[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at...
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Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work
For as long as I've been working professionally, I have been
slacking around a lot of the time, reading blog posts, HN, often
even reading (tech, biz-related) books and just doing the bare
minimum for appearances sake but no one seems to notice. In the
office I book a booth to work in to have some peace & quiet and
have a couple of code commits prepared to not arouse suspicion. In
companies with perf reviews I get some useful feedback here and
there but most of the time it's positive, people love to work with
me, I do get stuff done if I have to, but as soon as I can get away
with doing close to nothing, I'll take the chance. I don't think
I'm blocking other teams and I don't think I'm preventing my own
team from having accomplishments and often people refer to me as
being either partially or mostly responsible for shipping something
because I manage to have a clear mind and focus when things get
close to a deadline. If I am motivated and the
task/project/product is fun I throw myself into it but that isn't
sustainable. I've read a few of these posts from people at FAANG
doing almost the same so I don't really feel bad about it. I'm just
wondering how wide-spread this is. One of my theories for this
behavior is that this is related to 40+ hour work weeks. I think
I'd be able to get my devopsy work done in ~3 hours/day if I manage
my time well and schedule most meetings on Mondays.
Author : awaythrown1
Score : 335 points
Date : 2021-06-22 16:08 UTC (6 hours ago)
| akiselev wrote:
| You're probably in a state with "at will" employment so there's
| nothing stopping your employer from firing you for any reason
| short of discrimination or retaliation. If they haven't fired you
| or even so much as given you a warning, then you are clearly
| satisfying your end of the agreement, by definition. (You don't
| even have the insight to make this determination, so you have to
| go by their actions)
|
| That five hours a day of paid time off is the profit you earn for
| doing a good job. It is up to you to efficiently reallocate those
| resources as demanded by _CAPITALISM_ because the company is
| unable to.
| tekkk wrote:
| I have noticed that biggest inhibitor to my work is having to
| deal with other people's bullshit. If my manager doesn't really
| listen or isn't interested (or just fakes an interest) in making
| things well I kinda my lose motivation too to bring my best. Just
| being a monkey to churn-out half-assed code is what I hate the
| most and deteriorate my productivity too.
|
| I can really pump out code with my own projects but doing the
| same to finish a bunch of nameless JIRA tickets isn't really the
| same. What do I get for providing some corporation more value? A
| pat on the shoulder? Hah.
| dave_sid wrote:
| You have my dream job
| temporama1 wrote:
| Any tips on how to change the timestamp on your Git commits? That
| way you could get your work done on a Monday and spread the
| commits out throughout the week. I've looked at this before but
| there are two timestamps on each commit (can't remember now what
| each of them denotes) and I could only change one of them.
| throwwwawy123 wrote:
| You sound exactly like me. I've mostly just accepted the fact
| that this is the best way for me to work. I can buckle down and
| grind out a full day of work some days but not for many days in a
| row.
|
| I've come to the conclusion that I am usually as productive/more
| productive than those around me and I tend to think it is
| _because_ of the way I work rather than in spite of it. When I do
| sit and do some work I am less stressed and can use a couple
| hours of motivation to knock out a days work in 2-3 hours usually
| in the morning. The rest of the day might be
| meetings/exercise/reading/social media/youtube and perhaps an
| additional 30-60min of work.
|
| Ultimately I've found that the reason not to "slack" so much is
| less because I am not productive enough and more because when
| slacking I often lean on high dopamine activites like social
| media/youtube etc. that ultimately make me less happy than being
| with friends/going for a walk/learning something new.
|
| I will also say I have done the "grind" for months at a time and
| looking back I know that I would have gotten the same amount of
| real work done at my current pace. The issue is the added stress
| makes it harder for me to think, I often end up working on the
| wrong problem as I am trying to move too quickly, and having too
| many pending tasks makes it harder to make decisions/prioritize.
|
| I've also worked with those that grind and I've noticed they
| don't always work on high priority tasks. Often they are too
| focused on grinding they might not be able to step back and
| realize they could use their time better.
| 71a54xd wrote:
| I was and sort of still continue to be a mental wreck because of
| isolation / life stuff that changed because of covid. We were all
| locked in a room for basically a year, let's all just think about
| that for a second.
|
| Yes, I currently for the lack of a better definition coast at my
| job. I work maybe 20hrs a week and get paid the full degree,
| increased hours a bit to still get a raise after my last review.
|
| This is okay to heal and get back to normal, but will undoubtably
| stagnate your motivation, mental health and career advancement
| long-term.
|
| I'm probably going to leave this current job (since perception of
| my velocity is now set in stone) take a 2-3 weeks off and then
| start interviewing for a job with better pay.
|
| The way I see it, I'm just gaming the system to maximize my
| efficiency with a large bias for recovering my mental health.
| This is why companies are scared of work from home long term ;)
| lioeters wrote:
| Slack is our natural born right.
|
| ---
|
| > Church members seek to acquire Slack and believe it will allow
| them the free, comfortable life (without hard work or
| responsibility) they claim as an entitlement.
|
| > Sex and the avoidance of work are taught as two key ways to
| gain Slack.
|
| > Davidoff believes that Slack is "the ability to effortlessly
| achieve your goals". Cusack states that the Church's description
| of Slack as ineffable recalls the way that Tao is described, and
| Kirby calls Slack a "unique magical system".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius#Conspi...
|
| ---
|
| > Unlike those Christians and their tirades about Original Sin,
| The Church teaches us that all of us, humans and SubGenii alike,
| are born with Original Slack. As part of their mission to
| suppress and subjugate the SubGenii, The Conspiracy starts
| stealing your Slack from the day you are born.
|
| https://subgenius.fandom.com/wiki/Slack
| LouisSayers wrote:
| I'm guessing it's a spectrum in terms of "slacking off" at work.
| Like yourself I'm quite productive with my work and feel like I
| can accomplish the same amount in 30 minutes as some others can
| in a single day.
|
| This gives me wiggle room, working from home I'll take a longer
| break at lunch, going for a walk after eating and I like to read
| up on tech news etc as well.
|
| I wouldn't say I do the bare minimum, but I also have a strong
| sense of not letting people down.
|
| That being said I'm quitting my job as I'm not super motivated by
| the work and have a side project that I get joy out of every time
| I touch it.
|
| One thing to think about in terms of slacking off is what you're
| getting besides money in terms of the work you're doing. I
| suspect that if you aren't getting much personal growth from the
| work then it's easy to see how you'd be unmotivated to put in
| more than the bare minimum. In which case you might want to
| change job / project etc and work on something you feel will
| allow you to grow.
| [deleted]
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Ask HN: these are shit posts from throwaway accounts?
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I think a lot of people could get their work done in ~3 hours a
| day if they were actually focused for that long. I think a big
| chunk of folks are in your shoes and just don't recognize it or
| they think of all of those other things you do as part of work.
|
| I know people who "waste" a huge amount of their time talking to
| people in the office and probably do less than ~3 of real work a
| day. They also distract others. But they would call that team
| building.
| galdosdi wrote:
| If people around you are happy and things get done when they need
| to and others don't get blocked, it sounds like you are doing a
| great job and are merely baffled at how effecient you've gotten!
|
| If you have any interest, consider trying management? A lazy
| manager is a good manager, in the same long-term sense as a lazy
| developer is a good developer. Knowing what the real priorities
| are despite the bluster is a key manager skill. Nothing more
| wasteful than putting in tons of hours on a project that sounds
| important but ultimately isn't to the stakeholders that run the
| company, and the best managers have an incredible ability to read
| between the lines and predict what will end up mattering, and
| prioritize their own teams work accordingly.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| My company gets utility from me when I'm sleeping, showering, or
| sitting on the throne. I'm thinking about my work tasks and how
| to solve them in those situations. When I'm at my desk in my open
| plan office (pre-COVID), the constant interruptions meant not
| getting any work done.
| Communitivity wrote:
| I look at this from a physics perspective. I generally have 3-4
| hours a day where I am making something (as I take on more
| leadership it goes down to 2-3 hours a day). During this time I
| am doing 'real work', i.e. applying force to our goal posts to
| move them toward delivery. Simply said, work is force over time
| and force = mass * acceleration. If I look at that as development
| force = knowledge x development effort, then my 'real work' is
| increasing my development effort. However, the time I spend
| refreshing, increasing my skills and my general knowledge, is
| increasing my knowledge, aka mass. Therefore it still increases
| the amount of work I can do. I can do more with 4 hours of work
| than many junior devs I know can do with a week. Not because I'm
| special, but just because I've done it before and now the
| technologies.
| serjester wrote:
| 3 hours a day? This seems completely reasonable. I'm under the
| impression the vast majority of developer are in a similar boat.
| whateveracct wrote:
| The guilt you're feeling is intentional. The culture of
| capitalism is the driving force behind it. By recognizing it,
| you're already partway to breaking free.
| icedchai wrote:
| Very common. I know several people in this same boat. They're all
| smart and can get things done when they're motivated.
| Unfortunately, most of this work is _not_ too interesting so 70%+
| of the time they 're bored, half checked-out, doing the minimum,
| browsing HN, reddit, or checking their stock portfolios.
| jaegerpicker wrote:
| I think that's the root of the problem in software development.
| Development requires VERY smart people to solve hard(ish)
| problems. The catch, the majority of problems are stupid simple
| and easy. So smart developers are generally engaged one or two
| weeks out of the year, maybe one or two months if there are
| real tough problems to solve. Then is goes back to wiring up
| login screens or explaining how JWT's work for the 100th time
| or setting up DB models and access. It's terribly boring and
| very uneven. After a while you stop caring until the world is
| on fire.
| alanfranz wrote:
| My 2c: your value may be a net positive. Maybe not the largest
| positive, but remember: a lot of people actually are of negative
| value. You don't distract coworkers. You don't schedule meetings.
| You don't overengineer or start crazy projects.
