the bean counters or some other corporate force

Best dev flow for me is coworkers that don’t ask to ask, closed door office as necessary, and mid 70s prog rock (mostly, in 2003 I did a bluegrass rotation that seemed to coordinate well with Oh Brother Where Art Though)

Point being, what works for me may not work for you, but what works for you sounds like a hellscape to me.

Yes, I’m fragile snowflake and I’m ok with that.

What is DevEx?

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3595878

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