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What Counts as Work - in Software Development

  • December 10, 2013 at 12:05 am

    #395961

    Comments posted to this topic are about the item What Counts as Work - in Software Development

    Bill Nicolich: www.SQLFave.com.
    Daily tweet of what's new and interesting: AppendNow

  • December 11, 2013 at 7:18 am

    #1672618

    I had a manager who told me I was goofing off too much and not writing enough code. He was happy as long as I was typing on the keyboard. He regarded think time and research as goofing off. He did not want to see me taking notes or scribbling diagrams to help me get my head around something. he considered that goofing off. So, I learned to type all day long as I was thinking. Typing nothing important, but, when he walked past me, I was working.

    In the 30+ years I've been a developer, I have encountered few people who really know what it is all about.

    Tom

  • December 12, 2013 at 2:11 am

    #1672863

    When I first started writing Windows Form applications in my Visual basic 6 days, I always felt guilty about the time and effort spent getting all of the controls spaced evenly on forms. I felt that as there was not a screen of text generated I wasn't working. Now I know better, and there are built in tools to evenly space my controls for me.

  • December 12, 2013 at 2:35 am

    #1672869

    Way too long, skipped it, got work to do.

  • December 12, 2013 at 12:55 pm

    #1673073

    Long but well thought through editorial.

    Certainly very valuable when managing business expectations of IT work. I've had the experience of someone saying "It shouldn't take 3 months to do xyz" or "It's been 3 months and nothing has been accomplished" whereas the reality is that lots has been done and even delivered, but because it hasn't yet met the exact (and ever-changing) expectations of the person or didn't turn out to be as useful as they thought it would be, it counts for nothing. I can see it's very valuable in those situations to push back and emphasis what has been accomplished and why that's important.

    For myself, I know if I have a day filled with meetings and I don't accomplish something tangible on my own, I feel like I "accomplished nothing".

    Leonard
    Madison, WI

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