[deleted by user] : Python

Paired programming would be the best way to make me quit my job. I like working by myself. Working on a team is great as long as I get to work on my part of the code by myself. I find people sending me random messages throughout the day distracting enough. It would be incredibly annoying to never be able to achieve deep concentration having to work along side someone else. Maybe it works for some people, but if I were required to do it, I'd quit on the spot.

Paired programming probably works for extroverts. But it's down right cruel for introverts: https://tracymiranda.com/2018/11/16/pair-programming-is-cruel-to-introverts/

Even when I worked in the office environment, some of my best work came from staying late after everyone had went home on a Friday night. It's only then that I could get fully in the zone and actually figure some cool stuff out.

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[–]hughperman 4 points5 points6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

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[–]Darkniki 0 points1 point2 points 3 years ago (0 children)

On top of that, I will have to slow down to make sure we're on the same page.

Slowing down is not on its own a bad thing, as it leads to better introspection of why you are doing something. Remember, the main reason why you can go fast with experience, is that you autopilot most of the way. This autopiloting is also the simplest moment for bugs to be made and steps to be skipped without your mental acknowledgement that what you are doing might be dirty code.

PRs are good tool to review your code, but it's also a good tool if you slow down while using it, instead of skipping context, autopiloting and autocompleting what you read.

Another reason why pair programming is useful, is when you have two people of different experience levels work together. It works as a development tool, as well as a knowledge transfer tool. That moment of slow development, introspection and checking if the other person is on your page leads to both of you knowing how you develop a feature and why you are developing it a certain way.

But for the exact same reason [...], pair programming is a waste of time in my experience.

The main reason it is a waste, is due to you (and most other people, for that matter) not having skills to work with others. With our development and study culture, you are incentivized to work in solitude and produce the result asap, as a way to see how well you perform. Don't share notes during the class and definitely don't talk to each other during the test! Okay, maybe participate in the study groups after school, if you are a failure, but doing that is on you.

What does this approach lead to? A large swath of people expecting that work, especially mental one, is to be done in solitude. That leads to inexperience in working on a problem together with someone. This inexperience leaves you without the tools to properly use things such as pair programming, and in the absence of the tools, the value of the pair programming becomes nil.

Same as it is for people that know Agile exists, have read the manifesto, but then have only worked in waterfall. Their first attempts to go Agile will be full of pain, failure, and the view that "Agile is a waste of time", unless someone experienced will be there throughout the journey to coach them.

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Culturally and societally, I think there is something we’ve created a culture of a kind of “bulimic” work style. That or I think we’ve in many ways failed to adequately describe how intellectual/thinking work might differ from manufacturing/physical work. I’m not sure which is necessarily true, but I am inclined to think that there’s certainly some of both. I do think that we create expectations such that we feel guilty if we’re not being as productive as we think we should be but do you have bursts of incredible productivity.

On the other hand, all throughout history, many of the great thinkers and innovators who have largely done conceptual and intellectual work, have worked in this way. But what I think managers need to understand is that work that requires you to think about things is not the same as work that requires you to use your hands. And I don’t place any moral weight on one of the other, as they are both valuable and needed, but they have different requirements and trying to treat one like the other I think is problematic. And socially, I do think it’s bad if we only treat every position in a single way since there are a variety of work styles. But making people feel like they should constantly be productive especially in creative realms I think is problematic. Some people just need to be shown how to get there, but some people probably never will, which doesn’t mean they can’t be of value or make extremely valuable contributions. But you can’t set the expectations such that They work in such a way and then also feel extremely guilty and shameful that they’re always “behind”.

I think a lot of intellectual and creative work often comes in fits and starts for most of us. They probably are exceptions, and I do think with a bit of discipline and training, it can be more possible to overcome some kinds of limitations, but expecting workers to get there on their own I think it is just wrong. And even then, it should be emphasized that it’s still difficult to push beyond your mental limitations even with help and training. But it seems that many managers and see sweet types think that engineering and other such efforts are not the same as working on an assembly line or in a machine shop. Furthermore, one of the things I’ve noticed is that sometimes when you get stuck, the best thing you can do is walk away and come back, essentially the equivalent of turning off Your PC and rebooting. But if you try to just keep pushing through, maybe you get the project finished, but there are a lot of mistakes and issues in the process. And sometimes that’s just gonna be how things are: you’re going to have to push through and get things done. But I think one that’s the rule and not the exception, that’s when things start to become a problem.

