I live in an apartment with 3 front-end developers and none of them have a sane sleep cycle. I often wake up in the middle of the night and see one of them awake and glued to the laptop.
Me: Why are you up?
They: The client needs the update right now
OR
Me: Why are you up?
They: The client changed the design, have to make the UI again from scratch.
OR
Me: Why are you up?
They: This one bug is keeping me awake for the last 3 hours.
I often feel bad for them but they earn much more than I do so that stables things. I spend all day with developers and all I hear is time, time, and TIME.
One of my developer friends worked 20 hours a day for one month straight for a project and before he could rest, he had another one lined up. I see them sleeping in the car on the way to work and even in restaurants while we wait for food. One thing that I have learned after seeing all these events is that time is gold if you are a developer. Developers deserve massive respect for the hard work they put in developing something and I sometimes think that they go unrewarded or people don’t really understand how tough a job it is. Being a non-developer, I can only dream of working so many hours consistently with 10 cups of coffee a day and no sleep at all.
Now I know that developers would love to look for ways or tools that can save their time but one thing I know about devs is that they are really educated and smart people, and don’t compromise on their productivity. Anything that saves their time but messes up with their workflow or productivity will be bashed on by their community. I work at a place where we have multiple products for developers and believe me you guys keep us on our toes all the time. Since we all work in a developer-oriented environment, we focus on developing things that save time. But developers don’t just care about that. They actually don’t care much about saving time or using tools that save time if their productivity is in threat. They’d rather code for one week straight instead of using a tool that claims to do the job in 1 day but ends up messing up their code.
Then maybe developers don’t chase time. Maybe they want to do everything on their own to gain optimal outcomes. This can be true but not entirely.
Developers do like and use tools that do more than just save time. What do they actually need?
Well! One thing I’ve learned is the fact that Devs care about accessibility a lot. They also care about responsiveness and also formatting and so on… Developers won’t give a damn if even one of the discussed things is missing. As I said before, devs are very smart people, they’d rather do it themselves than trust an unreliable source. That’s just how they are which is perfectly fine.
After spending so much time with devs, we came up with a product and tried to cover all bases. Do check it out if you’re interested.
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