|
| You're just a living sign that we could work 3 hours a day and
| still create good value, and that our attempts at maximum
| efficiency isn't actually working.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Most people work a bit, then slack a bit, or just pace themselves
| at a constant sustainable rate. You're doing fine.
|
| What you _don 't_ want to find yourself in was my system
| administration job. At first there was plenty to do, my manager
| had me keep a log, so if a problem re-arose I could solve it more
| quickly. I did that, and things were good. After a few years, I'd
| done such a good job that I had a lot of slack time. There were
| some changes I wanted to make to the database, so I built a
| prototype of a new system that would have made things a lot
| better for everyone, and the production manager wouldn't even TRY
| it. I did this three different times before I finally gave up.
|
| For the last few years, I showed up, jumped on any problem that
| arose, and waiting for quitting time, all the while knowing that
| I wasn't really delivering much value (other than absorbing
| uncertainty as far as the computers were concerned). Eventually
| economics caught up, and they outsourced the job.
|
| You've got a steady flow of work... you'll be fine.
| wantsanagent wrote:
| Congrats! You have found a comfortable job. Also my condolences,
| you've found a comfortable job.
|
| Jobs like these are a warm and cozy trap. If you're spending time
| reading blogs you may not be spending your time in a way you can
| look back on with pride. Time is your ultimate limited resource
| and the one thing you will regret not spending more wisely.
|
| Depending on your risk tolerance I recommend:
|
| 1. Quit, start a company of your own.
|
| 2. Quit, get one or more remote jobs.
|
| 3. Work on open source during work time.
|
| 4. Volunteer for something that benefits you and uses your time
| better (e.g. running training sessions on tech you know / want to
| know)
|
| 5. Reduce your life costs, accumulate money, retire early (FIRE)
| dnautics wrote:
| having extra time makes 5) harder, not easier!
| KronisLV wrote:
| I don't necessarily agree with that.
|
| Having free time enables you to either upskill yourself and
| to move to a more lucrative position later, or perhaps even
| work on side projects.
|
| Some people freelance and both get practical skills and an
| additional source of income (even though a somewhat
| inconsistent one), whereas others enjoy trying to create
| their own SaaS solutions which could serve as a passive
| income, in the age of widespread web APIs and things like
| Stripe making payment processing easier.
|
| Heck, some people actually enjoy doing things that are
| completely unrelated to the ICT sector, so
| woodworking/carpentry/farming and so on could also be both
| nice sources of income, as well as a way of getting some
| fresh air and/or exercise in an otherwise sedentary
| lifestyle.
|
| Of course, even if some of the free time is spent not
| generating income but instead doing stuff like working out,
| that could also both improve one's quality of life and also
| cut down medical expenses, as well as indirectly make them
| more productive at their regular work due to better
| alertness, which may or may not further contribute to how
| effectively they can use those hours that they have.
| DantesKite wrote:
| Working for several hours a day is unfeasible for most people,
| unless you're working on something you actively love.
|
| From my perspective, as long as you're not holding anyone back, I
| think you're doing a decent job of modulating your energy for
| moments when you need it, as opposed to marathon running all day
| long.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| As someone with RSI, this is absolutely a good way to look at
| it. I've been working on rehabbing my hands and shoulders so I
| can work at longer / more intensive stretches, but I can only
| keep it up for a few weeks before I need some lighter duty
| work. I've had to give up video games and recreational
| keyboarding, but it means I can continue to work and put in the
| hours when needed.
| justanotherguy0 wrote:
| You're really selling me on moving my company to a 4 day work
| week.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I suspect five shorter days would work better (for an
| employer).
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Do it. Your employees will love you and you will be able to
| recruit talent you wouldnt otherwise.
| 01100011 wrote:
| That's great until the economy changes and you have to start
| competing again.
|
| I had a slack job for my mid career when I should have been
| busting my ass and positioning myself for my later career. I
| wasted tons of time and regret it. You may have ADHD. You may
| just be lacking self discipline. I don't know. You should get
| your shit together now when you have the option and not wait for
| life circumstances to demand it.
|
| It's not about what you owe the company. It's about what you owe
| yourself.
| DevKoala wrote:
| Check threads here: https://www.teamblind.com/
|
| It is a way of life at FAANG, Uber, etc.
|
| Don't feel guilty. These companies will eventually realize they
| need to change, or perhaps they are okay with it.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Why would they change if they print money?
| mylons wrote:
| in which case, this style of work is OK and should be
| accepted instead of shamed
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Just because something is profitable for the employers does
| not mean it is ethically or morally right.
| mylons wrote:
| i don't understand what's immoral in this case?
| DevKoala wrote:
| In the past I've hired engineers on a per hour basis; we
| agree on the hour count while we plan the tasks.
|
| Sometimes it takes them more hours than we planned,
| sometimes less, but our contract stays the same. There is
| nothing moral/amoral around them being efficient or
| padding their estimates IMHO.
| mylons wrote:
| i think project based billing is more fair so the last
| sentence doesn't have to happen.
| DevKoala wrote:
| Estimating hours for a project is essentially project
| based billing, it is just more granular.
|
| I don't think the developers who only work 3 hours a day
| when they are employed full time are being amoral. If
| they can do it, more power to them.
|
| I often work 6-8hrs a day with meetings taking 40% of my
| time. During crunch, I work far more. I don't think there
| is anything amoral when the system doesn't work for me
| either.
| DevKoala wrote:
| I wasn't arguing for these companies having to change. In
| fact, I am glad it suits the life of people who enjoy that
| lifestyle. I was arguing that whatever imbalance will fix
| itself.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| I spend a lot of time thinking through what needs to be done and
| how. I don't stare at a screen and just bang code out anymore.
| wiglaf1979 wrote:
| I was in a similar rut. Not just professionally but academically
| as well for most of my life. Motivation had to be forced to do
| more than just enough to blend into the crowd. It took me saying
| enough is enough in my 40's to go get tested. Turns out I have
| ADHD. Getting therapy to deal with anxiety and depression stuff
| as well as getting on Adderall has done wonders.
|
| I'm not suddenly working 40+ hours always in the zone. What has
| happened is that I've been better able to enjoy/engage with
| coworkers around helping them. Instead of feeling stuck and
| anxious, it's been easier to feel at ease at work and less
| fixated on metrics or usefulness. That engagement with my
| coworkers coupled with lowering how much effort was needed to do
| work that was previously seen as "busy" work has done wonders for
| my outlook about work.
|
| In my case the benefit/problem of hyperfixation due to ADHD meant
| that when I had an interesting bit of work in front of me I could
| knock it out the park and it didn't feel like any effort. Those
| infrequent home runs were enough to make up for the times where I
| just couldn't be bothered to do other less interesting things.
| Didn't want to do them and because no one was asking me to do
| them it was ok that I didn't. Deep down I knew I was
| overcompensating in my strong areas to avoid the uninteresting
| items. This may not be you but if it is you may want to think on
| it. It's helped me outside of work as well. Parenting and dating.
| humbleMouse wrote:
| "Not working enough? Just take meth!"
| manmal wrote:
| The dose makes the poison. With methamphetamines, the toxic
| dose just happens to be quite small. Ever tried a mega dose
| of Aspirin? It can kill you.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| ADHD is not meth in the same way grain alcohol is not wood
| alcohol.
| datameta wrote:
| For the reader, that's not only an apt analogy - it's a
| chemically accurate one. Structurally the difference
| between methamphetamine and amphetamine as well as between
| ethanol and methanol is a methyl group.
|
| Pharmacologically it's a different story - methanol is not
| a safe substance with any dose.
| adar wrote:
| Being snarkily dismissive of mental disorders isn't a great
| look, especially when OP stated that they also went to
| therapy for anxiety/depression and also stated they work less
| now than they did before because they're able to properly
| focus.
| marvin wrote:
| It might have been unhelpful way of formulating the
| response, especially in the light of OP's comments about
| getting treatment for anxiety and depression.
|
| But the comment was probably meant to highlight that
| there's a sense of ambiguity in medicating what's likely a
| natural individual difference in brain chemistry. Many
| diagnosed with ADHD would be considered perfectly well-
| functioning in a society where hunting, defense or other
| stressful, spontaneous physically and psychologically
| demanding activities were common. Many of them would excel
| at it far beyond the ideal office worker.
|
| So in that sense it can be considered a critique of
| contemporary society's requirements and standards.
| forz877 wrote:
| I feel like I hear this statement a lot, but is there any
| real evidence of this?
|
| First, I doubt there is any historical evidence of such a
| phenomenon.
|
| Second, ADHD isn't nearly as prevalent enough in the
| general population to suggest that it's society.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| This may be true for tribal societies but we don't live
| in one anymore and unless I go try and join the sentinels
| at Sentinel Island, which I have a 99% chance of being
| killed before reaching, I have to find a way to live and
| prosper in the society we do have and that's by
| medicating.
|
| I tried for a decade to make myself work "naturally".
| Almost left to be a monastic forever. At some point you
| have to pick up the same shovel everyone else is holding.
|
| Unless you want to pay me 100k to keep trying to do my
| own thing.
| whateveracct wrote:
| ADHD is an executive function disorder. OP clearly has
| perfectly fine executive function if they are gainfully
| employed getting good reviews.
|
| If you have ADHD, doing what OP is doing is not going to be
| easy untreated.
| mylons wrote:
| thanks for posting this. I've been putting getting tested off
| for a long time. I don't think anyone ever suspected me of ADHD
| because even though I'd do the bare minimum in school I'd
| generally do well.
| borski wrote:
| Just added a comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27596422
|
| Figured I'd also comment it here since it has some useful
| resources that led me to get diagnosed and improve my life :)
| [deleted]
| meowface wrote:
| This is exactly why I've concluded trying to go my own way is the
| best long-term plan for me. Before learning about YC and HN and
| such, the thought never really occurred to me.
|
| When I'm working on a personal project I'm really passionate
| about, my productivity is literally orders of magnitude higher
| than at any day job I've had. Months or years are compressed into
| days.
|
| For any ambitious personal project that I'm intrinsically
| motivated by, I'm working on it and designing it pretty much
| every free moment I have. It's actually crazy to me how much I
| can get done if there's absolutely zero "ugh field" [1]
| inhibiting me. It doesn't feel like work at all. I'd happily take
| 20% of my current salary if it meant I could do that all day
| instead.
|
| Even if it's stressful and even if I might fail miserably, I
| think life should be lived. If there's even the tiniest sliver of
| a chance that I could support myself just doing something like
| that, I know I'd be much happier. And if turning such a thing
| into a job or organization sucks the fun out of it, then I'll
| just keep trying again and again until I can find a project with
| a sufficiently viable enjoyment:financial stability ratio.
|
| [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EFQ3F6kmt4WHXRqik/ugh-fields
| (Regarding the author's username: yes, it's _that_ one.)
