The last three years has been an interesting time for me productivity wise.
I started a new job, and moved from Perl to Python Django. The organization was fairly new and there were two of us in an office, so not much in the way of distractions.
My productivity went up an order of magnitude, and Django made programming more interesting / fun again. There was (and still is) a lot of work to do building and maintaining the database. I generally tried to focus on the 80% that takes 20% of the time.
A year later I get an extra boss (who knows nothing about databases). He likes meetings. He is pedantic, and focuses way to much on the 20% that takes 80% of the time.We now have 4 people in the office (previously 2). I am constantly asked to switch task, and fix Excels (I have been arguing for two years that we shouldn't be using Excel for data uploads as it is so error prone).
Anyway, I think my productivity is around a quarter of what it was two years ago, and my work is a lot less satisfying. And I am on HN right now.
So for me, productivity gains:
Working in a quiet office.
Getting to use language / framework of my choice.
Learning new interesting stuff.
Focusing on one task at a time, until it is finished.
Losses:
Two managers pulling in opposite directions. One cowboy coder quick fix king. The other pedantic and focusing on spelling mistakes over new functionality.
Busy office.
Tedious repetitive work (fixing Excels that are used for data uploads) - really kills motivation.
Too many meeting. I don't get many full or even half days uninterrupted programming.
I started a new job, and moved from Perl to Python Django. The organization was fairly new and there were two of us in an office, so not much in the way of distractions.
My productivity went up an order of magnitude, and Django made programming more interesting / fun again. There was (and still is) a lot of work to do building and maintaining the database. I generally tried to focus on the 80% that takes 20% of the time.
A year later I get an extra boss (who knows nothing about databases). He likes meetings. He is pedantic, and focuses way to much on the 20% that takes 80% of the time.We now have 4 people in the office (previously 2). I am constantly asked to switch task, and fix Excels (I have been arguing for two years that we shouldn't be using Excel for data uploads as it is so error prone).
Anyway, I think my productivity is around a quarter of what it was two years ago, and my work is a lot less satisfying. And I am on HN right now.
So for me, productivity gains: Working in a quiet office. Getting to use language / framework of my choice. Learning new interesting stuff. Focusing on one task at a time, until it is finished.
Losses: Two managers pulling in opposite directions. One cowboy coder quick fix king. The other pedantic and focusing on spelling mistakes over new functionality. Busy office. Tedious repetitive work (fixing Excels that are used for data uploads) - really kills motivation. Too many meeting. I don't get many full or even half days uninterrupted programming.