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

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

#331

Post by phendrenad2 »

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.

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

#332

Post by a-dub »

jollybean wrote: post #247
cattown wrote: post #132

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…

" 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 '…

> 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.

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

#333

Post by digianarchist »

throwaway1777 wrote: post #113
batmaniam wrote: post #22

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.

In my last two jobs I fail to see that my employer got more value out of me than the expenses of paying me.

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

#334

Post by ClumsyPilot »

jollybean wrote: post #247
cattown wrote: post #132

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…

" 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 '…

"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?

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

#335

Post by breakpointalpha »

giantg2 wrote: post #49

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.

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.

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

#336

Post by H8crilA »

BbzzbB wrote: post #301
syspec wrote: post #55

> 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…

What is IC? Google tells me Interstitial Cystitis, but my hunch tells me it's something else.

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.

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

#337

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

pydry wrote: post #75
syspec wrote: post #55

> 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…

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…

Three weeks? It took me 6 months to get a dependency installed and they didn't even install the version that I requested.

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

#338

Post by dec0dedab0de »

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.

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

#339

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

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.

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

#340

Post by PragmaticPulp »

abledon wrote: post #323
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

but what if his 5-10 hours are equivalent in output to the 40 hrs of his coworkers?

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.

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