Are Your Programmers Working Hard, Or Are They Lazy?
> When people are doing a physical task, it’s easy to assess how hard they are working. You can see the physical movement, the sweat. You also see the result of their work: the brick wall rising, the hole in the ground getting bigger. Recognising and rewarding hard work is a pretty fundamental human instinct, it is one of the reasons we find endurance sports so fascinating.We've all heard about the stereotypical manager-perception of "effort invested will be proportional to results delivered!", like the article laments. But this analogy breaks down really quickly.Let's use an example that's not from software to illustrate the point -- in fact, let's use the author's own example, laying bricks. Who would you rather hire?-- Bricklayer A: Takes 2 weeks to finish a wall, stays late every day to finish the job, finally builds a brick wall of passable quality.-- Bricklayer B: Finishes your wall in two hours because he realizes there's a better way to lay your bricks, and builds a wall of excellent quality.I feel like most people, even managers of non-software folks, would rather hire B. At least, I certainly would.So I think the premise of the article is wrong. There's something deeper going on, and dismissing it with "managers want to reward hard work, and creatives don't look like they're working hard" is an explanation that is "neat, simple, and wrong" [0].[0]: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken