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Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do?
1665 points by ConfessionTime on Dec 16, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 1058 comments
I have been working as a software developer for almost two decades. I have received multiple promotions. I make decent money, 3x - 4x my area's median salary, so I live a comfortable life. I have never been fired or unemployed for more than a few months total over my entire career. Through most of that time I have averaged roughly 5 - 10 hours of actual work a week. I'm not even discounting job related but non-coding time as not work. There are literally days in which the only time I spend on my job is the few minutes it takes to attend the morning stand-up. Then I successfully bullshit my way through our next stand-up to hide my lack of production.

No one has ever called me out on this and my performance reviews range from mediocre to great. I'm generally a smart person. I went to a top 30 university, but it's not like I'm a genius or I'm coasting off connections made while getting a Harvard education. I wouldn't consider myself an abnormally talented developer. I often don't understand the technical details other engineers discuss in meetings. I have probably bombed more tech interviews than I have passed. All my jobs have been between 2-5 years so I'm neither finding a place to stagnate or leaving before anyone could judge my production. It feels like I am in the middle of the bell curve in terms of career success. So what gives?

Are most of us secretly lying about how much we are working? Do people regularly run into coworkers like me during their career and simply ignore it because they find it too awkward to criticize them? Have I just been incredibly lucky and every boss I have had is too incompetent to notice? Do I have imposter syndrome and I am actually a 10x developer whose laziness makes them a 1x developer?

These questions have kept popping up in my mind over the last year. Remote work during the pandemic has allowed me to finally be honest with myself and stop pretending I am working when I am not. I want to know if I was the only one pretending.




> Do people regularly run into coworkers like me during their career and simply ignore it because they find it too awkward to criticize them? Have I just been incredibly lucky and every boss I have had is too incompetent to notice? Do I have imposter syndrome and I am actually a 10x developer whose laziness makes them a 1x developer?

Lazy developers don't really bother me, if you do a couple hours of high-quality work a week I'd have no complaint. (Many weeks I do as little, some weeks I do a decent amount of real work :) The problem is developers making negative progress, usually messes that need to be cleaned up ... and it's an awkward situation, no matter your relative authority. I'm in the "we should consider them lines spent, not lines produced" camp.

An old disputed quote:

> I divide my officers into four classes as follows: The clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of these qualities.

> Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite nerves and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.


Yes! I bucket people into paddling the right direction, sitting in the boat, and paddling the wrong way. With enough momentum, you can tolerate the people that are sitting in the boat. Sometimes they have good reasons and it's temporary. The people always actively working against progress need to be overboard. Smaller teams may need all paddlers. I'd like to think I'm always paddling and usually the right direction.


I'm like OP, I feel like I paddle along, minimal effort, then sometimes I take some strong strokes and get many of the people that work "the wrong way" to paddle the right way for some strokes and I can continue on momentum for another couple of months.

When I'm not 100% sure I'm paddling the right way or management wants me to paddle the wrong way, I don't really peddle, I complain and start playing around with fun tech that I think is the right way. Then when the time comes, I makes some powerful strokes again (aided by the new knowledge from playing).

This is going to sound cocky but I feel that I'm pretty good at determining what the right way is, and that is the reason I get away with it. It's like I'm slowly walking by a wall, feeling where it is weakest for months on end, then I make one big push, it falls, things change, I make noise, people appreciate it and understand this is the right way. Lead by example it's been called.

To be clear, I consider the wrong way usually the ineffective way. Ie in our org many people write many one-off scripts, I always try to focus on creating re-useable assets following global standards. I promote innersource because it's fun but also because it enabled other devs to make my CI/CD pipelines. I'm lazy but I think in a good way.


> sometimes I take some strong strokes and get many of the people that work "the wrong way" to paddle the right way for some strokes and I can continue on momentum for another couple of months.

Welcome to management. ;)


I think another interesting aspect of software development is that critiquing others' paddling technique (code review) can be as or more valuable than just paddling yourself - it makes both of you more effective paddlers.


There are days when I feel like I'm outside the boat, calling out to all of those guys, saying, "You know you are in a swimming pool, right?"


I’ve worked with a genuine 0.1x developer. Not only were they unproductive (which is fine if you are new or inexperienced in an area), but they actually reduced the productivity of others in the team. I think sometimes this was deliberate as a plan to get the team reassigned. Luckily I was a contractor and could largely ignore the politics and just get on with work.


This is a -1.0x developer.


So called Net Negative Producer.

Much more dangerous than someone who is merely slow.


Stupid and industrious is exactly the crypto/NFT population. They are smart in code, but zeros in financial literacy, and zeros in complex social dynamics - the perfect rubes to promote hazy, social frauds.


now now, be fair: they're zeros in code too


so many of us are patting ourselves on the back right now :\


Perhaps quotes that make people feel bad are less likely to survive.


Just start to feel bad all the time to compensate for this bias, easy!


<sarcasm>Pretty sure that's imposter syndrome<sarcasm>


Because you didn't close that last tag I feel like there is still some double sarcasm coming after this remark...


Hmm. Now I'm wondering if it makes semantic sense to nest sarcasm tags. If not, they might self-close, like <p> or <li>.


</sarcasm></sarcasm>

<i>Felt like I needed to resolve that or we may never stop being sarcastic</i>


Always found that quote interesting as is not really correct. Everyone is a percentage of those traits. No one is universally clever and never does anything stupid for example.

It's putting people in a box which people love to do.


A generals job is to generalize and elevate the key agents.

The industrial idiot will cause more work, build in you into a corner, waste time, resources, people, lives, on counter productive missions and projects which distract from essential work, cause bottlenecks in any or all systems at once.

Objectively bad processes run away with more power than deserved.

An army of autonomous actors only works if you root out the problems and agents causing drift.


That's fair, but I think in this case boxing people is a method of telling the story, not the end goal; the goal is to point out how a seemingly good quality (Industrious, hard working, energetic) can have negative consequences and results if misused and misguided.


Massively agree with this, either do nothing or do it right. I’m a contractor and change around a fair bit and when I join a project you can tell if it is good or ok or terrible.

My current project is terrible, the people who set it up tried but have that real lack of understanding what is required (they have clean code but no tests) it is really hard to debug and takes forever to deliver anything. If they had just done nothing I could have set it up properly when I started and we could have been done months ago.


You don't go to war with the tests you want, you go to war with the tests you got. Write a test or swim blind with the rest of the fish.


(4 Choose 2) is 6. The quote only specified what to do with four of those combinations. What does one do with the other two?

Or is it just impossible to be both clever and stupid at the same time? I've had my share of both cleverly stupid ideas and stupidly clever ideas.


It's two bits: lazy or industrious, clever or stupid.

So four combinations.


The other two options are

1. clever and stupid

2. industrious and lazy

Neither of those options make much sense. They are choosing both values of one parameter and no values are choosen for the other parameter


You can't be lazy and industrious at the same time, nor clever and stupid. There are only four valid options.


Oh, yes you can. Never seen anyone waste a whole day grinding in a game? Never seen someone pour genius into a non-problem? These things happen all the time, as a result of exactly those intersections.


Limited to my participation in Advent of Code, I am clever and stupid.


Ok I'm going to be lazy from now on to avoid being fired...


I think an important lesson is, from all comments here, that you can work a lot less and get away with it but you need to excel in areas other than productivity.

What are those areas? Imho: Vision, providing direction, knowing when to be productive at the exact right time, identify well in advance what won't work, identify who is doing the same as you and working together or leveraging that work. Perhaps you can do very little until you finally identify that one core important thing and be praised for those couple of hours. It's a skill as any other.


> Lazy developers don't really bother me, if you do a couple hours of high-quality work a week I'd have no complaint.

This has been my philosophy, as long as a developer is not making me do more work, I won't mind.


This just makes me feel worse because I'm a very hardworking noob.


You don't start there. You end up there when you can crank out line of business apps super quickly. You start as a screw driver, takes a lot of manual work and time, and you end up years later as a power drill.


Haha. that's pretty funny way to look at it. i like it.


Author of quote?


I think there's also something to be said for passive processing.

Sometimes I'll know I need to write some code or some function and I'll just think about it in the back of my head while doing other things, sometimes for a whole day or two. Then I'll sit down and write it in like 20-30 minutes. Did I work 20-30 minutes, or have I been working for a day or two? I would say a day or two, and the 20-30 minutes was the time needed to produce the deliverable of that work.


> Did I work 20-30 minutes, or have I been working for a day or two? I would say a day or two, and the 20-30 minutes was the time needed to produce the deliverable of that work.

I would say that I do this too. There's a lot of stuff I can more or less do on autopilot and stuff that requires actual attention and finesse, for lack of a better word. I feel like management thinks that I'm good at my job for all of the autopilot stuff that I can crank out, and that makes up for the time I spend implementing one of the more interesting bits.

I think one of the ways that remote work changes this is that I can do other things while I think through a tricky problem; I can do dishes or walk my dog or something instead of trying to look busy in a room with 6-12 other people who are furiously typing because that's how the manager and project manager understand that work gets done.


The way I explained it to my boss, is to give him a list of numbers to add up in his head and come up with a total. He looked at the list for a couple minutes, then gave me the answer (I framed the whole thing as a riddle). I then looked at him and said it looked like he wasn't working on the problem for the last couple minutes. He replied that he was thinking during that time. My reply back is "That is what I have to do the majority of the time on my projects, is think about it then spend a relatively short amount of time spitting out the answer. The problem is I also have to look busy while I'm doing it". He then saw the light.


If you have to explain that to your boss, you are working for the wrong person. We are in a creative field, he shouldn't have to be explained this.


As long as they are willing to learn, I think that's fine.

I like to make parallels with sports: when I am on the court, I am so much dumber about what's going on. Suddenly, when I am on the sidelines, I can see patterns, strengths and weaknesses for each team and so forth. It's not that I was dumb while on the court, it's just that your brain is in a different mode of operation (focusing on your own performance in this particular case).


Sounds like you asked “how would Jesus explain this to my boss” and got an answer


This is great! Wish our senior director would understand this. The man loves the idea of butts in seats for long hours and can’t wait to have us back in the distraction riddled office.


Or just go and have a shower in the afternoon. It's the best remedy to an afternoon dip I know and one of the major benefits of working from home. It's a great place to solve problems before getting down to coding.