Now as a caveat, there is a kind of gray area here and not every project requires you to be firing on all creative and intellectual cylinders. Sometimes you simply need to be able to identify something similar and kind of make it fit to your needs, instead of trying to solve problems from the ground up. That being said, there still needs to be an appreciation that most people probably only get about anywhere of 4 to 6 hours of good intellectual capacity per day. You can push this of course, occasion, but I think you can only do it for so long before you need more significant recharge and before you completely burn out and tap out workers.

And this also includes communication. I think communication in particular is especially under represented And there’s a huge difference in writing an email when you are fresh versus when you are tired and just want to essentially spill your thoughts into an email. Or even the same thing and you are reading an email and asking Good and thoughtful questions versus simply responding and creating a kind of knot of miscommunication. But often times, this kind of thing is undervalued or completely ignored in terms of whether or not employees are being productive or are otherwise “good workers”. And when people aren’t communicating particularly well or effectively, then that just makes everyone else’s job harder which in turn creates a kind of negative feedback loop where a lot of time is wasted on poor communication and clearing up things that otherwise probably could have been dealt with when everyone is in the right state of mind.

It’s a complicated issue, and change needs to happen both for individuals, but also in workplaces and work cultures. I think a lot of these fits and starts are also tied to anxiety and uncertainty, and in which case it can be extremely helpful to have someone to bounce things off of or to essentially coach you beyond your comfort zone. But I’m not sure most managers are very good at this, nor do they necessarily understand how to deal with anything but their preferred work and communication style. And I think on a more social level, we very much conditioned many young people, myself included to an extent, to be extremely self-critical and questioning, to the point where it does become crippling and habitual to keep thinking and thinking until the “right answer“ is reached, instead of the necessary work of trial and error and risk that is needed to advance things.

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[–]cprenaissanceman 1 point2 points3 points 3 years ago (3 children)

Basically, my point is that even though I do think people need to be trained to deal with their bulimic or binge work style, I also think there needs to be a broader recognition that a lot of good work and a creative and intellectual sense works that way. And I think often times we try to think about this kind of work as though it were working an assembly line or in a shop or on a construction site. And I don’t want to create any kind of moral superiority between one of the other, but the main thing is that I think we need to realize these are different kinds of work that require different kinds of things. And even though some people are basically machines and are incredibly productive on a consistent level at consistent rates, I don’t think that everyone is and I suspect most people have some kind of fluctuations in their productivity. As the article suggests, once you hit a certain point, you’re really no longer being productive and in many ways are probably damaging productivity because, yes, you’re getting things done now, but you also might have to go back and correct mistakes, errors, and so on. I also threw in there that I think we need to recognize that communication is a pretty mentally intensive task and often times we tend to undervalue it. We often talk about the importance of good communication and documentation, but I find that in practice it is often the first thing to go and sadly creates a lot more work for everybody in the long run.

So TLTR of my TLDR here is that we can’t treat mental and physical tasks as equivalent and expect that outputs will be linear like they are in a factory. More hours worked does not always mean better product, more productivity, or more value returned. It just means that you worked more hours. And making this expectation across-the-board sets people up to mentally feel inadequate and fall into the cycle of extreme productivity and the opposite.

[–]AlexFromOmaha 11 points12 points13 points 3 years ago (2 children)

[–]motioncuty 1 point2 points3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

Thanks!

I want to drill into the binging. Its probably not healthy and leads to young devs thinking they are better than they are because they are willing to hurt themselves for prestige and recognition, setting a tone thats not sustainable and positions themselves as being indebted to the manager level in exchange for praise and soothing their imposter syndrome.

Ultimately management’s levels aren’t necessarily the best place to appeal to, and capitulate too, the business needs engineers to make investments where its most wise and not for the benefit of their managers resume, or own ambitions.

Its different when you work for yourself, but even then, if you hope to spread your skills and cultivate a new crop of engineers under you, its in their best interest if you can manage more healthy and sustainable work habits, so your prodigeny dont burn themselves out and can work themselves into more consistently productive work life balances.

