[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how mu...
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Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do?
I have been working as a software developer for almost two decades.
I have received multiple promotions. I make decent money, 3x - 4x
my area's median salary, so I live a comfortable life. I have never
been fired or unemployed for more than a few months total over my
entire career. Through most of that time I have averaged roughly 5
- 10 hours of actual work a week. I'm not even discounting job
related but non-coding time as not work. There are literally days
in which the only time I spend on my job is the few minutes it
takes to attend the morning stand-up. Then I successfully bullshit
my way through our next stand-up to hide my lack of production. No
one has ever called me out on this and my performance reviews range
from mediocre to great. I'm generally a smart person. I went to a
top 30 university, but it's not like I'm a genius or I'm coasting
off connections made while getting a Harvard education. I wouldn't
consider myself an abnormally talented developer. I often don't
understand the technical details other engineers discuss in
meetings. I have probably bombed more tech interviews than I have
passed. All my jobs have been between 2-5 years so I'm neither
finding a place to stagnate or leaving before anyone could judge my
production. It feels like I am in the middle of the bell curve in
terms of career success. So what gives? Are most of us secretly
lying about how much we are working? Do people regularly run into
coworkers like me during their career and simply ignore it because
they find it too awkward to criticize them? Have I just been
incredibly lucky and every boss I have had is too incompetent to
notice? Do I have imposter syndrome and I am actually a 10x
developer whose laziness makes them a 1x developer? These
questions have kept popping up in my mind over the last year.
Remote work during the pandemic has allowed me to finally be honest
with myself and stop pretending I am working when I am not. I want
to know if I was the only one pretending.
Author : ConfessionTime
Score : 770 points
Date : 2021-12-16 17:42 UTC (5 hours ago)
| sandos wrote:
| I have periods like these. And then I have periods where I obsess
| about work, and about not producing enough, which makes me work
| extra hours to compensate. After 20 years in development I think
| this is "sort of" normal, not for everyone and especilly not at
| every company. In my experience its more common the larger the
| comany gets. First, its easier to not be noticed too much, and
| then there is the normal inefficiencies which makes it so thay
| you might not even be _able_ to be productive at work.
|
| At the moment, I have been tasked with "test stability". I am
| unsure how exactly to proceed, and I have already mentioned that
| repeatedly running 2 hour tests to see where they fail, and when,
| is very time-consuming and inefficient, but people around me
| simply are expecting me to be somewhat inefficient at the moment.
| Having worked at exclusively large workplaces the last 10 or so
| years I am getting used to this. Also having worked on safety-
| rated systems conditions you to take it slooow, never rush
| things. Taking time is much more ok than being wrong.
| metabagel wrote:
| I think many of us have been where you are.
|
| I think in order to work more effectively, you might want to try
| to both motivate yourself and slow down your work process/set
| reasonable goals. Since you are currently not achieving much, it
| should be easy to increase your output. One of the reasons you
| aren't doing that may (or may not) be that you are afraid of
| failure.
|
| In my opinion, you can't go far wrong if you make steady slow
| progress. Don't set the bar high. Just keep identifying the next
| thing you could be working on in order to complete your project,
| and work on that. This doesn't mean that you need to be working
| continuously, but I think that if you work slowly, with curiosity
| rather than urgency, you'll enjoy working more, and you'll find
| that you're able to keep at it more than you are doing now. Be
| sure to take time to chat and socialize and feel grounded.
|
| Always Be Starting - It's hard to start working on something.
| Just trust that if you start working on the tiniest part, you'll
| have a much easier time of continuing to work. You just need to
| get started.
|
| Edit: I also find that being joyful helps put me in a good state
| of mind for working. Being anxious does the opposite. I have also
| found meditation to be beneficial.
|
| Edit 2: You may find this helpful:
|
| https://www.dextronet.com/blog/the-now-habit-summary/
| penjelly wrote:
| i monitor my work using a plugin and usually get 2-5 hours of
| code a day... and i have to do all kinds of communication work as
| well (JIRA, investigation, prepping QA test cases, documenting
| PRs)
|
| i looked back and was getting 1k lines merged every 2 weeks on
| average. nothing crazy I know but theres much more then just
| coding to my job, thats just reality.
|
| Days/weeks where i dont get a certain amount of code done i feel
| like actual garbage (like the last 2-3 weeks actually). So i try
| hard to make sure im moving the ball forward daily. The biggest
| obstacle to this for me is poor planning upstream, missing/bad
| requirements, missing APIs that are presumed finished, etc.
| ALotOfBees wrote:
| 1k lines per week sounds like quite a lot. I'm a dev whose role
| is mainly supporting legacy systems and sometimes I write
| probably ~50 lines in a week and feel incredibly productive due
| to the issues I've resolved.
| penjelly wrote:
| to clarify, my post says 1k every 2 weeks, not per week.
| countvonbalzac wrote:
| 50 lines on a legacy system is much harder to write than the
| equivalent just jamming out new stuff. Also it's hard to
| compare lines cause it's not a language agnostic measure.
| penjelly wrote:
| agreed on both counts.
| mateo411 wrote:
| That seems pretty productive for an IC. If you are spending
| half of your time writing code, that's pretty good. You seem to
| be driven and a self starter, which is why you feel like
| garbage when you don't hit deadlines that you've set for
| yourself. It's a good way to keep yourself motivated, but try
| to keep things in the right perspective.
|
| > The biggest obstacle to this for me is poor planning
| upstream, missing/bad requirements, missing APIs that are
| presumed finished, etc.
|
| This is the best reason to go into management or take on role
| where you spend more time on this part of the process. If you
| do go into management, I recommend positioning yourself as a
| player/coach.
| OzzyB wrote:
| > Harvard
|
| I wonder how much this plays into your being left alone and not
| being challenged by your co-workers. My guess is a lot. I'm sure
| the cachet of being an "Harvard Guy" has deterred many from even
| trying and simply assume you know what you're doing etc.
| agagrgar wrote:
| I think OP was saying they're _not_ Harvard, and thus not
| coasting based off those connections alone.
| byoung2 wrote:
| Imagine a security guard at an office building. 90% of the time
| might be sitting in a booth watching monitors. The other 10% of
| the time is buzzing people in or making rounds. But that 90% of
| the time when they are sitting around is important, since they
| are on call. So you are like a security guard. Your employer
| gladly pays you for the 90% of the time you are doing nothing,
| because they need the comfort of having a developer on call for
| when something needs to be done ASAP. They won't have to go to
| Upwork or wherever to find someone because you're already there.
| As long as you are 10x 10% of the time, you average out to a
| competent FTE and you are tolerated.
| pvarangot wrote:
| I think if that was his situation he wouldn't have to "bullshit
| through standup". Just say "nothing showed up" or "having a
| creative block" or whatever and then either get help or
| something.
|
| It's not like the security guard at all, the security guard is
| not lying or consciously giving a false sense of what his
| contributions to the team are.
| Ardon wrote:
| Part of the problem is that 'the company' accepts this 90%
| downtime, but managers running standups are paid to maximize
| productive output of their staff.
|
| So you'd be lying to your managers with the end goal of
| behaving as the company expects you to.
|
| This kind of internal tension is normal in lots of
| organizational structures. It's better if no one has to lie
| but it isn't (in my opinion) a disaster or anything.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Like most analogies, this one fails completely. It's well-
| understood that the security guard does nothing but stay alert
| 99% of the time. He very explicitly needs to "do nothing" for
| long stretches of time.
|
| Software development operates largely on trust that everyone on
| the team is putting in real effort. The manager trusts that
| when it takes you a week to finish a task, it's because it
| _actually_ took a week of work, not a few minutes on Monday and
| then you watched YouTube vids and were on your XBox the rest of
| the week. And not just the manager -- everyone at the company
| would almost certainly like to move faster, and wouldn 't be
| happy to know that features and bugfixes could be landing 5x
| faster, except for people who figured out that no one's
| checking up on them.
| alexk307 wrote:
| This is how I view it. Unless you work for a startup where you
| need to churn out code every hour, you are paid for your
| expertise and ability to navigate incidents quickly and
| efficiently. You are a force multiplier as well as an
| individual contributor.
| austincheney wrote:
| My observations about this:
|
| * The more internal hurdles in place to prevent a developer from
| solving a programming problem the less of a hurry that developer
| will be in to solve such problem. Hurdles may describe additional
| tools, build steps, security provisions, dependencies, processes,
| manual steps, and so forth.
|
| * Some developers actually know what they are doing. Sometimes
| they appear to be 10x developers. They don't work necessarily
| harder, but just get things done. Getting more done in a shorter
| period of time leaves of idle time comparative to their peers.
|
| * Lack of productivity is typically reinforced by the environment
| despite all their claims and agile methodologies. For example
| consider how many hours a day you are in meetings not writing
| code.
|
| * Most lost productivity appears to be a result of poor choices
| of technology and/or training misalignments. It appears that Java
| turns any software authoring process into slow moving tar, for
| example. On the other side some developers won't even attempt to
| write code unless they have a favorite framework and a bazillion
| tools/dependencies. The excess extraneous bullshit chokes
| delivery into a coma.
|
| * Most bad technology decisions appear to be deliberate around
| people concerns. Nobody wants to invest in dedicated formal
| training, so instead employers deliberately make choices around
| lowing hiring costs opposed to lowering delivery costs. Why
| should they invest in training when the average developer will
| stick around for less than 2 years? So instead seniors get paid
| more to do the same beginner work as everybody else, but likely
| get it done in a fraction of the time with nothing else to do.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| pdimitar wrote:
| Yeah, likely a lot of us do "lie" about how much do we work
| exactly, but you shouldn't lose your sleep over it because:
|
| 1. Mental health is important. Doing a grind 8-9h a day is, let's
| face it, no more than a 10-year affair for probably 95% of all
| folks out there (workaholics do exist and their lives usually end
| very ugly and sad; don't be a workaholic). Start working at 20
| and when you hit 30 you likely can no longer do the grind. Let's
| not kid ourselves. We all know it but we don't talk about it
| because that's somehow going to tarnish our perfect reputation or
| whatever.
|
| 2. Most programming jobs do NOT pay that well. HN is a special
| bubble and I hope the more privileged programmers around here are
| aware of their non-standard status -- but there's a LOT of work,
| both creative and laborious, that is being done out there by
| Eastern European folks for some meager 4000 EUR a month. And I
| can bet my neck they work much harder than many other SV-based
| engineers. So the conclusion is: work according to the money you
| receive. The median EU programming wage is in fact not that good.
| Let your efforts reflect that.
|
| 3. Expectations from business people tend to grow to infinity.
| Another thing we should not lie ourselves about is that if you
| put more work regularly then at one point this becomes the
| baseline expectation and when you finally get weary and normalize
| your workload, what happens then? They start to grumble about
| your "underwhelming performance", of course. You know what? F_ck
| them. Give them some base amount they are relatively happy with,
| hustle every now and then to show them that you can get stuff
| done when sh_t hits the fan and that they can rely on you, then
| quickly dial back your efforts to the previous baseline. Then
| chill. Rinse and repeat.
|
| ---
|
| I guess what I am trying to say is: don't take work very
| seriously because it's means to an end. I am 41 and I am really
| good at what I do but I can't bring myself to care enough to work
| as hard as I did even some mere 5 years ago. Most people are not
| that fortunate so as to work with a smile on their face. That's a
| fact.
|
| And it's not worth it. My wife had to literally drag me to bed
| several times this year and this really has put things into
| perspective for me. With the Covid situation I have also grown to
| appreciate enjoying things while I have them because now, even
| with three vaccinations, I still have to wear a mask literally
| everywhere except on the street. _And_ I have no guarantee that
| if I go take a vacation with my girl in another country, we
| wouldn 't have to self-isolate for 10 days, why? Because f_ck you
| that's why, who cares that you got all the vaccines right? But
| that's a different topic. My point was: enjoy things in life
| while they last. Covid has clearly shown that even the small
| things we have can be taken away by central authority even if
| we're good citizens.
|
| As my mother still loves to say (she recently turned 69): work
| was here thousands of years ago and will be there long after you
| die. You have to stop stressing about work and career and future
| and try to enjoy life. I wish I could listen to this advice but I
| am working on it literally every day and I am gradually getting
| there.
|
| I know some here will classify me as toxic or a lazy guy but meh.
| I always put some work into networking so I know I have where to
| land if things with my current employer turn sour. I have lost my
| ability to be truly loyal in a business setting. 99% of the
| employers out there will stab you in the back the minute it suits
| them financially so don't go ruining your health for them.
|
| In short: yes, you likely are lying about how much work you are
| doing, especially in a remote work setup. And? You shouldn't
| care. You are doing your part of the bargain well enough.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| I can't speak for other developers, but I've had periods of low
| productivity that were similar to what you describe, but they
| were mostly abnormal, for example when I was mentally "done" with
| a particular job, but hadn't been able to find something else.
|
| That said, I think I've got about 6 hours of real productivity
| available a day on average, expandable when doing urgent wrote
| work or for an urgent need. I've done some time on the 80 hour
| crew and it's bad for you.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| Had a co-worker who was this guy. So I moved jobs. Your co-
| workers notice, and they're tired of picking up your slack.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| I had monthly promotions ( pay) when shit hit the fan at my
| previous job because the CEO only sold ( a lot ) without planning
| and without taking normal hours into consideration.
|
| It's a dystopian feeling when you go Friday on 21:00-22:00 (
| tired) and say to the boss: "we need to talk on Monday" and just
| leave the office a couple of times. ( I was also working on the
| weekends at home, had my laptop when I went swimming Sunday
| morning and when/if I went out fyi ).
|
| Those promotions were directly valued to the value outputted. And
| were then transferred to my new job with normal hours.
|
| Conclusion: it's not about the hours. It's at the value you
| create and that ( eg. For small companies) they can count on you
| more than someone else. But ofc. There is a limit, which is why i
| happily left my previous job.
|
| Fyi: To me, It seems so obvious when people are slacking. I get
| that people have an off day, but spending 8 hours and they don't
| even know yet which component they need to adjust is a no-brainer
| about their effort after working in that project for a year. (
| When I saw that, we went to the html and there it is: the name of
| the angular component "<dp-setting-create>" -> 1 minute. Ugh)
| camclay wrote:
| Other people can probably tell when you're bullshitting, but if
| management isn't coming down hard on a deadline, it ultimately
| doesn't matter. Some types of the tech industry like games, I
| don't believe you can get away with that kind of lack of effort,
| but other areas its easier to.
| aroundtown wrote:
| The amount of slacking your allowed to get away with depends
| greatly on your job/boss/organization.
|
| If you're a slacker, almost everyone around you knows.
|
| The usual reasons I've seen for keeping slackers around include:
|
| 1. maintaining resources like budgets and office space
|
| 2. it hard to fire and rehire a position just because someone is
| a slacker. If HR thinks you are able to get by with a person
| slacking, then they will let you fire the slacker and not let you
| rehire someone else.
|
| 3. You could always end up with a worse employee. I'd personally
| rather work with someone who was predictably slow at working, but
| was otherwise a good employee than chance having hiring someone
| who has poor hygiene and body odors (usually a heavy smoker, who
| doesn't regularly bathe or wash their clothing, that douses
| themselves in musky cologne)
| whateveracct wrote:
| People are saying you're doing a disservice to yourself. Not
| necessarily.
|
| Remote work + my maturation as an engineer has gotten to the
| point where I can have OP's lifestyle, and it has allowed me to
| reorient.
|
| I now have personal goals. Some are semi-professional (side
| projects, e-commerce, art, music, etc), some are financial, some
| are personal. In a way, OP is probably close to a coast FIRE in
| general - can't criticize that!
|
| So if I'm giving less to my employer and spending my remaining
| daytime in My Goals..am I doing myself a disservice? Of course
| not - in fact, giving more to my employer would be the real
| disservice to myself.
| novok wrote:
| As a relatively new manager, you figure out relatively quickly
| who are the workhorses and who are not as productive. If I were
| to guess, you were probably in the lower half ranking of people
| usually in that manager's mind. You might be more skilled than
| average, but also more lazy so that might average out your
| performance too. Not the best but you deliver value eventually so
| the manager feels like its worth more to keep you than to drop
| you.
|
| I think where a performance evaluation issue starts popping up is
| long focused work where you don't quite know how much effort it
| really takes to produce. Some things take a lot of investigation
| time and show little code, some things produce a lot of code and
| actually wasn't that much work. If your manager has a lot of
| reports, they have less time to keep track about your individual
| productivity.
|
| It has probably effected your career, you could've gotten
| promoted faster, but did not.
|
| Also people who can communicate, are personable and you can just
| give a task and they will figure it out with little fuss are also
| low maintenance employees, which is a value of it's own.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I've come to think after my last place that I'd take a person who
| does high quality work slowly over someone (I'm talking about you
| JASON) who literally tries more and more random things until it
| finally sort of works... until anything changes and then the
| whole system breaks in _any_ number of ways.
| Freeboots wrote:
| I think about this every time i see someone talking about how
| their particular workflow is great because they have a hotkey
| that saves them having to lift their pinky to a different key,
| saving them almost 1 second per day.
|
| There probably are people like that out there but i strongly
| suspect they're very much the minority.
| t-3 wrote:
| I don't think productivity improvements like that are good
| because of the time saved, but the mental energy. Remembering
| and recalling all the various keymaps and interfaces to the
| many pieces of software encountered on a daily basis is not a
| trivial task, even though it feels effortless.
| ADHDBrain2 wrote:
| The facts are these:
|
| I work for a Fortune 100 company. Everyone reading this knows the
| company.
|
| In my entire time at the company (>5 years, I think), I've
| written maybe 30k lines of code.
|
| I'm terrible at responding to e-mail. Whatever you think this
| means, I'm worse than that.
|
| I skip meetings all the time. Sometimes I just don't dial in.
| Sometimes I say I have a conflict, sometimes it's true. I
| probably attend a total of 4 hours of meetings in any given week.
|
| Not too long ago, I had 3-4 weeks in a row where all I did was
| attend those few meetings.
|
| I have ADHD. I dick around _a lot_. I spend hours and hours
| reading /watching random stuff. 60% tech stuff, 40% random
| Youtube rabbit holes. Very little of it is applicable to my work.
|
| I take naps and often sleep in. Some days I don't show up for
| work at all.
|
| For the most part, what I do is review people's stuff and tell
| them why it won't work as well as they hope. Occasionally, I'll
| tell them what to do instead but with a lot of hand-waving. I
| believe it's called "being an architect".
|
| However:
|
| I'm at the highest individual contributor level the company has.
| It's a tech company, btw.
|
| I get consistently stellar reviews. My boss says she hears great
| things about me all the time, so "I shouldn't not even bother
| asking around" when we do 360 reviews.
|
| I've gotten off-schedule, totally unexpected stock grants as
| thanks for "all my good work".
|
| I make $15k/year more than any of my peers and $100k+ more than
| some of them. Some of that is due to regional differences (I'm in
| the Bay area), but it's all the US.
|
| This year, we weren't even supposed to get bonuses. 2020 had been
| a shit year. The board decided to give us bonuses anyway, but "no
| one would get their full bonus". I got 120%.
|
| If I ask if I can attend a conference, I've never gotten a "no".
| My boss even suggested a few more I should attend.
|
| None of this would make any sense, were it not for those (on
| average!) 2-5 hours a week of good, actually productive time I
| have. The ADHD means I can't do it on command, but when it hits
| me, it's apparently gold.
| spamizbad wrote:
| I think we are at a point where a minority of developers are
| legitimately burnt out but the industry is too good to leave. So
| people stick around.
| maaaarkONE wrote:
| I think the need for 10x developers is possible overstated on the
| internet. In my experience, teams generally figure out how to
| work around medicore-to-great developers and they're typically
| not an issue. People online also tend to wear their 40+ hour
| workweeks like a badge of honor. Many of the people who are 10-20
| hour workers like to keep their heads down, both on the internet
| and in real life, so maybe they're underrepresented.
|
| Ultimately, if no one is taking issue with you, you are getting
| your tasks done, and you are happy with your pay, then you are
| exactly where you should be.
|
| To answer the question in the thread title: I don't think most
| developers are lying about how much work they do, I just think it
| skews higher online, and the people who work less don't really
| care to share, or aren't around to share.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > I think the need for 10x developers is possible overstated on
| the internet.
|
| I don't really have any opinion one way or the other in most of
| this, but this part of your comment I completely agree with.
| Sure there are incredible talented people writing code, but the
| vast majority, even those writing Linux, Kubernetes or
| Postgresql, they aren't smarter than you and me, at least not
| by much.
|
| There where a blog post by Jacob Kaplan-Moss "Embrace the
| Grind" which I pretty much agree with. Doing the work no one
| else care to do and just stick with it, even if it's boring for
| two weeks, that's the stuff that will make you look like a 10x
| developer (well maybe 2x).
| josefrichter wrote:
| Just the other day I met a friend, a fellow developer. We both
| worked on fairly large projects with dozens of developers. We
| came to conclusion that on projects beyond certain size in
| certain type of corporations it's actually in nobody's interest
| to ever finish the project. That would kill the cash cow. So
| managers in those companies _love_ people like OP, because they
| help them achieve the same goal: never achieve the goal..
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Except the sponsors of the project that pay to put food on
| everyone's table?
| Tarucho wrote:
| Sometimes the sponsors get some money in return for contracts
| and such. It's not ethical but in my experience it's pretty
| common. These people rarely want the project to end.
| josefrichter wrote:
| Of course. They approve it and they get a cut of the budget
| they approve.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| kiawe_fire wrote:
| Some of it is a matter of what type of work motivates you and how
| your current work matches up.
|
| My coworkers tend to put in 10 hour days in the fall and winter
| during our busy season, in which we are bombarded with smaller
| tasks and bug fixes. They thrive on knocking out a large number
| of small things quickly.
|
| But they then do "almost nothing" the other half of the year,
| when we should be working on large new initiates and better
| tooling.
|
| I'm the opposite - give me a list of small soul crushing manual
| tasks, and I'll procrastinate like crazy. But give me some vague
| user stories and a big new project with the freedom to be
| creative, and I'll be pulling nights and weekends happily.
|
| One question I think you're asking without asking it is, "is this
| ok?"
|
| And that depends on two things.
|
| One, are YOU happy with this? Is your job just a means to an end,
| or do you want to have a bigger impact, be more productive, and
| enjoy your work?
|
| If the latter, then you're likely not in a position that properly
| challenges you or meshes with your motivations.
|
| If the former, then the next question to ask is, "am I providing
| my employer with value?"
|
| Are you doing work that would be hard to find others that could
| do it? Do you bring any unique skills or knowledge? Are you
| getting enough done that it helps the organization achieve goals,
| get new customers, or keep existing ones happy?
|
| If so, great, you're adding value and you aren't draining the
| organization.
|
| If not, then you might want to consider what and how you can
| improve.
|
| And frankly every engineer and developer should be at least
| vaguely aware of what value they provide, both to make a case for
| yourself if needed, but also to make sure you're satisfied in
| your current role and not just a butt in a seat.
| agumonkey wrote:
| In big offices, lying often happens due to:
|
| - you don't know how much the others are doing so why putting
| more effort (humanly naive classical economic strategy)
|
| - things are opaque, people may not know what you do, and how
| hard it is.. if they say something and are wrong, they're
| reputation is tainted, only your superiors are responsible for
| this but they may be busy (or faking too)
|
| - some people will willingly delay work, they don't like it,
| there's too much, so they'll stash tasks until people come and
| ask, then they'll pretend to be overwhelmed with so many things
| (unless management has clear views of what's going on, you're
| back to point 2).
|
| - oh and often people will act as if they're super tense and busy
| and having the worst job in the building. Just before going back
| to their office, and sitting watching netflix on their phone.
|
| Another thing, have you ever noticed people slowing things down ?
| and impeding you to improve things ?
|
| ps: I'm deeply hurt by testimony like these (you're not the first
| one I read), having been in chaos and near homelessness ready to
| work twice the amount for min wages, it's unbearable. When you
| know that this happens, it's near impossible to not hate
| HR/interviews.
|
| pps: few places where this can't really occur: public facing
| jobs, you don't want to look like a moron, or a lazy douche so
| you have no choice. Hospitals are probably free of that too.
| retail. There's a natural flow of timely tasks there.
| anon125236423 wrote:
| Are you me? I was remote before the pandemic and this has been my
| life since I went remote.
|
| I am constantly praised on my work (both in quality and quantity)
| but I keep telling myself it can't be true. I normally do 1-2
| hours of work a day right before my standup (often doing to work
| I said I was going to do the previous day) and every once in a
| while I work more if I feel motivated or if there is a production
| issue/big release. I know I do good work but I am often
| flabbergasted that I'm seen as such a good developer given that
| I'm putting in so few hours. I'm not trying to boast here, far
| from it, but I get a TON of praise and it bewilders me and I feel
| guilty.
|
| My biggest issue is what I do with the remaining time. Sure,
| sometimes I clean, do laundry, cook, etc but more often than not
| I just lay in bed and listen to/read a book or play a game. I end
| up doing next to nothing every workday until 5 when I feel "free"
| and I can finally go do whatever I want. For a long stretch at
| the start of the pandemic I would just scroll through TikTok for
| hours, always with a small voice in the back of my head telling
| me I would be found out. I know depression is to blame for some
| of my lackluster motivation, and it's something I'm working on,
| but even so I have zero interest in suddenly putting all that
| extra time into work, especially when they are thrilled with my
| performance as-is. What sucks is there is no one I can talk about
| this with. My friends would probably get mad or think less of me
| and so I just keep quiet.
|
| I keep thinking that if/when they hire someone to do the same
| work as me that I'll have to step it up since it will be obvious,
| at least to the other person, that I'm not giving 100% but even
| then I'm not sure. I've always outperformed my peers and so when
| I took my most recent job I never put in 100%, 80% max at the
| start and now it's down to 10-20% while putting out plenty of
| good work. Why should I work harder? I can't bring myself to care
| about it though I wish I could funnel some of that extra
| time/effort into my side projects.
| omnicognate wrote:
| Software development isn't a matter of sitting down and
| generating a fixed amount of code per hour. The rate of writing
| code is hugely variable. It's not unusual for most of my
| "productive" (as in typing actual code) time to be concentrated
| in a few particular days in a month. The time not spent typing
| (or being in meetings, doing admin, etc) isn't actually
| "unproductive" though. It's mostly spent solving problems, and a
| lot of that effort happens below the level of consciousness. A
| lot of it actually happens during sleep. It's effort, though, and
| it costs. You can't do an infinite amount of it in infinitesimal
| time.
|
| I suggest 2 tests to see if you're lazy or dumb:
|
| 1. Try to be more productive by sheer effort of will. Just say to
| yourself "this month I will write more code than usual" and set
| to it with a positive attitude. If you succeed you were being
| lazy and now you know how to not be lazy. If, as is more likely
| from what you've said, you fail, then you're not lazy. You're
| working at your maximum capacity but you have a poor
| understanding of what constitutes "work" in the job you do.
|
| 2. If, by the above test, you are not lazy, then look at how well
| you do relative to your peers. If you're holding your own (as you
| say you are), you're not dumb either.
| soneca wrote:
| Well, they said they don't do anything some days and bullshit
| their way to the next standup. It is clear to me where they
| stand at.
| jjav wrote:
| > Well, they said they don't do anything some days and
| bullshit their way to the next standup. It is clear to me
| where they stand at.
|
| But it's the agile standups that force the bullshitting. If
| you spent a day background thinking of best ways to achieve
| the goal while resting in your backyard hammock, there's no
| way you can say that out loud at the standup. So you're
| forced to come up with some random bullshit to fill your
| standup minutes.
|
| That's why daily status reports are so incredibly toxic in
| any creative or intellectual field. Progress doesn't happen
| in neat daily chunks like that.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Which is where?
|
| If they deliver X, and the expectation is X; OP may call it
| "bullshitting" but his point is that he's delivered
| expectations and now he's coasting which is totally fine. He
| delivered on expectations.
| khazhoux wrote:
| > Software development isn't a matter of sitting down and
| generating a fixed amount of code per hour. The rate of writing
| code is hugely variable... The time not spent typing (or being
| in meetings, doing admin, etc) isn't actually "unproductive"
| though.
|
| All true statements, but that's not what we're talking about.
| OP recognizes that he works 5-10 hours a week, and effectively
| blows the rest of the day off.
|
| Reminds me a bit of an engineer who reported to me a few years
| ago. He would describe every week in our 1:1s and during team
| meetings how he was solving this tough thread-synchronization
| problem. Because we trusted each other, we trusted that the
| problem was difficult. Then when he finally submitted his code,
| it was a single line. A single trivial line (as in, read the
| python `multiprocessing` docs for 5 minutes and the solution is
| right there). OK... sometimes it can take a long time to find
| that one-line fix, I get it. But then I looked into his commit
| history, and it turns out he was averaging a few lines of code
| a week -- on a good week, and sometimes even zero. When I
| confronted him, he said " _You can 't measure my productivity
| by lines of code!!!_" OK, sure, but how far am I supposed to
| excuse an engineer who has committed 100 lines of code in 10
| months? What a statistical oddity, that every single task he
| took on turned out to be a single-line-fix dragon!
| omnicognate wrote:
| I don't disagree, but I never said there was no such thing as
| slackers or that OP definitely isn't one. I provided a test
| to tell if they really are one or not.
|
| The point I'm making is that some people in our profession
| _think_ they are slacking when they 're not, for the reasons
| I described. OP's description doesn't convince me that they
| necessarily are. In particular the comment at the end about
| having spent the years prior to the pandemic "pretending" to
| themselves that they were working hard sounds to me like
| somebody who's never really understood their own mental
| processes and has encountered a different perspective by
| doing the job in a different environment. I might be wrong,
| but that sounds more likely to me than that they have been
| getting away with minimal contributions throughout what they
| describe as a 20 year career. Your report didn't get away
| with it - the evidence is always there in the commit history,
| and the 2-5 year job length OP mentions is, contrary to their
| assessment, plenty of time to judge a developer's
| productivity.
|
| Another hint is the fact that this person is seriously
| proposing the idea that _everybody else_ is slacking off and
| lying too. This indicates that they don 't think their actual
| output is less than other developers'.
|
| As I say, I may be wrong. I don't know this developer - these
| are just some thoughts based on what they've posted. Unlike
| some here I'm not assuming I know the truth.
| mrozbarry wrote:
| I think this 2-question test is very accurate.
|
| To add to this, even if for a time, you can increase your
| productivity, sometimes that's not sustainable. There's nothing
| wrong with having ebbs and flows. On days when you have a
| larger workload of smaller tasks, you may find yourself to be
| incredibly productive, and days when you have smaller
| workloads, or larger tasks, and you may be less productive.
|
| The thing is, if your boss is happy with your pace and work,
| then why be worried? It is literally your boss's job to notice
| if you aren't pulling your weight, and to ensure you are
| compensated fairly for your work.
|
| The work-place hierarchy (hopefully, and usually) is set up so
| you don't have to govern whether you are working at the proper
| pace, that is the problem of your superiors, it's only up to
| you to accomplish the tasks you are given, or give advice about
| those tasks if they are wrong.
| psyc wrote:
| I've never lied about it. I work to understand the user-facing
| and technical requirements, and I turn in a satisfactory
| implementation, usually on time.
|
| Once in a while this entails working late, or on a Saturday. The
| vast majority of the time it means showing up for the stand up
| and sticking around for 3-4 hours. I prefer not to work anywhere
| where anyone is taking any notice of when I'm at my desk or not.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Yes, your bosses have been too incompetent to notice.
