The one bug programmers cannot patch: procrastination.
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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My hyper focus makes me a good programmer. Unfortunately I only activate it every couple days. With their powers combined… I’m worth keeping employed. 👍🏻
Oh god, I feel this in my soul. I feel so fortunate that most people only see the running average of my work output and not a live feed of what I'm actually spending my time doing.
A good dev leader should know how adhd and autistic people work.
Luckily my boss does, bless him. If I ever leave the company, his attitude is one of the things I'll miss the most.
Big same.
I'm not a dev, but I'm on the infrastructure side of the house, and this is me to a T
If it works right?
That's what I always say.
The problem is definitely when I'm not working.
Coding is best done late at night when you wish you were asleep but there's that one bug...
I think it's more related to the fact that it's when there is no distractions at all. At least for me that's probably the reason. No colleagues asking dumb questions, no pointless meeting, nearly no notification whatsoever.
Yup, things are nice and quiet when everyone's asleep.
I'm really lucky that I work from home, my jobs timezone is 2h behind me, and my wife leaves for work at 10am when my work day is starting.
Are we the same person? If I haven't figured out that one bug, it's going to haunt me.
marks 8 on timecard
I work 9a-5p and I do my best work after 11pm.
I'm glad I'm not the only one
For me it's 7am-3:30pm and I do all my work between 7am and the daily at 9:30am. After that it's just meetings and bullshitting on the internet. Everyone is satisfied with my work.
I don't drink coffee. You can imagine my day.
This is actually about Daylight Savings Time
Why is it this way?
ADHD
Oh no
Welcome to the club, pal
Because we didn't evolve to survive in a capitalist society
I often wonder about this. Does capitalism impose so much emotional freight that it makes coding intimidating? Does having it attached to ideas about working hard and getting a job drain the fun out of it?
I'm beginning to think that I would actually get more coding done if I abandoned it as a career path.
Makes sense. When I was starting up, you couldn't keep me from it. I just hacked for the joy of making things and seeing what would happen. But now it's all tied up in work, performance, marketability, ROI, etc.
Even when I think about doing some hobby video game dev, there's a voice at the back of my head telling me it would be more profitable to brush up on OpenTofu or whatever.
Whenever I meet another web dev, they either have a job as a web dev, they're looking for a job as a web dev, or they're trying to create a startup. There are no hobbyists.
I actually know one web dev (experienced, front-end) who has two kids and is transitioning to driving truck after getting laid off earlier in the year.
He's got his straight-body license, and is working up to tractor-trailer. He just fixes things under the table and drives around, plows snow, etc. I've never seen him happier.
One of us got out 😌 he's free now
I was happy running my own successful website - did full stack, had a visual designer but I did everything technical from maintaining the webserver to the database to all the html, css, sql, python, PHP and JavaScript… but in retrospect it was a ridiculous amount of work for what I got paid, compared to what most people make for a tech job. I got burnt out and went back to an art career, but that wasn't very profitable or easy. At this point I wish I maintained my tech skills but fuck, being an electrician or something would probably be way more lucrative and not more difficult.
Probably. I hate coding now. I abandoned all my passion projects and can hardly even play video games now. I'm so sick of sitting in front of a computer all day every day.
If it's not too late, get into a trade instead.
no that can't be right it's probably a personal failing that I should internalise and maybe spend money on /s
Jokes on you but I get my best ideas at night
I just wish I got them during the day, when I'm getting paid
Make it an Irish coffee and you'll get there faster. My sweet spot was ~3 beers in an hour and I could suddenly code better (and it wasn't the alcohol talking).
Relevant xkcd
There's something similar with cannabis as well. Just a buzz and I'm a laser, even slightly more and suddenly I can't remember the process I was working on.
It's like looking through a telescope. Everything within the lens is clear and detailed, but anything on the periphery might as well not exist. Very useful state of mind for certain coding tasks.
Ballmer seems like a cokehead. He probably did plenty of both, though.
that late night working fugue state