Doing the dishes is indeed a good one too.


Doing the dishes or other chores doesn't work for me at all but showers are great. When I was at Apple one of the few unalloyed good aspects of the spaceship campus were every section had showers available.

I'd take a brisk walk around the spaceship and then hit a shower. It was a great way for me to avoid an afternoon slump and let me do a lot of background processing in relative peace.


I root caused so many hard to debug issues in the shower! Including some obscure bug in Darwin kernel implemented in assembly. Not that I take my laptop to the shower but exactly like the parent thread mentioned, the problem is still background processing in your head.


Sounds like we should ban you from the shower, then.

(Amusing to see “root caused” == “diagnosed” and != “caused”.)


As a non-native English speaker, on of my favorite things about English is that you can (ab)use just about any noun as a verb and make it sound natural


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poincar%C3%A9

> He never spent a long time on a problem since he believed that the subconscious would continue working on the problem while he consciously worked on another problem.

This is definitely a thing. Intellectual labor just isn't physical labor.


I can’t even count the number of times that I’ve had to give up on a problem after banging away at it for an afternoon only to solve it in 20 mins the next morning. Almost never fails.


Taking a break and going for a run sometimes does this for me as well.


However, banging away at a problem for an afternoon is often needed for the solution to magically pop into our head next morning. The break helps, but so does the work itself.


Yes. Often need to rule out a series of initial ideas first.


Yes, and that can really feel like getting nothing done :-)

Or just spending time reading about the topic


Most of the best ideas I've had in my career were in the shower before work.

The problem is making that a regular occurrence.


I use to think that they should pay me 1/4 of my hourly rate at work because I could get quite distracted and work quite ineffectually, 3/4 for each hour slept as that is where most of the processing happened, and a 10x bonus for the morning shower where all the hard problems of work would be solved in instantaneous heureka moments.


> The problem is making that a regular occurrence.

Ideally you shower every two days or so.


Reminds me of a phrase (joke?) I heard in Spanish.

> "I shower once a month, whether I even need it or not"

joke being that one clearly needs it after a month.


i shower twice a day -- between gym, walking my dog, living (south america is HOT), it's either shower once a day, or you start feeling like shit.,


I suppose I walked into that one.


ha! my wife once asked why i was speaking english while showering.

i told her that 1. i can only think in english when thinking about work and 2. saying stuff out loud helps me organize my thoughts and this is specially easy while showering because i don't really have to concentrate.


Interesting! What is your first language? Do you speak any others? Was learning English a natural part of growing up, or was it formally taught to you?


I do the exact same thing, though my internal monologue is like 95% English (not a native speaker). I talk to myself out loud when thinking, but my wife thinks it's weird so I only do it when alone.


Same here, I do that even when coding, helps me with processing stuff in real time.


The new WFS trend -- Work From Shower.


could make for some awkward zoom meetings


There is even a story in one of the productivity books about how one of the most productive employees requested shower to be installed in his office since he was most productive in the shower.


But which book? Could confirm my method.


That's why I like going for a run or cycling at lunch time. It always helps me to process ideas. And doing it after work means I'll get that great idea in the evening when I don't want to work for the company anymore. I believe doing sports at lunch time helps the company at least as much as it helps me.


Steve Jobs had a theory that hot water on the blood vessels in the back of the neck increased blood flow to the brain.


Not saying that this is wrong, but he also had some dangerous theories on how to treat cancer. Just because he was good at many things doesn't mean we should see him as an expert in medicine or biology.


Walking also increases blood flow to the brain and is amazing for problem solving (in case you don’t have access to a shower while at work).


Interesting. Tried to search for a source for that theory, but couldn't find anything.


He personally related that to a group of us after a NextWorld keynote when someone asked him where he got a particular idea.


For me it's often in the shower after work. Which is a pain because then I've gotta remember them until I get out and then find a way to remember them until the next day.


I got a good tip for this once: throw the shampoo bottle out of the shower onto the floor. It’s ideal for remembering when you need to buy more shampoo, but if the shampoo isn’t empty, it will remind you that there’s something you need reminding of.


A speech to text device in the bathroom helps. Sometimes I worry I'll forget by the time I'm done showering.


sometimes I wake up and know the solution.


But it only happens after spending a lot of time on a problem. You can also swap showering for walking.


Interestingly, that point is listed in the wiki article under his "shortcomings". (According to Édouard Toulouse, his contemporary and a psychologist who wrote a book about Poincaré)


Adding my voice to this one. I think a lot of work 'normal people' i.e. the PMs the non-technical management, the sales people etc. really don't get how we techies work. Because they have to do 'active' work all day long to keep on top, they think everyone is like that, where in reality we are really efficient in short bursts. I can ponder a deliverable for days and then just churn it out over a few hours, only taking breaks for coffee intake/discharge. The normals keep asking me 'how far have you got with X' during the whole period, and they don't seem like it when I say 'I'm thinking about it, but I've not done anything yet'.


And, ironically, much of the work that the "normies" do is something tech guys could to hundred times faster. It's stuff like manually copy-pasting numbers from a crappy proprietary software A to a crappy proprietary software B or entering numbers from some system to Excel while it could be done by just directly pulling the numbers from the database the system uses.

Seriously, modern work is all about knowing what to do and how to do it rather than putting in a large number of hours executing a straightforward task.


Hmmmmm, this is actually kind of interesting - perhaps that "continuous grind through criminally unoptimized UI" type of work is what actually constructs the "this is how you use a computer" mindset that these people have - because it's all they know.

Developers are always about optimization and automation and tweaking and refinement, and their tools reflect this constant pursuit of efficiency that constantly transcends and questions how a job is expressed (UI, mental modeling) and completed.

No other industry - ironically including technical management roles (maybe even especially so?) - seems to have this sort of focus.

I even hesitantly wonder if the biggest similarity I've ever seen is with accessibility type setups with screen readers and whatnot. (Ha, that says a lot about the fundamental impedance mismatch of developer tooling!)


Or maybe if you have to painstakingly copy those finance numbers and hour reports, you will be thinking about them more. You look busy enough to qualify as working, giving you time to actually think.

All the time tracking tools I've ever used (at software companies!) had a bad UI. Sometimes we even have to track the same hours into two different tools. Can't we automate time-tracking away? My explanation is that this is the result of cultural evolution. Companies that make people think twice about their time and spendings are more successful. People will copy whatever successful companies are doing.


> You look busy enough to qualify as working, giving you time to actually think.

This is so messed up - and yet so interesting as a direct result of that.

I've only ever considered the idea of "looking busy" in the sense of whether or not someone is trying to optimize for shirking actual mental engagement.

I never thought of how doing that can actually make room to think. But that's so logically obvious once you mush the two ideas together!

I say this is messed up because I can totally see this being both necessary and helpful in certain situations. Wow.


I can never do tedious work quickly. As soon as I notice work that should be automated, I start cursing at the developer of the tool I am using for not offering an easy interface for me to plug into and just automate it, instead of having to rewrite the whole thing from scratch if I want to have it automated (and that's usually too time consuming, so I don't do it). So I'd be constantly unhappy doing it, which is a recipe for avoiding it, ergo being slow at it.

That's why I am a huge fan of free software (and I've spent years on it too).


Hello Necovek, I would like to connect with you on linkedin because I also understand and see this problem

This link shows a touchline between using api and not using api https://www.swyx.io/api-economy/

But how can we build some tool for telling product managers that they should fix there automating proces?


thanks for the rec!


As someone who switched majors and became programmer, I experienced a great example of this when I first started programming.

Starting out, if I spent a whole day thinking over a problem or writing code that I ultimately had to scrap, I would tell people I got nothing done that day and it was a waste.

Now if I do that, I see if as the necessary troubleshooting that all must go through to solve the problem.


Thinking over a problem is valid work. The feedback is usually to timebox it or get someone 1:1 to help out if it feels like wasting time. Maybe something wasn't well defined or planned, otherwise it's no updates, no blockers.


The normals?

Come on guys. Plenty of software devs are actually working during the day.

What are you guys doing if you're not working? Reading articles? Playing Halo?


I didn't interpret the comment to be about not working, but rather about the non-linear nature of programming work. If you have 100 documents to process then you are halfway through after 50 and it will presumably take a similar amount of time as the first 50 did.

When writing code you might have written 10 lines of code in the past week, but the next day you write 200 because you've been thinking about the structure of the solution. In this way you might be working even if you're going on a walk or doing the dishes.

This isn't unique to programming, of course.


If you really have a breakthrough you rewrite that 200 lines of code from last week to 10.


>about the non-linear nature of programming work

You hit the nail right on the head.

This is the main thing that non-programmers (i.e. Management) need to understand about "Programmers" and the key to "Manage" them effectively.


Steve Jobs had an opinion on this with which I agree:

> The greatest people are self-managing -- they don't need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they'll go figure out how to do it. What they need is a common vision. And that's what leadership is: having a vision; being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it; and getting a consensus on a common vision.


Good quote.

Related quote from Scott McNealy : "Agree and commit, Disagree and commit, or get out of the way."

Too many times Management/Leadership devolves into giving orders without having a clue. It then becomes nothing more than a power trip to the detriment of everything and everybody.

All "Good" people just need Autonomy, Vision, Freedom and stellar Results will auto-magically follow.


Agreed. I probably think about the problems I am trying to solve during most of the day. However, I don't think that is really work. That is just my brain not being able to shut off. And it isn't concentrated work - it is off and on.


I mean ya, reading articles and documentation is a higher part of the job. But I’m this context, it’s not actively writing code.


Oh yeah totally. By articles I meant not work related stuff (like HN posts or something).


The other disconnect is that they can do their work in 30-60 minute bursts (meetings).

We cannot. Some things require multiple hours of uninterrupted concentration and if my calendar looks like someone fired a shotgun filled with 30 minute meetings at it, I can't achieve that.


At my previous company, Monday was filled with meetings with 40-60min of spare time in between.

I mostly did small bug fixes or read articles because there was no way to do anything productive. I need the mental space to properly plan and execute.


I sometimes feel like I'm trying to squeeze "real work" in between meetings and other interruptions. It's almost absurd.


I've done tons of work during meetings. Only need to listen like 4% of the time.


This is a weird take, but as a junior developer, I find I'm more productive on the days with meetings because I'm 'forced' to squeeze in the 'real work' rather than just being scared.


