Ask HN: "Is that work?"

We have to take 4 days over Christmas because the dealership is shut, I have used 15.5 days :(

Maybe after January.

I absolutely surf HN and other sites throughout the day. My brain needs a distraction every once in a while. As long as your work gets done, I don't see a problem with this. Intellectual pursuits and positions are not monotonous assembly lines, it is simply not possible to focus 100% of your attention 100% of the time. You need breaks.

While I don't see a problem with this, your boss quite clearly does. Not only that, he's handling his displeasure with you in a demeaning way. And as you say, it all seems to stem from the fact that he doesn't understand your work or what goes into you doing your work.

"I am really ashamed with how I am handling his rants and outbursts."

Have you tried sitting down with him (in private) and expressing your concerns about his expectations and the unhealthy working environment that he's creating for you?

I think that expressing your concerns in a very matter of fact manner is completely reasonable. I would start by focusing the discussion on the value that you bring to the team. Try to get your boss in the frame of mind that you are valuable, you do your work well and on-time. Then shift the conversation to the concerns you have. Use a lot of "I feel .." type sentences. Focus not on what he's doing wrong, but rather on the things that would help you to work better and feel happier. Try to frame it in a positive path. Also ask him what his concerns are. Don't be defensive (or rather try desperately hard not to be). Hear what he's saying to you and then try to say things along the lines of, "I hear what you're saying. I even understand how it might look like that. I can assure you that I'm a team player and I'm always looking to deliver the best that I can. From my perspective, sometimes I need to let the challenge at hand ruminate. That might mean that I need to look for a solution on the internet, or even take 5 mins and think about something else. Just to let it all process. At the end of the day I want to let you know that I enjoy the work here, and I think that I deliver real value to the company."

Keep in mind that your boss (who seems to be woefully inexperienced or at least very poor at managing technical staff) might not appreciate it. But at the very least you come out knowing that you handled the situation in a professional manner (great story for the next interview).

Another option is to get a feed of HN to your terminal (I saw something like this once). It'll blend into your work flow more. Even RSS feeds to your email.

I don't know how the programming climate in UK, but here in west coast US, I am almost always the only one who have computer science degree in the team.

But, most of my coworkers (who don't have degree) are fantastic hackers, wielding /usr/bin like magician, appending to fifo as hack-around, compiling xen kernel from source, etc.

So, don't get discouraged. If your situation is agile (being single or without children), move to big city, embrace its big-cityness, and enjoy its salary.

Except that in order to live somewhere he could afford on a London bus-driver's salary, he'd need to be somewhere awful (actually, I don't know whether London has awful-and-cheap bits these days) or way out of town with a horrible commute.

None the less: yes, there are more and better jobs in cities. There's also more competition for those jobs, though. I'll hazard a guess that although there's a lot of unemployment where the OP lives now, the unemployed people there are probably mostly not software developers.

STOP. MAKING. EXCUSES.

You're a poster child for Stockholm Syndrome. You are completely and utterly playing by their rules. Just start looking for a new job, that is something you can do when not at work, and if things progress as far as you getting an interview, take the day off from your job and deal with that problem then. Call in "sick". Say you've got a funeral. Take a vacation day anyway. When you get there, you'll realize you don't actually care about your current workplace that much after all.

But by leaping to the problem first and then declaring that you can't solve it right now, you're setting yourself up for failure. You're just manufacturing excuses for staying in the position you're currently in. STOP. IT.