this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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Programming
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Tbh I think alot of the "thinking" still looks like visible work though. I feel like the article makes it seem a little too much like there's nothing observable, nothing to show or demonstrate, until POOF the code comes out.
But I find that I often need to be doing visible stuff to make progress... Like devising little experiments and running them to check my assumptions about the system (or discover something new about it), and making little incremental changes, running them, using the output to guide the next thing I do... Even occasionally spending the time to write a failing test that I plan to make pass.
So I'm 100% on board with letting managers believe this "80% of the work is invisible" thing... But I think as advice for programmers, it's really important to not get too stuck in your head and spend too much time not kinetically interacting with the system that you're trying to change.
You're right, and other intellectual "design" jobs will have physical or visible manifestations of the design process. In video you have a storyboard, set design. In music you have notation, lyrics, demo recordings, and so on.
Right! For music, I think it's even like saying... The process of making music is much more than just literally performing it... But it'd be weird for the creative process to not contain any playing-of-music that looked in some ways like performance.
Unless you like improvising with music... But even that can be frustrating because any cool jams I played on my own were long gone before I even had a chance to look around to see if I made it up or was just pulling something from my archives without realizing it.