|
| Yes, if you only put in 5 hours, you are not delivering at your
| full potential. You are very unlikely to be delivering "10x
| Developer" work. I have no idea what your company size is, but I
| would wager that where I work, our top developer lands 10x as
| much code as you (and solid, well-tested, and efficient code).
|
| Yes, you are lazy. I don't know what else to call doing the bare
| minimum. I'm not passing judgement and I'm not angry at you for
| it. But everything you've described can be summarized as "I'm
| lazy and I get away with it."
|
| If, on the other hand, you tell us that your manager has
| explicitly signed off on you working 5-10 hours a week, only then
| would this not be laziness, but just a fantastic job arrangement.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| * Best: productive geniuses
|
| * Meh: unproductive geniuses, unproductive idiots
|
| * Terrible: productive idiots
|
| Honestly, I've had to deal with the Terrible far more than I've
| had to deal with the Meh. That said, in the org I'm in now, Meh
| will get you moved on to something "new" pretty quickly.
| thrower123 wrote:
| Depends wildly on how many meetings I'm scheduled with.
|
| I might work 6-8 hours if I don't have any meetings scheduled.
|
| I tend to work about two or three if the meetings are scheduled
| in such a way that I can't accomplish anything worthwhile in
| between them.
| xapata wrote:
| I once met a "Senior Manager" at a very large and successful
| company with only 1 responsibility: compile a quarterly report by
| consolidating a large set of monthly reports.
| winterplace wrote:
| Do you have an email address or a method of contact?
|
| You can make a new account on proton. Will send an initial
| message there.
| edub wrote:
| Is this a test to see if I clicked on this post?
| totaldude87 wrote:
| I usually felt guilty whenever i spend a couple of hours doing
| nothing. Usually those breaks come in because either a) i know i
| have a lot of time to complete my tasks 2) i don't have much work
| to do.
|
| Then i started going to office after years of WFH and noticed the
| amount of time we spend on coffee and lunch and still being
| called productive because of those same two 2 points .
|
| So i implemented a plan , when on WFH, i started playing chess
| during those long breaks. Believe it or not, the breaks were
| reduced gradually because either i win a lot and then i move over
| or i lose a lot and then i move over. goes without saying, your
| mileage may vary
|
| Slowly after making it a habit, i was greatly able to reduce my
| non productive time to somewhat productive. like reading
| something about the tech or learning ..
|
| Now being productive can be a subjective thing. you might read a
| lot about tech that has nothing to do with your job , so you are
| not productive for the company you work for , but still being
| productive to oneself.
| agagrgar wrote:
| Did you get any better at chess?
| totaldude87 wrote:
| Yeah , 800 to 1000 lol
| winddude wrote:
| :o
| eximius wrote:
| > No one has ever called me out on this
|
| Have you ever been stuck debugging something, maybe even
| something that _should_ be simple, for days at a time?
|
| I know I have.
|
| I think because, in the course of actual work, we encounter these
| kinds of things and because of innate social reasons, yes, you're
| unlikely to be called out.
| Mc91 wrote:
| If I have a story to complete during a sprint, and I spend an
| hour looking through the specifications and looking at the
| existing code and APIs etc., the company would probably be worse
| off if I immediately began coding a solution. I have two weeks to
| do the work, so why rush it? The company will be better off if I
| implement a better solution.
|
| We're not flipping hamburgers or soldering widgets on an assembly
| line. We're constantly adding to systems that get increasingly
| complex over time. The UX that the product manager sees is just a
| small percentage of the work. Haste makes waste, and a stitch in
| time can save nine.
|
| There are times I have spent a day banging on some problem, and I
| am up to even 1 AM trying to fix it and I give up and go to
| sleep, after a few hours of hitting my head against a brick wall.
| I wake up in the morning relaxed, and am hit with an epiphany, I
| go to the computer to code it and it works. I don't know if I am
| dreaming up a solution while I sleep, or a couple of seconds of a
| clear head beats hours of tiredly banging my head against the
| wall, but it has happened more than once to me, and I have heard
| the same from others.
| [deleted]
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| I have never done what you describe, except perhaps in times of
| illness when it was understood that working less was a reasonable
| accommodation (in that particular case, I had leftover brain fog
| from general anesthesia).
|
| I've never heard of any colleagues doing it either. I would never
| snitch if it happened, but I would certainly consider that person
| untrustworthy or think that they have an undisclosed condition
| that is between them and HR.
|
| As you covered in your post, we don't write code 8 hours a day.
| This is normal. Meetings, context switch and times when focus is
| unachievable are expected and mostly understood by my experienced
| management. So are times when we are monitoring technology
| advancement and keeping an eye on the industry and community
| (e.g. lurking at HN but not overly posting and commenting) and
| times of social activity between workers (e.g. talking about the
| weekend).
|
| Most of us take mental health breaks between meetings and need to
| take time to think through issues. Many also need to periodically
| break focus to think about personal life issues or hobbies. As
| long as you generally strive to work, this is not a problem
| either.
|
| But walking into a stand-up and then lying about your day? To me,
| that's unethical.
|
| The real question to me is:
|
| Do you do that on purpose or is this something that happens even
| if you are trying to focus? There are many conditions, from
| stress and anxiety to diagnosed mental health issues that can
| prevent you from focusing. Burn-outs and bore-outs also come to
| mind.
|
| In my eyes, the fact that you asked the community about it shows
| that you have some form of concern towards that behavior. Would
| you say it is negatively impacting your life?
| lta wrote:
| I'm happy to finally read a comment that say this isn't a good
| or normal thing. I was starting to feel a bit of despair. I
| don't think I've done that much more that you seems to do but
| I've certainly seen a lot of people do it and it's always been
| pissing me off. I've always wondered how the world even works
| when I consider how much I've seen people do that at every
| level and at every kind of job.
|
| Dear original post author, you really need to start doing
| something that you enjoy or that motivates you. You can also
| try to structure your life in a way that allows you to not work
| when you don't feel like you can or will be efficient. This is
| one of the very reason I'm freelancing: I work when I want/can,
| and do not pretend the rest of the time. But when I'm working,
| I'm trying to stay as close as possible to 100%. I charge a
| premium rate for those very focused session, and do not pretend
| the rest of the time. There are times when I work a lot, a d
| times when I don't accept new projects because I need time off
| (usually 4 months a year)
|
| I'm really wondering how healthy is, psychologically, all this
| pretending.
|
| Anyway, I don't think you're alone in your situation but I
| don't think it's a good thing either
| tqwhite wrote:
| All the other comments about the background processing, waiting
| for inspiration, only having stamina for a certain amount of
| time are all correct. For forty years I have lived that life
| and have never been in a situation where I averaged more than a
| few hours a day of actual coding. It often takes a long time
| for me to figure out what to do but, that's work, too.
|
| But, five to ten a week?, get a different job that you like. I
| have worked in situations where there wasn't really enough to
| do. My response, write something else. If I was 100% retired I
| would work more than five or ten hours a week.
|
| And I think, karawebnetwork, that you are right to inquire
| amount mental health. Having that little energy and motivation
| is not a good thing.
| trulyme wrote:
| Most of the other answers focus on how programming is not
| typing (which I agree with, of course), but I think they miss
| the point. Yours answers directly and I agree with it.
|
| Working 5 to 10 hours a week seems very low to me, though as a
| lead or as a coworker I would judge OP by the impact, not by
| the time spent behind the computer. But I doubt anyone can have
| serious impact in such time.
|
| I had the chance to work with a brilliant coworker who
| preferred to slack off - and have passed on recommending him
| for this very reason.
|
| World is a big place and there are many ways to go through
| life, so I'm not judging - but if you're asking if this is
| common, then the answer is "no, not at the places where I
| worked, and not how I work".
|
| Of course you would have to pay/promise me fortune to get more
| than 40hr weeks from me, but I'm not hiding that. :-)
| 300bps wrote:
| Based on my experience, this is not common. I have managed about
| 200 people in my career and have had to deal with this a few
| times.
|
| The basic strategy I've used is to write notes on every status
| update they give in the daily standups. The updates go right into
| our sprint planning tool. Then every day they are confronted with
| the fact that their prediction to, "Get it done today" failed to
| come true like six days in a row. They either realize the jig is
| up and get better or I fail to renew their contract if they're a
| contractor or manage them out/fire them if they're a full time
| employee.
|
| I had one employee though that would do nothing for about 6 days
| in a row and then get two weeks of work done in a few days. I
| could work with that. And she only made like $75k per year (this
| was about 15 years ago) so it's not like she was getting rockstar
| salary.
| bluedino wrote:
| Take a look at early stage startups when there are only a handful
| of people working there. They are working over 8 hours writing
| tons of code.
| ryanmercer wrote:
| Man, that must be nice. I've already worked about 62 full time
| weeks this year and we aren't 52 weeks into it, I just worked my
| 16th thanksgiving in a row too and even with all of that OT I
| won't even make the median household income for my state this
| year (which is lower than the federal quite a bit). Meanwhile my
| CEO went from 11 million to 54 million in compensation over the
| last 2 years.
|
| Every second of my day is logged and reports are made by someone
| and reported to other persons about how much I'm doing and how
| fast. My brain similarly has to be firing all day, the entire
| time I'm clocked in. Visually scanning data from imaged
| documents, processing that in my head figuring out what to do
| with and how to classify items in the case, then trying to
| remember what special handling procedures apply for any specific
| element. I start the day sharp, by the end of the day I can't
| even sit down and pay attention to tv because my brain is just
| shot from having to keep track of multiple phone-books worth of
| rules/regulations/procedures and tariff numbers. I've been
| working 6 days a week for 6 months now, Sundays once my wife and
| I come home from church I just check out and stare in the general
| direction of the TV while my mind just goes somewhere trying to
| find rest.
|
| I however do not work in software.
| indymike wrote:
| > Remote work during the pandemic has allowed me to finally be
| honest with myself and stop pretending I am working when I am
| not.
|
| Every big company I've worked for has people who hide in the
| cubicle forest.
|
| > Have I just been incredibly lucky and every boss I have had is
| too incompetent to notice?
|
| Who knows if it is incompetence or luck. Performance is always
| relative. The truth is, you are probably are contributing more
| value than others on your team.
| sz4kerto wrote:
| I don't think that what you're doing is very common, but it's not
| uncommon either. What you need to do this is to work in an
| environment where not being productive is not harmful. There are
| plenty of environments like this. For example, not doing any work
| but still getting paid doesn't do any harm at Google. The company
| is making money anyway. At a small startup that's under immense
| pressure people would realise what you're doing because you'd
| harm the business.
|
| I'm a big believer in Price's Law - the square root people
| produce half the value. If there are 10000 people at the company,
| you can very well survive in the group of 9900 that does the
| other half.
| Kranar wrote:
| As someone who worked at both Microsoft and Google... you can
| get await with doing little work at those companies for maybe a
| year, two years at most, but after that you're gone. The
| expectation at those places skyrockets after the first year.
| paxys wrote:
| At Microsoft at least that wasn't my experience at all. I
| knew several people there who hadn't done any real productive
| work for the last 7-10 years, probably longer.
| agagrgar wrote:
| I've been in Azure and GCP. IDK how anyone would get away
| with it. You constantly have customer issues, people from
| other teams pinging you, needing help with something. I
| don't see how it would be possible just to do nothing and
| survive.
|
| Maybe in some team that is further removed from customers?
| sjtindell wrote:
| Aren't there still tons of developer jobs at Google,
| Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, etc. where you aren't on call
| and just get to write code?
| ayewo wrote:
| Not to disagree with your experience at Azure and GCP,
| but the grandparent specifically mentioned their parent
| entities: Microsoft and Google, each of which have
| several divisions apart from their respective cloud
| divisions.
|
| Keep in mind that Azure and GCP are playing catch up to
| AWS, so they necessarily have to run a tight ship in
| order to close AWS' lead.
|
| So its possible for laxity to exist in other divisions in
| a large company, as long as the money keeps rolling in,
| e.g. the Windows division at Microsoft (which still
| enjoys a good share of the desktop market) and the Search
| division at Google (which still enjoys a good share of
| the search market).
| agagrgar wrote:
| Yeah, I mentioned Azure and GCP specifically, to imply
| that other divisions within those companies may be
| different. Anything where you're constantly deploying to
| enterprise customers, you're going to need to be
| responsive to issues that come up, and that alone will
| take a good chunk of the day.
| gipp wrote:
| At Google anyway, it's fairly common knowledge that cloud
| is a far more difficult place to work, both in culture
| and expectations, than most anywhere else in the company
| as a SWE.
| mathteddybear wrote:
| As someone who put more lines of code into <50KLOC hobby
| project, that is not guaranteed, especially when your "little
| work" affects the bottom line on megabucks scale.
| abledon wrote:
| hypothetically, do you think if people weren't allowed to
| drink caffeine or use performance enhancing drugs (adderall
| etc..), what % would not make that threshold of performance?
| Kranar wrote:
| No idea; most people I worked with drank coffee but never
| once was I exposed to performance enhancing drugs. At
| Microsoft I worked on IronPython and the people I worked
| with were productive not in the sense that they churned out
| 1000s and 1000s of lines of code a day, but they were
| productive in the sense that they were constantly
| outputting fairly novel solutions.
|
| A similar thing was true at Google, I worked in the
| platforms division there (storage systems, BigTable, Linux
| kernel tweaking), and it was mostly about identifying
| bottlenecks and coming up with interesting solutions to
| squeeze out more performance. Most of this work wasn't like
| massive lines of code, but you had to really understand the
| problem at a deep level and have the kind of rigor and
| discipline to make changes to large systems without
| breaking anything in the process. That last bit was very
| hard to do, since coming up with optimizations that don't
| break anything is surprisingly difficult.
| sombremesa wrote:
| I've worked at a small startup and find this to be untrue. If
| you're working with people 10-100x worse than you, you can be
| sandbagging as hard as you can and still be miles ahead and
| look like a paragon of productivity.
|
| Now, will that particular startup succeed? Probably not in the
| way their investors would like.
| snarf21 wrote:
| It also depends on the company. I've worked at companies where
| the #1 project can change weekly and by that I mean the
| previous project is completely abandoned for the new shiny. If
| you've worked at a place like this (there are lots of them),
| you have to not burn yourself out. It is very demoralizing to
| give your all to a UI just to have it literally thrown away.
| Sometimes slow rolling can let you move things forward in a
| protective way. If it is still #1 after 5 weeks, maybe it is
| time to dive in more fully. Digging holes and filling them back
| in is tough.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| With my current manager this has become a skill I'm honing.
| He's senile and asks for all sorts of things he will have
| forgotten about in a few days. So I slow roll any new idea he
| gets excited about until it has percolated for at least a
| week or two. The trick is figuring out how to wait long
| enough to avoid doing throw-away work without waiting long
| enough that he feels ignored. But, like I said, he's senile,
| so that helps with the latter.
| snarf21 wrote:
| For my previous boss, I have the rule of 3. Until he asked
| for something 3 times, I just said "yep" and didn't start
| it. If he asked three times, he wasn't going to forget so
| time to start moving it forward.
| [deleted]
| pmichaud wrote:
| I've seen this a lot at large, cubical farm type places. I think
| you're just not in the 20% doing 80% of the work. Whether that's
| a mistake or genius, I think is debatable and depends on the
| person.
| oakfr wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if a high number of us is now really
| doing 3-4 hours of real work a day, filling in the rest with
| stuff that we'd have been ashamed to do in front of our
| colleagues (or called for) in the pre-covid world.
|
| This is a good thing. The pre-covid world was mostly a circus in
| that respect.
|
| As long as the 3-4 hours of daily deep, profitable work are still
| there, we're good.
|
| Edit: this comment does not apply to small startups where your
| productivity as an engineer is much higher and it (sadly) makes
| sense to work for 8+ hours a day.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| You aren't a 10X developer whose laziness makes you a 1X
| developer. You're a 1X developer period. 10X developers wouldn't
| be on HN posting about how they coast and pretend, they would be
| doing literally 10X the coding as you (and me too).
|
| The reality is this: spend your attention wisely and don't worry
| about anything else. Attention is the real value of time. The
| more attention you can pay to producing good things, the more
| benefits you'll create. The more attention you pay to frivolity,
| to mindless consumption, the less positive impact society will
| feel from your existence.
| Daishiman wrote:
| There is an extremely broad range of work and effort put in by
| software engineers, but there's also an equally broad range of
| necessary and important work in most orgs.
|
| I was a sysadmin at a company that had things extremely well-
| tuned and within our team we averaged a couple of hours of work a
| day, tops.
|
| I've been at companies where there were 50-hour weeks of nonstop
| which which were necessary, followed by downtimes where almost no
| work was necessary (it was a very seasonal business).
|
| In my experience most engineers have no more than 4-5 hours of
| real work in them a day. After that, mental performance drops
| dramatically and while you can definitely respond to emails and
| attend meetings and do less intense work, deep thought is just a
| finite resource and heavily influenced by your mood, anxiety, and
| motivation. Keep it up for too long in an org that doesn't value
| clean code and good tests and your performance can definitely be
| negative.
|
| It's also true that good organizations and teams know and work
| with these limits rather than push people into unrealistic goals.
| People can switch around between deep architecture work and
| planning, managing a sprint, writing reams of code based on well-
| understood specs, debugging, etc. You can take turns when your
| personal life gets intense or you feel drained.
|
| I think that most works vastly underestimate the importance of
| deep work and being strategic about what gets done. The right
| product spec and the right amount of work researching solutions
| can easily save an order of magnitude of coding work. It's
| amazing how little you need to do if you know the happy path for
| implementing the right solution instead of iterating through
| multiple broken attempts.
| 3flp wrote:
| As I've been more in leadership positions over the years, this
| has been one of my challenges. We all have unproductive days
| (weeks?). What's interesting: I now work at a company that relies
| on hard work. I work in product development with significant
| software component, DSP and other specialties. When one team
| member does not deliver their part, the whole product is delayed
| and it becomes very visible. On the other hand, given that most
| of the stuff we do is new/unique, it is hard to see how much time
| a task "should" take. Sadly, people ocassionally hide behind
| this. One recent extreme example: We've hired a supposed senior
| "gun" that has been in the industry for 20+ years. Then he
| subsequently failed to deliver basic piece of software in 6
| months. After some discussions with him, we realized he lacked
| even basic fundamentals. Our failing was that we didn't pick up
| on this during the hiring process. Anyway, someone else had to
| take over and complete it in a few weeks. This "senior gun" has
| been bullshitting his way through decades of career.. Btw, the
| companies that he worked for are failing (or failed already), so
| there's that indicator. My point is - developer's productivity
| can have a huge impact, depending on what the business is. I
| would hate to be working in a job where my work (or lack of) has
| no impact..
| dsjoerg wrote:
| Certainly you're not the only one.
|
| There's often wide variation in how long something takes to do,
| and you have been given the benefit of the doubt. Also, however,
| you may have been judged relatively underperforming, and missed
| out on some fun & interesting opportunities as a result.
|
| Hopefully you can find a way to spend your workdays that feels
| better and more honest. You've already taken the first step.
| all_usernames wrote:
| Managers are supposed to weed out people that slack off enough to
| slow delivery and cause headaches for their peers.
|
| I do know some engineers who seem to coast or just be unhappy 70%
| of the time, but the 30% where they show up is insanely valuable.
| Those people can stay in my org.
|
| What I really hate is the guy doing what the OP is doing while
| his colleagues are working long days and weekends picking up the
| slack. That's just being an antisocial leech, and that person is
| toxic to a team and to morale.
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't think there's anything wrong with this. If your
| management had a problem with it, they would have said something.
| I don't think you "owe" anyone anything that your management has
| not asked or required you to give.
|
| At one point in my career I was working 90+ hours per week, and
| while I learned a lot in that time (and at least convinced myself
| I was having fun), the end result was burnout. These days I work
| less than 40 hours a week. My management is more or less fine
| with that, and I'm fine with not getting stellar perf reviews,
| big raises or equity grants, or promotions. I've also been at my
| current company for a while; I've already done the 60-hour work
| weeks here in the past, and contributed a lot. I still contribute
| and add value, but less, and on my terms.
|
| Just be sure what you're doing is sustainable. If you have to
| leave your current job for any reason (new manager who sucks,
| layoffs, company folds, whatever), will you be able to get good
| references so you can get another job? Will you be able to keep
| up the same low level of work at a new job? Will you even be able
| to pass interviews for a new job since you aren't really growing
| yourself technically?
|
| Also be sure that the company is large enough that you're not
| harming things by doing minimal work. If you work for a multi-
| thousand-person company with bureaucracy and redundancies all
| over the place, it's probably fine. If you work at a 15-person
| startup, where you not pulling your weight could mean the company
| is significantly more likely to fail, it'd be pretty shitty to
| stay in that situation and risk causing problems for your
| colleagues.
|
| Also I hope you're working remotely now and can do
| fun/useful/productive non-work things with most of your day. If
| you had to sit in an office for 8 hours while pretending to look
| busy (but actually just goofing off on the internet), I don't
| think that's a good use of your time (being paid or otherwise),
| and I doubt it'd be great for your mental health, either.
| kelnos wrote:
| To add one more thing: don't make life hard for your peers. If
| your intentional lack of productivity is making your teammates'
| lives harder, that's not cool. Don't be selfish at the expense
| of others.
| somerando7 wrote:
| I wonder if some people on my team even work 1-2 hours a day
| honestly.
|
| What I've found for myself is this greatly demotivates me. Why am
| I putting in 6-8 hours of pure coding a day when I see the guy
| next to me doing 1 hour of work and getting payed 2x as much?
|
| I legit have an ic7 on a sister team that has made 40 diffs in
| the past 2 years, I don't think a single one has been > 50 LoC
| and it was mostly config changes. Crazy world we live in.
| geijoenr wrote:
| Long time manager here as well.
|
| I am fully aware of the amount of work developers do and never
| expect more than 50% of their time to be spent in full focus. But
| this amounts to around 20h per week.
|
| The kind of behavior you describe amounts to me as medium-low
| performance, but as some other people mentions; there are other
| types of behaviors that are much more problematic because they
| disrupt the proper functioning of teams.
|
| If you have low performance, but are not problematic and have
| other qualities that are positive; you won't be last in the list
| when thinking about salary raises nor first in the list when
| redundancies are needed. The other more problematic types will be
| instead.
| workthrow320948 wrote:
| Long time manager, and I agree with all of this, but I also
| identify with OP and also get only a handful of hours of work
| done every week and I've wondered the same thing.
|
| I get high marks (high to superlative performance)
| consistently, but it's usually because when I deliver, it's
| with high quality outputs and effective delegation. Otherwise I
| don't really do much but wonder whether I'm really under
| performing if all my reviews are as strong as they are, or if I
| just do the work more quickly than most others.
|
| edit: I'm fine with this comment being dead, honest. less
| people see it and less risk of me being identified on my main.
| don't vouch. I'm using tor so that's why
| brokencode wrote:
| It sounds like you have a soul-crushing job where you don't care
| about what you are doing or the people you work with. I'd find a
| new job or career path, as that sounds miserable.
|
| I personally wish for a 4 day work week that lasts 36 hours, but
| I could not stand to be that disengaged every single day.
|
| And for what it's worth, I've had developers like that on my team
| several times, and it doesn't last forever. Either they get a new
| manager or new responsibilities, and it becomes obvious.
| Management eventually pushes them to work harder, and they
| invariably leave on their own.
| czbond wrote:
| slacker
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Yes, most people do very little to nothing at their jobs, in all
| professions where it's possible to get away with it
| handrous wrote:
| I know folks in non-tech office jobs who say it's easy to
| exceed typical metrics for their department in, at most, two
| hours of actual work per day. Doesn't even require that those
| be especially frantic or hard-working hours themselves. Just a
| couple normal-paced hours and you're at the front of the pack
| for the day.
|
| This exists at the other end, too: I've seen a lot of people in
| management positions who had enough assistants that I can just
| about guarantee their _average_ workday is also about two hours
| of actual work, though with some very long days and some near-
| zero-work days. I 've seen founder-CEO types who know (and are)
| the right people so it's easy to get early funding for their
| ventures, and make an "executive assistant" for that company
| (so, paid with investor money) a very early hire so they can
| get away with barely doing any work on it (they're always doing
| like 5 things at once, if you check their LinkedIn, and that's
| how: they're putting very little time in to any but _maybe_ one
| of them at any given time)
| agagrgar wrote:
| I'm literally about to get fired from Google for this, possibly
| today (HR is calling wondering where I am). Dumb thing is, I've
| been working like crazy on my 20% project. I just can't stand the
| other one, got an NI on my first (and presumably last) review
| cycle so pretty much killed any chance of a transfer.
|
| I've never outright lied, though certainly hemmed and hawed. And
| occasionally blatantly "I haven't done anything this week". And
| yeah, certainly work-from-home makes it easier to shut down and
| ignore everything. Which is great, except you feel like crap
| afterwards.
|
| But like I said, it depends on the project. Next job I take,
| money is going to be less of a consideration. Just want to work
| on something interesting. And there's a reasonable likelihood
| that I fall into the category of "needs professional help" (I
| also flunked out of school twice and took six years to graduate,
| despite getting five 5's on AP tests and only needing two years'
| worth of credits), but I've tried a few times without much
| success.
|
| And, no I don't think it's super-common. At least not to this
| level. Most of my coworkers seem to genuinely work pretty hard.
| Though some don't.
| [deleted]
| fouc wrote:
| It sounds like you're basically averaging 1 to 2 hours of actual
| productive work per day. I think work studies have shown that the
| average is close to 3 hours per day, so you're not that far off.
| xwdv wrote:
| We are paid for the value we bring, not the time we spend.
|
| If that means you only need to work 5 hours a week, so be it.
| [deleted]
| mywittyname wrote:
| There's this idea that half of the value created by a company is
| produced by the square root of the total number of employees. So
| you're experience is probably typical.
|
| In my experience, most developers fall into the category. Outside
| of the startup world, there's not really this huge push to move
| quickly. Established software works well enough that most
| companies can afford to have highly paid professionals dillydally
| through most of the work day. As long as everyone is doing
| _something_ each day, and the right people can shift into low
| gear when urgent action is needed, things will move along pretty
| smoothly.
|
| People who are both very competent and can sustain large volumes
| of work tend to gravitate towards startups. There's really no
| point in working 10x faster than everyone else at an established
| company because someone else is going to be the bottleneck.
|
| > Have I just been incredibly lucky and every boss I have had is
| too incompetent to notice?
|
| They are probably just as good at BSing during meetings with
| their boss as you are in standups. They either talk up the
| accomplishments of other team members, discuss future plans, or
| some other team is the focus of the conversations that week.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| "Less haste more speed"
|
| Maybe part of it is that when you do do something, it actually
| counts. And you don't waste time in perfectionism or ideology.
|
| This would make you a 10x developer, but it mightn't scale up to
| a 40 hour week, because the non-working time will partly be used
| to assess what is _really_ necesaary.
| devcamcar wrote:
| I would suggest maybe step back and think about a point in your
| career where you really felt challenged and inspired. I've
| definitely had periods where I felt similar, but was generally
| because I was just bored and didn't feel any connection to the
| work I was doing. So many of us attach so much of our identities
| to the work we do. And if the work we do isn't meaningful then we
| end up in thought processes like yours.
|
| The fact that you are really looking inward and thinking about
| this is super positive by the way, because without that things
| will never change.
|
| Think about what it is you really want to achieve and find a job
| that gives you a sense of ownership and pride.
|
| You got this!
| pjerem wrote:
| Are you me ?
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I think you're definitely an outlier, taking what you say at face
| value. My unsolicited advice: stay abreast of where software is
| going. What you're doing may make you vulnerable to obsolescence
| if you're not careful, and you'll only have yourself to blame.
| Also, I wonder about the health of the companies you work for,
| ceteris paribus.
| air7 wrote:
| It took some growing up on my part to realize the fundamental
| value in "If you do something, do it well".
|
| I used to be very much in favor of "getting by" and a "good
| enough is good enough" mentally. After all, it's the rational
| point of view. Why work more, if you can work less? But the truth
| of the matter is that once you put your entire being into
| something, you immediately find value in it. Anything you do
| fully, however menial, magically becomes worthwhile and fills you
| with a sense of pride and accomplishment.
|
| Atleast that's my experience. If you want a random person's
| advice, I'd say try it out and see for yourself.
| ironman1478 wrote:
| For me personally, I am going through this for the past month,
| however its because for the 5 months before I was working
| basically 50-60 hour weeks with tons of active debugging, coding,
| and triaging (HW bringup type work). But next month we start
| ramping up to start new projects.
|
| It could just be what you are doing isn't fundamentally that
| difficult and doesn't require a 40 hour work week and there is
| absolutely nothing wrong with that. If people think you're worth
| the money you are getting paid, then you are worth that money.
| They pay you to get things done, not to sit in a desk for 40
| hours a week or be stressed for performance reasons.
| adolph wrote:
| Value != Work
|
| https://www.artofbrilliance.co.uk/blog/2017/05/the-parable-o...
