

A Programmer's Work-day - r11t
http://climbing-the-hill.blogspot.com/2009/04/programmers-work-day.html

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mannicken
Schedule of a bipolar programmer (me):

Spent N days working 12 hours a day and enjoying it as hell.

Spent next N days watching sitcoms, playing Quake 3, chatting with people,
learning new technology (passively), and being generaly apathetic and
depressed.

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3pt14159
While not a programmer per se (I do data "stuff" like assembling reports,
analyzing correlations, split tests) when I need to write code for an analysis
I just come in extra early (0630) or stay extra late (2300) otherwise the
meetings/phone calls/IMs/blah just completely kill my focus. That one day
every couple weeks is where I get 50% of my real work done. I think it is far
better to work one day with 5 hours more work than 5 days with 1 hour each.
Otherwise any one of my numerous bosses may stay an extra hour late and
interrupt my work flow when I'm actually trying to get stuff done.

~~~
nfriedly
I rarely sign on to IM while I'm working and if I do, I make sure to do it as
invisible. It's just too much of a distraction.

Back when I worked in an office, my boss was pretty good about keeping me off
the phone and out of meetings. Being self employed these days, meetings aren't
as much trouble.

The phone still gets me sometimes, but it's usually something important.

~~~
3pt14159
I have to sign into IM at work, it is what we use to talk to each other when
we are too lazy to get up :)

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kiba
While I don't have a job per see, I once did a 30 day experiment of time-
boxing and scheduling.

I did 4 hours every day. So each week, I clocked 28 hours per week. The hours
were choked full of coding effort.

Mostly, I encountered difficult obstacles that would slow me for a day or two.
I couldn't just solve it siting around so I go around to coding different
projects.

It was actually a little understatement. I did a programming session in the
middle of the experiment when I tried to develop a game in 48 hours for a
contest. By the time I finish the project, I have a hard time protoyping newer
versions of the game so I got something like last place.

I did a the same thing for a week back in the beginning of April. I ended up
releasing a new version of a game I made but I worked really late. Mostly it
is because I procrastinate until the last minutes. So quality of life suffered
due to that. So I learn to not only time-box but also schedule my time so I
don't end up hacking at strange hours.

I got time management down to a few set of tools that allow me to do a lot of
solid coding. I can't get much better than that.

The actual major hinderance is the fact that I am extremely slow in term of
programming speed. Veteran hackers can complete trivial games even with unit
tests in mere hours while it takes me days or even weeks to accomplish the
same feat.

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intregus
At first I thought this was a very accurate article, but then I realized it
made no mention of sharing hilarious youtube videos.

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iamcalledrob
I feel lucky to have never worked long-term in an environment like this.

Quite often middle management doesn't feel the need to know what the process
is (or rather, they can't grasp what goes on, so they become defensive), and
so they lose touch and cause this despondency..

I think management in these places needs to wise up to how developers work.
That way us devs are kept happy and stimulated (and don't spend all day on
HN/digg/reddit), and they get results.

But alas, I'm sure nothing can break habits like sending emails in 12pt comic
sans.

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edw519
"If you really need to have an 8 hour work day for some reason, you'll only
find that the extra two hours ends up going into work-place play or dawdling"

Either you don't have enough to do or aren't passionate enough about what
you're working on. What a shame. Start a business and have the opposite
problem. There won't be enough hours in the day.

~~~
windsurfer
Well, you're here on HN...

~~~
kirubakaran
With 13347 karma, 2190 comments and 1245 submissions! :-)

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lallysingh
Usually I find that there's plenty of non-programming, semicognitive work to
do that hits another part of the brain. E.g. testing strategies, good ways to
properly document a system, etc.

Coding's just one part of the brain. Other parts are still ready to go.

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octane
It's really simple.

Once the money starts flowing, it's hard for it to stop. Hence, laziness.

Getting it started flowing is the tricky part.