This.

I will backburner a ticket for days, then when what I need to do comes together I will sit down and bang it out in an hour.

It's to the point that I will deliberately review a ticket and code segment every day, even if I'm not actively working it, just to have the pieces come together in my mind and crank out the ticket.

This method is not very scrum friendly, because in truth I'm actually brain-working all of my tickets at the same time, but I haven't shifted any electrons, just neurons.

Sometimes, when I hit a sticking point, I go do something completely different - like read Hacker News - in order to push stuff into what I call "background processing" in my subconscious.


> This method is not very scrum friendly, because in truth I'm actually brain-working all of my tickets at the same time, but I haven't shifted any electrons, just neurons.

This really highlights why I hate agile so much. Intellectual work doesn't lead itself to reporting status on completed tickets every single day.


I absolutely hate having to do a daily stand up. I'll have my tickets done by the end of sprint, just not before that though.


I agree that there is that implicit pressure, but really it should (as in the ideal case) be fine to just say "I've been thinking about A, B, and C" and leave it at that. That still gives you the room to say that issue C has blocker X etc if it needs to be resolved in the team.


> ...Intellectual work doesn't lead itself to reporting status on completed tickets every single day.

Status is WIP until completion. As for the intellectual work, that's just outright Analysis stage.

Most of dev's work is actually analysis. Sure, there's implementation, testing and such, but Analysis is almost non-stop.

Anonter way to put this is Evaluation of Alternatives, Optimization of Approaches.


I operate in exactly the same way. I wish more people would understand that process.


Here I am thinking I’m the only one. Tossing and turning in the middle of the night for hours just to bang it out for 15 minutes the next day for everyone to go “oh that was easy” no it wasn’t!


I almost got fired once for explaining this to my boss. He felt very strongly that each day of a 10 day project should mark 10% in progress. I told him that instead, you think about it, explore a few ideas, then suddenly you might be at 80%. But it's not linear.


Similar concept:

If one was tasked to move a 10-ton block, 1000 yards in 10 days. You can use brute force move it 100 yards a day for 10 days or spend 5 days inventing a way to move it 1000 yards in day and get it done in 6 days.


You might also be familiar with the Abraham Lincoln quote: If I had four hours to chop down a tree I would spend three hours sharpening the ax.


I had not, but that's a wonderful quote. Thanks for sharing


the ignorance of managment regarding non-linearity of developing something is one major reason for losing motivation. it causes much confusion and misunderstandings requiring justification. it gets tiresome after a while.


That just doesn't make sense because Pareto is a well known phenomena. To the point where it has entered the common lexicon (80/20 rule) and is essential for planning how long a project should take.


It is the same way that Vilfredo Pareto is almost only known for the 80/20 rule.

One of the deepest thinkers ever about society and he is known for the most boring of his ideas.

Most things can be explained with this other idea of Pareto that humans are not rational but rationalizers.

Most human action/thought is kind of dumb and non-rational and then we invent rational explanations after the fact. Paint a varnish of rationality after the fact on non-rational behavior in Pareto's words.


For sure, we need to collectively recognise how much real work takes place in this mode.

I once collaborated with a colleague to design and implement a data sync framework. For six weeks we chatted about it during our lunch break, while walking from the office to a Japanese takeaway and back again. We'd propose ideas and find weaknesses and flaws in them, and would spend our evenings thinking hard to come up with solutions to get around these issues.

Our boss saw none of this, but it easily consumed about three weeks of person-hours (i.e. around 120 hours).

One day, walking back from lunch, neither of us could find any problems with our proposed solution. We walked into the office straight into a meeting room, spend 30 minutes drawing diagrams on a whiteboard, then returned to our desks and coded up a working proof-of-concept in a couple of hours.

From our boss's perspective, we had implemented a new technology in an afternoon. He's the kind of non-technical person who equates productivity with typing code into a computer. But I think more places need to equate productivity with sitting on a sofa staring into space, or going for long walks, or whatever it happens to be that works for the developer in question.


Just read an article about employers increasingly monitoring their WFH employees with software installed on their computers. This is the "sitting at a desk and typing" measure of productivity. How do they propose monitoring the "solving problems by thinking hard" measure of productivity?


They can't. They have to capitulate to the idea that thinking is work. Especially in knowledge work.

But then again, since thoughts are words, thinking can be translated into typing that is monitored: notes instead of code.


I agree, I used to think I was like OP, coasting in between being quite productive. One day I took a bath, ended up thinking about my ticket, got out of the bath and did the ticket in an hour. The thinking time was definitely work just not in the traditional sense. And yes I could have done the ticket without the bath, it may even have taken the same time, but the code wouldn't have been as clean and there would have been a few more commits.


Well, not only was the code clean, I imagine you were clean too!


Nah, showering makes you clean, a bath is just marinating in your own dirt. Very pleasant though.


Which is why in Japan, you take a (quick, purposeful) shower and then get in the bath. Those baths are exceptionally pleasant.


Very bad, you should take a shower after the bath, not before, so when you're out, you're clean.


Rich Hickey’s “Hammock Driven Development” talk largely agrees with this view: https://youtu.be/f84n5oFoZBc


Awesome!


processing for one or two days to prepare productive working that takes 30 minutes sounds a bit extreme. but I get the gist and second it. I hate developers you immediately jump at any task coding right away. they usually actually get the stuff done but the solution is ugly and contrived instead of elegant and simple. that's also what makes me skeptical of devs obsessing about typing (layouts, keyboards, editors, ...) to optimize it further. as a developer I never found speed of input to be even close to a bottle neck. the bottle neck usually lack of silence and peace in a large office which I need to think!


> that's also what makes me skeptical of devs obsessing about typing (layouts, keyboards, editors, ...) to optimize it further.

Those things are a form of procrastination. With your points you should be sceptical for those who just go for VS Code or whatever MS sets up for them nicely in 2 minutes, not those who configure Emacs or Vim.


To be fair, I've done both. By now I can roughly estimate that a task will take me one hour. If I dedicate myself to it right now, it will actually take me 2-3 hours. I can also sort of carry it around for a couple of days, and then implement it in one hour.

This says two things about me: I usually underestimate the design details when estimating time, and the design takes me roughly the same time anyway.


This kind of “background processing” was covered in detail in the infamous “Learning how to learn MOOC”. I would go further suggesting that for people unaware of this way of thought processing/problem solving (like OP?) peer pressure may bring something akin to impostor syndrom.

This doesn’t have to be a programmer only thing IMHO. If you spend 5 hours chilling and 3 executing and everybody is happy with your performance, it may be just your way to do things. If someone next to you does the same by coding 8 hour straight - its their style, and neither is better.


The lack of replies accusing you of immorality, theft, sloth, etc is somewhat surprising given the reactions in the rest of the thread.


Right? The OP is literally saying he slacks off then bullshits his way through meetings and that he regularly doesn't understand what's going on.

Everyone else appears to be talking about time spent directly thinking about a problem - which absolutely can look exactly like you're staring into space and this magic "subconscious processing" everyone claims to do.

That is far too seductive and idea, and far too ego flattering for me to trust it. "I'm so smart I solve problems in my sleep!"

Oh really?

But the phenomenon of solving problems quickly after a break/sleep/shower/whatever is one I recognise too.

Something else I recognise is that I also jump to solutions too quickly, often wrong ones, or by something that feels quit similar, jump to the idea that I don't understand things or that I don't know how to solve a problem.

Either the "wrong idea(s)" or the "no idea" are patterns of thinking that make it that much harder to see the problem a different way, or to think up new approaches. You can absolutely overcome it, but it takes a deliberate effort of will, and possibly explicit step by step techniques to do.

Much easier to just put it down and have a nap or a walk or whatever.

But that time isn't "subconsciously working on the problem", it's time spent letting go of you original ideas, letting those neuron interconnections to loosen up ( or whatever, not a neurologist, can you tell? ) so you can generate new ideas, obviously you haven't forgotten them.. but they have that softening distance to them now, and the no longer carry as much weight.

To take in one more, completely unsubstantiated step further, maybe that what a 10x coder is: someone who can more freely move between their ideas ( naturally or via learned technique ) meaning the the need to sleep on it far less often. Or maybe they give themselves a chance to let go of there currently working on the next and the next ( which I'm sure we all do some of, or every software company would be surrounded by a cloud of Devs, walking or staring off into spec! ) But maybe to 10x engineer does that more readily? Without the the exhausting drain I know I feel jumping from deep thinking on one think to deep thinking on another?

We shouldn't discount how many of the "other things" people list are either directly rejuvenation ( sleep! ) Or at least refreshing via increased bloodflow from some level of physical movement, even if it is just getting up to do the dishes.

Personally I think "well rested me" is of about average intelligence, "well rested and in the zone me" is perhaps a little higher but "tired me"? Wow can that be a big drop!

So.. rest, rejuvenation, letting go of mental models by directing your attention else where all seem like more likely causes than "my brain solves problems without even trying"

( Sorry tsike, kinda went of on a tangent there.. ! )


Same. Most of my time is spent in thinking. My manager has told me though that it sometimes is not possible to quantify this time unless I create a doc where I lay down my thought process.


Right! I find that I have to 'sleep on' most hard problems. WfH is great because I can take a nap and then get back to work. In the office I can't do that.

Less hard problems need less-passive processing but are better solved on a bicycle or doing something completely unrelated.


I think passive processing is one, intuition is the other. You can solve a problem by thinking about it for hours or by once looking at it and immediately knowing a good solution. It's about experience, intelligence and probably many other factors.

And that doesn't mean you'll perform well in technical interviews. They're often about specific algorithms most people would never implement themselves. Few are about the problem solving part of programming.


Hammock driven development is real.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc


I can attest to this.

There have been times I spent 20-30 minutes understanding a new problem at 5pm, which at the time seemed like it was going to take up a significant amount of my working hours the next day.

Then come back the next day and I'm able to finish the task before 10am. During the evening, the problem was solved both consciously (thinking about it on the train home) and subconsciously (whilst sleeping). I just had to produce the deliverable the next day.


This. This happens whether I enjoy the thing I am working on or not. It’s just part of the process.

Also sometimes your mind needs a break. I personally cannot produce quality thoughts continuously no matter how much you force me, or I want to. I can mindlessly do physical things, but cannot code or think. I find it hard to believe there are people who can do this, if there are, they must be rare I beieve.


