Ask HN: How do some software engineers "do it all"? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do some software engineers "do it all"?

13 pointstheappsecguy23 comments

I am constantly amazed by the output of certain people, often ones with some public visibility, for example active in open-source.

How does one have the time, energy and mental capacity to: work their full time job at a prestigious company (presumably with high expectations), create and maintain multiple open source projects, run profitable side hustles, fulfil family obligations and have a life outside of all that?

This is a genuine question. There are days when I'm very productive and days when I'm not so much; but on average, in a given 8 hour workday with a trip to the gym, I often don't have the energy to chase other things that I want. Some days I just can't look at a screen anymore due to fatigue or headaches.

Are some people just "built different"? I already wake up at 5am to do what I can every day. What's the secret sauce that I'm missing?

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A few scattered thoughts here:

There were periods in my early career when I was hyperproductive. Every time I burned out, unable to work for months afterwards. It had a cost in terms of physical and mental health that in retrospect was not worth paying.

It also often didn't come out of good places in me. Self-medicating with excess work is not better than other sorts of self-medication, even if society does like it better.

The reality is that you can only do so much. You aren't other people, and you can't know what's going on with them, especially when they work at presenting a particular socially approved image to you. The best you can do is pay attention to what works for you and optimize for what matters to you.

One thing that has been helpful to me was an Adam Savage comment on obsession in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqO5T8KTnn0

He talked about deciding what he was willing to be obsessed by was very helpful. I've been most productive when I've gotten obsessed by something, and I want to choose things where that's possible. But I need to do it in healthy ways. So the way I think about it at the moment, I'm not trying to directly improve my productivity. I'm trying to find the things where I can get obsessed sustainably.

Hope that helps, and I'm glad to answer questions.

Thanks for your input! I have experienced the acceleration of obsession as well but I find that I can’t maintain it or spark it on demand.

I guess I’m looking at systematic changes that yield some of those results but for long stretches of time.

I get that as life moves forward maybe I just don’t have it in me to out some things ahead of everything else.

Yeah, I don't think you can choose what obsesses you. If you want to make use of obsession, you have to notice things you can be obsessed by and pick among them.

For me at least, feedback from other people really helps there. So I look to incorporate things like user tests, releasing early and often, beta testers, and the like. Those provide new problems and new opportunities, which always helps keep things fresh for me.

I also like having people to not disappoint. That can carry me through low points in projects when I might otherwise quit. That can include both collaborators and users.

Have you ever heard of anyone admitting they’re not fulfilling family obligations? It’s something that those who do, aren’t aware of. People who work 12 hours a day or spend their time off work doing side projects often are filling a role in their families life but they likely do not know their family - their spouse maybe.

Absentee parents don’t see themselves as absentee - they see themselves as being in a provider of material resources role and eschew genuinely knowing or nurturing their children. Source: people with parents like this have been in my dating pool for the last decade, enough that I’m fairly confident this is extremely common.

I have seen people who are genuinely good at balancing everything - they operate on very little relaxation time, they’re on a pretty tight schedule and they have flexibility at work and in other projects. This is the minority - most people require direct support from a spouse or other family to maintain this level. Most actually wealthy people who work hire help.

In StarCraft there’s a way to think about the game - if someone is rushing you early with a large force, that gives you information about what they can’t be doing at the time as well - you can’t build a stargate while proxying a barracks. The same applies to productivity influencers. Maybe with a lot of other people working for them, and a strict singlular focused mindset, and a sprinkling of neglecting the rest of life, it’s possible.

Similar to StarCraft, maybe these top performers can just macro continuously while doing micro things. There's orders of magnitude difference in execution there.

I do agree that it's about what they don't do. But I suspect it's largely that they don't do things like optimize computer desktop, window managers, already working build scripts, learning yet another language I won't really use, etc.

See Warren Buffett’s “2 List” Strategy[0].

[0] https://jamesclear.com/buffett-focus

Sacrifices are made somewhere. Sleep time/qiality, hobby time, social life, family life, or compensation.. it has to come from somewhere.

Agreed. There is no secret sauce. Some people are good at painting a nice picture of their life for others but sometimes they struggle the most.

If you are trying to do more and do it better I think most people would be shocked how much consistent exercise, good diet, and meditation can be. But if you start doing those things you might also find that your priorities change from being the best engineer to making yourself happy in other ways.

I can only speak to my own experience. This is how I managed being a new father, running a startup, having a side gig, and actively engaging in hobbies, all at the same time: Extreme time management, with schedules for everything, and those schedules were adhered to rigorously.

I was genuinely shocked at how much I could accomplish every day. I didn't keep that pace up forever, although I do continue with several of the practices I developed then and my current schedule is pretty full. Now when I look back on that time, I have a hard time believing that what I did was even possible. It didn't come without a cost, of course, and one of those costs was my marriage. These days I'm simply not willing to sacrifice so much.

Thank you for sharing, and thank you for your candor!

If there was one strategy that had the best bang/buck impact on your own productivity during that intense time, what would that be (if you're willing to share)? Thanks in advance!

I suppose it would be: do not condone procrastination. What can be done now should be done now. What can't be done now should be scheduled for a specific time in the calendar. I found, personally, that half of my time doing anything was avoiding doing the thing. Procrastination. Usually cloaked in something that I could justify if I didn't squint too hard, such as "planning" or "research", or working at a slower than necessary pace.

