

Ask HN: How productive are you? - frickskit

I&#x27;m a programmer at a trading firm, and I am interested in how productive or unproductive people in this industry are. I know it&#x27;s hard to quantify productivity and even more so comparing across industries and projects, but some anecdotes could help paint the picture.<p>Do you sometimes spend a whole day working on a supposedly &quot;simple&quot; bug fix? Do you spend most of the day in meetings? How many hours do you work<i>? How has this changed over your career?<p></i>I know productivity is not measured in hours.
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collyw
This is something I have noticed a lot over the last three years.

I started at a sequencing centre to build the database for them from scratch.
I decided to give Django a try. That took up a bit more time for the first
couple of months as I was learning the concepts. But once I started to get to
know it (and realized that a lot of the problems I was coding had already been
implemented as part of the framework - a lot better than I had done), my
productivity rocketed. The admin interface gave me 3/4 of what we were looking
for without much effort at all.

I was in an office with another girl, so basically if we were talking to each
other that was the only interruptions.

Three years later. We are four of us crammed into the same office. Management
regularly comes down to discuss things with one person (despite having a big
office upstairs for that sort of thing). Makes concentrating on a learning new
feature difficult. The database is now central to running of the organization,
so I am constantly bugged to fix excel upload errors (parsing excels was
supposed to be a temporary solution, until I got a chance to implement
something better - now it has become a chicken and egg situation - I don't get
the time to code anything better, as I am constantly interrupted by trivial
errors that should have been eliminated by building a proper interface ages
ago).

I know form experience now that I can code a new, moderatly complex web view
to return some results from the database, highlight problems etc in maybe
three or four days, if I am uninterrupted. Now try doing that with constant
"can you see what my excel errors is?" (honestly - its says in the big red
error message - "there is nothing in the database matching what you have
entered"). Writing anything that takes more than a day when you are constantly
context switching easily makes me a quarter of the productivity of focusing on
one task.

So I have see myself having a big drop in productivity mainly caused by poor
management decisions in my opinion. As long as its not causing them any direct
pain, then they are happy with the status quo.

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tatalegma
I have similar experiences. Sometimes, as part of a fix for an investigation
like this that I'm tasked with, I simply take the three days and build the
actual correct solution. Or I build part of it, use it to partially automate
what I'm investigating, and then continue to build on it next time a similar
investigation comes up. Once I'm done with the better solution, I present it
to the people who would use it, and transition them towards using that.

It's not always possible depending on the type of organization. A lot of
managers are offended that you would work on something they didn't ask you to
work on, even though they would never think to ask you to work on the thing,
and even though the thing you work on pays for itself over a short period of
time.

Other times I just say fuck it. If you want to pay me to do the same
investigation over and over, I'll mentally check out while I collect my
paycheck and spend my extra time teaching myself skills for my next job.

~~~
makaveli8
+1 on your last sentence. If management can't spare anything to treat you
better then why bother going the extra mile? Gear up for your next (better)
job.

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kendalk
Productivity can't be measured by hours because a single thought can change
the course of a company, or a life... but that thought can take months or
years to develop in order to be "thought."

For example, there is a running joke here on Hacker News about HN being a
time-sink. I disagree. Some of the comments here have altered my thinking
about startups. A single comment can change the course of a life.

Paul Graham's "Beating the Averages" has influenced how many programmers to
pick up Lisp? One essay can change a life, or a company.

Productivity does not accumulate with X hours. It grows in starts, jumps,
leaps and crawls. For those who work with their brains, accomplishment is not
lines of code written, or the number of pages in your business plan.

Productivity is a result of thought, and thought often comes through a lost
art called "leisure."

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PaulKeeble
I would love to be able to wake up on a morning, fill my day with inspiration
and have solutions come to me immediately as I worked and do that for a solid
8 hours and crank out thousands of lines a code every day. Isn't ever going to
happen.

Today I wrote 3 lines, they were really important lines, they took me 4 hours.
3 hours and 59 minutes to work out what had to happen, why and how and 1
minute to type it out. Then I was done for the day. Was it a productive day?
Depends how you look at it really, I could have spent 8 hours writing reams of
code to achieve the same result. I measure how productive today was based on
how many lines of code I didn't write.

~~~
kendalk
> Today I wrote 3 lines, they were really important lines, they took me 4
> hours.

Haskell? :)

Haskell is like a fine wine. It is meant to be sipped.

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kerrsclyde
Productivity can be measured in raw output but it can also be very subjective,
it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking (or having your boss tell) you
have not been productive during a day when actually you have.

Productivity needs to be measured over weeks or better months. An hour, a
morning or a day is too small timeframe to access how productive you have
been.

I write down what has been improved, 5 mins at the end of the day. Code I have
developed, customers I have helped, sales I have made. It's a nice list to
look at later. Easy to forget what you have improved. Writing down
distractions also helps me to look how to eliminate them.

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mrlyc
I'd say I was the most productive when it took me eight hours to write a seven
line shell script. That replaced 2,650 lines of C.

The previous programming team had written a data transfer program with its own
implementation of ftp. I just used the one which was already on the computer.

It took me a while because I had to read the Unix source code to find out if
my program would work. In the days before Google, and even the World Wide Web,
I used a combination of Gopher and WAIS to find a publically available copy.
That was difficult as it had been released only to universities with a licence
saying it must be kept hidden.

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junto
I work for a software solution consultancy. I tend to see productivity come
and go in waves.

New projects => new enthusiasm => more productivity.

Towards the end of projects, and projects that require support and the odd
feature addition tend to have much lower productivity.

~~~
reefoctopus
This is spot on. When I started writing the application I'm working on, it was
as though I could divine new features overnight with little effort. Now, much
of my energy goes to making sure I don't screw myself over with bad design
decisions, fixing bugs, and answering questions about the software. I find
that it is hard to write any code on some days. I'm glad to see this is
common.

~~~
junto
We often see a large "setup" sprint 0 set of tasks when kicking off a project.
That being said, we are working in the MS environment using Visual Studio and
Team Foundation Server.

The setting up of the initial architecture, including ops tasks such as
setting up the build / test servers is a painfully long process. I'd love to
find a way to speed this up. Boilerplate setup would be extremely useful.

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Misiek
My productivity tips:

\- to do lists and pomodoro technique

\- automate everything what can be automated

\- delegate everything what can be delegated

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fauria
Productivity can, at least partially, be measured in hours.

For example, turnover/hours worked, GDP per capita/hours worked, etc.

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frickskit
right, you definitely need the denominator there, that's true.

