Re:Ask HN: How much time in your working day do you spend in...
by lamansion on Friday December 01, 2017 @12:11AM
(#15822073)
>> it could take ~8 hours just to regain the state I had in my head
Sounds interesting, can you please share more details about what you were working on?
Re:Ask HN: How much time in your working day do you spend in...
by luckydude on Monday December 04, 2017 @04:48PM
(#15847859)
It was almost always performance stuff. I'd get stuck with stuff like "Oracle's cluster database sucks on our systems, can you find out why?" and then you have to go figure out where it is slow (find the hot spot) and then figure out why we were slow.
That meant keeping all of the hardware in your head, the kernel in your head, and the app in your head. If you didn't have all that state it was super hard, maybe impossible (for me at least), to figure out the problem.
When I was a kernel engineer at Sun, there were stretches where I worked around 14 hours per "day". "day" had a different definition for me, I worked on about a 34 hour "day". Which meant that my day time hours were constantly shifting. A coworker put a clock on my door that said "where's larry?" and it showed when I'd be in next. I think it was a joke but some people said they liked it.
The reason I did this was I would be working on stuff where it could take ~8 hours just to regain the state I had in my head when I stopped working the previous day. So if I did 8 hour days I'd never make any forward progress. So you do 8 hours to page in the state and then you go as far as you can go to move things forward.
I didn't have much of a social life back then but I didn't care, I was getting stuff done at Sun and loved it. It was a super productive time of my life.