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Search - "hours != productivity"
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I live in the terminal. I write lots of scripts (Shell, Python, node js) to automate tasks that would take hours to do by my teammates. Recently, I started automating everything that I put my hands on using Ansile: from pointing DNS server to continuons deployment, provisionning a fully customized infrastructure on the cloud using just a single command!
This is because automation gives you super power, the feeling that what you do help tl increase the productivity, reduce bugs etc.. Simply, once mastered, automation is ausome!12 -
Who shares this struggle?
I have a 9-5 development job and I also have a personal web application I am building and plan to bring to production.
There are simply not enough hours in the day. I struggle to find enough time to work on my personal project while still performing well at the 9-5 and spending some time with my family so I'm not absent.
Agh I wish I could pause time for productivity 😂29 -
At one of my previous companies, there was a guy, let's call him X.
X was the ideal employee.
X used to come to office at 8.
X used to go to sleep in AC office.
X used to wake up at 10 when everyone started coming in.
X used to play Uno and Pokemon Go till 6.
X was a master in Uno and Pokemon Go.
X used to wait till 8 to get free cab facility.
X didn't do one single productive piece of shit whole day.
My boss loved X Because he came early and left late.
My boss didn't give a damn if that person even switched on his laptop or not.
My boss didn't care about productivity.
I didn't come on time and didn't leave on time (I travelled in non-traffic hours)
I slogged my ass off because I really wanted to learn.
My boss scolded me, asked to be like X.
This was the last straw.
I resigned the next day.
I never wanted to be like X. Seeing him daily, motivated me so much.
When I worked, I focussed on it, I didn't keep checking the clock waiting for it to hit 5 pm.
I aimed for productivity, set realistic targets and always achieved them, no matter what.
My boss was an a--hole. I met X and Boss recently. Both are still in the same role, just scraping through.
Felt really good that I worked hard and have achieved something in life ^_^13 -
To save server cost and developers' productivity, devRant should have an intentional downtime of 3 to 6 hours daily :37
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Manager: What the heck are you guys doing? Pair programming?! That would halve the team productivity!!!
We:
Manager: Alright, Let's do a "quick" four hours meeting. Everyone in the company MUST attend!
We:3 -
Stuck on a problem for 2 hours, walk away for a coffee, return to fix it in 2 mins.
Should take breaks every 5 mins to maximize productivity.8 -
I rewrote my resume. It is getting shorter and shorter. Scary.
But I was thinking, that during interviews, I never get to ask the important questions. Like, I do need to ask a few things that are important for me. Those that are not written in their websites, and they will do their best to hide.
So I came up with a list of questions:
1. Do you pay for overtime work? what is the basis of pay? hours or work-module? how realistic are the work-modules?
2. Have you ever had issues with employees from minority groups?
3. How do you address employee's professional concerns? for example, about technological debt.
4. what's the policy for meeting and daily interruptions during brain-work? Are people ever forced to participate in meetings that could be summed up in emails? what's the company policy for initiating a meeting?
5. Who designs the software? Are the requirements always non-negotiable? do the direct developers have a say in design matters?
6. How close are job requirements (as advertised) to actual tasks I need to perform?
7. What's the company policy for motivating the employees?
8. How does the company deal with mental health issues? is it acceptable for people to take leaves due to mental health issues? Has anyone ever done it?
9. How does the company deal with individual needs for working methods and space? Specifically, how does that apply to meetings? Do you have company-wide meetings? How often are they? What's the impact on productivity? Can employees not participate? Do they have to have an excuse to not participate?
10. Do developers get to develop their skills during worktime often? Or is it a "do it in your own free time" kind of thing? Are there any resources available to those who want to develop their skills further? Is it included in the career planning and employee performance review?
11. Assume I work for your company for a year. What are the benefits I can potentially gain in a year from working here, aside from adding a line of work experience to my resume?
12. Does the company provide any form of free feminine hygiene products in the bathroom?
Any questions I should add?92 -
Productivity struggles... Am I the only one who is super productive between 7am - 12:30pm. And after those hours I'm near useless 😞. Brain is to tired to solve problems effectively.
How do you guys combat the afternoon slump/drain?21 -
Me: We should use typescript to enhance our readability and productivity.
Senior dev: No... We don't want to use any other languages except JavaScript.
(A month later)
Too many catch, race conditions and hidden bugs left. 5 hours of debugging16 -
I just had a chat with the CEO (I'll call him John) of the company I work at. I was trying to get a real alignment on what I need to do to be a valuable resource to this company. They promoted me (without a raise in pay) to a different (management) role, and I do not know what I need to do to be the best in this role.
During the discussion, the CEO failed to provide any usable metrics, or a way to track those, except for phrases like "higher productivity" and "higher quality". How to track? No idea.
So, at this point, me being the idiot I am, wanted to make things explicit:
*Me: Okay, so what if I request for a 20% raise six months from now, what metrics will you look at to decide whether to give me the raise.
(My last raise was a big one, more than 100% or so, more than a year ago. That was a dev role, and I was paid 2 cents earlier, so the doubling to 4 cents wasn't really a big deal.)
John went on a long rant on how people just expect raises every year, inflation, etc. All good and fine.
But then he mentioned something strange.
*John: ...and you know, for the last three years, there has been a race to retain resources. During this race, many companies, including us, had to pay people WAY MORE THAN THEIR VALUE to retain them. These people are going to be the first to be fired during cost-cutting as they are the most expensive resources at the company without any proven value. These people should not expect raises to come soon, and if they do expect that, they need to prove the value themselves.
