When I last worked at MegaCorp, I would be in the office by 6.30 in the morning and leave by about 3.30 in the afternoon. This was non negotiable and part of the agreement I made with the company. I could work[1] productively for about three hours before the day's meetings and "manager work" started and the rest of the day usually went downhill very fast. I had some dim sense of "preserving my sanity"as a reason for doing this and it worked very well in this regard, but I could never explain clearly why this worked so well.
Now I know. Paul Graham writes an excellent essay on the different notions of scheduling for managers and "makers". A must read for both managers and programmers.
[1] At MegaCorp "work" had strange meanings - it was mostly measured in the degree you sucked up to your superiors (I am not being condescending here. I watched several masters of this art who would apply a frightening degree of focus on "managing upwards". Very educational but very scary), and how many meetings you attended. By God, did we have meetings. One of the reasons I left (not the most important one!) was that we started to have meetings about meetings and I came out of these dispirited and demoralized and completely drained.
" Meetings about meetings " . Did you take notes about taking notes ?
ReplyDeleteLuckily, my friend who was a fellow programmer became my manager(he started getting bored with tech work)
ReplyDeleteGood thing was he too disliked meetings.He initially kept a meeting once a week and now even that is gone!
Vignesh
Ravi
ReplyDeleteI think programmers like to have(or imagine) infinite available time before starting any work.Even if the work might get completed in 30 mins.
When i was working on exercises in Simply Scheme book , i will never start it when i know in my mind that lunch will come in another 2-3 hours even though i was able to finish the exercises in 2 hours after lunch.Blocks of 2 hours with interruption like meeting/lunch in between are not very conducive for programmer's concentration.
Vignesh