Ask Slashdot: What Practices Impede Developers' Productivity?

nossim writes "When it comes to developers' productivity, numerous controversial studies stress the differences between individuals. As a freelance web developer, I've worked for a lot of companies, and I noticed how some companies foster good practices which improve individual productivity and some others are a nightmare in that regard. In your experience, what are the worst practices or problems that impede developers' productivity at an individual or organizational level?"

Easy answer;

[Stumbles]

Anything that involves a person in management.

And Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Trolling Slashdot generally eats up 50% to 80% of my work day.

The rest of the time in meetings or organizing meetings for later.

Re:42

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I've been meaning to stop doing that.

Re:Beg to differ & WHY... apk

[gabereiser]

HOLY capital letters that was a LONG comment... I see where your COMING from but I don't TOTALLY agree. Meetings DO harm you as far as time is CONCERNED. Rarely are YOU exiting the meeting with a better UNDERSTANDING of what the meeting was SCHEDULED to resolve. Most of the TIME its so that some MANAGER can get the people who KNOW what they are DOING in one room to REACH a DECISION. Rarely are meetings beneficial to ALL parties involved which results in TIME loss and PRODUCTIVITY wasted. I'm using GRATUITOUS use of all caps like you HAVE in your response because I'm emphasizing my WORDS so you understand my intelligence level.

Re:fix it later

[CanHasDIY]

"I'll fix that bug later" is legit when you're already having trouble meeting a deadline, better to meet it with a buggy product and fix it during QC than not deliver.

...

Ballmer, is that you?

Ducks to avoid flying office chairs

Re:The Number One Impediment is MEETINGS

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, there's value in keeping up with your peers' work, but this is not worth an hour a day, for example. I can go spend that time with the specific people that I am working with and get a lot more out of that than their piece in a meeting.

Or, more accurately, you can spend that extra hour of time reading slashdot.

Re:#1 visiting slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, going on available data from my years of reading Slashdot, hearing everybody bitching about every conceivable IDE, dev tool, library, language, storage system, network, computer, smartphone, and compiler, plus the fact that anyone who has anything good to say about any of those is an obvious shill, I'd say the thing that impedes software developer productivity the most is software development.

Re:The Number One Impediment is MEETINGS

[CycleFreak]

Meeting: An event where minutes are kept and hours are lost.