Comment by gedrap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gedrap | Hacker News Reader

>>> I’ve felt the pull. However, personal motivation to succeed keeps the wheels churning.

I really like your point about motivation.

I'm a freelancer and working from home, and I used to think that nutrition, physical activity etc has a lot to do with it. Yeah sure it does but recently I think at the end of the day, it's just about will power and deep, personal motivation. If you are not enjoying it, no diet will make you more motivated or energetic. It's about an ability to say firm 'no' to distractions. Especially the 'short' ones, because they never tend to be short [0].

Sometimes there is just shit that needs to be done. I mean ugly stuff, like code written by someone else and you have no idea how does it even work in first place or think that the the other programmer was drunk when coding it. Something that your mind says 'I didn't signed up for this shit!'. You just have to focus on it, and get it done. No 'just going to starbucks downstairs', or 'just a cigarette' will help.

Actually, I think one of the best indicator of maturity of software engineer is dealing with unpleasant tasks. Less mature developers try to delay it to the last minute (when bad comes to worse), or impulsively suggest re-writing everything from scratch, etc. Mature developers just get their shit together and get it done.

[0] Once I noticed that the biggest productivity killers are longer than 5min breaks because once you are away, it's so tempting to do one more thing, and then another. I blogged about it "It's all about the short breaks" http://blog.gedrap.me/blog/2014/02/09/its-all-about-the-shor...

With the current market for engineers, if you aren't enjoying your work most of the time, you're doing something wrong and should probably find a more interesting project to work on. Fire yourself if you have to.

That said, good diet, healthy social life, and exercise are of paramount importance to will power. The better balanced your life, the more will power you're going to have.

But it's also important to manage will power. When you're tired, just stop, take a break. Even leave things for tomorrow. You are likely just fooling yourself that you can still get stuff done and wouldn't you rather just take a proper break than spend the next hour or two shuffling your feet and getting neither rested nor getting work done?

As for short breaks -> Timers. Use timers. Seriously, use a timer.

Shameless plug, I've been working on a book about this stuff: http://nightowlsbook.com

Good points!

>>> With the current market for engineers, if you aren't enjoying your work most of the time, you're doing something wrong and should probably find a more interesting project to work on. Fire yourself if you have to.

Yup, I'm starting a new job in 1.5 week, extremely excited :)

>>> Even leave things for tomorrow.

That is also very true, blogged about it too a while ago as well [0]. Trying to get something done for 3hrs can be replaced by 1hr burst next day, as long as 'tomorrow' doesn't become a procrastination. What is important is to make sure that you are actually having a break, your mind is totally away from work.

And yeah, I agree about the timers. I sometimes use a pomodoro timer app and trying to make it a habit, planning to make a physical arduino one. Some day :)

[0] "3. Take a break and don’t feel guilty about it" http://blog.gedrap.me/blog/2014/05/19/4-things-i-learned-the...

> Trying to get something done for 3hrs can be replaced by 1hr burst next day

I've often found that impossible bugs that I struggle with for hours on end and just can't figure out no matter what I do, get solved in 10 minutes next morning.

Now how do I teach this to junior developers? I've worked on teams where juniors will frequently overwork themselves in an effort to "pay their dues" or whatnot, or just because they feel they should offset their lack of skill with stronger work ethics and I am fairly convinced it's counterproductive. But I can't seem to find words to explain this to them. Or maybe I'm wrong and the "leave it for tomorrow" only works when you've reached a certain level of skill.

These are the questions that keep me up at night.

Good point again!

Programming largely is creative, with some degree of standard and quite autopilot code. Creative work can't be produced by staring at a blinking cursor.

I agree with counter productivity, and I strongly agree with companies who approach this with 'just get it done, whenever you want'. Twitter certainly does so, Netflix I believe does.

>>> Or maybe I'm wrong and the "leave it for tomorrow" only works when you've reached a certain level of skill.

I think there is some skill involved, or more accurately, experience. The problems we are solving are often unique but still share something in common. After solving a bunch of them, you have a gut feeling when something's going right, and when you must to take a step back.

And it has to do with corporate people and managers, not everyone understands how programming works. Young developers are afraid to look lazy in front of their non-technical managers. It's often important just to appear working hard, e.g. reading HN in terminal ;)

Second the Timer comment. For me, something as simple as the Pomodoro http://tomato-timer.com/# is really helpful.

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