Also, when I blew the window for something I had scheduled, I didn't feel bad or scold myself. I rescheduled it and then looked at what caused the issue. Often, it was that I didn't schedule enough time for the prior activity, so I would know to schedule more for similar tasks in the future.

Also, bonus strategy... delegate as much as those around you will put up with.

Thank you for sharing that!

For me, being number 1 is overrated. My ego naturally knows no bounds already, so I don't really seek validation outside of the echo chamber of my own mind (especially from strangers on the internet)

As long as I'm number "anything", it means I'm still alive, and I get another day to keep on keepin' on doing the stuff that I do.

And yes, I realize how folksy and unhelpful and "Joe Dirt" that comes off, but the truth of the matter is, you gotta find your own happiness and personally decide what success means to you and shoot for that. We live in a period of humanity where 'achievements' are often overblown by media, misrepresented, packaged and sold to us as branding exercises in such a subtle fashion that we don't even realize it.

Plus, they say "never meet your idols" because it's quickly laid bare how human they really are -- best to leave something to the imagination and seek inspiration from the one-dimensional representation of them that you hold in your mind than to find out how flawed and fallible they actually are.

Anyways dude, unless you're completely miserable at your day job, you're probably doing just fine and are on the right path. Enjoy the journey. It's cool to aim high but it's just as cool to never actually get there too.

A lot of the time, "there" turns out to be a cold, lonely, shitty place anyways!

Gotta ask one themselves. I'd wager their answer would be along of the lines of centenarians answering "How did you get so old?": "I don't know" (i.e. genes)

I don't think people really do it all like you imagine, you probably have the wrong image of folks based on social media highlights.

Another thing to consider is that much of what you see was built over years. If you take Redis for example its first release was in 2009.

This might seem like a strange example, but there was a very popular soccer coach in the 1980s. He led the Argentina national team to victory in the 1986 World Cup. His name was Carlos Bilardo, and he was an incredibly successful, world-class coach.

Later in life, when someone showed him the World Cup trophy, he started crying. He said, "I gave everything for that trophy—my family, my personal life. I forgot to live."

Sometimes, what appears to be success from the outside hides a deep obsession and significant gaps in personal care and mental health.

It’s okay not to be number one sometimes, there is a huge price to pay that not everyone sees, and nobody shows.

Systems engineering. Systems are resilient, self-repairing, self-organizing. Most lifestyles are brittle. Systems are elastic and flexible.

A system is very often a bunch of reinforcing loops, managed by other loops. Hugs are a reinforcing loop. Toxic behavior reinforces too, making things more toxic. Some habits are reinforcing loops - hard work+passion, exercise, showering every day. Most forced habits are not self-reinforcing and these are the habits that deteriorate no matter how hard you try to maintain them.

Automation is often not part of a system, and often used as a patch for where a system should exist.

What people often do is set up a very stable system. When I go home, my kids jump on me. Apparently that's a better indicator than most people get. Once you have this form of stability in one place, you can set up systems for other things.

Communities are also a fairly stable system, but one that needs nurturing. Open source is a community. Bots and agents are somewhat, but the question is if they'll sustain it if nobody sustains them.

Same with work. If you're not there, things should not fall apart. Prestigious companies are also very likely to enforce this - if you're a linchpin, then you might not be doing your job.

Systems tend to oscillate, things get bad then good then bad. You have a stable system when you're confident that things will get better when bad.

Don't use them to abdicate, though. They're there to let you switch as needed. I could give a ton of real world examples, but the post is long enough as is.

In my experience there are just people built differently, I have known a few of them, it can actually be “scary” to be around them and realize that, no matter the effort, you would never be able to reach a similar output.

They are able to be extremely productive while also maintaining a good life outside work. I attribute it to a mix of incredible intelligence and wit.

By working hard and acquiring domain knowledge one can improve, but typically won’t even come close to matching their output.

To me a good analogy would be similar to saying, you could wake up every day at 5am and train all day, but most likely you won’t make it to the NBA, NFL, or what have you. There are just people built differently (quite literally in this analogy).

People typically don’t have a problem accepting the NBA analogy and that they are not a 10x athlete, but are uncomfortable with the other, as proved by the various “there must be sacrifices, shortcuts, a price to pay, etc” in this thread. In many cases I’ve seen there were none, these people were just 10X, at work and life.

I've come to realize that "do it all" developers tend to be very very effective at recognizing and avoiding low-impact work. Top engineers are ruthless at prioritizing and dissecting requirements. Everything is on the chopping block, aiming for simplicity and well-defined domain boundaries with no superfluous complexity.

The 10x developer isn't 10x faster and doesn't necessarily produce 10x more code or handle 10x more tickets than their colleagues. But they are 10x better at understanding what needs to get done and what doesn't. It's quality not quantity.

You don’t know their performance at their jobs. You don’t know either if they fulfill family obligations decently. You don’t know how their lifestyle is affecting their health long term.

Even when you don't have energy to chase things that you want, you have energy to chase things that you need.

They’ve seen it all before because it’s all that they do so they know what to do when they’re doing it

Wife.

I don't think it's just software engineers. In every discipline, there's a pareto distribution of people's time management ability.

My take away is that being in that caliber just requires a wide range of attributes, and put bluntly, most people just don't have them.

In order of necessity, and probably the order in which people screw themselves out being that way: energy, curiosity/purpose, discipline, and maybe above average IQ.

The example I gave the person, and I'm reminded of when I read your description, is dhh. Probably the most public example would be Musk. Joe Rogan is another good one.

There seems to be a group of people for which one life is not enough. I'm endlessly fascinated by this.

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