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| I think you're correctly responding to incentives. If your hard
| work created a new product line for the company you work for,
| that made them millions, how much of that would you get? Close
| to 0%. So why should you work full-out for someone else?
| degrews wrote:
| > This is exactly why I've concluded trying to go my own way is
| the best long-term plan for me. Before learning about YC and HN
| and such, the thought never really occurred to me.
|
| Interesting. It also didn't really occur to me that being an
| employee might just not be for me, until I read this comment on
| HN over a year ago
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22520709. Although the
| reasoning is a somewhat different from yours. Excerpt:
|
| > The reality is that if you care about your craft a tiny bit
| more than average, you will most likely end up feeling that you
| are overpaid for trivial work, that you could do so much more
| for the company, that your coworkers and hierarchy are
| apathetic to things that do not directly affect them (and will
| seek to avoid any change as much as possible). The more you
| stay in this situation, the likelier you are to burn out.
|
| > If you are that kind of person, then you need to GTFO and
| start your own thing - have your own skin in the game
| tspike wrote:
| I'd love to do that, but health insurance in the US makes it
| a nonstarter.
| granshaw wrote:
| This is me, but maybe to a lesser extent.
|
| I tried doing my own thing but couldn't keep at it after about
| 8 months.
|
| I think the key is to at least have your expenses covered by
| your business. I couldn't stand seeing my savings and
| retirement-fodder continue to dwindle even though I had plenty
| left in the bank.
|
| Found a part-time job and now my days are less fun but also
| less stressed
| halgir wrote:
| To me it sounds like the fact that you're "slacking" for five
| hours a day is what enables you to complete your work effectively
| during the other three hours.
|
| I expect that if you forced yourself to slack less and do more
| hours of "real work", you would get less done in more time, and
| with degraded quality.
|
| If you can change your perspective and feel less guilty, I
| recommend you keep doing what you do for both your sake and your
| employer's. It's a long term win-win.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Honestly you could do worse than reading HN. I have learned tons
| on here that I frequently later apply to my day job.
| salixrosa wrote:
| This sounds like it might be good thing for the company. Having
| employees who have extra capacity is incredibly important for an
| organization that wants to get things done; if you're constantly
| hard at work on something important, when something else comes up
| (someone has a question, there's a bug or an outage, whatever),
| you either have to delay the thing you're already working on, or
| delay the thing that came up. This tends to have a cascade effect
| on most kinds of work, locking up all your people resources.
|
| Plus, those other things you're doing sound like they overall, in
| the long-term, probably give you a wider range of knowledge,
| improving your usefulness.
|
| Just wanted to add a voice against that sort of Taylorism
| perspective on work.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I'm definitely not in the same boat as the OP (trying to get
| away with doing the minimum), but because I hate to be the long
| pole on a project, I always try to get my pieces done well in
| advance of when they're required. As I work primarily on infra,
| I can usually manage to pull this off.
|
| What this means is that often when crunch time hits, I've got
| excess capacity I can use to help "row the boat" (or maybe bail
| out water from leaks?). Excess capacity is extremely valuable
| as lots of folks are really bad at time estimation, so having
| some more senior "floaters" around can really help get projects
| completed.
|
| Excess capacity is also useful for longer-term efforts. You
| need at least a few folks who can get out of the low-level
| crunch mindset and figure out what needs to be done for
| sustainability of efforts, or else you just end up in mega-
| crunch forever.
| reader_mode wrote:
| I've seen something similar backfire for a guy I worked with.
| He had this idea that he would get his shit done Monday-
| Thursday and have an easy WFH Friday.
|
| People ended up doing most work towards end of sprint and
| Friday would usually be really busy - basically he always had
| to be present and management would offload priority stuff to
| him since he was done. So he'd end up busting his ass all
| week. Eventually he got tired and reverted to standard
| schedule - but this meant his relative performance dropped -
| I saw him get singled out in a review for performance drop
| (and not a lot of people noticed when he was going above the
| norm).
| bbkane wrote:
| I'm surprised he didn't just switch his "light day" to
| Monday or another weekday.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Obvious your mileage may vary, and timeframes matter. I'm
| talking about getting my pieces done weeks or months in
| advance of when we need to ship, not days or hours.
| rosseloh wrote:
| >if you're constantly hard at work on something important, when
| something else comes up (someone has a question, there's a bug
| or an outage, whatever), you either have to delay the thing
| you're already working on, or delay the thing that came up.
| This tends to have a cascade effect on most kinds of work,
| locking up all your people resources.
|
| Working in a retail store/break-fix repair/MSP environment, for
| a small business in a small city, this is absolutely the case.
| There is nothing more frustrating than having three customer
| projects on your plate, all of which are important (think "the
| email server is down"), and then the doorbell or phone rings
| and you end up spending half an hour walking an old lady
| through resetting her facebook password. It's an absolutely
| massive productivity killer, as well as making the day feel
| longer.
|
| More employees would be the normal solution, but that's not
| possible here (we've had more in the past, it wasn't
| financially viable, apparently). Unless of course they started
| paying commission based on what people actually got done
| instead of a regular wage, which I'm not a fan of. (Though to
| be fair, if we _did_ switch to that, the one employee who
| barely does anything would either get his ass in gear, or
| leave, so win /win maybe?)
| salixrosa wrote:
| Sadly, from what I've read the commission-based approach
| often leads to worse long-term results, especially in
| software engineering. It depends on the kind of work, of
| course. The metric I use (and in this case I have no idea how
| others look at the problem) is the number of decisions the
| person has to make, especially having long-term effects or
| effects on other parts of the company. It's hard to make the
| right choice for the org when you stand to make a bigger
| chunk of money right now from the other option.
| lallysingh wrote:
| Or in productivity, utilization != throughput.
| [deleted]
| systemvoltage wrote:
| They can pick up low priority tasks and if something of high
| priority comes in, it takes the precedence. An employee can
| also learn new tasks, rotate to different teams, cross train,
| fix old code / refactor, take a sabbatical-on-call, write
| documentation, etc which do not get in the way of taking on
| high-burst high-priority tasks. This is far better in terms of
| company's productivity than pretend-work that the OP is
| describing.
|
| I don't think its better for the company as you suggest. It is
| possible to use good sense of prioritization and still have
| 'extra capacity'.
| salixrosa wrote:
| I don't really have enough information on the specific's of
| OP's job and what they're doing with their spare time.
| Reading tech books sounds like learning to me, but otherwise
| I don't know.
|
| I think that it's really difficult for a lot of people to see
| the value they're providing outside of the proper business
| tasks they're assigned, and once there are tasks assigned to
| fill up all the time, everything breaks down. It doesn't
| matter if your task is something as irrelevant as "provide
| documentation regarding this vendor relationship," once it's
| on the board it can't be dropped and so you're no longer
| available to try the new tool people are looking for feedback
| on, or whatever.
|
| The other thing doesn't even have to be high-priority, but if
| you're at a large enough organization, there are lots of
| things you'll realize can't be done well because too many
| people need to be involved, even if it's just a little bit of
| time. My org can't make any movement on, for example, API
| clients or API documentation because there are lots of
| different needs, but by the time you've gotten through the
| initial conversations it's a six months later, because people
| weren't available. There are many efforts we can't get done
| because that effort isn't priority for the team's involved,
| but requires time from people on those teams.
|
| Ideally, of course, we try to minimize those things. But I've
| yet to hear of a sizeable org that has none of those kinds of
| things.
| sly010 wrote:
| Eliyahu M. Goldratt has some great books explaining in great
| detail why this is the case:
| https://www.amazon.com/x/dp/0884272079
| https://www.amazon.com/x/dp/0884271536
| goodpoint wrote:
| Also, extra time is where new ideas and new projects come from.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Yep, there was article that recently came up on Hacker News
| about maintaining some slack in your work schedule so that you
| can always be responsive when an issue comes up. I'm having
| trouble finding it because searching for "Slack" on Hacker News
| turns up a whole other range of things...
|
| I feel like I am in a similar boat to OP. Often feeling like my
| regular work doesn't take up a full week and not trying to fill
| up every bit of that 40 hours. I also spend a lot of my time
| "poking around" and not doing my own work. Seeing what others
| are working on, learning random things that may or may not be
| applicable to my job. But performance reviews come around with
| words like "very responsive!" and "always knows what's going on
| in the program and can jump in to any project"
| temp8964 wrote:
| It's better to spend free time on your own, actually. Managers
| don't like you to spend free time to dig around. I learned it
| hard way.
| somethoughts wrote:
| I think there's a tremendous value in having
| insurance/redundancy for supporting existing critical SW
| projects/infrastructure.
|
| So while day to day there might not be immediate obvious work,
| much like a fire fighter or life guard; if the servers go down
| or coworkers leave there needs to be some ballast that can
| steer the ship.
|
| That said, if you don't actually know much of the companies
| code base other than stuff you've directly written, you could
| very much be providing only perceived insurance versus actual
| insurance.
