171–180 of 1001 posts
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.
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.
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.
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…
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…
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."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
> 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 f…
> 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 adv…
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.