It is SHOCKING beyond words to me what accepted dogma it is that the human resources/devs only work on one thing at a time, they start at the beginning, plan, write, test, & code review the thing, and then move on.

It's a huge waste of human potential. Background processing is vital. Getting hit by the various silly hurdles in the path to shipping- having to go from the elation of getting something done to having to switch to an entirely different set of less fun tasks to get it shipping. Yet our processes, our industrial processes, are oriented towards assurity, towards treating us "human resources" like machines, to making us complete full units of work.

It's hard for me to tell exactly where this sprung up from, how it is so deeply deeply rooted. I tell my managers outright I think it's a wasteful & outright damaging practice, but that I understand that it's the expectation, that every other company acts like fools too, not just them. I don't argue, but I am quite clear that you will get much much much less out of me when I don't have some autonomy, when I have to drag, roll, push, row, swim each rock, one at a time, from end to end. Again, I'm not sure how such a demeaning & menial form of completing single-task-at-a-time happens, especially when no one in management or upper ranks is expected to live like this. My top theory is just that it's convenient for management purposes. That company's are bad at assessing progress, that we're afraid of situations that aren't ultra-well scheduled & predictable, and that we treat programmers like cogs in a machine because we're too afraid to try for better.

Creative procrastination is amazing. Not only are programmers out doing great things, but the task they're more obligated to do goes from irrelevant & stupid to something they just don't ever want to think of again. The internal pressures builds over time, even for the irrelevant everyday crap of development, until we're finally jazzed to just get it done. By procrastinating, we bank up some motivation. And we've gotten a lot of passive processing in. Productive procrastination is one well-known example, but I feel like it's just the tip of the iceberg. Having some different tasks to switch between, having a wheelhouse of obligations, allows enormous relief, allows a much higher average output to be maintained, in my view. I'm kind of in a lull of personal projects right now, because I completed some stuff, and don't have a lot of in-flight options to pick up & work between. Everything feels so slow & getting going again has been such a chore, I feel it so much. Being able to trade off, switch around, chase what feels good is a huge huge productivity increase.

More than anything what amazes me is how conventional & dogmatic companies are. They seemingly all chase the same malgining evil controlling exploitation of human-resources, and not a once has a company seemed to even understand that there are trade-offs. The whole industry is exactly the same; controlling & top-down, one-at-a-time. The people who invented Amdahl's law, surprisingly, seem utterly unable to grasp it's application to humans & our motivations. We all have diverse & wide execution units, but we are treated like in-order single-stage processors. If this were just the predominant way of treating engineers/human-resources, I'd find it unfortunate, but that it is almost entirely the rule, that it is universally expected, that there are so few systems or experiments for doing anything else: the status quo is pathetic & cruel, and lacks even the basic legitimacy to have explored other ideas.


> My top theory is just that it's convenient for management purposes. That company's are bad at assessing progress, that we're afraid of situations that aren't ultra-well scheduled & predictable, and that we treat programmers like cogs in a machine because we're too afraid to try for better.

This is because the classical consecrated need for project management. Back in the day, you would have factory workers overseen by managers to a) establish a process for the work to be done which is easy and precise - "plan the work" and b) oversee it - "work the plan". The process is, in their view, necessary so why question it?

SW development is a creative process which doesn't really lend itself to rigid guard railing of classical project management.

Some advocates outright speak against managers because of the penalty the rigid process has on creative throughput. Quote from https://www.simplethread.com/agile-at-20-the-failed-rebellio... :

> The important piece that gets forgotten is that Agile was openly, militantly anti-management in the beginning. For example, Ken Schwaber was vocal and explicit about his goal to get rid of all project managers – not just get the people off his projects, eradicate the profession from our industry.


>It's hard for me to tell exactly where this sprung up from, how it is so deeply deeply rooted.

Industrial mass production makes physical objects with incredible efficiency, once things are up and running. Because it's so effective with atoms, people think it can be just as effective with bits, and they're wrong.


a nice contrast showing the difference between Ursala Franklin's prescriptive & control technologies (that orchestrate & organize) and holistic & work technologies (that increase worker power capability & freedom).


Software development isn't a production problem, it's a design problem.

Software manufacturing is the bit after you compile the code.


Creative procrastination is a good way to put it. Sometimes I found myself procrastinating and couldn't push myself to move beyond a certain point. Later I realized it's the wrong path after all and it's like my subconscious is recognizing the approaching leading to nowhere and stops me from wasting time.


> how conventional & dogmatic companies are

Seems to invite a deep dive into the history of Gantt charts or their use.


While this is true, I strongly doubt OP is talking about this case. In your example although it did look like you didn't work from the outside, but in your mind you were still thinking about the problem, technically speaking, working.

The case in discussion is how we developers do just the bare minimum consciously (or unconsciously) and the fake away the rest. Even with this perspective I don't consider it wrong at all. Our developer brains can be in "the zone" for not more than 2-5 hours everyday. If we force ourselves to be in the zone more than that, we are just damaging our runway and heading towards a burnout.

That said, the only thing we could do is - learn how to increase our zone hours. John carmack went to the extent of measuring his bathroom breaks as a way to extend these focus zones. While that is a bit extreme. generally as developers our antidote should be to optimize our focus zones to what fits us.


Intellectual and physical work differs a lot. True. Writing a book may take years, while writing the words mere days.

This, however, should not be an excuse, but a cue to get better at that 'thinking stuff'. Improve it. Train it. Learn.

And with all that, strongly ask yourself if that 'backburner time' must be paid. A bricklayer needs 10+ hours off to rest his body, so he can lay bricks for another 8 hours tomorrow. Should we pay him 18 hours?

My answer to both is that when I efficiently ponder and backburn ideas, it is 'work'. But when I'm binging Silicon Valley Episode 5, it is not (unless I can prove that this helps me bring the problem closer).


Very common. It's hard to quantify the mental work done, so we only measure kilos of code written.

I do think though that anyone that has written code should be able to understand that it's not as simple as sitting down and typing fast.


Yeah, I am kind of similar boat. I actually has opportunity to implement certain algorithms which were pivotal in launch of specific products. I spent perhaps 3-4 hours implementing the whole thing but i kept thinking about the core problem for a week, so much so that i started dreaming about it. (this dream thing happen quite often).


Absolutely. Sometimes for the whole day I remove code because of dead path or rewrite part of the code because of wrong initial design. Am I adding negative productivity?


At a previous job, the boss awarded praise, and "points" each week for the developer who removed the most code from production. Counted as lines of code deleted according to git.

(Points were redeemable for schwag from the company shop. They were highly desirable and nearly cash equivalents).

Deleting code is arguably the most valuable work you could be doing.


That can turn into code golf quickly which makes reading the code later take 2-10x longer. I like the spirit oh this but the incentives are off.


any non-physical work should be paid for 24-7?


I have never done what you describe, except perhaps in times of illness when it was understood that working less was a reasonable accommodation (in that particular case, I had leftover brain fog from general anesthesia).

I've never heard of any colleagues doing it either. I would never snitch if it happened, but I would certainly consider that person untrustworthy or think that they have an undisclosed condition that is between them and HR.

As you covered in your post, we don't write code 8 hours a day. This is normal. Meetings, context switch and times when focus is unachievable are expected and mostly understood by my experienced management. So are times when we are monitoring technology advancement and keeping an eye on the industry and community (e.g. lurking at HN but not overly posting and commenting) and times of social activity between workers (e.g. talking about the weekend).

Most of us take mental health breaks between meetings and need to take time to think through issues. Many also need to periodically break focus to think about personal life issues or hobbies. As long as you generally strive to work, this is not a problem either.

But walking into a stand-up and then lying about your day? To me, that's unethical.

The real question to me is:

Do you do that on purpose or is this something that happens even if you are trying to focus? There are many conditions, from stress and anxiety to diagnosed mental health issues that can prevent you from focusing. Burn-outs and bore-outs also come to mind.

In my eyes, the fact that you asked the community about it shows that you have some form of concern towards that behavior. Would you say it is negatively impacting your life?


I'm happy to finally read a comment that say this isn't a good or normal thing. I was starting to feel a bit of despair. I don't think I've done that much more that you seems to do but I've certainly seen a lot of people do it and it's always been pissing me off. I've always wondered how the world even works when I consider how much I've seen people do that at every level and at every kind of job.

Dear original post author, you really need to start doing something that you enjoy or that motivates you. You can also try to structure your life in a way that allows you to not work when you don't feel like you can or will be efficient. This is one of the very reason I'm freelancing: I work when I want/can, and do not pretend the rest of the time. But when I'm working, I'm trying to stay as close as possible to 100%. I charge a premium rate for those very focused session, and do not pretend the rest of the time. There are times when I work a lot, a d times when I don't accept new projects because I need time off (usually 4 months a year)

I'm really wondering how healthy is, psychologically, all this pretending.

Anyway, I don't think you're alone in your situation but I don't think it's a good thing either


I understand the negative reaction, but I'm not sure I agree with the following:

>Dear original post author, you really need to start doing something that you enjoy or that motivates you. You can also try to structure your life in a way that allows you to not work when you don't feel like you can or will be efficient.

May I ask why? The OP doesn't suggest anywhere they are unhappy. Presumably, they have a very good work-life balance, seemingly leaning toward the 'life' side of the equation. They presumably have a lot of time to themselves, to enjoy as they see fit. Furthermore, they say that their performance reviews range from good, to great. So if all the above is true, both parties seem to be happy with the arrangement.

I am in a similar position, and I think it boils down to not relying on my work for personal satisfaction or happiness. I work to live, not live to work. I provide a good service to my employer, and I believe my value is in my overall output, not overall input. When I am needed, I work hard enough to achieve the end goal. Otherwise, I work enough to satisfy my employer, regardless of how long that takes. My relationship with my employer is transactional, and I see no moral obligation to work beyond what is absolutely necessary - providing I do enough to satisfy my employer.

I do however understand the mindset of someone who is motivated and driven by work and their career. If that's what floats your boat, more power to you. That's not everyone though, and as long as the person is still providing enough value to someone that their salary is still a worthwhile investment - hey ho!


> you really need to start doing something that you enjoy or that motivates you.

