HACKER Q&A
📣 Jaedon_Proctor

Born to code forced to write confluence and attend meetings?


What are tasks that seem too trivial for someone of your expertise but are nonetheless essential for your organization's bottom line?

How does this affect your productivity as a programmer?


  👤 kstenerud Accepted Answer ✓
Communication is essential, and improves my productivity. If you're not building what is required, your productivity is 0.

If your organization sucks at communication, then the meetings and confluence pages will suck, of course.


👤 cebert
I don’t understand how writing documentation or attending meetings is “trivial”. Writing good documentation is a skill and is essential to effectively disseminate information throughout an organization. Meetings, if managed effectively, fosters collaboration and helps ensure everyone is on the same page. While you may love coding, as I do, we’re getting paid to solve problems and deliver business value. Communication is a critical element that ensures business value is delivered.

👤 gregjor
You don’t get paid to write code. That’s a means to an end. You get paid for adding value to the business, solving problems, and multiplying the overall effectiveness of your team and the organization.

Taking a narrow view of what you can or should be doing — “that’s not my job” syndrome — is a sure way to get stuck in the lower rungs and feel like you don’t make a difference.

The programmers who mainly think their “productivity” depends on removing “trivial” things so they can focus on themselves and “DX” are hunting for jobs right now. Employers are getting wise to that nonsense. Productivity is not the goal, adding business value is.


👤 billy99k
Developers hate meetings, but they can be very beneficial. I can't tell you the amount of times I've had miscommunications over slack/teams that were resolved with a 10 or 15 minute meeting.