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Why are you so busy?

tomlingham.com

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Re: Why are you so busy?

#21

Post by cjbgkagh »

JadeNB wrote: post #18
idiocrat wrote: post #12

There was a saying: If you want something important to be done, give it to the busiest person, not to a person who is free. The busy people tend to be more efficient and organized. You do not need to explain them what to do -- they can figure out themselves. The people who have free time tend to require external motivation/explanation, so you will end up micromanaging them, wasting your own time.

> There was a saying: If you want something important to be done, give it to the busiest person, not to a person who is free. > The busy people tend to be more efficient and organized. You do not need to explain them what to do -- they can figure out themselves. Sounds like a great recipe for burning out your highest performers.

Also people look busy for all the wrong reasons. It’s a ridiculous rule of thumb. Like the ‘he did $1M of damage on his first day, why fire him, I spent $1M’ training him’. The odds are the new hire is a fool who will repeatedly make costly mistakes.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#22

Post by unethical_ban »

maxsilver wrote: post #15
howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #6

Those of us who loathe laying off good employees are busy because we are understaffed. We're understaffed because we are sure that a downturn, recession or worse is upon us (or coming soon) and that the agony, expense and distraction of layoffs (to equalize income & overhead) are a bear market squeeze not worth the bull market juice. So we get by with fewer employees, more part-time & gig workers. We work harder than…

> providing security for the business, the employees & the owner The problem is that everything you've described only provides stability for the owner, and no one else. There's zero reason for an employee to believe money in your bank account somehow provides for their security -- even if you are honest and ethical and magically choose to do it, no one else ever does -- there is no way a reasonable person can believe…

>even if you are honest and ethical and magically choose to do it, no one else ever does

That's right, literally no employer ever does right by their employees in tough times except for this one HN commenter.

Or to put it non sarcastic, it's entirely possible for an employer not to be a bastard, even if it is less common than the opposite.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#23

Post by unethical_ban »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #13
howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #6

Those of us who loathe laying off good employees are busy because we are understaffed. We're understaffed because we are sure that a downturn, recession or worse is upon us (or coming soon) and that the agony, expense and distraction of layoffs (to equalize income & overhead) are a bear market squeeze not worth the bull market juice. So we get by with fewer employees, more part-time & gig workers. We work harder than…

That's great for you, but this is rarely, if ever, logical for the employee. This is very much a "you should be happy with your stable, lower wage job because it's stable" argument that is frequently used to suppress wage increases. As an employee, the only thing that really matters is the dollars flowing out of your account into mine on a regular basis. Trust, job security, growth opportunities, work life balance...…

>Trust, job security, growth opportunities, work life balance... they're all just words

Or not, if you have been at a good company where people got treated well, with good bonuses, great healthcare, tons of time off and job security during recessions and times when an unscrupulous company could have fired people.

A lot of people are asserting that companies and business owners are physically and psychologically incapable of anything except slitting throats at the earliest opportunity.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#24

Post by reillyse »

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #6

Those of us who loathe laying off good employees are busy because we are understaffed. We're understaffed because we are sure that a downturn, recession or worse is upon us (or coming soon) and that the agony, expense and distraction of layoffs (to equalize income & overhead) are a bear market squeeze not worth the bull market juice. So we get by with fewer employees, more part-time & gig workers. We work harder than…

As a business owner myself this is total nonsense. I proudly pay my staff well and I don't overwork them. Anything else is a choice and it's a choice that nearly always benefits you not your employees.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#25

Post by unethical_ban »

idiocrat wrote: post #12

There was a saying: If you want something important to be done, give it to the busiest person, not to a person who is free. The busy people tend to be more efficient and organized. You do not need to explain them what to do -- they can figure out themselves. The people who have free time tend to require external motivation/explanation, so you will end up micromanaging them, wasting your own time.

If you think this, just fire the people with free time.

It is false that someone with free time has it because they are incompetent. It is false that someone who needs up-front hand holding needs it throughout an assignment.

I need a decent amount of explanation to wrap my head around concepts, but once I have the prerequisite information and the tools I need to develop a tool, I can do it.

And like others said, "give the busy people all the work" is how you get your top workers to navigate to LinkedIn.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#26

Post by [deleted] »

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #6

Those of us who loathe laying off good employees are busy because we are understaffed. We're understaffed because we are sure that a downturn, recession or worse is upon us (or coming soon) and that the agony, expense and distraction of layoffs (to equalize income & overhead) are a bear market squeeze not worth the bull market juice. So we get by with fewer employees, more part-time & gig workers. We work harder than…

[deleted]

Re: Why are you so busy?

