Richard Hook, a game programmer, writes about developer productivity, working habits, and code quality, best known for his post on smart guy pitfalls.
HN links it for "Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls," a story from someone who worked with John Carmack, cited in debates over long work hours.
There is a difference between not knowing when there is to much stress and saing, that 4h are enough.
I do get more stuff done when i work longer.
I might get distracted by stuff but this is also a part of my work. Helping my collegues? Yes part of my job. I do not count my lunch time as work.
And no not the majority of my work as a software engineere is thinking, thinking and thinking. What i really think is tiring is making decisions.
Most of people out there have bad jobs and get paid little. But look at us: Earning good money and talkling about 4h workdays for the same pay. Its fucking arrogant.
I can only recommend to read this: http://bookofhook.blogspot.de/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity-pitfalls.html
and no there is no 'but i did my work so i can go home' How about spending the rest of the time to improve something in your company? or bring the garbage out? Or whatever?
And if you are part of a team, you put less work in than others and let them down :(
It also requires strong intelligence, mental processing speed, vocabulary and frankly just giving a damn about not only the subject but clearly articulating it to the audience.
After I read "Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls"¹ it became apparent to me that John he has quite an acute awareness of life's smaller details.
Too many people care too little about a lot of things. There seems to be a common perception that a passionate-about-the-reasonably-small-details attitude is simply being "anal" or "OCD". Finding people who are intensely passionate about their work-- not just the paycheck-- is insanely difficult. It'd be nice to have the company of more people who fall into John's category (though statistically unlikely at his level). I'm not saying that to hold him on some kind of pedestal, just giving him credit for his hard work.
¹ http://bookofhook.blogspot.com/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity-pitfalls.html
From Brian Hook[0], who worked with John Carmack at id Software:
> I remember Carmack talking about productivity measurement. While working he would play a CD, and if he was not being productive, he'd pause the CD player. This meant any time someone came into his office to ask him a question or he checked email he'd pause the CD player. He'd then measure his output for the day by how many times he played the CD (or something like that -- maybe it was how far he got down into his CD stack). I distinctly remember him saying "So if I get up to go to the bathroom, I pause the player".
> You know what's pretty hardcore? Thinking that going to the bathroom is essentially the same as fucking off.
0: http://bookofhook.blogspot.com/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity-pitfalls.html
"Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls" (http://bookofhook.blogspot.com/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity-pitfalls.html) were useful to me and techniques related to "no zero days" and just getting started (with a single sentence, slide, line of code) are virtually the only things that consistently work for me. These techniques are nicely summarized in "Micro-Progress and the Magic of Just Getting Started" https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/22/smarter-living/micro-progress.html.
Anything causing guilt turned out to be counterproductive, vide my answer to "How to stop feeling guilty about unfinished work?": https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/17988/how-to-stop-feeling-guilty-about-unfinished-work/18009#18009.
Procrastinating on an assigned task because you think you can do things faster than everyone else. It's a trap that I fell into often. Nearing the shipping date, I found myself scrambling to finish the task wishing I had started earlier. The learning: Even if you're faster at doing things, underestimating unknown unknowns is going to be detrimental in the end. It's better to start sooner. There's a good article that covers this hazard[1]
[1]: http://bookofhook.blogspot.in/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity-pitfalls.html
I like this quote attributed to John Carmack:
"Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and
just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which
way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better."
See also this blog post by someone who worked with Carmack:
http://bookofhook.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity-pitfalls.html