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Octopath Traveler, World Cup, sleep.
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Sadly, this stuff has been well known since at least the famous “Peopleware” book of the 1980s, and certainly firmly ensconced into conventional wisdom by the zeros. Facts and new studies are not moving the needle on this one. (My pet theory: tech companies are much more risk-averse than they like to pretend, and doing anything different from your peers is too scary, especially if it costs more.)
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tech companies are much more risk-averse than they like to pretend, and doing anything different from your peers is too scary
I think it’s more active than that. Tech companies want to emulate silicon valley startups. Silicon Valley startups are funded by VCs, who want to check on their investment. At some point, someone decided that open-air offices would 1- show thrifty spending, and 2- show people being busy. From that point on, everyone’s been doing open-air, even when it’s no longer #1 (I’m thinking of some significant remodel work that’s gone into some open-space workplaces, not to mention climate control costs or morale/productivity loss), nor #2 (when open-air offices are as large as football fields).
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It’s not just startups, although I bet most successful startups have open floor plans. Facebook and even Microsoft are moving or have moved to the model.
To quote Dan Luu, speaking of Peopleware:
This book seemed convincing when I read it in college. It even had all sorts of studies backing up what they said. No deadlines is better than having deadlines. Offices are better than cubicles. Basically all devs I talk to agree with this stuff.
But virtually every successful company is run the opposite way. Even Microsoft is remodeling buildings from individual offices to open plan layouts. Could it be that all of this stuff just doesn’t matter that much? If it really is that important, how come companies that are true believers, like Fog Creek, aren’t running roughshod over their competitors?
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I asked the Facilities people at Google about this last year and they told me why they subject us to open plan offices despite knowing we hate them. Apparently the #1 reason is flexibility. They move teams around frequently as they grow so being able to easily defrag space is their top priority.
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That’s long been a reason. I wonder if the answer is to try to make easy to build or tear down spaces that are more like actual offices. Especially with noise resistant material in between the “walls” maybe in form of squares or rectangles that can be shoved and stacked in there. I guess it would look like cubicles that go up to the ceiling with an outer wall, filler, and inner wall. If they have different shapes, windows could be another modular component in some of them if someone desires.
I wonder if anyone has tried something like this.
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I believe this is called survivor bias
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Sure, but if you publish it online don’t advertise it around unless you know it’s 100% correct and useful to others.
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What I’d really love is is WFH say, two or three days a week. The office days would be for meetings and planning. In the rest, I am working or having quick video chats if something comes up.
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Funny enough, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I still have meetings on remote days, but they’re a no brainer. It works pretty great for me because everyone on my team is on par with it, some of them do the same even though they live closer to the office than I do. There are a couple of things that are still remote friendly, but slowly we’re moving them to remote first. Have you tried talking with your team on why you want to work remotely?
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This isn’t news to anybody who has to be involved with Node.js development. This is also an NPM issue, not a Node.js issue, despite how tightly coupled they are. There’s alternative package managers out there (Yarn) that try and solve these problems.
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I don’t disagree with that last statement of yours at all. I’m just saying Node.js isn’t really the problem in and of itself, and there’s people in the Node.js world who are actively looking for better solutions to these problems.
And to be fair, its not really shit code, its just run of the mill average code.
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I’d argue that it is shit code. Shit doesn’t mean its faulty. Good code is both functional and uncomplicated.
The
isEven/isOddshit is deliberately written to use a bitwise operation which makes it a lot less obvious what it’s doing, for this reasoning:everyone knows the i % 2 === 0 solution, I was trying to have fun with bitwise operators
And frankly, JavaScript itself is part of the problem - “is-number” has 10 million downloads for the last 7 days.
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This microoptimization is silly because JavaScript runtimes recognize modulus by a power of 2 and change the generated code accordingly.
The V8 code to do this is here.
The ChakraCore code for this is here, search for isModByPowerOf2.
SpiderMonkey appears to do something similar but the code is harder to track down. -
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Yarn is an alternative dependency resolver, but it uses the exact same package ecosystem as NPM.
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In November of last year, RC announced that they’d be experimenting with “mini” one-week batches. Being away from work for just one week felt very reasonable - it’s about as disruptive as going to a conference, but much more educational! It seemed like my time had come!
Well, this suddenly makes attending the Recurse Center much more appealing.
