791–800 of 1001 posts
I've been there. Maybe not 5 hours a week but certainly 10. I was in a small company that got acquired, and the organizational bloat really killed my productivity. Having to deal with paperwork for payroll and pointless meetings was a distraction from the actual work. I think this contributed to a creeping burnout, which led to me actually working 10 to 25 (tops) hours per week for maybe a year or two. Eventually I w…
Could I ask you how old are you ?
Yes. I definitely run into colleagues that are underperforming so much that it's obvious they don't work at all. But more common even is to bump into people that might work a bit but overall don't really care at all and don't put any effort.
We simply say nothing. I never share my opinion of said colleagues with anyone else. That's why they have managers. It's on them to figure it out. If we share the same manager I might give a hint or two but would never bring it up directly.
Now this is coming from a person who is not a workaholic. I try to do my job well because I enjoy being productive but I very rarely work more than 6 or 7 hours a day and that still puts me in the higher percentiles of productivity. I do think a lot about the problems I'm solving outside of work hours so I guess that helps as well.
EDIT: And when I mentioned I work 6 hours a day, I'm obviously not programming more than 2 to 3 hours on average everyday. The rest of my time is spent syncing, driving things, answering people, doing discovery work, helping, ...
However the nature of programming is bursty for me. That means I cannot program well all the time, but when there is such a phase I can get a lot done in short periods.
What are you doing for the rest of the time?
I'm working to maintain a huge system that is kept working and the company I am employed depends on it.
It's a mess. You know, it's written in an obscure language not much people knows about so we have no hope of hiring a person who know the language beforehand, almost all original developers were left the company, documents are scarce, and mostly outdated, nobody understand the entire picture of the system as a whole.
I am maintaining it by fixing bugs. Most times, we don't know how to reproduce the bugs and there's nobody in the company who understand the portion of the code responsible for the bugs. Because of the obscure programming language, debugging environment is horrible. The best method is essentially equivalent of printf debug.
So I ended up spending months on futile attempts to find out the cause of bugs. It's a bullshit job. Spending more time doesn't help finding the cause of bugs. Well, I'm constantly thinking about bugs and the way to reproduce it I haven't tried yet so I'm still working on it, but this type of thinking cannot be measured and evaluate.
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 agree. I once had a coworker who I KNEW was under performing. They went from 'normal' output to just checking in and out. It was pretty frustrating and de-moralizing as it felt like they weren't pulling their weight. Among teams there is a social contract, it's not all just between an employee and the company, it also impacts your coworkers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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... The time not spent typing (or being in meetings, doing admin, etc) isn't actually "unproductive" though. All true statements, but that's not what we're talking about. OP recognizes that he works 5-10 hours a week, and effectively blows the rest of the day off. Reminds me…
I don't disagree, but I never said there was no such thing as slackers or that OP definitely isn't one. I provided a test to tell if they really are one or not. The point I'm making is that some people in our profession think they are slacking when they're not, for the reasons I described. OP's description doesn't convince me that they necessarily are. In particular the comment at the end about having spent the years…
Personally I don't see why I should be overworked if I get all of my stuff done in a short amount of time. Plus because I feel guilty I am always available on Slack and answer or even code on demand if somebody really needs it.
I sense that higher ups look at me as a hard worker and a good employee, but if only they knew the thruth. But if I was forced to work a lot more I would probably quit.