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…
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. Coasti…
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.