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I would apply if I could find a project I thought I could focus on! As a mere self-taught web developer, I feel like I’m not ready yet. I have a long way to go in terms of basic knowledge (mostly low level languages, some algorithms) before being able to focus on something meaty for a week. But I would like to do something compiler related.
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As a mere self-taught web developer, I feel like I’m not ready yet.
If you knew you were ready then there wouldn’t be anything to learn. :)
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NAND2Tetris is a pretty popular choice for people wanting to learn more low-level computing. And I don’t think “mere” is a good word to describe someone learning enough of a complex topic with several different paradigms at work like full-stack web dev up to a level that they can be gainfully employed at it.
Edit: Also, I think people see the applying similarly to tech job interviewing. The shape is there, but Recurse doesn’t strongly filter on technical ability. If someone can write programs and want to learn more, that’s enough.
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NAND2Tetris is a pretty popular choice for people wanting to learn more low-level computing.
That is a neat book. It would definitely be a fun project for RC given it covers several areas simultaneously… CPU, compilers, low-level software… without overwhelming reader.
Only thing skimming it made me wonder was what would be next thing to read on that topic to build digital design skills. Something that was an incremental step giving useful skills instead of a huge leap. Did you or anyone else here get a solid recommendation about what to read next?
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I would apply if I could find a project I thought I could focus on!
That’s me. The write-up’s people have done about the RC experience make it seem pretty incredible. I’d love to go there to just chill, focus on some projects, and listen to all those other people are doing. I’m just not sure what one or two things I’d focus on with a whole week of free time and good environment. I’d kind of want to make that time really count with the right projects. Staying focused is also a personal weakness of mine, though, as many have probably noticed.
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That’s good advice. I guess it’s a discipline thing I gotta work out. I’m too easily distracted esp by good learning opportunities. :)
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Employers think the elder employees have families and want more work-life balance, so they won’t work over-time without complaint like fresh graduates.
It’s true. I’m 34 and I do care more about getting a weekend hike in or working on my book than rendering additional hours, for free, unto capitalism. Even in terms of career investment, I’m generally more adept at investing in my own career than some duplicitous corporate manager who says he has my back but is really out for himself.
Older people know more. They’ve made their bad decisions already. (Some of us have made more than enough for two or three lifetimes.) All that stuff makes us better at everything… but harder to take advantage of.
The reason the pre-20th-century geniuses like Keats and Galois peaked so early is… they died. Before 1900, the age of 50 was fairly old and you were very lucky if you got to 60 with your health intact. (It happened; it wasn’t common.) We live in a different era and the intellectual peak seems to be quite late– at least 30, probably around 50– with the decline being extremely slow (if not nonexistent) in people who stay in good health.
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As a 24 year old, I hate the fact that enough people my age work long hours such that it is almost expected of me. Everyone is free to do what they want, but I can’t imagine not having enough hobbies so you willingly fill time doing work. Even with my strict 8 hour schedule I feel like I don’t have enough time to do what I want!
Also, almost every young programmer I’ve seen put long hours to “impress” bosses has failed. Software doesn’t work like that and most spend the extra time tabbing in and out of Reddit anyway.
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I relate to that (as a 26yo that was doing +12h/day). I read some books about work life balance (Off Balance) and others (Dream Manager, The Rythm Of Life) from Matthew Kelly, and then tried to apply.
When I changed job recently, I decided to add a challenge and directly told my future manager that I won’t work more than the legal 8 hours per day. He was comprehensive and even if he overworks a lot, I don’t feel pressured to do the same.
At the beginning coming home earlier was a pain, I wondered what to do, and spent hours reading HN/Lobsters/The Guardian, watching YouTube/Netflix etc…
Then I started to cook a bit more complex stuff and challenged myself to impress my girlfriend with it, I started to contribute on Github (very small things but I cleared myself from computers at home so I do my PR from and iPad now!), I’m reading more than ever, I now sleep much better, probably because I’m out of screens earlier, so I can wake up at 6 and go to the gym…
I really think that if you try to un-focus from work, you’ll find things to do. Play a musical instrument, help a local community, or if you still want to dev, dev for yourself or the community !
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An interesting set of notes. I’m dubious about how much you can rely on this sort of thing. It leaves out a vast swath of the industry - e.g. private repos. I know several companies with huge and established Ruby code bases so I’m not sure I’d say “avoid Ruby”.
