Stop being productive. Just stop. Stop this insane qualification. Stop this forever-measure. This race for immer besser, always better. It is so saddening.
I came into tech for the joy and the wonder. You don't measure joy. You enjoy joy.
If you want to be in tech for joy and wonder that's great but that's not the same as being in a business. If you want to be in business and make money then output matters. It matters less to some companies than others but it always matters at the end of the day.
What I've seen in my career is that when developers were motivated by joy and wonder like 2830 said, or by a sense of mission, etc. productivity and customer satisfaction was high. But when the emphasis turned to productivity (CMMI 5, KPIs, OKRs, Big "Agile", punch clock tool in JIRA issues), the only thing that went up were numbers in a paper.
It's not that money and output are not important for a business, but obsessing with productivity may cause the opposite effect.
Or just maybe there's a way for us to prioritize the human aspect of work, such that we can acknowledge how important joy and wonder are, while still making money and providing value.
Otherwise we're going to just keep burning more and more people out. And for what?
This isn't an argument against what I'm saying though. You cannot be in business expecting it to be 100% joy and wonder. You have to be conscious of the "providing value" part of your statement. There are companies that have excellent work-life balance and provide ample space for play. I work for one of them but if the value you provide is 0 and you expect a 100% wondrous joyride, you won't be there for very long
the eternal dilemma of the min-maxers and the roleplayers.
the productivity cult are the min-maxers.
living cannot be min-maxed.
even productivity cannot be min-maxed, save for the short term, for the simple reason that we don't know what productivity is. technological revolutions are the prime example of this, where each turn of each revolution shifts the entire idea of what being productive is.
> You have to be conscious of the "providing value" part of your statement.
Perhaps if "providing value" is something you have to be conscious of and not something that comes about naturally from doing what energizes you then that's a signal to pursue a different line of work.
Having joy & wonder from what you build (and the value it provides) I believe is tangential to work-life balance. Why is work-life balance pertinent when the question is: "can we stop focusing on being 'productive' and focus on building the right things, that deliver value in unexpected deep ways?"
Another question, why does a work-place need to provide "ample space to play?" I have trouble knowing what this means. At a hack-a-thon, rather than building some throw-away project that was going to be a space to "play", I opted to see if I could decrease the test run time from its current 25 minutes. Obviously this was not a popular hack-a-thon project, but it was by far the most useful (all the others while cool, were never fully integrated).
I somewhat wonder if the "ample space to play" is reflective of an attitude where engineers need to be managed, and like children they need some recess time to burn off excess energy and to be made happy. Is that your take at all? What benefits does this "ample play" provide, and what does that look like? A very important element of job satisfaction is to not have your work thrown away. A "play" project seems exactly something like that. Given this, my impression of providing space to play means: (1) the developers are not taken seriously, are things to be managed, and are not partners in identifying user and business needs, nor are they drivers of identifying business process value [eg: hey, we could automate this, we could optimize that, what if we tweaked this thing a little bit and could then solve a few user-needs at once; vs just building what you are told exactly how you are told]. (2) the 'space to play' is going to be demotivating. "hey, the regular stuff is soul sucking, so here is some time to do something that is not soul-sucking, but it's 'play' and whatever you choose to work on is just a toy and like a toy we'll throw it away.
So, I'm really curious what this "play time" or "play space" looks like. If a developer chooses to work on something, either they are picking projects that do nothing, or they are picking projects that arguably should be already integral to the business development process (and hence should not be 'play' projects at all). Overall, it is work, and if you tell someone that has spent 3 days debugging J2EE configs or YAML configs that they should not expect 100% joy and wonder, or spending a week trying to fathom what the previous time rushed (time-boxes & project focused) developers jammed into the system, & you'll probably getter a rather curt 2 word response rhyming with 'no pit'. That is to say, it is work, I don't think the development profession expects for there to be "space to play", and if so, why are we bothering with wasting time like that? (which seems to be a good way to boost productivity, cut out this throw-away play-time. If developers want to play, as in boost productivity by developing their personal skills, that is for off-the-clock [find an OSS project]).
Sorry the rant-like nature. In sum, I do have these questions:
(1) Why is work-life balance pertinent to productivity at work, as related to development process? Asked another way, how does a work-life balance interact with any "Agile" development process such that the efficacy of that agile process is changed by 'work-life' balance?
(2) What is "ample space to play" - what does that look like? What artifacts come out of that? If useful things are being built, then why isn't that just part of the work? If useful things are not being built and are being thrown away, how does that help anything?
If I read your comment with extreme charity, I think that sentiment boils down to the fact that everyone needs money to continue having food, shelter, and medical care. If I read your comment mildly charitably, it would reduce to a tautology: everyone who works for money wants money. If I read it uncharitably, meaning anyone who does sustained, hard, taxing work wants money, I would argue it's easily disproven since people do incredibly hard work as volunteers. It baffles me that tech titans rail against government and academia, and think everyone has a single-minded desire for money, when the Internet (gov't), the World Wide Web (academia), and Linux and a slew of open-source software (volunteer) powers our lives.
Employees are not in bussiness. They are employees. Employers are in bussiness. They get all the risk and the profits. Now they just want to push the risk to the employees, but keep the profits (all recents official and unofficial layoffs)
When I feel joy and wonder at work, I'm incredibly productive and I work long hours on top of that. When my senses of agency, exploration, and play are undermined, I'm deeply demoralized and find it very difficult to focus and can't wait to walk away from my computer.
I'm still trying to figure out how to better regulate myself away from those extremes (how to put my work down for the sake of other aspects of my life when I'm excited on the one hand, and how to push through and 'reset' when I am frustrated by something outside my control on the other). But one of the things I've already learned is that focusing on productivity in terms of sheer discipline doesn't really work. I get a lot farther working with self-reflection on my emotions and carving out space for joy and freedom in the formal structure of my work week than with sheer mental effort.
I have it similarly. For me, if I can't "play around" or explore something new in a while, my motivation and focus drops to zero.
On the other hand, most days I'm just too mentally exhausted to work on programming when I get home. So I rarely get to scratch that itch on my own time.
To get around that, every now and then I take some time while working on some issue to do something new, like play around with programming language constructs and exploring the limits of the language.
It's not always easy to do though, with deadlines and whatnot. So can be a real struggle at times.
The joy and wonder you feel in tech comes, directly or indirectly, from a lot of prior capital investment. Trillions of dollars over the decades, and a sizeable portion of those outflows are into developer salaries.
Any trillion dollar capital outlay will invariably measure performance, irrespective of the motivations of sector's people.
I came into tech for the joy and the wonder. You don't measure joy. You enjoy joy.