Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do?

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.

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.

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.

" 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.

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).