Now, I, being a simpleton, am wondering how is it fair for an organization to pay someone "more than their value" to retain them once so that they can just be fired two years later. How did the company decide the value of such employees to begin with?
And all this is ignoring the fact that in the company there are no metrics, no KPIs, and performance of a person is how much the CEO likes that guy. How TF the people who joined a year ago and never interacted with the CEO prove their worth?
Developers are building PowerPoints and configuring JIRA/Confluence/Laptops of Sales team, project managers are delegating management to developers and decision-making to the CEO, Technical architect is building requirements documents, Business Analyst is the same person as the QA team lead (and badly stretched), and the Release Manager is the Product Technical Admin that cannot write one sentence in English. And then we got 3.8 hours in meetings every DAY. Why TF are Dev Managers in "QA KPI Meeting"? Why are "developers" writing documentation on "How to create meeting notes at <company>"?
And, in this hell-storm, how does one really demonstrate one's value?15 -
That feeling you get when you write an automation package on top of selenium and python that at a press of a button runs through an entire User Checkout process 😍
Oh the hours this is going to save me.
Now to see what else I can automate in my day to day life.3 -
I work for a small company with about 10 employees working full-time in the office. We all report directly to the CEO, Phil. When the pandemic hit, Phil went into full panic mode and had us all move our desks 12+ feet apart, wash our hands every 20 minutes, sterilize everything in between uses, etc. Nothing super weird, and better than having no reaction at all, but it was a hypervigilant process that made me expect him to be very accommodating when our state went on lockdown.
Boy, was I wrong. Our industry is considered essential so we’re still open, but Phil is being odd when it comes to working from home. For background, about 95% of our work can be done remotely. The other 5% would require about 15 minutes in the office once a week. I was the first one to pose the idea of working from home and Phil nervously agreed, but only let do it three days a week. My coworkers were given similar instructions but were “encouraged to come in every day, if possible.” A few of them do.
Since then, Phil has gotten pretty weird about the situation. He refers to people who are working from home as being “off work” (which is NOT the case, we are all working and available while at home, which he knows because he calls us for work-related things during work hours!). Today, Phil asked me if my coworker Travis was in his office, and I said Travis was working from home, and Phil replied in a sour tone, “So he’s not working then, great.” He has made similar comments about my other coworkers. When I’m working from home, he’ll call me and ask in a sarcastic tone, “What are you even working on today?” Or he’ll give me an assignment and end with, “Can you actually do work on this today? I need you working.” One time, he called while I was in the bathroom and when I called him back less than five minutes later, I was told that I “need to be available and not screwing around.”
The weirdest thing is that none of us has had productivity problems! My job is such that I can tell when anyone is slacking even a little and I haven’t noticed any issues. Personally, I’ve actually been MORE productive! And I’ve never been accused of “screwing around” while at the office before, so this attitude has baffled me.
He is so convinced that we aren’t working that he cut our work-from-home time down two days a couple weeks ago, and now it’s being cut down to one day as of next week – when COVID cases are higher in our city than ever!
My guess is that because Phil isn’t physically seeing us work, he assumes we aren’t working. CCing him on stuff to leave “proof” doesn’t work because he doesn’t read his email. He is also naturally a nightmare of a micromanager (and an across-the-office yeller) so not being as “in control” is probably freaking him out. But what is the best way to handle this?10 -
Day 7 post turning 30:
I can feel the boomer mentality kicking in at full strength.
I find myself talking to people about how 90's music was so great and kids these days won't get to appreciate it.
I see so many people with jobs who are significantly younger than me.
I sleep a couple hours more than I used to.
I live a routine life which is how I don't feel time passing by me.
I hear a voice inside my head telling me to quit gym because i am gonna grow weak anyway. Also, it would help with my productivity.13 -
Sometimes, I really fucking hate Windows.
Having trialled Linux for a week on a spare HDD, I wanted to move to a proper dual boot with Windows on my SSD, and I decided I may as well downgrade to Windows 7 at the same time (10 had started to really annoy me).
Booting into the initial USB yielded an unresponsive mouse and keyboard. Hmm, not a great start. Turns out the Windows install USB doesn't like the rear USB ports or the wireless mouse. Strange but plugged in a spare USB mouse into the front and could install Windows.
This install was very unhappy about not having SP1 - to the point where I couldn't even install the network drivers so I could download SP1. Fine, I just downloaded an ISO with SP1 on my Mac.
Then I discovered that you can only really make a Windows USB with Windows. But I've just removed both my Windows and Linux partitions so I can reinstall them ...
After hours of searching and trying to create a bootable USB on my Mac, I finally give up and install a trial of Parallels. So I ended up using the same ISO to install a VM of Windows on my Mac, so I can create a bootable USB, so I can install Windows on my desktop. Well done Microsoft ...
And then I needed to install various drivers for the install to be even remotely useable.
To top it all off: Linux just worked. The keyboard and wireless mouse worked when installing. I didn't need to do any additional set up to be able to use it all. It can even use all 3 monitors, rather than just the 2 that Windows recognises for some bizarre reason.
Thanks to Windows being special, I've lost a day of productivity 😡16 -
Elon musk has shown himself to be a terrible person, a worse manager and someone who hasn't a clue of what a code review is. A summarily fires so many people that he can't find someone to open the doors for his big in person meeting or the vet the badges. He offers 3 months termination pay or you can work 12 hours a day 7 days a week hardcore. But none of the payroll people are around anymore either. Critical subsystems have not a single engineer left to work on them. He's paranoid that employees will sabotage the software. But I think he's doing such a good job it would be impossible to tell that anyone else was helping him.