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Probably this varies greatly between teams and companies. My
| situation was similar to yours at my previous job. But I've just
| joined a big tech company, and I've been working a lot. My
| coworkers are very skilled, and super productive. Considering the
| amount of code review, PR, oncalls, user support, there's noway
| they are slacking, even if they are 10x developer.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| I am considered by many I've worked with to be a highly
| productive individual contributor. 40+ years of professional
| software development. 20+ years of managing people. That said,
| there are days when I don't touch the keyboard and spend longer
| thinking about the code than actually writing code.
|
| I've been in companies, mostly smaller ones, where I've "crushed
| it" and shipped consumer products with small, scrappy teams and
| been very proud of my team and the goals we all achieved. And
| there was no way to hide in the cracks, and people spoke up if
| someone tried too.
|
| I've also worked in soul crushingly terrible companies (Facebook,
| Intel, Microsoft, Ericsson, eBay) that cannot get out of their
| own way where tasks and features are wildly mis-estimated or just
| take an interminable amount of time to actually deliver.
|
| Prior to my current position I was Lead developer for a big
| telecomms company, and I went from "highly productive" and
| delivering results with a small team -- we were small and we
| moved fast and we broke things. And it was glorious. Then I got
| "promoted" to a differnt team and regularly attended 19
| scheduled, standing meetings per week, not including impromptu
| meetings with individuals of the team, and in a classic Office
| Space scenario, I had six different people I reported too. And I
| was still expected, by two of the people I reported too, to get
| 40+ hours of hands-on-keyboard time.
|
| I am now back to a small, scrappy start-up team of four
| individual contributors and we have done more in five months than
| the team of 40+ was able to achieve in over 18 months.
|
| A lot of the time, the environment will beat out of you any
| inclination to reach for the brass ring. It will actively beat
| you down. You either subsume yourself to it, or you find a
| different company.
|
| But then, there are also those individuals which you just know
| are phoning it in, no matter the environment.
| mgaunard wrote:
| Large established businesses enable lazy developers which are too
| comfortable.
|
| You won't find too many of those in startups though, because
| there work getting done actually matters.
| tacostakohashi wrote:
| There is a book about this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
|
| Yours sounds like a textbook case. Reading it may give you some
| understanding of what's going on, and possibly what to do about
| it.
|
| Perhaps you are a "duct taper" - your main job is actually to
| just be around ready to jump in when something goes wrong, not to
| ever actually change, fix or build anything.
| oneepic wrote:
| I have to confess, it really, really makes me pissed when other
| people on the team aren't putting forth the same effort. I'd say
| I work 40 hours a week at least, counting real actual work, and
| I'm on a project right now where I think the other person is
| dragging their feet and making almost zero progress, not
| communicating, not asking for help, etc. A large part of that is
| because this person is a little more junior, but I get the
| feeling they're hiding and not doing what they should be.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| One thing many comments are missing is that you don't have a
| simple 1:1 relationship with your company and their backlog. You
| said you have a stand-up, which means you have a team.
|
| Work you don't do is work that someone else has to do. If you're
| literally not working at all some days but claiming you did
| during standup (as you said in your OP) then the work assignments
| must be flowing to your team members.
|
| In essence, you're asking your peers to pay for your lack of
| activity with their own work.
|
| Nobody expects you to be crunch mode 8 hours per day, but you do
| need to make an honest effort. Don't be the guy on the team who
| makes everybody else do most of the work.
| quinnjh wrote:
| In lieu of an economic system that redistributes gains in
| productivity, arguable anyone involved in automation SHOULD be
| "working" less and less. If your job duties are fulfilled by a
| weekly bash script , and you were hired to perform those duties
| weekly, i dont see why you shouldnt be paid for delivering the
| work and reap the reward of spending that time on personal
| projects / charity / hobbies
|
| Also like others said passive processing - chewing on an issue
| for 4 days and having the breakthrough in 20 minutes - if you
| only were paid for the 20 minutes it would be completely
| unsustainable, you would constantly grind and not recieve the
| rewards for that exponential (and humanly impossible) rise in
| productivity
| jeffalbertson wrote:
| you're not alone. I probably work the same amount as you. I ship
| stuff the org feels customers love, I get promotions, and get
| paid well. I could grind so much more but I like to spend my day
| in other ways. I like to read the news in the morning, clock out
| at 5 etc.
|
| We have the ability to "work" this little and still be valuable
| because writing code has a very high barrier to entry. That 5-10
| hrs of work took years of learning.
| sethammons wrote:
| A man approached a street artist making amazing paintings and
| asked for one. About 2 minutes later, the artwork completed,
| and the artist asked for the fee. The man balked at the price.
| "What!? This only took a couple of minutes!" "No," replied the
| artist, "this took me my whole life."
| CSSer wrote:
| Also see the parable of the plumber and the water heater:
| http://www.readersadvice.com/mmeade/musings/plumber.html
| willcipriano wrote:
| A real life version of that, that is closer to software dev
| in my opinon.
|
| I knew a plumber who was called out on Christmas Eve to
| deal with a clogged toilet. He arrives at the place and
| it's a beautiful mansion, full of well dressed guests
| eating wine and cheese. He goes into the bathroom and
| begins to resolve the issue when the homeowner comes over
| to dispute his price, "$500 for 15 minutes of work, how can
| you justify that?", the plumber reaches into the toilet
| grabs a handful of the contents and squeezes them between
| his fingers "Because I am willing to do this". The
| homeowner ran away disgusted, his bill was paid in full.
|
| Writing software for bureaucratic organizations loaded with
| non-technical management sucks. We get paid what we do
| because nobody else wants to do it.
| garmaine wrote:
| > I ship stuff
|
| This is the key point, I think, and the only thing that
| matters. Does OP ship stuff too? If so, he's got imposter
| syndrome.
| rizkeyz wrote:
| It's a matter of motivation. I had project flushing in speed,
| with correct, tested code, happy clients and I also had other
| assignments, where a feature that that should take a week took a
| year.
|
| That's insane about our field, the sheer variance in so many
| things we do.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Are you delivering more value to the company than you take from
| it in salary/benefits/overhead? That's all that matters here. Who
| cares if someone else is more productive on paper. Who cares if
| someone else has more visible progress.
|
| If you listen to people posting here, you'd think that you need
| to be sitting at a keyboard, typing furiously for exactly 8 hours
| a day, or you should be immediately fired. It's saddening to see
| that people in our industry still think that way, and it's a good
| reminder that even if you bring value to the company, you can
| still be canned if you don't play the political game and clang
| pots and pans whenever you ship a one-line bugfix.
| [deleted]
| pkrotich wrote:
| I believe your post is a cry for help. It's clear you're not
| happy or challenged enough. Perhaps you've simply been doing what
| you do for income and you're now trying to find some purpose.
|
| That said, I have a question: How on earth can you barely
| contribute as a developer and not get noticed? No one watches
| commits? No milestone or deliverables? Do you report to technical
| manager?
|
| I can understand if someone is on a desk pushing invisible
| paperwork (mangers etc) - but to me it seems like as a developer
| it's hard to imagine the coasting you describe.
| jerome-jh wrote:
| Most of my career I have been dedicated and worked seriously, but
| never over-worked for any extended period of time. I think I
| might be just a bit above average compared to co-workers in terms
| of amount of work done.
|
| However sometimes I have been unable to produce almost anything
| for maybe 2-6 weeks. I was scared to be discovered and blamed. To
| my surprised it never happened. Most of the time I have been able
| to bullshit my way through it. Only once it clearly was
| discovered I did not do my job. Not even started actually. A
| manager asked a coworker to help me on my task, which was a bit
| of shaming for me, but not too bad either. I was a contractor and
| some time ago the company offered me a position (which i
| declined). So I do not think this had any consequences.
| peakaboo wrote:
| It's more like I don't care how much work my coworkers do. It's
| not my problem and I'm not going to police them.
|
| I happen to be very productive when I like what I do, and very
| lazy when I don't. I even work weekends for free when im loving
| my work, but I slack for days and weeks when I don't.
|
| It's fine.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I worked at Intel for 20+ years and I felt like I was worked into
| the ground until I had to quit from exhaustion. I was promoted
| constantly for the first 15 years, I always had more work than I
| could finish, and most of my work was a rush to meet a deadline.
|
| No, I never lied. It was exhausting.
| catsarebetter wrote:
| Yes
| nfw2 wrote:
| In general, I expect most developers aren't working 40 hours and
| many don't come close. (The amount of upvotes on this thread
| seems to prove that.) For me, it is hugely dependent on the
| environment.
|
| By the time I left my last position, I was hardly doing any
| heads-down work. The team was an internal platform team, and the
| leadership was actively against sourcing any feedback from the
| eng/data teams we were meant to serve. The only things that were
| ever on the roadmap was long-term refactors that no one was
| asking for. My feedback on the direction of the work was by-and-
| large ignored, despite the fact that I was the only person
| writing any code on my project.
|
| I started a new job and it's been a night-and-day different.
| Furthermore, the lead engineer of the project is a grinder which
| motivates me to at least pull my own weight.
|
| TL;DR if you're an eng manager and want your team to be engaged,
| then lead by example, give them tangible goals, and listen to
| what they have to say.
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| What are you doing for the rest of the time?
| handrous wrote:
| HN, obviously. The only way this site stays so busy is _lots
| and lots_ of people doing this instead of working. It 'd be
| much quieter if there weren't plenty of people like OP.
| mrkentutbabi wrote:
| Ahh, I remember now in my previous company. The guy didnt know
| how to code, so always take 1-2 lines of css fix (and even then
| it was bad). Went out every lunch for 3 hrs, back to office, then
| watch youtube till 5pm then go home.
|
| That company is underwater now.
| p2p_astroturf wrote:
| Most programmers will never use more brain power than a child
| learning long division. Still doesn't change the fact that they
| are rotting away 9-5 for their entire life.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I got a bad rating this year for being slow. We have about an
| average of 4 hours of meetings everyday. I'm not sure when they
| want us to get work done. I'm tired of working hard and not it
| not paying off. I work, but don't go too fast.
|
| So I have been called out and punished for it.
| breakpointalpha wrote:
| They just gave you a huge sign that they want to let you go.
| The paperwork has already been filed, they are just waiting the
| legally appropriate amount of time to fire you.
|
| Clean up your resume now and start applying for new jobs.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I thought the sign was when I got a 1.5% raise for year end
| today. So a 4.7% pay cut.
|
| They say they want to retain me...
| danuker wrote:
| > We have about an average of 4 hours of meetings everyday.
|
| That would be the entirety of my workday. You should complain
| about this, meetings are incredibly costly to a company and
| must have a limit.
| giantg2 wrote:
| We do complain, but nothing really gets done.
| syspec wrote:
| I'm with you on this, the additional problem with the meetings
| is that they are sprinkled throughout the day.
|
| I know if I have a meeting starting in 30 minutes, I am not
| able to go into the deep thinking required to solve difficult
| problems.
|
| If I am in a flow state, and the meeting is an 1 hour away, it
| tends to break that and I look up at the clock once in a while
| to make sure I don't miss it (which can happen in flow state!)
| anikan_vader wrote:
| If you can get your work done in 10% of the time, great for you!
| _Unless_ this lack of productivity is due to a lack of motivation
| that translates across disciplines in your life. Or if it 's
| because you're running away from your work.
|
| If it is due to a lack of motivation, I would recommend WOOP, a
| science-based way to increase motivation and help people achieve
| their goals. Meditation, sleep, and exercise are all helpful too
| of course, as is cognitive-based therapy.
|
| But again, if you're just cruising through your job as a means to
| an end and you enjoy goofing off on the clock, then I genuinely
| think all the more power to you. Just make sure that whether you
| are productive or not is an intentional decision.
| chrismatheson wrote:
| Possibly...
|
| Your accidentally achieving what needs to be done with less
| effort than another.
|
| A lot of the work assigned wasn't actually needed in the first
| place
|
| Lazy people can find the best effort/reward trade off
| lostcolony wrote:
| Scrolling through I didn't see anyone address this question from
| an organizational perspective, so let me -
|
| You are not operating in isolation.
|
| Your work has upstream dependencies (well defined requirements,
| things owned by other people being done first, communication from
| other parties, etc), that will form blockers on being able to
| execute on what is important.
|
| Likewise, there are downstream bottlenecks; code you write has to
| be peer reviewed, tested, released, whatever else.
|
| This, alone, is like a Kanban process; so long as you are not the
| bottleneck, you are going to have a lot of downtime, even while
| some other part (that is the bottleneck) may feel stressed and
| overworked.
|
| But that's not even the only consideration! The 80/20 rule
| applies to software development, same as everywhere else. Is
| there more you -could- be doing? Almost certainly! Does it have
| anywhere near the value to you, the team, or the business, to
| warrant it getting attention? Assuredly not. Even if you devoted
| your remaining hours to things you felt you could get some
| traction on, the return on investment would be super low; likely
| so low as to not even be noticed.
|
| Between the two of those, it is quite possible for people, a
| majority within a company even, to still provide close to if not
| their actual maximal value, while not actually being productive
| 40 hours a week, and with it being neither organizational
| dysfunction (not to dismiss that as being true some places, but
| just to highlight it doesn't have to be), nor individual laziness
| (also not to dismiss that as a possibility, just that it doesn't
| have to be).
| wruza wrote:
| I don't mind working fulltime or overtime when the duty calls,
| but my professional sanity levels drop quickly after 4-5 hours a
| day, even if I want to do things. Sometimes faster. Some mornings
| I don't even feel to care, and arrive only after noon (my
| superiors know that, I'm not lying to them). I also have observed
| and discussed it with other people, including management, and
| they agree that there is no reason to push developers to the
| limit in "peaceful" times, because 1) these reservoirs aren't
| endless, 2) sometimes it's better to just slack off than to
| hackathon yet another bullshit solution for a problem. Just go
| and sleep on it, you know. I also know a guy from mid-management
| of a huge local company and he said that even planned allocation
| in busy departments barely exceeds 40% (3+ hours/day) and bragged
| that he could bring it up to around 60%. I think they definitely
| have people who just do nothing on a daily basis, or report
| things like "I rotated keys in two servers yesterday, three more
| to go", because nobody really knows anymore what that operation
| comprises.
|
| Most of us developers and our managers perfectly understand that
| it's not a paper-turning job and they really have no better
| options out there. In practice there is no supermen, only idiots
| who break things eventually in various ways. (Sorry if you,
| reader, are a rockstar developer. Nothing personal, but I'm tired
| to clean out these Augean stables)
|
| The only exception is the flow, when I can shut the door and code
| straight through a day in a field that is completely my
| competence.
| granshaw wrote:
| I'd really like to know where OPs working, I'm guessing a FAANG
| or similar, if so my next question would be how common is this at
| FAANGs
| tomerbd wrote:
| Don't you have oncall shifts?
| pictur wrote:
| You have very serious ego problems. I think you should focus on
| that.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't cross into personal attack. It just makes
| everything worse. Perhaps you don't feel you owe people with
| "ego problems" better, but you owe this community better if
| you're participating in it.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the
| intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
| pictur wrote:
| Have fun with your crappy community rules. You can
| permanently delete my account.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| For me, I find there are peaks and valleys - there are times when
| I'm so overwhelmed with coding tasks I feel like I'm drowning and
| other times when there's a lot to do, but all of it's blocked
| waiting for somebody else to make a decision/finish doing
| something/approve a budget/etc. When I first found myself in the
| "wait" state, I figured the logical thing to do would be to
| proactively find something to improve: documentation, unit tests,
| performance improvements, etc. I've found consistently over my
| near 3 decades in this business that that sort of proactivity is
| either frowned on or outright prohibited. What I've taken to
| doing with myself when I either have no "approved" work or am
| blocked on everything is reading documentation - recently I read
| through the O'Reilly Hadoop book and clarified a lot of things
| that I'd been confused about before.
|
| I do feel the same as you, though - I'm always concerned
| somebody's going to put me on the spot and say, "what have you
| done for me lately?" I will say, I've been doing this a _long_
| time and that 's never really happened. I go through the
| performance review song-and-dance every year and I can point out
| quite a few things I actually have done when the time comes, and
| so far it's made them happy.
| dgfitz wrote:
| I've been in the industry for over a decade at this point and
| I've found when I'm in the "wait" state, I just do whatever I
| want. If it works out, I show people and so far it's always
| gone over well. If it doesn't turn out, I don't show anyone,
| and nobody seems to get excitable about what I'm doing.
|
| I'm in that state right now, so I'm making an elastic search
| database and flapping grafana on top of it to injest and
| visualize all our logs. It's been a pain point for a long time
| so I think it'll go over well. I'm also compiling a c++ qt app
| to emscripten so we can host the app and connect with a
| smartphone instead of lugging a tablet around.
| mokarma wrote:
| The bar for Developer productivity is extremely low. There is a
| theory that this is due to Computer Science being more Art and
| less Science and artists need their space to let their creativity
| shine. This is why a 10x Developer is possible unlike other
| industries.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Or is it that a 10x developer just sits down and works a full
| 40h week instead of messing around all day pretending to work.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| > Do people regularly run into coworkers like me during their
| career and simply ignore it because they find it too awkward to
| criticize them?
|
| I've utilized people that shy away from actually doing the work
| in the past to justify my own high salary. E.g. "Look at X. I get
| 10x more done than him. It would be fair if I'd get 10x his
| salary, too, but I'll settle for only 2x."
| apinstein wrote:
| That is not normal for any dev team I've ever run. We have had
| people with your "approach" for sure, though. They were detected
| and fired within 1-4 weeks of when that behavior pattern started.
| I don't know how any company could tolerate that. At a startup,
| that's deadly.
|
| That said, I can totally believe people get away with it. At many
| companies, many managers seem to not care, be incompetent, or not
| believe they can do anything about it. I could personally never
| be happy with myself getting away with something like that, and
| would quit any job that couldn't provide productive work for me
| to tackle.
| alexashka wrote:
| > Do I have imposter syndrome and I am actually a 10x developer
|
| Yes, after 20 years of doing it, I believe you've at last
| discovered that you're an incredible talent.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| Smart people generally understand hubris a bit better. Are you
| going exclaim how humble you are next?
|
| Not sure about your intelligence IQ but your emotional IQ is in
| the gutter.
| jeffalbertson wrote:
| cringe
| flerchin wrote:
| "I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes
| of real, actual, work."
|
| - Peter Gibbons. Office Space 1999
| didibus wrote:
| I honestly can't relate and am confused who gets the work done
| then?
|
| Who supports the running software, who writes the code for new
| features, bug fixes and upgrades? Who works on planning and
| figuring out what to do or not do next? Who works to mentor and
| train and ramp up new employees? Who does the work to decide if
| we need to hire more, how we need to break up the work, where we
| need to invest more, etc?
|
| My work experience has always involved all of these things
| needing to get done and never having enough people to do all of
| it.
| chalcolithic wrote:
| What you enjoy is a corollary to the fact that software
| development estimation is hard.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I notice it much more when we're near the equinox's, not sure if
| that is a correlation to light or temperature.
|
| I am always upfront about my strengths and weaknesses. My manager
| and team accept that I can go forever on some simple things,
| because they know I'm going to do a good job in the end, and
| because I am always there to help someone struggling, or fix an
| outage. I tend to be given projects that are expected to take a
| long time anyway, while junior engineers get the shorter projects
| with the expectation that they'll ask me for help. It is a bit
| annoying when I want to work on something, and my manager says
| "let's see how long this takes you first."
|
| I suspect your managers understand your weaknesses, and have
| decided that your strengths are worth more.
|
| I suspect part of the problem is the standup culture of expecting
| a daily report. I used to have a bi-weekly meeting where we went
| over how things were going on all the projects. I was so much
| more productive on that system than I am in agile with all the
| meetings. Starting the day off by remembering how little you did
| yesterday is just a bummer. In the older system I would wake up
| early and work like 15 hours once or twice a month, and that was
| my most productive time. I can't do that now, because I know I
| would have to stop to get on a meeting.
| edwnj wrote:
| If you can get done in less than 10h what they expect you do in
| 40 then you have much more to give.
|
| It can be anything from aiming at climbing up the ladder to
| working on your own stuff. You get like 2 decades of life where
| you have the most energy and potential, might as well make the
| most out of it.
| jollybean wrote:
| You might want to consider actually doing something productive
| irrespective of whether someone is watching you or not.
| asmos7 wrote:
| I 100% notice when ppl are slacking - especially at the levels
| you mentioned. I'm a team lead - it's to much of a pain in the
| ass to fire people so it's easier to just keep them and give them
| the minimal salary increase possible. If someone is from a
| protected class 100% forget about firing them but I realize not
| all companies are like mine but I suspect a lot are.
| VictorPath wrote:
| > Are most of us secretly lying about how much we are working?
|
| How much are the heirs collecting dividend checks from the wealth
| I create working? Should I crawl at the boots of some St.
| Grottlesex graduate, telling them I could have worked harder,
| trying to gain some Stakhanovite hero of labor award from them?
|
| If you have time to spare, which apparently you do, study CS so
| that you can be an L5, L6, L7 etc. at some FAANG. That benefits
| you and them.
| SubuSS wrote:
| If only you could study and get L5/L6/L7 roles in faang :)
|
| At least theoretically loops at these levels try to gauge what
| you've seen in your career and how you have grown from it,
| possibly try and project to what you would do in the current
| situation. I am sure there are folks who game this by reading
| blogs and leetcoding away, but there is a lot of survivor bias
| in those statements. Most of the time, folks have their
| bullshit radars up high for higher level interviews and this is
| hard. I wish I had some kinda stats on how hard though :/
| syspec wrote:
| > Do people regularly run into coworkers like me during their
| career and simply ignore it because they find it too awkward to
| criticize them?
|
| Yes exactly this, especially at larger companies. I know a few of
| those developers, and they sit right near me...
|
| They find a way to make any task take forever...
|
| If it was a smaller company they would be called out, but at my
| [very, very] large company - its very hard to get fired. So what
| happens is that they are just given what is essentially remedial
| work.
|
| As a fellow IC, it will in no way make my life better to call
| this person out.
| notJim wrote:
| > I know a few of those developers, and they sit right near
| me...
|
| In fact, this is so common that I can name the exact people at
| several jobs I've had. And I could mention them to my coworkers
| and they'd know exactly what these people's reputation are.
|
| Our feeling toward them is a mix of being impressed and being
| embarrassed. Impressed because there's something to be said for
| someone who works the system to their advantage like this.
| Embarrassed because it's hard to understand how they couldn't
| be more ambitious at work. It's not that companies are that
| great at rewarding getting things done (sometimes they are...),
| but it's that getting something cool done is rewarding in its
| own right. Why don't they want that feeling... ?
| notreallyserio wrote:
| I want to be ambitious and enjoy my work, but most of it is
| REST or similar level work. Those rare times I have an
| interesting project I end up stuck waiting for information or
| eventually code review (for days).
|
| Nowadays I just want out. I'll get that feeling doing my own
| thing with no blockers but time and myself. I'm not at all
| convinced this is generally possible at any company (based on
| what I've heard from friends and read on HN and elsewhere).
| There's always something in the way.
| yolovoe wrote:
| I used to feel the same. The work I was doing at the last
| startup was just REST level work. Work at current team at
| Amazon was fun at first with new serverless technologies,
| but I ramped up in a month and it's now data pipelines and
| full stack development and integrations that is better than
| REST level work but still getting boring. The engineers are
| all much better and processes are solid, but I wanted out.
|
| Now, I'm joining a systems/kernel team working right above
| hardware that drives EC2 servers.
|
| Believe me, lots of good work is out there. Join a large
| company and look into internally transferring into an
| interesting role. I heard back from DynamoDB, Lambda, and
| so many other cool teams while I was considering
| transferring out of the current team. There's loads of
| interesting work at the bigger companies.
|
| There is good work at some startups too, I'm sure, but it's
| easier to try different teams at a FAANG than switch
| between small companies.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| >but it's that getting something cool done is rewarding in
| its own right. Why don't they want that feeling... ?
|
| Cant speak for everyone, but in my case, Ive done the grind
| to get something cool done in my younger days. Ive designed,
| programmed and tested a differential braking system for a
| sizeable unmanned aircraft technology demonstrator, from
| hardware to drive the master cylinders, to the software with
| control of stepper motors following dynamic control laws, and
| then sat in a control room at a US Air Force base and watched
| the traces as the real thing was landing and purely steering
| with the brakes after touchdown (to test nose wheel actuator
| failure).
|
| At my current company, when I got hired, I specifically said
| upfront that my goal is just to become a subject matter
| expert, and to have a more consistent and chill workload. I
| did what I was supposed to, nothing more, but I did it
| correctly, and put in extra hours when crunchtime before
| deadline came. I got promoted to senior after 4 years, and
| now Im pretty at very minimal hours of actual work per week.
|
| But, because Ive been on the same team for so long, can
| answer questions about the entire tech stack, I can debug
| things, I am happy to sit in meeting and talk about high
| level things when managers don't want to, so my value is
| still fairly high. I no longer care to really put in hours to
| build something cool, instead I am focusing on things I
| didn't have time to do when I was younger and grinding, like
| travel and fitness.
| ddoolin wrote:
| To me, your current situation is ideal. I've been here for
| 5 years and I'm ready to transition slowly to something a
| bit more hands-off since I have (sole) familiarity with
| nearly half of our apps since I helped build them while
| many of the others have since left the company, but we're
| severely understaffed as is and so my responsibilities are
| growing responsibilities, and they're growing fast and
| throwing on new things all the time. I love the work but I
| don't like being one of the ones holding it all together.
| I'm exactly the OP now -- minimal work, just getting by.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Embarrassed because it's hard to understand how they
| couldn't be more ambitious at work.
|
| Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That's why I'm poopin' on
| company time.
|
| Most companies don't meaningfully incentivize ambition. At
| most companies, even tech companies, if you save them a
| million dollars you'll be lucky to get a used Red Lobster
| gift card. If companies want ambition they should incentivize
| it rather than only rewarding the corporate ladder climbing
| sociopaths.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I worked on a project that saved 8mil and got a pat on the
| back. I basically paid for my self for the next few years
| to do nothing.
|
| Also for a lot of companies millions isn't a lot when
| profits,expenses,revenue are near billions. I don't really
| worry about cost savings anymore, the numbers are so huge
| all around, individual impact is always almost a rounding
| error.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| "Embarrassed because it's hard to understand how they
| couldn't be more ambitious at work" If everyone was
| aggressive at work, there are still only a limited number of
| promotions available. Why cram at work for something that
| reality dictates is unobtainable for most.
|
| "it's not that companies are that great at rewarding getting
| things done (sometimes they are...), but it's that getting
| something cool done is rewarding in its own right. Why don't
| they want that feeling... ?"
|
| So they finish the task and then what? Move on to the next
| task and then the next until retirement. There is no real
| purpose to it, its just a treadmill.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _but it 's that getting something cool done is rewarding in
| its own right. Why don't they want that feeling... ?_
|
| I mean it just... depends? I've been on both sides of this.
| Sometimes getting something cool done is super rewarding even
| without getting a raise, bonus or promotion. But I'm at the
| point now where if someone is going to tell me what to do,
| and force me to be "at work" for half of my waking hours, the
| compensation bit far outweighs the "this was cool to work on"
| factor for me.
|
| Don't get me wrong; when it comes to personal projects, I
| find plenty of reward there. But for those I get to decide
| exactly what I do, how it gets done, and when it gets done.
| p_l wrote:
| Sometimes that feeling has been beaten out of us by various
| means.
|
| I had a ton of ideas in many a job, rarely if ever I could
| get into conditions where I could even start working on them
| - usually the interesting stuff happened in secret side
| projects, off the company time.
| hpoe wrote:
| I think this is a big one, there comes a certain point
| where the bureaucracy simply squeezes the ambition and
| desire out of you. I hit that at some points, I just didn't
| want to work anymore excelling at my job made no difference
| to me or anyone else because even if I stood out and did
| excellently it wouldn't matter because I had to go to other
| teams or get other approvals to actually acomplish
| something.
|
| I found myself spending time on leetcode, or learning emacs
| because I could justify those as improving my abilities. To
| quote Office Space "I have 4 different bosses, my only
| motivation is to not get hassled, that and fear of losing
| my job. But you know what Bob, that gets someone to work
| just hard enough to not get fired."
| cheradenine_uk wrote:
| As my old boss would say: "Why would I push that rock up
| that hill".
| floydian10 wrote:
| It's both remarkable and incredible saddening how
| relevant Office Space still is.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| What's the point of building something cool just so your CEO
| can have all the credit & profits while you're stuck with a
| shitty market rate salary and some stock options if you're
| lucky?
| tomrod wrote:
| Potentially leverage, if you can swing it.
| julianlam wrote:
| I could be completely wrong on this, but I think there's a
| bit of positive punishment at work.
|
| If you do something quickly, and it is of high quality, it
| will probably get noticed, and your reward in addition to a
| sense of satisfaction, is more work. The satisfaction high
| won't override the punishment of more work, although salary
| will. However, salaried employees don't get paid more to do
| more work (bonus notwithstanding.)
|
| Knowing that, it's not a far jump to realize that you can
| minimize your work but keep your salary, so long as your work
| output doesn't dip enough that you get fired.
| sjtindell wrote:
| Yeah this was a huge revelation to me. Spend months of long
| days to complete a record milestone for the company with
| hundreds of people involved...get a couple celebration
| dinners and it's immediately into meetings to scope out the
| next months long, record milestone. Corporations will
| continuously push you, they never run out of work to do,
| and the better their documentation the more disposable you
| are (although they'll never realize it). If you're in the
| mood, fine. But it's not a lack of motivation if you're
| not...it's being realistic and having self worth.
| Milestones and the share price and the late night meetings
| are a fun game if you have an interest and spare time, not
| something intrinsically great and motivating.
| allenu wrote:
| I've encountered this so many times myself, and I still
| get burned on it, but mostly because sometimes the work
| you're doing is so technically interesting that the
| "reward" is the work itself. Then, when you finish, you
| somehow expect everyone to celebrate and take it easy but
| then they shove more work at you.
|
| You couple that with maybe one day your project gets
| cancelled, and not due to the quality of the work itself
| but for other business reasons, and all of a sudden you
| just don't care anymore. This is something that just
| happened to me recently and I find it incredibly hard to
| get motivated to work hard on anything. I just can't
| "logic" my way into doing more than the bare minimum.
| kqr wrote:
| But is keeping a chair warm really how one wants to spend
| the precious few years one has alive?
| szundi wrote:
| I would rather be kind of poor but having a good time
| (like other people paying for having a good time) than
| have a very good salary and have miserable days. Maybe
| accept some temporary misery if this means some personal
| development that I like.
|
| But I can fully understand a decision not to change to a
| much less paying alternative as it decreases the quality
| of life for an other part of every day. Considering the
| frightening fact that when you move away there is
| probably a chance that you cannot come back that easily.
| This may present a fear of trying out the alternatives.
| jesuis_14 wrote:
| Of course it can be, especially if one can work remotely
| or can do other things they are interested in. I mean,
| for sure it sounds bad (parasite!), but it does not feel
| right at all to me this (very US- or US-driven) attitude
| that one's contribution to the world is through work or
| family.
|
| Let's say I am the daughter of rich parents and I inherit
| a fortune. It happens, am I right? For some (intuitively
| "right") reason, it is not considered as bad as getting
| "free" money from a corporation, which has intrinsically
| zero control over spending at the individual level.
| Paraphrasing some Blade Runner here, "I have seen people
| paid...". And while the fortune is inherited just for
| sheer luck (I don't think anyone has chosen their
| parents), most of the time those cushy positions are
| coming after years or decades of hard study and hard
| work. How many of those inheriting good money said, "I
| don't want it, I have no worked for it". Some, for sure.
| But the vast majority pocket the money, maybe do some
| charity or some work, and carry on.
|
| Sure, one feeling the need to work effectively can change
| jobs, we all can do it. But there are many other
| opportunities to have a good time and good impact on the
| world outside of a corporate job. If the money is coming
| in and who's distributing the money is ok, who am I to
| say no to good fortune?
| panzagl wrote:
| Of course not. I bought a heating pad and now the chair
| keeps _me_ warm.
| Tarsul wrote:
| I think coasting ain't as bad as many people think.
| That's because a) you are doing your job good enough, so
| you are not a burden on your team and b) you have a
| better chance to stay healthy than if you're overworking.
| Also, you're probably a better team player because of
| your healthy/peaceful state of mind. I think if you can
| find the line between overwork (burnout) and boredom
| (boreout) then you're good (even if it means only working
| 20h instead of 40) and your employer can be satisfied for
| a long time. But really, we must not discount
| healthiness. Health is the most important part of being a
| successful cog in the machine.
| mguerville wrote:
| Not an engineer but definitely seen and experienced that. I
| want to exceed expectations, just not to the point where
| I'm carrying the cognitive load equivalent of 10 mediocre
| people on the regular just because I've proven that I can
| on occasion do it
| Chinjut wrote:
| They may well get that feeling outside of work. Maybe they
| like making music but couldn't make a living as a musician.
| Maybe they're writing a novel. Whatever it is. Most of the
| things most people in the world enjoy doing are not the
| things they are made to do for their job.
| datavirtue wrote:
| They used to be ambitious and they kept getting their hand
| smacked. They already did the things you think are "cool" a
| few times. Nothing left but slogging through bureaucratic
| busy work.
| ThrowawayP wrote:
| I've also seen such behavior occur because of
| burnout/depression. Sometimes the person themselves is
| unhappy and embarrassed about it too.
| abledon wrote:
| I first was driven mad by people like this... 5 days work and 2
| lines of java code committed modifying class visibility etc.
| then I slowly became them after realizing busting my ass
| everyday for a corporation was not worth it. (also reading
| gervais' piece on losers/clueless/sociopath triad in orgs)
| tingletech wrote:
| interesting, thanks for the reference to
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
| principle-...
