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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

For developers building something, the following are often true:

  Tweeting != Work
  TalkingAboutWork != Work
  Blogging != Work
  DoingSomethingInYourIDE does not necessarily = Work
  DoingSomethingInGithub does not necessarily = Work
  ThinkingButAppearingToBeDoingNothing may = Work
  Meetings != Work
  CodeReview may = Work
  Testing usually = Work
  DeliveringBuiltSoftware(AndItsPrerequisites) = Work
  HackerNews definitely != Work

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I disagree here. If what you're saying is correct, then the following would be true:

  School != Work
  Learning new language != Work
  Testing new lang/framework != Work

This is blatantly false, because doing these things may enable you to create something you couldn't before. Let's take two people. Person A only does code. Person B both codes and learns new theory. Person A creates something in X hours. Person B spends X/2 hours learning and creates something in X/2 hours. You can't say A has worked twice as long as B - both have put in X hours and gotten a result.

And so,

  Learning new things on HackerNews = Work
  Blogging to reinforce your understanding and help co-workers = Work
  Setting up Github to speed compilations and testing = Work
  Meetings to discuss new features instead of re-doing the same 
    feature incorrectly 5 times = Work

This is an important discrepancy between the words "working" and "producing". And even then, reading HN can be productive in your clauses. So it ends up just being semantics.

However, in this article the author seemingly seems to want to say "Shipping Code", which is clearly just a small subset of work/being productive.

I agree. Perhaps a better clarification would be billable work vs work?

Nice one, but billable work is - by definition - whatever you can get someone to pay you for. If that's the case, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people getting paid to be on HN, or sleep under a tree with their phone on and being on call. That would be billable work too, and very productive if you consider productive to be "how much money I made".

And no, there isn't someone in the sky recording how many minutes you looked away from coding and deciding if you're an acceptable person or not. ;) The "work" vs "not work" is all in your head.

It really depends on what you're reading on HN, if you're reading about acquisitions or gossip or meta commentary like this, then definitely HN != work if you're reading a technical article then definitely HN = work. And I believe they're both useful information, but one of them definitely isn't work.

I would split the hair even finer and say if you're researching how to accomplish a particular task and you serendipitously find an article on HN then you're doing work, but that's pure luck since normally you would be Googling rather than surfing HN. Reading HN "for the [tech] articles" is at best like going to university—you may be preparing for future work, but all this abstract preparation and self-betterment is not the same thing as real work and we would be wise not to fool ourselves.

I actually disagree. I believe abstract self-betterment is as important as what you are calling "real work". There's certainly a balance to be kept between direct production and abstract self improvement but they aid each other in a big way. I would say they are both part of "real work" as long as you don't stray so far into theoretical improvement that you lose sight of getting stuff done.

Eating and breathing is also necessary, but it's still not work.

Unless you're eating WHILE you're working.

Whatever work might be, this thread certainly isn't it.

You make an interesting point that perhaps learning is NOT working. While learning can help you get more work done it is not work itself. In fact it is often an imitation of actual work - pretend or practice work: an essay the never get published, a program that never gets run or a calculation that never gets used.

This is an interesting distinction and depends on the exact definition of "work". However work is clearly not the same thing as learning.

So the argument here is

sharpening axe != chopping wood

The problem is that "sharpening axe" is not so clearly defined. Many people spend time sitting around comparing axes with the rationalization that they're learning more about axes and the art of sharpening axes and 8 easy steps to improve your swing...

that includes me, I guess. Gotta go.

I think the word "Work" above would be better replaced with "Productivity". It's work/life balance, not productivity/life balance. Every hour I can't do what I want at the drop of a pin because I'm in a place, fulfilling an obligation for my company, or something else along those lines - it's work. If the company puts things like meetings in my way of completing my job in the number of hours I allot to my full time employment, that's their problem, not mine.

Sure, there are exceptions. I'm young and single so I have the luxury of putting in a few hours at home in the evenings if I need to when meeting a deadline. But I don't subtract 5 minutes from my "time spent working" when I check Hacker News while my code is compiling. Am I being productive? No. Am I working? Yes.

"But I don't subtract 5 minutes from my "time spent working" when I check Hacker News while my code is compiling. Am I being productive? No. Am I working? Yes."

I would count reading HN as inspirational and thus inclined to lead to better/more productivity/idea's etc. I can count numerous things on HN that lead me to being a better dev. I also used at a lot of interesting tools/tech that came up on HN and that would later fit/solve certain business requirements. So this surely did make me more productive. I would say though this depends on your ability to filter, scan and retain information derived from articles that are often tl;dr.

Also this article in itself is misleading, so reading an article posted on HN on how to be more productive is not considered productive?

This is a popular idea, but developers can also fall into the trap of thinking they can code their way through every problem. Tweeting and blogging especially may in fact be extremely important, if done well and purposefully. Same with (some) meetings, depending on who you're meeting.

You can build the best damn software in the world, but it won't matter if no one knows.

The opposite could be said as well. You could tell everyone on the planet about your awesome software, but it won't matter if you never build it.

Of course. You need both. But that's not the typical failing of a developer.

If I'm at work, I'm working. Doesn't matter whether I'm writing code, flipping through HN, eating lunch, (preferably at my desk) or taking a walk around the building to stretch my legs.

I used to try to "become more productive" by cutting down on some of these things to do more actual coding. But I found that my actual productivity "metrics" didn't increase. I might write more code, but I also introduce more bugs.