An engineer wrote a prescient seven page report listing problems ahead including user verification. So Elon twit-fired him.
Also entirely predictable is the stress that the world cup will put on the system beginning today, I believe. He doesn't "like" microservices.
I work for the psychiatrist once who barely needed to sleep. Maybe Elon can function with 12-hour days week in week out. But it's cool to think you're going to squeeze substantially more work out of people by doubling their hours. More likely you will more than double their errors and what will that do to you budget? 50 years ago IBM determined that the best way to improve programmer productivity was to give each one their own office.
I can't believe he's whining over spending 13 million dollars a year on food. That is so far from being a strategic item. Soapbox out.28 -
A guy came from another city, just to teach a little bit on how to improve productivity, and after almost 2 hours of him telling stories about his life and career, in five minutes he told us to delete games and facebook from our cellphones, and only focus on learning and work related apps... And He tried to sell us the complete series of books and videos with the full content on productivity in the end...4
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Fuck me sideways. I work for a small business doing most of their IT work, a lot of which is in-house software development. Today I was working on a feature of our employee schedule system that I wrote and for the last couple of hours, my laptop (which is my dev machine) kept freezing up on me every ten minutes or so... 😬
Well, I finally found the cause, but only after running apt-get update/upgrade to see if updating fixed the issue. I haven't updated in a LONG time... Productivity is not on the agenda for today I suppose.5 -
developer makes a "missed-a-semicolon"-kind of mistake that brings your non-production infrastructure down.
manager goes crazy. rallies the whole team into a meeting to find "whom to hold accountable for this stupid mistake" ( read : whom should I blame? ).
spend 1-hour to investigate the problem. send out another developer to fix the problem.
... continue digging ...
( with every step in the software development lifecycle handbook; the only step missing was to pull the handbook itself out )
finds that the developer followed the development process well ( no hoops jumped ).
the error was missed during the code review because the reviewer didn't actually "review" the code, but reported that they had "reviewed and merged" the code
get asked why we're all spending time trying to fix a problem that occurred in a non-production environment. apparently, now it is about figuring out the root cause so that it doesn't happen in production.
we're ALL now staring at the SAME pull request. now the manager is suddenly more mad because the developer used brackets to indicate the pseudo-path where the change occurred.
"WHY WOULD YOU WASTE 30-SECONDS PUTTING ALL THOSE BRACES? YOU'RE ALREADY ON A BRANCH!"
PS : the reason I didn't quote any of the manager's words until the end was because they were screaming all along, so, I'd have to type in ALL CAPS-case. I'm a CAPS-case-hater by-default ( except for the singular use of "I" ( eye; indicating myself ) )
WTF? I mean, walk your temper off first ( I don't mean literally, right now; for now, consider it a figure of speech. I wish I could ask you to do it literally; but no, I'm not that much of a sadist just yet ). Then come back and decide what you actually want to be pissed about. Then think more; about whether you want to kill everyone else's productivity by rallying the entire team ( OK, I'm exaggerating, it's a small team of 4 people; excluding the manager ) to look at an issue that happened in a non-production environment.
At the end of the week, you're still going to come back and say we're behind schedule because we didn't get any work done.
Well, here's 4 hours of our time consumed away by you.
This manager also has a habit of saying, "getting on X's case". Even if it is a discussion ( and not a debate ). What is that supposed to mean? Did X commit such a grave crime that they need to be condemned to hell?
I miss my old organization where there was a strict no-blame policy. Their strategy was, "OK, we have an issue, let's fix it and move on."
I've gotten involved ( not caused it ) in even bigger issues ( like an almost-data-breach ) and nobody ever pointed a finger at another person.
Even though we all knew who caused the issue. Some even went beyond and defended the person. Like, "Them. No, that's not possible. They won't do such dumb mistakes. They're very thorough with their work."
No one even talked about the person behind their back either ( at least I wasn't involved in any such conversation ). Even later, after the whole issue had settled down. I don't think people brought it up later either ( though it was kind of a hush-hush need-to-know event )
Now I realize the other unsaid-advantage of the no-blame policy. You don't lose 4 hours of your so-called "quarantine productivity". We're already short on productivity. Please don't add anymore. 🙏11 -
I have to comment, how the fuck do you guys stay up so late and work for so long into the night? It doesn't matter how much caffeine is in my system, my productivity eventually just reaches absolute zero and I can't go on without sleep. And that's being awake for like, 18 hours. At most! I'm frankly kind of jealous.
But hey, if you are that type, just remember sleep is just as important as food and water. If you've been up more than a day, it's probably time for bed. Your brain will thank you. :) </psa>4 -
This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.
The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;
Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.
I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.
And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.
Yay. Thanks for reading :)2 -
After 13 months of 12 hour days going back to 7 hours, how will I explain productivity going up... (Been burnt out for last 10 months)4
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So, first: I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to code and love to think I know everything.
We had a group project at university and me being laid back but unknown to the other people, the "rest" of them was together with me in a group. We got to know each other and actually we were a pretty cool group. I guess "the rest" in a computer science course means you get the cool guys.^^
1/6 of us did ever code in C# and 2/6 even knows what an engine is and how unity works. I was in both sixths, got group leader somehow (if you'd know me from school. Omg. I was that one guy not knowing what went on, saying my two sentences at the presentation and took the B-.:D), so what to do to have a nice 2 weeks with them?
