As a programmer, I agree. In a meeting, I recently uttered the line, "Can we revisit that problem we identified yesterday? I was running last night and I came up with a really clever solution"
Now try being at a place where your manager pings you when you're "inactive" for more than 5 minutes. Like bro, I'm literally thinking and every time you ping me, I have to restart my thinking.
Acting like the bottleneck to output on code is how fast and long people type is just bugfuck insane.
I had one of these just this week, where I just spent a few minutes talking through a problem with someone, and it occurred to me that we had a pretty easy way to do it. The implementation was maybe an hour of work, and the vast majority of that was testing. The actual code took like 5 minutes to type.
exactly. i do most of the work in day driving in the car, going to the store or for a walk in the nature - all during working hours - where i can think away from messages and screens.
I don’t currently code, but when I did I used to regularly come up with the solution to things that I had been struggling with in my sleep. I would literally wake up and know how to do the thing that I had been trying to figure out.
Any time there's a linear correlation between 'hours worked' and 'productive output' you've a job you should have automated already.
(And most jobs where humans 'add value' are not like that, although I'll grant increasing numbers of employers are hiring 'meat robots' because they're cheaper than the metal kind)
The most reliable way for me to come up to solutions for tough problems as a software dev was to get up from my desk then go outside and take a walk. These days for a lot of jobs you'd need a mouse jiggler to get away with that.
34
u/BleapDev 17d ago
As a programmer, I agree. In a meeting, I recently uttered the line, "Can we revisit that problem we identified yesterday? I was running last night and I came up with a really clever solution"