Hacker News Reader

Comment by 31reasons | Hacker News Reader

But here is what goes through the mind of a manager who never been a programmer:

If John is working only 4 hours coding everyday and gets stuff done. He can do double in 8 hours. So I should ask John to not goof around and focus on getting more things done.

View on HN

I have a technical boss now whereas before I had a non technical one. My previous boss would have me stay till 10 or 11 sometimes. My new boss lets me go home and take naps in the middle of the day. My productivity has been roughly the same at both places.

Non-technical co-founders need to avoid this way of thinking too. It's detrimental to the personal relationship and any potential for a positive outcome.

And while there are severely diminishing returns on more hours worked, there is of course an optimum. Most of us will get more done working five hours a day then five minutes.

So the challenge seems to be finding the ideal and somehow getting management to understand/believe it.

I think the challenge there is that the "optimum" varies from day to day. Some days, John might not need to be in the office for more than 5 minutes - the time to check and respond to emails - and other days he might need to be in there 12 hours as he dumps the contents of his brain into an implementation.

You don't hire those managers in a company that values 4 day work weeks.

> But here is what goes through the mind of a manager who never been a programmer:

That's why every technical manager should have a technical background.

:( I know a lot of non-programmer managers who act nothing like that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com