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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

#41

Post by systemvoltage »

salixrosa wrote: post #16

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. T…

They can pick up low priority tasks and if something of high priority comes in, it takes the precedence. An employee can also learn new tasks, rotate to different teams, cross train, fix old code / refactor, take a sabbatical-on-call, write documentation, etc which do not get in the way of taking on high-burst high-priority tasks. This is far better in terms of company's productivity than pretend-work that the OP is describing.

I don't think its better for the company as you suggest. It is possible to use good sense of prioritization and still have 'extra capacity'.

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

#42

Post by zsmi »

bostonsre wrote: post #21

Host file the sites you like. You saying this and me typing this reminded me that I need to do that again... my current one: 127.0.0.1 arstechnica.com #127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com 127.0.0.1 reuters.com 127.0.0.1 techcrunch.com 127.0.0.1 slashdot.org 127.0.0.1 www.youtube.com 127.0.0.1 youtube.com

interesting. no news.ycombinator.com obviously.

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

#45

Post by dekhn »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #30
dekhn wrote: post #18

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 l…

> From the feedback I got, I wasn't much more productive working more hours I've had this feedback too and I feel like it is likely not true. Really what it is is that your managers aren't paying much attention to your output and have sort of written you off for promotions, raises, etc. This was feedback I got a couple of months after I had been working my ass off trying to impress management and then a couple of wee…

No, I'm pretty sure it's true. I had to spend a ton of time explaining what I did and its values to my managers, like writing "ELI5" docs and then suddenly when they "got it" they paid very close attention to my work, and formed a team around me and established scope and got headcount.

This is the messaging I got every single quarter: """David, your work is very good. All the people you work with say you're great and it's clear you are adding value, but you need to spend more time finding metrics that demonstrate that value and improving those. Also, if you want to get higher ratings, here is a whole bunch of extra management work and document-writing to do. If you do that, we can make a case for Exceeds and eventually a promotion"""

What I concluded was that I was better as an L6 than an L7 (L7 at google has a lot more responsibility, and far fewer job opptys) and I knew the value I was adding to the company without having to spend weeks cooking up metrics dashboards.

At google you're not going to be fired, if you're an FTE, with anything less than 6-9 months of feedback and runway to get back in the air (few exceptions)

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

#46

Post by topicseed »

bun_at_work wrote: post #25
enlyth wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree that you shouldn't work yourself to the bone for someone else's profit, but ADHD can be insidiously crippling, at least for me. Seeing a doctor and getting medication (I don't take amphetamines) has been super helpful for everything from feeling better about my work and being more productive, to handling day-to-day life. The biggest improvement is just in conversation/meetings/engaging with people, where I do…

Might be TMI but your "bizarre hypotheticals" triggered me.

What often occurs in conversations in my life is... We chat, we disagree on a random point and the second we start arguing it, my brain brute forces every single path possible. What if they say this? Then what if I say that, or this, or even that? And it keeps on branching out.

Eventually I come back to the chat, after what seemed like an eternity but was in fact a couple of seconds, and I am bored and dismissive because I know where the arguements will lead, and they do go one of these paths 99% of the time.

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

#47

Post by jtxt »

bostonsre wrote: post #21

Host file the sites you like. You saying this and me typing this reminded me that I need to do that again... my current one: 127.0.0.1 arstechnica.com #127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com 127.0.0.1 reuters.com 127.0.0.1 techcrunch.com 127.0.0.1 slashdot.org 127.0.0.1 www.youtube.com 127.0.0.1 youtube.com

Nice. I made commands called by cron that copies a focus and relax file to hosts... 25 minutes work, 5 minutes relax during work hours.

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

#49

Post by thecrash »

Thank you for slacking, sincerely.

Management tends to set a bar for effort based on how hard our peers work. In a competitive environment this can lead to an ugly race to burnout. By straining to meet expectations, devs inadvertently increase the pressure on each other to perform - higher and higher - to the point that 60+hr weeks are normalized.

By doing the minimum, you're pushing back against that and helping to keep the bar in a reasonable place. It is really a favor to other developers (and in many cases to the company, since burnout can destroy whole projects in the end).

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

#50

Post by dnautics »

wantsanagent wrote: post #40

Congrats! You have found a comfortable job. Also my condolences, you've found a comfortable job. Jobs like these are a warm and cozy trap. If you're spending time reading blogs you may not be spending your time in a way you can look back on with pride. Time is your ultimate limited resource and the one thing you will regret not spending more wisely. Depending on your risk tolerance I recommend: 1. Quit, start a compa…

having extra time makes 5) harder, not easier!
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