We did a crash course, I taught them some basics and everything.
The point is, i was hella nervous and i really get anxious if something is expected from me.
Long story short, I talked a whole week for 5-7 hours straight without real pauses and eating wayyy less a man should. Dude I was literally dead on my way home on friday evening. I felt like I would fall over any fucken second, i was all shakey, dizzy as hell, weird vision, everything. It felt like I was about to die on the spot.
I got home though, ate like 1/2 kilograms of pasta and felt myself coming back to life.:D
What to learn from this:
Keep the fuck calm, do pauses, drink and eat enough and don't rush all in for a fucken week without real rest..^^
It fucks you up and doesn't do anything good for your productivity.
We got an A btw, so in the end, all went good.(: -
My workplace has been forcing me to work everyday for almost a month now. I've been working at least 8-10 hours from Saturday to Thursday, and 2-3 hours on Friday as well. I'm so exhausted. I can't sleep properly. All I do is work. I have no time left to do things that I want to enjoy. I tried coding today but I'm too exhausted to do it. I was literally at 0 productivity today. I hate seeing my computer now. I don't know how to overcome this especially during the current lockdown situation. The work I do is not valued or appreciated and it's mentally breaking me honestly. I don't know what I want anymore. For sure another job but I need at least a temporary fix till the lockdown is over.
For those who know me or read through my profile, yup it's the same company. The reason I haven't left them even after all this is because this is a really tough time for me financially and I have no other sources of income and right now at my place there are no job opportunities. So the only option is to continue with the existing work place.6 -
its day 4 of updating documentation and consolidating data.
The webclient has broken on average 4 times a day.
The database took 20+ seconds on updating a password entry.
I explained to my boss the real cost of interrupting my attention with these pauses. I figure it's caused my productivity to go from record high last week to being literally losing about 4 hours a day lost, plus extra time in having to go back through and verify things worked.
The technicians and developers who are working on fixing the database system are apparently quitting left right and center; their company acquired it awhile back, so they don't actually have native developers on it. Yet they still are pushing out new integration features rather than fixing anything.
Yesterday, one of the other people on the documentation project lost half a days work due to the angular updating the local cache, but it never reaching the backend. He came back from lunch, reopened his browser, and all his work was gone. (at least thats what we think happened). So we are hard resetting the program every 10 minutes or so just to make sure it is updating the backend.
The good news is that when it is done, we theoretically will be able to use this to cut back onboarding time and update times by about half, and it'll mean our new nano-server deployment project should be able to spin out with standards that can be referenced properly by everyone, not just the guy with the powershell script that he tinkered with for a particular project and never told anyone else what he did.
Theoretically. -
Okay so this is my first desk job. I'm experiencing some personal issues and wondering if they are normal, what you do to combat them, etc.
First of all, some days, I literally almost fall asleep on the job. Caffeine doesn't work much. I know it's just my sleep schedule but what should I do in this situation? What if I actually do fall asleep?
Secondly, I'm finding that my productivity only exists in bursts. I'll do three hours of work in 10 minutes, and then 10 minutes of work in three hours. I can't just catch a stride. How do I become more consistently productive? Should I be more consistent?
My legs hurt. Sitting all day is not for me. I guess this is more situation to situation, and I do walk almost 6k steps a day on my breaks, but it really doesn't feel great most of the day.9 -
Is it normal for productivity to wildly fluctuate from one week, or even one day, to the next? There are days where I hardly get a couple of hours of real work in and others where it's eight hours straight, and I find it hard to "justify" to myself why the former happens if I'm capable of the latter.5
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Business logic:
Meeting starts at 9:45 AM. They only really wanna talk about the features they have on the horizon and how innovative and distruptive and rich we'll be. We spend 10, maybe 15 minutes talking about UI and details of the feaure. The meeting ends a few minutes before 12, so that's 2 hours of lunch (I wanna respect the schedules we had pre-covid to keep that rhythm). I start working again at 2 PM, but 15 minutes later, I get called again by one of the managers to hear more about this new great new idea they have.
So I work about 7-9 hours a day. But HR and management want to spend 3 of those hours. Suggestion: we'd improve our productivity by about 35% if we cut those daily meetings.6 -
Just spent 4 hours working on a somewhat complex restructuring of my current project that, when boiled down totals about 50 new or modified lines.
While I realize that line count != productivity, all the testing and reworking over that period has me feeling like there should be more to show for it.
But then, there's the fact that it's working properly as it's supposed to now, so I guess it's a win in the end.1 -
I usually only work for a couple of hours at a time. I will work for a bit, then take 15 to 30 minutes playing a game or riding the motorcycle. I found that this raises my productivity and I also got more done faster believe it or not.
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People just can’t show up on time. I respect people’s time and I do not waste a minute of anyone s time. I do not like it. Time is a precious resource and we should all treat it as such. I expect the same from other people too.
There was a meeting supposed to happen a month or so back. Me and another guy. This meeting was basically giving him the resource utilization and some cost related details for the budget our team used up. They wanted a more granular report than the generic ones we submitted.
He scheduled it once and about ten minutes before he cancelled it. Fair enough.
A week later he sent an invite and the next day he cancelled it a few hours before the meeting. Fair enough I’m still not pissed.