| duxup wrote:
| I used to work a tech support job overnight. Some nights I'd
| take two calls.
|
| This was expected for the reasons you noted. When there was an
| emergency someone needed to be idle in the first place so they
| could immediately respond fully focused.
| zrobotics wrote:
| Same story for me, they just needed someone available for
| emergencies. As long as I could respond when pinged, they
| didn't care what I did with my time. My boss came in one
| morning, saw I was playing Fallout 4 on my (personal) laptop,
| and just asked if it was any good. I finished a lot of books
| I wanted to read, and had lots of time for personal projects,
| but ultimately the boredom and overnight schedule were too
| much. I'd rather feel productive, personally, but for a
| certain type of person that job would have been paradise.
| nprateem wrote:
| If you're available for work you're working. Only taking 2
| calls isn't slacking. They're paying you to be available and
| so they should because they're impinging on your free time.
| tmnstr85 wrote:
| Einstein spent the better part of three years wandering around
| the Princeton campus before he presented his theory on
| relativity. During that time he was mocked by his peers for not
| "working hard". In retrospect, Einstein noted the time he spent
| ambling the campus allowed him the space required to finish his
| postulation.
|
| Focus on you. Don't look at the other animals in the cage to try
| and measure yourself.
| sombremesa wrote:
| I wanted to start a business and work the bare minimum, but I
| felt guilty about it - even though my bare minimum is still
| impressive to my employers.
|
| My solution was to just switch jobs and take a pay cut. I work a
| lot less now (with the same kind of arrangement), but I feel a
| lot less guilty about spending chunks of my time on my own thing.
|
| Relevant pg essay, under the 'working harder' heading:
| http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html?viewfullsite=1
| thecrash wrote:
| Thank you for slacking, sincerely.
|
| Management tends to set a bar for effort based on how hard our
| peers work. In a competitive environment this can lead to an ugly
| race to burnout. By straining to meet expectations, devs
| inadvertently increase the pressure on each other to perform -
| higher and higher - to the point that 60+hr weeks are normalized.
|
| By doing the minimum, you're pushing back against that and
| helping to keep the bar in a reasonable place. It is really a
| favor to other developers (and in many cases to the company,
| since burnout can destroy whole projects in the end).
| 74d-fe6-2c6 wrote:
| this sounds a bit too much like humble bragging. I mean, you're
| considered "responsible" for rollouts and you want to tell me
| you're a relative of George Costanza? get outa here ...
| borski wrote:
| Read up a bit on ADHD. That 'hyperfocus' that occurs either with
| deadlines or on a passion project is a symptom, as is the
| inability to get excited about projects you simply don't want to
| do - especially given your otherwise positive reviews and your
| ability to clear your mind and hyperfocus near a deadline, it's
| something to consider.
|
| I was diagnosed at 33, and it changed my life infinitely for the
| better. YMMV, and you may not have ADHD, but if you do, it is
| nothing to feel guilty about - it, in fact, gives you some
| insanely useful abilities that others simply don't have, as
| evidenced by the number of comments on this post explaining you
| have no guilt to feel, and your positive performance reviews.
|
| But being able to understand _why_ we do these things, and being
| able to understand how to adjust for them (whether through
| medication or coping mechanisms) is, alone, insanely relieving.
|
| Consider picking up 'Driven to Distraction,' or 'Delivered From
| Distraction,' or check out these posts by Mark Suster which was
| what led me to get started on the path:
|
| * https://bothsidesofthetable.com/how-to-know-if-you-have-add-...
|
| * https://bothsidesofthetable.com/why-add-might-actually-benef...
|
| * https://bothsidesofthetable.com/developing-an-action-plan-fo...
| meej wrote:
| I'm really glad to see that this is the top comment. This was
| my first reaction too, sounds a lot like ADHD.
| williamtwild wrote:
| "as is the inability to get excited about projects you simply
| don't want to do - "
|
| Why is this ADHD and not just being human? This sounds so basic
| I have a hard time believing this is because of a condition.
| kdkdkskdn wrote:
| I have an ADHD diagnosis (honestly I think my case is rather
| severe, even) and I agree.
|
| Procrastinating is something everyone does.
|
| Being completely unable to sit still for more than a few
| minutes is an experience neurotypicals don't share.
|
| ADHD is really one of those disorders that's both under and
| over diagnosed
| forz877 wrote:
| To someone without ADHD it doesn't make sense at times.
|
| If you have certain types of ADHD and you aren't excited
| about something, you just have a huge resistance to doing it
| and you likely won't do it. Many don't even do the work with
| a deadline.
|
| On the flip side, when you're intensely interested, you often
| times are completely absorbed into it, at the expense of
| other human needs.
| borski wrote:
| It's not about not getting excited; it's about literally
| being unable to. Someone with ADHD can sit there and _really
| mean_ to get excited, and yell at themselves to, and they
| simply can 't do it; their brain won't let them.
|
| Someone neurotypical can usually convince themselves to at
| least do it, and "will" themselves into it.
|
| But you're somewhat right, and this is why getting a real
| diagnosis from a professional is so important: lots of people
| have _some_ of these symptoms. What distinguishes the ADHD
| brain from the neurotypical brain is the duration and
| frequency of these symptoms, and an inability to adjust for
| them even with disciplined effort.
|
| And it's not about medication, necessarily, though for 80% of
| people with ADHD, medication is extremely helpful; often,
| just learning about the syndrome and finding a
| therapist/coach to help build tools and stop blaming yourself
| for the things you cannot change is extremely helpful on its
| own too.
| conductr wrote:
| That helps a lot. I know I'm 100% able to do the thing, I'm
| just a lazy bastard some days
| meej wrote:
| It's ADHD when it seriously negatively affects your quality
| of life.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| What did you do to solve it? I recently saw this Reddit post
| [1] and immediately booked an appointment with my doctor. He
| gave me the run around and asked me to book a 15 min call with
| another doctor to get an anxiety assessment. As soon as the
| call began they asked if I felt like I had ADHD. I said maybe
| and they stopped and said that they only diagnose anxiety. Now
| I am 200$ poorer(thanks American healthcare) and am nowhere
| closer. I am going back to my doctor and demand he take it
| seriously and prescribe something for me to at least
| try(something like an extremly low dosage of Adderal or
| something else).
|
| Years ago I had a different doctor and she gave me a
| prescription for Lexapro. My god what an experience that was. I
| suddenly lost all random thoughts and boredom. Its like I
| became a robot, got my work done on time, without any
| distraction and a kind of concentration I had never had before.
| I wasn't sad or happy for that matter, I just felt neutral all
| the time. It was such an interesting feeling.
|
| However Lexapro had severe side effects. Outside of a few hours
| of relative alertness, I was extremely exhausted and sleepy. I
| tried sleeping for 24 hours and was still extremely exhausted.
| It also made me feel extremely nauseous, like I felt like I was
| being poisoned. Finally there were other side effects of an
| ahem...sexual nature.
|
| All in all I threw the pills away after a week and never
| perused the issue again until I saw the video above. Man I'll
| never forget that week though. The productivity was life
| changing.
|
| [1]:https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/newcvd/what_adhd_f
| e...
| borski wrote:
| You'll never "solve" it; you learn to manage it.
|
| I've had fantastic experiences with donefirst.com, but also
| chadd.org is a great website with _tons_ of resources.
|
| Don't give up on the medication; finding the right one and
| right dosage is extremely helpful for many people with ADHD,
| myself included.
|
| The most important part is: find an expert. Child
| psychologists/psychiatrists often have a ton of experience
| with ADHD, and also often treat adults. Someone without
| experience treating ADHD is almost worse than leaving it
| untreated, because some of the 'solutions' proposed by folks
| who don't understand the syndrome serve to only make life
| worse for ADHD people (negative reinforcement, talk therapy,
| etc.). Talk therapy, or CBT, for example, can be helpful, but
| coaching is much more useful.
| meej wrote:
| Yes yes yes to all of this!
|
| I was fortunate to have a local medical school with a
| psychiatry department that has an Adult ADHD clinic where I
| could seek a diagnosis at the age of 42. Unlike many adults
| who suspect they have ADHD, I was taken seriously and did
| not encounter any skepticism on the part of my healthcare
| providers. I even expressed concern that my problem could
| be anxiety or depression instead, and my psychiatrist said
| "If you have undiagnosed ADHD, of course you're going to be
| anxious and depressed." Find the most expert ADHD person
| you can for diagnosis and prescribing medication, I really
| think this is key.
|
| I also agree on not giving up on medication, I had to try
| three before I found one that worked without also having
| negative side effects. There's at least one other one I'd
| like to try, mostly out of curiosity.
|
| I've worked with both a therapist with ADHD expertise and
| an ADHD coach. My therapist helps me accept my ADHD brain,
| my coach helps me figure out how to work with it instead of
| against it. I agree coaching is more helpful but it works
| best if you can accept the way your brain works instead of
| trying to fight or change it, so seeing a therapist first
| to work through that might be a good idea.
|
| I've been listening to a lot of ADHD audiobooks lately. The
| one I've liked best so far is Nancy Ratey's _The
| Disorganized Mind_ -- she has ADHD herself and she's the
| wife of John Ratey, co-author of Driven to Distraction. She
| kind of invented ADHD coaching and the book is about how to
| coach yourself.
| garciasn wrote:
| Lexapro made me feel like I was on the come up for LSD or
| MDMA for the first two weeks I took it. It was, for lack of
| better explanation, as if I were plugged into an electric
| socket.
|
| After the first two weeks or so, things evened out and I felt
| much more normal but all of the good things Lexapro brought
| to me remained. This, from my understanding, is normal and
| you simply did not give your body/mind enough time to adjust
| to the dosage.
| throwaway389983 wrote:
| Same story. Founder, early 30s, a couple kids, just got
| diagnosed last year. Life-changing. Loved the Suster blog posts
| you linked. The book I liked was "A New Understanding of ADHD
| in Children and Adults".
