
Ask HN: Make something of the free time at work - highhedgehog
In my job there are a lot of times where I am not doing much and slacking off. Unfortunately there is a lot of control due to security and I cannot do much on my computer (no install of software, a lot of websites are blocked by the firewall etc.).<p>For instance, I would like to learn a new technology, or consolidate one (for instance Node.js) that I know, but I can&#x27;t because I cannot install Node.js, ore reach npm to install packages.<p>How can I use the time that I have available during work? What would you do?<p>Books are not a good idea because I don&#x27;t think it would seems good to bring a book and study it at my desk<p>EDIT: I work in Banking and I cannot bring anything with me (such as my personal laptop). This means I am constricted to the use of my work PC. Something like repl could work, but for instance, that is not reachable for me
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philpem
I think this is asking the wrong question.

Your team lead might not have realised that the workload is becoming sporadic.

Speak to them, explain the situation, and ask if there are other smaller tasks
you could use to fill in the gaps.

If it "wouldn't seem good to bring a book to study at my desk", then it's
probably not a good idea to do effectively the same thing on the computer
either.

~~~
saluki
y, I wouldn't draw attention to your workload, I've seen people ask about
mores tasks due to not having anything to do, only to find out the company has
a low level of work/revenue available and this person was let go. Maybe see
about changing teams or taking on a higher level position, be careful how you
frame it. Typically managers are stacking tasks/assignments/deadlines so
you're as busy as possible.

~~~
el_dev_hell
> I've seen people ask about mores tasks due to not having anything to do,
> only to find out the company has a low level of work/revenue available and
> this person was let go.

I witnessed a similar scenario with a former colleague.

He would have 2ish hours of dead time each day after submitting his
daily/weekly/monthly reports to different departments (he was a data analyst).
He wouldn't have anything to do until the different dept. heads replied with
more work based on the last report.

He asked our manager what else he could help with (on multiple occasions) and
came off as super driven/motivated from my read of the situation.

I had similar dead spots and... well.. STFU. I would browse reddit/hackernews
or work on a personal blog post. At the time, I felt like a dick for not doing
the same and asking for more work. My rationale was "I get paid to do X, I
have done X, it is not my job to load myself up with work if I can do X in 6
hours instead of 8".

Anyway, in January a few years ago, we had a restructuring (I still lol at
that word every time) and several jobs were "shifted" from fulltime to
partime/casual. My colleague had his position "re-evaluated" to 18 hours per
week from 40. He could either accept the new role or take a redundancy
package.

He took the redundancy package.

I kept my 40 hour per week job and ended up with a slight COL raise.

I chalk this up to a real life example of "what's good for the whole isn't
always good for the individual".

------
tlarkworthy
I use [https://observablehq.com/](https://observablehq.com/) when in
constrained environments

------
alistairSH
Wrong question. You're being paid to work (and earn money for the bank), not
work on ad hoc personal projects.

You should go to your supervisor and tell them you either need more work, or
would like to establish formal career growth goals.

If your supervisor is not receptive to this, it's time to start looking for
another job.

The above assumes you're in a professional role. If you're a teller/clerk and
there just aren't customers, I'm not sure - the bank very well may want you
sitting idle and available for the next customer. Of course, if that's true,
you probably need to look for a new job because they're over-staffed.

~~~
BrandoElFollito
No, they are being paid to do the work they are given.

It is up to them to look for more work if this is what they want. There is no
obligation here, management runs the company as they see fit.

So the question is very reasonable : once work is done and since they
apparently have to be physically present, how can they manage this free time.

~~~
alistairSH
That works if you're happy with the status quo, don't want a promotion, and
are happy being bored half the day. The fact that the OP asked makes me
believe that's not what he wants.

~~~
BrandoElFollito
OP asked what to do with his free time at work, not how to manage his career

------
cocktailpeanuts
1\. read ebook. problem solved.

2\. make use of Instapaper. save a bunch of articles to read into Instapaper
the previous night, come to work and read them via Instapaper.

------
calebkaiser
I'd wholeheartedly recommend Glitch for this situation:

[http://glitch.com/](http://glitch.com/)

It will give you an IDE and a VM to build projects, and a big community to
share/get inspired by. It's sort of like MySpace for web apps.

------
elamje
Solution: [https://repl.it](https://repl.it)

I learned Clojure at my last job when I had downtime. I was restricted from
downloading Clojure dependencies which was a pain, so I either used mobile
hotspot, or I used repl.it which has about every relevant language in the last
40 years. Many of them come with a web framework to make a web app (which they
also host for you for free)

~~~
rayhendricks
Hah REPL/Colab/Kaggle are great, did a similar thing at my last job when there
was downtime. No one cared what we did while the reaction was running.

------
latte
First and foremost, this is your time and you should use it how you see fit.

