
How to hide thinking at work so that the non-programmers don't suspect slacking - fogus
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/811246/how-to-hide-thinking-at-work-so-that-the-non-programmers-dont-suspect-slacking/
======
nazgulnarsil
I have an alternate solution: grow a backbone. Do not put up with
childish/ignorant behavior. If your immediate superior harasses you for doing
the job you are being paid for you need to go over their head.

I've had to deal with this while doodling/sketching ideas on a whiteboard. Not
being firm with people does you no favors and makes them think their initial
assessment was correct.

~~~
w1ntermute
> If your immediate superior harasses you for doing the job you are being paid
> for you need to go over their head.

His problem isn't with his superiors, it's with his co-workers:

> If you don't stare at boring stuff on the monitor for 8 hours straight, co-
> workers suspect you being a slacker. Yes, not the managers who see the
> output. Only the co-workers who see the process and can't relate to this
> kind of work.

~~~
jrockway
Incidentally, I never look at my coworkers' monitors, but I still know who
isn't doing anything.

It's simple: if this week's status update is exactly the same as last week's,
then you didn't do anything. Whether you typed stuff in the IDE and nothing
worked or you just read Slashdot all day doesn't really matter.

(Everyone has one of these weeks, of course, or I do anyway. But when it's
every week for a year, well, that doesn't look so good.)

------
edw519
1\. Choose any web page you want to read (My choice is usually something from
Hacker News).

2\. Ctrl-A.

3\. Ctrl-C.

4\. Open your IDE or text editor (I prefer textpad with black background and
lime green foreground.) Bonus points if there's already some code in there.

5\. Ctrl-V.

6\. Read away at your heart's content. If anyone sees your screen from a
distance, it looks like you're working.

7\. Guilt = 0. I spend most of my time "thinking" about work when I'm not at
work. When I report to work in the morning, I usually have a flurry of pent up
code to write that I thought about at home the night before. But I stay at the
office all day long whether or not I actually have something to code. I always
hit my deadlines. It all evens out.

~~~
pmjordan
I smell an opportunity for a "readability" style bookmarklet using a
monospaced font and a blinking cursor at the bottom of the screen. F11 gets
rid of the browser chrome and you're set.

~~~
mkramlich
It's called lynx.

Man I feel old.

Back to my Gopher session...

------
sporksmith
One response I'm surprised didn't get more votes at stackoverflow is thinking
on paper. Not only does it make the fact that you're thinking visible and
socially acceptable; it's a big help in focusing your thoughts. I use this all
of the time for brainstorming, planning, or "rubber ducky debugging", and I
find that I make a lot more progress on paper than trying to just do it in my
head.

The permanent record is a secondary bonus, but sometimes I find writing in a
permanent place like my bound notebook makes me hold back and do the thinking
in my head again so that I can write perfectly, instead of just brain dumping
as I think. When I get blocked like this, I switch to looseleaf, which I can
toss if it turns out to be scribbles. More often I end up saving that too,
though, in folders.

~~~
mbenjaminsmith
I work independently so I don't worry about what I _look_ like working (and it
is awful, usually messy hair and a pair of boxer shorts, who has time for a
comb or pants?), but I definitely agree with the thinking on paper. Spending
15 minutes sketching out ideas with a pen saves me hours of dead-end code
writing. That's especially true if I have to write a tricky algorithm of any
type. I haven't seen one yet that couldn't be sorted out without a single line
of code. I'm not talking about writing pseudocode either, I'm talking about
drawing pictures of what an algorithm does (or needs to do). Boxes, squiggly
lines and arrows are your friend. Or, to look at it another way, if you can't
draw a picture of it, you don't know what you're doing yet. That mindset has
made me much more productive (and saner).

------
sgift
This is the most depressing question I've read in a while. Thinking is so
fundamental to programming - the most important part of the whole activity
(for me) - and then there is a professional programmer who has to ask how to
hide this part of programming from his coworkers because they do not
understand his activities.

I do not even know what I would do in such a situation. Probably trying to
find a new job if such questions and suspicions persist after an explanation.

------
cookiecaper
I would usually spin around in my chair looking at the ceiling when I was
thinking about something. Occasionally I would play with a pen or do something
else like that.

This would irritate even other programmers. My bosses strongly preferred the
other programmers because they always had code up and always looked like they
were working; if they had to think, they would usually call a meeting and talk
it through. I looked like I was getting paid to make myself dizzy.

I told them I was thinking about stuff and that they should leave me alone. I
quit because it was a bad place to work.

------
cletus
Speaking as the person who wrote the top answer to that my solution was this:
I now work at Google. Problem solved.

------
gabea
It is so funny that this has been posted on HN. A friend of mine was recently
spoken to at his place of work for this exact same thing. When being
confronted, his boss spoke to him about how he is being "perceived" by
everyone as someone who doesn't do any work even though he gets all of his
work done and then some. When he asked his boss back if his boss thinks he
doesn't get his work done his boss was unable to say he didn't and finally
confessed how it was his manager questioning my friend's work

I am starting to believe that if you have a web company ALL your employees
should have some sort of programming experience before they are hired for non-
programming jobs. I know this may be untrainable to do, but it might be the
best thing a business does for itself.

