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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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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.
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.
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.
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…
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...
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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…
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…
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 th…
Except the sponsors of the project that pay to put food on everyone’s table?