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Ask HN: Can you get away with not working?

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Re: Ask HN: Can you get away with not working?

#81

Post by ryandrake »

rburhum wrote: post #49

Ugh... Let me give you a different point of view that will most likely not be popular in HNs, but what the hell. I have had employees like you, and I try to scan like the plague during interviews to avoid hiring folks like you. The thing is, that I hate to be micro-managed and by extension, I hate to micro-manage people. Since to have a good work environment, you need to have trust that works both ways. When one pers…

Counter-point: assuming OP is employed at-will, his employer is free to fire him if they judge his output to be insufficient. But they don’t so... maybe they are fine with the current situation.

Re: Ask HN: Can you get away with not working?

#82

Post by [deleted] »

d0m wrote: post #10

I mean, it's illegal and you're lying to your employer.. so in the end it's about your morale sense.. it doesn't matter much what other people do or think of it. A somewhat stupid analogy is like saying "I'm killing people in my spare time. I get that it's wrong, but that hasn't stopped me from doing it. Am I the only one that does this?" If you find other people doing it won't make it more legal ;-)

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Can you get away with not working?

#83

Post by tyrex2017 »

ryandrake wrote: post #81
rburhum wrote: post #49

Ugh... Let me give you a different point of view that will most likely not be popular in HNs, but what the hell. I have had employees like you, and I try to scan like the plague during interviews to avoid hiring folks like you. The thing is, that I hate to be micro-managed and by extension, I hate to micro-manage people. Since to have a good work environment, you need to have trust that works both ways. When one pers…

Counter-point: assuming OP is employed at-will, his employer is free to fire him if they judge his output to be insufficient. But they don’t so... maybe they are fine with the current situation.

or maybe they are super pressed and would need it to be done faster, but trust the OP that this is simply not possible (because he must work on his side gig)

Re: Ask HN: Can you get away with not working?

#84

Post by swsieber »

reificator wrote: post #24

I can't speak to doing something to make sidemoney while you're on the clock. But I can speak to the boredom side of this question. Whenever you feel the temptation to just slack off, come up with something that you could do to help the company out that would also be enjoyable. For instance: Most of my job is in Javascript/web and Golang. A few months ago I needed to get back into the swing of C# (and learn WinForms)…

This is indeed a viable path if it's available. I get some sort of strange fulfillment out of integrating things, or adding features where none were expected... and most of what what I want to touch affects developer happiness, so of course my tech lead approves :) Fast-forward and in the past couple of years I've written Jenkins plugins, ugly glue code in Java (but that made everything else so much easier), a VS Code plug-in, the list goes on.

It's done well to keep me from getting antsy. It also enabled me to move without getting let go, because of my unique value add (I think)

Re: Ask HN: Can you get away with not working?

#85

Post by jacknews »

rburhum wrote: post #49

Ugh... Let me give you a different point of view that will most likely not be popular in HNs, but what the hell. I have had employees like you, and I try to scan like the plague during interviews to avoid hiring folks like you. The thing is, that I hate to be micro-managed and by extension, I hate to micro-manage people. Since to have a good work environment, you need to have trust that works both ways. When one pers…

I agree to a degree. However, if your startup is, or stands to, make you a millionaire, and the engineers are just getting a salary, then it is they who should be resentful.

Re: Ask HN: Can you get away with not working?

#86

Post by derekp7 »

throwaway184827 wrote: post #75
decentrality wrote: post #37

From the looks of it, you asked basically this same question within the past year. I think the real question is: are you being honest with yourself? The last time you asked this it was more along the lines of "I hate my job and want out, btw I have wife and 1 child" and now it's more cooled down to "I've accepted that I hate my job and I'm sort of just punishing them with my lack of direction in life" and then lookin…

Good eye. Fun fact: I quit my job there, built these Android apps and started growing my SaaS, then got this job to help further fund my stuff on the side. I wasn’t expecting this job to be so boring (the job description sounded fun), or to be able to get away with doing the same thing as my last job. But a month in I started getting back into the groove of working on my stuff while on the clock. I’d love to quit but…

Sounds like a similar situation to a high school student who is too bored at school, due to being capable of much more. What you need is a position that challenges you, and rewards that challenge with a higher pay.

Re: Ask HN: Can you get away with not working?

#87

Post by derekp7 »

alkonaut wrote: post #69
tw1010 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some contracts even give ownership of what you create on your free time to the company.

I know it's common, but I can't imagine those often hold up in court (assuming the work was completely unrelated, no employer hardware, knowledge, hours etc were used).

In general, the contract is phrased as "Work that relates to activities and business that the employer is currently involved in, or may become involved in in the future". So if you work for a large company that has many businesses, almost anything you invent could be related to some area they are involved in. However enforcement is relatively rare.

Edit: I found an article on Slashdot that I remember reading at the time, which scared the crap out of me. About a programmer that made a bunch of GPL code on his own time, but his employer stole it back. https://developers.slashdot.org/story/02/03/21/0139244/bewar...

Re: Ask HN: Can you get away with not working?

#88

Post by sameers »

If you really know your stuff, enough to build good apps and a successful business, then it's possible that a smart enough co-worker (manager or not) will notice a gap between that potential, and your output. So "can I get away" seems to me equivalent to, "will they notice, and if so, does it matter to them?"

The answers to those questions will vary over time as your employer's business itself changes. Your worst case scenario is "Yes/Yes," ofc, and best-case is "No/Irrelevant." Reality is probably somewhere in the middle. I have seen cases where someone like you got "noticed," because a peer who didn't care about a side business out-competed them at work performance. No one was malicious in this equation; once "Mary" got going with her natural enthusiasm, it just became obvious that "Joe" was being paid too much. "Joe" got a bit of talking-to; he decided to quit.

If your W-2 income is critical to you, for whatever reason, you want to keep an eye on this whole situation. If the energy spent in keeping an eye on that drains you from pursuing your business goals, then it's not worth it to you to get away with it, even if you do.

If you are weighing moral qualms, don't fall into the trap of over simplifying it in either direction. No, you probably don't work for a "soulless" corporation that doesn't care about your creativity and thinks you are dispensable yada yada; but no, you didnt sign some sort of pledge of absolute allegiance either when you joined (but yeah, you did sign something that would give your employer property rights to your business, under certain circs, and it's again not a given whether they'll exercise this right if they can.)

Short version: it depends :)

Re: Ask HN: Can you get away with not working?

#89

Post by born2web »

I had a couple of employees working for me that used to do this... for more than three years they used to do the bare minimum (1-2 hours/day at most) ... I used to try to motivate/nudge them to at least automate parts of the work they were doing so that we could make a product (SaaS) offering out of it and provide that to additional clients and grow the business (of which all of us would benefit with generous profit sharing)... being a small business owner, i couldn't risk losing them... so I carried a fair amount of their load... Finding balanced people involves lot of luck as well!
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