| unicornfinder wrote:
| As someone who highly suspects they may have ADHD, how was
| the diagnosis life changing? Was it through medication, or
| simply through understanding yourself better?
| throwaway389983 wrote:
| There's a bunch of reasons. None by itself is life-
| changing, but together they make a big difference.
|
| - Awareness. Sometimes, I notice, "oh, I'm feeling
| distracted right now." Or, "I'm feeling bored right now."
| Once I notice, I can avoid doing the unhelpful next thing I
| was going to do.
|
| - Medication. It does help with focus and context-
| switching, especially on days I have to do a number of
| medium-size boring tasks. I probably take it every other
| day.
|
| - Being present. More present with kids when I'm on
| medication. My wife says I'm less impatient.
|
| - Self-acceptance. That's why I love Mark Suster's posts.
| He's open that his ADHD makes him a talented entrepreneur
| and a terrible employee. I have a different temperament
| than Mark but feel similarly. I used to feel ashamed of a
| couple of character traits. I don't anymore. This is who I
| am.
|
| - My tribe. When I look around at close friends and
| acquaintances, other founders I know including some you've
| probably heard of -- a ton of them have ADHD too. An
| employee at our startup has expressed that he's going to
| start his own startup fairly soon. I was talking to his
| manager about it and said, effectively: "of course he is.
| He's brilliant and a bit ADHD. He's got founder genes."
| kdkdkskdn wrote:
| Yeah seriously, what's the secret? I'm 32 and I was
| diagnosed when I was 20 but the drugs make me anorexic and
| mute my personality and knowing I have ADHD has not proven
| particularly useful, especially given that I already knew
| my tendencies and behaviors and had long since developing
| coping strategies
|
| The only way my life changed when I was diagnosed was that
| I got paid for the study I had signed up for, which
| required I have a diagnosis
| borski wrote:
| Therapy/coaching, and don't give up on trying to adjust
| the medication. Finding the right dosage, and specific
| med that works for you, is tricky (I haven't found it
| yet, but am closer), but can be life-changing. There are
| a ton of new types of medications for ADHD now; far more
| than there used to be, when we basically knew stimulants
| helped but didn't know why.
|
| Still, for about 20% of people, medication simply doesn't
| help. For them, coaching and therapy (and education about
| ADHD) is far more useful.
|
| Check out https://chadd.org/ for lots of fantastic
| resources
| throwaway389983 wrote:
| I also recommend Scott Alexander's blog post on ADHD
| medication:
|
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-
| amphetamines
|
| If you're not familiar with the author, he's an
| incredibly talented blogger whose day job is as a
| psychiatrist.
| codpiece wrote:
| Just asked last week:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27514005
| borski wrote:
| Both; but honestly, the latter was more important. Simply
| having a _name_ for the reasons why, no matter how hard I
| tried and no matter how much I really, genuinely, truly
| _wanted_ to, there were certain things I just _couldn 't_
| do... that alone was extremely relieving. And infuriating.
| And vindicating. But mostly, genuinely relieving.
|
| I was able to accept that I wasn't an incompetent fool,
| incapable of being useful - I had ADHD.[1] That was OK.
| That meant I could accept what I was bad at, focus on the
| things I was good at, and use techniques to adjust for the
| things I've now accepted I'm bad at, instead of incessantly
| trying to do the same thing over and over that works for
| other people but ... just doesn't work for me.
|
| Medication has also helped, and I use it on an as-needed
| basis, but it is not, alone, a cure for anything - it is a
| tool, often an incredibly helpful one, but still just that.
| The education and understanding about what ADHD is has been
| far more helpful, though I'm glad I have the medication as
| a tool, too.
|
| [1] Incidentally, not understanding your own effect on
| other people, and devaluing your own contributions and
| successes? Also a symptom of ADHD. Think about it: most
| people choose, simply, to try to do the things they are
| likely to be successful at; they choose carefully. ADHD
| people do not choose; they can't. They do all of the things
| they might be excited about, meaning they fail, frankly, at
| most of them. But in those that they succeed, they are
| often wildly successful; to everyone else, this is
| objectively obvious. To the ADHD person, they know they've
| failed 98 times for every 2 successes, and often fall into
| a depression (though not as deep as someone who has
| clinical depression or BPD, unless that's a separate
| symptom) after nearly every success.
| ceph_ wrote:
| > often fall into a depression (though not as deep as
| someone who has clinical depression or BPD, unless that's
| a separate symptom) after nearly every success.
|
| Echoing this point. I struggled with depression for much
| of my life. Being diagnosed with ADHD at 25 and taking
| medication for it on a regular basis (5-6d/week) has done
| more for my depression than any depression medication
| I've tried.
| sackerhews wrote:
| Second all of that.
|
| Driven to Distraction or Delivered From Distraction. But not
| both, they're effectively the same book.
| borski wrote:
| Yeah, I could see that. Once I had an explanation, I wanted
| to read _all of the things_ about it (heh, ironic)
|
| I did find value in reading both, but mostly because it gave
| me a sense of history, and how much our understanding of what
| ADHD is had progressed from the past, and how my (incorrect)
| assumptions about what it was came to be.
|
| YMMV :)
| hanniabu wrote:
| Besides reading this books, what else do you do that helps? Are
| you taking medication as well?
| d4mi3n wrote:
| Reading the OP's account on it's own, I figured it may have
| been due to burnout or similar. Reading this (excellent)
| comment, I'm reconsidering my own experiences. I suspect this
| may be the WebMD effect in action (I clearly have cancer!), but
| it's definitely making me reconsider a lot of my own personal
| experiences.
| uh_uh wrote:
| Isn't it just rational not to get excited about boring stuff
| that is rewarded by a fix monetary ceiling? Economically it
| completely makes sense: why put more energy into something that
| yields the same result either way? Or maybe I have ADHD too.
| Sophistifunk wrote:
| There's a big gap between finding the work you're actually
| doing kinda boring, and the massive effort required for me
| (the narration which believes itself to be the executive) to
| make progress _of any kind at all_ when the rest of my
| internal processes don 't feel like playing ball. Even with
| meds.
| masukomi wrote:
| it's not about not getting excited. It's the result of being
| "not excited". Neurotypicals can work on things that are
| uninteresting to them. ADHD people can sit there yelling at
| themselves to "do the thing" that they _know_ they need to do
| and still be completely incapable of starting regardless of
| how "easy" it is to actually do it once something forces them
| to actually start.
|
| this video does a good job of explaining the motivation
| problem when you have ADHD.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM0Xv0eVGtY
| uh_uh wrote:
| > ADHD people can sit there yelling at themselves to "do
| the thing" that they _know_ they need to do and still be
| completely incapable of starting regardless of how "easy"
| it is to actually do it once something forces them to
| actually start.
|
| I also do this. Even worse: the easier and hence duller the
| task seems, the more difficult it is to get started on it.
| Once I do start on it and finish 5 minutes later, I need a
| 20 minute break (WFH doesn't help).
|
| I also often zone out during meetings to the point I
| haven't got a clue what people are talking about. But to be
| honest the information content of most meetings is really
| low.
| EricBurnett wrote:
| That's actually a strategy recommended to ADHD folk: do
| 20m of engaging "fun" to prepare yourself for 5m of
| forced boring activity. Think of it as recharging a
| reservoir of $tolerance before draining it to power some
| boring activity.
| andi999 wrote:
| You mean people can fill out their tax forms before the due
| date?
| edoceo wrote:
| No joke. I pay my CPA extra to nag me.
| stavros wrote:
| Oof, this video makes me think I may have ADHD. I just
| _cannot_ get boring things done, and I get more stressed
| the more I procrastinate, and it just spirals.
|
| What has helped me is something that the video mentions
| too, and that's working with a coworker. Not so much
| pairing (as in, looking at each other's screen), but just
| saying "I'm working on X now" and feeling like someone else
| is working on their thing alongside you/simultaneously.
| That has produced great results for me.
| borski wrote:
| This, exactly. It's not about not _wanting_ to. It 's about
| literally being _incapable_ of changing that, no matter how
| much you tell yourself and _really mean_ to want to.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| With ADHD, for many it's nigh on impossible to get focused,
| no mater how high the stakes are - to the point where it
| seems extremely irresponsible and downright irrational to
| normal observers.
|
| Imagine that almost everything in your life, is the
| equivalent of starting on a test/exam 2 hours before the
| deadline, even though you've had a week or two to finish it.
| aloer wrote:
| What is it that changed your life? Medication? Better
| understanding of yourself?
| borski wrote:
| I expanded on this elsewhere in the thread :)
| hda111 wrote:
| Medication could also change the life for worse because one
| risks getting psychosis.
| borski wrote:
| This is simply false. Please read up on it before making
| claims that are unfounded.
|
| Medication saves lives.
| hda111 wrote:
| No, this is not false. Reddit is all over posts about
| this. Any medication has risks how can you deny this? If
| you take it you accept this (admittedly) small risk.
| 6t6t6t6 wrote:
| If you work 3 hours a day but you deliver decent code and you are
| not on the way, you are not a problem for your manager. He knows
| that you are slow, but you don't give him problems, so he is ok.
|
| A hyper motivated developers who starts lots of projects and
| don't finish them, or who writes buggy code, or who creates
| social problems in the team, will raise more red flags than a
| "slow but consistent developer".
| dekhn wrote:
| by the end of my employment at Google, I was working about 2
| hours a day (and getting Meets Expectations at L6, which is OK
| but not great). While I'd be online and available to respond to
| chat for 8 hours, I only exerted about 2 hours and most of that
| was just explaining to executives just how bad our fleet was.
|
| Before that I had worked at least 6 hours a day. And I assumed
| that to be "right" i should be working at least 8.