Here are some random suggestions:

\- Solve algorithmic problems on Codewars or HackerRank

\- Build an app on Python Anywhere (cloud9.io was a more convenient and
versatile remote coding sandbox, but its UX has become much worse after they
were acquired by AWS)

\- Try to answer some questions on Stack Overflow

\- Take a coding course on Codecademy

\- Take a ML (or any other) course on Coursera

\- Take a language course on Duolingo (you won't be able to do speaking
exercises, but you'll still be able to learn)

\- Write for your blog (on any platform that you can access - starting a site
on your own domain is a good option because it will most likely not be blocked
by your filters)

Some of these sites can be blocked on your machine, so choose what is
available.

------
wbazant
Some man pages are pretty interesting, like the ones for Perl if you use the
language.

You could also become really, really good at using a text editor, it becomes a
bit of a game and it's going to be useful for as long as you are planning to
type.

------
akerl_
If it would look bad to read a book at your desk, that would seem to suggest
there’s something else your employer expects you to be doing with your time?

~~~
Frost1x
Pretty sure you employer expects you to be making them money with your time.
At the same time, you should be expecting to do as little as possible for your
compensation.

It's funny how culturally, we paint business practices of optimizing profit as
picturesque but paint labor optimizing their profit as a sin.

It's really all a matter of perspective and somewhere, most the labor force
was convinced to take the capital owners perspective.

~~~
gvjddbnvdrbv
This is because if everyone does very little the company goes bust and we are
all out of work.

Organised labour movements are supposed to be about what is fair.

A fair wage for fair safe work.

~~~
Frost1x
I agree completely, as with most things in life, there's a healthy balance
somewhere in between. One extreme or the other tend to be counterproductive to
everyone involved. Theres a reasonable amount of productivity that's
respectable with a reasonable compensation that considers everyone's
situation.

Unfortunately, the economic system we've adopted tends to work quite well at
finding extremes and many of the corrective measures to flatten these out are
failing more and more.

~~~
mod
Maybe we're in the healthy balance.

~~~
Frost1x
Maybe we're not.

------
jlengrand
Just to add to what others already said : You could also invest in making use
of your time to create values in other, more 'social' but techy ways.

I also work in a bank, and started spending some of my idle time preparing to
organise meetups, invite external speakers, and find ideas that would
contribute to tech for everybody. Things like pushing for the start of a tech
blog for example. This usually requires finding the right people, know how to
convince, and other things you won't get blocked on, while staying on the tech
side. Or even spend time writing one pagers on how your company could become
more efficient.

Just another perspective. Not everything you can learn has to do with your
computer. you could also spend more time with some of your business pips for
example and learn more from their processes.

If you really just want to iterate fast and write code all day, maybe your
current environment is not the best for you :).

------
chapium
The old saying goes.. "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean".

Define "clean" as you will for your work context.

------
onion2k
Trying to do things that aren't work while you're paid to do work is an easy
way to short circuit your career prospects. Don't do that.

Make good use of the time. Talk to your manager about things you could be
doing that would improve the codebase you work on _and_ enable you to learn
new things. Better yet, make some suggestions.

~~~
diehunde
That's only if you are planning to stick around. If you are thinking of moving
on soon it's a good time to learn and practice.

~~~
highhedgehog
and I am not planning to stick around

------
sct202
At my work we organized group trainings, where we all learn X technology
together that is related to our jobs in that we could do more if we knew how
to use it but don't actually need to use it. Maybe there is some approved
software that could be installed that is semi-related to your job.

------
sebringj
It sounds like you are in the wrong job. You are a creative thinker and
deserve a better suited place for your type of mind. It sounds like you are in
a prison of boredom. I would recommend working remotely and have a work
machine dedicated and your own personal machine.

~~~
highhedgehog
i definetly feel in the wrong job and I want to change it, but in the
meanwhile

------
flaie
I've worked in three different banks and was able to bring my laptop (not
connected to the bank network of course), use my headphones to cut the open
space noise and listen to anything I want.

As in your bank, proxy was very restrictive, a lot of the web wasn't
reachable, but with my laptop when I had free time between projects or issues
I could use them for something interesting, and management/security was OK
with that.

Seems like hell, just get out of there if you can and have the chance to. In
the meantime try to ask for other tasks, or try to refactor some code, there's
always room for improvement somewhere, and it's better than looking at the
clock for hours a day.

Good luck!

------
textread
Test your SQL fu:
[https://mystery.knightlab.com/](https://mystery.knightlab.com/) No
installation needed. All online.

Pretty sure there is a codepen like site for nodejs too. Find it, build
something.

------
smarri
I'd arrange meetings with colleagues in other teams and departments to find
out what problems they are working on and how you might help. If they have
nothing, you could arrange to shadow them for a few hours or half a day. This
way you'll find new things to work on, or have a greater understanding of the
business and have a larger internal network. Alternatively, if there are ways
the business could be improved, you could work on a proposal, and get buy-in
and ideas from your colleagues and finally present it to your management.