A month or so since the first scheduled meeting, he scheduled a meeting and I turn up and he s not there and I wait for about half hour before I leave. Next day I get an email saying he s sorry. Now I’m pissed.
A couple weeks back he schedules a meeting and I turn up and I could see through the glass door and he s talking to someone in the room he s in. He signals to me to wait for five minutes. It takes about 20. Finally I go in and he s relieved so he can finally get the data from me. I tell him I waited for twenty minutes and I have to somewhere and asked him to reschedule the meeting. He asks when and I tell him a time where I know he won’t turn up. About 8 30 in the morning. He says yes.
Next day I show up he s not there and I wait for ten minutes and just he s walking in to the floor I exit the room and run to my place. He comes over and asks and I tell him I waited for sometime and I’m busy now and he mumbles and goes away.
By this time it is already a week or so after the deadline. The bigger boss from finance turns up and asks me why I haven’t given them the data I asked for. I tell him they schedule meetings and don’t turn up on time and my other work is getting affected productivity blah blah and he says okay make the report and give it to me. I tell him no I’m not wasting anymore time on this.
He goes to my boss creates a little ruckus my boss comes over and he goes wtf. I tell him what happened. He says it’s okay give them the report. I’m like I don’t know where I kept it must be somewhere I can’t waste anymore time on this. Guy from finance joins us at this point and angrily says he’ll find it himself and don’t need our help anymore.
The file is in my laptop I use for travel. Just a local copy. Zero fucking backups. And I just deleted it.
Fuck. You.1 -
If you’re struggling with productivity:
[1] Wake up early & Exercise
Waking up early means getting most of the work done as soon as you start your day. This sets a routine for you.
Doing a high-intensity workout early in the morning can kill laziness and make you feel productive.
[2] Divide the day into three parts
Do the most work in the morning hours i.e 6 am to 11 am.
Keep the 12 pm - 3 pm for work that requires less energy. Evenings can be utilised to finish minor tasks.
[3] Make a timetable
A proper timetable or To-Do is a good way to keep a track of your daily routine.
Tick off the work you've completed and you'll feel you've been productive.
[4] Follow people who motivate you to work
If you waste time scrolling on social media, make sure to follow people who instantly motivate you to work and take action.
[5] Update or shift workspace
Your workspace is where you spend most of your time, so make sure it makes you feel motivated to work.
In case you are bored of your workspace, shift it to a new room, preferably that has windows for fresh air.10 -
When updating the activities log:
- Working in the clients report feature 8:00 am - 9:30
- Improving slow query 9: 45 am 10: 45 am
- Filling this piece of shit because my boss cares what other departments say and wants to demonstrate that we are actually working since his a fucking square-minded dinasour who thinks more hours = more productivity FML 11:00 am - 11:15 am1 -
Without a break this would probably be around 4 hours. After that I just loose all productivity. So there so is really no point in forcing it any further.
For working without sleep I have regular done stretches as long as 32 hours. With just breaks for food and a quick walk around. To keep my body awake.
Why you probably ask yourself, well this has several reasons. For me to get in the "zone" I have to be awake for at least 12 hours. I'm not sure why this is, but the combination of being too tired to get distracted and the increase in dopamine from sleep deprivation. Is I think what makes for this, or by now it might just be a placebo. But well it works for me.
So when a deadline gets near and I'm not going to be able to make it, which used to happen a lot because I used to have a lot of migraines. I would start working in the morning, trying to get things done but not being to able to. Then after a full workday would take a dinner break and get back in the office, at this point I get in the zone and time flies by as I work through the night. Next morning people are coming back in the office and I start another workday.
I try to plan this so I have a lot of meetings or other social work. I get really social and chatty after being awake for more then 24 hours. Because my problem solving skills have really declined after being awake for so long.
Now when I still used to drink, I would after this workday get some dinner and go out to a bar to have drinks with friends. To celebrate me having made my deadline and well I'm really social from being awake so long. And I stop overthinking everything.
Still looking for a way to get in the zone before being awake for so long, so any tips are welcome! -
!rant
So, when I was young, I wanted to be a freelancing nomad. You know, live the live, work remote and travel.
But I didn't have the bones to pursue that. After 10 years of struggling as a normal "programmer", I did a little of everything. I did normal boring "erp maintenance" in C#, Oracle and some legacy stuff called Visual WEB GUI , which was fun, but required a full 9,5 hours work day, 8:00 am to 6:30pm, and the bosses where squares, and I was young and wanted to try something out of the corporate world.
Then I did some work for a newly funded consulting company that used python, Django, and postgresql, but the bosses promised a lot and delivered none, (I was supposed to work backend and have frontend support, which I did not have, and that hurt my productivity and bosses instead of looking at what they promised but did not deliver, they just discounted my salary 3 months in a row, so Bye bye MFs!!
Then I did some remote work for some guys, that, I managed to sustain for a whole year, the pay was good, the stack was simple, just node.js and pug templates, that gig was good, but communication with the bosses was hard, and eventually things started to get hard for them and me, and we had to say farewell to each other, I miss those guys. This is the only time I remember having fun working, I could work whenever I wanted, I only had to reach the weekly goals, and then my time was mine, I could work from home in the odd hours, or rent a chair in a co working space if I wanted to socialize.
Then fate got me one big gig with a multinational company, and I could hire some people, but I delegated too much and was asking too little of myself, and that project eventually died because I did not know how to negotiate.
