Comment by pton_xd
8 hours ago
5 minutes... what about 5 hours, or 5 days? Imagine spending 5 hours with a pen and paper sketching solutions. Unthinkable to spend that amount of time "unproductively" today. I feel like there's just so much pressure to make visible progress, and with these tools available it's getting harder to convince yourself to take the time to think.
It is unfathomable to me that spending 5 hours of hard mental work is deemed ‘unthinkable’ and ‘unproductive time’
I might be of the old “hammock driven development” school, but I wonder if people have any idea of what productivity and creativity consists of, how it works and how to promote a state of flow and deep work. Hint: it’s not about context switching between 15 different agents per minute.
I keep wondering if I am defending my experience in this field against the deep hubris of 19 year olds that are still figuring it all out (programming but also system design and how to tackle hard problems efficiently)
Absolutely not unthinkable! We're paid for exactly that in research, for example.
It's terrifying to hear that 5 hours of focused thinking is considered crazy. I can understand a budget battle if it's 5 months, but 5 hours?! Everyone, in every profession (or none), would be better off mentally if they "wasted" 5 hours thinking about something every now and then!
If 5 hours of thinking time to solve a problem is unthinkable to some people does that mean they have some form of Attention Deficit Disorder, be it a natural thing or introduced by an over-dependence on LLMs? Like stopping for an hour to think through a problem is unfathomable and instead they would rather hit small dopamine spikes every few minutes from talking to a chatbot?
I completely agree with you, but being "better off mentally" is really not valued very highly today.
Fast, visible progress and delivery is the melody.
Sometimes you gotta do things that others don’t value highly. A long career needs you to act with good judgment. Even - sometimes - when the optics are bad.
If you were in need of legal services in a high-stakes case, or if you needed brain surgery, would you want "fast visible progress" or "I need to think this through"?
I'd say both relevant professions are highly regarded.