|
| From the feedback I got, I wasn't much more productive working
| more hours. At first I felt guilty and then I realized in my
| career that working harder isn't going to make any difference in
| terms of $, career security, or opportunity to work on cooler
| stuff. So, I just upped my anxiety meds and got back to working 2
| hours a day.
| goodpoint wrote:
| If you work too much you reach a point where you are tired
| enough that your productivity becomes NEGATIVE.
|
| With negative I meant that you might spend 1h to do something
| that will then take more than 1h to be
| debugged/reworked/discussed and ultimately removed.
|
| Or something that cause breakage that could be avoided.
|
| You need to be well rested and clear-minded to foresee a
| problem and take the right decision, especially around
| software.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > From the feedback I got, I wasn't much more productive
| working more hours
|
| I've had this feedback too and I feel like it is likely not
| true. Really what it is is that your managers aren't paying
| much attention to your output and have sort of written you off
| for promotions, raises, etc.
|
| This was feedback I got a couple of months after I had been
| working my ass off trying to impress management and then a
| couple of weeks before getting fired. C'est la vie.
| handrous wrote:
| I've actually noticed a completely inverse relationship
| between how hard & how many hours I'm (actually) working and
| how well I'm perceived by my peers and by management. This is
| unrelated to acute problems caused by errors on my part, or
| anything like that.
|
| I don't get it, but if I feel like I'm working hard I now
| take it as a _very serious_ alarm bell. Some of my best
| feedback has come when I was starting to get nervous because
| I felt like I was hardly doing anything.
| phkahler wrote:
| If you're working hard at a lot of places you're not
| getting noticed. If you spend more time talking to people
| (about work?) They think you're busy.
|
| Sometimes the person who is fixing problems is seen as
| better than the one who is not - it's hard for people to
| tell which challenges are self inflicted.
|
| Sometimes I think the way to get noticed is to spend money.
| Someone always has to approve your purchases so you get
| noticed. Sitting in your cube hammering out code, or
| design, or documentation isnt visible.
|
| These things aren't optimal ways to measure effectiveness,
| but I think they all come into play.
| dekhn wrote:
| Your first sentence is actually restating the difference
| between maker schedules and manager schedules
| http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
| dekhn wrote:
| No, I'm pretty sure it's true. I had to spend a ton of time
| explaining what I did and its values to my managers, like
| writing "ELI5" docs and then suddenly when they "got it" they
| paid very close attention to my work, and formed a team
| around me and established scope and got headcount.
|
| This is the messaging I got every single quarter: """David,
| your work is very good. All the people you work with say
| you're great and it's clear you are adding value, but you
| need to spend more time finding metrics that demonstrate that
| value and improving those. Also, if you want to get higher
| ratings, here is a whole bunch of extra management work and
| document-writing to do. If you do that, we can make a case
| for Exceeds and eventually a promotion"""
|
| What I concluded was that I was better as an L6 than an L7
| (L7 at google has a lot more responsibility, and far fewer
| job opptys) and I knew the value I was adding to the company
| without having to spend weeks cooking up metrics dashboards.
|
| At google you're not going to be fired, if you're an FTE,
| with anything less than 6-9 months of feedback and runway to
| get back in the air (few exceptions)
| ska wrote:
| > What I concluded was that I was better as an L6 than an
| L7
|
| This generalizes: often people want a promotion because
| it's the "next thing", but in many cases once you are mid
| career a promotion can make you pretty unhappy. Having a
| clear idea of how the work & responsibility will differ,
| and whether it is what you actually want.
| dekhn wrote:
| My dad explained it to me like this when I was a kid. I
| ignored it for a long time, but it definitely stuck in
| the back of my head. I asked him if we wanted to get a
| promotion or be a manager but he said he thought his role
| as a documents library was fine.
|
| "Do you know the Peter Principle? It's the idea that you
| get promoted when you do good work, but at some point,
| you'll be promoted to a level you're not competent to do,
| and get stuck there, or fired." He then expanded: "In
| this case, I perceive that the additional
| responsibilities and stress associated with a higher
| level position or management would make me unhappy, and I
| don't truly need the extra money."
|
| For nearly my entire career I have pursued advancement
| with the utmost drive. Originally that was going to be
| grad school->postdoc->professor at major research
| university->make amazing discovery but at some point I
| realized that I was only ever going to be a professor as
| a minor reesarch university (and spend hundred+ hours a
| week treading water) and switched to the
| postdoc->software engineer->tech lead path. It wasn't
| until I did the Tech Lead role, got promoted to L6 and
| started to think about being a manager or getting to L7
| (or getting Exceeds at L6) that I started to realize the
| truth of what my dad was saying. I've reached a level I'm
| perfecetly comfortable at, and could stay here until
| retirement. I was mainly chasing the advancement for ego
| and money reasons.
| ska wrote:
| Your dad was on to something.
| dekhn wrote:
| he's retired now and works harder than ever before,
| leading trips for the sierra club and competing in
| crossword puzzle tournaments.
| jaegerpicker wrote:
| This is very similar to my path. I grew up poor and had a
| bad time in school, so I didn't make it in college as
| well. Once I started working in the industry though, I
| went all in all the time. Made myself the kind of
| engineer that people from startups around. Became a
| manager, a co-founder, a director, and was incredibly
| close to accepting a CIO/CTO role. With each goal I found
| I was less and less happy, eventually I took a boring job
| at a consulting firm that works with boring industries
| and Fortune 500 types. I'm a principal engineer and
| architect and it's boring as hell but it pays incredibly
| well, is super stable, and I get to go train bjj for 2.5
| hours twice a week during the middle of the work day. I'm
| happier than I've been since I landed that first
| programming job.
| francisofascii wrote:
| > you need to spend more time finding metrics that
| demonstrate that value and improving those
|
| I have always had trouble with this type of nebulous goal.
| dekhn wrote:
| The challenge for me that I always struggled to explain
| to my leadership is that in many cases, the time
| investment to make an accurate metric dashboard greatly
| exceeds just fixing the problem and knowing anecdotally
| that it works (I worked with ML Whisperers, people whom I
| trusted a lot to understand the underlying problems and
| filter out noise).
|
| For example, in my case (sending machines causing
| invisible data corruption to be replaced) I could have
| been promoted by doing the following:
|
| 1) Finding a metric that correlated with the user pain
| that I was fixing. In this case, it would be something
| like "number of jobs that die with a NaN in 1 hour" while
| running an A/B test (half the jobs in the fleet have some
| feature enabled) and showign that, with significance, our
| fix reduces the number of NaNs significantly. (data
| driven)
|
| 2) Demonstrate that the NaN rate corresponds to user
| productivity (this could be # of papers published, # of
| models trained per hour, whatever) and that high NaN
| rates really did have an effect (impact)
|
| 3) filter the data carefully, because the vast majority
| of nans are actually caused by user error, not silent
| data corruption (this was the actual hard part and nobody
| has a better solution than "run a determinstic
| calculation on 8 cores and use majority vote to find the
| baddie")
|
| Run the above for 6 months, show it to all the execs in
| your division, get a few people from Search, Ads, YouTube
| or Research/DeepMind to say it increased revenue or
| decreased costs by 10%. Bingo: promotion, along wiht a
| full time job maintaining a dashboard with constant
| requests to add new features, fix code broken by other
| teams, and making even _more_ presentations to execs on
| how dysfunctional it is.
|
| Or, I could just focus on fixing the machines, hearing
| anecdotally from the ML Whisperers that it's working
| again, and go back to surfing hacker news and getting
| another 100 karma in a day.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Doing it the other way around in a really small team and a lot of
| pressure still makes you feel guilty, you do too much work (even
| working an 8 hour day), burn out and end up very stressed. So
| careful what you wish for!
| meheleventyone wrote:
| And maybe just to assuage some of the guilt, most guidelines
| for working at a desk say you should take a break from your
| screen/sitting for 5-10 minutes every hour. Over an 8 hour day
| that's 40-80 minutes a day just by itself.
| jakub_g wrote:
| There's a deeply ingrained conviction (that I'm also a victim of)
| from generation of our grandparents and blue collar jobs that the
| work ain't real work unless you put 8hr of sweat and pain and
| you're dead at the end of the day.
|
| Things work differently in 21st century highly intellectual job.
| Doing that is a straight recipe for burnout.
|
| I'm the kind of person who typically overly engages in every job
| but I'm tired full time as a result. I actually think I need to
| work less (but be better organized).
| yarcob wrote:
| I just wanted to say that I also suffer from this problem. I
| think I only do real work a couple of hours per week.
|
| One thing that works for me is pair programming, but I can't do
| that every day because it is so exhausting.
| debt wrote:
| Programmers are inherently incredibly underpaid relative to the
| immense value they bring to everything so if anything your
| working hours match what you're being paid. You may still be
| doing too much work.
|
| Do not worry about it. It's not your job to worry about it.
|
| If you want to work more, then get paid more.
| TheFreim wrote:
| Are they? I only have a pretty small sample size but the
| programmers I know all are quite happy with how much they're
| paid. Do you have any backing for the claim, personal
| experience possibly?
| mym1990 wrote:
| It is so interesting to think of this dilemma in tech/computer
| oriented jobs vs something that requires one to be
| present(retail/customer service/etc...).
|
| I work as a dev now, but worked as a gas station clerk for 6
| years starting at the age of 16. If I came in for an 8 hour
| shift, I honestly think 7 of it was spent doing 'work'. I would
| have to pretend to go to the bathroom for a #2 just to get a 5
| minute breather(and thats not to say the environment was
| oppressive, but the work standard was high and we felt valued at
| the company).
| getYeGone wrote:
| This describes my situation pretty well. Working remotely makes
| "getting away with it" all too easy. Unfortunately the effect
| it's having on me is a great deal of anxiety. Though the anxiety
| is probably a combination of many factors: lack of social
| life/friends post-graduation, feeling stuck at a job I don't
| enjoy, wanting to move out of my parents' house but not knowing
| where to go.