~~~
adestefan
This has nothing to do with programming. A designer, an illustrator or a copy
writer all take time throughout the day to think and find inspiration. Please
don't assume that you _must_ train everyone in progamming just so they
"understand"

------
fleitz
Ask them what they do and tell them the ways you can automate their job away.

Tell them that perhaps their job could be done by a machine and you will speak
to their supervisor about creating such a project.

In all seriousness ignore it and focus on actually doing your job. If you
really want to convince them, rephrase the above as helping them get the
annoying parts of their job automated. Then when they tell you, tell them
you'll need to do some research on the best way to approach the problem and
look what's already been done to automate those sorts of tasks, rather than
blindly working and reinventing something that already exists. At this point
the light bulb should go on, however you'll have to usually spell it out for
them that this is why you think about things rather than charging right in
unthinkingly. So that you don't waste resources by reinventing something that
could be found for free just be looking (aka. research aka. 'thinking').

Talk to them about how something like a browser requires millions of man hours
of work and how if you can find a browser on the internet rather than creating
your own you can provide better value to the company.

------
matwood
Write some stuff on your whiteboard then stare at it and then write some more.
Even business people will understand whiteboarding as 'work.' If you really
want to impress them write some random stuff on post-its, stick them on the
whiteboard and mention 'six sigma' every once and awhile.

------
jimfl
When anyone asks me what I'm doing if I've "come up for air", I just reply
"Programming. I'll type it in later."

Software development doesn't happen in computers, it happens in our minds. And
not just one person's mind, but in the minds of the collaborators. Sometimes
the only way to sync up with someone else appears, for all the world, to be
just a bunch of Monty Python quotes.

------
JulianMorrison
In my dream workplace, they'd put aside little lockable rooms with HEAVY sound
insulation, warm-white lighting, no distractions in the decor, and a beanbag
to lounge in, and let us use them when we need to think. I bet it would pay
for itself in code quantity and quality.

------
jarin
I lucked out at the last place I worked (a 50 person company): It was a suit-
and-tie kind of environment, but the programming department (about 10 people)
had our own closed-off section of the office with a Wii and a Street Fighter
II arcade machine (which we used regularly).

It was weird because the rest of the company was run like you would expect a
suit-and-tie place to be run, but we programmers were only graded on our
results. We even used to take 1.5 hour (paid) lunches if we were ahead of
schedule, and I even decided to start coming in at 10 instead of 8:30 since I
would always stay until 7 pm or so (didn't ask anyone, and didn't get any guff
from anyone about it).

------
Mz
_Yesterday's case was even worse because this same guy would sit with a
colleague and discuss the house she's buying and other things in the middle of
doing his own work (and he's charging his clients for his time and I'm sure
he's not charging for such downtime), which I found particularly galling as a
real double standard on downtime._

Actually, the fact that this individual would chit chat about personal crap
while on the clock is probably _why_ they thought this particular programmer
was simply slacking.

~~~
sgift
I think you've misread this part: The person who "blew up" on the programmers
was the person who later chit chatted with a colleague.

~~~
Mz
No,not at all. I am saying the person who does all this chatting is projecting
-- they are the one who actually slacks on the job but doesn't see it as such.
I see this same dynamic at work all the time (and I am not a programmer):
People who spend gobs of time on a daily basis discussing all kinds of
personal stuff with other employees. They are in "management" type positions,
so I think they view it as "part of their job"/"team building" etc. I don't
think it is. And these folks who spend so much of their day shooting the
breeze are the exact same people who get after others (lower ranking than
themselves) for talking to coworkers "instead of doing their job" -- even if
they actually are discussing work and not just shooting the breeze.

~~~
sgift
My bad. Now I've understood your reasoning.

~~~
Mz
No big. Probably just a case of "Mz talks like Elle Woods* yet again" anyway.
(I say this based on the low number of upvotes for my first remark and the
much higher number of upvotes for my second one.)

* A la the scene in _Legally Blonde_ that goes something like this: "He's gay! -- what kind of shoes do I have on?" ..."Uh, black?" ..."See! He's gay!"

------
antirez
if your employer feels like you are not working enough since you do pauses in
order to think to your design, also think about picking a different company...

Your boss should be utterly happy that you spend some time in design activity.
At max I think that if you want to make this a bit more clear, use pencil and
paper when reasoning about your design: it tends to help also.

