by Tdarcos » Fri Apr 29, 2022 1:35 pm
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Thu Apr 28, 2022 8:55 pmneeding to get "in the zone"... it was his belief that anyone at a senior enough level in IT should be able to quickly and easily snap in and out of this mode.
He's an asshole who has never done creative work or probably even developed a spreadsheet. Becoming laser focused - what is normally called "being in the zone" and now has this ridiculous and unnecessary euphemism - is a special mental state which you only get through sustained concentration on a task. When you get there, it's fantastic; everything works, it all flows and the work becomes effortless. But to get there requires an environment conducive to concentrated thinking: quiet areas (or possibly one's favorite music); uninterrupted time to work; and proper resources (today, being a programmer or knowledge worker doesn't just mean Internet access is a nice perk, it is absolutely essential to do one's job. While a good programmer knows his/her language and tools, the APIs, functions, objects, methods and data formats are often too vast for a person to keep all of them in their head. Sure, I can write SQL, but if bit's anything more complicated than SELECT, UPDATE or DELETE, I'm almost certainly going to have to look it up
"Do I do a RIGHT JOIN or LEFT JOIN? What format do I use for SELECT on Oracle vs. MySQL vs. Postgres vs. DB2? )
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Thu Apr 28, 2022 8:55 pmI think now it's mostly bullshit (the guy was wrong about everything else,
Well, at least he has a perfect record.
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Thu Apr 28, 2022 8:55 pmI believe it's a skill to get into that zone and tune out distractions, like any other skill. And it works best when practices.
Right on both points. Any skill requires practice to learn it. Bad habits don't just "happen", they require regular repetition to reinforce them. All of the ways we have found to successfully develop software require we got our heads bashed in over and over by doing things the wrong way and discovering doing things the right way makes things easier long term, at the expense of a little extra effort short term.
Taking half an hour to set up a repository and copy files to it, then check those files out, and regularly commit them is a little extra work that seems pointless. Until you have to rollback a change that doesn't work. That becomes a serious pain without SCM. You might have to spend hours or days to go back to a working state. When you have source code control, rollbacks - or roll forwards, if you went too far back - are easy and painless. It makes experimentation
cheap. If anything, I'm starting to realize that I don't "checkpoint" code on a project often enough; commits should be done every time you complete a correction that does not break the build.
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Thu Apr 28, 2022 8:55 pmWhat do you guys think? What are your experiences getting "into the zone" for mental work?
Executives have various perks, or as Mary Chapin Carpenter asks in
Passionate Kisses:
Is it too much to demand... pens that won't run out of ink, cool quiet, and time to think? Shouldn't I have this? Shouldn't I have this? Shouldn't I have all of this...
Why do executives get these sort of perks? Because executives are supposed to
think to have long range goals and strategy for planning what the business will do. Programmers do something similar; they think of ways to implement a solution to the problem they have been presented, and to figure out ho to develop future improvements.
No one would expect an executive to do good work in a noisy place where they're interrupted every five minutes with telephone calls and someone asking for something/ Programmers shouldn't be expected to do so either under the same circumstances.
[quote="Ice Cream Jonsey" post_id=128464 time=1651204510 user_id=3]needing to get "in the zone"... it was his belief that anyone at a senior enough level in IT should be able to quickly and easily snap in and out of this mode.[/quote]
He's an asshole who has never done creative work or probably even developed a spreadsheet. Becoming laser focused - what is normally called "being in the zone" and now has this ridiculous and unnecessary euphemism - is a special mental state which you only get through sustained concentration on a task. When you get there, it's fantastic; everything works, it all flows and the work becomes effortless. But to get there requires an environment conducive to concentrated thinking: quiet areas (or possibly one's favorite music); uninterrupted time to work; and proper resources (today, being a programmer or knowledge worker doesn't just mean Internet access is a nice perk, it is absolutely essential to do one's job. While a good programmer knows his/her language and tools, the APIs, functions, objects, methods and data formats are often too vast for a person to keep all of them in their head. Sure, I can write SQL, but if bit's anything more complicated than SELECT, UPDATE or DELETE, I'm almost certainly going to have to look it up [i]"Do I do a RIGHT JOIN or LEFT JOIN? What format do I use for SELECT on Oracle vs. MySQL vs. Postgres vs. DB2?[/i] )
[quote="Ice Cream Jonsey" post_id=128464 time=1651204510 user_id=3]I think now it's mostly bullshit (the guy was wrong about everything else,[/quote]Well, at least he has a perfect record.
[quote="Ice Cream Jonsey" post_id=128464 time=1651204510 user_id=3]I believe it's a skill to get into that zone and tune out distractions, like any other skill. And it works best when practices.[/quote]
Right on both points. Any skill requires practice to learn it. Bad habits don't just "happen", they require regular repetition to reinforce them. All of the ways we have found to successfully develop software require we got our heads bashed in over and over by doing things the wrong way and discovering doing things the right way makes things easier long term, at the expense of a little extra effort short term.
Taking half an hour to set up a repository and copy files to it, then check those files out, and regularly commit them is a little extra work that seems pointless. Until you have to rollback a change that doesn't work. That becomes a serious pain without SCM. You might have to spend hours or days to go back to a working state. When you have source code control, rollbacks - or roll forwards, if you went too far back - are easy and painless. It makes experimentation [i]cheap[/i]. If anything, I'm starting to realize that I don't "checkpoint" code on a project often enough; commits should be done every time you complete a correction that does not break the build.
[quote="Ice Cream Jonsey" post_id=128464 time=1651204510 user_id=3]What do you guys think? What are your experiences getting "into the zone" for mental work?[/quote]
Executives have various perks, or as Mary Chapin Carpenter asks in [i]Passionate Kisses[/i]:
[quote]Is it too much to demand... pens that won't run out of ink, cool quiet, and time to think? Shouldn't I have this? Shouldn't I have this? Shouldn't I have all of this...[/quote]Why do executives get these sort of perks? Because executives are supposed to [i]think[/i] to have long range goals and strategy for planning what the business will do. Programmers do something similar; they think of ways to implement a solution to the problem they have been presented, and to figure out ho to develop future improvements.
No one would expect an executive to do good work in a noisy place where they're interrupted every five minutes with telephone calls and someone asking for something/ Programmers shouldn't be expected to do so either under the same circumstances.