So, I quit the whole entrepreneur idea, and got a public job at my University, I was a public employee with all the perks, but none of the fun, I just had to clock-in, work, and clock-out. That experience led me to discover a lot of myself, I worked as a public employee for a year and a half, and in that time, I discovered more about myself than what I learnt in 27 years of previous life experience.
Then, I grew bored of that life, and wanted some action, and I found more than enough fun in a VC funded startup ran by young narcissists that did not have a clue of what they were doing, I helped them organize themselves into "closing stuff", you know, finish the things you say you have finished. Just to give you an idea of what it was like before I got there, the were working for 3 months already on this project, they had on paper 50% of the system done and working, when I tried to use the app, I couldn't even sign-up without hacking some database commands, (this was supposedly done). So I spent a month there teaching these guys how to finish stuff, they got, Sign Up, (their sign up was a mess, it is one of those KYC rich things, that financial apps have), Login, and some core functionality working in a month, while in the previous 4 months they only did parallel work, writing endpoints that were not tried, and an app that did not communicate with the backend. But the bosses weren't happy with me, because I told them time and time again that we were not going to reach the goal they needed to reach to keep receiving funds from the investors, and I had to quit before it became a mayhem of toxic employer/employee relationship.
So now I decided to re-engage with life, I have funds to survive about a month and half, I have a good line of credit in case I need some more funds, and the time of the world.
So wish me luck!!! And I'll be posting often, because I would like opinions, hear from people with similar life experiences and share anecdotes.
Next post, it's going to be about how I discovered taskwarrior, and how implemented my first weekend following some of the aspects of GTD to do all my housekeeping chores, because, I think that organizing myself will be key to survive as a freelancer nomad. -
Am I stupid? Do you know how many hours I've spent filling in forms for tests?
Why did I never think of using a random auto fill extension before now?
And bam, productivity increases dramatically3 -
That moment when project managers all demand a share of your weekly hours, failing to accept that productivity diminishes exponentially with the number of projects you have to switch between.
-
Have a lot to do so I only sleep for four hours.
Next day take 4 hour nap and waste entire afternoon.
Productivity pre alpha. -
My last company during the interview said I could do hybrid.
It was about 6 hours of public transport a day. One way was 3 trains and one bus. If everything went well. Which it almost never did. Had days where I had to travel 9 hours.
My whole plan was to move closeby but was going to lean on the hybrid to stay somewhat sane.
They said well we kind of want you to work in office only for a bit. I was like fair.
I went hard responding on home for months.
I asked if I could do hybrid now because it got to the point it really started affecting my productivity.
They said nah we dont do that here.
(They literally had hired an third party dev that was fully remote)
Month later I said wasn't it possible to do at least something.
They offered me 1 day every 2 weeks. Like that was gonna make a fucking dent you fucking crownies. I had to act like it was a god damned privilege.
I made it 9 months in before I was like I really can't do this anymore like this.
The CTO was very quick to move me to HR. They wanted me to mutually unwind the fucking contract.
They were saying well you've got this many vacation days left we'll add 2 days so you'll have pay next month.
Last day was friday where the CEO came to me. Was like here a little something.
A 10 fucking bucks amazon gift card. Are you fucking mental.
I was so fucking done with it.
Work should be a two way relationship you fuckers.
I always did my work. I did it well and it really felt like they just didnt even acknowledge me as a human.7 -
Anti-features need to be fought with fire (metaphorically speaking).
This means they must be eliminated, not just made optional.
Why? Because an optional anti-feature is just one step away from a mandatory anti-feature.
For example, "secure" booting: https://youtu.be/vvaWrmS3Vg4?t=750 (Jody Bruchon)
Another example are disguised remote kill switches, such as add-on signing ( https://digdeeper.club/articles/... ). It started as optional and people were able to opt out, and everyone accepted it because no one expected what would come next.
All that was left was removing the ability to opt out, and then Mozilla has control over which extensions users are allowed to use.
For years, this feature sat dormant and users did not know of its existence. But in early May 2019, the metaphorical thread snapped and an expired certificate remotely disabled all extensions, wasting millions of man-hours of productivity.
From the digdeeper.club article:
"The funny thing is, the whole point of the extension prison was allegedly to increase security - and yet today, all security addons got disabled because of it! Shows how freedom always has to trump over security or it ends up in a disaster like this."
Evil needs to be nipped in the bud before it can flourish.2 -
Pressing Ctrl+C shouldn't overwrite an existing clipboard entry that has just been created by pressing Ctrl+C immediately before.
Who thought it was a good idea to use copy + paste shortcut keys exactly next to each other? Some people's muscle memory does not work with such a fine subtlety.
How much working hours, days or even years must have been wasted by people using productivity software accidentally losing what they were about to paste from their clipboards?
Anticipating the first comments, yes, that's another kind of first-world problems affecting people that spend too much life time doing stupid office work on a (German) (PC) keyboard, but here we are, procrastinating on devRant ant wasting even more time.
Antipating even more comments: why am I using a keyboard to work in a German train on a sunny Sunday instead of relaxing at a lake or a swimming pool instead? Well, at least this train doesn't seem to have a pool. More luxury problems for me.3 -
!rant but tips
TL;DR consistent commitments form a habit.
I didn't write any code or do any major tasks past 5 days. Rest at home 2 days and went to short trip for remaining. Answered a few business calls. Made few important calls. Didn't bring my laptop with me and used my gf's one for less than 2 hours. (Majority of that 2 hours was spent on changing her W10 Japanese display language into English.)
This morning I found it hard to gain the productivity and concentration I had past few months. I thought I have lost it and got back to my old lazy 🐒 self.
