Doing nothing at work
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Doing nothing at work
1–10 of 168 posts
Re: Doing nothing at work
#2This is written as if you have actual control over the volume of work given to you and/or deadlines.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#3This is written as if you have actual control over the volume of work given to you and/or deadlines.
It's surprising how often people dig their own grave.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#4doing LOTS of nothing can also be a huge power move. i was in software development, technical writing contracting in Silicon Valley back in the 80s. i stepped away to do something completely different for 40 years. curiosity in AI brought me back. the background acquired from my exploration of an apparently unrelated field enabled me to develop some very advanced software concepts relevant to the problems with AI, and implement them in working code.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#5It sounds like you could have a little "buffer time" where you "do nothing" to prevent burnout when you need that free time for something that pops up and to take adequate breaks to pace yourself cognitively speaking
Otherwise I don't see why you couldn't do lower value tasks with flexibility to abandon them if something higher value comes up
Re: Doing nothing at work
#6Thank you for this. I'm new to SWE. How to know when it is time to leave an organization versus sticking it out?
Re: Doing nothing at work
#7This is written as if you have actual control over the volume of work given to you and/or deadlines.
Don’t you? You can always say no verbally or with non-delivery. Are you working under a continuous and immediate threat of dismissal?
Re: Doing nothing at work
#8This is written as if you have actual control over the volume of work given to you and/or deadlines.
Don’t you? You can always say no verbally or with non-delivery. Are you working under a continuous and immediate threat of dismissal?
When customers that pay you a lot of money demand resolution to issues from your higher ups, you sort of have to. Especially true if their product is not working.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#9This is written as if you have actual control over the volume of work given to you and/or deadlines.
It's surprising how often people dig their own grave.
You can say no thats too much work load, we're understaffed or its too tight of a timeliness for the results.
But understand the ecosystem. People make promises that arent entirely dependent on them to be able to deliver
Re: Doing nothing at work
#10There's a lot of wisdom in this. In addition to reserving some capacity for when true high-value work comes along, I think software engineering is not the type of job that you can do well if you're constantly busy. Trying to write some code as quickly as possible seldom yields the best design. This article doesn't get into another important aspect of this, which is how to get away with working at 80% capacity without getting in trouble with your manager. This takes a bit of care around communication and estimation of work. One of the first good pieces of advice that I got from older seasoned developers when I started my first real programming job has stayed with me to this day: take your estimate of how long it will take to do something and double it before communicating to your manager/users. As you get more experienced that ratio can come down to maybe 1.5x instead of 2x, but the principle still applies.