Personally I find myself radically under-extended by the typical one-thing-at-a-time mentality. One at a time feels like accepted dogma, and pushback feels extreme & immediate if I as a dev attempt anything else. Businesses really want exact control & certain knowledge over how I spend every minute of developer time.
And I think it's such a waste, in my view. When I write code or make designs, usually the first couple cuts aren't great! They usually work, but how I lay out interfaces & how the code is structured tends to be pretty so so. Insight is garnered over time & experience.
Now, if work wants to pay me to spend 2/3rds my time just reflecting & pondering one thing at a time, I think that would work. But what makes sense to me is to have a couple things in flight, ideally staggered at slightly different phases of development, and to shift between them as the whims take me. Give myself time to decompress & reflect on one thing, by picking up another item that I've been pondering for a while.
It feels so unnatural & suboptimal, what we do to developers. The expectation of constant productivity in one task feels like such a recipe for bad code. I have no idea how so many people do it. It boggles my mind seeing folks able to stay to task, able to power through, without these pauses & times for reflection.
I wish so much there was some affordances, some option, something available for those of us who don't work well one task at a time. I want to be juggling more of the world at once, switching on and off tasks, having intervals & spacing between working specific areas of the code. I just don't see this perspective mirrored at all in the world, don't see anything at all that reflects what works for me, that reflects how hard it is for me to feel good about my work when I'm managed down, as though a machine that just has to turn a crank until it's done. My mind just is not that fast & direct, not that quick to settle and resolve the complexities of system; I need some dwell times built in. I don't know what would happen to velocity, but quality would be much higher & I'd be so much better able to flow, to latch onto tasks I was much more primed for. Please, someone, give the Hammock Driven Devs a chance.
> But what makes sense to me is to have a couple things in flight, ideally staggered at slightly different phases of development, and to shift between them as the whims take me. Give myself time to decompress & reflect on one thing, by picking up another item that I've been pondering for a while.
This is exactly how it works best for me, as well. A few problems being tackled and solved in parallel, out-of-phase.
And I think it's such a waste, in my view. When I write code or make designs, usually the first couple cuts aren't great! They usually work, but how I lay out interfaces & how the code is structured tends to be pretty so so. Insight is garnered over time & experience.
Hammock Driven Development (Rich Hickey) speaks to me a lot. Sit back and reflect; consider what we are doing, how it's going. Reconsider the possibilities. https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
Now, if work wants to pay me to spend 2/3rds my time just reflecting & pondering one thing at a time, I think that would work. But what makes sense to me is to have a couple things in flight, ideally staggered at slightly different phases of development, and to shift between them as the whims take me. Give myself time to decompress & reflect on one thing, by picking up another item that I've been pondering for a while.
It feels so unnatural & suboptimal, what we do to developers. The expectation of constant productivity in one task feels like such a recipe for bad code. I have no idea how so many people do it. It boggles my mind seeing folks able to stay to task, able to power through, without these pauses & times for reflection.
I wish so much there was some affordances, some option, something available for those of us who don't work well one task at a time. I want to be juggling more of the world at once, switching on and off tasks, having intervals & spacing between working specific areas of the code. I just don't see this perspective mirrored at all in the world, don't see anything at all that reflects what works for me, that reflects how hard it is for me to feel good about my work when I'm managed down, as though a machine that just has to turn a crank until it's done. My mind just is not that fast & direct, not that quick to settle and resolve the complexities of system; I need some dwell times built in. I don't know what would happen to velocity, but quality would be much higher & I'd be so much better able to flow, to latch onto tasks I was much more primed for. Please, someone, give the Hammock Driven Devs a chance.