801–810 of 1001 posts
I feel you. I'm on the same boat except in a situation that just spending more time doesn't increase my productivity. 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 lef…
My current gig is demanding, but my work tends to produce results. So I'm happy to do the work there. I decided that early stage startups are where I like to be, working on products that I would like to personally see successful, and working with people that don't give me uncomfortable vibes. It took me 15 years to figure this out. If you're finding yourself trying to get away from work as much as possible, maybe that company isn't for you.
If you do want to work and you're finding it hard to be motivated, try tracking your own hours with something like Harvest App. You'll quickly figure out where your time is wasted. Hopefully, you'll even be able to make subconscious efforts to improve your habits, using those time measurements as one of your top observability metrics. You want to keep yourself really honest? Send weekly reports to your boss. If you don't trust your boss with those, ask yourself if that company is really for you. If you find yourself cheating the system, then you're not ready to leave the doomed outland of corporate mediocrity.
There's plenty of other possible reasons you might not be motivated though. Ask yourself how good your health is, how good of shape you're in, are you getting enough sleep, is your living/working space clean or polluted, do you have uncontrolled ADHD, just to name a few.
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Actually, compensation is based on what the company has to pay . There are some other rules, like they have to (overall) pay less than they make from the output. But in general, a company never pays their employees more than they think they have to. 10x programmers don't make 10x the pay. They might make slightly more, but not even 2x what a 1x programmer (of the same level, no comparing seniors to juniors) makes at…
best solution is to stay a 1x developer then devote most of your energy to sidegigs and stock investing
Minimize risk and time spent in efficient markets with millions of participants (the developer talent pool, the stock market). These places are treadmills.
Instead, spend your free time in inefficient markets by starting a business with the rest of the time you’ve now freed up.
Most B2C and B2B markets don’t have millions of competitors, and hence are much less efficient than the developer talent pool and stock market (which do).
This is the optimal strategy.
For me the important question would be: How much do you _care_ finding that line in the haystack?
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…
This, however, should not be an excuse, but a cue to get better at that 'thinking stuff'. Improve it. Train it. Learn.
And with all that, strongly ask yourself if that 'backburner time' must be paid. A bricklayer needs 10+ hours off to rest his body, so he can lay bricks for another 8 hours tomorrow. Should we pay him 18 hours?
My answer to both is that when I efficiently ponder and backburn ideas, it is 'work'. But when I'm binging Silicon Valley Episode 5, it is not (unless I can prove that this helps me bring the problem closer).
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And, ironically, much of the work that the "normies" do is something tech guys could to hundred times faster. It's stuff like manually copy-pasting numbers from a crappy proprietary software A to a crappy proprietary software B or entering numbers from some system to Excel while it could be done by just directly pulling the numbers from the database the system uses. Seriously, modern work is all about knowing what to…
Hmmmmm, this is actually kind of interesting - perhaps that "continuous grind through criminally unoptimized UI" type of work is what actually constructs the "this is how you use a computer" mindset that these people have - because it's all they know. Developers are always about optimization and automation and tweaking and refinement, and their tools reflect this constant pursuit of efficiency that constantly transce…
All the time tracking tools I've ever used (at software companies!) had a bad UI. Sometimes we even have to track the same hours into two different tools. Can't we automate time-tracking away? My explanation is that this is the result of cultural evolution. Companies that make people think twice about their time and spendings are more successful. People will copy whatever successful companies are doing.
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…
All the other comments about the background processing, waiting for inspiration, only having stamina for a certain amount of time are all correct. For forty years I have lived that life and have never been in a situation where I averaged more than a few hours a day of actual coding. It often takes a long time for me to figure out what to do but, that's work, too. But, five to ten a week?, get a different job that you…
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" This is both normal and mostly acceptable, in my professional opinion. " It's definitely not acceptable. It's a form of White Collar / 1st World Corruption. Taking money from people with expectation of value, while not providing that value is Fraud. Just because we don't always have great oversight, does not abnegate our responsibilities towards trying to do a good job. This notion of 'I Can Get Away With It' and '…
It's definitely not acceptable. It's a form of White Collar / 1st World Corruption. Taking money from people with expectation of value, while not providing that value is Fraud. Woaaah there buddy! Did you read the all of the OP's post? He's never been fired and gets middling to good performance reviews. Continuing to pay his salary implies that the company it's getting a fair deal. This is obviously not fraud in any…
Yes and he clearly indicated he's lying about issues.
There's likely a major gap between what the company wants/thinks he is doing, and what he is actually doing, and this is facilitated by his misdirection (i.e. admitted lying), and probably the political incompetence of the situation overall.
One one hand - it's fraudulent to misrepresent your work.
On the other hard - it's still fraudulent even if the company is not able to properly assess the work.
I agree that it's likely not some kind of legal issue - that's not the point really, but it's still a form of fraud.
If you agree to provide a service and due to your customers inherent trust, and their inability to do proper oversight, you still need to provide that service.
But what is offensive is the Peanut Galleries Commenters acceptance of a person who is admittedly lying and misrepresenting themselves as somehow 'not a problem'.
It's shameful for someone to lie, misrepresent and take advantage of another group.
What is 'warped' is this bizarre gaslighting of the employer for somehow 'being corrupt' because they are being lied to by an employee?
In what upside down universe does an employee lying about their work make the employer corrupt?
"the real issue here is that salaried employees are almost never compensated in proportion to actual value that they generate"
That's mostly separate question.
"A flat rate arrangement, assuming no significant bonuses, results in a zero-sum game with diametrically opposed incentives for the two parties. T"
This is wrong, 90% of the world is paid for their time, that doesn't make incentives 'opposed'. They are aligned, just maybe not perfectly.
"The incentives become perfectly aligned if the pay is based on some objective measure of generated value. Moreover, I would would argue that it would be fairly straightforward to come up with a logical metric for every single position within a company that generates revenue. "
I'm going to gather you're new to this, and have never hired people, set salaries or worked on a large team?
The situation that the OP is in is common - precisely because measuring value and oversight is actually really hard, especially in software.
It's a bit glib to suggest that somone could come up with some magic metric relate to profit that aligned incentive, it's the Holy Grail of HR. There's too much ambiguity in the system.
"TL;DR - Don't hate the player, hate the game. "
Players that cheat, either employers or employees should be called out.
Having some reasonable degree of professional standards, which include trust (on all sides), is what makes the system work, along with intelligent management and oversight etc..