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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

#101

Post by goodpoint »

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…

If you work too much you reach a point where you are tired enough that your productivity becomes NEGATIVE.

With negative I meant that you might spend 1h to do something that will then take more than 1h to be debugged/reworked/discussed and ultimately removed.

Or something that cause breakage that could be avoided.

You need to be well rested and clear-minded to foresee a problem and take the right decision, especially around software.

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

#102

Post by ska »

dekhn wrote: post #45
bluefirebrand wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> What I concluded was that I was better as an L6 than an L7

This generalizes: often people want a promotion because it's the "next thing", but in many cases once you are mid career a promotion can make you pretty unhappy. Having a clear idea of how the work & responsibility will differ, and whether it is what you actually want.

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

#103

Post by DevKoala »

an_opabinia wrote: post #65
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...

If I’m your boss, sitting next to you and in full view of your screen, and I’m there for 8 hours working, will the average person work a real 8 hours?

When I was a junior engineer, I quit a position over this. My manager had a direct line of sight from his desk into my screen and would give me passive aggressive comments if I wasn’t always on task.

I was the best performing engineer at that company, handling a contract that was worth >20% of their revenue by myself. They loved me at that company, and I wish I had been honest with the feedback I gave during my exit interview, but I just couldn’t tell the guy my issues were with him.

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

#104

Post by reader_mode »

QuercusMax wrote: post #34
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…

I'm definitely not in the same boat as the OP (trying to get away with doing the minimum), but because I hate to be the long pole on a project, I always try to get my pieces done well in advance of when they're required. As I work primarily on infra, I can usually manage to pull this off. What this means is that often when crunch time hits, I've got excess capacity I can use to help "row the boat" (or maybe bail out…

I've seen something similar backfire for a guy I worked with. He had this idea that he would get his shit done Monday-Thursday and have an easy WFH Friday.

People ended up doing most work towards end of sprint and Friday would usually be really busy - basically he always had to be present and management would offload priority stuff to him since he was done. So he'd end up busting his ass all week. Eventually he got tired and reverted to standard schedule - but this meant his relative performance dropped - I saw him get singled out in a review for performance drop (and not a lot of people noticed when he was going above the norm).

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

#105

Post by salixrosa »

rosseloh wrote: post #91
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…

>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. Working in a retail store/break-fix repair/MSP environment, for a small busi…

Sadly, from what I've read the commission-based approach often leads to worse long-term results, especially in software engineering. It depends on the kind of work, of course. The metric I use (and in this case I have no idea how others look at the problem) is the number of decisions the person has to make, especially having long-term effects or effects on other parts of the company. It's hard to make the right choice for the org when you stand to make a bigger chunk of money right now from the other option.

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

#107

Post by macu »

I work 7-hour days, but I might work 2 or 3 hours during that time. A lot of the time I find the work unbearable and can only bring myself to do it in short intervals. When the task is interesting, involves my skills, and I'm making progress, I can work for hours with almost no breaks. It really is an emotional thing. I won't force myself to do anything that is really painful because it ruins my mood for the whole day. At the same time I feel guilty of days I get little or nothing done and I feel trapped by the time constraint of the work day, even though I work from home. I would really like to make a deal where I work independent of a work day, with no set hours and no expectations, and not feel like I'm on call all day, so I can do things other than work through the day and not feel like I'm cheating.

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

#108

Post by bigbillheck »

humbleMouse wrote: post #60
wiglaf1979 wrote: post #54

I was in a similar rut. Not just professionally but academically as well for most of my life. Motivation had to be forced to do more than just enough to blend into the crowd. It took me saying enough is enough in my 40's to go get tested. Turns out I have ADHD. Getting therapy to deal with anxiety and depression stuff as well as getting on Adderall has done wonders. I'm not suddenly working 40+ hours always in the zo…

“Not working enough? Just take meth!”

ADHD is not meth in the same way grain alcohol is not wood alcohol.

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

#109

Post by gorbachev »

One possibility is that whatever you've been doing in these companies just isn't your thing.

Are you sure you're in the right career? Maybe there's something else that you'd be good at and actually interested in?

I've found myself in this sort of situation a few times, and every time it's been due to either me picking up a job for the wrong reasons, or the job just not being a good fit to begin with. I'm not saying this is the case for you necessarily, but you should probably think about it a little bit, and if it is, find something more stimulating to do. Unless, of course, you find the situation you're in acceptable to you.

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

#110

Post by bigbillheck »

mylons wrote: post #100
AlwaysRock wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they change if they print money?

in which case, this style of work is OK and should be accepted instead of shamed

Just because something is profitable for the employers does not mean it is ethically or morally right.
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