------
adriand
Although it happens so often it should no longer be a surprise, it is
nonetheless often surprising how stepping away from your desk and doing
something totally unrelated to the problem you're battling with or the bug
you're tracking down - like watering plants, going for a walk, etc. - provides
you with a solution in a few short minutes.

That's why I often tell employees who are blocked on some problem or are
visibly frustrated with a bug to just go do something else for a while. It's
more of a waste of time to keep working at it, then to "slack" and quickly
achieve a flash of inspiration.

------
nerd_in_rage
Suspect slacking? Slacking is a given.

I have yet to have a programming job where more than 4 hours a day of "work"
was required.

~~~
LiveTheDream
Join a startup

~~~
nerd_in_rage
I did, in the late 90s.

~~~
LiveTheDream
Did you really not work more than 4 hours at that startup? That really
surprises me. Care to elaborate?

~~~
nerd_in_rage
early on, I did.

later on, right before the bubble burst, the place was totally over-funded and
hired tons of people who didn't know what they were doing at a technical
level. many of the people "in charge" (VP level, etc) were complete buffoons.

cronyism, nepotism, and incompetence ran rampant. there were many useless
managers, directors, assistant directors, on and on. this was typical of
companies of that era. this provided ample opportunity for goofing off.

i could tell you some detailed and hilarious stories, but i'd wind up outing
myself.

------
bcl
Work someplace where they can't see you.

------
jasamer
I have a kind of similar "problem"... when I'm going out, I often have some
unsolved problem that I can't stop thinking about... And so it happens that
I'm sitting quietly, with a beer in hand, at the bar and think about trees and
forests and forests of trees whose leaves are trees, and people start thinking
that I'm depressed or bored or weird.

My solution: not caring about what other people think. But I realize that's
not really an option at work.

(OT.: Hello everyone, this is my first comment, but I've been reading HN for a
while.)

------
dools
Get a thinking cap. Whenever you're thinking, put the cap on. If someone asks
you what you're doing, tell them you're thinking, and that whenever they see
you wearing your thinking cap that's what you're doing and you'd like not to
be interrupted please.

------
knodi
This is a question close to my heart.

My favorite way is to pull the terminal down and start compiling something.
But this only works for good 30mins. Then I just think to my self I don't give
a shit what "they" think and start doing what I want to do like reading
HackerNews.

When I have my moments it can last anywhere from few hours to few days of just
procrastinating then its back to business. But this time of procrastinating is
very importing as I play out different scenarios in my head (and research) on
how to tackle the current problem on hand and what will its impact be on
current and future code, but you can't aspect everyone to understand that.

------
bherms
One thing I've been doing is working on a fun side project. (I'm currently
building software for a new business, and I would never work on that during
office hours -- FYI). However, I found another cool idea for the guys in my
office to use, so when I need to get off the problem I'm working on, I
typically work on my little utility for a bit. Helps me clear my head and it
still looks like I'm coding -- because I am.

------
sachitgupta
This applies to all kinds of people who create (artists, designers, musicians
etc.), not just programmers. Me personally, I get my best ideas in the shower
or when I'm running.

I know Tim Ferriss gets a bad rep around here, but he has a very good solution
to this: ask to work from home, get more work done and show that you produce
more results when you work from home vs working in the office.

------
diziet
I think that the problem is that most people just aren't used to thinking
about how to do things better for long periods of time. They fall into a
routine they find comfortable and they feel unnatural to step outside that
comfort zone. Also, thinking about how to solve problems or build things isn't
unique to only programmers.

------
jimfl
I have found that making things with those little magnetic balls is both
therapeutic and easily recognized as thinking.

------
xhuang
There is a JAVA version of reddit at <http://www.codereddit.com> Normally I
use eclipse's internal browser to read it along side my normal code, no one
ever notices it

I wish there is a version for HN.

------
Dilpil
Keep a pencil and paper on your desk, and use them to guide your thinking.
This eliminates any ambiguity as to what you are doing, while at the same time
actually helping your thought process along.

------
kingofspain
Used to get this quite often when I was office-based. Now I'm home-based, I
get the slightly better 'phone call every hour' approach to make sure I'm
putting required hours in.

~~~
pmiller2
How do you manage to get anything done with such frequent interruptions?

~~~
kingofspain
The short answer is that I don't :) I make real progress only when my boss is
on one of his (thankfully fairly frequent) holidays around the world.

------
pxlpshr
i decompress by working on something less taxing on the creative juices. i
don't read reddit or play facebook games... but i do give myself downtime in
the evening to turn off and unplug from everything.

i think that's the difference between the founders I know and cogs. there's
often just not enough time in the day, so the game of work is really like a
RTS - maximize time and resources without diluting core focus.

------
motters
When I was thinking about stuff at work other guys, who were electrical or
mechanical engineers, would describe me as "praying".