| BTCOG wrote:
| "Chaotic-neutral I'm always fuckin' coastin'"
|
| It's first best to realize sociopaths drive from the top in
| the same fashion. NO employer gives a damn about you, they
| control you in ways to squeeze the value out of you and will
| dispose of you at the very drop of a dime.
|
| Those of us that "fail up" within companies and update
| resumes and move on, throw the ball back in their court by
| also manipulating them.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Same here. Once I realized that my efficiency in output only
| helps my immediate management look good (as opposed to me
| getting promos/bonuses), I lost all motivation to go above
| and beyond.
|
| The only time I felt like doing my best was for a manager who
| genuinely wanted to get me promoted, and he did it smartly.
| pg_1234 wrote:
| My reaction to these situations is - if someone will me for
| half days, spend the other half shopping for higher pay for
| actual full days. You're not going to get anywhere near double,
| but don't settle, use the time to pursue something better.
| marvinblum wrote:
| Trust me, this also applies to smaller companies.
| amelius wrote:
| > Yes exactly this, especially at larger companies. I know a
| few of those developers, and they sit right near me...
|
| I find it a somewhat comforting thought ... if I ever get
| overworked then I can always become one of those guys ...
|
| Maybe that's why nobody ever calls them out.
| pydry wrote:
| Large companies have a tendency to throw up all sorts of
| impediments to actually getting shit done.
|
| Simple tasks can take 3 weeks because there are 7-9
| dependencies throwing sand in the gears.
|
| This not only provides plenty of cover for not getting stuff
| done it also saps the motivation to get it done quickly. Like,
| if X team sits on your request for a week that prevents Y
| feature from getting out are you really gonna be motivated to
| push it to production the second it's unblocked? Or could it
| wait another couple days?
|
| Contrast that with a small startup where you barely need sign
| off to do anything - it's much easier to get into that pleasant
| loop of code -> deploy -> see customers use it -> dopamine hit
| -> motivation to code some more.
| icedchai wrote:
| Yep. Or never mind dependencies: you're simply getting
| interrupted so many times that between zoom calls, slacks,
| and emails, that a 2 day tasks turns into 2 weeks.
| jjav wrote:
| Slack culture is very toxic to productivity. Numbers of
| channels grows forever and at least in the places where
| I've been that use it, there's an expectation for a reponse
| to everything within a minute. So one ends up all day just
| looking at it, can't get any work done with interruptions
| every couple minutes.
| icedchai wrote:
| Yeah. And if you don't respond immediately, you starting
| getting friendly reminders. "Have you found the problem
| yet?" "What do you think it is?" "Can you fix it soon?"
| Ugh.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| > Large companies have a tendency to throw up all sorts of
| impediments to actually getting shit done.
|
| This. People get tired of the enormous overhead everything
| has, and gets lazy in the end.
|
| I work for an ISP and I have my days, but some weeks I can't
| care less. I tried so many times to drill into people's minds
| how to not get tangled by complexity and then watching them
| just do the opposite...
|
| Now I'm teaching myself programming so I can get out of this,
| but It seems I'm only going to upgrade my pay and be bitten
| by the same problems.
| dpe82 wrote:
| That's still an improvement, IMHO. And the degree to which
| you get bitten by the same problems depends on the size and
| culture of the company you're joining. Small, agile
| (usually young) companies tend to be better in this regard
| but you trade off other things like experienced management.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| I hope so. I enjoy programming for myself, and taking
| some challenges in Python currently, I'm not sure how it
| will go as a job. Hope is confy enough to not regret the
| change, I'm pretty tired of having a low pay but high
| complex job.
| greedo wrote:
| Until just recently, I couldn't increase the disk and
| filesystem of a server without waiting for weekly approval.
| And there had never been an instance of someone using lvm
| breaking anything... Same with adding RAM (these are VMs). If
| you haven't read Pournelle much, he calls this the Iron Law
| of Bureaucracy.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| I see this regularly at small companies, too. They add
| process they think is necessary but don't have the human
| resources necessary to ensure these don't become blockers.
| datavirtue wrote:
| It's called: arbitrary. Someone in power makes up a new
| rule or policy based on what they think. Authoritarian
| government.
| a-dub wrote:
| > Large companies have a tendency to throw up all sorts of
| impediments to actually getting shit done.
|
| early in my career i once worked for a spinoff of a very
| large tech company and was involved in a collaboration with
| the mothership, so to speak.
|
| my boss pulled me aside and explained to me. "here's how this
| goes. time here does not work like time there does. what
| happens in one day here takes two weeks there, and if there's
| anything missing when you ask them for something, that two
| week timer will reset. so make sure when you communicate with
| them, you send them absolutely everything they need and then
| some. then be prepared to wait. for a long, long time. they
| will either cancel or eventually deliver something. whether
| the thing they deliver is relevant remains to be seen, but be
| prepared for it not to be. if this starts sapping your time
| and energy, bring it back to me."
|
| he was absolutely right.
| retbull wrote:
| Reading this is making me sick. I am working on leaving my
| large company for a start up for this exact reason.
| Something as simple as changing a tag on a server requires
| submitting a request -> waiting for the reply that they are
| working on it -> getting someone contacting you 1-3 days
| later -> Confirming the changes you want -> finding the
| changes in place the next day -> telling them the ticket is
| closed.
| [deleted]
| notreallyserio wrote:
| You missed some steps between confirming and finding:
| seeing that it was done wrong, reporting that, wait 1-3
| days for a response, repeat at least once.
| retbull wrote:
| :(
| suction wrote:
| Absolutely mirrors my experience when our small company was
| acquired by a large multinational of French origin. Why is
| France significant? Because their corporate culture is
| extremely hierarchical and centralised, similar to how
| their country is centralised like few others. Used to be we
| could turn small web apps into production in the course of
| a week. Nowadays even the most minuscule of features of an
| existing app will take a year to implement, because
| "central" will involve several project managers, somewhat
| related staff, external consultants, etc. etc. into the mix
| who spend a few months creating power points and excel
| tapestry under the banner of "change management" before
| even involving one programmer. Then, when they finally
| decide that the coders must be involved, stuff gets done
| quickly and without fuss, and often much less complicated
| than what was planned for us. Then they spend another few
| days sending each other congratulatory emails about how
| successful the project ended, apparently ignorant to the
| fact that they managed to spend a year on a feature that
| could have been implemented and tested in a week if they
| hadn't been involved.
| mylons wrote:
| the startup i just left did this. they have about 300
| employees, and are pre revenue. the process to add a field to
| an api response was incredibly tedious and sapped my
| motivation completely.
| floydian10 wrote:
| Adding a simple endpoint to an existing API somehow ended
| up being a 3-day back and forth in my latest GitHub PR.
| Worst part is that I knew beforehand that was going to be
| the case, since it happens all the time. Can't se myself
| lasting long here.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Three weeks? It took me 6 months to get a dependency
| installed and they didn't even install the version that I
| requested.
| bartread wrote:
| Wow. A mere 3 weeks to get something done.
|
| I worked somewhere once where it took 8 months to implement a
| two page sign-up process, and I counted about 60 people
| involved. A colleague said I didn't know the half of it and
| that there were actually more than 100 people involved.
|
| I didn't last very long.
| jjav wrote:
| At a previous employer we had an extremely urgent
| escalation from a very large customer which had made its
| way even to the CEO given the visibility. Meeting is
| scheduled with customer, problem reviewed, initial action
| items identified.
|
| Also, the next sync up meeting is scheduled by the
| customer... for about 5 month later! So much for urgency.
|
| OTOH, there's great life balance when everything isn't a
| mad rush to complete everything by tomorrow. A lot to be
| said for a sustainable pace of work that can be maintaned
| for an entire career, instead of the agile sprint model
| where you're expected to be running at 100% mental
| utilization forever. Which isn't sustainable by any human,
| so just leads to burnout in a year or three.
| dorgo wrote:
| impressive!
|
| Whrereas I (alone) finished two client projects this month
| (programming) and am starting the third. Help colleagues
| with their stuff, and am supposed to work on an internal
| project ( client projects are merely a distraction from the
| internal project ). I'm also supposed to make a
| certification ( I'm not sure whether in my free time or not
| ). I'm paid for 24h a week. And I have bad concience every
| standup because I didn't manage to finsih more the day
| before.
| p_l wrote:
| One of the reasons I left a company recently, despite it
| getting better, was how it took over a year before I could
| start working on SSO (despite it being critical, super-
| duper-high priority item) because it took 3/4ths of a year
| before we started getting user data necessary, then I spent
| fixing stuff that atrophied due to similar issues.
|
| We were also over a year into "how do we setup direct
| access between on-prem and cloud" where I stopped attending
| meetings because within two or three meetings we always got
| back to starting point, whereas I joined the first meeting
| with reasonable, implementable solution.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _where I stopped attending meetings because within two
| or three meetings we always got back to starting point_
|
| This is a reliable litmus test for company dysfunction:
| how many people are in meetings & do meetings end with
| clear, concrete decisions?
| lpapez wrote:
| I repeat these exact same words on each retrospective of
| my new scrum team with 16 people. The amount of overhead
| is insane and I've simply started not showing up to some
| meetings and just asking for conclusions. Usually, there
| aren't any or it has been concluded that another meeting
| is neccessary.
| p_l wrote:
| I remember a certain retrospective and being called out
| for not participating enough.
|
| I was one of the few people dealing with outage at the
| time, which was known to project management... (And we
| had to deal with said outage with laptops on knees in
| overfilled conference room)
| cheradenine_uk wrote:
| This is spot-on.
|
| I'm used to small, get-things-done environments (startups,
| small dev shops).
|
| Transitioning to working within a much more "corporate"
| environment (not that the actual dev team is any bigger) I
| struggled with the endless gatekeeping and bureaucracy
| because it was impeding us ... getting stuff /done/.
|
| Once you realise they're not optimising for that goal, I feel
| less frustrated and have scaled back my efforts accordingly.
|
| Want to do everything via PR, and have andless code-
| janitoring stylistic bollox ? Fine, I'll do that - but I'm
| not going to chase you to close it.
|
| Want to spend hours in planning guff and pointless
| retrospective naval-gazing? Great, I can join the call on
| mute and get on with something else.
|
| About 10-15 hours actual work per week is fine. "Office
| Space" is just as true today as it was when it was filmed.
| datavirtue wrote:
| These people have settled into the behavior learned from the
| repeated signalling to work like this.
|
| I have worked in startups and small companies and after a
| recent aquisition have worked in large companies for the first
| time in my career spanning 30 years. I am absolutely blown away
| at the environment and the behavior it breeds. I have lost most
| respect for the human race that continues to endure this as
| though it is acceptable. So many managers, so much busy work:
| remediating vulns that have no impact, CBTs, forced
| collaboration and sharing, layer upon layer of shared services,
| arbitrary policies, byzantine draconian change orders, and all
| the crap that the afore-mentioned cause.
|
| Every problem results in a new arbitrary policy (authoritarian
| bureaucratic reflex) that gets layered on top.
| milofeynman wrote:
| I still remember one guy who did that and he'd pass work to me
| I complained to my manager and nothing happened. I work a lot
| and am super driven. Don't like people like that.
| BTCOG wrote:
| I can assure you, the feeling is mutual. If you are the type
| who overachieves, would complain to a manager, and enjoys
| meetings, you should realize those fed up with banality and
| fake niceties of corporate office work that do just enough to
| get by really do not like you, either.
| zcw100 wrote:
| It must have been a couple of months because...
|
| > I keep this link sitting around and enjoy dusting it off
| every couple of months or so
|
| > https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
| principle-...
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| LOL this came to my mind too. And also the more tech-centric
| treatment it gets in 'Developer Hegemony' is well wroth a
| read.
|
| OP is making a perfectly rational decision.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| What is IC? Google tells me Interstitial Cystitis, but my hunch
| tells me it's something else.
| aembleton wrote:
| Individual Contributor - Someone who isn't managing others.
| H8crilA wrote:
| Individual Contributor.
|
| Means that you're only writing code, not managing people at
| all. It's the opposite of a (pure) Engineering Manager, who
| only manages and writes no code / produces no design.
|
| Most mid level people (for example L6-L7 at Google/Facebook)
| are simultaneously managers and engineers, thus somewhere
| between IC and EM.
|
| Almost all low level people (L3-L5) are ICs, almost all high
| level people (L8+) are managers/directors/executives that
| produce no technical solutions themselves.
| [deleted]
| wheelinsupial wrote:
| Adding "tech" or "tech meaning" to the end of an unfamiliar
| abbreviation can help refine the searches. In my case "tech
| meaning" brings up a Quora question that answers this.
|
| Alternatively, you can Google "what is an IC hacker news" and
| you can find previous threads where this was asked and
| defined.
|
| If you have a question about an abbreviation being used in HN
| (Hacker News), it's probably something others have asked
| about before.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| honkycat wrote:
| > If it was a smaller company they would be called out
|
| Don't be so sure. It is HARD to get fired in this job,
| sometimes. You have to be actively toxic, or your boss has to
| have a buddy they want to hire in your position.
| digianarchist wrote:
| I had a coworker at a government job that clocked in doing no
| work for 6 months. They were going to PIP him when I left but
| he's still there now.
| abledon wrote:
| reminds me of this gem on a previous thread similar to this
| from 8 months ago:
|
| > My supervisor said to me "This guy can spend 100% of his
| time trying not to get fired. You can spend maybe 2% of your
| time trying to get rid of him. Who's gonna win?"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26727803
| brodouevencode wrote:
| It's also the government. There are generally more barriers
| to firing someone than to hiring them.
| digianarchist wrote:
| It had been done before. Most people were packaged out
| though.
| aresant wrote:
| There are two elements that I've observed drive acceptance in an
| organization to software developers "5 hour workweek"
|
| (1) deep institutional knowledge - code debt / knowing how to
| work with peers in company system to get things done /
| understanding business objectives / etc
|
| (2) ability to think dynamically and react quickly within
| institutional systems - edge case bugs / outages / competitive
| feature response
|
| It's like having a fully staffed fire station in a small town
|
| Most of the time the guys are there playing foosball, turning out
| for events, and saving kittens in trees but boy are you glad to
| have them when the shit hits the fan.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| I feel like my ability to work in a focused, intelligent and
| productive manner is a very particular mental mode. Some days I
| can reach that mode for a few hours at a stretch. Nearly never
| 9-5 let alone the crazy hours that seem normal in the USA. Other
| days, I wish I had a culturally accepted way of saying "don't
| bother me, I won't be working".
|
| Many's the day I've been sat in an office, reading Facebook on
| repeat, present in only the most physically literal sense,
| because my brain was not going to go into productive mode and
| trying to force it would be asking for a headache. But the
| cultural rules of "work" don't allow you to say "not today".
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Huh, no, I actually work. I mean, I spend some time reading HN or
| other research/skill-building (job-related), or on facebook (not
| job-related) like anyone else. And of course, as you mention,
| plenty of job related but non-coding time. I consider "talking a
| walk to think through this problem" working. And nobody can be
| 100% productive; and I do things like non-work phone calls on
| work hours when convenient.
|
| But, no, I don't spend days in which I spend no time on my job
| (maybe an occasional day in which I'm in bad physical or
| emotional health and can't get it together to get any work done,
| but don't take leave; these are not typical). Overall, most days,
| I'm mostly working.
|
| I think I'd actually go crazy if I was in your situation, I don't
| think it would make me happy, it would make me feel useless and
| unfulfilled. i've been in situations like that at non-coding
| jobs, and while in theory getting paid not to work sounded great
| to me, in fact it was not good for my mental/emotional health to
| be sitting around all day not working and not doing much else.
|
| Unless I was remote maybe, perhaps I'd just do other things that
| I wanted to do that really had nothing to do with work (learn a
| musical instrument, learn a foreign language, make art), and feel
| fulfilled, as long as I wasn't guilty about ripping off my
| employer (which I guess could depend on the employer).
|
| You say you weren't remote before pandemic. I'm curious what you
| did with all that time you aren't working? and how you think it
| makes you feel to be in this situation, are you happy with it,
| does it make you feel crappy even though you think you oughta be
| happy with it, other?
|
| I am also curious what you think of the work you hypothetically
| could be doing. Is it horribly boring? Does it seem really
| useless, like nobody is going to care or benefit even if you did
| it? Are there barriers in the organization such that you don't
| think you could produce anything that really benefited anyone
| even if you tried?
|
| I think maybe part of it is that programmers might be wildly
| variant in productivity? If you're getting good perf reviews,
| could there be someone else working more of their full time, but
| producing no more than you? I think maybe at a lot of places, the
| people doing evaluation simply have no ability to evaluate
| engineers, they have no idea.
|
| I have worked before with people who produced literally
| _nothing_. If they got good perf reviews, I guess it 's because
| their supervisors didn't expect anything? Perhaps their
| supervisors weren't working much either? Or just didn't know how
| emotionally to deal with a bad review? I had one coworker who
| (many years pre-pandemic) "worked from home", but when a rare
| urgent thing in their domain happened to come up, it turned out
| they didn't actually have the tools to work on it at home; I
| suspect they were never working at all from home. I wasn't very
| happy with this overall condition, but I'd never try to "turn
| them in" -- not necessarily that it would be "too awkward", but,
| I'm no snitch and don't want to be one. Who knows what's going on
| in that person's life.
|
| I would have appreciated a coworker who could carry the load
| instead, but I've realized that I am significantly motivated by
| _doing a good job_ , making high-quality products... and many
| people, and many _whole organizations_ just aren 't, they have
| other motivations. I've learned I'm not going to be happy unless
| I'm at a place where doing quality work is a motivation of many
| people.
|
| Also... I actually enjoy writing code?
| alunchbox wrote:
| >Also... I actually enjoy writing code?
|
| you can tell usually during the hiring process, some do it for
| the pay some for the love of the art.
| allochthon wrote:
| > Are most of us secretly lying about how much we are working?
|
| I'm pretty good about putting 7-8 hours of work a day. There are
| a few days a year when I'm less productive.
| sirmoveon wrote:
| The work you put in is not about how many hours you spent
| twisting screws, but knowing what kind of screw, the pressure
| needed and all the resources you had to dedicate into learning
| your craft. Get the slave out of your brain.
| J-dawg wrote:
| I'm a pretty useless developer who does about the same amount of
| real work as you per week. I also often don't understand the
| technical details other developers discuss in meetings.
|
| I am generally quite open about my lack of aptitude, as I result
| I've never really been promoted, I've just bounced around between
| different junior roles. It always seems obvious that I'm the most
| junior member of any team I'm on, but I'm starting to wonder if
| that's all in my head.
|
| Your post kinda makes me wish I'd tried a bit harder at
| bullshitting. Maybe I could've at least made a bit more money.
| 1991g wrote:
| > I also often don't understand the technical details other
| developers discuss in meetings.
|
| I often worry about this, but unless you're at the Staff+
| level, I think the chances of you knowing the intricate details
| of ~other~ peoples' work is low. And that's probably not a
| problem.
|
| > makes me wish I'd tried a bit harder at bullshitting.
|
| Honestly, I'd highly encourage it (a little). Being able to
| market yourself and your skills is very valuable.
| sneak wrote:
| I have friends that do this at two simultaneous full time, remote
| positions.
|
| Both of their full time employers are happy with their
| performance and output.
|
| They get two not-trivial paychecks.
| hu3 wrote:
| How do they weasel away from colliding meetings?
| sneak wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k44uoVm0lPI
| wsc981 wrote:
| I am a freelance dev and I only bill the hours that I work. But I
| am quite sure a lot of freelance devs just bill 8 hours of work a
| day, even if they only work 3 hours. My conscience wont allow me
| to do this in a remote work situation.
|
| Back when I worked in the office as freelancer, I did bill 8
| hours a day, since I was expected to sit in the office 8 hours a
| day, regardless if I performed or not.
|
| In the past I worked at large and small organizations and I did
| see it's generally much easier to slack in large organizations.
| cheschire wrote:
| I am inferring from your message that some other freelance devs
| are less conscience-driven than you are. Perhaps that's not
| what you intended to imply with your statement "my conscience
| wont allow me..."
|
| If that was your intention though, imagine if another freelance
| dev has performed justifiable calculations that determine their
| 3 hours of work should be billed at 2.5x your 3 hour rate. How
| could they possibly compete with you?
|
| What if the deliverable was the same? What if the other devs
| just billed on deliverable instead of hours with strong
| renegotiation clauses? Would that be more acceptable to you
| than playing games with the hours just to get passed bean
| counters?
| newsbinator wrote:
| I'm a freelance dev and I agree with Jonathan Stark that hourly
| billing incentivizes freelancers to inflate estimates and
| incentivizes clients to commoditize your work and to let scope
| creep.
|
| http://hourlybillingisnuts.com
|
| Ever since I read his stuff, I've been doing value-pricing,
| i.e. "here's what we both agree will solve your problem, and
| here's 3 price options, depending on my level of involvement".
|
| Then if I can get it done in an hour or in a year, either way I
| get paid the same and the client gets what they paid for.
|
| Realistic time estimates, though, are a separate matter.
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| I got to a point where I only offered clients retainer based
| agreements as I got tired of fighting over hours. Ironically,
| even when they were being billed by the month they would still
| try to do these mental gymnastics where they tried to calculate
| the hourly cost of activities based on rate / hours in a month.
| It got exhausting. Yes they were often shitty clients. But my
| point here is, there's a lot of merit in trying to take hours
| out of the conversation so that I can just get the work done
| and not have to argue over whether it's going to take me four
| hours or four hours and fifteen minutes to complete this task.
| W0lf wrote:
| I think we should rather talk about the (history) of working the
| typical 8 hours a day, which doesn't make much sense for software
| people if you ask me. IIRC the concept of working 8 hours is more
| than 100 years old and was considered an optimal value to
| minimize the number of work accidents and burnouts (for factory
| workers) and allow for three shifts per day. Hence, 8 hours was
| (is?) considered to give optimal efficiency for any worker.
|
| For me on the other hand, I cannot do any deep work for more than
| 3-4 hours during a normal day. However, to comply to the historic
| 8 hours work day, the rest of the day gets filled with __other__
| stuff, which may or may not is reasonable.
|
| As others have mentioned already, I think it totally depends on
| company size, culture and people if you are able to gaze through
| a day by doing only a few hours at any given day. This completely
| coincides with my experience as well.
| hogFeast wrote:
| The working day was 10-16 hours for most of the 19th century.
| But work then was totally different: a lot of it was piece-rate
| work, most factories didn't directly employ anyone, etc. (this
| was also true of proto-industry which is often used as some
| kind of proof that working conditions can be different).
|
| This came down to 8 hours per day as the labour movement grew
| stronger. The concept of burnout makes no sense outside of the
| present, it was just politics. The move to 8 hour days was
| faster in countries that had tighter labour supply and/or
| greater political representation for working people (i.e.
| Australia and the US).
|
| The structure of work has rarely been determined by efficiency.
| There is a greater context of norms, other obligations that
| people have, economics, politics, etc. Even within the
| developed world and within individual countries, there is
| significant variation. Indeed, the only limits within most
| countries is at the extreme i.e. an employer requiring 12 hours
| of labour without a break or something.
|
| The most "efficient" kind of work is piece rate. Some people do
| this today but I think that most people chose not to do this
| because it is inconvenient.
| timwaagh wrote:
| I often struggle with starting. And then when I have started
| often I get stuck. It's not an easy job where you can just keep
| going. There also things like building that can take ages.
| Sometimes I need to wait for questions. We might not call this
| waiting working but since I still need to watch the screen I
| think it qualifies.
| cnees wrote:
| Failing to pass most tech screens is normal, but not working at
| work is not. I've heard of this kind of behavior before, but my
| coworkers and I work most of the day, with a few breaks, and
| sometimes stay late if we're really engaged in a problem. I'm not
| terribly surprised you can get away with it, but self-discipline
| is a critical part of your character and well-being, so don't
| lose it.
| bjornlouser wrote:
| Modern management techniques rely heavily on peer pressure to
| motivate employees. That works on most of us because we feel
| shame when we disappoint. You seem to have been born with an
| undersized shame sensor. You lucky, lucky bastard...
| i_dont_know_ wrote:
| I think there's also something to be said for passive processing.
|
| Sometimes I'll know I need to write some code or some function
| and I'll just think about it in the back of my head while doing
| other things, sometimes for a whole day or two. Then I'll sit
| down and write it in like 20-30 minutes. Did I work 20-30
| minutes, or have I been working for a day or two? I would say a
| day or two, and the 20-30 minutes was the time needed to produce
| the deliverable of that work.
| celticninja wrote:
| I agree, I used to think I was like OP, coasting in between
| being quite productive. One day I took a bath, ended up
| thinking about my ticket, got out of the bath and did the
| ticket in an hour. The thinking time was definitely work just
| not in the traditional sense. And yes I could have done the
| ticket without the bath, it may even have taken the same time,
| but the code wouldn't have been as clean and there would have
| been a few more commits.
| julianlam wrote:
| Well, not only was the code clean, I imagine you were clean
| too!
| lordgrenville wrote:
| Nah, showering makes you clean, a bath is just marinating
| in your own dirt. Very pleasant though.
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| Adding my voice to this one. I think a lot of work 'normal
| people' i.e. the PMs the non-technical management, the sales
| people etc. really don't get how we techies work. Because they
| have to do 'active' work all day long to keep on top, they
| think everyone is like that, where in reality we are _really_
| efficient in short bursts. I can ponder a deliverable for
| _days_ and then just churn it out over a few hours, only taking
| breaks for coffee intake /discharge. The normals keep asking me
| 'how far have you got with X' during the whole period, and they
| don't seem like it when I say 'I'm thinking about it, but I've
| not done anything yet'.
| vkk8 wrote:
| And, ironically, much of the work that the "normies" do is
| something tech guys could to hundred times faster. It's stuff
| like manually copy-pasting numbers from a crappy proprietary
| software A to a crappy proprietary software B or entering
| numbers from some system to Excel while it could be done by
| just directly pulling the numbers from the database the
| system uses.
|
| Seriously, modern work is all about knowing what to do and
| how to do it rather than putting in a large number of hours
| executing a straightforward task.
| rektide wrote:
| It is SHOCKING beyond words to me what accepted dogma it is
| that the human resources/devs only work on one thing at a time,
| they start at the beginning, plan, write, test, & code review
| the thing, and then move on.
|
| It's a huge waste of human potential. Background processing is
| vital. Getting hit by the various silly hurdles in the path to
| shipping- having to go from the elation of getting something
| done to having to switch to an entirely different set of less
| fun tasks to get it shipping. Yet our processes, our industrial
| processes, are oriented towards assurity, towards treating us
| "human resources" like machines, to making us complete full
| units of work.
|
| It's hard for me to tell exactly where this sprung up from, how
| it is so deeply deeply rooted. I tell my managers outright I
| think it's a wasteful & outright damaging practice, but that I
| understand that it's the expectation, that every other company
| acts like fools too, not just them. I don't argue, but I am
| quite clear that you will get much much much less out of me
| when I don't have some autonomy, when I have to drag, roll,
| push, row, swim each rock, one at a time, from end to end.
| Again, I'm not sure how such a demeaning & menial form of
| completing single-task-at-a-time happens, especially when no
| one in management or upper ranks is expected to live like this.
| My top theory is just that it's convenient for management
| purposes. That company's are bad at assessing progress, that
| we're afraid of situations that aren't ultra-well scheduled &
| predictable, and that we treat programmers like cogs in a
| machine because we're too afraid to try for better.
|
| Creative procrastination is amazing. Not only are programmers
| out doing great things, but the task they're more obligated to
| do goes from irrelevant & stupid to something they just don't
| ever want to think of again. The internal pressures builds over
| time, even for the irrelevant everyday crap of development,
| until we're finally jazzed to just get it done. By
| procrastinating, we bank up some motivation. And we've gotten a
| lot of passive processing in. Productive procrastination is one
| well-known example, but I feel like it's just the tip of the
| iceberg. Having some different tasks to switch between, having
| a wheelhouse of obligations, allows enormous relief, allows a
| much higher average output to be maintained, in my view. I'm
| kind of in a lull of personal projects right now, because I
| completed some stuff, and don't have a lot of in-flight options
| to pick up & work between. Everything feels so slow & getting
| going again has been such a chore, I feel it so much. Being
| able to trade off, switch around, chase what feels good is a
| huge huge productivity increase.
|
| More than anything what amazes me is how conventional &
| dogmatic companies are. They seemingly all chase the same
| malgining evil controlling exploitation of human-resources, and
| not a once has a company seemed to even understand that there
| are trade-offs. The whole industry is exactly the same;
| controlling & top-down, one-at-a-time. The people who invented
| Amdahl's law, surprisingly, seem utterly unable to grasp it's
| application to humans & our motivations. We all have diverse &
| wide execution units, but we are treated like in-order single-
| stage processors. If this were just the predominant way of
| treating engineers/human-resources, I'd find it unfortunate,
| but that it is almost entirely the rule, that it is universally
| expected, that there are so few systems or experiments for
| doing anything else: the status quo is pathetic & cruel, and
| lacks even the basic legitimacy to have explored other ideas.
| mikewarot wrote:
| >It's hard for me to tell exactly where this sprung up from,
| how it is so deeply deeply rooted.
|
| Industrial mass production makes physical objects with
| incredible efficiency, once things are up and running.
| Because it's so effective with atoms, people think it can be
| just as effective with bits, and they're wrong.
| rektide wrote:
| a nice contrast showing the difference between Ursala
| Franklin's prescriptive & control technologies (that
| orchestrate & organize) and holistic & work technologies
| (that increase worker power capability & freedom).
| what_is_orcas wrote:
| > Did I work 20-30 minutes, or have I been working for a day or
| two? I would say a day or two, and the 20-30 minutes was the
| time needed to produce the deliverable of that work.
|
| I would say that I do this too. There's a lot of stuff I can
| more or less do on autopilot and stuff that requires actual
| attention and _finesse_ , for lack of a better word. I feel
| like management thinks that I'm good at my job for all of the
| autopilot stuff that I can crank out, and that makes up for the
| time I spend implementing one of the more interesting bits.
|
| I think one of the ways that remote work changes this is that I
| can do other things while I think through a tricky problem; I
| can do dishes or walk my dog or something instead of trying to
| _look busy_ in a room with 6-12 other people who are furiously
| typing because that 's how the manager and project manager
| understand that work gets done.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Or just go and have a shower in the afternoon. It's the best
| remedy to an afternoon dip I know and one of the major
| benefits of working from home. It's a great place to solve
| problems before getting down to coding.
|
| Doing the dishes is indeed a good one too.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Doing the dishes or other chores doesn't work for me at all
| but showers are great. When I was at Apple one of the few
| unalloyed good aspects of the spaceship campus were every
| section had showers available.
|
| I'd take a brisk walk around the spaceship and then hit a
| shower. It was a great way for me to avoid an afternoon
| slump and let me do a lot of background processing in
| relative peace.
| ckaygusu wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poincar%C3%A9
|
| > He never spent a long time on a problem since he believed
| that the subconscious would continue working on the problem
| while he consciously worked on another problem.
|
| This is definitely a thing. Intellectual labor just isn't
| physical labor.
| oceanghost wrote:
| Most of the best ideas I've had in my career were in the
| shower before work.
|
| The problem is making that a regular occurrence.
| gampleman wrote:
| I use to think that they should pay me 1/4 of my hourly
| rate at work because I could get quite distracted and work
| quite ineffectually, 3/4 for each hour slept as that is
| where most of the processing happened, and a 10x bonus for
| the morning shower where all the hard problems of work
| would be solved in instantaneous heureka moments.
| sq_ wrote:
| For me it's often in the shower after work. Which is a pain
| because then I've gotta remember them until I get out and
| then find a way to remember them until the next day.
| xapata wrote:
| A speech to text device in the bathroom helps. Sometimes
| I worry I'll forget by the time I'm done showering.
| dorgo wrote:
| sometimes I wake up and know the solution.
| fernandotakai wrote:
| ha! my wife once asked why i was speaking english while
| showering.
|
| i told her that 1. i can only think in english when
| thinking about work and 2. saying stuff out loud helps me
| organize my thoughts and this is specially easy while
| showering because i don't really have to concentrate.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| Every technical person's eternal struggle between
| productive inspiration and personal hygiene.
| dunefox wrote:
| > The problem is making that a regular occurrence.
|
| Ideally you shower every two days or so.
| jonchurch_ wrote:
| Interestingly, that point is listed in the wiki article under
| his "shortcomings". (According to Edouard Toulouse, his
| contemporary and a psychologist who wrote a book about
| Poincare)
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| To be fair, I've done both. By now I can roughly estimate that
| a task will take me one hour. If I dedicate myself to it right
| now, it will actually take me 2-3 hours. I can also sort of
| carry it around for a couple of days, and then implement it in
| one hour.
|
| This says two things about me: I usually underestimate the
| design details when estimating time, and the design takes me
| roughly the same time anyway.
| gyam wrote:
| This. This happens whether I enjoy the thing I am working on or
| not. It's just part of the process.
|
| Also sometimes your mind needs a break. I personally cannot
| produce quality thoughts continuously no matter how much you
| force me, or I want to. I can mindlessly do physical things,
| but cannot code or think. I find it hard to believe there are
| people who can do this, if there are, they must be rare I
| beieve.
| mring33621 wrote:
| I almost got fired once for explaining this to my boss. He felt
| very strongly that each day of a 10 day project should mark 10%
| in progress. I told him that instead, you think about it,
| explore a few ideas, then suddenly you might be at 80%. But
| it's not linear.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| the ignorance of managment regarding non-linearity of
| developing something is one major reason for losing
| motivation. it causes much confusion and misunderstandings
| requiring justification. it gets tiresome after a while.
| daltont wrote:
| Similar concept:
|
| If one was tasked to move a 10-ton block, 1000 yards in 10
| days. You can use brute force move it 100 yards a day for 10
| days or spend 5 days inventing a way to move it 1000 yards in
| day and get it done in 6 days.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| Right! I find that I have to 'sleep on' most hard problems. WfH
| is great because I can take a nap and then get back to work. In
| the office I can't do that.
|
| Less hard problems need less-passive processing but are better
| solved on a bicycle or doing something completely unrelated.
| geekbird wrote:
| This.
|
| I will backburner a ticket for days, then when what I need to
| do comes together I will sit down and bang it out in an hour.
|
| It's to the point that I will deliberately review a ticket and
| code segment every day, even if I'm not actively working it,
| just to have the pieces come together in my mind and crank out
| the ticket.
|
| This method is not very scrum friendly, because in truth I'm
| actually brain-working all of my tickets at the same time, but
| I haven't shifted any electrons, just neurons.
|
| Sometimes, when I hit a sticking point, I go do something
| completely different - like read Hacker News - in order to push
| stuff into what I call "background processing" in my
| subconscious.
| jjav wrote:
| > This method is not very scrum friendly, because in truth
| I'm actually brain-working all of my tickets at the same
| time, but I haven't shifted any electrons, just neurons.
|
| This really highlights why I hate agile so much. Intellectual
| work doesn't lead itself to reporting status on completed
| tickets every single day.
| hotz wrote:
| I operate in exactly the same way. I wish more people would
| understand that process.
| flatiron wrote:
| Here I am thinking I'm the only one. Tossing and turning in
| the middle of the night for hours just to bang it out for
| 15 minutes the next day for everyone to go "oh that was
| easy" no it wasn't!
