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Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work

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Re: Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work

#11

Post by enlyth »

psion wrote: post #4

While I don't seem to have all the information here, what I do have is enough to make a really good suggestion. I have some of the same issues with goofing off and such like that. So with this, a couple of questions. 1. Do you find yourself avoiding work you don't want to do outside of the job? 2. Was this a problem in school? 3. Have you talked to a doctor about this? Number three is the most important. I have ADHD,…

I'm not saying this is what you're suggesting, but I also feel like medicating people with amphetamines so they can be 120% productive 40+ hours of week is also not the solution to everything

We're humans and especially those of us with curious brains, we get bored easily doing the same unstimulating tasks over and over again

Maybe it's fine if he does what he needs to do in 3 hours and slacks off for the rest of the day, if it's enjoyable to work with him, and does what he is paid for, I only feel like this 'work yourself to the bone to make someone else rich' culture has created all this pent up guilt

Re: Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work

#12

Post by TheFreim »

debt wrote: post #2

Programmers are inherently incredibly underpaid relative to the immense value they bring to everything so if anything your working hours match what you're being paid. You may still be doing too much work. Do not worry about it. It's not your job to worry about it. If you want to work more, then get paid more.

Are they? I only have a pretty small sample size but the programmers I know all are quite happy with how much they're paid. Do you have any backing for the claim, personal experience possibly?

Re: Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work

#13

Post by DantesKite »

Working for several hours a day is unfeasible for most people, unless you're working on something you actively love.

From my perspective, as long as you're not holding anyone back, I think you're doing a decent job of modulating your energy for moments when you need it, as opposed to marathon running all day long.

Re: Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work

#16

Post by salixrosa »

This sounds like it might be good thing for the company. Having employees who have extra capacity is incredibly important for an organization that wants to get things done; if you're constantly hard at work on something important, when something else comes up (someone has a question, there's a bug or an outage, whatever), you either have to delay the thing you're already working on, or delay the thing that came up. This tends to have a cascade effect on most kinds of work, locking up all your people resources.

Plus, those other things you're doing sound like they overall, in the long-term, probably give you a wider range of knowledge, improving your usefulness.

Just wanted to add a voice against that sort of Taylorism perspective on work.

Re: Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work

#17

Post by sombremesa »

I wanted to start a business and work the bare minimum, but I felt guilty about it - even though my bare minimum is still impressive to my employers.

My solution was to just switch jobs and take a pay cut. I work a lot less now (with the same kind of arrangement), but I feel a lot less guilty about spending chunks of my time on my own thing.

Relevant pg essay, under the 'working harder' heading: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html?viewfullsite=1

Re: Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work

#18

Post by dekhn »

by the end of my employment at Google, I was working about 2 hours a day (and getting Meets Expectations at L6, which is OK but not great). While I'd be online and available to respond to chat for 8 hours, I only exerted about 2 hours and most of that was just explaining to executives just how bad our fleet was.

Before that I had worked at least 6 hours a day. And I assumed that to be "right" i should be working at least 8.

From the feedback I got, I wasn't much more productive working more hours. At first I felt guilty and then I realized in my career that working harder isn't going to make any difference in terms of $, career security, or opportunity to work on cooler stuff. So, I just upped my anxiety meds and got back to working 2 hours a day.

Re: Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work

#20

Post by cm2012 »

MattGaiser wrote: post #10

At 3 hours a day, you work as much as everyone else does. [0] [0] https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver...

I did an HN poll, how many hours per day do you work including meetings and etc, and the answer was a normal distribution around 6 hours a day.

https://imgur.com/qdSltlM

The left axis is years of seniority.

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