Screw this advice. The world is filled with and is highly tolerant of mediocrity. Do your best and collect the biggest paycheck that you can. Not everyone gets to have their dream job.


Replace "you really need to start doing something ..."

With "maybe you'd like to consider searching for something ..."

And it's good advice? Everything doesn't need to be taken literally :-)


I was kinda in similar shoes to OP but I am at the start of my career and it became obvious to me that I was not working at the same level as everyone else. I quit because I was severely burnt out and like you, I didn't want to pretend.

9-5 just isn't for me but it seems like you found a way around that with freelancing. I would love to do the same. Can you please shed some light on how you got started with it and how you built you client base?

I have always admired those that get to work in their own time as you do, it would be a dream to do the same.


> I'm happy to finally read a comment that say this isn't a good or normal thing. I was starting to feel a bit of despair.

I felt the same way. One of the weird things about the Internet is that it, as Randall Munroe wrote recently, "makes us see messages from awful people and assume they come from normal peers." That isn't to suggest that people who share OP's views are awful -- just that these comments could come from any world view, income level, religion, mood, and state of intoxication.


Most of the other answers focus on how programming is not typing (which I agree with, of course), but I think they miss the point. Yours answers directly and I agree with it.

Working 5 to 10 hours a week seems very low to me, though as a lead or as a coworker I would judge OP by the impact, not by the time spent behind the computer. But I doubt anyone can have serious impact in such time.

I had the chance to work with a brilliant coworker who preferred to slack off - and have passed on recommending him for this very reason.

World is a big place and there are many ways to go through life, so I'm not judging - but if you're asking if this is common, then the answer is "no, not at the places where I worked, and not how I work".

Of course you would have to pay/promise me fortune to get more than 40hr weeks from me, but I'm not hiding that. :-)


All the other comments about the background processing, waiting for inspiration, only having stamina for a certain amount of time are all correct. For forty years I have lived that life and have never been in a situation where I averaged more than a few hours a day of actual coding. It often takes a long time for me to figure out what to do but, that's work, too.

But, five to ten a week?, get a different job that you like. I have worked in situations where there wasn't really enough to do. My response, write something else. If I was 100% retired I would work more than five or ten hours a week.

And I think, karawebnetwork, that you are right to inquire amount mental health. Having that little energy and motivation is not a good thing.


Haha. I absolutely love your comment on retirement. I might borrow it from tout in the future


I agree. I once had a coworker who I KNEW was under performing. They went from 'normal' output to just checking in and out.

It was pretty frustrating and de-moralizing as it felt like they weren't pulling their weight. Among teams there is a social contract, it's not all just between an employee and the company, it also impacts your coworkers.


Agreed. Really surprised by most of the answers here. On my team, someone like the OP would be found out fast and wouldn't last long.


My interpretation is that most of the people replying are giving the OP the benefit of the doubt regarding productivity, considering OP never mentions anything concretely other than having acceptable performance reviews and isn't jumping between workplaces every 6 months. It's hard to know if they mean "I write code and close all my tickets in 10 hours every week" or if they mean "I touch my work computer twice a week and spend the rest of the time on youtube and playing video games". Depending on what you assume the response would therefore be "yikes" in the latter case or "well, not all programming work is typing code" in the former.


Not sure about the arguments regarding ethics. When I'm an employee, my contract is with the employer. They pay me, they evaluate me and their success is what determines my progress (in a good company). Sure, coworkers can suffer if I refuse to do my work, but I'm not there to make them happy, I'm there to make the company money.

So I don't think it's unethical to work less as long as your employer is still happy with what you do. Sure, lying is always suboptimal. But if your company likes your output and would just be confused by the hours needed to achieve, I don't see a big problem with it. You could even argue that working full time and producing 8x as much could bring coworkers in trouble who already can barely match OPs output. And they will exist, he wouldn't have gotten to the point where he is if he constantly was the worst performer.


> So I don't think it's unethical to work less as long as your employer is still happy with what you do.

Then tell the truth and deal with the consequences.


Why? Perception is reality in engineering. I'm not incentivized to be anything other than slightly above average... people have horrible memories and velocity is very arbitrary. Engineering is a charlatan's paradise full stop; sounding smart is easy. In sales (especially) and marketing, there are real numbers that you drive. Everyone has bad quarters but if it continues, you will be let go.


> sounding smart is easy

If talking with much less technical people

But not if talking with a brighter and more experienced person

>> tell the truth

> Why? Perception is reality in engineering

There's also the saying that goes "pick your battles". -- Compared to other things in life, how important is it that the managers know that in fact you work only so and so much?


I'm not sure if you care or whatever, but this could be helpful advice. In general, those in academia and engineering (especially) don't have the social skills to tell apart a charlatan from someone with "true smarts".

There is no amount of "smartness" that will allow you to tell the difference... they will flatter you, shadow you, mimic you, and hide behind esoteric jargon. And chances are, you will be none the wiser.


Thanks for the advice

I've met one or more such people already (no harm was caused, but thereafter I started paying even less attention to clothes and voice and self confidence etc). Good to get to hear your perspective.

Please note that I included the words "more experienced" -- meaning, you would be more experienced, know more than them, about the things they were talking about. Any esoteric jargon -- you'd know all of it.

But you had in mind areas where one isn't experienced oneself, and then I think you're right. It's a different thing than what I was trying to write about though

> Engineering is a charlatan's paradise

Aha, you meant that the engineers could be fooled by business/sales/law people. Then I better understand what you wrote. (First I interpreted that text, the other way around)


Software development isn't a matter of sitting down and generating a fixed amount of code per hour. The rate of writing code is hugely variable. It's not unusual for most of my "productive" (as in typing actual code) time to be concentrated in a few particular days in a month. The time not spent typing (or being in meetings, doing admin, etc) isn't actually "unproductive" though. It's mostly spent solving problems, and a lot of that effort happens below the level of consciousness. A lot of it actually happens during sleep. It's effort, though, and it costs. You can't do an infinite amount of it in infinitesimal time.

I suggest 2 tests to see if you're lazy or dumb:

1. Try to be more productive by sheer effort of will. Just say to yourself "this month I will write more code than usual" and set to it with a positive attitude. If you succeed you were being lazy and now you know how to not be lazy. If, as is more likely from what you've said, you fail, then you're not lazy. You're working at your maximum capacity but you have a poor understanding of what constitutes "work" in the job you do.

2. If, by the above test, you are not lazy, then look at how well you do relative to your peers. If you're holding your own (as you say you are), you're not dumb either.


> Software development isn't a matter of sitting down and generating a fixed amount of code per hour. The rate of writing code is hugely variable... The time not spent typing (or being in meetings, doing admin, etc) isn't actually "unproductive" though.

All true statements, but that's not what we're talking about. OP recognizes that he works 5-10 hours a week, and effectively blows the rest of the day off.

Reminds me a bit of an engineer who reported to me a few years ago. He would describe every week in our 1:1s and during team meetings how he was solving this tough thread-synchronization problem. Because we trusted each other, we trusted that the problem was difficult. Then when he finally submitted his code, it was a single line. A single trivial line (as in, read the python `multiprocessing` docs for 5 minutes and the solution is right there). OK... sometimes it can take a long time to find that one-line fix, I get it. But then I looked into his commit history, and it turns out he was averaging a few lines of code a week -- on a good week, and sometimes even zero. When I confronted him, he said "You can't measure my productivity by lines of code!!!" OK, sure, but how far am I supposed to excuse an engineer who has committed 100 lines of code in 10 months? What a statistical oddity, that every single task he took on turned out to be a single-line-fix dragon!


I don't disagree, but I never said there was no such thing as slackers or that OP definitely isn't one. I provided a test to tell if they really are one or not.

The point I'm making is that some people in our profession think they are slacking when they're not, for the reasons I described. OP's description doesn't convince me that they necessarily are. In particular the comment at the end about having spent the years prior to the pandemic "pretending" to themselves that they were working hard sounds to me like somebody who's never really understood their own mental processes and has encountered a different perspective by doing the job in a different environment. I might be wrong, but that sounds more likely to me than that they have been getting away with minimal contributions throughout what they describe as a 20 year career. Your report didn't get away with it - the evidence is always there in the commit history, and the 2-5 year job length OP mentions is, contrary to their assessment, plenty of time to judge a developer's productivity.

Another hint is the fact that this person is seriously proposing the idea that everybody else is slacking off and lying too. This indicates that they don't think their actual output is less than other developers'.

As I say, I may be wrong. I don't know this developer - these are just some thoughts based on what they've posted. Unlike some here I'm not assuming I know the truth.


I am in a similar position as OP. I do 15-20 hours of work and watch Twitch or YouTube the rest of the time. I am a lead dev at a startup and developed one of their main products. I have always implemented every feature in a few days or less. Bug fixes usually take 30-45 minutes. Meanwhile another lead dev, who handles the development of another product, takes at least 2 days to fix a simple bug, and 1-2 weeks to implement a simple feature.

Personally I don't see why I should be overworked if I get all of my stuff done in a short amount of time. Plus because I feel guilty I am always available on Slack and answer or even code on demand if somebody really needs it.

I sense that higher ups look at me as a hard worker and a good employee, but if only they knew the thruth. But if I was forced to work a lot more I would probably quit.


Yeah, that's the common mindset. You feel that you're slacking off, and you feel "guilty" about it, but you have a successful career and describe the prospect of doing more than you do as being "overworked" to the extent that you may have to quit.

There's nothing noble about burning out.


> how far am I supposed to excuse an engineer who has committed 100 lines of code in 10 months

The problem is poor understanding of an employee's performance. Squarely on the management side.


Good programmers by definition are lazy - Ancient wisdom circa 1980


1) How did you let this go on for 10 months?

2) If it was so easy to fix, why didn't you do it yourself? Too many meetings?


1) He was on another team the first 6-7 months of that. He was transferred to me on account of previous project being wrong area for him (it required domain knowledge he didn't have and didn't pick up). His former manager had worked with him before, so we gave him benefit of the doubt. After a few weeks of ramp-up on my team, he started giving me productive progress updates throughout every week. "I spent all week debugging such-and-such. I spent half the week helping Joe debug a problem", etc. He was very nice and external signs were fine. Then I saw his actual code was minimal, and sadly I learned that the engineers he kept telling me he was busy helping (which would be super valuable work) weren't actually getting that help -- he'd occasionally answer a question, or spend 15 minutes looking over someone's shoulder.