Developers don't give enough credit to the cerebral aspects of development. Modern dev is such that you have to do design while you're coding, you don't separate them anymore. Design requires an exceptionally fresh mind. Doing random things to decompress throughout the day keeps you in this productive state of mind and lets you proceed with fewer of the sorts of bugs that necessitate ugly rewrites/redesigns.

Another thing not taken seriously enough by devs is refactoring. It's part of the project, just because your non-technical boss/clients might not quite get why refactoring is important, doesn't mean you can just let them tell you not to. Grow a pair and spend the time and do it right.

I do all these things on the clock and in my experience it makes me more effective in the long run. Citation: a consistent history of rapid increases in responsibility and salary

I had a talk with my girlfriend the other day; she asked me if I'm working more now (freelancing for 2 months now) than I was doing at my FT job with overtime. I reckoned i was more busy now, while I just always would tell here I was working.

I clearly am not making as many productive hours. This of course has to do a lot with all the things involving starting your own business. Also being mechanically confined to a 5 year old windows laptop, looking into buying new hardware, actually setting it up, and then setting up all your dev needs sure amounts to a lot of time. *I would definitely call it work, but not production. Your "reading HN" clause will absolutely hold.

I disagree on some points here: if you develop and promote a product or an open-source project, tweeting, talking about work, blogging are definitely in the scope of useful and more than required work. Getting the word out is critical.

I would add probabilities. And see it differently in my case:

HN is ~10% work (this comment is not work)

Blogging is 90% work

Tweeting is 90% work

I disagree on HN not being work though...

More than once now I had a problem to solve and found the solution on HN's front page.

Meetings: where minutes are taken and hours are wasted.

Depends on the meetings.

And if you are wasting time in meetings, then you are wasting time in meetings.

Not in a very large corporate environment. I have had so many meetings where I didn't say a word, didn't even know anyone there. Manager I talked to like once a month sent me meeting requests and I went. It was pointless. They weren't optional either.

I've never worked in a very large corporate environment.

> meeting requests

Did you ever reject the request? I'm honestly curious to know what would happen?

Did you ever speak up to your manager about this? His manager?

I guess the real question is, what did you do to fix this?

I'd rather be as much as a ghost as possible in the environment lest I get more shit-work to do. Nothing, I set a world record in Temple Run from all the training I've received at these meetings.

Haha. Well, thanks for the honest answer. Having never been in that environment, I can't say what I'd do. =)

I reject every time I think the meeting is not a good use of my time. I always give a reason why I'm rejecting and sometimes that will be challenged but more often and not I don't attend the meeting and people don't get to upset.

A lot of the time people who are booking meetings will request attendance from anyone and everyone who may have a remote link to the agenda, they don't put any thought into whether the meeting will actually be useful to everyone they invite. Another problem is that people, usually project managers, will book meetings at the drop of a hat when a quick two minute chat at someone's desk would suffice - a lot of middle-managers have nothing to do other than attend meetings and they suck everyone else in with them.

I agree with that. Sometimes a meeting is the only way to get the right people talking about the problem or issue.

Doesn't that indicate a huge organizational dysfunction, if you cannot get an answer through (say) email?

I'm surprised you would consider e-mail an effective tool to have a discussion with multiple people. In the past I've found emails for non-trivial things to be more slow and frustrating than useful.

Or one's boss is wasting one's time in meetings.

> "Meetings: where minutes are taken and hours are wasted"

Only if you run bad meetings. Don't call one without an agenda. Stick to that agenda (have a chair). Arrive and leave on time. Send minutes (even notes) within the hour after the meeting.

Meetings take discipline on the part of the attendees and it's just a structured communication method. It's not fair to blame the tool because most people are too lazy to use it well.

> It's not fair to blame the tool because most people are too lazy to use it well.

Which tool? The tool who called the meeting? Har-har... I'm here all week.

But seriously, I think you make a good point. There's an equally good counterpoint, which is that most people can't do this well. Would training help? Or are some people congenitally boring and disorganized (the two are related, I think)?

I think better training would help. In a lot of ways, I think meetings are an attempt to make up for bad communication. If team size has grown to the point where team members aren't able/willing to communicate with each other outside of having a formal meeting, that's when meetings almost have to be called, to make sure everyone in the room is on the same page.

I wish the MBAs would figure out a way to minimize formal "meetings" by encouraging better informal communication. Not all situations need meetings, maybe things are better solved by a simple "walk over to Jill's desk and hash it out there". Just my opinion though, I don't have formal training in management!

It's not just bad meetings, it's meetings that shouldn't exist in the first place.

Meeting can be useful, but I've worked at companies where meetings are (reasonably) well-run (minutes, chairs, time-capped, etc), but ultimately unnecessary in the first place. People leave with action items but feel as if the whole exercise could have been accomplished in half the time with only half the people in the room.

Or a quick email from one person to another.

In my trailing days at Amazon we had a project that was falling behind due to unforeseen team attrition. The more it fell behind the more meetings were called - one by each stakeholder - to discuss why the project was behind and what can be done to solve it. Ultimately this just meant more engineers in a room explaining things to a lineup of PMs rather than writing some damned code. A few months of this and I decided it was time for me to attrition out.

Before worrying about whether or not your meeting has an agenda, a chair, and set times, figure out if you need the meeting at all.

Hehe, I used to work at a place where it seemed like the only purpose of a meeting was to schedule another meeting at the end.

I've been in meetings where we schedule meetings to talk about the time it will take to come up with the plan to allocate developer time to coming up with a plan of how to tackle a problem.

I found it hilarious because (thankfully) that part of the meeting was nothing to do with me.

I'm now a contractor. I do the tech stuff and I do it well, and nobody involves me in meetings because I'm not part of the company and I don't have to care!

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