| macu wrote:
| I work 7-hour days, but I might work 2 or 3 hours during that
| time. A lot of the time I find the work unbearable and can only
| bring myself to do it in short intervals. When the task is
| interesting, involves my skills, and I'm making progress, I can
| work for hours with almost no breaks. It really is an emotional
| thing. I won't force myself to do anything that is really painful
| because it ruins my mood for the whole day. At the same time I
| feel guilty of days I get little or nothing done and I feel
| trapped by the time constraint of the work day, even though I
| work from home. I would really like to make a deal where I work
| independent of a work day, with no set hours and no expectations,
| and not feel like I'm on call all day, so I can do things other
| than work through the day and not feel like I'm cheating.
| gryn wrote:
| work from home has been great for me in that I can compress
| work into non 9-5 bursts.
|
| instead of slacking trough 8hours per day with an effective 2-3
| hours of work for 5 days I take the 1 day(and/or night) were I
| work full concentration until exhausted (with small breaks) and
| take next day "off" (I'm connected still reachable in
| communication tools) to do personal stuff, side projects, watch
| TV, exercise, or just chores.
|
| My overall productivity and mood are much better than when I
| was working from the office, but I'm afraid it's soon coming to
| an end unless I find a new job that's Ok with being remote.
| granshaw wrote:
| Daily stand ups that ask for updates kindof kills this,
| unless you purposely have uncommitted work and suddenly
| commit+push it during your "off" days
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| It is impossible to work 7 hours a day.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| That's a rather blanket statement. Depends on the work! I
| have certainly had paid employment where I frequently just
| sat down at 8am, programmed and programmed, realised about
| 3pm that I hadn't eaten yet, and stopped for a break. It
| would never happen in the office, but it happened quite
| regularly early on in the pandemic-induced WFH (thanks to me
| happening to be on the right project to allow it).
| FredPret wrote:
| You've got management written all over you!
| phaemon wrote:
| He just said he felt _guilty_ about extracting maximal value
| for minimum return. That 's the opposite of management.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| Relevant: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
| principle-...
| twiddling wrote:
| work smarter, not harder ;-)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You get paid for the value you deliver, not the effort
| exerted.
| 8note wrote:
| You get paid for the scarcity of your labour, unrelated to
| the effort you put in, or the value you produce
| handrous wrote:
| Right, but if you're in management, then management
| invariably decides that your labor is quite scarce and
| must be well-compensated. Go figure.
| [deleted]
| brushfoot wrote:
| Talk to your manager. They may be okay with you looking for what
| to work on on your own.
|
| I started doing that a couple years ago. I'd scout and talk to
| people about what they needed. Eventually we'd find a project
| that was worth working on.
|
| It's gone really well. I was okayed to basically choose what I
| worked on after a while, so that made work more fun. And your
| employer may recognize that and reward it.
| gorbachev wrote:
| One possibility is that whatever you've been doing in these
| companies just isn't your thing.
|
| Are you sure you're in the right career? Maybe there's something
| else that you'd be good at and actually interested in?
|
| I've found myself in this sort of situation a few times, and
| every time it's been due to either me picking up a job for the
| wrong reasons, or the job just not being a good fit to begin
| with. I'm not saying this is the case for you necessarily, but
| you should probably think about it a little bit, and if it is,
| find something more stimulating to do. Unless, of course, you
| find the situation you're in acceptable to you.
| bostonsre wrote:
| Host file the sites you like. You saying this and me typing this
| reminded me that I need to do that again... my current one:
|
| 127.0.0.1 arstechnica.com
|
| #127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com
|
| 127.0.0.1 reuters.com
|
| 127.0.0.1 techcrunch.com
|
| 127.0.0.1 slashdot.org
|
| 127.0.0.1 www.youtube.com
|
| 127.0.0.1 youtube.com
| zsmi wrote:
| interesting. no news.ycombinator.com obviously.
| jtxt wrote:
| Nice. I made commands called by cron that copies a focus and
| relax file to hosts... 25 minutes work, 5 minutes relax during
| work hours.
| thrill wrote:
| If the minimum wasn't good enough it wouldn't be the minimum.
| psion wrote:
| While I don't seem to have all the information here, what I do
| have is enough to make a really good suggestion. I have some of
| the same issues with goofing off and such like that. So with
| this, a couple of questions.
|
| 1. Do you find yourself avoiding work you don't want to do
| outside of the job? 2. Was this a problem in school? 3. Have you
| talked to a doctor about this?
|
| Number three is the most important. I have ADHD, and it sounds
| like you might too. Go see your doctor as soon as you can. Once
| you know what's going on, you can make yourself a plan to improve
| yourself.
| enlyth wrote:
| I'm not saying this is what you're suggesting, but I also feel
| like medicating people with amphetamines so they can be 120%
| productive 40+ hours of week is also not the solution to
| everything
|
| We're humans and especially those of us with curious brains, we
| get bored easily doing the same unstimulating tasks over and
| over again
|
| Maybe it's fine if he does what he needs to do in 3 hours and
| slacks off for the rest of the day, if it's enjoyable to work
| with him, and does what he is paid for, I only feel like this
| 'work yourself to the bone to make someone else rich' culture
| has created all this pent up guilt
| bun_at_work wrote:
| I agree that you shouldn't work yourself to the bone for
| someone else's profit, but ADHD can be insidiously crippling,
| at least for me.
|
| Seeing a doctor and getting medication (I don't take
| amphetamines) has been super helpful for everything from
| feeling better about my work and being more productive, to
| handling day-to-day life. The biggest improvement is just in
| conversation/meetings/engaging with people, where I don't
| find myself wondering about bizarre hypotheticals instead of
| paying attention to the topic at hand.
| enlyth wrote:
| Yes I agree if it's impacting life so much then it's best
| to follow the doctor's recommendations, that's why I wanted
| to be a bit careful with my comment to not sound dismissive
| to those who genuinely need help
| topicseed wrote:
| Might be TMI but your "bizarre hypotheticals" triggered me.
|
| What often occurs in conversations in my life is... We
| chat, we disagree on a random point and the second we start
| arguing it, my brain brute forces every single path
| possible. What if they say this? Then what if I say that,
| or this, or even that? And it keeps on branching out.
|
| Eventually I come back to the chat, after what seemed like
| an eternity but was in fact a couple of seconds, and I am
| bored and dismissive because I know where the arguements
| will lead, and they do go one of these paths 99% of the
| time.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > my brain brute forces every single path possible. What
| if they say this? Then what if I say that, or this, or
| even that? And it keeps on branching out.
|
| To me this just sounds like intelligence. Not a disorder.
| 71a54xd wrote:
| ADHD and WFH have basically been a death sentence for me in
| regards to my output and velocity. Some days are good, some
| days are horrible. As someone who received their ADHD diagnosis
| at 22 (well after I fumbled through a CS degree wondering if I
| was a moron, while also working part time at startups) it
| changed my life. Ignorant people will say "nobody needs
| stimmies" but 5mg Adderall has legitimately changed my life and
| given me another 3/4 of mental capacity back.
| athorax wrote:
| I've been extremely lucky with WFH actually significantly
| improving my productivity. My ADHD in an office environment
| was significantly worse. Coworkers coming to talk to me,
| overhearing conversations from the break room, unlimited free
| snacks, etc. I'm also fortunate to be able to have a
| dedicated space at my home to use for work so I can still
| have that "disconnect" at the end of the day.
| the_doctah wrote:
| Good thing you live in <current year>, I guess you would have
| been screwed if you lived in a society before Adderall and
| ADHD existed, eh?
| 71a54xd wrote:
| I'd likely be a chemist or a plumber in those days. Quite
| frankly, I'd likely be happier today if I was a plumber -
| however although I really liked chemistry, I'm glad that's
| not my occupation since a friend of mine has a PhD in
| chemistry from Stanford and has been unemployed since
| graduation.
| marvin wrote:
| They might have been perfectly okay in the Manhattan
| Project doing varied but unplanned fast-paced research, as
| a WWII fighter pilot, doing subsea welding for the oil
| industry, being a scout in any number of military forces,
| being a professional athlete on the bleeding edge of rock
| climbing and so on.
|
| I think the rise of ADHD as a common impediment correlates
| very strongly with a society that has few good career
| options for people who have these neurological variations.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Yeah having the same device, software, and websites I use
| for work also able to connect to things I use for not
| work does not help my ADHD.
| notdarkyet wrote:
| If you are venting this, you know its an issue.
|
| Maybe the theory you should post instead of an excuse is that you
| are lazy and the skill you perfected is hiding that you don't do
| anything.
| latenightcoding wrote:
| You should make sure you and your manager(s) are on the same
| page. It would be unfortunate if you think they are happy with
| your work just to get in trouble later on for working less hours
| than what your getting paid for.
| droptablemain wrote:
| You have no reason to feel guilty. The relationship between
| employee and employer is fundamentally one of exploitation.
| bunkydoo wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with this, doing what you want with your
| time is the point of life.
| new_guy wrote:
| This sounds like the flight, _fight_ , freeze response. You're
| lacking stimulation so you coast along until you need to work
| then you _fight_.
|
| More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26371848
| vegancap wrote:
| I'm very similar, or was. I was diagnosed with ADHD aged 30. If
| I'm working on something I enjoy or find interesting, I'm all in
| on it, obsessed. If I find it slightly dull or tedious, I'll have
| to fight with myself to get it done, just turns into relentless
| scrolling through hacker news, or get distracted with other
| things.
|
| The trick, I've found, is to either find ways to enjoy what
| you're working on if you don't enjoy it. For example, gamifying
| it or finding some other challenge in it. Or try to insist on
| specialising on what you do enjoy working on more.
