Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.
So, even Apple was affected by the mania of ridiculous productivity metrics.
My measurement will be the parking lot: it should be substantially full at 7:30 AM and 6:30 PM. The pizza man should show up at 7:30 PM to feed the starving teams working late. The lot should be half full on Saturday mornings. We have a lot of work to do.
A sad story of a manager believing that telling people to look busy will increase productivity and make them care.
He’s great at reminding me, via his excellent talks and interviews, that it’s easier to be highly productive when you only have a limited time window in which to do so. It’s easier to perform an amazing, in-the-zone, four-hour block of work on a Friday night if I’m leaving town the next day and I know that it’s is the only chance I’ll get all week to work on Instapaper.
On power of timeboxing and small-step progress. Also, the linked podcast with Merlin Mann and John Gruber is worth listening to. If for nothing else, then for opportunity to listen to Gruber's opinion on Mike Arrington.
You see, years back the famous psychologist B.F. Skinner discovered that rats would work much harder if the rewards were unpredictable (rather than a treat every 5 times they pressed a bar, one would come after 4, then 13, etc). This is the same as email, most of it is junk, but every so often, it’s fantastic: an email from the woman you’ve been chasing for instance.
“You are weighed in the balance, and found wanting.”
Lesson Three is this: five-day weeks of eight-hour days maximize long-term output in every industry that has been studied over the past century. What makes us think that our industry is somehow exempt from this rule?
Excellent article on impact of overtime work on productivity. People regularly working long hours aren't heroes, they're slackers. I'd love every manager to read it.
If we assume that our userbase is representative, that means:
- Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)
How Google is destroying world economy.
Always. Be. Closing.
All books on productivity combined cannot surpass this scene from Glengarry Glen Ross.
Studies about productivity declines when working more than 40 hours a week surface with disturbing regularity. As a developer your creativity declines, you make more mistakes, you miss existing issue etc., to the point where you're doing more harm than good. Should I even mention the health concerns when you spend that much time engaged in the same activity (they even had rules about spending too much time at work in the Soviet Union, and those guys were all about putting in the time for the good of the people).
An excellent article on overtime programming work.
Here’s a quick example of what I’m currently dealing with…
- 269 video presentations to watch
- 230 slide decks to review
- 36 books to read
- 542 unread RSS feed posts
- 141 podcast episodes to listen to
- 213 unread articles
It’s a classic case of Information Anxiety. Not enough free time to process all the information I want to. The result is a constant background level of stress. Even when I’m at rest I’m thinking about all the stuff I should, and could, be doing.
Information overload with a desperate and inherently flawed solution idea.
The real question is: is all this information really relevant? Even if so, can such an amount be effectively digested? I don't think so. One should think, what can be skipped, not how to find more time to consume it all.