Couldn't able to touch, well didn't have the mood to touch to be precise, my major tasks. I did my best to sit at my desk and finish minor small tasks that I can find the whole morning. That's the best I could do and probably the wise one I did.
After lunch time around 2pm, I gained my concentration back. I worked on my major tasks till 7pm. And now going home happy.
So my "productivity-is-a-lot-like-intercourse" analogy belief became stronger. As long as I commit to my desk and keep my work routine, I won't be losing my concentration and productivity for a long period. -
TLDR: It's okay to take naps while working from home
Brief:
I feel that there is nothing wrong with taking afternoon naps while working from home. Mainly because after taking rest for a couple of hours my mind is re-energised and I am able to pull off quite a lot of work in much lesser time after waking up and my overall productivity for the day roughly remains same.
This is mainly because if I end up staying awake even when I am tired and sleepy there is not much productive work done even if my number of hours online increase.
And if a company has strict measures set for calculating the number of hour employee stays online while working from home then it will actually reduce overall employee productivity rather than having any kind of actual benefits.3 -
Fuck Oracle, fuck you oracle! The stupidest shittiest worst nightmare company with the most user-unfriendly, productivity-killing, illogical, stupid pile of software garbage products ever! And unfortunately I want to extends my worm-fucks to all Oracle employees and maintainers and to the whole fucking community of shit that made up oracle-community and to every conscious being who ever liked, enjoyed or have found the slightest genuine interest of any product tagged "oracle".
I installed the pile of shit a.k.a Oracle 18c and imported a dumb file locally, everything was working in the slightest amount of the word (fine) before it turns to nightmare. I created a C# client to call a stored procedure in that shit of a database engine. I kept getting error related to the parameter types, specifically one which is custom type of Table of numbers. It turns out that the only of doing this is through that shit they called (unmanaged driver), the "managed" doesn't support custom types. So I had to install another package of shit they call (odbc universal install) "universal my a$$ by the way", at that moment, where everything just crashed and stopped working. I spent 3 hours trying to connect to the fucking database to no avail. I shockingly found a folder in my desktop folder called (OracleInstallation) and all windows services related to oracle installation "suddenly" got somehow (re-routed) to that folder.
In conclusion, fuck oracle.4 -
How many of you have managers who grill their employees for coming late?
Maybe it's just me being downright lazy but I've always had this idea that working for a tech company would mean flexible timings and no fixed minimum working hours (as long as you meet your deadlines and get the job done).
I've been working for this small AI/CV startup for about 10 months now and my manager/founder's nephew, who is my age(22) keeps grinding me for not coming on time. I'm not really a morning person (and my productivity decreases significantly whenever I wake up early) but I make sure I meet my deadlines.
Initially, I used to avoid all this BS but now it has started to annoy me. Suggestions?10 -
Why do people think that putting in more hours = more productivity and sitting extra makes you a more hard working employee?
Today out producer guy indirectly tried to tell me to 'be more productive' and to show 'some dedication'; I asked him outright that is he implying that staying beyond office hours is how I'm suppose to do it and the asshole replies how else would you? (in a non aggressive way)
Fuck this attitude. 😐2 -
I’m one month into my first job as a C++ dev for a company with a MASSIVE code base and I still am struggling with having a consistent build environment, sometimes spending almost 3 hours a day troubleshooting because my environment is always inconsistent. I’ve barely gotten my hands into the code nor pushed anything because I’m stack tracing through thousands of compiled dlls through process of elimination to identify a bug in the software.
Is this normal? What am I doing wrong? I’m freaking out that I haven’t shown any productivity to this company.1 -
Deciding whether I should buy a PS5 is driving me nuts these days.
It has started to grow its library of amazing games. You may know about the Marvel Spiderman 2 trailer. It looks fire AF. So I know I'll enjoy playing games on it.
But I am afraid it'll take a hit on my productivity. So alright, don't play on weekdays.
But then it'll keep collecting dust and I don't want to buy something I'll use only couple hours a week. And who's to say I'll play every weekend? You skip one weekend and bam! You forget you even had a PS5.
It'll cost me about 500 USD which is right around the mark of me spending money that's on the umph side. It's not too much to make a dent in my savings but at the same time not too little that I don't have to think about it.
I'd probably end up not buying it because I am 30 years old and people like me shouldn't be wasting time playing games.18 -
Spent a few hours optimising a procedure...
It's almost quitting time now, my procedure is returning wrong results in more time...
I hate "productivity" on Friday... -
Facebook and Buzzfeed :(
I kept checking every notification which pulled me in to a black hole of surfing and I ended up using 2 or so hours on Facebook and Internet stuff a day (this was only at work so my days got so long because I had to stay longer and actually do my job). Found out I was addicted, read some articles about work productivity and how to be more effective at work, deleted social apps from my phone and only check notifications once a day, and now my days are much shorter and I actually feel relieved and free :) -
I’m at my last hair with this job; I report to 3 (two mid-level; one senior) project managers. The senior PM decided not to fix up the company’s jira and has encouraged “I’ll tell you what to do by mail, text, call. Even outside office productivity apps,” and I didn’t mind it but it’s become unbearable. Each of these PMs manage at least one client that I have to work with — in essence, any given day I’m reporting to these PMs, for multiple tasks for at least 2 clients, especially for MVPs. One of the mid-level PM (let’s call her T) has taken it upon herself to make me look bad. I’m the only developer at the company; when I joined the only two developers had already left a week prior, so I was their replacement (no one mentioned this to me during any of the 3 interviews).
