- the requirements for each piece of work are expressed completely clearly
- you get immediate feedback on whether your solution works
- you are given, without having to build it yourself, accurate metrics for how your solution measures up in terms of costs, speed and so on
- you get to revisit problems as many times you like at your leisure and reoptimize your solutions to make them more elegant or to prioritize different properties
then I definitely envy you. For me, those things being part of the zachtronics experience turn playing the games into a shortcut to the dopamine-producing parts I love about coding.
Revisiting the problems isn't necessary to get the dopamine hit for figuring out a solution, in my opinion, and as for feedback it depends on the company culture.
Honestly it’s not a bad framework to strive for in a workplace. Introduce the ‘zachtronics test’ as a modern version of the old Joel test.
Give your workplace one point for each of the following:
1) you create acceptance tests for features before coding them
2) you have metrics that provide immediate feedback on how a feature performs
3) you have a system for determining the technical challenge level of each feature
4) you allow developers to tackle problems at the level of technical challenge they are comfortable with, so they can develop mastery before moving on to more tricky problems
5) you let people play card games between projects
6) your workplace has a striking and coherent aesthetic, complementary soundtrack and a compelling storyline
- the requirements for each piece of work are expressed completely clearly
- you get immediate feedback on whether your solution works
- you are given, without having to build it yourself, accurate metrics for how your solution measures up in terms of costs, speed and so on
- you get to revisit problems as many times you like at your leisure and reoptimize your solutions to make them more elegant or to prioritize different properties
then I definitely envy you. For me, those things being part of the zachtronics experience turn playing the games into a shortcut to the dopamine-producing parts I love about coding.