productivity

I burned myself out once and it took at least 12 years to regain full productivity. Don't do it.

There are plenty of studies that outright prove the productivity boost that comes with bigger monitors.

And, wouldn't you know it, productivity went up -- considerably.

* Google is resistant to any change that might improve engineer productivity beyond the rather plodding rate it has now. C++ and Java are the real house languages; Scala's not even on the table.

The real reason programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity: They don't demand it. I had the privilege of working with some extremely talented and productive people.

Practically speaking, that company probably won't be the one we all know as the bloated monopolistic entity that makes most of its profits from boring office productivity software. But this made me wish it was.

GMail's priority inbox and new-style inbox where machine learning is used to sort out mail is a productivity booster for me. With Outlook, I regularly lose important mail because it is buried under the difficult to filter masses of other email.

We bought their cell phones, their operating systems and productivity suites, their internet adds, hosting and email services and movies and music. We even let some of their largest corporations get away without paying taxes on the money they made in our countries.

This made an enormous difference to our productivity, which everyone in the company took notice of when the number of "development days" we got done each week increased dramatically. At the start we thought of "sacrifice one for the good of all" and we didn't look forward to our turn.

In fact, I'd probably go so far as to say that if I'd been sitting down and chatting while I had lunch, my overall productivity would have dropped precipitously. This is by no means an argument against socialising with one's coworkers; it's not even an argument against having lunch with them.

And look, I GET that rogue spreadsheets can turn into productivity-damaging unseen business risks. But until the corporate "software project" culture understands why it happens and why people are often far happier with their clunky spreadsheet than with your shiny WPF app or web page, I don't think this problem is going to go away.

Ideally burnout is kind of self-regulating because as your productivity decreases your opportunities decrease as well. Unfortunately I was organising an event and getting less done only meant having more to do.

They get the productivity benefits of programming Web pages in a "fit for purpose" language while getting most of the performance benefits of native code and they only had to give up some small subset of PHP to do it. If you argue the subset thing is a problem try working in any C++ shop where using only a small subset of the language is de rigeur.

It makes sense in a startup to work hard in crucial weeks, you can sustain that for a few days both from the point of view of your body and your productivity, but making this the rule is just plain silly. Also, remember that a startup has a small percentage of probabilities of making you rich, so better for you to also enjoy life while working at a startup.

So, the more these jobs languish unfilled, the more productivity slows, the less likely the economy flourishes, and the more the currently unemployed will stay that way unless they remediate or accept jobs beneath their experience/education/skill level. My personal pet theory, however, is that we don't have a jobs problem, we have a Business-with-a-capital-b problem.

Finally regarding productivity vs. hours put in. Again, this is completely irrelevant if you're following the right metrics - results. Long hours obviously don't make sense if they're making you too tired to deliver results. If you're delivering but not in a sustainable way, well, you need to calibrate and lower expectations so you don't under deliver. In short, people should optimize for long-term productivity appropriate to their goals.