|
| Read the following as well (if, of course you haven't already): -
| Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Deep Work by Cal Newport -
| Hyperfocus by Chris Bailey
|
| Oh, and don't beat yourself up for not feeling 100% productive or
| enthusiastic all the time. Most of this expectation is a tech
| culture thing and it's just silly. Most jobs don't expect this,
| most jobs people assume you're sat around talking and eating
| biscuits several hours a day. Our brains aren't designed to work
| in well defined, lengthy chunks of time, it's absurd we expect
| that.
|
| As a few others haven't mentioned as well, it's worth getting
| screened for ADHD if you haven't already, the meds can really
| really help. They were a revelation for me anyway.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| It's fine. You're hurting no one really. At most you're hurting
| yourself but likely not. If you wanted something different you'd
| behave differently.
| rackjack wrote:
| They pay you the bare minimum needed to keep you, so why would
| you do anything but the bare minimum amount of work? Passion is
| things you are actually invested in, like hobbies, or your
| family, or a business you own, or a particularly interesting
| question, or career development, etc.
| akomtu wrote:
| Think of it this way. If you can get away with so little work
| while being recognized as a solid contributor, you must be
| extremely competent: where a newbie sounds the entire day on
| busywork to find a solution, you just see the solution and spend
| the rest 7 hours reading HN. Also, when was the last time your
| manager approached you with a conversation "hey, out company is
| doing much better, so we wanted to double your pay and give you
| this expense card to pay for flights, hotels and restaurants,
| wherever those might be"? The company isn't seeking an
| opportunity to spend more money on you, so you should be doing
| the same. It's just a business relationship.
| u678u wrote:
| I wish I was like you. I volunteer to get involved in lots of
| projects then fail at half of them and end up burnt out.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| from all the reading i do here, you would be a great fit at
| Google, every G employee here seems to talk about barely working.
| :x
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| I do the same at Amazon fwiw.
| creamytaco wrote:
| I spent ~6.5 years at Google working an hour a day at the most
| (cue Office Space, meeting with the Bobs) with nobody being the
| wiser. I met or exceeded all performance review expectations.
| When I left, my colleagues complimented me on my "work ethic". It
| wasn't just me doing that either. Most ppl are too busy focusing
| on whatever life goals and ladderisms they've assigned to
| themselves to really scrutinize what others are doing.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Reading hn and other tech related information is working -
| increasing your depth and breadth. It's just not direct work.
| It's good for you and your employer for you to spend time with
| indirect work, with related and unrelated general topics.
| ryanianian wrote:
| It's certainly not uncommon.
|
| But: Turning it back to you: how is that working out for you? The
| title of your post -- "feeling guilty" -- may be telling you
| something. Either do it and enjoy it or don't.
|
| You can be a genius "slacker". If that's fulfilling for you,
| great. Otherwise, focus on what you want to be getting out of the
| situation and not on the guilt.
| text_exch wrote:
| There is a certain subset of programmers who get away with this
| at work. But if you're posting this, it sounds like you're torn
| between the comfortable quality of life you're living now, and
| the boredom and knowing you could be doing more.
|
| Some ideas:
|
| * Can you do a rotation on a different team? (For example, if
| you're devops, you might learn a lot on SRE/ops.)
|
| * Can you start side projects at work, for work?
| zombieprocess wrote:
| Curious about career advancement with this approach? Does this
| get you promoted and does this get you work on more interesting
| projects?
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| If your employer is happy with you, there is no reason to 'feel
| guilty'.
|
| Being competent (top 20%) and working 3hrs / day is way more
| productive than a middle performer working 12 hrs / day.
|
| In my personal experience:
|
| I work with people that, in 5 minutes, I can accomplish more than
| they can in a day. And those people are not stupid / unmotivated.
|
| I also work with people that, in 5 minutes, can accomplish more
| than I can in a day. I'm not stupid, or unmotivated.
|
| Some people are just more experienced, have better judgement, are
| smarter etc.
|
| Output is what counts, not time.
| treesrule wrote:
| > Being competent (top 20%)
|
| What sort of toxic exceptionalism led you to think that only
| 20% of workers are suitable for their jobs....
| tasuki wrote:
| In reality it's probably more like 0%...
| abeyer wrote:
| Experience with humanity? Dunning-Kruger, Peter Principle,
| hubris, and just plain laziness compound nicely to make 20%
| seem like the right ballpark. There are a lot of people out
| there who are not very well suited to what they do, often
| through no real fault of their own. I don't think it's toxic
| to recognize that.
| spacephysics wrote:
| I think he's referring to the 80/20 law, or Pareto
| distribution.
|
| Essentially 80% of all corporate output is performed by 20%
| of the workforce, and continues down each chain (of the 20%
| doing 80% of the work, 20% of them are doing 80% and etc...)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
|
| https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/business/trends-and-
| in...
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| I would say that for the first 10 years of my programming
| career I was not competent. The next 5, I was marginally
| competent.
|
| I like this essay on the topic:
|
| http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html
| [deleted]
| b3kart wrote:
| I think what they're implying is that the bottom 80% are
| incompetent and should (presumably) feel bad. This is an
| interesting way to define competence.
| _wldu wrote:
| I don't think what you call "slacking around" is actually bad.
| You are keeping abreast and learning new things from relevant
| sites. That's a big part of your job and a tremendous value to
| you and your employer.
| [deleted]
| rychco wrote:
| I used to always try to be productive during my workday, and
| would feel extremely guilty for getting distracted. Over time,
| however, I have drifted steadily towards the bare minimum because
| I feel like I was always doing the most by far. Now I consider it
| productive time spent if I learn something new or work on side
| projects. I still feel guilty, but not nearly as much as I used
| to.
| hashberry wrote:
| Yeah, the guilty feeling sucks, I also had a devops job where I
| worked 2-3 hours a day. I finally found a more demanding job that
| required 4-6 hours of work per day. Being remote also helped
| instead of trying to keep up appearances in the office.
| ww520 wrote:
| Don't feel bad. Most companies ask you to sign away your
| intellectual properties even when they're come up during your
| rest in non-working hours. Your slacking is just your rest time
| for your work.
| iguanayou wrote:
| Very, very common.
| ceva wrote:
| Dude just enjoy it its simple!
| MattGaiser wrote:
| At 3 hours a day, you work as much as everyone else does. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-
| aver...
| Gengar wrote:
| I can't remember the last time I worked more than 3 hours,
| being done by lunch time everyday is great. If I work in the
| afternoon it is just mandatory meetings.
| youerbt wrote:
| Which is the best argument for WFH, really. At 3h a day + 1h
| commuting, it's 6h a day wasted for being in an office, crazy.
| cm2012 wrote:
| I did an HN poll, how many hours per day do you work including
| meetings and etc, and the answer was a normal distribution
| around 6 hours a day.
|
| https://imgur.com/qdSltlM
|
| The left axis is years of seniority.
| mylons wrote:
| i don't think you have enough data to be linking this as if
| it has meaning. N=104 is not a large sample size.
| phaemon wrote:
| 104 seems enough to be meaningful. Might have a fair margin
| of error but that's ok. Why do you think otherwise?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what is the math you used to determine
| it's not a large sample size?
| phreeza wrote:
| It depends what you are measuring. It looks like the rough
| distribution is robust across seniority strata, hinting at
| the sample size probably being adequate.
| phkahler wrote:
| For a lot of people "meetings" aren't productive work. They
| may be necessary for communication but they are not actual
| work for a lot of people. It's entirely different if you're a
| manager or someone else whose main job is largely
| communication.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| At least with work from home, I generally do not consider
| my meetings part of my work because I can go and do work in
| my meeting.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Here's how I phrased the question:
| https://strawpoll.com/47x15cf1
| manmal wrote:
| Did you segment this for presentation purposes, or were there
| only 3 ranges to choose from? I'm asking because the latter
| could also mean that most people work 4h. Deducing [4;8] = 6
| would not really work.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Only three stages, the average there could be different
| than 6.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| If I'm your boss, sitting next to you and in full view of your
| screen, and I'm there for 8 hours working, will the average
| person work a real 8 hours?
| mylons wrote:
| if you're doing this I'm quitting and going to work in one of
| the thousands of firms where this doesn't happen, and
| potentially for better pay?
| bigbillheck wrote:
| If you're my boss watching me that closely, I'm going to be
| reading up on the OSS workforce sabotage manual.
| csa wrote:
| > If I'm your boss, sitting next to you and in full view of
| your screen, and I'm there for 8 hours working, will the
| average person work a real 8 hours?
|
| You probably get a few weeks of "real 8 hours" before your
| best employees find somewhere less oppressive to work and
| leave your micromanaged company.
|
| Your bad employees will stay because they don't have better
| options.
| DevKoala wrote:
| When I was a junior engineer, I quit a position over this. My
| manager had a direct line of sight from his desk into my
| screen and would give me passive aggressive comments if I
| wasn't always on task.
|
| I was the best performing engineer at that company, handling
| a contract that was worth >20% of their revenue by myself.
| They loved me at that company, and I wish I had been honest
| with the feedback I gave during my exit interview, but I just
| couldn't tell the guy my issues were with him.
| LandR wrote:
| I wouldn't be.
|
| I simply can't sit and focus working for 8 hours a day.
| Especially if its hard. I'm not a robot.
|
| If I thought you were sitting there just to watch me to try
| and force me to work more, I'd leave.
|
| I think for me doing dev, 4 hours is about the max before the
| quality of work drops off significantly.
| asymptosis wrote:
| This question doesn't parse well. What does this "average
| person" have to do with me?
|
| If you're my boss, and I'm reading your question, will the
| average boss communicate clearly?
| soperj wrote:
| If you're my boss and doing this, then you're getting none of
| your own work done.
| goodpoint wrote:
| If you're my boss and doing this, then you're going to see
| me leave the company.
| jaegerpicker wrote:
| That's me also. Maybe not fair as I'm more likely to be
| the boss since I have 20+ years of experience but no way
| am I working under those constraints.
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