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Are you paid to look busy?

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Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#61

Post by spinlock »

zanny wrote: post #48
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…

It's not your IP. It's theres. They paid for it.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#62

Post by dsirijus »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #50
dsirijus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...)

Well, you do have a new unread mail now. :)

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#63

Post by Havoc »

qwerty_asdf wrote: post #58
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.

Don't worry. The network administrators know how lazy you really are.

>The network administrators know how lazy you really are.

Not always. The clients net admin can't see it (encrypted VPN) and my own companies net admin would catch hell for looking at my traffic too carefully (NDAs). Everything is logged though...so people behave.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#64

Post by jacques_chester »

hawkharris wrote: post #54

This reminds me of a study focusing on soccer games. It analyzed A) how often players shot goals toward the left, middle and right sides of the net; and B) how often goalies responded by jumping toward the left, middle and right sides. The stats revealed a surprising phenomenon. Though opposing players shot toward each area of the goal evenly — about 33% of the time — goalies jumped toward the left or the right 80-90…

DeMarco and Lister called it "undertime".

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#65

Post by Havoc »

reboog711 wrote: post #37

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.

>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.

Have you tried approaching them with a proposal for actual work? If they are willing to spend money on BS work then you might as well propose something solid. Either way you're billing, either way you're working...but you might just deliver some extra value in the process.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#66

Post by BSousa »

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.

Not sure if you are just making a joke or not, but please, if you started to drink more due to a boring job (including drinking before/while on the job) either talk to someone for help (a sibling/wife/friend if you don't want to go the professional route) and try to change jobs as quickly as possible (if you feel the drinking is related to the job). I've seen some colleagues becoming borderline alcoholics (even if highly functional) by using alcohol as a coping mechanism for work.

Nothing wrong with a few drinks, or a night out where you get plastered, but if the drinking is related to the job, please ask for help/do something.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#67

Post by jacques_chester »

My employers are actually serious about pair programming, so I am easily getting more work done now than I've ever done before.

We take lunch, we take breaks, we work fixed hours, but holy moly we also get a helluva lot done every day. It's both exhausting and refreshing.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#68

Post by hippich »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #43
zanny wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 other…

I would argue with you that games are not most of the software. Even if it would be, it would benefit a lot from standardized game engines which could be used by workers of art (designers, writers, etc) to build creative games to entertain people.

Most software today is basically CRUD and reporting on top of it. Sadly, all this crap re-implemented so many times each day instead of focusing on inventing. How many corporate time spent on creating login form? retrieve password form? input form validation? In my short life I seen it re-implemented so many times already (and often very poorly btw.) This is one example of engineering BS job I mentioned above.

Or create own protocols only to avoid competition and lock in customer. And there are people who actually engineer it all day long every day. And customers who essentially paying for this person's BS work. It almost feels like corporations are interested in hiring as many people as possible, force them to do non-standardized stuff just to be able to siphon money though corporation bank account to be able to take a cut. It totally make sense to do that for corporation, but for their customers? I am not sure...

From humanity standpoint as a whole, there is place for proprietary software, but way-way less prevalent as it is right now IMHO.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#69

Post by sliverstorm »

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…

We've had systems where not everybody had to work to eat & make a living.

It was called monarchy, and you will notice it didn't go over well.

The problem is one in ten thousand still leaves a very disgruntled & disenfranchised 30,000 people in America slaving away so everyone else can do as they wish. And until we can automate all the dirty work, the hard laborious work, these aren't 30,000 people working white collar desk jobs.

Now, it's much easier to uphold that status quo than the old monarchies, because nearly 300 million people are pretty fond of the arrangement and can successfully keep the other 30,000 down. Maybe you realize that, and maybe you're ok with throwing 30,000 people under the bus "for the good of the country", but be upfront about that.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#70

Post by TorKlingberg »

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://codereddit.com/

Reddit that looks like source code. For opening in Visual Studio's built-in browser. I am not a Windows dev.

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