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Are you paid to look busy?

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Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#41

Post by stephengillie »

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.

Yes, VS and SSMS open do help.

I keep RDCMan open on my 2nd screen, always connected to an administrative RDP server in the production domain, usually with Perfmon pulling occasional counts of IIS users and connections from our clusters. Sometimes I'll have ADUC or DNS or DFS or WSUS or SSMS up instead.

Half of my monitoring tools and error logs, and all of my ticket systems, use web interfaces. So do Sharepoint and parts of TFS and Office365. I use Chrome and keep a dozen tabs pinned, most of which are work-related. HN and Imgur are among those.

And then there's the spattering of Office applications (Outlook, Word, Excel), and Lync and other chat clients, and Notepad++ and Snip tool and Fiddler and Putty and other utilities...

It's not hard to hide anything at all.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#42

Post by christiansmith »

ryandrake wrote: post #22

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery becau…

Can't remember which book this quote is from, but "Critical Path" and "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" are great food for thought:

http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Path-Kiyoshi-Kuromiya/dp/0312...

http://www.amazon.com/Operating-Manual-Spaceship-Buckminster...

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#43

Post by sillysaurus3 »

zanny wrote: post #39
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 t…

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.

Game engines are a counterexample. There are probably dozens of others.

I'm trying to figure out what people are arguing against. Would you help me understand? Let's assume your argument is true: creation of most proprietary software is entirely bullshit. Ok, so?

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#44

Post by dsirijus »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #36
dsirijus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, resolution to a situation where I'm pretending to work, from an ethical point of view, is to, well, stop pretending to work. I can do that by either starting to work, or stopping to pretend to work.

I now at least have a clear consciousness, if not productive output. And it is Saturday night after all. I offered him quality free beer of his choosing. He refused. I also linked him to this thread.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#45

Post by wolf550e »

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://pcottle.github.io/MSOutlookit/

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#46

Post by AndrewKemendo »

keypusher wrote: post #23

No, I'm not, and it's one of the things I enjoy about programming. Some weeks I work 30 hours, others I work 60. But if I did the things I committed to doing this week, then I go home. Why sit in the office and pretend to be working? It makes no sense.

>Why sit in the office and pretend to be working? It makes no sense.

Only if you think of it from the "accomplishing tasks" perspective.

For example where I work, we are there even if we are not actively working to be available in case we need to immediately respond to demands of leadership. For example this week I had to answer an off the wall question about our project that they needed an answer to RIGHT NOW because they have a meeting with their boss in 15 minutes and anticipate that their boss would ask that question.

Yea.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#47

Post by morgante »

markbnj wrote: post #32
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.

I think that's actually the point.

On one side, we have low-wage work which is many ways the least-bullshitty. People at the bottom of the hierarchy are often the ones actually getting the work done.

Then, on the other side, we have the layers of HR reps and people who exist only to mind the hierarchy—in many cases, being very well-compensated to do so.

Between the two, there are few meaningful and well-paid positions left.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#48

Post by zanny »

danso wrote: post #7

I've had this concept rolling around in my head occasionally...the best path in becoming a better programmer is to sincerely desire to automate yourself out of your job . Instead of backing up a system via GUI every week, figure out the API calls needed to hook up via a script. After a few weeks of triggering that script by hand, write a cron job and a logger that logs the relevant transactions. After awhile of manua…

> Does your company have the foresight to reward you

More like to they have the foresight to patent your ideas in their name, take your IP and restrict it via copyright, and then make fortunes off of it while the rest of the world withers in squalor.

There is a huge market movement in the IP industry not just because of how it is an obvious quick buck today to just sue everyone and put money down the legal black hole, but that in the long run when the means of production are wholly automated, you rule the world if the men with the guns give you exclusive rights to those ideas.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#49

Post by stingraycharles »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #46
keypusher wrote: post #23

No, I'm not, and it's one of the things I enjoy about programming. Some weeks I work 30 hours, others I work 60. But if I did the things I committed to doing this week, then I go home. Why sit in the office and pretend to be working? It makes no sense.

>Why sit in the office and pretend to be working? It makes no sense. Only if you think of it from the "accomplishing tasks" perspective. For example where I work, we are there even if we are not actively working to be available in case we need to immediately respond to demands of leadership. For example this week I had to answer an off the wall question about our project that they needed an answer to RIGHT NOW becaus…

Usually phones work fine in emergency situations like that.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#50

Post by sillysaurus3 »

dsirijus wrote: post #44
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, resolution to a situation where I'm pretending to work, from an ethical point of view, is to, well, stop pretending to work. I can do that by either starting to work, or stopping to pretend to work. I now at least have a clear consciousness, if not productive output. And it is Saturday night after all. I offered him quality free beer of his choosing. He refused. I also linked him to this thread.

I'm just trying to understand, why be at work on the weekend or after hours unless you need/want to get something done? (Man, I wish HN had a private messaging system, because I usually have questions that interest me but aren't really appropriate to ask publicly. Thinking of writing one...)
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