2) A guy on my team is repeatedly telling me he's on the verge of solving a tough problem, and then I take a look at his code and discover it was a trivial issue all along. No, the answer was not that I should have jumped in earlier and taken over the bug myself.

His story ended by being put on a performance plan, which he failed, and then we let him go. At the end of the day, though, he could very likely have stayed with us, if he just accepted my feedback that his productivity was far lower where it should be, and lower than all his peers. He refused to hear it. "You can't measure my performance based on LOC!" Correct, but the LOC was the first clue that he was delivering nearly zero value.

The reason I even told this story to begin with was because some developers somehow tell themselves that they're super productive despite barely checking in any code. By and large, that can't be true.


I think this 2-question test is very accurate.

To add to this, even if for a time, you can increase your productivity, sometimes that's not sustainable. There's nothing wrong with having ebbs and flows. On days when you have a larger workload of smaller tasks, you may find yourself to be incredibly productive, and days when you have smaller workloads, or larger tasks, and you may be less productive.

The thing is, if your boss is happy with your pace and work, then why be worried? It is literally your boss's job to notice if you aren't pulling your weight, and to ensure you are compensated fairly for your work.

The work-place hierarchy (hopefully, and usually) is set up so you don't have to govern whether you are working at the proper pace, that is the problem of your superiors, it's only up to you to accomplish the tasks you are given, or give advice about those tasks if they are wrong.


It's certainly not your boss's job to ensure that you are compensated fairly.


Often the opposite. They get kudos for keeping costs down.


Perhaps I worded that a little badly. They are responsible for making sure you are getting paid, or if you get fired.


I see myself very much like the person in the original question.

For me, I try to do put in sheer effort on a regular basis. It is just that more day than not, I just can't bring myself to do it. I end up spending more time berating myself for not working, slacking off, writing this answer on HN, etc, than actually working.

The sad (or perhaps enlightening?) thing is that it has always been like this. Since school, I would always do work at the last possible second. The only save is that I actually do a good job at the end, so it goes unnoticed. But the process is excruciating, and looking back at week after week of something like 5-10 hours per week is frustrating.

Like the original question, I also "lie" in standups. I get why people say it is unethical, but I can't bring myself to saying I wasted the whole day yesterday on reddit.


Same here, I really recognize this. There are times I really peak. Most times I really don't do much. I don't lie in startups really, maybe I'll say I'm working on something when I just opened a doc and glanced at it. Which is lying, ok... But I do often finished the work in time, but just in very intense sprints.

I recognize a lot in this thread.


For me, I think I could tell myself to be more productive for 1 week and succeed at it, but I'd feel a lot more stressed or cynical about work as a result. I feel I'ma lazy person because I know I'm not doing what I could when I try my best, but I also feel wellbeing and health is more important in the long run.


Well, they said they don’t do anything some days and bullshit their way to the next standup. It is clear to me where they stand at.


> Well, they said they don’t do anything some days and bullshit their way to the next standup. It is clear to me where they stand at.

But it's the agile standups that force the bullshitting. If you spent a day background thinking of best ways to achieve the goal while resting in your backyard hammock, there's no way you can say that out loud at the standup. So you're forced to come up with some random bullshit to fill your standup minutes.

That's why daily status reports are so incredibly toxic in any creative or intellectual field. Progress doesn't happen in neat daily chunks like that.


> ” If you spent a day background thinking of best ways to achieve the goal while resting in your backyard hammock”

There is absolutely no part of OP that warrants this charitable interpretation. My interpretation is that they just spent the day playing video game or something like that. You are reading things that are not there


Playing video games for many people is exactly as relaxing as hanging out in a hammock, with all the same background processing. I see no difference here between the hammock and video games here, it just depends on the person.


For me, there have been many times when I've been playing Rocket League in almost a fugue state, where I'm only half paying attention to the game. (Like how you can drive for a while in your car in a half-daydream, and snap back to reality and wonder how you missed so many miles going by without getting in an accident. If you've never experienced it, yes, it's a thing; no, it's not epilepsy.)

I tend to make a lot of progress just organizing my thoughts during those times; it's like the act of doing something else distracts the part of my brain that would get in the way of the processing I needed to do otherwise.

Strangely, I also tend to play Rocket League pretty well, even though I'm not fully focusing. Again, probably something about just doing vs. thinking about how to do.

I don't switch off from work very well, though, so this invariably happens when I should be enjoying my personal time but I'm still thinking about work. The exact opposite situation from the OP's.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis


Sounds extremely charitable to me. There is no indication from the OP they’re solving crazy hard problems requiring a ton of thought, or that they’re actually thinking about said problems while goofing off.

It just sounds like they’ve managed to get enough done to get by, and continue skating like this. I’ve seen quite of few people do this professionally. It’s just important to be honest about it.

My guess is there’s a motivation problem, which may be from the job itself, or something else.


Aren't the positive performance reviews such an indication?


I don’t think so. I just think they are a bullshit artist. Where is that very critical HN opinions of extrovert MBAs that don’t or know do anything, but keep getting promotions because they are good at bullshitting? Suddenly if it is a fellow engineer doing the same they are actually “working in the back of their minds in very hard problems”? How convenient.


I've never posted anything like that, and there are plenty of critical posts in this thread from others regardless.


They said they range from mediocre to positive. We don’t know what the bar is where they work, but it seems they’re just barely meeting it. Imagine if they actually worked a whole week, every week!


>My interpretation is that they just spent the day playing video game

>You are reading things that are not there

you too???


Which is where?

If they deliver X, and the expectation is X; OP may call it "bullshitting" but his point is that he's delivered expectations and now he's coasting which is totally fine. He delivered on expectations.


> ” If they deliver X”

What make you think they deliver? Certainly not the OP.

I think everyone is reading OP as an “anti-agile champion”, a “hero against meaningless jobs”, but the way I read it they are just a lazy person lying their way around to trick companies into paying them for work that they are not doing. At all. Not even willing or trying to do. Just lying to people.


All I can speak from is observation and experience. And in both, I have never worked under a manager so stupid that they can’t spot laziness.

To be honest, if you’re a manager who can’t spot incompetence or laziness, then you deserve every bit of it. Same with upper management who hires managers who can’t spot incompetence. It’s really not hard at all. I don’t get why OP is the bad guy when he literally meets ALL expectations per their manager’s own words.


Maybe the problem is the need to have feedback at the stand up. This assumes writing code is linear and is something that can be routinely managed through a stand up.


The same could be asked about upper management. They earn 10x our pay, so their output is 10x more value than our work, and they work 10x harder, right? In our normal 8 hour work day, they must work 80 hours. Except a full day is 24 hours.

Why is the onus always on the bottom workers to be honest? Why are we trying to feel guilty about our working hours vs how much we're paid? Because it's clear salary is not tied to better performers given how much upper management is compensated.

Just enjoy your life. Management probably lowballed you coming into the job anyway, but if they are happy with your work, then spend that extra time you're saving to enjoying other things in life.

What do you want to do, OP? The new year is coming up.


I'm not upper management. Most upper management gets paid way too much for the value they bring.

But, when you have the opportunity to work under an excellent CEO or CTO you will learn that they do bring 10x or even 100x the value you bring to the team.


> But, when you have the opportunity to work under an excellent CEO or CTO you will learn that they do bring 10x or even 100x the value you bring to the team.

The same can be told about OP who claimed that they work 5-10 hours a week but their performance reviews have consistently ranged from mediocre to great. The point is, the hours you work is not an indicator for the value you bring to the team.


I absolutely agree.


They are also capable of causing 10x as much damage. Their job is to make correct decisions because they supposed to have the permission and responsibility to make larger decisions.


Agree with your second statement. I work at a semiconductor startup. Both the CEO and the CTO are excellent folks. Kind, extremely competent, hardworking, and reasonable; I love my time spent interacting with them.


I have never seen that happen in practice. Can you give an example of a CEO who delivered 100x value to the company you worked for?


Yes. They do this in a lot of ways.

- Connections: industry, hires, investors

- Investing themselves into the company (bringing capital to help you grow)

- Domain specific knowledge. Hopefully they know the industry better than anyone.

- Management. Do not underestimate how far good management can go. It can really be a productivity multiplier - but the other way is true, too. If you have bad management, you're going to kill productivity.


I would love to see an experiment where a single CEO competes with a group of 100 experienced software engineers, sales people, product managers etc. I have a feeling that close to no CEO would win that one.


This is uncharitable, the parent comment explicitly said CEOs are a power multiplier.

Using your parallel, I think it'd be more fair to compare

> CEO + 300 software engineers, sales people, product managers

> 400 software engineers, sales people, product managers in a flat structure

I tend to think that the former would be more efficient, because otherwise we would be seeing at least some organizations of the latter type outcompeting the former on the free market. We don't, with 1-2 exceptions.


The whole point is the compensation is not based on how hard you work but the value you provide and what the market will support. Of course upper management works roughly the same hours as everyone else, but they also have far more responsibility.


> but they also have far more responsibility

This is relative. In my experience, many people in upper management have held little to no real responsibility because they were the types that if all goes right, it's their doing, but if anything goes wrong, it's the fault of someone below them. I find this more true for middle managers, but I have seen this with upper management numerous times.

Again in my experience, the higher in rank one achieves, the less real work they end up doing when compared to their subordinates. Delegating isn't that hard to do and takes very little time -- and there are some master class delegators out there.

That all being said, I do respect and love working for upper management who understand, who care, and who do as much as the rest of us. I currently work for such individuals and it's part of the reason I've stayed as long as I have.


Actually, compensation is based on what the company has to pay. There are some other rules, like they have to (overall) pay less than they make from the output. But in general, a company never pays their employees more than they think they have to.

10x programmers don't make 10x the pay. They might make slightly more, but not even 2x what a 1x programmer (of the same level, no comparing seniors to juniors) makes at the same company.


best solution is to stay a 1x developer then devote most of your energy to sidegigs and stock investing


yes. or better be a 10x for 4 hours a week. i feel like 10x is about flow not stress, so doing 10x might be easier than 1x ironically.

there is a disconnect about how companies mildly or jot so mildly “gaslight” employees into burning all of their energy on the job.

Its more cultural than profit-seeking. The profit seeker would want to maximise the effectiveness of the worker, by for example thinking hard about what work is worth doing.

