Are you paid to look busy? • Hacker News Board

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#31

Post by glesica » Sat, May 10, 2014, 5:23 PM UTC

LeafyGreenbriar wrote: post #16

glesica wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "...work is valuable in itself." This is it. We have been fed a lie that "work" has intrinsic value and that people who don't want to work constantly are somehow inferior or immoral. Worse, "work" has come to be associated more with occupying a particular area in space during particular times than with actually accomplishing anything. I work relatively little (I'm 31 and I've literally never worked 40 hours a week)…

Out of curiosity, how are you able to work as little as you do?

To be fair, I worked nearly full-time for several years (37.5 hours per week, government job which also had a ton of paid time off) and then I've been back in school for the last couple years, which pays me a stipend. I also work part-time as a software developer. But, basically, I just don't have a ton of expenses (I don't own a car, I have lived in cheaper areas, I have no children). I will likely end up with a full-time job in the near-ish future. If I had it my way, I would always work part-time, but it is quite difficult to find good part-time work, and that is sad.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#32

Post by markbnj » Sat, May 10, 2014, 5:24 PM UTC

tormeh wrote: post #26

Combine this with how miserable low-rank work like shopping bag packers and store work is, and you have a great clusterfuck of a society.

I don't think that's the point at all. Even low-wage work would be more satisfying, in the author's view, because your labor is directly beneficial. You can see the results of it. Of course we'd all like to make more money than a store clerk, but in the quest for money we might end up doing things that satisfy us much less than simple labor would. For my part, as a developer, I'm among the fortunate.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#33

Post by hippich » Sat, May 10, 2014, 5:24 PM UTC

If you are developer or some sort of IT engineer, don't automatically think your job is not BS. Like job of developing thin client to a windows server running licensed software to get around license costs of software, where price is based on number of users... Yes, this types of businesses generate TONS of money from essentially the fact, that supplier and customer could not get in agreement for more reasonable license...

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#34

Post by pdkl95 » Sat, May 10, 2014, 5:27 PM UTC

xr09 wrote: post #24

dsirijus wrote: post #9

My employee next to me is working hard. I'm in elinks in terminal on HN and on IRC, with vertical split of htop in tmux. He thinks I'm working hard too, with all those numbers, columns, scrolling output and blinking cursor. I feel so bad right now. I'm going to go actually work.

When reading stuff like this I wonder, how do the Windows folks manage to do the same? A browser disguised as Visual Studio? doubledesktop.exe? I'm so thankful for my *nix with all these little toys.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key

These days, the Boss Key is probably mapped to the "minimize" keyboard shortcut.

//well, at least that how they used to do such things; a new solution may be needed in the "open plan" offices that have been trendy

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#35

Post by Totient » Sat, May 10, 2014, 5:27 PM UTC

The guy I work for really has no idea how easy certain tasks are once you automate them. I have done nothing to correct his misconceptions.

(I'm a CS grad student, working under a professor who somehow got tenure despite being unable to program his way out of a cardboard box. I swear, half of this job is tricking him into thinking I'm doing his work, so I can focus on doing actual research. ...I really need to find a new advisor.)

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#36

Post by sillysaurus3 » Sat, May 10, 2014, 5:29 PM UTC

dsirijus wrote: post #21

id wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should actually feel bad if the two of you are working on the same thing.

We do, and I found another way to not feel bad - I started drinking. At least I'm not pretending to work anymore! Win-win. Thinking out of the box like a boss.

I found another way to not feel bad - I started drinking. At least I'm not pretending to work anymore! Win-win.

What do you mean?

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#37

Post by reboog711 » Sat, May 10, 2014, 5:31 PM UTC

The bulk of my clients pay me hourly, on an as needed basis.

I've had a few clients; where it sometimes it feels like they are making stuff up for me to do just so I'll be available when real work comes down the pike.

I have mixed feelings about this.. on one hand--billable hours. On the other hand--it is not satisfying to do things with absolutely no business value.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#38

Post by sillysaurus3 » Sat, May 10, 2014, 5:33 PM UTC

Totient wrote: post #35

The guy I work for really has no idea how easy certain tasks are once you automate them. I have done nothing to correct his misconceptions. (I'm a CS grad student, working under a professor who somehow got tenure despite being unable to program his way out of a cardboard box. I swear, half of this job is tricking him into thinking I'm doing his work, so I can focus on doing actual research. ...I really need to find a…

What research are you working on?

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#39

Post by zanny » Sat, May 10, 2014, 5:33 PM UTC

hippich wrote: post #33

If you are developer or some sort of IT engineer, don't automatically think your job is not BS. Like job of developing thin client to a windows server running licensed software to get around license costs of software, where price is based on number of users... Yes, this types of businesses generate TONS of money from essentially the fact, that supplier and customer could not get in agreement for more reasonable licen…

I'd argue (as would most of the free software community) the creation of proprietary software is entirely bullshit. Because you have to eventually reinvent it with either permissive or copyleft licenses to just avoid the huge black hole that is legal bullshit and bureaucracy around licensing rights to a number that is not even scarce once its made. And until it is foss, you are just denying the users their freedoms to the stuff they are paying you for, and until it is sufficiently free it really isn't even a working product in my book.

Hell, even projects like Tizen vs Android and ZFS vs BTRFS vs XFS and KVM vs Xen vs Vmware vs Virtualbox are all bullshit jobs and unnecessary work reinventing the same wheel over and over to either satisfy a boss need out of the chief developers, the inability for the forerunner to accept others opinions into their project, or just raw license and legalese incompatibility bullshit.

It is, though, 99% bs. And every time someone tries to reinvent IMing after xmpp (without being able to, in a paragraph, describe the intrinsic flaw in xmpp you can't fix through amendments to the standard, and how their alternative immediately fixes them) it is just more BS. All the photo sharing websites, all the web apps, 99.99% of them are all bullshit because someone already did it before, and you just want to tweak a few knobs (which you could have easily done if all involved projects were open contribution and pliable to change and forking) and had simple results, but no, you have to start from scratch and spend a million LOCs reinventing wordpress. And you still write it in Lua! If you wrote it in, say, python, I'd be all over that because that presents a tangible benefit - "Lua is awful, I don't like it, and as a user of my software, you don't like it either, and you can't just patch fix that, so here is a replacement in python".

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#40

Post by AimHere » Sat, May 10, 2014, 5:35 PM UTC

xr09 wrote: post #24

dsirijus wrote: post #9

My employee next to me is working hard. I'm in elinks in terminal on HN and on IRC, with vertical split of htop in tmux. He thinks I'm working hard too, with all those numbers, columns, scrolling output and blinking cursor. I feel so bad right now. I'm going to go actually work.

When reading stuff like this I wonder, how do the Windows folks manage to do the same? A browser disguised as Visual Studio? doubledesktop.exe? I'm so thankful for my *nix with all these little toys.

When I was stuck in a meaningless office job with too much time, I took to learning myself a perl (that was used for some login scripting so there was an interpreter lying about) using notepad to edit, and the windows cmd.exe to execute the scripts. One other (more senior) employee did get curious and asked me what I was up to, but I did have a script that was actually useful to get part of my job done, so I just showed that off. Then I went back to teaching Perl to play scrabble!