------
mister_hn
Use the website PlayOnDocker and run there your experiments with NodeJS, free
and out of restrictions. Otherwise, consider buying a VPS or build a VPN at
home and doing your experiments on your local server

~~~
jcims
Just don't put any personal credentials on those instances (e.g. github
tokens, aws access keys, etc). I don't know if it's still the case but when it
was first released I was able to mount other container volumes and snag them.
(Reported to Docker security)

~~~
mister_hn
yeah right, it should be taken only as testing environment

------
KennyFromIT
Read man pages!

These constitute a rabbit hole of extremely interesting documentation. They
will help you improve as a developer, and more importantly broaden your
horizons beyond what you ever thought was possible. Enjoy!

------
gopiv100
I used to work at bank too without admin rights. Anaconda has a portable
version which can be installed to My Documents folder(if space permits)
without need for admin rights. This comes with lots of apps for you to tinker
with. Python, numpy, pandas, flask, sqlalchemy and many more.

EDIT: One of my quants did such a great job with Jupiter notebook and anaconda
that it is now added to the official list of softwares that we can request for
installation.

------
dougmwne
The raspberry pi is a good suggestion, but if you don't want to be seen
bringing outside hardware into the building, you could look into Amazon
Workspaces or another remote workstation service, or host your own box and
remote into it. Workspaces has a web client for accessing your workspace, so
unless Amazon cloud services is specifically blocked at work, you should be
able to access it. There's a small monthly fee, but I'd think it'd be well
worth it.

------
mortivore
If you can't bring a book, then you probably shouldn't bring your own laptop
or much anything else. Do you have your phone? Maybe you could do something on
that.

~~~
highhedgehog
I indeed cannot bring my laptop. It's a bank and they are taking security
seriously apparently, which is good on one side, but bad on my side because I
cannot do anything.

------
answerquestions
You could answer questions on
[https://stackoverflow.com](https://stackoverflow.com)

------
kipchak
If research is something that might be considered work during the day you
could hop on Sci-Hub and read some interesting papers.

------
8bitsrule
I used to code using a paper and pencil when away from a machine. It was
actually more likely to run without error too.

------
52-6F-62
Can you use [https://repl.it](https://repl.it) ?

You could learn some new tech/patterns on there including NodeJS
([https://repl.it/languages/nodejs](https://repl.it/languages/nodejs))

~~~
highhedgehog
good, I didn't know it.

EDIT: Tried, blocked (failed to connect)

~~~
52-6F-62
Damn, sorry to hear it. Other users listed some good options, like
[https://codesandbox.io](https://codesandbox.io) and
[https://observablebq.com/](https://observablebq.com/)

------
jimbob45
Don't undermine your company or risk being fired.

That said, you can go to LeetCode (or just email yourself screenshots of the
problems) and then work on the solutions in Notepad++. Email those solutions
to yourself and then, when you get home, you can submit those solutions for
credit.

~~~
jcims
If they have that many controls at the desktop, emailing code to a personal
address is not going to go well.

------
quickthrower2
Do you have access to codepen, scrimba or jsfiddle or something similar. There
is a lot of front end stuff you could learn just with that to keep you busy
for days. Bring in a book or use your phone for a tutorial. G’luck

------
bosslee
I have the same issue I used the site glitch to learn Hopefully it works for
you

------
franzwong
I also work in a bank. We can submit request to install software. Of course we
need to get manager's approval. So what kind of software do you use daily?

------
justinmarsan
I'm sure many people have headphones on, download courses on your phone and
listen to them, or audio books, nobody needs to know where the sound is coming
from !

~~~
highhedgehog
Nope. None. I had them in the beginning, until one day my boss asked me if I
had headphones on and told me to take them off because we can't

~~~
mindcrime
And you didn't quit on the spot, because???

~~~
highhedgehog
oh, I will, I just don't want to end up in another shitty job like this.
Unfortunately this is not an area for high quality tech companies id like to
work for

------
soneca
Maybe use this to learn node?
[https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9](https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9)

------
jt2190
It would really help to have more details, like what country you're in and
what industry, e.g. Banking, Defense, etc.

~~~
highhedgehog
banking

------
jerome-jh
Could you bring your own laptop? Of course not connecting it to the LAN.

Alternative: use a RPi with your monitor/mouse/keyboard.

~~~
yboris
RPi = Raspberry Pi ? Not sure that's commonly used enough to use without a
parentheses long version :(

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate
Pretty sure it is. Fairly ubiquitous, and I know of nothing else that would
conflict with it.

RasPi is also used.

------
LeonB
You could get very good at vanilla js.

~~~
TurkishPoptart
How so?

------
mapster
Bring a laptop to work and use that when you have freetime?

------
phelm
are sites like glitch.com and codesandbox.io blocked? they give you a
development environment in the browser

