681–690 of 1001 posts
Kind of hilarious to see the comments from those who are shocked and offended upon the realization that a lot of us work less than 40 hours a week and get away with it. My unsolicited suggestion is drink less kool-aid and realize your company's mission statement is simply propaganda. No, your ad-based web app is not making the world a better place. Stop pretending that your unwavering devotion to your corporate overl…
With that said, still, I see why you would come here to ask this crowd about it.
Once there was an old engineer retiring from a company after working there for many years. He's their top notch guy and knew their system inside out. Couple months later the biggest machine in the company stopped working, costing the company millions in lost production. No one could fix it. In desperation the manager called the engineer to come in to take a look. The engineer looked around the machine for a few minut…
I don’t think OP is solving any problems
Software development isn't a matter of sitting down and generating a fixed amount of code per hour. The rate of writing code is hugely variable. It's not unusual for most of my "productive" (as in typing actual code) time to be concentrated in a few particular days in a month. The time not spent typing (or being in meetings, doing admin, etc) isn't actually "unproductive" though. It's mostly spent solving problems, a…
I work really hard, but I might be an anomaly. I can't get much done in the time many people might. My brain is bad at focusing on things, so it takes a lot of effort to engage, become productive, and then stop. There's a lot of time build up inertia, but then it's difficult to reduce that inertia as well. As a result I'm fairly inefficient by default. I have a practice of never billing for inefficient time. I don't…
This is why contracting was exhausting to me. lunch? Pause the clock. Get up to get a coffee? Pause. Go to the bathroom? Pause. Not typing but thinking about a problem? Pause. It got old fast thinking about every fleeting second of my finite existence.
That's time they should pay for.
Kind of hilarious to see the comments from those who are shocked and offended upon the realization that a lot of us work less than 40 hours a week and get away with it. My unsolicited suggestion is drink less kool-aid and realize your company's mission statement is simply propaganda. No, your ad-based web app is not making the world a better place. Stop pretending that your unwavering devotion to your corporate overl…
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…
There have been times I spent 20-30 minutes understanding a new problem at 5pm, which at the time seemed like it was going to take up a significant amount of my working hours the next day.
Then come back the next day and I'm able to finish the task before 10am. During the evening, the problem was solved both consciously (thinking about it on the train home) and subconsciously (whilst sleeping). I just had to produce the deliverable the next day.
Signed, Underpaid conscientious tryhard
You're cheating yourself. It's never too late to start over but for crying out loud, can you really consider yourself "lucky" to be coasting through life contributing, learning, and growing at the absolute minimum level? I'm sure there are many others out there with similar experience; I hope some of you wake up and start living fully before it's all over.