21–30 of 87 posts
Can't stand being at home all day and work very little and be drafted to so many meetings, syncs while effectively seeing 15 people teams achieve the work I can confidently say can be done by two people, and better.
Not only that, by working much more I get to solve many more problems, under bigger time pressure and my skills and knowledge grow many times over than those of other peers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know, it’s pretty trivial to automate that mouse jiggle…
I know. Some people have bought "Mouse Jigglers", and so on to do this. I cringe when I see people buy weird USB devices on eBay for this purpose. Who knows what lurks in the firmware of those things. Some people even buy little hardware turntables that physically jiggle the mouse every so often. On an SOE laptop with all kinds of corporate spyware, you'd have to be pretty game to install a driver to automate the tas…
"In an anonymous online poll on how many “focused hours of work” software engineers put in each day, 71 percent of the over four thousand respondents claimed to work six hours a day or less". Written as if 6 hours is little. To get a full focused 6 hours is a pretty high number.
Ye 6h of work per day is really high. A honest answer for a programmer is probably 1h tops plus meetings. Once I worked at a place for like half a year to a year I have qued up so much work for others that I can't progress myself. And efficiency gets down to like 1-5% or something of what I would produce in a one man project.
While I don't think I'm evolved enough to be totally okay with knowing someone has a second full-time job... if someone working for me is delivering the goods and nice to work with and I don't have any idea, in the abstract I think I don't have a problem with it.
I am hiring for results, not keeping a chair warm.
Honestly, I usually do 90% of the most important creative work for a given week in a few hours. Always in a concentrated burst that I can't predict ahead of time.
Allowing my brain to stop feeling guilty for that is likely going to be a life-long challenge, but it doesn't change the reality of it.
"In an anonymous online poll on how many “focused hours of work” software engineers put in each day, 71 percent of the over four thousand respondents claimed to work six hours a day or less". Written as if 6 hours is little. To get a full focused 6 hours is a pretty high number.
An hour for lunch, a few 15 minute breaks, a bathroom stop, a conversation in a hallway, makes 6 hrs an 8 hour workday. Everyone's workday has always been this way.
A person familiar with tech work would interpret 6-hour focused work to be not bullshit, but the author deliberately does not put the survey results into context.
I also disagree with the author here about "bullshit projects".
By listing the number of killed projects by Google, the author was trying to portray these projects as "bullshit".
But when one wants to innovate, it is not about how many projects get killed, but the quality of the projects that do succeed.
It would be like dismissing Edison's work as bullshit because he went through a brute-force approach to developing an incandescent lightbulb.
We have a person on our team that has been as best I can tell really abusing it basically since we started working from home at the beginning of the pandemic. Turns in very little work, takes literal days(!) to respond on slack, almost entirely ignores requests for code review and has a project that is now six months late.
Less important but they’ve also never shown to an in-person event or even turned their camera on in a meeting - not necessary but adds to the mystery. Literally have not seen their face since the start of the pandemic. If I hadn’t worked with the guy physically in an office pre-pandemic I’d be worried he wasn’t who he said he was.
It’s been beyond frustrating to see, as someone who genuinely tries to gives his all and cares. Please for the love of peat, don’t ruin this for the rest of us. Do you want metrics, because this is how we get metrics. This only continues to work if our output is good.
People higher than me have begun to notice (finally) - mostly because the late project is becoming more and more of an issue. It was supposed to be his project to design and lead. Because it’s so late however, the rest of us have been getting bumped from other projects to help. Mythical man month, I know. Best of all he’s been almost entirely unavailable to answer design questions or even review code. On top of everything else and despite the goal being to get it done by the end of the year, he took almost all of December off - because there’s no review of our PTO - another wonderful freedom being abused.
I am very hopeful he can just get a stern talking to and kicked back onto track, but I am not going to hold my breath.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know. Some people have bought "Mouse Jigglers", and so on to do this. I cringe when I see people buy weird USB devices on eBay for this purpose. Who knows what lurks in the firmware of those things. Some people even buy little hardware turntables that physically jiggle the mouse every so often. On an SOE laptop with all kinds of corporate spyware, you'd have to be pretty game to install a driver to automate the tas…
Windows supplies an API call, SendInput() I believe lol. You can write a script in a couple minutes.
The turntable idea is quite good imho. Could also repurpose a toy robot or something.
I really enjoy the flexibility of my current job - being able to set my own hours, run to a doctor appointment without any prior notice, work at my own pace. Frankly part of why I have stayed so many years. We have a person on our team that has been as best I can tell really abusing it basically since we started working from home at the beginning of the pandemic. Turns in very little work, takes literal days(!) to re…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know, it’s pretty trivial to automate that mouse jiggle…
I know. Some people have bought "Mouse Jigglers", and so on to do this. I cringe when I see people buy weird USB devices on eBay for this purpose. Who knows what lurks in the firmware of those things. Some people even buy little hardware turntables that physically jiggle the mouse every so often. On an SOE laptop with all kinds of corporate spyware, you'd have to be pretty game to install a driver to automate the tas…