I think it’s more interesting to consider what communities are aggressively adopting open source policies. For example, science likes python (e.g. NumPy, SciPy, Jupyter) and python is heavily represented on Github. Does that mean science has embraced uploading more content to places like Github in an open fashion? (Caveat: correlation =/= causation, etc etc).
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The incredible bias here is that Ruby is the core language of GitHub. Their first big project was Rails. At some time, the only community purely happening at GitHub was Ruby. It can only go down from there.
What is happening in this graph is the whole world moving to GitHub, expanding its size extremely and fixing the bias that GitHub had. You can’t read anything notable in that graph. They even admit that factor and still draw that conclusion.
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Unpopular opinion: Could be seen as a good opportunity to stop “gaming”.
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I can only really speak from my own perspective, and that is that I regret to have wasted hours upon hours of my life on games, playing them instead of doing schoolwork or learning something productive, and most of the time being frustrated because of them, since I didn’t play them because they were necessary fun, but because they were made to addict people. Since I decided to stop “gaming” (which I radically distinct from playing games from time to time. Being a “gamer” is a commercial identity!), my life has drastically improved. Now my case might not the usual one, but I still argue that less video games would help everyone. I have had friends who socialized to a minimal degree, since for the most part they could just play games, and avoid being human. Furthermore, I’ve experienced games changing the way people concive of their surrounding world, to the worse I believe. In other cases, video games supplement the failures of the predominant worldview.
All of these things, not to mention the toxic “gamer “”“community””””, have lead me to have a strong anti-“gamer” stance. I know that most people won’t agree with me, and it would be wierd if they would. Nevertheless, I defend the view.
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Depends on what your goals/aspirations in life and how easily the comfort zone of gaming might keep you from achieving them. Many will require hard work or high-friction activities we prefer to avoid. That on top of some dollars that people were about to sink into a high-end, graphics card among other things.
If that doesn’t apply, then this supply-side problem is just blocking expanding on a harmless hobby. At that point, next question is whether they can adapt that hobby to not needing a high-end, graphics card still having fun? Or are they a slave to the man only enjoying what comes with mandatory hardware updates? Or could they switch to a different hobby entirely while still enjoying life?
Why are some of these gamers so mad about graphics cards if they’re in control of their mind and lives?
(Just screwing around. Gamers don’t take me too seriously. Then again, I like building jokes on top of kernels of truth. Hmmmm.)
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Sure there are people who escape reality, but I’d think that people with severe problems managing their lives couldn’t afford expensive hardware.
Even if they overspend on it, it’s not a problem with games or hardware, those are just substitutes for alcohol or drugs or Instagram or TV or whatever.
I haven’t really played shooters or strategy games in a long time, but I’ve understood these games are good for developing reflexes and thinking. As long as they’re not abused like crystal meth.
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People who really like games will just not upgrade and deal with it or play old games. Or consoles. Last year I played a ton of games and I don’t have a gaming PC. I played 3DS, Vita, and PS4. Also IIRC none of the currently popular PC games demand a lot of graphical power.
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I am getting into Rust precisely for CLI apps (among other things, but that is my main motivation), so this was a very interesting read. The post was easy to follow and introduced some new concepts without confusing me.
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I remember all too often getting caught up in the process of completing feature after feature. It’s easy to check a box, complete a task, and move on to the next one. But don’t forget: you’re not a human code generator nor a specification-document paster. A button here, a reverse chronologically sorted list there… buy why? I’m constantly reminding myself to take a step back to ask myself — and my team — why we are even doing a task in the first place.
The biggest challenge I had as a junior was justifying why we were implementing features to begin with. With maturity that changed, but I’m still surprised that so many juniors come into the world of software and are excited to just… close tickets. These folks must be wired differently than me.
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I’m still surprised that so many juniors come into the world of software and are excited to just… close tickets
Because a) we want to prove that we can do work and get things done b) we want to learn new things and get experience. Not all tickets are opportunities to learn something new, but many are. Moreover, the productivity of a junior engineer is more directly correlated to how many tasks they finish than a senior engineer’s. The more you advance in your career the less it matters, but I’ve had more success as a junior engineer in terms of raises and getting respect by closing tickets efficiently.
The biggest challenge I had as a junior was justifying why we were implementing features to begin with
This is a skill that is learned with time, as you said. For better or for worse, in many companies the junior engineers are not tasked with deciding whether a feature is needed or not. In more traditional or downright bad cultures, a junior asking why we need to build X at all (as in, discussing its necessity, not just out of curiosity) might be seen negatively. It’s usually the person above the junior engineer who’s the one that decides what feature gets put on the sprint or what is not worth our time.
