641–650 of 1001 posts
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Well, not only was the code clean, I imagine you were clean too!
Nah, showering makes you clean, a bath is just marinating in your own dirt. Very pleasant though.
Long time manager here. I call this "work-shy" and it is neither ubiquitous nor rare, I'd guess about 10%-20% of all employees, and it's certainly not unique to software or even to white-collar work. You should think of this as a problem. Even if it's not for your boss or your teammates (and it will be, eventually), it is for you. It is soul-crushing to fill up the hours. Two pieces of advice: 1) The "good" solution…
It is interesting the number of people who see this as a problem that needs to be fixed. Since this specific comment is near the top, I might as well address that here. Why should I work more? How will that improve my life? My self-worth is derived from what I do outside of work to the extent that I don't prioritize professional validation. The primary reason I work is for money. I make enough money that I can live a…
I have never done what you describe, except perhaps in times of illness when it was understood that working less was a reasonable accommodation (in that particular case, I had leftover brain fog from general anesthesia). I've never heard of any colleagues doing it either. I would never snitch if it happened, but I would certainly consider that person untrustworthy or think that they have an undisclosed condition that…
I'm happy to finally read a comment that say this isn't a good or normal thing. I was starting to feel a bit of despair. I don't think I've done that much more that you seems to do but I've certainly seen a lot of people do it and it's always been pissing me off. I've always wondered how the world even works when I consider how much I've seen people do that at every level and at every kind of job. Dear original post…
I felt the same way. One of the weird things about the Internet is that it, as Randall Munroe wrote recently, "makes us see messages from awful people and assume they come from normal peers." That isn't to suggest that people who share OP's views are awful -- just that these comments could come from any world view, income level, religion, mood, and state of intoxication.
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…
I'm not upper management. Most upper management gets paid way too much for the value they bring. But, when you have the opportunity to work under an excellent CEO or CTO you will learn that they do bring 10x or even 100x the value you bring to the team.
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Just wanted to point out that this > I truly believed in the mission, worked hard, was paid a lot, achieved great things and was overall very satisfied. and this > used to leave at 5pm sharp are not mutually exclusive. We have this weird thing in tech where we think that, to be passionate, you have to work yourself into the ground. But this is stupid. There's organizational psych research going back decades showing t…
> going back decades Longer than that. In WW2, factories increased hours to 60 to increase production. The workers were all on board with this. Production increased for a while, and then dipped below the 40 hour results. Some experimentation showed that to get a sustained increase in production, the working hours would be increased for a time, and then brought back to 40, back and forth. Personally, I'm well aware th…
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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.
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…
productivity = (time * effort)^talent
Just as a general model.
I run into people like you in the field sometimes. Unless you're actively hindering my efforts at delivering something, I ignore you. If you're assigned a critical task, and you block us, I'll bring it up to stakeholders privately to ensure they understand what you're doing. Sometimes this results in you being fired, most of the time, you just get assigned less important work. I find people like you unpleasant to be…
I don't always do 8hrs every day. And I certainly cannot program for 8hrs a day day in day out. But I'm working for a good portion of my day and I'm getting things done.
If I only worked 5hrs a week I'd feel like a cheat.
I think there's also something to be said for passive processing. Sometimes I'll know I need to write some code or some function and I'll just think about it in the back of my head while doing other things, sometimes for a whole day or two. Then I'll sit down and write it in like 20-30 minutes. Did I work 20-30 minutes, or have I been working for a day or two? I would say a day or two, and the 20-30 minutes was the t…