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

Some of it is a matter of what type of work motivates you and how your current work matches up.

My coworkers tend to put in 10 hour days in the fall and winter during our busy season, in which we are bombarded with smaller tasks and bug fixes. They thrive on knocking out a large number of small things quickly.

But they then do “almost nothing” the other half of the year, when we should be working on large new initiates and better tooling.

I’m the opposite - give me a list of small soul crushing manual tasks, and I’ll procrastinate like crazy. But give me some vague user stories and a big new project with the freedom to be creative, and I’ll be pulling nights and weekends happily.

One question I think you’re asking without asking it is, “is this ok?”

And that depends on two things.

One, are YOU happy with this? Is your job just a means to an end, or do you want to have a bigger impact, be more productive, and enjoy your work?

If the latter, then you’re likely not in a position that properly challenges you or meshes with your motivations.

If the former, then the next question to ask is, “am I providing my employer with value?”

Are you doing work that would be hard to find others that could do it? Do you bring any unique skills or knowledge? Are you getting enough done that it helps the organization achieve goals, get new customers, or keep existing ones happy?

If so, great, you’re adding value and you aren’t draining the organization.

If not, then you might want to consider what and how you can improve.

And frankly every engineer and developer should be at least vaguely aware of what value they provide, both to make a case for yourself if needed, but also to make sure you’re satisfied in your current role and not just a butt in a seat.

I'm literally about to get fired from Google for this, possibly today (HR is calling wondering where I am). Dumb thing is, I've been working like crazy on my 20% project. I just can't stand the other one, got an NI on my first (and presumably last) review cycle so pretty much killed any chance of a transfer.

I've never outright lied, though certainly hemmed and hawed. And occasionally blatantly "I haven't done anything this week". And yeah, certainly work-from-home makes it easier to shut down and ignore everything. Which is great, except you feel like crap afterwards.

But like I said, it depends on the project. Next job I take, money is going to be less of a consideration. Just want to work on something interesting. And there's a reasonable likelihood that I fall into the category of "needs professional help" (I also flunked out of school twice and took six years to graduate, despite getting five 5's on AP tests and only needing two years' worth of credits), but I've tried a few times without much success.

And, no I don't think it's super-common. At least not to this level. Most of my coworkers seem to genuinely work pretty hard. Though some don't.

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 be motivated to push it to production the second it's unblocked? Or could it wait another couple days?

Contrast that with a small startup where you barely need sign off to do anything - it's much easier to get into that pleasant loop of code -> deploy -> see customers use it -> dopamine hit -> motivation to code some more.

Don't you have oncall shifts?

A man approached a street artist making amazing paintings and asked for one. About 2 minutes later, the artwork completed, and the artist asked for the fee. The man balked at the price. "What!? This only took a couple of minutes!" "No," replied the artist, "this took me my whole life."