StackOverflow2013

Note that there are some explanatory texts on larger screens.

plurals

PO
text
Body
copied!<p>I'm a corporate developer, the kind Joel Spolsky called "depressed" in a couple of the StackOverflow podcasts. Because my company is not a software company it has little business reason to implement many of the measures software experts recommend companies engage for developer productivity. </p> <p>We don't get private offices and dual 30 inch monitors. Our source control system is Microsoft Visual Source Safe. Enough said. On the other hand, I get to do a lot of things that fill out my day and add some variety to my job. I get involved in business analysis, project management, development, production support, international implementations, training support, team planning, and process improvement.</p> <p>I'd say I get 85% of my day to code, when I can focus and I have a major programming task. But more often I get about 50% of my day for coding. If production support (non coding-related) is heavy I may only get 15% of my day to code.</p> <p>Most of the companies I've worked for were not actively engaged in evaluating agile processes or test-driven development, but they didn't do a good job of waterfall either; most of their developers worked like cut-and-paste cowboys with impugnity. </p> <p>On occasion I do work from home and with kids, it's <em>horrible</em>. I'm more productive at work.</p> <p>My productivity is good, but could be better if the interruption factor and cost of mental context switching was removed. Production support and project management overhead both create those types of interruptions. But both are necessary parts of the job, so I don't think I can get rid of them. What I would like to consider is a restructuring of the team so that people on projects could focus on projects while the others could block the interruptions by being dedicated to support. And then swapping when the project is over.</p> <p>Unfortunately, no one wants to do support, so the other productivity improvement measure I'd wish for would be one of the following:</p> <ul> <li>Better testing tools/methodologies to speed up unit testing</li> <li>Better business analysis tools/skills to improve the quality of new development and limit its contributions to the production support load </li> </ul>

Querying!

Guidance

An individual column

Larger individual text columns get their own page to allow for proper reading.

SQuiL has stopped working due to an internal error.

If you are curious you may find further information in the browser console, which is accessible through the devtools (F12).

Reload