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| processing for one or two days to prepare productive working
| that takes 30 minutes sounds a bit extreme. but I get the gist
| and second it. I hate developers you immediately jump at any
| task coding right away. they usually actually get the stuff
| done but the solution is ugly and contrived instead of elegant
| and simple. that's also what makes me skeptical of devs
| obsessing about typing (layouts, keyboards, editors, ...) to
| optimize it further. as a developer I never found speed of
| input to be even close to a bottle neck. the bottle neck
| usually lack of silence and peace in a large office which I
| need to think!
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I used to do that. Chose an IT career path specifically that
| would allow me to bullshit and collect a big paycheck. Worked for
| a decade and a half. But I became so disillusioned by the
| stupidity of it all that I decided the only way I could stay in
| that job was to begin caring deeply about my work and trying to
| find a way to make a real positive impact.
|
| When I started to apply myself, it turned out that I was one of
| the 2-3 most skilled people in the company. Which made me angry,
| because it meant that I could see all the problems, but I didn't
| have the power to change them. So my only option was either to
| climb the corporate ladder, or quit. I'm currently going back to
| bullshitting, and looking for a job where I either work fewer
| hours, or can really care about the work and be passionate about
| it. But there's very few jobs out there for co-ops, collectives,
| and groups working for real social good.
|
| I think it's fine to bullshit a job if you are not hurting
| anybody. If your bullshit forces others to work harder to make up
| for you, I find that unethical, like leaving your garbage in the
| street.
| stopglobalism wrote:
| I think 5 hours of 100% engaged, mentally intense work is about
| all that can be expected from a person in a day.
|
| After 5-6 hours of mentally intense work, there are diminishing
| returns.
|
| Therefore, I think about 6 hours/day are what should be expected
| from a developer, including 30-60 minutes of meetings/admin work.
| Though some companies might need another hour or two-- hopefully
| such extra time is not mentally intense and is more socially
| oriented work (such as meetings).
|
| "Youtube: How Hard Should You Work? - Jordan Peterson"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1_wjViDfnI
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Are you doing 5-10 hours of coding every week? That's approaching
| a full work week after you count meetings, design work, research,
| etc.
|
| I mention this because I've found that this attitude of "I don't
| work enough" often comes from people who are working more than
| enough but only count the hours they're logging in an IDE.
| jconley wrote:
| I fire engineers like you. You're lucky. :)
| alexk307 wrote:
| I quit jobs because of managers like you
| decebalus1 wrote:
| I fire managers like you. You're lucky. :)
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| All of OP's managers are fooled, why do you think you'd do any
| better?
| blunte wrote:
| In my lengthy career, most of my jobs have demanded significant
| and intense amounts of effort and attention. With very few
| exceptions, I have certainly put in 6+ hours of focused work on
| average per day.
|
| If I were your manager, we would have a talk about what motivates
| you and what you need to be productive.
| alunchbox wrote:
| how do you stay focused for 6+ hours? Is it spread across the
| day in multiple small sessions?
|
| Meetings are horrible and even then a lot of times I find my
| work also ties in with many other individuals that cannot
| proceed without communication and often time blocked.
|
| I'd love to be more productive throughout the day but the
| current org doesn't feel it's possible.
| tmsh wrote:
| > I am actually a 10x developer whose laziness makes them a 1x
| developer?
|
| You're capable of being a 4-5x developer compared to what you're
| doing currently (if you think about 5-10 hours versus 40 hours a
| week). But perhaps you lack mechanisms for motivation and
| continuing to explore spaces that benefit your team/org and might
| lead to faster promotions/career growth.
|
| I.e., just haven't figured out as many intersections yet for
| what's sustainable and enjoyable for yourself and what directly
| benefits the businesses, teams and people you work with.
|
| My suggestion is to add a few "virus" candidates (i.e.,
| potentials for exponential growth) to your day to day. And push
| yourself more.
|
| Getting a lot more productive starts with getting productive and
| gaining confidence/experience in small things. Assuming that's
| something you want (i.e., being even more effective) and that
| you're not just happy with the current steady state of where you
| are.
|
| But to your points - a lot of software developers don't realize
| that they're in a steady state and are living a comfortable life
| (still a good deal for the company you're working for) when they
| could be making a lot more / having greater impact.
|
| Part of the issue is that with programming our jobs are focused
| around 'automation' (in the form of software), so that very often
| we reach a point where our required effort really plateaus (and
| yet for the business still scales and provides value). If you
| want to really have exponential growth for yourself, you have to
| push yourself in those plateaus (i.e., find intrinsic
| motivation).
| TylerE wrote:
| I think it's important to consider that an "hour" out of a 40
| hour week might be vastly less productive than an "hour" in a 5
| or 10 hour week.
|
| Flow state is a thing. You can't fake it.
| dsfnctnlprgrmng wrote:
| I hate working as a software engineer. I'm convinced it's the
| most tedious job on the planet. I would rather count termites, by
| hand, one-by-one. (I don't know why that specifically is the
| alternative I came up with. Just go with it.) My loathing of this
| work, an activity which was the light of my life when I was
| growing up, led me to behave in the way you describe. The worst
| part is that it didn't feel like a choice I was making. I felt
| physically unable to even start typing. And then the self-
| loathing starts--what kind of loser/leech/fraud am I?--while
| feeling powerless to do anything about it. I've never been so
| miserable. (Yes, I've been evaluated for ADHD. No, that's not the
| problem--or at least the solution to ADHD is not the solution to
| this.)
|
| Eventually I decided it wasn't worth it. I took an enormous pay
| cut (more than half) to switch to a very, very different field.
| At first I had some money problems. Changing one's mindset from
| not having to even think about a budget, to having to actually
| make choices, does not happen overnight. But after a while I was
| in good shape and had enough to meet my needs, save, and have a
| little left over for fun stuff.
|
| Then I made the idiotic mistake of going back to school. Now I'm
| back in this awful industry again out of sheer necessity, and I'm
| miserable again. You can bet your buttons I'll be out the door
| and back to my other career the instant my debt is paid off.
|
| It's not that I'm not good at programming. I am. I've built some
| stuff everyone here has heard of, and that a lot of people use.
| I've been on some fantastic teams. But those times were the rare
| exception. It's also not that I don't enjoy programming per se. I
| do enjoy it again, up to a point, when it's no longer my job. But
| as work--this industry just isn't for me. And it sounds like it
| isn't for you either. The sooner you accept that and move on, the
| happier you'll be.
|
| (Aside: How is it not a _global fucking crisis_ that 85% of
| people hate their jobs? You know, the thing they spend most of
| their time doing? _85% of people hate most of their waking
| lives,_ and we 're just fine with that.)
| time_to_smile wrote:
| Developer work should almost exclusively be measured on "did you
| get that thing done we needed done on time?", with the limit that
| you shouldn't be required to work extra hours to make that happen
| (with rare exceptions).
|
| I've had weeks where I do nothing, and then have two hours of
| real insight and solve a problem my team has had stuck in the
| backlog on for month/years in an afternoon.
|
| I've had mornings where I browse HN, then take a shower, and
| suddenly realize the solution to a problem that ultimately brings
| my employer potentially millions in revenue.
|
| At the same time, I can't perform these quick moments of
| brilliance for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
|
| I've also had weeks were I put in long days quickly building a
| prototype needed to test out a new product idea, it's hard work
| but the results impress important clients and help everyone look
| good. But I can't keep up weeks like that for long without
| burnout.
|
| The most import things:
|
| - are you getting the things done you and your team agree are
| important, on time
|
| - when you're involved with other people, where do the find you
| on the "oh god no" -- "oh thank god!" scale
|
| If your team is on track solving the problems that need to be
| solved, and whenever someone pings you with a question or in need
| of help they leave feeling like you saved them a ton of time, it
| doesn't really matter if you work 5 minutes a day.
|
| The inverse is also true. If people find that adding you to a
| project is a time suck, and things never seem to work right, it
| doesn't matter if you are putting in 70 hour work weeks.
| neilk wrote:
| Please indulge my curiosity.
|
| This might be wildly unrelated but... how attractive are you,
| physically? Are you thin? Are you taller than most people in your
| peer group?
|
| Do you more or less resemble the "dominant" demographic where you
| live? That is, the same gender presentation, ethnicity, etc. as
| most of your government and business leaders.
|
| Are you a citizen of the country where you live?
| trulyme wrote:
| Would love to hear your hypothesis, care to share it?
| Supermancho wrote:
| It isn't hard to infer. This is about confounding effects of
| non-professional tangibles. Human judgement is often
| influenced by non-technical qualities.
|
| eg You'll find that the advantages offered by being
| attractive is tangible, but never quantified. It can allow
| you more stable employment, as unfair as that may seem in the
| abstract.
|
| This is a little off-the-path, but is additive. Domain
| experts, for example, often get a lot of leeway in
| performance reviews because it isn't always needed. If you're
| hired on as a DB2 expert, you're golden because DB2 is a sub-
| standard database and you get to answer questions in the most
| forgiving manner while doing almost nothing - "it doesn't do
| that" "that's not available" "there is no standard practice".
| TruthWillHurt wrote:
| I get what he's saying. I myself am not so pretty, but I
| carry myself with pride and have that "alpha male" attitude.
| I speak with confidence, humor and a bit louder than others -
|
| And that lets me get away with a lot of slacking off.
| khazhoux wrote:
| It should be obvious, I think, that the question is whether
| being of the pre-dominant nationality/ethnicity, and also
| being physically fit, etc, makes it easier for someone to get
| away with coasting through their job without doing much work.
| frazbin wrote:
| I feel ya. It's hard to measure software engineer productivity,
| which means it's hard to incentivize software production at the
| margin, so the tendency is to work hard on your own recognizance
| until you run out of motivation and then sandbag forever. You can
| offer engineers equity to try and fix this but it seems like you
| have to offer quite a bit, and the measurement problem remains.
|
| I know a company where engineers publicly set their own twice-
| yearly objectives, which are then linked to their bonuses. You
| can imagine a number of advantages to this system from the
| perspective of someone trying to optimize a firm: high performers
| will set difficult goals, sandbaggers will set easy goals that
| look difficult. Telling the difference is still hard because
| often only an already-expert person can estimate a problem's
| difficulty, but at least the loop gets closed in theory.
|
| If the companies you work for never catch you sandbagging, then
| you're good .. until they go out of business because of all the
| other dead weight they're carrying and you find the remaining
| firms use technologies that require you to re-adapt your
| sandbagging strategy. The firms hope that this adaptation itself
| will refresh your motivation for a decent percentage of your vest
| period (since you're one step closer to being truly obsoleted and
| need to build resume points). Anyone who stays past their vest
| period can assumed to be a sandbagger, so 2-5 years looks good.
|
| Yeah basically you're fine for now; just remember that this
| business will kick you out on your ear eventually if you don't
| keep up. This can happen real fast sometimes. If you don't use
| some of your fallow time to do continuous learning, you might
| slip out of your salary range or out of employability entirely--
| that's the tail risk you're taking.
|
| Maybe that's why you feel some anxiety: you have a fat-tailed
| existential risk that hasn't triggered yet. You should feel
| anxious, it totally can and will trigger eventually.
| evancoop wrote:
| Seems like there are multiple issues here. The first would be
| rather ineffective management that fails to notice or address a
| lack of productivity. The second would be a lack of interest in
| one's current role - most folks would probably do more work if
| only to alleviate day-to-day boredom, especially given the
| aptitude that the OP clearly possesses.
|
| I worked at a company where someone like this was eventually
| unearthed, and the result was all manner of big-brother-esque
| counts of commits, etc.
|
| Is the argument about morality or managerial structure?
| fjfaase wrote:
| I can relate to this. In the past decade, I have been working
| about 24 hours a week, at first because I am a caregiver, now
| because I am used to it, but also because I feel that that is the
| amount of time I can be productive. But I still do a lot of
| procastination.
|
| In the past two years, I have been working in at a company
| building a high-tech 3D printer and developing slicing software
| only used by my colleagues. I am strongly motivated by helping
| people and I feel motivated by developing features that my
| colleagues benefit from. They are mechanical and process
| engineers. I feel I am part of a team that does not only exist of
| software engineers and I love it.
| lkrubner wrote:
| I think I'd get bored just working 10 hours a week. I'm drawn to
| ambitious adventures. I like working on insanely bold ideas. But
| because of this I've ended up at a few deeply dysfunctional
| startups. I wrote about one, a spectacular failure back in 2015.
| Among the many ridiculous situations we got ourselves into, at
| one point we had to sit in the office and work for 23 straight
| hours, from 11 AM to 10 AM the next day, to get ready for a demo
| the next day. If you're interested, I wrote all the details here:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-eboo...
|
| But I think you can ask why anyone would want to work at such a
| dysfunctional startup. Why work 70 hours a week when you can make
| more money for less work? One of the most interesting reviews of
| my book asked the question:
|
| " _Personally, I find the book most interesting not for the
| absurdly lousy management characters, but for giving a glimpse
| into the mind of a person that accepts this kind of treatment as
| okay, shoulders unreasonable burdens, and seems repeatably drawn
| into difficult situations with the corresponding drama that
| inevitably ensues.*"_
| jesuis_14 wrote:
| In the last year or two, I have not "worked" more than 1-2 hours
| a day on average--some days for a grand total of zero hours. The
| quote/unquote is not there by accident. I manage a team and some
| projects, and most of the time I let other people do the
| technical work while I get to chat with higher ups or give some
| general direction on where the work should go.
|
| I consider myself very competent in my field even though I
| stopped doing purely technical work some time ago, but there are
| a lot of very good coders out there, but not enough "lazy
| pragmatists" like me.
|
| My team likes me because I don't micromanage, I support them as
| much as I can and can entertain them with some good jokes, career
| advice and a general openness that is hard to find in
| professional circles.
|
| I have also been able to work remotely for months, and when I say
| remotely I mean in very remote places.
|
| I also make top money for European standards.
|
| Some will see me as a "parasite", but they would be very wrong. I
| do exactly what I am asked to do, I am positive and upbeat and
| always ready to support the team at large when needed. Others may
| ask, "is she not getting bored?", but the answer is "are you
| kidding me?". I can spend time with my kids and partner, climb
| mountains, and brunch on the regular with my girlfriends.
|
| Maybe (surely?) it will end at some point, but like someone said,
| "tomorrow is not promised to anyone".
|
| I might start a coaching service at some point, as I believe most
| professionals (forget about the SV types, I am talking about
| other geographies) are far from having a real understanding on
| how big companies work and what should be done to have a
| comfortable and impactful professional life (I am a top
| performer!), while at the same time enjoying this splendid world
| we are lucky to live in.
| i_love_music wrote:
| I love this comment and your vibe. I agree with the lack of
| lazy pragmatists.
| batmaniam wrote:
| The same could be asked about upper management. They earn 10x our
| pay, so their output is 10x more value than our work, and they
| work 10x harder, right? In our normal 8 hour work day, they must
| work 80 hours. Except a full day is 24 hours.
|
| Why is the onus always on the bottom workers to be honest? Why
| are we trying to feel guilty about our working hours vs how much
| we're paid? Because it's clear salary is not tied to better
| performers given how much upper management is compensated.
|
| Just enjoy your life. Management probably lowballed you coming
| into the job anyway, but if they are happy with your work, then
| spend that extra time you're saving to enjoying other things in
| life.
|
| What do you want to do, OP? The new year is coming up.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| The whole point is the compensation is not based on how hard
| you work but the value you provide and what the market will
| support. Of course upper management works roughly the same
| hours as everyone else, but they also have far more
| responsibility.
| wccrawford wrote:
| Actually, compensation is based on _what the company has to
| pay_. There are some other rules, like they have to (overall)
| pay less than they make from the output. But in general, a
| company never pays their employees more than they think they
| have to.
|
| 10x programmers don't make 10x the pay. They might make
| slightly more, but not even 2x what a 1x programmer (of the
| same level, no comparing seniors to juniors) makes at the
| same company.
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| Sad truth.
| bentlegen wrote:
| If a company is doing its job correctly, a 10x engineer
| should not be leveled the same as a 1x engineer. (It's more
| complicated than that but, y'know.)
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| You're not wrong, of course the company will pay the
| minimum it can get away with. My point was a bit broader
| regarding the market value between an executive versus a
| programmer.
| ulkesh wrote:
| > but they also have far more responsibility
|
| This is relative. In my experience, many people in upper
| management have held little to no real responsibility because
| they were the types that if all goes right, it's their doing,
| but if anything goes wrong, it's the fault of someone below
| them. I find this more true for middle managers, but I have
| seen this with upper management numerous times.
|
| Again in my experience, the higher in rank one achieves, the
| less real work they end up doing when compared to their
| subordinates. Delegating isn't that hard to do and takes very
| little time -- and there are some master class delegators out
| there.
|
| That all being said, I do respect and love working for upper
| management who understand, who care, and who do as much as
| the rest of us. I currently work for such individuals and
| it's part of the reason I've stayed as long as I have.
| didibus wrote:
| Ah yes, the incredible value of providing feedback on
| proposals and signing off on initiatives.
| digianarchist wrote:
| In my last two jobs I fail to see that my employer got more
| value out of me than the expenses of paying me.
| epolanski wrote:
| I can't think of focusing 8 hours a day, hell even 6 on coding
| and thinking can be that healthy. Especially when you're solving
| business problems you likely don't care about.
| pajtai wrote:
| You must work at a big company. I work at one with 4 full time
| developers, and I don't think any of us could work 5 to 10 hours
| without the others and the whole company noticing.
| pugworthy wrote:
| This is me at times, and I'll say that work from home the last 2
| years has not helped at all.
|
| Fortunately for me, a certain amount of my job is to directly
| innovate with UX for a device used in Life Sciences / Pharma
| research. It's not unreasonable for me to take a walk and think a
| lot about challenges.
|
| But at the same time, it's easy to fall into the "I'm thinking
| about it still" trap and not work. And there can be a certain
| level of depression involved too. Am I inactive because I'm
| depressed or depressed because I'm inactive?
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| If you're in places where you're getting away with this, the
| likelihood is everyone knows but doesn't say anything because
| they're doing something similar. Including your managers.
|
| Most businesses just don't need all their employees running at
| full capacity. I've been professionally programming for nearly 30
| years and I've seen this be true in small businesses with < 10
| employees and in Fortune 500 megacompanies. So there's often an
| unspoken agreement to be comfortable and cruise. This can extend
| even to upper management and owners.
|
| The weird thing is you can often get yourself into trouble if you
| get too ambitious in such situations. People don't want their
| comfy little boats rocked too much.
|
| From my experience the places that require running on all
| cylinders all the time are either incompetently managed (which
| includes understaffing) or very ambitious. Or both I suppose. The
| thing is, real ambition is much rarer than you'd think given how
| much society claims to value it.
|
| I've had times when I was happy at both ends of the scale.
| Cruising is comfortable. Ambition is exciting. Both work for me
| at different times, but I do eventually tire of too much of
| either.
|
| I will say ambition and full-speed-ahead only works for me when
| the goal is something that has value to me. Either a big
| financial reward or I believe in what we're building. I'm not
| going to do it as a cog writing your accounting software package.
| cattown wrote:
| I've been a software engineer and managed software engineers for
| 20 years and worked in all kinds of businesses. This is both
| normal and mostly acceptable, in my professional opinion.
|
| Doing just as much work as your employer requires and no more is
| way less of a problem than employees who actively steal, commit
| fraud, bring drama and distract other team members, or are
| introducing defects because they've faked their way into a job
| they don't have the skills for. Your managers are likely dealing
| with those problems too, so they may be more aware of your
| situation than you think and are ok with it. Or maybe not,
| whatever. Not your problem either way. They can let you know if
| they're not happy with your performance, which it sounds like
| they are not doing.
|
| However! I will say that this way of working and living comes
| with some significant hazard to your mental health. Doing
| something you don't like, care about, or believe in for decades
| long periods of time can really mess with your sense of self
| worth and happiness in life. You only have one life, do something
| with it that is satisfying. Get out of the rat race.
|
| Personally, this realization has led me to switch careers. I'm
| now in a 2 year evenings and weekends program to get certified to
| do something that has nothing to do with tech. It is a huge pay
| cut. I also am happier than I have ever been in my adult life
| because I'm learning something challenging and helping people
| instead of coasting through 8 or 9 hours of pretending to work
| every day. Starting over mid-life and finding another thing that
| I love as much as I loved computers as a teen has been a blessing
| worth more than any amount of money.
|
| Good luck!
| cj wrote:
| > This is both normal and mostly acceptable, in my professional
| opinion.
|
| Perhaps at large companies?
|
| I would hope people applying to jobs at small 5-20 person
| startups aren't bullshitting and lying about the work they do.
| Or to reword the same sentiment, I hope people looking for the
| easiest possible path target their job search at companies with
| lots of bureaucracy where people not doing your job is more
| easily tolerated.
|
| Edit: I like the suggestion from someone else in the comments
| here to "work in an environment where not being productive is
| not harmful."
| cogman10 wrote:
| The 5->10 hours a week is definitely on the extreme end of
| laziness.
|
| However, I do think if you are doing the full 40+ hours only
| working you are likely heading towards burnout. IMO, 5->6
| hours of work in an 8 hour work day is both normal and
| acceptable to keep people from burning out and ultimately
| dropping to the 5->10 hour a week range.
| [deleted]
| almost_usual wrote:
| At a 5-20 person startup there are probably like 5 engineers,
| there's no time to waste and everyone knows what everyone is
| doing.
| [deleted]
| mrbonner wrote:
| I appreciate your candid feedback about the OP's attitude at
| work. Especially, I like it when you, as an SDM, agree that
| majority of the people will be "average" and as long as they
| don't wreck-havoc the team, they should be appreciated, right?
|
| > However! I will say that this way of working and living comes
| with some significant hazard to your mental health
|
| I have a hard time believing that in this stage and age,
| especially in the US this is true. How do you justify working
| for a big corp big nice pay to support your family vs. getting
| a salary just to live by working for your life's mission? Do we
| just forego the opportunity cost from a bigger paycheck, not
| just for you but your family as well?
| tmnstr85 wrote:
| I think the real issue arises with equity or the option for
| equity. Suddenly you're in a much more influential position
| because if you build the next unicorn internally, its going to
| take everyone to the moon. That equity needs to be proportional
| to your input to the stack. That's what i'm hearing from all
| the "well you can't do this in a small company!" comments.
|
| What often happens when companies start to mature- from small
| to medium - the equity stops making sense. At the beginning the
| engineers were in the business meetings, now others are taking
| credit for the engineers work and you find yourself in a back
| room being told there's a jira list of defect and bugs to work
| through. Meanwhile, you wrote the source. That's where the
| significant hazard mentioned above plays a really wacky role in
| your mental health.
|
| I'm at the point where I'm just realizing how toxic my
| situation has been for YEARS. And I'm ready for the change...
| methyl wrote:
| > this way of working and living comes with some significant
| hazard to your mental health
|
| I can relate to that. I used to work not more than it was
| required for being perceived as a very productive person (10-15
| hours / week), but at some point I couldn't stand it. I co-
| founded a startup and for first two years I easily crossed 60
| hours/week on average, yet I was much happier and had more
| energy than previously. Of course 60 hours work week is not
| sustainable, but I definitely felt better mentally doing too
| much rather than too little.
| nostrebored wrote:
| 60 hour workweeks are absolutely sustainable?
|
| Desirable maybe not, but I've known lots of people who have
| worked ten hours a day six days a week. Especially if they
| don't have other commitments.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I think 60 hours of debugging a compiler is different than
| 60 hours of wining and dining executive clients.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| I think it's largely depending on the person which of
| those sounds more tiring. An extrovert would thrive on
| these meetings, while an introvert might hate every
| second of them. Conversely, an extrovert might hate
| sitting alone in front of his PC for 60h, while an
| introvert might find it very fulfilling (assuming that he
| loves writing compilers).
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| I think many doctors work much more than that (60-80 hours
| each week) for pretty much their entire careers.
| zibarn wrote:
| So what
| dudeman13 wrote:
| Yes, and burning out and stress are huge issues for
| doctors their entire careers too
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| It depends on the type of work being done
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| Yeah, it depends on the work and the person. I've had
| periods at my company where 60h absolutely would have been
| sustainable for what I was working on at the time, and
| periods at the same company where 40h is still headed
| towards burnout. And I've experienced much worse elsewhere.
| I actually really like the periods where I have stable
| things that give back enough energy to keep me sustainable
| at 60h.
| repomies69 wrote:
| > It is a huge pay cut. I also am happier than I have ever been
| in my adult life because I'm learning something challenging and
| helping people instead of
|
| While I congratulate your career move and I am very happy for
| you, I want to point out that there are tons of jobs in
| Software Development that genuinely help people and make
| society go forward.
| pradn wrote:
| > I will say that this way of working and living comes with
| some significant hazard to your mental health. Doing something
| you don't like, care about, or believe in for decades long
| periods of time can really mess with your sense of self worth
| and happiness in life. You only have one life, do something
| with it that is satisfying. Get out of the rat race.
|
| I am a few years out of college and this hasn't quite crossed
| my mind. Perhaps I've now had enough years of work experience
| to start feeling the long term effects of how I feel about
| work. The effects of stress have been evident, certainly -
| weight gain, for example.
| paxys wrote:
| > However! I will say that this way of working and living comes
| with some significant hazard to your mental health. Doing
| something you don't like, care about, or believe in for decades
| long periods of time can really mess with your sense of self
| worth and happiness in life.
|
| Agree with everything you wrote except this part. I have worked
| jobs where I truly believed in the mission, worked hard, was
| paid a lot, achieved great things and was overall very
| satisfied. I was also massively burned out by the end of it.
|
| On the other hand I have had stretches where I was
| disillusioned and disconnected from work and was completely
| coasting, so exactly in the situation the OP describes. I had
| zero stress at work and used to leave at 5pm sharp, had lots
| more time for family and friends, picked up some great hobbies,
| did a lot more weekend trips and extended travel, and my mental
| health and happiness could not be better because of it.
|
| Ultimately some people derive their life's purpose from their
| jobs, while to others it is just a necessary annoyance for
| making money. There's no single "correct" approach to this.
| cvwright wrote:
| Just wanted to point out that this
|
| > I truly believed in the mission, worked hard, was paid a
| lot, achieved great things and was overall very satisfied.
|
| and this
|
| > used to leave at 5pm sharp
|
| are not mutually exclusive.
|
| We have this weird thing in tech where we think that, to be
| passionate, you have to work yourself into the ground. But
| this is stupid. There's organizational psych research going
| back _decades_ showing that teams who work 40-hour weeks will
| quickly outperform teams working 60 hrs / week. For one
| thing, they make fewer mistakes and thus have less work to
| re-do. Fewer bugs to fix.
|
| I've done more than one stretch of intense, focused
| programming and CS research work when I was a grad student.
| There was one period of two weeks when my buddy and I both
| put in about 116 hours one week and 118 hours the next week.
| I have basically no memory of anything that happened in those
| weeks, and I never have since like one month afterwards --
| like a drug addict on a bender or something. I guess it
| worked out OK. We got our papers published. But our actual
| productivity in those last few weeks must have been absolute
| garbage.
|
| In contrast, I spent last academic year on sabbatical
| building out my side project, and I don't think there was
| even one week where I put in more than 60 hours. Personally I
| can sustain 45 or 50-hour weeks basically indefinitely. But
| if I ever tried to push it above 55, there was a big price to
| be paid, and I was useless and braindead for the following
| day or two.
|
| Be passionate, love what you do, but don't hurt yourself
| doing it.
|
| There's a quote that I like: Most people vastly over-estimate
| what they can achieve with intense effort over the span of a
| week. And they vastly under-estimate what they can accomplish
| with sustained, moderate effort over the course of a year.
| kittiepryde wrote:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30793826/
|
| Do you happen to know of good studies to back up ---
| organizational psych research going back decades showing
| that teams who work 40-hour weeks will quickly outperform
| teams working 60 hrs / week --- I've heard this before,
| but, I've never seen the studies talked about.
|
| I found this study via Googling, it took a little longer
| than I would like to admit. (I'm probably using the wrong
| search terms)
|
| It definitely paints a more complicated picture - from a
| manager perspective, they could say that more hours equals
| more work - except they should be measuring worker
| engagement according to the study I linked, because it's
| more heavily associated with productivity than total hours
| worked - but they could say this is hard to do, it's just
| cheaper for the company to make everyone work more? That
| kind of company is definitely a place I would not want to
| work, but more studies, might make it easier to justify a
| change if you find yourself in one of these organizations?
| loopz wrote:
| I were going to say this, but found it in the Results /
| Conclusions part (nice link!). So to paraphrase:
|
| Results: Working >40 to 50 hours per week and >50 hours
| per week were significantly positively associated with
| work productivity in univariate analysis. However, the
| significant association no longer held after adjusting
| for work engagement. Work engagement was positively
| associated with work productivity even after controlling
| for potential confounders. Working hours were not
| significantly associated with work productivity among
| those with high-work engagement or among those with low-
| work engagement.
|
| Conclusions: Working hours did not have any significant
| associations with work productivity when taking work
| engagement into account. Work engagement did not moderate
| the influence of working hours on work productivity,
| though it attenuated the relationship between working
| hours and work productivity.
|
| In my personal experience of workplace since 90's,
| whenever you have the chance to "level up", work a bit
| extra to gain a bit more progress and experience, it's
| absolutely worth it. If you don't gain anything by it or
| have no meaningful work to do (ie. process-related tasks
| and projects), it is worth more _to you_ to leave work
| for another day.
|
| I've become sensitive enough I can feel the stress begin
| to build at the end of the day, and know which day is
| worth to leave work (most days), and which rare day is
| worth more _to you_ to stay a bit longer just to follow
| that flow out to its end.
|
| Anything new after 3PM can wait to next day. Your mind
| will anyways work it out in the background if it's
| important somehow.
| raducu wrote:
| Some places can thrive with lots of overtime -- if they
| can attract the right kind of people, like Space X can.
| Other places can do great if their employees have no
| alternatives -- like Amazon. Some can do extremely well
| if they use slave labor, like ancient Rome or USA.
|
| But in the vast majority of cases a lot of hours worked
| cannot be sustainable or beneficial to the employee.
| cvwright wrote:
| The main result that I'm thinking of is quite old --
| going back to the Ford assembly line days IIRC. NPR had a
| great segment on it several years ago. I'm on mobile now,
| but I'll try to so some digging when I get back to a real
| computer.
|
| I suppose there's a valid question about how well those
| oldest results transfer from manual labor over to
| knowledge work like programming. The NPR guest that I'm
| remembering seemed to think that the effect might
| actually be even stronger for knowledge work, not weaker.
| notJim wrote:
| Exactly this, I've believed in (to varying degrees) the
| mission of every place I've worked, and still feel
| passionate about the projects I'm working on, and enjoy the
| work I'm doing. I've also rarely worked more than 40-45
| hours a week, and fairly often work less than that. If I
| ever worked somewhere that actually required more than that
| I would find a different job, because I am not built for
| working many hours per week.
| cloverich wrote:
| They aren't mutually exclusive. Being very interested and
| motivated at your job does not mean you have to work long
| hours, sacrafice vacation, or tune in during off hours. Some
| of the best (staff level) people I ever worked with
| absolutely killed it while at work, and would take multiple 2
| week vacations and say "dont contact me while I'm out" (etc).