The biggest waste i see is cancelled projects that could have easily been pre-cancelled. The next is features that are hardly used. Followed by technical debt and its impact on velocity.


Actually, the best strategy is in fact to stay a 1x performer at work, AND to stay a 1x performer in your investing life via set-and-forget index funds.

Minimize risk and time spent in efficient markets with millions of participants (the developer talent pool, the stock market). These places are treadmills.

Instead, spend your free time in inefficient markets by starting a business with the rest of the time you’ve now freed up.

Most B2C and B2B markets don’t have millions of competitors, and hence are much less efficient than the developer talent pool and stock market (which do).

This is the optimal strategy.


You’re not wrong, of course the company will pay the minimum it can get away with. My point was a bit broader regarding the market value between an executive versus a programmer.


If a company is doing its job correctly, a 10x engineer should not be leveled the same as a 1x engineer. (It's more complicated than that but, y'know.)


Yeah, but you have to go up quite a few levels to make 10x the pay. E.g., a Google L5 makes (ballpark) $360k. An L8 makes (ballpark) $1M. That's only 3x higher, and you probably need a lot more than 10x impact to go L5 -> L8. An L4 makes $270k, still within ~1/4 of an L8. L3s are paid almost 200k, which is still ~1/5 of an L8.

I don't know what L9s or 10s are paid; it's probably highly variable and the total number are probably a handful.


Advancement at Google is tied heavily to being on the right projects to the extent that I think you're way overselling the extent to which the higher levels will be better at their jobs.


That seems plausible; I don’t work there. I think that further supports the argument that “10x engineers” are not paid 10x.


if the company is doing its job correctly, its paying the 10x engineer even less than the 1x engineer.

if the engineer is doing their job correctly, they are negotiating to be paid more than tne 1x


> paying the 10x engineer even less than the 1x engineer

Why is that a good idea? Isn't there a risk that s/he will then quit?


that's one way to get a lot of 1x engineers...


Sad truth.


Compensation is based on how much economic rent the employer can extract from the value that its employees produce. Thus, roles who produce the same amount of value can still receive drastically different compensation. Furthermore, in case of upper management, the value produced is negative in many cases - numerous examples of companies run into the ground, with the people responsible still getting their golden parachutes etc.


Ah yes, the incredible value of providing feedback on proposals and signing off on initiatives.


In my last two jobs I fail to see that my employer got more value out of me than the expenses of paying me.


don't feel too bad. There are a lot of CEOs that get $20M salaries for doing nothing. If the company succeeds due to market conditions they are seen as heroes- if the company fails for market conditions they are seen as losers. They may have some impact but mostly its luck.


They in general seem to accept credit for other peoples work and delegate blame to others as well. I don’t call that being responsible.


Most upper management aren't hired because they're good at something. They're hired for who they know.

Knowing the personal number of CxO from a Fortune 500 company and being familiar enough to just call them is worth a TON of money for the whole company.

Management experience is also a plus, but it's not necessary when you have the ability to short-track yourself (and your company) straight to the people who make the decisions.


You think execs get hired based on connections alone? That is pretty absurd. It’s difficult to see value when you have little insight into their day to day. Upper management probably has the same skill distribution of any other job. Meaning your likelihood of working for an incompetent C level is probably roughly the same as working for an incompetent leader at any other level.


> execs get hired based on connections alone

I think you're interpreting what theshrike79 wrote, a bit too literally :-) (agreed, though, about the skill distribution thoughts, I guess)

(Good books, btw, the Hyperion series, theshrike79 :-))


Labor is not productivity. Labor is labor, and if badly aimed, might as well be completely useless. Upper management has the power and responsability to make decisions which can have colossal implications on the overall productivty of the company towards its goal of selling what it sells. The real issue though, is that even though labor can approximately be measured, the impact of decisions not so much; whatever decision is taken becomes the "new normal" and it's hard to know how much it was a productive or improductive one. I'm not really knowledgeable on how upper managers are evaluated.


> Why is the onus always on the bottom workers

Power imbalance. The same reason why *essential* workers often get poverty salaries.


In the last year or two, I have not "worked" more than 1-2 hours a day on average--some days for a grand total of zero hours. The quote/unquote is not there by accident. I manage a team and some projects, and most of the time I let other people do the technical work while I get to chat with higher ups or give some general direction on where the work should go.

I consider myself very competent in my field even though I stopped doing purely technical work some time ago, but there are a lot of very good coders out there, but not enough "lazy pragmatists" like me.

My team likes me because I don't micromanage, I support them as much as I can and can entertain them with some good jokes, career advice and a general openness that is hard to find in professional circles.

I have also been able to work remotely for months, and when I say remotely I mean in very remote places.

I also make top money for European standards.

Some will see me as a "parasite", but they would be very wrong. I do exactly what I am asked to do, I am positive and upbeat and always ready to support the team at large when needed. Others may ask, "is she not getting bored?", but the answer is "are you kidding me?". I can spend time with my kids and partner, climb mountains, and brunch on the regular with my girlfriends.

Maybe (surely?) it will end at some point, but like someone said, "tomorrow is not promised to anyone".

I might start a coaching service at some point, as I believe most professionals (forget about the SV types, I am talking about other geographies) are far from having a real understanding on how big companies work and what should be done to have a comfortable and impactful professional life (I am a top performer!), while at the same time enjoying this splendid world we are lucky to live in.


> I consider myself very competent in my field even though I stopped doing purely technical work some time ago, but there are a lot of very good coders out there, but not enough "lazy pragmatists" like me.

I have found many times that junior developers really love to write code (I did too early in my career). Most of my time is spent stopping people from writing more code. As in, why are you doing this instead of using this library? Why are you even thinking about writing code to do date/time manipulation? Why are even thinking about doing something custom when it’s security related?

I guess it’s because modern development is actually mostly boring so anything that looks challenging people love to think they can finally apply that algo/leet code shit they’ve been prepping for. In NormalCorp you can forget about it. It’s my job to actively make sure no one is trying to be clever by writing unnecessary fun code.


I've met people like you, some as employees, but most as coaches. I believe their role is somehow religious, priest-like: they are able to occupy a spot between leadership and workers to embody the ability to believe in what the company is doing. I think your role is perfectly summarized by your last sentence. You role is to be the person who says: "I'm enjoying the splendid world we are lucky to live in."

I envy your ability to see the world as splendid in the context of work. I see exploitation, destruction of the environment, abusive relationships, boredom, meaninglessness. I believe most of your/our bosses feel the same way.


This is it!


What practical things can I do to get better at my job? Ive always been a procrastinator but since the pandemic I've become like op. Very little work on job, whole weeks where I don't do anything. It's double edged sword, I have rekindled some old hobbies but I feel a lot of guilt about not being good at my job. I get by just about at work some people love my work some people hate working with me.

I would love to learn from successful people like you, is there anything you can recommend reading or any course to learn?

I'm in the middle of my life and feeling stuck and confused about working in tech. What's the remedy?


It's mostly about deciding what you want your life to be, and then that big decision impacts other decisions about your work life.

I grew up in a family where my parents worked normal (non-tech, non-professional) jobs and never talked about work when they were home. We would take cheap vacations in the summer for 3+ weeks and they never checked in at work to hear how things were going or whether or not the xyz project was approved.

If you work in technology, you're probably used to your work life spilling over, in terms of time, thoughts and concerns, into your life outside of work. Culture, which is a social phenomenon, has great effects on the lives of individuals, but there is usually ample room for the individual to decide what their approach and attitude will be.

People who hate working with you are a problem. It could stem from a cultural mismatch or from people who are better at their jobs than you are and aren't as inclined to work with someone on their level (I'm writing descriptively here, no judgment) or from a toxic environment, like some I've had the displeasure of finding myself in. What's going on there? Look at it honestly and without emotion, which is hard to do at first.

By observing and understanding how the world works, which is one of the most important skills you can possess, it is quite easy to observe what is the most common way to achieve a goal, to the point where it is sometimes surprising to see how delusional most people are. For example, if you want to build a muscular physique, it's easy to do the following: observe what most people who are muscular do - given some starting points (endo- or ectomorphic, tall/short, genetically weak or strong points) - and follow what they did at different stages of muscle development. But what you often see when you go to the gym is a large number of non-muscular people doing all sorts of bizarre exercises or protocols that people who have achieved success never did. Same with diets or learning or doing business.

And the same with career development. To get a, say, director position at Big Tech, say FAANG and company, the most common way is to move from IC to manager to director at a FAANG and co, either vertically within the company or horizontally with some possible down-leveling or a mix of the two. Now the second step is to look at how people are promoted, and it's a combination of technical skills, personality (someone has to promote you, remember, you're not promoting yourself), actions (e.g., backstabbing or turning the other way often works, this is unfortunately the world we live in, to the point where the "be nice" movement advocated by people in positions of high power makes me laugh, because to get to their position it's very likely they were only being nice in their minds. But I don't tolerate bad actions in my world), and timing. Do I have the technical skills? Do I have the personality? Do I have the right timing? Clearly, it's all situational, which is the second thing you should learn in combat sports (the first is being able to fight), i.e. you have to somehow adapt to the situation that arises in the fight (yourself and your opponent).

You might read this and say, no, it's not that easy. But actually it is, conceptually. Then, one sometimes cannot achieve the technical proficiency necessary for a certain position and peace. But at least one doesn't run in circles thinking that the secret to a great career is in adding brown sugar to coffee.

Then, one last (of many) aspect to consider is that new positions and advancements often don't provide a linear increase in "professional currency," but at the n increment, where n is much larger than 2. Say, you're working as an IC at the Nooneknows company with a certain skill set and you get by luck, skill and whatever else a position at a FAANG. In 6 months, you'll be contacted by 10-100 times the number of companies that were interested in you before. A good effort can be enormously rewarded.

But first, think about what you want to do with your life. You only live once, that will never change, and taking control of your life, forgetting as much as reasonably possible (we all want a piece of it) of validation from friends, family, neighbors and society at large, is the necessary first step toward a great, wonderful life.


I love this comment and your vibe. I agree with the lack of lazy pragmatists.