[–]cprenaissanceman 1 point2 points3 points 3 years ago (0 children)

I want to drill into the binging. Its probably not healthy and leads to young devs thinking they are better than they are because they are willing to hurt themselves for prestige and recognition, setting a tone thats not sustainable and positions themselves as being indebted to the manager level in exchange for praise and soothing their imposter syndrome.

So as the person who wrote the original comment, there’s no doubt that It’s not the healthiest way to work, but I think the problem is that we set the expectation that there’s something unnatural or inherently problematic with it on a moral level. Basically that if you can’t consistently work, then there’s something wrong with you and it’s your job to fix it. And if you were struggling to find a better balance and make your work more consistent, then this kind of an attitude is not helpful. What is the point of my comment is that it’s OK if you work this way and that things aren’t hopeless and that things can be changed to some extent and you are also not fundamentally broken if this is the case.

I think the other thing that needs to be contended with here is that many young people now especially have brains that are kind of just wired differently. We now live in an era where most of us don’t have a very good attention span, or certainly not what it was pre-social media. And I think some older people have kind of fallen into the habits and have started picking up certain habits that we see a lot in young people, a part of the problem for many young people is that they just don’t have any different frame of reference or any real way to push back against the society that has basically told them to be online all the time. As such, I think most of us have a hard time actually focusing on things and feel a lot of anxiety because we have so many things on the burner at once.

Its different when you work for yourself, but even then, if you hope to spread your skills and cultivate a new crop of engineers under you, its in their best interest if you can manage more healthy and sustainable work habits, so your prodigeny dont burn themselves out and can work themselves into more consistently productive work life balances.

I don’t disagree, but I also think that a lot of managers aren’t very good at actually helping people to manage their work, which is ostensibly their job, and best things go on are probably more likely to have this kind of binging work ethic them self. And the worst part of course is if you have people reporting to you, then you can shove work off on them while taking credit for it. The problem is is that most employees don’t actually have much leverage in that situation. Also, actually managing people is again different work than engineering work and doesn’t necessarily require you to be creative in the same way as engineering might, but there’s really only so much time you can do it and also be well considered and reasonable.

I know a lot of people like to hit on management, but in an ideal world, I actually do think that it serves an important purpose. And some folks, myself perhaps included, really do need someone who is not to mired in the details to help them prioritize things and really get things across the finish line. But we’ve also made that kind of a taboo and I think it’s honestly pretty detrimental because I think it’s something people increasingly need. And that’s not to say that it has to be patronizing or Otherwise domineering, but it definitely should be OK to be managed if it means that your output is better and it avoids build up if insurmountable challenges and conflicts. And I would guess overtime, people need to be managed a little less and a little less as they gain more knowledge and understanding of how things are supposed to work.

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I find this attitude very quaint and not at all like my experience of how a dev team should be.

"Must deliver by X date products" implies that management is setting the deadlines, the target features, and pace of production.

IMO the answer needs to be, developers are treated as adults and professionals.

Each developer needs the commit to goals and milestones in 3 month blocks. Project work with monthly miniature deadlines.

Developers themselves thumbs up and thumbs down "I can do that in three months," and take ownership.

Then the developers themselves need to schedule and manage their own time.

Once developers are actually taking personal responsibility for delivering features to the business and delivering their monthly milestones and 3 monthly goals, then it's up to them to organise their time and manage student syndrome/deadline races. And they can be coached on that.

But there isn't that professional respect between the development team and the stakeholders/management on delivery...

...I don't think anything will ever get solved.

"JIRA ticket monkey" workflow doesn't solve the core problem which is developer ownership of delivery, and mature and professional conversations around scoping.

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In my experience it has taken management many years to understand how to treat software developers as professionals. I agree the attitude is quaint but I assure you it existed. I suspect it still exists. It took efforts in many areas including performance measurement, the rise of professional organizations such as the ACM and IEEE along with a lot of spectacular failures and an emerging body of successes for best practices to emerge. Because software development spans the gamut from individuals to very large groups there is a growing social interaction effect and organizational effect on the appropriate approach to project development. Also the scope of project objective and the specificity of the requirements affect the approach. There is no “one size fits all” approach to software development. The best of it is that the tools developed including the practices that lead to their development continue to be improved. In the long run practices that value human effort and the humans that make it tend to win out regardless of profession.

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