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| I'm hoping to follow after your example.... at some point.
| Really want to do something with my time that feels worth it.
| But the difficulty of starting over is this intimidating
| mountain that I look out my window at each day, behind a forest
| with no visible path. I wonder when I'll finally get fed up
| enough to strap on some boots and head out into the wilderness.
| jollybean wrote:
| " This is both normal and mostly acceptable, in my professional
| opinion. "
|
| It's definitely not acceptable.
|
| It's a form of White Collar / 1st World Corruption.
|
| Taking money from people with expectation of value, while not
| providing that value is Fraud.
|
| Just because we don't always have great oversight, does not
| abnegate our responsibilities towards trying to do a good job.
|
| This notion of 'I Can Get Away With It' and 'Other People Do
| It' is exactly the kind of logic that someone in an corrupt and
| dysfunctional system would use to accept taking bribes, or to
| commit other forms of common crimes.
|
| 'Wealthy Nations' are wealthy because people are organized
| rationally and effectively, - but we can't have oversight over
| everything.
|
| 'Wealthy Nations' run into dysfunction and bloat often due to
| systematic reasons, but also due to these kinds of scenarios
| and it's an example of where it breaks down.
|
| Workers are adamant that they want to be 'trusted' to do their
| jobs and to work remotely - at the same time they want the
| ability to do 'nothing' in systems which necessarily can't have
| a lot of oversight, or don't because 'trust' ?
|
| This is unreasonable populism: "Pay me, trust me, but I'm going
| to do nothing, and if you lay me off over Zoom, you're going to
| see it on CNN!"
|
| If you want to live in a world of trust, it means you have an
| obligation to at least try to live up to your obligations.
| paxys wrote:
| Is there a quantification for the value you are obligated to
| provide your company written down in your employment
| contract? If not, on what basis are you throwing around words
| like "crime" and "fraud"?
| jollybean wrote:
| It's Fraud when there is payment for services not rendered.
|
| The problem arises when there's little ability for
| oversight, which implies a high degree of trust in the
| system and the mechanism for verification can't be there.
|
| Put another way:
|
| If someone pays you $50 to fill their tires up with air,
| it's Fraud if you don't do it - irrespective of your
| customer's ability or willingness to verify.
|
| If your customer was busy on the phone, or with their
| children, would it be 'Perfect Contractually Acceptable' to
| not fill their tires up with air 'Because You Can?'?
|
| Either legally or morally - no - it's fraud.
|
| Fortunately, most tasks involve a kind of implicit
| oversight - i.e. 'you know when your tires were not
| filled'.
|
| In software, the mechanisms for oversight aren't so great -
| but that should be fine with all of us to the extent that
| we're professionals - we don't want Management breathing
| down our necks anyhow. But the inherent level of trust
| implies a higher degree of professional competence on the
| part of all of us.
|
| FYI - this is assuming that there is a problem with
| oversight. If the OP is doing some 'genius 2 hours a week',
| the company knows it, is fine paying $150K for that bit of
| work, that's totally fine.
|
| It's disturbing that this is even a discussion.
| paxys wrote:
| You are missing the core part of the question. You say it
| is fraud when you aren't delivering what was agreed upon
| - fine, that could be the case. But what were you hired
| to deliver exactly? Is that written down somewhere?
| Forget management, can you yourself judge in some
| objective way whether you are committing fraud at work or
| not?
| ojilles wrote:
| Yes, your employment contract has likely a minimum number
| of hours of work stipulated (otherwise PTO etc becomes
| hard).
|
| Look, i'm not saying it is a valuable way of looking at
| productivity at all, but the fraud aspect is reasonably
| clear.
|
| So if it states 40 hours, you put in 40 hours. If you do
| nothing during those 40 hours, we can have a moral/ethics
| discussion about if and how you should change the
| situation etc, but at that point we're outside of the
| fraud scenario in my opinion.
| paxys wrote:
| At will salaried (non-hourly) exempt employment contracts
| in the US do not generally state the number of hours you
| must work in a day or week (mine does not). And even if
| they do, how do you measure "working" hours? Are you
| committing fraud if you sit in the office and browse the
| internet for an hour every day? And how does that
| translate to working from home?
|
| I will say from experience that someone who does 10 hours
| of good, productive work a week is still adding more
| value to the company than someone who works 80 but writes
| terrible code, ships bugs and causes outages. If you want
| to accuse someone of fraud for not being valuable, go
| after the latter.
| ojilles wrote:
| In that case, paxys, I stand corrected and can see where
| the questions in this thread are coming from, indeed.
|
| In my experience in Europe, an employment contract will
| state number of hours (say 36, 40, etc) and you need to
| be present and available for that time. These are non-
| hourly contracts (e.g. salary is expressed by month not
| hour). None of that has anything to do with productivity,
| to your/mine point.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| If OP is considered valuable by the organization and everyone
| is satisfied by their output then they are providing the
| value they are being paid for. If they feel they are
| overpaying OP for for the output he is providing then they
| would PIP him or at the very least say something. OP though
| has received promotions so they must feel he is doing a good
| job.
| jollybean wrote:
| Yes - it's perfectly fine if OP isn't stressed or not doing
| a lot - if their 2-hour genius contributions are worth
| $200K to the company that's perfectly fine.
|
| This however, is probably not the case.
|
| The common case is that due to lack of proper oversight and
| bloat, people just coast and do nothing.
|
| It's incredibly hard to have 'true oversight' in software,
| which frankly is 'just fine' if everyone does their jobs
| properly.
|
| But if the cost of 'little oversight' is that slowly but
| surely 'nobody is doing anything', it's not going to work
| out now, is it?
|
| It's also a moral dilemma.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Sounds like the problem is with management not doing
| their jobs to provide proper oversight. So everyone is
| derelict in their duties.
| paxys wrote:
| > This however, is probably not the case.
|
| That's obviously for the company to judge. If they
| continue to pay him and promote him, why is the takeaway
| that he is committing fraud by not working an arbitrary
| 40 hours a week?
| sophacles wrote:
| Probably some puritan nonsense. The person is a _worker_
| for god 's sake - why would you consider them to be
| worthy of something resembling profit?
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I for the most part agree with you. Its probably not 100%
| on the up and up but a very large group of us do it. If
| everyone started working the full 8 hours then deadlines
| would be hit in half time or less. What would prevent the
| company from then deciding that they have to many
| engineers and laying off 30% of the workforce? It would
| save them a ton and they are still getting their goals
| accomplished in the same time frame as before. I feel
| like everyone coasting allows 25% of software engineering
| roles to exist. Don't get me wrong I am not saying we are
| angels helping our fellow man, quite the opposite; just
| an interesting thought experiment.
| bccdee wrote:
| I feel like you ignored most of the original post and are
| just injecting your own preconceived notions.
|
| > Taking money from people with expectation of value, while
| not providing that value
|
| If the employers in question felt that they weren't getting
| what they were paying for, they would tell the original
| poster that they were performing below expectations.
| According to the original poster, that has not happened, and
| their employers have never expressed dissatisfaction with
| their productivity.
|
| > This is unreasonable populism: "Pay me, trust me, but I'm
| going to do nothing, and if you lay me off over Zoom, you're
| going to see it on CNN!"
|
| Nobody's "doing nothing"; as established above, the employee
| in question is doing more than enough work to satisfy their
| employers. What does "you're going to see it on CNN" mean --
| are you talking about "cancel culture"? How is populism
| involved with this, and what on Earth do you think populism
| _is_ if you think that your bizarre strawman is
| representative of it?
|
| I'm not one to argue that politics should be considered as
| separate from our personal lives, but you're throwing around
| emotionally- and politically-loaded ideas like populism,
| cancel culture, and "white collar first-world corruption" in
| a discussion where they bear no relevance.
| a-dub wrote:
| > Taking money from people with expectation of value, while
| not providing that value is Fraud.
|
| Taking _time_ from people with expectation of _opportunity to
| build career by building things_ , while not providing that
| _opportunity to build career by building things_ is Fraud.
|
| fixed it for you. j/k
|
| this is not constructive. if i join a company and their
| internal dysfunction gets in the way of me getting projects
| done that further my career and that comes at a steep
| opportunity cost, that doesn't mean they defrauded me (even
| though it may feel good to think that when letting off
| steam), it just means it didn't work out.
|
| name-calling and accusations of bad faith don't really serve
| anyone in the end.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "It's a form of White Collar / 1st World Corruption"
|
| Dear lord, is this The 'first world corruption'? With
| corporate profits at record high? Amidst *checks lists'
| rampant corporate tax avoidance, runaway climate change,
| balooning executive pay, unaccountable executives who's
| create Boeing Max or 2008-style events every few years Money
| in politics Survaliance capitalism, exploding house prices,
| (add whatever else bothers you)
|
| Is this really the corruption that will destory the first
| world way of life?
| whateveracct wrote:
| Nobody is being defrauded. It is at-will employment. If the
| employer is still willing to employ the dev working this
| much, everything is well above board.
|
| At-will cuts a lot harder both ways when it's remote work ;)
| jollybean wrote:
| 'At will' has noting to do with it.
|
| When payment is made for services not rendered, it's Fraud.
|
| If the employer has expectations that the employee 'does
| nothing' then it's fine, but that's almost assuredly not
| the case.
|
| This posture is not only toxic, but it's also unjust will
| spread into much greater malaise as others take up the
| mantle of 'doing nothing'.
|
| Literally a colleague I had over for dinner last night left
| his job, and the primary reason was 'many of my higher paid
| colleagues are not doing anything'.
|
| I'm not sure if he was more frustrated or jealous, and
| there were other issues, but he left just the same.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Nothing in any of my FTE contracts has anything beyond
| "at-will." No explicit "money for such and such services
| rendered."
|
| There's literally no fraud here for a typical American
| FTE at-will employment arrangement. The worst-case
| scenario is getting fired from the job with no additional
| repercussions.
| ojilles wrote:
| Does it not state a minimum amount of hours worked? If
| so, there's a reasonable argument for fraud?
|
| ($x for y hours, but y hours were not delivered, only a
| fraction was.)
|
| Just so I'm clear; I don't think that works at all in a
| knowledge worker environment, but tell that to the judge?
| whateveracct wrote:
| There's no mention of hours - only yearly salary,
| employed at-will.
| ojilles wrote:
| Gotcha (saw similar reply elsewhere in this thread). Ran
| into a US-EU difference here it seems like.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "Literally a colleague I had over for dinner last night
| left his job, and the primary reason was 'many of my
| higher paid colleagues are not doing anything'"
|
| Surely if this was actual Fraud he should be filling a
| police report or lawsuit?
|
| Surely the all-knowing free market should punish
| companies that pay people to do nothing with its3 all
| powerfull invisible hand?
| Supermancho wrote:
| > Surely if this was actual Fraud he should be filling a
| police report or lawsuit?
|
| In the US, if someone is defrauding someone else (in a
| civil matter), the best you an do is make a statement.
|
| ie https://nccriminallaw.com/news/criminal-fraud-vs-
| civil-fraud...
| sophacles wrote:
| If I go to widgetco and purchase a widget for $100, but it
| only costs them $50 to make that widget (including all
| salaries, marketing etc), what do we call that?
|
| That's right profit. They provided me the thing I wanted for
| a price I agreed to, and they did so in a way that generated
| some extra $ for them.
|
| Why is it Fraud then when a worker is asked to provide KPIs
| in exchange for $salary, and meets them in less than the
| expected time? Wouldn't that be profit also?
| achillesheels wrote:
| I think the OP is providing value, just at a rate which can't
| be calculated using 19th century industrial era compensation
| schedules, i.e. the 8-hour work day. OK, it actually became
| shorter than before, but the main point is that software is
| not the same as machining shoes.
|
| There's a difference between how effective the OP is at being
| a team player/contributor, and a worm who tries climbing the
| social ladder with as little risk to his/her self which I
| believe you allude to. It seems to me the OP is not the
| ambitious type and found his place in the industrial matrix.
| taswellian wrote:
| > You only have one life, do something with it that is
| satisfying. Get out of the rat race.
|
| How?
|
| I find satisfaction in many things, but none of those things
| pay the bills or put food on the table.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| > >You only have one life, do something with it that is
| satisfying. Get out of the rat race.
|
| This is asking the wrong question. A few weeks ago I ran into
| quote on hackernews... [1]
|
| "Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a
| kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no
| longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I
| understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is
| just a kick."
|
| I hope I'm not stretching this too far as I'm not too good
| about explaining stuff like this. But, my take away is that
| you'll discover the things that pay the bills and the things
| that don't are one of the same. The difficulty of life is
| finding that peace.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29442307
| pmulard wrote:
| Just curious, but what career did you switch to? Also, congrats
| on finding more happiness :)
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| well put! I work in consulting for a large corporation and they
| pay for me more than 1000 Euro per day. I don't see much of
| that money but I can't really complain about my salary. It's
| pretty good (not SV-good, though). Now on average I'd say I
| work no more than 4 hours. Some days even less. Occasionally I
| feel proud of that and even brag about it to friends. But deep
| down I feel how this is just not making me happy. It's also not
| that I am lazy by any means. I think I am burned out to some
| extent. This mental state comes with an inability to use the
| rest of the work day. I spend it procrastinating - which is
| actually more tiring than working for whatever reason. During
| office times I thought this is because I have to multitask
| watching my back and having a solution at hand if somebody
| suddenly stands next to me. Now being in home office for more
| than a year it seems that the origin is more something like a
| spiritual conflict. I'm wasting my time. And I know I'm wasting
| it. At the same time I feel motivated to become more structured
| and diciplined so I can game my employer (which I do not
| respect for a couple of reasons) in a way benefiting me beyond
| my salary. Having said that I have been taking my car to a
| garage, doing shopping, reparing my bike or whatever during
| work time - so, technically, I do benefit. My g/f earns about a
| third of what I do while actually working a tough, stressful
| job in full time. Regularly when she leaves the house in the
| morning I sit there browsing the internet after the obligatory
| daily and I feel actually a bit ashamed when she sees that. I
| don't know ... but, yeah, thanks for your post - got me
| thinking.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| It appears we live much of the same life. I work 3 to 4 hours
| a day at best, and part of that is the standup. Wife works
| hard for 8+ hours a day and makes a third of my salary. I
| want to be productive but I just cant seem to do more hours
| than that. Even those hours of work are broken up.
|
| "his mental state comes with an inability to use the rest of
| the work day. I spend it procrastinating - which is actually
| more tiring than working for whatever reason"
|
| I feel the same way. Difference is I actually really like my
| employer and I still cant focus for more than a few hours a
| day.
| noduerme wrote:
| My regular work is similar. Some days I don't work at all.
| At most, 3-4 hours. But I think this is because nothing I'm
| working on is particularly urgent. I'm well ahead of
| deadlines.
|
| When I really get into my own side projects in code, the
| last of which I got heavily into about six months ago, I
| literally forget to eat or sleep and can go on 24-hour
| marathons - compulsively, without intending to, because I
| need to make something work. When there is a once-a-year
| crisis on my regular job, the same thing applies. It's
| actually beyond my control.
|
| I wish I could harness that level of motivation to e.g.
| take on 3x as many clients and expand my studio, but just
| thinking about that makes me shut down. I feel lazy when I
| spend a whole day reading news sites or something... or
| even engaging in hobbies like music. But I don't want the
| burden of 3x as much work that I _have_ to do. I earn low
| six figures and it seems enough.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| of course, the obligatory thing to consider is AD(H)D -
| which I do suffer from. anyway - interesting that you
| "really like your employer". do you also like the product
| and the work environment? looking back though it didn't
| seem to matter much for my productivity either. liking my
| employer can even complicate things further because then I
| feel guilt.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I do like the product. Issue might be that I see no value
| in what I do, the work I am doing is not going to change
| the world or make it a better place. I have felt this way
| about every job I have ever had. It will leave no lasting
| mark. I would love to leave tech but unfortunately the
| salary acts as golden handcuffs. I essentially waste 8
| hours a day sitting on a chair consuming internet garbage
| and its somewhat soul destroying.
| seb1204 wrote:
| Why not work on some public software project in your
| 'spare' time?
| raducu wrote:
| I used to work about 4 hours a day, sometimes not at all and
| felt terrible inside about myself.
|
| Then I got diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Concerta. The
| focus is not what I want, but the reduction of impulsivity is
| doing wonders.
|
| I started seeing the incompetent, manipulative and rude
| pieces of shit colleagues that I kept attracting (because of
| self immage and guilt) and that kept leaching on my time,
| interrupting me when it was obvious I had nothing to do with
| their problem(I do backend stuff and a coeague insisted I
| help her fix frontend stuff that doesn't work after the
| frontend did a deploy, the same for another system).
|
| I realize how I tolerated bullshit from low level
| management,how I caved in to their frowns and how I turned
| into their saviour tech wizard which only compounded my
| problem.
|
| How I tollerated their endless ramblings in meetings upon
| meetings where they decided nothing or bitterly protected
| their vagueness to kafquesques proportions.
|
| How I tollerated other peoples indecision and became
| indecisive myself, because I thought I could not do stuff
| without them.
|
| How I've ignored my own emotions and needs and played it all
| logical when people were playing emotional games.
|
| And now with my impulsivity under control, I work a lot
| longer and stress free, because I can control my impulses so
| I'm not affraid to answer ironically but still professionally
| to an agressive email, or to say "guys I have no taks" ...
| "guys, I asked you for a task yesterday and guess what, I got
| it by telling your superior that I asked for work and you did
| not have any, he was delighted to get me in contact with this
| product owner who has a full backlog".
|
| This makes me so glad and so sad at the same time. This
| explains why other people were cold and "mean" to these
| people.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "My g/f earns about a third of what I do while actually
| working a tough, stressful job in full time"
|
| There is only one thing i learned, life is deeply unfair,
| meritocracy is a myth, and noone knows why most things are
| the way they are.
| arpanetus wrote:
| well, if someone is a janitor, and the other one is a
| software developer, can you actually compare them properly?
|
| if so, then training somebody to become a SEng involves
| more costs, than training smb to mop a floor.
|
| the guy u responding didn't mention the job his gf does,
| thus assuming that she's the same software dev, would be a
| wrong thing to do, i believe.
|
| besides that, she even may obtain the same level, the same
| set of skills as he does, thus she also has the same
| opportunity as he does.
|
| that being said there is nothing to discuss about
| meritocracy, yet i agree with the fact that things are not
| that meritocratic as we want them to be. why? because there
| is always an asymmetry in a market, and contracts may
| always have some flaws (for e.g.: lemon market).
|
| i perceive the case of him since he's not that tired as his
| gf is. that's just the basic compassion that one wants to
| feel, and even empathy.
| oakfr wrote:
| I am with you on most of your points, but definitely not on the
| "normal and mostly acceptable".
|
| The truth of our domain is that you can get great work done in
| 3-4 hours a day (I am referring to deep work here, not
| meetings). In fact, most of us become much less productive
| beyond that. The remaining hours can/should be spent on useful
| meetings, reading, learning new things, chatting to people
| about things, etc.
|
| Coasting from a standup to the next with zero work in between
| is definitely not normal (_if done on a regular basis_) and the
| sign that something is not right in your current situation.
|
| You may find it OK right now and for years on end. But you're
| likely going to pay a hefty bill for this many years down the
| road. I am not saying you should live Elon's life. But finding
| something meaningful to do with your life should be a goal, I
| believe.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > I am with you on most of your points, but definitely not on
| the "normal and mostly acceptable".
|
| The "normal" part is easy to disprove: If everyone was doing
| near zero work and lying their way through standup about it,
| nothing would ever get done. That may be normal in certain
| zombie organizations, but those organizations can't last
| forever without people doing actual work. _Somebody_ is doing
| the work, even if the OP isn 't.
|
| > Coasting from a standup to the next with zero work in
| between is definitely not normal (_if done on a regular
| basis_) and the sign that something is not right in your
| current situation.
|
| The part about doing nothing all day and then lying their way
| through standup stood out to me.
|
| Like you said, we all know that programmers aren't hands-to-
| keyboard programming for 8 straight hours every day, nor do
| we expect that. However, we do expect that everyone is
| putting in similar amounts of effort to their peers.
|
| I'm surprised how many comments here are justifying the zero-
| work behavior because the manager hasn't caught on yet. This
| doesn't mean the work disappears. It means the person's
| teammates have to pick up the slack and carry the project
| forward without the OP.
|
| Working with a deadbeat teammate is an awful experience. If
| you need to get anything done, the only way forward is to
| plead with them to get some work done, or just do it
| yourself. More often than not, the team ends up doing it
| themselves.
|
| We've all been stuck with deadbeat team mates, from group
| projects in school to the workplace. It's not okay to be the
| deadbeat teammate.
| marktangotango wrote:
| > However, we do expect that everyone is putting in similar
| amounts of effort to their peers.
|
| I think there's a distinction here between two types of
| "work" (at least). Work that moves the product/business
| forward in tangible ways, in addition to just adding
| features (decrease down time, reliable repeatable
| deployments, reproducible, easy to understand
| configuration, fast bug remediation) and work that doesn't.
|
| I think we've all experienced teams who switch frameworks
| and libraries at a whim, or worse yet, adopted entirely new
| languages "just because". They usually don't ask
| permission, or if they do the sell the decision makers on
| some hula balu about "increase productivety" or whatever
| when they really just want to use new cool X. Or howabout
| the frontend teams that switch naming conventions, and
| never rename the old stuff before starting another naming
| convention?
|
| The point being there are a lot of developers who waste a
| lot of time "working" on things that just don't matter. The
| business never asked for it, it serves no purpose or real
| need other than to scratch someones itch (or build their
| resume). I maintain if wasting time doing nothing is
| "stealing" from the company, then so is this.
| Retric wrote:
| This isn't about dead beat team members, this is about not
| having enough work to do which can happen for various
| reasons. Sometimes companies just want redundancy and don't
| care if that costs real money. Other times a team is built
| and just gets less work than expected and or people are
| simply more productive. And of course, if you actually want
| to make important deadlines you want be conservative in how
| much work the team takes on.
|
| Finally if you get a 10x person but don't have 10x the
| stuff to do they often spend a lot of time twiddling their
| thumbs. You could keep giving them a larger share of work,
| but that's hardly fair and you don't want to reduce staff
| in case that person quits.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| > those organizations can't last forever without people
| doing actual work.
|
| Maybe not no work, but very little work, they can last a
| very long time.
|
| >This doesn't mean the work disappears.
|
| It may have never existed in the first place.
| spaced-out wrote:
| >Working with a deadbeat teammate is an awful experience.
| If you need to get anything done, the only way forward is
| to plead with them to get some work done, or just do it
| yourself. More often than not, the team ends up doing it
| themselves.
|
| I've never had this issue with the projects I've managed.
|
| Create a doc/Jira for the project, including timelines and
| tasks. Allocate tasks to all teammates. Daily/weekly go
| through those tasks, updating progress. If timelines are
| being held back by someone, I'm going to make management
| aware because I'm not taking the fall. If they're not then
| I don't care.
| ConfessionTime wrote:
| >However! I will say that this way of working and living comes
| with some significant hazard to your mental health. Doing
| something you don't like, care about, or believe in for decades
| long periods of time can really mess with your sense of self
| worth and happiness in life. You only have one life, do
| something with it that is satisfying. Get out of the rat race.
|
| This is where my comment about remote work comes into play.
| When I worked in an office, I spent most of the day just
| entertaining myself on the internet. That isn't great for long-
| term mental health. Now that I am working from home I can put
| in the same level of work while spending the rest of my work
| day in more satisfying ways as long as I keep an eye on my
| Slack and email for urgent issues. I can't imagine ever
| returning to an office in which there is more pressure to spend
| 8 hours a day sitting in front of my computer.
|
| I have thought about switching careers a few times over the
| years. However anything I would want to switch to would require
| a big pay cut. My relatively high salary as a software
| developer is what enables the rest of my life. Maintaining that
| lifestyle is my priority as that is where I find my happiness.
| somethoughts wrote:
| As a SW developer you provide two benefits to the company:
|
| - the build phase: develop spaghetti code
|
| - the maintain/insurance phase: maintain the spaghetti code
| and keep it up to date with the software package dependencies
| required by the spaghetti code
|
| In the long term its easier/cheaper to have the person who
| originally wrote the spaghetti code be around to maintain and
| add one off small feature improvements to it (i.e. ensure
| log4j patches are handled properly) than to find/hire/train a
| new developer every time a 0day patch needs to be applied.
| thow-58d4e8b wrote:
| There's one more reason - the one I use to rationalize my
| idleness to myself: in addition to our work output, the
| corporations are also paying us to be a part of their
| "reserve army". We might work 3-4 hours a day, but when
| things escalate, the company taps into its reserves to get
| stuff done. Having doldrums about that is like soldiers
| worrying they only spend 3 hours a day in combat
| somethoughts wrote:
| That reminds me of this article for some reason :)
|
| "Google has a secret 'bench' program that keeps execs at
| the company even when they're not leading anything"
|
| https://venturebeat.com/2015/05/09/google-has-a-secret-
| bench...
|
| I think another way to frame the role of a SW developer
| is you are in a sense a manager of a new "team".
|
| But instead of developing new hire training material and
| recruiting/managing people to do the new task, you've
| developed/trained/created/deployed software
| programs/scripts/bots to do what needs to get done for
| the organization.
|
| While infinitely easier than dealing with HR problems
| that humans bring along, your team of programs/bots still
| needs some manager.
|
| And just like a traditional manager, if you set up your
| "team of bots" just right and handle all the corner cases
| in the training manuals, a good managers job will
| actually ideally not be that hard day to day particularly
| since the meatspace problems have been abstracted away.
| irrational wrote:
| > Doing something you don't like, care about, or believe in for
| decades long periods of time can really mess with your sense of
| self worth and happiness in life.
|
| Well, I love programming. I'd just rather work on my own
| personal projects than the boring stuff the business wants me
| to work on. Fortunately I can get done what the company wants
| me to do in a few hours a day and then write code for my own
| projects.
| etskinner wrote:
| One thing I've found helpful to combat boredom is this: In
| the absence of deadlines or people nagging you to do
| something, pick the task you want to do most (or dislike the
| least), or the task that is most interesting rather than the
| task that's oldest or some other measure. That way, you're
| still chipping away at your to-do list, but you're happier to
| do it.
| bennysomething wrote:
| What did you switch to? I keep thinking I want to be an
| electrician or carpenter
| globalise83 wrote:
| How does work allocation take place in your organisation? Does
| your team not decide itself who will do what work? If they do,
| and you are not being given any work to do, that probably
| reflects the level of esteem for your productivity held by the
| rest of your team. They aren't willing to "dob you in" to
| management, but they don't respect your professional ability,
| which would be intolerable for anyone with self-respect. If they
| don't, well fair enough, the problem is not really with you but
| with whoever in your management allocates your work and holds you
| accountable. In that case I don't blame you for only doing what
| you are asked to.
| arasx wrote:
| Software engineering is one of the easiest jobs out there from an
| ability to track your output standpoint. I think a lot of the
| commenters implying "if you have 10 hours to cut down a tree, use
| the 9 to sharpen your ax" and using that to argue against code-
| line-output != productivity. Certainly in cases where you need to
| put a lot of thinking or research to come up with a very elegant
| solution in a few lines, no one can argue you have been
| productive. But more often than not, we work on simple CRUD or
| basic apps that were stretched among hours, flying under radar
| from one stand up to the next, like you mentioned.
|
| It's a common problem so you are not the only one. Especially in
| large teams, or teams that are run by PM's who are not very savvy
| to open the hood and understand what had been going on. In most
| of the opposite cases, it's also awkward for some managers to
| challenge what you have produced in a day. It starts more on the
| foot of discovering: is there another mental block with the
| employee, are they having motivation issues (maybe you fall into
| this group), is there a training/onboarding issue? And I have
| seen first hand, most of the time - they give up and mediocre
| output continues.
|
| Laziness/talent/ethics of it is not our place to comment for you
| - but it sounds like this would be a boring job to continue. Sure
| you can make good money and live a comfortable life, but I can't
| fathom if it would be fulfilling in the long run for me. Find
| what stirs your passion and try to apply to work. You have the
| luxury to do so.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I usually book time with JIRA in hours so there is a small mark-
| up when I round say 45 minutes to 1 hour. But I'd say it's not
| off too much from reality. My company also doesn't force us to
| "work" 8 hours.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I work for myself and most of my days are lazy. Today i spent
| most of it on reddit. Programming is the job of automating your
| job, if you do it right you shouldn't have much work. In an
| office environment, i easily tune into the collective LARPing of
| being busy.
| bradlys wrote:
| This varies a lot on the job. I can guarantee you'd spend more
| time at my current place. In fact, half of that time you're
| currently spending would be at least on interviewing people - and
| another half would be on the mandatory meetings.
|
| You'd easily spend a lot more time on the projects. Many of my
| coworkers work nights and weekends. It's not uncommon to see
| people starting around 8-9am and logging off around 7pm for a
| regular schedule. And then pressure hits and weekend work starts
| showing up too.
|
| It's gonna vary so much by your place of employment. I'm gonna
| guess you don't do any project work or significant projects and
| management is entirely disengaged.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| You and your co-workers are working too hard and need to press
| back against it.
| sneak wrote:
| "working too hard" is an individual decision, and these
| people have lots of job mobility - they have opted in to this
| particular circumstance.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| why
| bradlys wrote:
| Why so much work? Understaffed orgs and exceedingly high
| expectations of engineers. A lot of management has no social
| life or life outside of work - so they expect the same of
| their subordinates.
|
| I'll move on after a year or two. I just wanted some name
| brand recognition and to give the company a chance. I was
| tired of going with unknown places.
| paxys wrote:
| Not why so much work, but rather why do you put up with it?
|
| I've never understood how companies like this can still
| exist in today's job environment. Does everyone get paid
| significantly more than market rate or have equity doubling
| in value every quarter or something?
| f6v wrote:
| The parent said how. I know a company where people are
| forced to come on weekend, get underpaid, and work on
| patents filed under someone else's name. Just because
| it's a well-known company and looks good on the CV.
| paxys wrote:
| From my experience it isn't companies like Google or
| Microsoft running these tech sweatshops. Large
| prestigious companies generally have great work life
| balance and take care of their employees. It's the bottom
| tier ones who get away with hiring desperate talent and
| exploit them.
| bradlys wrote:
| I will say - people here are not chronically underpaid.
| It depends a lot on how the stock is doing but a lot of
| people here are from pre-IPO. So, it's not uncommon for
| people to have a 7-figure TC. The company basically 50x'd
| its valuation in <3 years. So, even if you got a kinda
| not-so-great amount of stock back when you joined, you
| still are getting a ton of money.
|
| For newer candidates such as myself who joined post-IPO,
| the pay is definitely nowhere near competitive for the
| level of effort. I'm making a good amount but I'd say
| it's closer to average-slightly-below for FAANG but it's
| also my first big name. I didn't have a competing offer
| to push that could push them to the top of the band or
| into the next level. My offer was for about $360K
| recurring TC (I have ~8years of xp). Now, it's worth like
| $330K because the market went down so hard but just a
| month ago... It was $450K. So, the stock is _very_
| tumultuous and frustrating to deal with. I wish I had
| joined a Google or something because my last company IPO
| 'd but the stock tanked 75% since IPO. I've held the
| entire time and am wondering if this shit is gonna be a
| penny-stock now. I went from thinking I could buy a home
| in the next year or two to "well, I'm fucking nowhere and
| I spent nearly $100k on those options. FML."
|
| A lot of my peers have been here before IPO and are
| putting up with the shit because they make so much money.
| A lot of people here are making crazy money even if they
| joined just a month before IPO because it 3x+ just before
| they listed. The people who are post-IPO (like myself)
| tend to put up with it because it's their first big name
| - although blind leads me to believe a lot of people
| quit... Just not from my immediate team. We'll see. I'm
| surprised no one has left on my team in the 6 months I've
| been here.
|
| I'm in SV, obviously.
| f6v wrote:
| Keep in mind not everything is in SV.
| icedchai wrote:
| This is not uncommon. I know developers who pace themselves,
| either by doing less than they are actually capable, or
| alternatively, simply get more work done than they talk about in
| their standup and save it up, so there is something to talk about
| the next day, etc.
|
| It doesn't help that many of the folks involved (scrum masters,
| PMs) are utterly clueless. If you have a particularly weak team,
| you may not even need to pace yourself... just do whatever.