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Note that I still agree with the article - you should know why you are building every feature and not work in a vacuum. But as to why people don’t question every feature and just want to close tickets - most people just want to do a good job, get experience, get paid, and go home. So we close tickets and go home.
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I’ll emphasize your answer by saying that not all tickets/features deserves challenges from a junior. Sometimes, you just trust more senior people on the subject, and trusting your peers is a great skill to learn too. You just have to be careful not to code without understanding the context (but sometimes you can just skip this part and still learn many things as stated by the previous commenter)
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This is off-topic, but do you live in Sunset Park? I live here too and was surprised by the blog name.
Anyway, great post. It’s going to take me a few reads to process but there’s a lot of interesting stuff here. Thanks.
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South(ish) BK represent!
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Great article but please be really confident you can live code well - I’ve see many live code presentations go bad or awkward. I personally still prepare code examples or set stuff up so it can’t fail just to be safe.
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Excellent. I never work more than 8 hours a day. Never been asked to or pressured to. If I give notice a few days before, I can leave early (obviously not every week but more than in other places).
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Not a bad observation, I guess, but not all that interesting or new either.
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One problem I’ve noticed is that many junior developers seem to be OK with this. In my experience, they justify it as “paying their dues”.
I did the same early on in my career. Now I work 40 hours and go do something else. I wonder if this is just one of those lessons you have to learn the hard way. That would explain why job postings like these are still around: they work.
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As long as the culture continues to lionize it, as long as companies that demand it face no consequences, then, yes, “the hard way” is the only reliable way to learn it.
But those of us who have already learned it can work to change the culture, and the companies. Blog posts like this are one way of contributing to that work.
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I’m 23 and started working when I was 22. At a startup. An early stage startup. I’ve never worked more than 8 hours and never would - even if I love software programming. I will never understand the mindset of 22-26 year olds who do this, pressured or not. Am I just lucky that no one has asked me to do work long hours?
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I’ve sometimes accepted to put in exceptional extra hours because everything was exploding - on the condition that we’d fix the root cause once found. Otherwise, same thing. I mostly refuse to work more for the same amount for two reasons: I have a family that I care about more than I care about work, and also, if you want me to work more and not actually incentivize that by actually paying me for the extra work, I’m not doing it. Usually, the conversation goes “We’ll need you guys to put in overtime.” and then I’ll reply “Oh, nice, I’m fine with it, as long as it’s paid.” “Never mind.”
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If you are not even aware of what your hourly rate is when you probably have a degree in computer science, then you have only yourself to blame.
Getting young people drunk on an image so they will work for you for free or at a great discount is a proven technique in the charity industry.
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I mean, my “hourly rate” is highly variable. I’m on a salary and have no fixed hours.
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Could use that to get my average hourly rate, I suppose.
Though, how should I count hours when I’m on-call but not working but might need to be working at any moment? There’s a reason salary is just easier :)
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If you have no seperate, explicit arrangement for on-call as a freelancer, you should renegotiate your contract. Different services, different arrangements.
If you are on-call for free and get paid only when a call happens, you negotiated badly. Carrying a pager is a service worth something, you are selling off the right to be called to work at any time. You are not allowed to freely use that time, for example, you are not allowed to drink or get too far away from you computer. It’s not unusual that this is worth 50% of the hourly wage!
If your client thinks these fees are too high, maybe the systems you are on-call for aren’t as mission-critical as they are communicated.
I’m working for a major local enterprise company that - because they thought through that line of thinking in full - has almost no systems in 24 hour support, only 6 to 20.
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I’m an employee, not a freelancer, and I get paid the same oncall or not, called or not, working or not. That’s how salary works – I work enough to make the bosses happy in exchange for a single (very large) number.
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Similarly in that case, I hope your contract has clear phrasing about how much of your workload is on-call, how much not and what your compensation around that is. It is very usual that on-call on weekends is paid higher, so your salary is not necessarily fixed.
(I know how salary works, I have employees with on-call regulations)
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Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that you personally don’t know how salary works – poor wording on my part.
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At a job I had, on-call had specific procedures and expectations, and we’d get a bonus on the paycheck when we’d have to carry the torch, as a compensation that would be paid even if nothing happened. This incentivized us to take care of our shit in such a way that we would only get disturbed during office hours. They also provided a cheap company smartphone that would rotate along with the duty, preconfigured so that you could use it to connect anywhere at any time if it was required.