#27

Post by kickout »

unethical_ban wrote: post #23
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great for you, but this is rarely, if ever, logical for the employee. This is very much a "you should be happy with your stable, lower wage job because it's stable" argument that is frequently used to suppress wage increases. As an employee, the only thing that really matters is the dollars flowing out of your account into mine on a regular basis. Trust, job security, growth opportunities, work life balance...…

>Trust, job security, growth opportunities, work life balance... they're all just words Or not, if you have been at a good company where people got treated well, with good bonuses, great healthcare, tons of time off and job security during recessions and times when an unscrupulous company could have fired people. A lot of people are asserting that companies and business owners are physically and psychologically incap…

I mean....what's a realistic split on this? 95/5 bad to good? If these unicorn companies exist those jobs are vanishingly rare because people wouldn't move, correct? Im 'young' and I don't know I would ever give a company the benefit of the doubt. Been screwed too many times

Re: Why are you so busy?

#28

Post by jll29 »

stemlord wrote: post #11
howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #6

Those of us who loathe laying off good employees are busy because we are understaffed. We're understaffed because we are sure that a downturn, recession or worse is upon us (or coming soon) and that the agony, expense and distraction of layoffs (to equalize income & overhead) are a bear market squeeze not worth the bull market juice. So we get by with fewer employees, more part-time & gig workers. We work harder than…

>We've had two good employees leave in good times for less work for more money. Both came back after a few years when boom business cycles that drove that dislocation reverted to the mean. Did they experience a pay increase between leaving and coming back?

Because large organizations are slow to respond to market forces, it is typically easier to get a rise by leaving and coming back than by staying on, which is a shame.

Worse, in many places, people who stay on for half a decade or more are assumed permanent fixtures ("Bob has been here forever, he doesn't want to leave, or he can't get a job elsewhere") that are unlikely to ever leave, and therefore may be ignored when salary adjustments are conducted.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#29

Post by unethical_ban »

kickout wrote: post #27
unethical_ban wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Trust, job security, growth opportunities, work life balance... they're all just words Or not, if you have been at a good company where people got treated well, with good bonuses, great healthcare, tons of time off and job security during recessions and times when an unscrupulous company could have fired people. A lot of people are asserting that companies and business owners are physically and psychologically incap…

I mean....what's a realistic split on this? 95/5 bad to good? If these unicorn companies exist those jobs are vanishingly rare because people wouldn't move, correct? Im 'young' and I don't know I would ever give a company the benefit of the doubt. Been screwed too many times

I've worked at a private fortune 100 company and a publicly traded company and both had their ups and downs. I get compensated substantially more at the public one, but as a consultant of sorts, the work ethic and vacation expectations are a bit more... Documented. Either way, I must have been lucky to have 10 of 12 years with entirely competent and hard working managers, good vacation and so on. I liked almost every coworker I've had and pre COVID, we would get lunch or coffee together every day and chat about work and life.

If anything, I've lost some sense of purpose and direction, partially due to societal upheaval and partially due to depression and burnout. But I have never hated my job or been afraid of losing it.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#30

Post by strken »

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #6

Those of us who loathe laying off good employees are busy because we are understaffed. We're understaffed because we are sure that a downturn, recession or worse is upon us (or coming soon) and that the agony, expense and distraction of layoffs (to equalize income & overhead) are a bear market squeeze not worth the bull market juice. So we get by with fewer employees, more part-time & gig workers. We work harder than…

I think busyness, work hours, productivity, and context switching are all conflated with each other. They're interrelated but not the same.

When a lot of people talk about being busy, they're not so much saying "I had to do 50 hours of focused work this week," they're saying "I did 10 hours of focused work, because clients kept emailing me and we had a bunch of meetings, then our biggest customer's DB got corrupted for preventable reasons and we had to recover it, but we never test our restore process and so it all went wrong."

This is touched on in the grey box side-note and elsewhere in the article. Writing software is not usually a factory floor job where hours worked is linearly correlated with output. Removing slack from your team (not the app, the "free time" that gets filled with urgent incoming tasks or maintenance work) has long-lasting consequences for everyone that may be counterproductive.

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