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| Early in my career, at larger companies, I saw some of this but I
| had the opposite problem in smaller companies. It's one of the
| reasons I left tech - too many clients with unrealistic
| expectations.
|
| I do recall briefly a (publicly traded) company where there would
| be weeks of almost nothing to do and then a frenetic rush to
| implement whatever had come down from on high. Guess you've got
| to decide what you want in your career... for many people if they
| can coast along and make good money, it's a good deal. My concern
| in that scenario would be what happens when the company hits a
| rough patch or gets bought out and you find yourself a 50
| something who has been semi retired in place for a decade.
| ok_dad wrote:
| I did that at my last job and it was torture because I always
| felt like I was going to be fired after they figured it out. Now
| I have a job where I work at least 4 to 6 hours a day on code and
| that's about all I think a normal person can handle because I
| focus very well during that time and after those few hours I just
| get sloppy and tired. My boss here says I'm way ahead of the
| curve after a few months and everyone thinks I'm some 10x
| engineer, but I really just put in a bit of effort. I rarely have
| meetings here so my days are pretty short.
|
| All that to say that I do think most programmers do about 10
| hours a week of coding because maybe either they have too many
| meetings or that's just what's expected in general.
| vmception wrote:
| If you were paid hourly and billed for more hours then you
| worked, then yes it is a problem
|
| If you are paid to never create anything for yourself during a
| chunk of hours, using resources made available to you, in
| exchange for money, perks, community, access to licensed
| software, then its fine. Just deliver what you said you would
| deliver, on time. And move on.
| honkycat wrote:
| This is something I have said before: Some people just stop
| working after a few months. And I don't think they mean to, I
| just think they learn helplessness and don't do any work anymore.
| Motivation can be difficult to maintain.
|
| I know someone who is "leading" an internal initiative I got
| STUCK on currently who is like that. Nice guy, talks a good game,
| but when the rubber meets the road, he has not delivered in any
| capacity. Not even in the technical implementation capacity, the
| easiest part of the project.
|
| I saw another person at my last company who did absolutely
| nothing, but was VERY present in meetings and constantly battling
| other people who trying to improve stuff. Then you do `git blame`
| on the code-bases and you don't see their fingerprints ANYWHERE.
|
| It was a problem throughout the company, to the point they
| introduced a ton of really strict agile processes to micro-manage
| points and work. Guess what? The bullshitters played that system
| successfully too.
|
| It is common. And it is hard to detect from a management
| perspective. They don't know what ad-hoc
| meetings/reading/research/other work is happening, so it is hard
| to pin people down when they are not working.
|
| I've actually mentioned this before in a previous comment[0].
|
| > Are most of us secretly lying about how much we are working?
|
| My motto is 3 good hours a day is an excellent day. You can't
| really realistically expect more from yourself. I consider
| anything over that a nice bonus.
|
| > Do people regularly run into coworkers like me during their
| career and simply ignore it because they find it too awkward to
| criticize them? Have I just been incredibly lucky and every boss
| I have had is too incompetent to notice?
|
| I have regularly run into people who do 0 work during their
| career, and I just tolerate them. One, because I have seen it
| enough to know it is normal. Two, because it isn't worth burning
| my social capital to attack that person. Like... what do I care?
| It's your manager's problem, not my problem. I just think it is
| hard to quantify.
|
| 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28069689
| psim1 wrote:
| Not only do you do very little work and get rewarded nicely for
| it, you post about your laziness on HN and get rewarded for it
| through praise and upvotes. Obviously you are doing well for
| yourself. But I am glad I do not work with you.
| vanusa wrote:
| _Are most of us secretly lying about how much we are working?_
|
| Maybe many of us are.
|
| But the bigger lie by far is the allegedly meritocratic standard
| of performance we are held to -- to be always relentlessly
| efficient, always "on" and in love with what we do, always
| striving to be in the top 10 percent of our pile, always keeping
| tabs on the latest shiny, etc. Meanwhile the years slip past, our
| relationships falter, the commute is the same damn commute (or if
| you're WFH the chair is the same damn chair). And while our
| salaries are above median, we aren't the ones really getting rich
| off the work we do.
|
| So it shouldn't be -- in the least -- surprising that some of
| fall into that "fuck all y'all, I'm just going to coast" mode. In
| some cases permanently.
| [deleted]
| williamdclt wrote:
| I don't know about "most of us", but certainely not all of us. I
| work a solid 7h a weekday (not all of which is at 100%
| productivity, but all of which is work), and I know for a fact my
| colleagues work at least as much as I do (I personally think most
| of them work too much).
|
| And I seriously doubt you'd be able to reach anywhere near an
| acceptable output working <= 10h a week in the sort of company I
| work at, no matter how good you are. I don't mean that my company
| is special, it's a pretty standard start-up environment, but I
| mean that it probably depends a lot on what company you work for
| rather than being a "developer thing". I recon that a lot of big
| corporates have no idea the sort of people they're hiring and do
| not have a feedback loop to assess performance.
|
| Personally, it makes me uncomfortable to think that there might
| be so many other people with this mindset around, lying to
| coworkers and doing the absolute minimum to get by. In my current
| role, I feel passionate about what we're building and being a
| startup, we need to maximise efficiency: I'd have zero remorse
| flagging that somebody is doing close to nothing when everybody
| else is so involved and relying on each other to do their job. In
| a corporate environment, I suppose I'd either join you or quit
| out of lack of respect for coworkers and company.
| condorito wrote:
| In 20 years of doing development I can count with one hand the
| cases where promotions and salary increases went to the best
| performers. In most cases they went for those that befriended
| management.
|
| I worked my ass off for almost 20 years. But later than sooner I
| learnt. Now I coast.
|
| Work hard if you want, slack if you want too. The defining factor
| for your success is who you are "friends" with.
| victorbstan wrote:
| I work a pretty good average of 40h/week. Not sure what you're
| talking about.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Story time! :)
|
| When I was a kid, sitting in a rear row of classroom I felt
| invulnerable. Chatting with other kids, reading a book, playing
| with pencil and eraser, there was NO way teacher could POSSIBLY
| know what I am doing. Not when there were so many rows of other
| kids between us!
|
| Decades later I visited a elementary classroom as an adult. I was
| shocked... it was tiny! I could practically reach the last row. I
| could see, in exquisite amount of detail, EVERYthing that
| happened in that room. Everything.
|
| ---
|
| As a system administrator for 15+ years, I had weeks where I
| worked 40-60-80 even 100hrs. But most weeks, I did not work quite
| as hard.
|
| Then I became a team lead, then a manager... and I have far more
| awareness of my team members than I thought was possible. At the
| end of the day, I care about targets, plan, deliverables,
| ownership. If you and the team are meeting those, I am far from
| the micro-manager who cares exactly how you spend every minute of
| every day. It's up to me to ensure you are challenged, motivated,
| productive, and delivering; and if I need you to work harder and
| deliver more, it's up to me to set that expectations and hold you
| accountable. If I don't... it's 100% fair game for you to do what
| is required, meet expectations, and nothing more if you're happy
| with where you are and don't desire growth.
| chad_strategic wrote:
| Thanks for the post.
|
| I think when I first started programming I figured this out at my
| first real coding job. After about 3 months, organized the code,
| streamlined systems, met the needs of the stakeholders, reduced
| interruptions, pushed more responsibility back to the account
| managers, and provide a sense of security and trust to the owners
| of the company. (oddly enough I was the only developer) After
| that was established, the company had a meeting on Monday morning
| that I initiated. Once that was done, there were times I wouldn't
| get an email/phone call for the rest of the week.
|
| Keep in mind, rolling into this job I was a combat vet, and for
| what it's worth an MBA as well. I just have an innate sense of
| how to cut to the chase and get the job so I can sit back and
| reap the rewards of the front-loading work. It's when I get bored
| that I get in trouble. Even since 2014 I always seem to have some
| side works/side projects going because well I like to be
| challenged. It probably also helps that I don't really want a
| career in software engineering, so lately I have been just
| working on contract work.
| ineptech wrote:
| Long time manager here. I call this "work-shy" and it is neither
| ubiquitous nor rare, I'd guess about 10%-20% of all employees,
| and it's certainly not unique to software or even to white-collar
| work. You should think of this as a problem. Even if it's not for
| your boss or your teammates (and it will be, eventually), it is
| for you. It is soul-crushing to fill up the hours. Two pieces of
| advice:
|
| 1) The "good" solution is to find some work you actually give a
| shit about. If you can't force yourself to care about corporate
| software, work on an indie video game, or get a job at Amnesty
| International, or find some other way to get personally invested
| in your work product. If you can't find it doing software, become
| a chef, or build houses, or whatever. It will improve your life
| immeasurably to spend your day doing something you get intrinsic
| satisfaction from instead of websurfing.
|
| 2) The "bad" solution, more like managing the problem really, is
| to get good at using Pomodoro timers, to-do lists, and other
| crutches to force yourself to do enough to not fall behind. "Fall
| behind" in this context does not mean that you do so little work
| that everyone notices and calls you out on it, it means that you
| stop keeping up with new frameworks and new tools and the years
| march by and your skills atrophy and then your employer folds and
| you find pushing 50 in an ageist industry with weak skills and
| few options.
|
| Hope this is helpful.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > You should think of this as a problem. Even if it's not for
| your boss or your teammates (and it will be, eventually), it is
| for you
|
| Low output engineers can often coast for years before something
| forces them back on to the job market. Usually, routine layoffs
| force companies to take a hard look at who's producing and
| who's not, at which point the lowest productivity individuals
| are the most likely to be cut.
|
| This is where the real problems begin: If someone has spent
| years or even a decade doing very little actual work, they're
| now effectively years behind their peers with similar career
| lengths. Even if they could cram enough to skate through
| interviews, they can struggle when forced to work at normal
| productivity levels in a normal organization. Years of
| accumulated habits can be hard to break.
|
| I've interviewed a significant number of employees who (I
| suspect) fit this mold: They landed an easy job at a big
| company that didn't look too closely at their output, spent
| years coasting while doing little work as possible, but then
| something forces them out of the job and into interviews at
| other companies. It's surreal to speak to someone with a decade
| of confirmed experience but a level of knowledge equivalent to
| what I see out of the average motivated college graduate.
| quesera wrote:
| This is so true.
|
| Early in my career, I was in a big organization, surrounded
| by people like this. Our direct manager was not competent to
| assess their work output on any technical level. He might not
| have cared anyway, since the true measure of management is
| how large your pool of subordinates is.
|
| It was truly soul-sucking to be surrounded by such
| mediocrity. I'm all for work-life balance, but having
| counterparts who accomplish so little is demoralizing.
|
| I can almost convince myself that there's a strategy in it --
| with 15 people doing the work of 3 people, a very large bus
| accident will probably have very little impact on business
| operations.
|
| It killed me though. I left and went into consulting for a
| few years. Then startups, where 3 people are expected to do
| the work of 15. Which can be its own problem, of course!
|
| The aforementioned co-workers? Still at the same place, and
| honestly they're probably pretty safe (financial industry,
| revenue is barely affected by macro economy). Goodness help
| them if they ever need a new job.
|
| EDIT: Nowadays, I hire and manage people. My expectation of
| the team is to be "productive" about 20hrs/wk, ebbing and
| flowing according to personal life flux, but making an honest
| attempt to give the rest of us enough to rely on.
|
| I hope to hire the kinds of people who will use some part of
| the remaining time to reflect on how to improve something,
| somewhere -- sometimes including our work product or
| processes. This is where the interesting stuff happens, when
| it does.
| medvezhenok wrote:
| The alternative is to embrace minimalism / the FIRE lifestyle
| and hopefully skate by long enough to not have to work by the
| time the company folds and live off of investments -> then into
| retirement).
|
| I think most "underwork" on the job is a motivational issue and
| stems from one of a few overlapping reasons: 1) No way to
| promotion/advancement (dead end job) 2) Overqualified and bored
| 3) Unclear goals, no feedback, and/or undiagnosed ADHD. 4) None
| or negative social value to the job - for example selling shady
| financial products to seniors (so that slacking becomes a
| social good)
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I actually think that other than underwork you might have to
| hire people that you have enough "burst" performance but
| regularly don't have to do much.
|
| There is a real example with global markets like the stock
| market. Most trades are done electronically but, if those
| electronic systems fail you can activate an automatic backup
| system which is a bunch of traders on a trading floor.
|
| Hypothetically the recent Facebook outage could have been
| minimized by just having a security guard that could open and
| close a door. I know that DNS propagation would have still
| fixed it and yes the AS systems would had to have time to
| propagate but it still would have been a better solution.
| politician wrote:
| > Unclear goals, no feedback, and/or undiagnosed ADHD
|
| This makes me wonder how many people who secretly believe
| they may have undiagnosed ADHD are actually suffering from
| unclear goals and no feedback.
| ineptech wrote:
| Sure, but you could also find a job you like better and
| embrace FIRE doing that.
| oakfr wrote:
| I've read about the FIRE theory time and again. For some
| reason, I don't buy it. I fail to believe in the plan that
| consists in building enough FU money to then "be free".
|
| Free to do what? What was the plan originally?
|
| I think the real meaning of life is to do what you care about
| today, _with the constraints you have today_.
| FooHentai wrote:
| (I think) very few people intrinsically want to work for
| someone else, in pursuit of someone elses goals, for
| monetary compensation. Most people do that because the
| monetary compensation allows them to meet their basic needs
| and pursue their own goals in turn. In this context, 'be
| free' means chopping out that extra step and removing the
| need to work for someone else - You have the necessary
| means and can now pursue whatever goals you personally have
| independent of needing continual financial input from an
| employer, for which in return you must dedicate 40+ hours
| of each week.
|
| For some people, they might start their own business and be
| their own employer. Others might still go for part-time
| work in something they enjoy but couldn't support them
| financially. Others might remain in full-time employment
| because knowing they can quit at any point removes a large
| stressor and makes the work itself enjoyable. Others might
| move to a shack in the woods and spend their time growing
| food and posting drivel on the internet.
|
| Edit: I've missed out here people who genuinely want to be
| a small cog in a large machine, working towards a greater
| collaborative goal e.g. someone working at spacex. That has
| to be a pretty big motivator for some people in some
| sectors.
| kelnos wrote:
| Being free might mean that you take a traditional full-time
| job, if doing so is the best way to "do what you care about
| today". But the great thing is that you can take that job
| without all the normal financial stress that goes with it,
| and with the knowledge that you can just quit if you don't
| like it or end up with a bad manager.
|
| Aside from that, though, I really think you should step
| back and try to reexamine "life". Why does life have to
| revolve around "work"? Why do people define themselves by
| what they do professionally? The world is very rich, and I
| personally don't find it very hard to find meaning outside
| of a job (traditional or otherwise).
|
| I get that a lot of people who go the traditional route end
| up retiring at 65 or whatever, and then have no idea what
| to do with themselves for the rest of their lives, and that
| adding another 10, 20, or more years to that retirement
| period sounds scary. I think of this as a result of
| societal brainwashing. From a young age we're asked what we
| want to do when we grow up, and then during much of our
| teens we are pushed hard to pick a university, pick a
| major, and pick a career. And this is right while our
| brains are still developing; the focus on employment
| fundamentally affects the shape of our minds for the rest
| of our lives.
|
| Free to do what, you ask? Literally anything. Learn how to
| play an instrument, join or form a local band, and play at
| coffee shops, bars, whatever. Learn new languages and
| travel (or just travel!). Get involved with your community,
| whether that's youth outreach, volunteering to help
| homeless people, or whatever you like. If you're a software
| developer, get involved with (or start your own) open
| source projects. Attack that ever-growing stack of books
| you keep telling yourself you're going to read but never
| seem to find the time. Find and grow new hobbies, whatever
| they may be, especially those that have nothing to do with
| your former job. Commit to improving your physical fitness
| by doing something (running, lifting, a martial art, etc.)
| for a certain number of hours per week. Go back to school
| and learn things you thought were too impractical to make a
| living off of back when you were 18. If you're a parent,
| you can spend a ton more time with your kids (raising a
| child is more than a full-time job anyway).
|
| There is enough in this world to fill multiple lifetimes,
| and restricting yourself to spending 40 hours a day drawing
| a paycheck is a very small part of the possibilities.
| Relying on a job to define ourselves and fill our time is
| the easy way out because it "automatically" takes up half
| of our waking hours (or more). I get that it can feel like
| a daunting task to figure out what to do with all that
| extra time, but I can't believe it wouldn't be worth it to
| do so.
| oakfr wrote:
| Thank you for your reply. I found it very profound and
| insightful.
| kelnos wrote:
| I'm glad you found it helpful! One thing to add that just
| occurred to me: filling your waking hours with a job is
| "easy" because a full-time job usually takes up a large
| amount of our free time (half or more!). If you don't
| have the job, it might be hard (or even impossible) to
| find just one thing that fills up your time to that
| degree.
|
| So when a person who is fully employed might in addition
| have one or two other activities that they use to fill up
| the rest of their time, a person with no job might have
| to come up with 10 or 15 other activities. I can get why
| that might seem daunting... the can be a lot of mental
| overhead just deciding what you want to _do_ , and then
| some overhead around organizing that time and keeping up
| with your various activities. So I can see why that might
| be a little off-putting as well. But to me, I think it's
| worth it. And with a larger amount of smaller things that
| you do, it's probably easier to stop doing one and find
| something else if you decide you're tired of it. Much
| easier than changing jobs, at any rate.
| ConfessionTime wrote:
| It is interesting the number of people who see this as a
| problem that needs to be fixed. Since this specific comment is
| near the top, I might as well address that here.
|
| Why should I work more? How will that improve my life? My self-
| worth is derived from what I do outside of work to the extent
| that I don't prioritize professional validation. The primary
| reason I work is for money. I make enough money that I can live
| a comfortable life, I have few material wants, and I can be
| generous with my money. I am on pace to likely be able to
| retire in my mid-50s. I recognize that I likely could be making
| more money if I worked harder, but it wouldn't be proportional
| because compensation is not tied closely to production for
| individual contributors. A 50% increase in effort won't yield a
| 50% salary increase. Most of the added value from my increased
| effort would be captured by people above me in the org chart
| and our company's stockholders.
|
| As it currently stands, I don't find it that difficult to find
| a new job. I do spend some time keeping up with the industry, I
| am on HN after all, which tells you I care more about software
| development as a skill than some of my coworkers. It isn't that
| I dislike the profession, I simply don't see the reward in
| working harder primarily for the financial benefit of other
| people.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| The OP wasn't asking about working harder. They specifically
| said that they BS their way through standups to deceive their
| peers and manager into thinking that they're working, while
| often doing zero work at all:
|
| > There are literally days in which the only time I spend on
| my job is the few minutes it takes to attend the morning
| stand-up. Then I successfully bullshit my way through our
| next stand-up to hide my lack of production.
|
| At that point, it's not about grinding harder or going above
| and beyond. This is a problem of misleading everyone around
| you.
|
| It's not just the company that suffers. These situations
| usually result in the rest of the team having to pick up the
| slack to get things done. The person doing little to no work
| is taking advantage of their peers' productivity.
| moonchrome wrote:
| >It's not just the company that suffers. These situations
| usually result in the rest of the team having to pick up
| the slack to get things done. The person doing little to no
| work is taking advantage of their peers' productivity
|
| Had a gig like this, the codebase was so shit it took days
| to do simple stuff, it was highly domain specific logic I
| cared nothing about and I was going to leave ASAP.
|
| Most of the time l bulshited my way through turns out a lot
| of the features got scrapped because they weren't necessary
| in the first place (ie. there was another way to do it for
| eg. or client didn't really need it), requirements got
| updated that would have made any progress I did
| worthless,etc. There were two crunch weeks before releases
| where I did some OT to help push stuff out the door (wasn't
| even my backlog) other than that yeah - did two months of
| work in 6 months I was there.
| abledon wrote:
| but what if his 5-10 hours are equivalent in output to the
| 40 hrs of his coworkers?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I guarantee his 0 hour days (mentioned in the post) are
| infinitely less productive than his peers' 8 hour days.
|
| In the real world, someone who is 4-8X more productive
| than their peers is also significantly more senior and
| therefore paid significantly more. You don't see seasoned
| experts on the same teams as inexperienced juniors all
| getting paid the same.
|
| In my experience, the best team cohesion happens when
| everyone is putting in similar amounts of effort.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Seasoned expert here. I think your reasoning is just
| wishfull thinking.
|
| What if the seasonal expert is the 5 minutes work person,
| and the juniors the 5 hour work people (yeah, I said 4
| hours because I don't believe any developer can output 6+
| hours per day consistently)
|
| On the other hand, as a seasoned expert, I sometimes
| solve an issue in 5 minutes which took a junior a day to
| still not figure it out.
| winterplace wrote:
| How many years of experience would you put to seasoned
| expert?
| abledon wrote:
| yeah, but maybe each of his 1 hours on his 5 hour work
| day, is more productive than the 8 hours of the coworker.
| e.g. code-reuse instead of bloating system with
| unnecessary classes/interfaces/designpatterns
|
| > You don't see seasoned experts on the same teams as
| inexperienced juniors all getting paid the same.
|
| But don't you? There are tons of accounts now of juniors
| joining and getting inflation adjusted salaries, and a
| loyal old dog discovering that his 'high salary' is
| actually just a smidgen above what this new young buck is
| getting
| throwthroyaboat wrote:
| I guess one thing that hasn't been clarified is how much time
| you spend dedicated work, v.s. actually working? Possibly the
| OP is assuming that you are only putting in effort 5-10
| hours, but still at your desk (or equivalent) for the
| remaining 30-35, which is the soul-crushing waste-of-time
| part. If you are literally only spending 5-10 hours on work a
| week, and the remainder on avocational activities that you
| find fulling, then that sounds pretty ideal.
| prh8 wrote:
| Just want to say that I am the same as pretty much everything
| you said. Job is to make for a good life.
|
| I will also say, most discussion usually paints the devs not
| working as much as less productive, whether explicitly or
| implicitly. But that isn't necessarily true either. I'm the
| top contributor for this calendar year at my company (public
| but not F500, about 100 developers) but averaging ~4 hours a
| day of actual work.
| wilkommen wrote:
| 4 hours of real work per day by someone who is already good
| at their domain is a whole lot of work, in my experience.
| throw54679 wrote:
| >Why work more?
|
| I founded a company and we were successful, but we really
| tried to continue the momentum. We had a group of 7-10
| engineers, built over time and strenuously recruited and
| managed. And we have plateaued over the past 5 years. Now
| looking back I realized that probably a lot of the engineers
| had an attitude similar to what you describe. So they really
| ended up damaging their co-workers, because less growth at
| the company means limited advancement and less money all
| around, some layoffs during tough times, worse company
| culture, etc. It also wasted some of my professional time,
| because I am passionate about the industry and want to
| accomplish something in it.
|
| Do you feel bad when the Product Manager is eagerly
| contacting you and trying to pull together all requirements
| and engineering estimates for the next sprint, or whatever,
| that you are sandbagging that person's career?
|
| Now, I know what all the HN burnouts will say, "Screw them!
| If I can trick somebody out of a wage, that's my right!"
| kelnos wrote:
| It's kinda weird to blame your employees for your poor
| hiring choices, and for failing to recognize at the time
| that your current slate of employees wasn't pulling their
| weight.
|
| But also think about _why_ they weren 't pushing harder to
| help the company grow. Were you not compensating them
| enough? Did you allow morale to go down, and then do
| nothing about it? Did you push your people to work
| unreasonable hours because you should have hired more
| people, but didn't want the added expense?
|
| Or maybe your product just wasn't compelling enough, or
| your addressable market not big enough.
|
| There are plenty of places where I would expect the blame
| to go, and "my employees didn't work hard enough" is likely
| at the bottom of that list.
| gkop wrote:
| What changed? Did your employees simply reach the cliff of
| their stock options?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I was an employee at a company that slowly declined due
| to employee malaise.
|
| In our case, it wasn't about options or compensation. It
| was a slow poisoning of the well as a few obvious
| slackers were allowed to persist without consequences. If
| your team lead is only showing up for 4 hours per day and
| nothing bad happens to them, you suddenly don't feel like
| putting in more than 4 hours per day yourself. In fact,
| you get paid less than the team lead, so maybe you only
| put in 2-3 hours. Then your junior teammate sees this
| happening and decides to push it even further to 1-2
| hours per day.
|
| Meanwhile, the backlog piles up more and more. If you
| take a task, you're just inviting more work on yourself
| because you'll be responsible for it. You'll also have to
| convince the lazy teammates to help you with all of the
| blockers that fall in their domain, which they don't want
| to do. Better to just sit tight and claim you're still
| working on something else.
|
| From the management side, it's critical to address
| severely underperforming employees before the mindset is
| allowed to spread. Some times it's a simple matter of
| engaging with the employee and determining what's wrong.
| Other times, some people just like pushing the limits of
| how much they can get away with. They won't do any work
| unless prodded by a manager. They either need constant
| attention from their manager, or if that's unavailable
| they need to be removed from the company (sadly).
| spicyusername wrote:
| Reminds me of a saying I hear woodworkers say a lot: "If it
| looks good, it is good"
|
| If you feel happy, you are happy. No need to over think it.
| If you feel you have what you need and are meeting your
| professional, emotional, familial, and financial
| responsibilities, sounds like you're good to go to me.
| fromfar wrote:
| I think if you're working 10-15 hours a week and spending the
| extra time with your family and doing things that are
| fulfilling to you that's great.
|
| But the strategies mentioned to find more meaningful work are
| probably more useful if you're doing 10-15 hours of real work
| a week and then spending the remaining hours sitting in front
| of your computer browsing YouTube and doing nothing of value
| while pretending to be at work. If you have to pretend to be
| at work, then you can at least fill that time at the computer
| with something productive.
| winterplace wrote:
| What is a better way for the company to give you increases?
| workshy wrote:
| Throwaway for this one...
|
| It's possible that you've got cause and effect the wrong way
| round: consider maybe that your self worth is derived mostly
| from your extracurricular activities because you're failing
| at work. You put almost no effort in, achieve very little,
| are almost entirely disengaged, but, since you're a normal
| human, being a loser doesn't fit your self-image so you look
| to find meaning elsewhere in areas where you are engaged,
| connected, even passionate. It's a coping strategy.
|
| Finding meaning at work doesn't mean you no longer get to
| derive self worth from your family or your hobbies, rather it
| just enlarges the pie of your self worth.
|
| The advice given in the comment you're replying to is to find
| a job or career where you will be able to apply yourself. It
| really isn't bad advice. You should work more because you
| cannot exist without working, and what you're doing now is
| damaging yourself psychologically.
|
| Now I'm not trying to be mean here. I was in your shoes VERY
| recently. I suspect you've got yourself to a point where a
| couple years of pandemic stress and working from home has
| disconnected you from your colleagues and your company and
| you no longer want to reconnect. Whatever mission you are
| working towards was probably never all that engaging for you,
| but take away the human connection and that's been laid all
| too bare. And I expect you're worried about this ending, and
| having to go back to a grey office and a shit commute and
| losing the freedom that you think you have today. You don't
| want to "lean in" (as awful managers would say) because you
| recognize the mission as unfulfilling, but you can't separate
| yourself entirely because you need the money. It's not
| healthy.