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Hackathons, at least the US ones that happen in universities, are the opposite of free software. So many of them are ran by for profit companies and sponsored by corporations such that you are more likely to win by using their APIs (e.g. MongoDB is a sponsor so use MongoDB to win!). Couldn’t attend more than two, to be honest.
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It’s the standard corporatisation of a subculture. They figured out how to monetise a bunch of ‘hackers’ getting together to hack and experiment. Needless to say this trend will crowd out the original hackers with the newer more virtue-signalling ‘hackers’ whose primary reason to go there is not the joy of finding a solution to an interesting problem but to advertise themselves as super-coders so they will get hired.
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They figured out how to monetise a bunch of ‘hackers’ getting together to hack and experiment.
You also just described the big, tech companies. I mean, they pay a lot of money but also have that factor of being “cool” or “wide impact.” In reality, they’re getting paid well to subvert or eliminate much of the market for the kind of tech hackers really want. Usually increasing surveillance state’s power, too.
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It’s the standard corporatisation of a subculture. They figured out how to monetise a bunch of ‘hackers’ getting together to hack and experiment
This, 100%
Needless to say this trend will crowd out the original hackers with the newer more virtue-signalling ‘hackers’ whose primary reason to go there is not the joy of finding a solution to an interesting problem but to advertise themselves as super-coders so they will get hired.
The original hackers who leave will do so because they’ve been bitten by it before; the ones who stay will be the ones who haven’t learned the hard way yet.
Plenty of people who love solving interesting problems will show up, because there’s always a new batch of idealistic programmers.
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A good solution is to freely give out commit access to contributors.
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I have found that not to be the case in my experience; when I give people commit access they are still respectful of the overall vision of the project and hesitant to do make changes without getting feedback. Of course, it also means that providing advice re: their ideas still takes a good chunk of maintainer time.
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The author was a great Haskell study group leader - we ended up learning Haskell and developing a small but friendly core group over the weeks.
Hope Germany is treating you well Steven!
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Headphones, turn notifications off, find a way to politely let people know when you don’t want to be disturbed (wearing headphones is a good start), and the rest is self-discipline. Most of my distractions come from me goofing off online, not due to my open office.
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This used to happen to me. Then I bought better headphones. Problem was solved. I’ve spent thousands of dollars (USD) on headphones to find what I felt were the best for me and my use. I used to be a headphone snob. I am now content and liquidated my collection keeping only 3: Denon D7000, Sony MDR-1R (I imported from Japan), and the Beoplay H6 (2nd generation)
Those are my 3 favorites and I’m honestly perfectly content with and have been for at least a couple years. I can go all day with any of the 3 on my head and not really notice.
Marco’s review of the Beoplay H6 2nd Generation: https://marco.org/2016/03/02/beoplay-h6-v2-review
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Thank you very much for the advices! I was looking for a new pair of headphones and this is really great!
Regarding my comment, having a good pair of headphones doesn’t change the fact that a marble silence is sometimes nice to work with. I like being in the openspace when I need to collaborate and I don’t mind some noise, when I need to focus deeply, remote at home provides the silence that helps me focus.
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I used to work in a really noisy open space.
I’d wear soft earplugs (from a construction safety supplier) under big over-ear headphones.
Frequently I wouldn’t even have any music playing - the headphones hid the plugs, and provided a socially acceptable explanation for not hearing the people around me.
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The yet-another open-plan office blog post is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.
And it should be repeated over and over until pointy-haired management stops with the open plan office abuse, and people start demanding reasonable working conditions en masse.
Things won’t change until a very successful company or startup says their success was because of their not-open office plans. PHBs follow what the big, successful companies do.
We already have that. Microsoft always gave their employees offices. And they are somewhat successful. Yet no other company ever followed their lead. Go figure.
TBH if I had to tackle one of the management issues today, I’d choose overtime instead of open offices…
Yeah, is anyone ever arguing for those things? I don’t mind the one at my office, but we’re also a very small office with an average of six employees in it. I might like it better if we were even more isolated, but except for my coworkers’ typing, I hardly ever hear anything at all.
It’s not really a big problem until you’re surrounded by people who work on unrelated stuff who like to have loud conversations.
Yes, this is exactly the problem – not the open floor plan itself, but an open floor plan with lack of strategic desk placement.