31–40 of 87 posts
In our company, it's all about hitting the deadlines. It's cool because no one's clocking our hours, but miss a deadline and, whoops, you could be out the door. I totally dig this style – it's modern, bendy, and keeps us on our toes. Totally different from the 19th-century industrial routine of '8 hours a day' work style.
"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.
When work _was_ done, it was done in the most unoptimised, short-term-thinking way possible. There was seemingly no concern for quality of output (almost presumed that they'd have to do the task again), and deadlines were a vague fairy tale. Most of their time was spent drinking coffee and chatting.
Since then, I've observed that this is just how people work. I had never experienced it because I'd always been in tech, where we actually _like_ what we do.
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…
What did you manager say when you told them you noticed this person has been slacking off and how it's demotivating for you to work with this person?
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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.
Maybe everyone's white collar job is this way? There are plenty of jobs, like assembly line work, where an 8 hours day is not likely to be less than 7 hours of work (30 minutes for lunch, two 15 minute breaks). Source: I worked factory jobs for a temp agency over the summer while I was in high school (in 1990, before light industry was gutted in NE Ohio).
(Cheese plant when in college)
But that's the way of it. Different jobs have different requirements, and different cultures. Assembly line work obviously cannot have people wandering off whenever they choose. Most white collar workers, have more choice, and the longer lunch, is part of the pay.
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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…
USB devices purporting to be a mouse or other human interface device (HID) don't need drivers as there's a spec they follow.
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Windows supplies an API call, SendInput() I believe lol. You can write a script in a couple minutes.
If it’s a bank, you can be pretty sure another bored to death IT security dude will find it and it’ll be the highlight of the month. 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…
What did you manager say when you told them you noticed this person has been slacking off and how it's demotivating for you to work with this person?
We’re given a lot of rope when it comes to what we’re working on so other than hearing about what others are working on in standup, often I’ll never see it.
That said, I’m not sure he knows what to do about it. I’ve worked under him for over a decade and this is the first time we’ve had a real problem like this. I suspect he’s working with his own manager on how to handle it.
Assuming the author is familiar with the tech industry, this author seems to be engaging in dishonest arguments to portray tech as "bullshit". The writing is subtle to avoid interpreting the 6-hour focused work survey, but writes so that a person unfamiliar with tech would interpret the data as if 6-hour focused work is low. A person familiar with tech work would interpret 6-hour focused work to be not bullshit, but…
I actually had to fire a guy once who was working another job while working for me. I didn't do it because he was working two jobs; I did it because he was falling behind and being dishonest about why. 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 abs…
Why would an "evolved" person be ok with it?
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What did you manager say when you told them you noticed this person has been slacking off and how it's demotivating for you to work with this person?
My manager is well aware and pissed. I only really became aware after getting pulled onto the project a little over a month ago, seeing how little existed followed by being able to get basically zero feedback on how things should fit into the project. It was easy to not see (for me) when we were supposed to be heads down on separate projects. We’re given a lot of rope when it comes to what we’re working on so other t…
I've seen this same inability to punish incompetence in my own coding career at [insert large retailer]. No one got in trouble despite my protests but rather were moved around the organization. Alongside lots of other signs, it was clear to me that the tech work being done there wasn't important to many or any people who would be using it. It seemed to mostly be about the value of the company's stock.