david_chisnall on Nostr: nprofile1q…tvdjy Many years ago, I read a productivity study that said ‘knowledge ...
nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpq0mwq9c623ujjzpql7r4fk090yxrf458sz2egzprw0zn0ca669q9q8tvdjy (nprofile…vdjy) Many years ago, I read a productivity study that said ‘knowledge worker’ (a phrase I hate) productivity increased to 20 hours a week, plateaued until 40 and then decreased. Over 60 it tended to be net negative. A few years later, I read a study that attempted to reproduce the result and came up with numbers that were well within experimental error margins.
This seemed obvious for programmers. It takes ten seconds to introduce a bug that takes a week to debug. If you sleep for ten hours instead of writing buggy code while tired, you will achieve more simply by not creating more work.
I was quite surprised recently talking to someone who studies this kind of thing as her research topic. She was just finishing up a study of construction workers that came up with almost the same numbers. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that fixing an error in a building is very expensive, so even if they may be easier to find than programming defects they’re much harder to fix and it works out roughly even.
I worked 20 hour weeks for a while when I was contracting (always bid as fixed-price, so the customer didn’t need to know how long I was working). Several people expressed surprise at how quickly I worked. I did the same during my PhD. People in the lab were surprised that I would roll up at 10 or 11, have coffee for an hour, work an hour, go for lunch for a bit, then work a couple more hours and still got a lot done when they were working much longer hours. I tried to explain that I wasn’t more productive in spite of working shorter hours, I was more productive because I was working shorter hours. I’d turn up after a good long night’s sleep, relaxed, and then work for four really focused hours. I got far more done in that time than I would if I had been working a ‘full’ work day.
When people join my team, I tell them this and tell them I want 20 productive hours of work from them. How they spread that out over the week is up to them.
This seemed obvious for programmers. It takes ten seconds to introduce a bug that takes a week to debug. If you sleep for ten hours instead of writing buggy code while tired, you will achieve more simply by not creating more work.
I was quite surprised recently talking to someone who studies this kind of thing as her research topic. She was just finishing up a study of construction workers that came up with almost the same numbers. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that fixing an error in a building is very expensive, so even if they may be easier to find than programming defects they’re much harder to fix and it works out roughly even.
I worked 20 hour weeks for a while when I was contracting (always bid as fixed-price, so the customer didn’t need to know how long I was working). Several people expressed surprise at how quickly I worked. I did the same during my PhD. People in the lab were surprised that I would roll up at 10 or 11, have coffee for an hour, work an hour, go for lunch for a bit, then work a couple more hours and still got a lot done when they were working much longer hours. I tried to explain that I wasn’t more productive in spite of working shorter hours, I was more productive because I was working shorter hours. I’d turn up after a good long night’s sleep, relaxed, and then work for four really focused hours. I got far more done in that time than I would if I had been working a ‘full’ work day.
When people join my team, I tell them this and tell them I want 20 productive hours of work from them. How they spread that out over the week is up to them.