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Why are you so busy?

tomlingham.com

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Re: Why are you so busy?

#31

Post by quickthrower2 »

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…

> My advice to the "don't be so busy" folks... get busy. Do a good job and tactfully take credit for it. Work hard and make sure your name is associated with results.

If you are in a dysfunctional org this will be very hard to do. What you think is a great outcome can be overshadowed because in 500ms some higher up decided it was a shit outcome. And customer/boss is always right is the culture in general.

You need to be busy on the right things. And the right thing might be brushing up the resume. Or it might be pulling an all nighter at the current job and bragging about it the next day. Or managing the manager. Or it might be giving yourself a break, by taking leave. But it is never clear, you just have to decide.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#32

Post by keyle »

RyanOD wrote: post #4

I turned this into a poster and hung it in front of my desk. Great quote. “as long as you are doing your work well and continuously working on the next most important thing prioritised by the business, any pressure to deliver beyond what your team is capable of is objectively unreasonable.“

Like I tell my kids when they go too fast (I heard it from somewhere)...

   "Smooth is fast kids, smooth is fast!"

Re: Why are you so busy?

#33

Post by fancy_pantser »

keyle wrote: post #32
RyanOD wrote: post #4

I turned this into a poster and hung it in front of my desk. Great quote. “as long as you are doing your work well and continuously working on the next most important thing prioritised by the business, any pressure to deliver beyond what your team is capable of is objectively unreasonable.“

Like I tell my kids when they go too fast (I heard it from somewhere)... "Smooth is fast kids, smooth is fast!"

Originally it was: "slow is smooth, smooth is fast"

Re: Why are you so busy?

#34

Post by mythrwy »

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…

Not only stability for the owner. Stability for the business. Which is where the money for salaries comes from.

Owning a business for a number of years was a very eye opening experience and has made me a much better employee and I'm in agreement with OP.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#35

Post by colechristensen »

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.

Some people are very good at appearing busy or at making themselves busy by being inefficient or by adding unnecessary steps and noise to the thing that needs doing.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#36

Post by colechristensen »

RyanOD wrote: post #4

I turned this into a poster and hung it in front of my desk. Great quote. “as long as you are doing your work well and continuously working on the next most important thing prioritised by the business, any pressure to deliver beyond what your team is capable of is objectively unreasonable.“

Often very useful things are never the "next most important" if you don't scope "importance" very carefully.

"Slow down to speed up" can capture it, setting aside times for those non-critical maintenance steps that prevent problems or make everything just a little bit faster can make worlds of difference in your work, but never seem to be able to compete with the "next most important" thing on the list.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#37

Post by grensley »

I was thinking to myself as I read this: "this man has never worked somewhere long enough to be the guy who has to fix things when it breaks", and lo-and-behold, he's had 7 jobs in 8 years.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#38

Post by crooked-v »

colechristensen wrote: post #36
RyanOD wrote: post #4

I turned this into a poster and hung it in front of my desk. Great quote. “as long as you are doing your work well and continuously working on the next most important thing prioritised by the business, any pressure to deliver beyond what your team is capable of is objectively unreasonable.“

Often very useful things are never the "next most important" if you don't scope "importance" very carefully. "Slow down to speed up" can capture it, setting aside times for those non-critical maintenance steps that prevent problems or make everything just a little bit faster can make worlds of difference in your work, but never seem to be able to compete with the "next most important" thing on the list.

That reminds me of the military saying "slow is smooth, smooth is fast".

Re: Why are you so busy?

#39

Post by jiggawatts »

Please note the important caveat in the article:

If the following are true: Your team is following software engineering practices that have been shown time and time again to be indicative of highly performing technology teams (think CI/CD and DevOps).

This is all too often the root cause of developers being "too busy".

I've had some variation of the following conversation nearly verbatim with six different teams in the last twelve months:

Me: "I can help you guys to set up Azure DevOps pipelines to automate your builds and deployments, you just need to make sure your code builds on an isolated machine first."

Them: "That sounds nice, but we're too busy to work on that."

Me: "May I ask what is keeping you guys so busy?"

Them: "We have three (manual) deployments this week."

Me: "ಠ_ಠ"

Re: Why are you so busy?

#40

Post by fritztastic »

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…

People are expected to keep savings to weather through the lean times, and corporations should do the same- set up a fund to keep valued workers through lean times.

From personal experience, you can do good work and still be laid off. I got laid off a couple months after the company's president gave himself a 5M bonus, fully aware a recession was ongoing and that measures would have to be taken.

From my perspective many businesses are very happy to have people stick around to do the work with less pay, dur8ng good times they give the profits of this labor to the people at the top + shareholders and then when a downturn comes they trim off workers. They could have kept the people they laid off and paid everyone more if they'd (rather than giving bonuses to executives) put that money away for a rainy day. I don't see the benefit of having loyalty and working yourself to the bone when the people you're working for have lots of loyalty to the bottom line, themselves, and their investors, yet very little to the quality of life of the people who work under them.

Sure, I'm willing to work crazy hours and do whatever needs to get done but I expect to be met halfway and be respected (preferrably properly compensated) for the sacrifices I'm willing to make for the work I do.

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