Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#151

Post by sfblah » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

sweetheart wrote: post #35

sfblah wrote: post #12

I’m in the same boat as you. I’ve been working at the same tech company for 6.5 years making around 500 (used to be 1.2 but my stock grant ran out). I only show up one day a week to have lunch with friends and do nothing. My advice is to keep the money flowing and do something else on the side.

This blows my mind. I make 120k as a young person in SWE, and I feel like a fraud often for making that money, and being able to work from basically anywhere I want in the world. How do you justify it to yourself? Do other things fulfill you? I’m already feeling pangs of doubt about my life, and I work more and earn less than you. I’m passing no judgement at all, I’m just curious about how that dynamic effects you an…

I don’t really care about stuff like that. I assume I’ll get laid off at some point, but I’ve made so much that I don’t really worry about it. It’s hard for big companies to find people who aren’t doing anything.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#152

Post by aphextron » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

dhuyrv wrote: post #130

You remind me myself a few years ago: a talented, but bored slacker who didn't see any point in investing any energy into that project. Turns out I was right: the project didn't go anywhere after I left and investing any extra time would be a clueless thing to do. So what's changed since then? Have I found meaning in work? No! I've become a professional slacker who knows all these psychological tricks, knows what bod…

>I've become a professional slacker who knows all these psychological tricks, knows what body language to use to make the desired impression, what to say and what not to say. My managers think I'm a high performer who also makes valuable social contributions to our team and this is reflected in pay rises.

i.e. the Gervais principle [0]

[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#153

Post by HashThis » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

throwaway_googl wrote: post #48

I have three friends at Google who are nice, smart people, but terrible employees. All three of them seem to be doing just fine in their Google careers. One is very smart, but he's been telling me literally for years that he has zero motivation, to the point where he sometimes won't actually start working until 6PM. He's moved around within Google trying to find something he's interested in, but it's just the same th…

I know companies that won't hire Google employees because of this reputation.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#154

Post by analog31 » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 9:52 PM UTC

I'm not employed as a programmer per se, but I work with a lot of programmers and other kinds of engineers. I wonder if you're talking yourself out of the value of your work. A great deal of engineering is not creating fundamentally new components, but organizing and arranging things, fitting them together, and so forth. Is this a bad thing?

As businesses and their products get more complex, "systems" behavior becomes a larger part of making things work, until you might only need a few people working on components, and everybody else on fitting those components together in different ways. There's hardly any loss of honor in doing the 90% of the work that needs to be done and makes the business successful.

I think you can do two things. First, look into new technologies that you'd like to dive into. Second, start to rehearse your elevator speech about how great your present work is, until you begin to believe it yourself, because it might be true. Doing great work and looking for better work are not mutually exclusive.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#155

Post by CodeWriter23 » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 9:53 PM UTC

A) I saw “boss as a service” on HN some months ago. This might teach you diligence and accountability by rote. B) Jumping ship won’t change this problem. This IS actually about you, and guess what, until you address it, it will go with you everywhere you go.

Or you can become a skillful slacker as some here have mentioned. That personally wouldn’t work for me; maybe it will for you.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#156

Post by Nickersf » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 9:54 PM UTC

dhuyrv wrote: post #130

You remind me myself a few years ago: a talented, but bored slacker who didn't see any point in investing any energy into that project. Turns out I was right: the project didn't go anywhere after I left and investing any extra time would be a clueless thing to do. So what's changed since then? Have I found meaning in work? No! I've become a professional slacker who knows all these psychological tricks, knows what bod…

This.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#157

Post by jcims » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 9:55 PM UTC

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #102

wayoutthere wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have; I was a software engineer for over a decade before I moved up through architecture and laterally into product. Those problems are tedious. Not difficult.

While I agree that there are parts of software engineering that are merely 'tedious' rather than 'hard', there are definitely parts that are legitimately 'hard' too. Just because you've had a particular set of experiences that you've classified as tedious doesn't mean your perspective represents the totality of the industry.

The problem here is that 'hard' is dimensionless and relative. There are people in Australia right now storming the gates of hell with a shovel and a hose because that's the job they signed up for. If that type of work is on the spectrum, I can't really think of anything in software/systems engineering that's 'hard'.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#158

Post by leetcrew » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

frobozz wrote: post #84

Your current behaviour should mark you for fast track promotion. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

isn't OP employing the loser strategy? they are doing (what they consider) barely okay work. the prospective sociopath strategy in that serious of articles is to do below-acceptable work and vie for political advantages.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#159

Post by ec109685 » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #42

I think you underestimate your value to the company. “All I do is copy code from the internal codebase and patch things together until they work” — this is exactly what established tech companies mostly need from their engineers. They want people with enough CS competence to not fuck things up while patching together new solutions from the institutional code soup that everyone knows how to navigate and review. If you…

You didn’t read his whole post. They’re bored. Their value to google is high enough to keep them employed but the job is beneath their capabilities.

The failing for google is not providing this person a path to do more or at least understanding their ambition to do more.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#160

Post by blihp » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 10:02 PM UTC

christiansakai wrote: post #123

......I don't know what to say. I know a few people are like this too. On the other hand, I think I do a lot of things for my employer and constantly learn/challenge myself, but don't make anywhere near FAANG SWE. I am trying hard to pass onsite FAANG interviews, and still failing. So I'm still Leetcoding now. But hearing stories like this just kinda demotivates me and confuses me more. Most non FAANG companies have…

Don't confuse the mystique for reality. Google is just a large company now. The mystique helps them recruit talent. The interviews are mostly a filtering process since they have far more people applying than they actually need. Being a large company, they have more than their fair share of bozos who are now the gatekeepers of that process. The only thing that Google management really cares about at this point is maximizing profit. It's just a business and that's reflected in everything they do and don't do these days.

There's nothing wrong with any of that. If you want to make more money and/or get Google on the resume to open up some new doors, keep trying and you'll probably eventually find a way in. Just don't think it's going to be some sort of techie nirvana... it's going to be a lumbering bureaucratic beast ruled by politics as virtually all large companies are.

If you're looking for technical challenge and growth, you probably want to be looking at smaller tech companies who are where Google was 10+ years ago.