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Are you paid to look busy?

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Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#101

Post by quasque »

turnip1979 wrote: post #80
paulhauggis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds great, but you still need money to survive. This would mean that the few that did work would essentially be supporting the rest of society. Why would I ever want to start a million dollar business if I knew the majority of my earnings would be taken from me by the government to support people that didn't need to do anything?? You don't have to get a crappy job and work for someone you hate for the rest of…

I'm not someone who downvoted you but would like to discuss your points. Lets start bottom up. 1) You cannot legally collect berries in the woods. That may have been possible a few hundred years ago. For all my life, I've lived in concrete jungles where pretty much every shrub was manicured and every tree was allowed to survive for aesthetic reasons. More so that that, we don't have commons any more. In the stone age…

> You cannot legally collect berries in the woods.

A minor point, but this is generally legal in the UK if you're doing it for personal consumption [1]. I expect other countries have similarly permissive exceptions.

[1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/4

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#102

Post by Artistry121 »

dantheman wrote: post #89

"And then I thought, well, maybe that explains some other things, like why is it there’s this deep, popular resentment against people who have real jobs? They can get people so angry at auto-workers, just because they make 30 bucks an hour, which is like nowhere near what corporate lawyers make, but nobody seems to resent them. They get angry at the auto-workers; they get angry at teachers." I thought people were ang…

Lawyers are not unionized but the bar exam definitely does limit supply.

You are correct though - one major reason why teachers and auto-workers might get criticism is because they pay an organization to make sure companies and other individuals cannot contract freely.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#103

Post by 21echoes »

paulhauggis wrote: post #93
chasing wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You appear to be getting downvoted, but you've struck at the heart of the issue: If we want to do away with meaningless jobs, people will still need resources to survive. And that "one-in-ten-thousand" (or whatever) will need to be taxed very heavily so the wealth can be spread. We can't have all of our financial resources siloed into an increasingly small number of people's wallets. A great benefit to this system wi…

I made a good point..and I wasn't even snarky or mean about it. I was down voted because I differed with someone's opinion. Silencing trolls is one thing..but silencing the opposition reminds me why need freedom of speech.

I'm sorry, but you really did not make good points.

> Why would I ever want to start a million dollar business if I knew the majority of my earnings would be taken from me by the government to support people that didn't need to do anything??

To help people. Maybe you don't feel like helping others, but most people do. To question even the existence of that motive is... pretty scary

> You don't have to get a crappy job and work for someone you hate for the rest of your life. I started a business 2 years ago and I don't plan on getting a job anytime soon.

Starting a business requires capital, talent, and a lot of luck. Obviously, not everyone has access to these things, nor should we expect them to.

> You have the freedom to do this..or work for someone..or you could even live in the woods on berries.

No, living in the woods on berries is really not realistic.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#104

Post by shawn-furyan »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #84
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Should your leadership be aware of the answer to the potential question without having to ask you about it 15 minutes before the meeting? This seems like something that ought not be a problem, if your leadership is attending standups and there's clear communication.

I agree. This is an organizational issue, not a legitimate job duty, irrespective of whether the rank and file should be allowed to leave when they've finished their work.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#105

Post by chadcf »

paulhauggis wrote: post #55
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…

This sounds great, but you still need money to survive. This would mean that the few that did work would essentially be supporting the rest of society. Why would I ever want to start a million dollar business if I knew the majority of my earnings would be taken from me by the government to support people that didn't need to do anything?? You don't have to get a crappy job and work for someone you hate for the rest of…

> Why would I ever want to start a million dollar business if I knew the majority of my earnings would be taken from me by the government to support people that didn't need to do anything??

Why do people start million dollar businesses now when they can work at McDonald's or work at a call center or or teach schools or be a policeman or or or...

It's almost like some people are naturally motivated to do certain things for reasons beyond just the desire to have food and a roof over their heads.

I don't understand why people think if you offer everyone, say, $20k a year to do nothing that nobody would ever want to work to achieve more, earn more, improve people's lives, etc. Sure some people would (especially people who currently live on minimum wage). But many would not be satisfied with such a minimal existence. And with nobody having to worry about surviving without a job, it also frees up many people to explore ideas they otherwise would never have had time for.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#106

Post by withdavidli »

paulhauggis wrote: post #55
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…

This sounds great, but you still need money to survive. This would mean that the few that did work would essentially be supporting the rest of society. Why would I ever want to start a million dollar business if I knew the majority of my earnings would be taken from me by the government to support people that didn't need to do anything?? You don't have to get a crappy job and work for someone you hate for the rest of…

There are some assumptions here:

1. You need money to survive - Nope. Money is a medium to exchange for goods. All the money in the world can't save you if there's no food/water.

2. Starting a business solely on personal gain - A million dollar business, I assume, is you're example of a successful business. Though it will be true for a lot of people, please pose the question "Would you start a successful business if it would save millions of lives and billions of work hours?"

3. Supporting people that didn't need to do anything - There's an assumption that people that don't need to support themselves will be unproductive. Is this neccessarily true? Though it might be a small fraction of the population, there are people's interests that they pursue that would greatly automate jobs or help their society. Theoritical work that people pursue are abstract, but the research findings could give great insight into physics, biology, social dynamics, etc.

The heart of your statement is more philosophical in why communisum won't work. But would a purely capitalistic society be better? Where you know that near every action is derived from personal gain?

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#107

Post by sitkack »

jacques_chester wrote: post #64
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".

Is that my version of "homing from work" ?

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#108

Post by pscsbs »

paulhauggis wrote: post #86
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.

Most managers would not accept this. Since most developers are paid salary (as opposed to hourly), many feel like if you were leaving early, you aren't working hard enough. I've seen it at every place I've ever worked. At one place, my manager directly told me I needed to stay until 6 or 7 every night or the boss will think that I'm slacking.

That's shocking. No manager I've ever worked for had this kind of mentality. If you needed to show up late or leave early, as long as you were getting your tasks done for the week, it was fine. Forcing people to stay until 6 or 7 is the fastest way to get developers to burn out.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#109

Post by jes5199 »

id wrote: post #14
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.

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

Maybe! but sometimes the net productivity win comes from letting the frantic person spin their gears down until you reach a velocity where thinking clearly is possible

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#110

Post by qwerty_asdf »

There's an aspect of this frustrating, forced busy-work behavior that can get baked into software development, and it isn't going away anytime soon.

Technology innately gives rise to a behavior called yak shaving, and it's not limited to software development, but pretty much any form of technology-related behavior is prone to it, when layers upon layers of technology compound one another and accumulate their own accretion disks of cruft.

http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/old-archive/gsb-archive/gs...

A very simple example is needing anti-freeze to drive a car. If there were no chemical companies producing millions of gallons of anti-freeze a year, and no auto-stores to distibute periphery car necessities, and gas stations, and auto mechanics didn't supply anti-freeze, because it's beyond the scope of their expertise, how would I produce the right anti-freeze for my car on my own? Well, what are the requirements for producing industrial grade ethylene glycol?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene_glycol

A similar open-source software example would be dependency hell.

Just compare the differences in dependencies between two very popular open-source web browsers:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/web/chromium-browser

http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/web/firefox

In order to accurately compare the two applications, how would you take advantage of the fact that these are open-source projects, and actually review the source code, and then build from source?

Each application is built upon many other independent software projects, each sub-project with it's own disciplines, specializations and dependencies. It's time consuming and painstaking behavior to dig into the source trees for these programs and all their dependencies.

How deep can you go before you give up?

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