T reports to the senior PM and senior PM, who is friends with T from outside the job, would also give T instructions to provide me in regard to Senior PM’s clients. To made this clearer, Senior PM’s client would request for a feature or whatever, Senior PM would prepare a lousy document and send to T to send to me, just so, T can have things to say in standup daily like “I reached out to the Dev to fix xyz’s something something,” so this means I have had to tolerate T twice as much as the other PMs. (She’s new to the job, a week after me — Senior PM brought her in — they both do not have technical experience relating to work tools for programming but I can say Senior PM knows how to manage clients; talk shop).
Anyhow, T gets off by making me look bad and occasionally would “pity” me for my workload but almost in a patronizing way. T would say I don’t try to reply messages in 5 minutes time after I receive them (T sends these messages on WhatsApp and not slack, which is open during work hours). T would say, “I can’t quite get a read of this Engineer — you(me) are wired differently,” whenever one of T’s requests is yet to be completed because I’m handling other requests including T’s, even though T had marked the completed ones as Done on her excel sheet (no jira).
In all of this, I still have to help her create slides for our clients on all completed tasks for the week/month, as senior PM would tell me because “T is new to this.” We’ve been at the job for roughly 4 months now.
I have helped recruit a new developer, someone the company recommended — I was only told to go through their résumé and respond if they are a good fit and I helped with the interview task (a take-home project — I requested that the applicant be compensated as it’s somewhat a dense project and would take their time — HR refused). The company agreed with the developer’s choice of full WFH but would have me come in twice a week, because “we have plenty live clients so we need to have you here to ensure every requests are handled,” as if I don’t handle requests on my WFH days.
Yesterday, T tried making me look bad, and I asked, “why is it that you like making me look bad?” in front of HR and T smiled. HR didn’t say anything (T is friends with HR and T would occasionally spill nonsense about me to HR, in fact they sit together to gossip and their noise would always crawl to my corner; they both don’t do much. T would sleep off during work hours and not get a word for it — the first time I took a 10 minutes break to relax, T said, “you look too comfortable. I don’t like that,” and HR laughed at T’s comment. While it was somewhat a joke, there was seriousness attached to it). As soon as HR left, I asked T again, “why is it that most of the things you say are stupid?”, T took offense and went to her gossip crew of 4, telling them what I had just said, then T informed senior PM (which I’m fine with as it’s ideal to report me to her superior in any circumstance). Then I told those who cared to listen, T’s fellow gossipers, that I only said that in response to T’s remark to me in front of them, a while back, that I talked like I’m high on drugs.
I’ve lost my mind compiling this and it feels like I’m going off track, I’m just pissed.
I loved the work challenges as I’ve had to take on new responsibilities and projects, even outside my programming language, but I’m looking for a job elsewhere. My salary doesn’t not reflect my contributions and my mental health is not looking good to maintain this work style. I recall taking a day off as I was feeling down and had anxiety towards work, only to find out HR showed T my request mail and they were laughing at me the next day I showed up, “everybody’s mental health is bad too but we still show up,” and I responded to T, “maybe you ought to take a break too”.3 -
I can work productively and for very long hours with a lot of stuff which many dev considers productivity hurdles:
- single small monitor? No problem (in fact in one occasion in which my roommate accidentally broke my laptop charghing port and I couldn't get a spare I worked on an iPad connected trough SSH to a Linux machine completing one of the hardest tasks I ever did without significant loss of productivity)
- old machine? That's ok as long as I can run a minimal Linux and not struggle with Windows
- noise and chatter around me? A 10€ pair of earbuds are enough for me, no noise cancelling needed
- "legacy" stack/programming language? I'd rather spend my days coding in Swift or Rust but in the end I believe which is the dev and its skill which gets the job done not fancy language features so Java 8 will be fine
- no JetBrains or other fancy IDE? Altough some refactoring and code generation stuff is amazing Neovim or VS Code, maybe with the help of some UNIX CLI tools here and there are more than enough
despite this I found out there is a single thing which is like kryptonite for my productivity bringing it from above average* to dangerously low and it's the lack of a quick feedback loop.
For programming tasks that's not a problem because it doesn't matter the language there's always a compiler/interpreter I can use to quickly check what I did and this helps to get quickly in a good work flow but since I went to work with a customer which wants everything deployed on a lazily put together "private cloud" which needs configurations in non-standard and badly documented file formats, has a lot of stuff which instead of being automated gets done trough slowly processed tickets, sometimes things breaks and may take MONTHS to see them fixed... my productivity took a big hit since while I'm still quick at the dev stuff (if I'm able to put together a decent local environment and I don't depend on the cloud of nightmares, something which isn't always warranted) my productivity plummets when I have to integrate what I did or what someone else did in this "cloud" since lacking decent documentation everything has do be done trough a lot of manual tasks and most importantly slow iterations of trial and error. When I have to do that kind stuff (sadly quite often) my brain feels like stuck on "1st gear": I get slow, quickly tired and often I procrastinate a lot even if I force myself out of non work related internet stuff.
*I don't want this to sound braggy but being a passionate developer which breathes computers since childhood and dedicating part of my freetime on continuously improving my skill I have an edge over who do this without much passion or even reluctantly and I say this without wanting to be an èlitist gatekeeper, everyone has to work and tot everybody as the privilege of being passionate in a skill which nowadays has so much market2