|
| It could be time to take a risk and move. You know you can
| work remotely, there are jobs out there. There are better
| missions, companies with values that perhaps align closer to
| your own. That's scary, but finding a new gig where you'll
| have to work will not erase all the progress you've made in
| your hobbies and domestic life; those are things which make
| you more rounded, and they're yours forever. You can keep up
| with all that - because, after all, you're mostly just
| wasting time on the internet today.
|
| I say all this as someone who's struggled with your situation
| in the past and made a move recently to tacke it. It was
| frightening for me. I will say that I am considerably happier
| when my days are full of work, and it hasn't got in the way
| of any of my side projects or interests, which are numerous
| and very consuming. If anything, it is more energizing.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _consider maybe that your self worth is derived mostly
| from your extracurricular activities because you 're
| failing at work._
|
| You say that like it's a bad thing. I would much rather my
| self worth be derived from the things that I choose to do,
| versus something I have to do in order to survive.
| workshy wrote:
| They're not mutually exclusive, as I said in my comment.
| They are additive, and, especially without a commute,
| deep involvement in one doesn't preclude the same in the
| other.
| kelnos wrote:
| No, they're not mutually exclusive, but the level of
| control you have over your extracurriculars is orders of
| magnitude higher than the level of control you have over
| your job.
|
| If you so choose, you can set up your life so your non-
| work time is damn near close to 100% happy and fulfilling
| (and if you find something lacking, you have the ability
| to change it). I doubt there is a person alive who can
| claim their work time is 100% happy and fulfilling and
| that they have control over it.
| ineptech wrote:
| This doesn't have to be either/or. Once upon a time, your
| "work" would've been weaving baskets or gathering berries
| or whatever, and you would get immediate satisfaction
| from seeing how you are improving your own life and the
| lives of those around you. Nowadays, for a lot of us, the
| connection between doing work and improving the world is
| very tenuous, maybe non-existent; but it doesn't follow
| that it never existed or that it's gone for good. I know
| a lot of people who genuinely get a sense of
| accomplishment from their job, including people who do
| stuff that seems pretty pointless (a lot of the software
| industry, honestly) in the grand scheme of things.
|
| The bottom line is, you have to find a way to get
| satisfaction from somewhere to be mentally healthy, and
| if have to work anyway, getting some satisfaction out of
| it is preferable to not getting any.
| kelnos wrote:
| It doesn't _have_ to be either /or, but in practice for
| most people in the world, it is.
|
| Even in tech, we don't always get to work on what we
| want, or what we'd find most fulfilling. Often the best
| we can do is put up with bullshit 75% of the time while
| we try to carve out some meaning in the other 25%.
|
| Sure, "well find another job". Often easier said than
| done, and there are no guarantees that the new job will
| be more fulfilling.
|
| I know a lot of people who get satisfaction and a sense
| of accomplishment from their jobs. I also know a lot of
| people who don't. I also know a lot of people in a weird
| middle state: they derive that sense of accomplishment,
| but they have to deal with so much
| bureaucracy/politics/bullshit, that it erases most or all
| of the good feelings they get from that accomplishment.
|
| > _The bottom line is, you have to find a way to get
| satisfaction from somewhere to be mentally healthy, and
| if have to work anyway, getting some satisfaction out of
| it is preferable to not getting any._
|
| Absolutely! But I think you overestimate the number of
| people who are truly able to do that (HN is definitely a
| skewed population in that regard). And there's nothing
| wrong with just punching the clock, and deriving
| happiness outside of work.
| egypturnash wrote:
| An American investment banker was at the pier of a small
| coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one
| fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large
| yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the
| quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
|
| The Mexican replied, "only a little while." The American then
| asked why didn't he stay out longer and catch more fish? The
| Mexican said he had enough to support his family's immediate
| needs.
|
| The American then asked, "but what do you do with the rest of
| your time?" The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a
| little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife,
| stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and
| play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life."
|
| The American scoffed, "I am a Harvard MBA and could help you.
| You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy
| a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you
| could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of
| fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman
| you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening
| your own cannery. You would control the product, processing,
| and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal
| fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and
| eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding
| enterprise."
|
| The Mexican fisherman asked, "But, how long will this all
| take?"
|
| To which the American replied, "15 - 20 years." "But what
| then?" Asked the Mexican.
|
| The American laughed and said, "That's the best part. When
| the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your
| company stock to the public and become very rich, you would
| make millions!"
|
| "Millions - then what?"
|
| The American said, "Then you would retire. Move to a small
| coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a
| little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife,
| stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip
| wine and play your guitar with your amigos."
| greggman3 wrote:
| This parable is completely unrelated to the topic at hand
| unless you add in some catch like
|
| > The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of
| his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
|
| > I don't catch them. I just go to one of the other
| fisherman's boats from my company and take a few of their
| tuna. That way they get up at 5am and work there asses off
| and all I have to do is carry a couple of their tuna in to
| earn a living.
|
| Note: I didn't say he stole the tuna. All the tuna needs to
| be carried in. He just didn't do as much work as the
| others. He did the minimal work, "carrying in a few tuna",
| instead of the full work, "spending hours catching tuna and
| also carrying them all in".
|
| The OP isn't running their own business. If they were sure,
| they could decide to only work enough to pay the bills and
| enjoy the extra time. Instead the OP is at a company. If
| they're not doing the work then others are probably picking
| up the slack and the OP's possibly effectively riding off
| their work. I get that's harder to account the larger the
| company but it becomes very clear on small team or small
| company.
| ConfessionTime wrote:
| People are taking the one extreme example I gave of a day
| of not working as my typical day. That isn't the case. I
| do put in work. Maybe not as much as my coworkers, but I
| ship features, I close tickets, I do everything that
| everyone else does. I never try to pass anyone's work off
| as my own. The only dishonest part is that I'm not
| truthful about how much time it takes me to do the work
| that I do.
|
| I don't take fish off other people's boats. I tell people
| I was fishing for 8 hours when I was really fishing for 2
| and maybe blame the weather for why I didn't catch more.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| If we're going to moralize like this, I'll flip the
| tables and assert that receiving stock dividends from
| companies at which you've never worked is theft that
| should be criminalized ;-)
|
| Morality is no guide here because we immediately happen
| upon deep issues of political-economy. It's more
| productive to focus on the law. OP's employer carefully
| chose their corporate structure and hired devs into
| exempt salaried roles FOR A REASON. If they want him to
| work a certain number of hours and have recourse if he
| doesn't, then they can switch the role to hourly non-
| exempt. They won't. For a reason.
|
| Excusing all the ways in which corporations short-change
| tech workers while moralizing about watercooler talk or
| reddit time or whatever is textbook master-slave
| morality.
|
| General hard agreement on the "is this really how you
| want to spend your life?" comments, though.
| tylerhou wrote:
| > ...receiving stock dividends from companies at which
| you've never worked is theft that should be criminalized
|
| No, because when you receive dividends, you have provided
| something of value to the company (capital). Without your
| money, the company wouldn't be able to generate that
| revenue.
|
| When you steal fish, you are providing absolutely no
| value.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| There's no shortage of moral critiques of financial
| capitalism. But my point was not to spark a moral debate
| about political economy.
|
| My point was simple: the moral question here is far from
| obvious. Plenty of labor relationships are grossly
| immoral and exploitative. Whole books have been written,
| whole wars have been fought. We will not resolve this
| issue in an HN thread. But it is an issue on which people
| disagree.
|
| So. Focus instead on legality.
|
| And, in a legal sense, you are absolutely 100% dead
| wrong.
|
| OP is NOT stealing. Not in a legal sense. There is
| nothing illegal about a salaried employee sitting at his
| desk and twiddling his thumbs. To the extent that you
| could build a case, it would be PR suicide to actually
| prosecute.
|
| If the company OP works for wants to count unproductive
| time as theft, then they would make their devs hourly
| non-exempt employees. They choose not to do so for good
| reasons.
|
| But what's good for the goose is good for the gander. If
| the company is constrained only by law, then labor should
| be constrained only by law. Don't impose moral boundaries
| on yourself when your employer insists on at-will
| contracts, non-competes, NDAs, and exempt status.
|
| Again, I think working 5-10 hours a week at a job where
| you're nominally expected to work 40 hours is probably
| not the ticket to a good life. But the issue isn't one of
| morality or even shop ethics. OP's employer almost
| certainly doesn't give two shits about any sort of
| morality or ethics that aren't enforced by the law or the
| marketplace.
| raldi wrote:
| The next week the fisherman got a toothache.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| FYI: this is a variation of a story by Heinrich Boll (https
| ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arbei...)
| . The original story is set on the west coast of Europe and
| the tourist is of unknown nationality.
| jkepler wrote:
| So he would retire once his kids were grown & out of the
| house.
| [deleted]
| ineptech wrote:
| Deleted my previous reply as I didn't realize you were OP.
|
| I characterized this as a problem because a) you made it
| sound like one, and b) in my experience, people in this
| situation are usually unhappy and struggling in other areas.
| If you _can_ do hard work when you want to, and simply choose
| not to, great. When I have coached people who are in this
| situation, that is not usually the case - usually, they got
| in to software because they liked programming, and they
| enjoyed their work previously, and now they don 't, and want
| to get back to that.
|
| If that doesn't apply to you, great. I would say by way of
| warning though, that a) it's very likely your teammates have
| noticed and are frustrated with carrying you, and b) I would
| urge you not to get over-confident about your job prospects
| never changing. Any programmer over 50 can tell you that
| working a few hours a week was a totally viable career in
| 1998 and totally unviable in 2002.
|
| Oh and one more thing: if the main thing holding you back
| from 40 hour weeks is that you wouldn't capture the value,
| the solution is well-known: become a contractor. It pays
| better, and your income will scale linearly with hours
| worked. A lot of people find contract work less satisfying,
| but you said you don't care about that, so there you go.
| dlisboa wrote:
| Do you find that in the hours you're not working you're
| constantly worried that you'll be "found out"? If so the
| problem is those are wasted hours, you can't just sit down
| and read or travel because you're still supposedly working.
| Which means it doesn't really matter that you're not working,
| you're just not doing anything productive.
|
| That leads to doing nothing but mucking about on the
| Internet, not actually furthering anything for yourself. So
| it can have an impact on you mentally. I've felt that myself
| before.
|
| Now, some people have a well-defined work output where the
| boss just says "I want this, that's all". So if you do it in
| 3 hours in one day or 40 hours in one week, it doesn't
| matter, meaning you can actually use those other hours for
| yourself.
| achillesheels wrote:
| Well said! Human cultivation, such as "deep reading" - like
| reading Descartes or Leonard Euler - can't be sustained
| when one is so easily interrupted at work.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Now that i work from home, i go to the gym, do chores, take
| naps, cook meals etc
| ConfessionTime wrote:
| I would be lying if I said there was zero "I'll be found
| out" stress and that was part of the motivation for this
| post. Hearing that other people do this too would reduce
| that stress. Although this has never been a particularly
| big stressor for me. That is especially true over the last
| couple years in which the world has presented us with so
| many bigger concerns. I also know that most companies
| aren't going to fire someone for poor performance with zero
| warning and I have never received any type of warning about
| performance in my career. I don't consider the possibility
| of being fired as an immediate concern.
|
| I mentioned in another comment how working remotely has
| been a big productivity boost for those non-working work
| hours. Similar to tayo42 in another reply, it provides me
| the opportunity to do a lot of things that I previously did
| outside of work hours. One example is that I used to wake
| up an hour earlier to get exercise in before work. Now I
| sleep in and get that exercise in during the work day.
| dkarl wrote:
| > 1) The "good" solution is to find some work you actually give
| a shit about.
|
| Or think about why you do the work, what it allows you to do
| with your life. Doing what you love / loving what you do is one
| way to be happy, but it isn't a requirement, as long as you
| have a reason for doing the work. Life is full of things that
| don't directly bring fulfillment and happiness, such as
| brushing your teeth, doing the dishes, exercising (for many
| people), shopping for clothes (ymmv), and (for most parents on
| most days) cleaning up after messy children. All preaching
| about how you really _ought_ to feel fulfilled by stuff like
| that aside, most people don 't, yet it doesn't ruin their lives
| to keep doing it day after day.
| epolanski wrote:
| I so much agree with the part of it being soul crushing,
| especially from remote.
|
| If I liked videogames maybe I could fill that void in my
| working days.
|
| In the end I choose to program other things, I still get to
| learn and be a better dev every day for my employer.
| koonsolo wrote:
| I was once at a job where I didn't do much. One day I did
| nothing, the next day I fixed a bug in 15 minutes, etc.
|
| I got excellent reviews. So I asked myself the question: If I
| get excellent reviews with this kind of work, what the fuck are
| those other guys doing???
|
| > about 10%-20% of all employees
|
| I highly doubt it. Do you have a 10x developer on your team?
| That's probably the only person doing any serious work. Does he
| get paid 10x? No? Well that's why the other guys are slacking
| off. Maybe the person you gave an excellent review is slacking
| off like crazy.
| oakfr wrote:
| Experienced manager as well. I highly concur.
|
| Sadly, the "good" solution is much harder to accomplish than
| one might think.
|
| One way to address it is to take it from the People
| perspective. Are there people you've really enjoyed working
| with? Go talk to them, see what they work on, etc.
|
| This may get you out of your current (deep) local minimum.
| Doing this on your own is really, really hard.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| I have done this for many years.
|
| The problem is that software work is very similar to being a
| novelist. And very few successful novelists are able to crank out
| lines of content for 8/hours a day. It is draining, but it is
| also work that can be leveraged by a huge amount. If a million
| people use my code or buy my novel, I have generated huge amounts
| of value. It doesn't matter if it took me 2 years to write the
| book or 1 month. I'm still able to make a living off of the
| revenue from that book. Same thing with code. If a software
| company is generating 5M a year you can afford to hire a team of
| developers to maintain it. Even if they are all not working 40
| hours a week.
| [deleted]
| throwaway413 wrote:
| I've had jobs where this has gone on for years at a time. I've
| also had jobs that this behavior would get noticed and called out
| after two sprints. It's obvious, and either everyone is in on it
| or no one is. "In between" only comes from the isolation between
| teams in an org capable of getting away with it.
| ultra_nick wrote:
| There're Tiktok influencers that make 100x what my boss makes. I
| feel underpaid.
| DarrenDev wrote:
| 58 minutes after posting, your post has 134 points and sits at
| the top of Ask HN. I think that answers your question a lot more
| clearly than the comments themselves. What you've said is clearly
| resonating with a lot of readers, even if they may not say so in
| the comments.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > What you've said is clearly resonating with a lot of readers,
| even if they may not say so in the comments.
|
| The way it resonates with me specifically, is that I am curious
| how does one get a job like this. Is this company hiring? Do
| they allow work from home?
|
| Don't get me wrong; I am a lazy person. If I had an opportunity
| to work like this, I probably would do it, too. But I don't
| know how.
|
| For example, it happens to me that I am assigned as the only
| developer on a project, the management prepares the list of
| features that must be completed during this month... but of
| course, we are "agile", so I have almost complete autonomy over
| choosing which part of the list I implement during the first
| sprint, and what will be left to implement during the second
| sprint... so at the end of the month, if the features are not
| implemented, it is obvious that I didn't do as much as I was
| supposed to.
|
| Or, how could I do "5 - 10 hours of actual work a week. I'm not
| even discounting job related but non-coding time as not work"
| when the _meetings_ alone already take 5 hours a week.
|
| I keep regularly hearing about jobs where this is possible. So
| my question is, where exactly am I making the mistake that
| prevents me from getting one? As far as I know, this is not
| about salary; sometimes it seems to me that the companies that
| pay _less_ actually require _more_ work.
|
| Could it be that the mistake is the productivity itself? Like,
| if a manager notices you doing a lot (or just the average
| amount), then their "path of least resistance" is to assign
| more work to you, because then they know that the work will get
| done? But this sounds too self-congratulatory; I am actually
| not _that_ productive. Or maybe I 'm still above the average?
| That is a scary thought.
| breakpointalpha wrote:
| 1. You need to look for a team/project with more developers.
| It's hell to be a solo developer when you don't also control
| the "promised" features and timelines.
|
| I've worked 6 positions for 5 different companies over 12+
| years. Two of those as a solo developer. Neither had upper
| management promising things I could deliver on deadlines. I
| was _still_ fairly stressed out because I was always afraid I
| wouldn 't be able to solve problems by myself. I can't
| imagine how torturous it would be to have someone with little
| understanding of code or my personal output making promises
| that I would have to keep! Look for an out, ASAP, in my
| opinion.
|
| 2. If you target very large organizations, you'll tend to
| have a lot more slack in delivery pace.
|
| _Nearly everyone that works in the Fortune 50 or at a major
| US university works slower._
|
| I've worked for both, the _feeling_ is just different. I
| think it 's because everyone expects delays, paperwork, and
| process bureaucracy at every step. This gives you lots of
| breathing room to take a more pastoral approach to what's
| considered "productive". I think the work from home
| revolution has further enhanced that. I can say for sure in
| the 7 years of being a "senior full stack engineer" at a
| major org, I've worked after 5 pm less than 10 times.
|
| This isn't a bad thing, as typically you can trade time for
| less risk to the company. "I need an extra day to make sure
| this won't embarrass us / leak data / hurt customers / etc."
| [deleted]
| abledon wrote:
| its like one of those 'chat' scenes in tv shows where a bunch
| of AA or drug recovery people sit in a circle on chairs in a
| church basement and discuss their kafka-esque worklife issues
| 01100011 wrote:
| Yes, but they're upvotes from people browsing HN on a work day.
| Don't think of it as a particularly random sample of
| programmers.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Some of us (me) are on lunch.
| spurtrenolds wrote:
| Ummmm
|
| You do realise the world (and time zones) extend beyond New
| York and Los Angeles don't you?
| aliceryhl wrote:
| It's evening in Europe. We also have programmers here.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Devs generally are, SREs are doing way more than 40 hours. Small
| sample size, but my observations.
| Borrible wrote:
| Welcome to the club.Take a seat, beer is in the fridge.
|
| No, not all are like us, but there are a lot of club members from
| other professions.
|
| At first it feels quite strange and you tell yourself,that can't
| last for long. But it does. I accepted my fate after about five
| years and learned to live with it. It's not allways easy to cope
| with it, but my wife suffers from the same condition, so we can
| support each other.
|
| Heads up mate, life goes on. You're not alone.
| nawgz wrote:
| There's engineers like this, but at small companies your
| colleagues dislike you and lose respect for you each day. There
| was a guy like this at my last company, and then when they tried
| to fire him he threw accusations against colleagues and played
| the legal game. In a word, absolutely pathetic stuff.
|
| I work very hard, and I don't expect others to, but I question
| why you would spend 40h a week every week just playing time-
| waster and obfuscator
| knuthsat wrote:
| This is the case for other parts of the workforce. I admire those
| in service that really work their ass off (drivers, cleaners,
| cooks, etc.)
|
| From my work experience, about 90-95% of people do barely any
| work (have tasks that take months). I would get in a team of 15
| people and I'd be the only one doing something, everyone else is
| just making some slides for weekly presentations and not even
| that. The amount of part-time people that do nothing is even
| greater. The amount of consultant experts that work for
| consultant agencies and get loaned to other companies that do
| nothing is massive.
|
| I think it's the standard way of life in most cities. I do not
| quite understand why that percentage of the workforce won the
| work lottery.
| beebeepka wrote:
| On the other hand, there's people like Carmack pulling 60 hour
| weeks on a regular basis. Not everyone is lazy
| ghostoftiber wrote:
| > Are most of us secretly lying about how much we are working?
|
| Yes, but I would venture it's the other way - most of us are
| probably working our butts off and thinking we make a decent wage
| for 40 hours a week when we're putting in 60 hours a week. I
| didn't really notice this until I had a family and started
| bumping into family activities. At first, I was really pissed off
| that something was getting in the way of work, then I reassessed
| by values and got pissed off that I was putting in that sort of
| time.
|
| > Have I just been incredibly lucky and every boss I have had is
| too incompetent to notice?
|
| Pretty much. It's likely the problem is systemic (your boss
| doesn't work either). One of two things are going to happen, by
| my guess. You are going to get re-orged when some efficiency
| expert comes in and they're going to apply arbitrary metrics
| which are designed to "accelerate delivery" or something. Since
| you don't do anything already, you can't meet those metrics. The
| good news is people who do work probably can't meet them either
| since it's designed to make people uncomfortable, so you'll be
| one of many getting a parachute. Feign indignation and leave with
| the herd.
|
| The second thing that might happen is someone updates the tech
| stack in a significant way. This happens when consultants come
| through and a company tries to "buy the devops" or "buy the
| kubernetes". They have a vested interest in delivering a
| solution, so they're going to want to train people on the new
| thing. If you're not participating in the existing workflow in a
| meaningful way, it's going to be rapidly apparent that you're
| also not using the New Expensive Thing(tm). Since the New
| Expensive Thing is indeed quite expensive, there's going to be a
| lot of eyeballs on it, and you'll probably either get noticed for
| not using it or for being one of the people "not adopting the New
| Expensive Thing".
|
| Of course the third option is you live in like Cornfield, Kansas
| and you're actually pretty cheap compared to everyone else across
| the country and so you're really not going to attract any
| scrutiny whatsoever. Who knows!
|
| Best of luck, either way.
| vlunkr wrote:
| > putting in 60 hours a week
|
| I would just get a new job. Unless you're volunteering for it
| and getting paid overtime, that is unacceptable.
| sneak wrote:
| A lot of workers in technology are getting paid in equity.
| For many, it makes it more than acceptable. It's not really
| anyone's place to tell someone else that the way they're
| making money is unacceptable without knowing all of the
| details.
|
| I put in 60-70 hour weeks routinely. I work at companies I
| founded and own. I don't make overtime. Is my work schedule
| unacceptable?
|
| What is the percentage of equity between 0% and 100% that
| makes working above 40 hours per week "acceptable"? Who
| picks?
| vlunkr wrote:
| I think it should be obvious that that's not what I'm
| talking about. If I'm employed to work 40 hours a week, I'm
| not going to work more than that on a regular basis.
| sneak wrote:
| What if you are employed "full time" with the expectation
| that that means substantially more than 40 hours (and
| your compensation package includes equity in the
| company)?
|
| That is the (commonplace) situation that I am describing,
| that almost all of my friends and acquaintances in this
| industry (developers) find themselves in.
|
| They don't find it unacceptable, or they'd go do
| something else.
| vlunkr wrote:
| If you go in expecting to work that much, great, but I
| think it's easy for people to be manipulated and
| overworked for the good of a company when they should
| push back for their own good.
| sneak wrote:
| I guess my point is that it's not your place to tell
| other professional adults what they should do "for their
| own good" when their own opinions contradict yours in
| practice, as they would be the top world expert on what
| is or isn't in the interest of their own good.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I've been there. Maybe not 5 hours a week but certainly 10. I was
| in a small company that got acquired, and the organizational
| bloat really killed my productivity. Having to deal with
| paperwork for payroll and pointless meetings was a distraction
| from the actual work. I think this contributed to a creeping
| burnout, which led to me actually working 10 to 25 (tops) hours
| per week for maybe a year or two. Eventually I was put on a
| performance improvement plan and I decided to quit to take some
| time off.
|
| After ~5 months off I started working as a contractor (for one
| employer) which has made me realize getting 35 hours of actual
| work done in a week is a Herculean task for me. I only run my
| time tracker when I'm actually working, and in a week I might
| have 2 to 4 hours of meetings, and through pushing myself, can
| get 15 to 30 hours of work done.
|
| It's pretty rough, I'm not going to lie, and I don't understand
| how so many people can regularly work more than 40 hours a week
| (but I was also on medication for ADHD as a child and currently
| not treating it, so I understand I may operate differently than
| most people)
|
| Basically to get 35 hours per week of work done, I have no life
| now other than trying to work. Fortunately it's not the end of
| the world if I only get 25 hours, though it's not great for my
| savings.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I work really hard, but I might be an anomaly. I can't get much
| done in the time many people might.
|
| My brain is bad at focusing on things, so it takes a lot of
| effort to engage, become productive, and then stop. There's a lot
| of time build up inertia, but then it's difficult to reduce that
| inertia as well. As a result I'm fairly inefficient by default.
|
| I have a practice of never billing for inefficient time. I don't
| feel right doing it. As such, I tend to work an average of 10
| hours per day but end up billing for more like 7 or 7.5. It's
| just a reality that I live with now.
|
| So no, I can't get by on 5-10 hours per week. I would be fired
| quickly.
|
| Although I have the knowledge to do my job well, I lack the
| executive function. Improving that is one of my main objectives
| but it's much easier said than done. I think it's the one thing
| that would improve my career and personal life the most.
|
| All that is to say, there are plenty of reasons why some people
| work more or less. I work more than you because I'm not a
| productive person. I'm not a 10xer, I'm not more committed, I'm
| not more effective. I simply have to in order to get an
| acceptable amount of work done.
| rozap wrote:
| This is why contracting was exhausting to me. lunch? Pause the
| clock. Get up to get a coffee? Pause. Go to the bathroom?
| Pause. Not typing but thinking about a problem? Pause.
|
| It got old fast thinking about every fleeting second of my
| finite existence.
| alecco wrote:
| 80% of time not programming or meetings is reading and figuring
| out other people's code.
|
| L'enfer, c'est les autres programmeurs.
| svaha1728 wrote:
| If you've ever seen the TV show Silicon Valley, "Big Head" played
| this archetype very well. There are always a few people in every
| company who do so. Consider yourself lucky in some ways; you
| probably haven't rocked anyone's boat, which might catapult you
| to management and beyond!
|
| If you don't go to management, it's probably worth doing another
| 5 hours of Leetcode each week. Regardless of how much work you
| do, the career lifespan at most companies is less than ten years.
| So you will have to prove you are a coder 4-5 times in your life,
| and probably at least once when you are over 50.
| zby wrote:
| I am kind of retired on the money I made from crypto - but now I
| am back at programming because I like it and also because I have
| an app idea that I like. Maybe it is a different situation -
| because I also still speculate and read about economy etc - but I
| cannot program more than maybe 15 hours a week. And also I am
| more productive when I take some time to sleep over the problems.
| soneca wrote:
| > _" Do people regularly run into coworkers like me during their
| career and simply ignore it because they find it too awkward to
| criticize them"_
|
| I ran into people like but don't care because I am not your boss.
| I (and others) do our fair amount of work which is usually enough
| to get the job done, despite you. I would never work late to
| cover you not working, but I never had to do that so far. I also
| don't have a moral opinion about you cheating the company (after
| all you signed an agreement that you are not fulfilling just
| because you do not get caught). So I don't mind either way.
|
| The thing is, it's easy to cheat employers being a software
| developer on a place where people don't know much about software
| and/or don't care much. Just don't assume everyone does it.
| kerneloftruth wrote:
| In my years consulting for companies in their traditional IT
| departments, what you describe is all too common -- and utterly
| depressing.
|
| Since, however, moving into the embedded systems space, I rarely
| see this kind of scenario, anymore. I see it as the effect of the
| commoditization of IT skills, coupled with the mundaneness of the
| kinds of software produced in typical IT shops. It's a sign of
| maturity (which to me had the stench of death).
|
| I'm grateful to now (10 years+) working with deeper-skilled
| engineers, and getting to work on truly new products and
| technologies.
|
| My advice is to embrace the discomfort you're feeling about
| yourself -- change is definitely indicated. Seize the day.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > There are literally days in which the only time I spend on my
| job is the few minutes it takes to attend the morning stand-up.
| Then I successfully bullshit my way through our next stand-up to
| hide my lack of production.
|
| This is the key point that makes your situation problematic:
| You're actively deceiving your manager and peers.
|
| Reasonable managers don't expect everyone to be in crunch mode
| all of the time, to produce 8 hours of work in an 8 hour day, or
| even to be productive every single day they were.
|
| But they _do_ expect you to make an honest effort, and to tell
| the truth about your progress. If you 're going out of your way
| to feed them information to make yourself seem productive while
| doing as little as possible, that's a problem. It will catch up
| with you eventually, one way or another. They either know
| already, or they will know once they start looking more closely.
| Usually the people who aren't working are at the top of the list
| to be cut when layoffs are necessary.
| keewee7 wrote:
| I know HN hates whiteboard interviewing and it used to be
| uncommon in Europe but I feel it has really cut down on slackers
| at my company.
|
| My problem with slackers is that they make productive devs feel
| like suckers.
| DEDLINE wrote:
| I know several developers just like yourself. None of them are on
| HN.
| icedchai wrote:
| A lot of them are. Where do you think all these comments come
| from? Everyone isn't on their lunch break.
| binaryblitz wrote:
| Yes, your coworkers know. I for one am generally very vocal about
| it to my manager. People that aren't pulling their weight make my
| life harder.
|
| You could be doing more and making your teammates live's better.
|
| Be better.
| heldrida wrote:
| I personally put a lot of effort on everything I do, and usually
| spend more time working then what I'm paid; Also to study, etc.
| It's my belief that there are better things to do with life, but
| there are tasks that require a lot of personal dedication and
| skill and that requires a ridiculous amount of time.
| nothrowaways wrote:
| This could be a good opportunity to start a side project e.g.
| open source project. Though, easier said than done.
| [deleted]
| dsr_ wrote:
| I've hired people like this by accident, and let them go as soon
| as I figured out they weren't going to change. I have not noticed
| them having trouble finding other jobs -- almost always at much
| larger companies.
|
| On the other hand, I assume that people typically have 2-4 hours
| of good thinking in them per day; that it takes time to learn
| complex systems; that a smoothly running system should not need
| attention every moment of the day.
|
| "I have probably bombed more tech interviews than I have passed."
| This is perfectly normal for almost everyone.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| It seems to me like a high number of commenters are getting
| REALLY hung up on your "bullshitting my way through standup"
| comment. I want to clarify--was it your intention to say that you
| simply say what needs to be said to communicate: "Yeah I am
| getting my expected deliverables delivered"?
|
| My suspicion (and the way I read your post) is that you're
| meeting expectations, so sometimes at standup you have to
| diplomatically say, "Yeah I didn't really do much but I'm still
| on track".
|
| If that's the case, I honestly see nothing wrong. I do this
| myself from time-to-time, and it's usually due to poorly defined
| requirements. It's always a phase and eventually I'll have
| moments of brilliance--churning out days of code in just a few
| hours. But honestly, that's normal for me. I know nothing
| different if that's wrong or bad.
| Azsy wrote:
| The Pareto distribution applies to software development.
|
| And aggravated in my experience because:
|
| - Its really hard to work with multiple people on the same
| project ( and when you do:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law )
|
| - People Managers usually think they are buying bus-factor
| insurance and throughput for each additional developer.
| Additionally they want more devs to indicate they are an
| important team.
|
| So this all conspires to you being in the 80% doing the remaining
| 20% of the work without getting payed less or being called out.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Figuring out how to do a 40 hour a week job in 10 would lead to
| promotion not dismissal in a sane world...
| hindsightbias wrote:
| I have always said Tim Ferris is a workaholic. That comes down to
| time of hard thinking and creative coding.
|
| The other 50 hours a week is process, support, debug, test,
| documentation, attending meetings... We're not paid for ESLOCs,
| we're paid for all the crap around it.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Shhh.
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