…when you’re wasting the company’s time?
Zyada, who does database support, at least learns stuff by sometimes working on her own programs. She has one co-worker who seems to spend a lot of time on Facebook, and another who talks on the phone a lot. I’ve seen others checking their personal mail or reading various stuff on the Web.
So what do you really pass the time doing?
The Dope, duh.
Double duh. And e-mailing a few people.
Ditto tdn. Plus I read some news and opinion stuff.
Unfortunately compiling takes about 10 seconds nowadays. I barely have time to type this response.
Hey!! Who spilled the beans? That guy has to be found and have his programming license taken away. We’re all going to have to start working for a living if management finds out about this.
Oh, wait. They already know. They can’t do anything about it because they can’t program.
I’d go into more detail but I’m way behind on my Spider Solitaire.
I should add that Asteroids is still fun after all these years.
Seriously though… (good) programming is as much of a creative task as any graphic design, musical composition, writing, etc… and for me, anyway, requires almost as much intense thought as it does break time to let my brain chew on the problem.
It sure isn’t some kind of transactional processing type job where you transform Xes into Ys all day long, or you basically facilitate communication. It’s fundamentally different, so the work patterns will look very different to someone not familiar with hit.
“Those mines aren’t going to sweep themselves.” - Jim Halpert
Yeah, when I first started I could do a full recompile and literally have it take more than a half hour. And it killed me when my boss bought a top-end fully decked out machine for the *sales *manager - who promptly loaded it with so many TSRs that it slowed to a crawl. My boss was an idiot. (He remains one of the top 2 stupidist people I have ever worked for.)
Any way, back from the tangent, a full compile now takes seconds. How amazing the changes in our profession are.
Speak for yourselves. A full compile for me takes in the vicinity of an hour. (Which is kind of quick compared to the other projects here… One of them takes well over 3 hours to compile. They compile once a day, over night)
In the mean time, I read forums, formulate beer recipes, catch up on administrative stuff, etc. I used to play lots of web games, but they cracked down on that.
See post #1
Yeah, I didn’t check the link because I was on company time 
I didn’t check the link cause my work blocks everything, including XKCD, probably cause of me. This board was blocked for awhile, then unblocked. I’m hoping it stays unblocked.
That just means your boss (or theirs) hangs out here as well.
Me, I have a whole separate computer on a whole different network just for goofing off with during work hours. Did you see that article about Netflix streaming being one of the largest bandwidth consumers on the Net now? That was me.
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That is very true especially for hard or unusual problems. You literally can’t tell when a good programmer is working or not. It certainly requires time in front of the computer doing stuff that you can show other but it is impossible to stay at the highest levels of concentration for 40+ hours a week. I have given up on a problem for a while and dreamed the solution while I was sleeping. Sometimes I will just leave and go for a drive with music blasting during work hours if I am working on something and get stuck for too long. That doesn’t sound good to people that don’t do that type of work but it is genuinely effective sometimes.
One thing is true though. A programmer that looks like he or she is working extremely hard most of the time almost certainly isn’t a good programmer. The goal is to automate things so much and make them so bomb-proof that neither you nor anyone else has to do much with that process anymore. Bad programmers spend all day frantically patching flaws and dealing the resulting problems of their work.
Development builds generally take less than a minute, and incremental changes only a few seconds, but spinning off a full new runtime build of our desktop software or a deployment of our cloud-based software can take 5-10 minutes, so there is some downtime. I often spend my time going over bug reports, filling out bug fix documentation, etc.
We also have an internal IRC channel that a bunch of us hang out on. There’s a decent amount of actual work-related conversation, but also lots of links to ponies. (I have at least one coworker who’s obsessed with My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and my coworkers either give him a hard time about that, or give the pony-haters a hard time because they think it’s funny.)
Then there’s always the option of getting another cup of coffee, grabbing a snack from the kitchen, etc., although that’s a risky proposition, as the phone support folks are on the most direct route to the kitchen - and there’s a decent chance I’ll get nabbed by one of them, since I have made the poor life choice of being good at solving problems.
This is so true. One of the best things about working from home is that I don’t have to keep up the illusion that I’m working all the time. I could spend 4 hours banging away at a keyboard, or I could go out for a one hour bike ride, and end up with same amount or more work done. Clearing your head is sometimes the most direct route to a solution.
Amazing how many high tech bosses don’t get that.