Ever thought it might be a carrot to dangle to ICs "look at them yo-yos! that's the way to do it! if you work hard and stay in this company, you could be able to enjoy 2-hour week work, too! No need to break away and start a start-up or anything that risky"


If you're managing a team, they like you, and you're being productive then I wouldn't consider it a parasite. A good manager who helps when needed and stays out of the way when I'm working is amazing.


I'd love to hear more about how you operate. Do you write?


What is your title/job description? Are you more of a team lead/engineering manager?


It is a technical director of engineering position, but as we know jobs are more nuanced than the title they have


Yeah definitely. Is it possible to work in a similar way for a lower-level management position? I'm not interested in the Managerial track, but it's worth a try if this is possible.


How do I sign up for your service :P


Can you say salary too?


Between 200k and 250k Euros depending on bonuses and value of shares


I don’t think that what you’re doing is very common, but it’s not uncommon either. What you need to do this is to work in an environment where not being productive is not harmful. There are plenty of environments like this. For example, not doing any work but still getting paid doesn’t do any harm at Google. The company is making money anyway. At a small startup that’s under immense pressure people would realise what you’re doing because you’d harm the business.

I’m a big believer in Price’s Law - the square root people produce half the value. If there are 10000 people at the company, you can very well survive in the group of 9900 that does the other half.


I’ve worked at a small startup and find this to be untrue. If you’re working with people 10-100x worse than you, you can be sandbagging as hard as you can and still be miles ahead and look like a paragon of productivity.

Now, will that particular startup succeed? Probably not in the way their investors would like.


As someone who worked at both Microsoft and Google... you can get await with doing little work at those companies for maybe a year, two years at most, but after that you're gone. The expectation at those places skyrockets after the first year.


At Microsoft at least that wasn't my experience at all. I knew several people there who hadn't done any real productive work for the last 7-10 years, probably longer.


I've been in Azure and GCP. IDK how anyone would get away with it. You constantly have customer issues, people from other teams pinging you, needing help with something. I don't see how it would be possible just to do nothing and survive.

Maybe in some team that is further removed from customers?


Not to disagree with your experience at Azure and GCP, but the grandparent specifically mentioned their parent entities: Microsoft and Google, each of which have several divisions apart from their respective cloud divisions.

Keep in mind that Azure and GCP are playing catch up to AWS, so they necessarily have to run a tight ship in order to close AWS’ lead.

So its possible for laxity to exist in other divisions in a large company, as long as the money keeps rolling in, e.g. the Windows division at Microsoft (which still enjoys a good share of the desktop market) and the Search division at Google (which still enjoys a good share of the search market).


Yeah, I mentioned Azure and GCP specifically, to imply that other divisions within those companies may be different. Anything where you're constantly deploying to enterprise customers, you're going to need to be responsive to issues that come up, and that alone will take a good chunk of the day.


At Google anyway, it's fairly common knowledge that cloud is a far more difficult place to work, both in culture and expectations, than most anywhere else in the company as a SWE.


That's surprising because I came from Azure, and Google Cloud is way slower than Azure was. Frankly I think that's why I failed at the job (separate thread). It feels like a "me too" offering, and the initiative and creativity just isn't there, and I just couldn't be bothered to care. I felt so much more energy at Azure (even though they're the ones most often criticized as being "me too").

That said, it may have just been timing or team fit or seratonin levels or whatever. I'm sure plenty of others have had the opposite experience.


Aren’t there still tons of developer jobs at Google, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, etc. where you aren’t on call and just get to write code?


It's easy to be productive in that context. People pinging you to get help with something, that's a "positive distraction." You'll write a block of code super fast and send it back to them.


Love the async-ian slip


As someone who put more lines of code into <50KLOC hobby project, that is not guaranteed, especially when your "little work" affects the bottom line on megabucks scale.


hypothetically, do you think if people weren't allowed to drink caffeine or use performance enhancing drugs (adderall etc..), what % would not make that threshold of performance?


No idea; most people I worked with drank coffee but never once was I exposed to performance enhancing drugs. At Microsoft I worked on IronPython and the people I worked with were productive not in the sense that they churned out 1000s and 1000s of lines of code a day, but they were productive in the sense that they were constantly outputting fairly novel solutions.

A similar thing was true at Google, I worked in the platforms division there (storage systems, BigTable, Linux kernel tweaking), and it was mostly about identifying bottlenecks and coming up with interesting solutions to squeeze out more performance. Most of this work wasn't like massive lines of code, but you had to really understand the problem at a deep level and have the kind of rigor and discipline to make changes to large systems without breaking anything in the process. That last bit was very hard to do, since coming up with optimizations that don't break anything is surprisingly difficult.


I’ve never mentioned my ADHD diagnosis and medication to my coworkers and none have ever mentioned it to me.


It also depends on the company. I've worked at companies where the #1 project can change weekly and by that I mean the previous project is completely abandoned for the new shiny. If you've worked at a place like this (there are lots of them), you have to not burn yourself out. It is very demoralizing to give your all to a UI just to have it literally thrown away. Sometimes slow rolling can let you move things forward in a protective way. If it is still #1 after 5 weeks, maybe it is time to dive in more fully. Digging holes and filling them back in is tough.


With my current manager this has become a skill I'm honing. He's senile and asks for all sorts of things he will have forgotten about in a few days. So I slow roll any new idea he gets excited about until it has percolated for at least a week or two. The trick is figuring out how to wait long enough to avoid doing throw-away work without waiting long enough that he feels ignored. But, like I said, he's senile, so that helps with the latter.


For my previous boss, I have the rule of 3. Until he asked for something 3 times, I just said "yep" and didn't start it. If he asked three times, he wasn't going to forget so time to start moving it forward.


> He's senile

Figuratively speaking, right? (Or did you mean literally? Dementia? If so, is he old)


Different formula but I've always liked:

productivity = (time * effort)^talent

Just as a general model.


let talent=0 then productivity = (time * effort)^0 = 1 = 100% Sounds about right


Yup! Time and effort absolutely count.

But the "star line" folk out of Heinlein's Beyond this Horizon are the ones that catapult the entire species forward.

The Wright brothers, the Norman Bourlags, the Nikola Teslas, the Alan Turings.


What about charismatic poor decision makers, pulling everyone in the wrong direction? Or evil geniuses

Maybe multiply with sign(talent)? And the exponent could be abs(talent):

    sing(talent) *
       (effort * time) ^
                 abs(talent)


I’ve had coworkers like op almost in every team that I worked for and google was one of the only places where some folks like that got walked out so may not be the best advice ;)


I'm literally about to get fired from Google for this, possibly today (HR is calling wondering where I am). Dumb thing is, I've been working like crazy on my 20% project. I just can't stand the other one, got an NI on my first (and presumably last) review cycle so pretty much killed any chance of a transfer.

I've never outright lied, though certainly hemmed and hawed. And occasionally blatantly "I haven't done anything this week". And yeah, certainly work-from-home makes it easier to shut down and ignore everything. Which is great, except you feel like crap afterwards.

But like I said, it depends on the project. Next job I take, money is going to be less of a consideration. Just want to work on something interesting. And there's a reasonable likelihood that I fall into the category of "needs professional help" (I also flunked out of school twice and took six years to graduate, despite getting five 5's on AP tests and only needing two years' worth of credits), but I've tried a few times without much success.

And, no I don't think it's super-common. At least not to this level. Most of my coworkers seem to genuinely work pretty hard. Though some don't.


If you do need help, I hope you get it.

I have been having success with narrative conversational therapy.

At my best, especially on projects I care about, I’m a high performer. At my worst, I’m slow and mediocre. In the end, most of us are simply average.


you make it sound like it's a named condition, which one is it?


Whoa. timeout. If I'm reading your post correctly your manager gave you a NI as a noogler (first review cycle)?! WTF. Do NIs make it harder to transfer? sure, but it's not impossible.


First of all, I hope you'll be alright and end up with a job you like.

But I think it's important to distinguish between cases where people hardly work but get praised for their output, and cases where the employer notices and tries to get rid of the employee. The latter case is obviously problematic. But what if Google told you they love your work even though you hardly ever work? I wouldn't see it as problematic at all in this case.


I'm surprised your manager let you join a 20% project as a noogler. Sounds like poor remote management at least deserves a slice of blame.

The right mental health diagnosis might temporarily shield you from certain employment consequences and longer term actually help you find a sustainable pattern of work and life. Google offers benefits and resources that might help in that area, try them before you lose access.

"a day in the life of an engineer working from home" https://youtu.be/Rgx8dpiPwpA


Imagine a security guard at an office building. 90% of the time might be sitting in a booth watching monitors. The other 10% of the time is buzzing people in or making rounds. But that 90% of the time when they are sitting around is important, since they are on call. So you are like a security guard. Your employer gladly pays you for the 90% of the time you are doing nothing, because they need the comfort of having a developer on call for when something needs to be done ASAP. They won't have to go to Upwork or wherever to find someone because you're already there. As long as you are 10x 10% of the time, you average out to a competent FTE and you are tolerated.


I think if that was his situation he wouldn't have to "bullshit through standup". Just say "nothing showed up" or "having a creative block" or whatever and then either get help or something.

It's not like the security guard at all, the security guard is not lying or consciously giving a false sense of what his contributions to the team are.


Part of the problem is that 'the company' accepts this 90% downtime, but managers running standups are paid to maximize productive output of their staff.

So you'd be lying to your managers with the end goal of behaving as the company expects you to.

This kind of internal tension is normal in lots of organizational structures. It's better if no one has to lie but it isn't (in my opinion) a disaster or anything.


Like most analogies, this one fails completely. It's well-understood that the security guard does nothing but stay alert 99% of the time. He very explicitly needs to "do nothing" for long stretches of time.

Software development operates largely on trust that everyone on the team is putting in real effort. The manager trusts that when it takes you a week to finish a task, it's because it actually took a week of work, not a few minutes on Monday and then you watched YouTube vids and were on your XBox the rest of the week. And not just the manager -- everyone at the company would almost certainly like to move faster, and wouldn't be happy to know that features and bugfixes could be landing 5x faster, except for people who figured out that no one's checking up on them.


everyone at the company would almost certainly like to move faster

Not necessarily true. This is certainly the case at a startup, but at a more established BigCorp, things move slowly, and the ability of an engineer to work at a slower pace is an asset. You may be waiting on legal approval for weeks or months, or a software review from infosec, signoff from finance on integration testing for a new payment processor, or any number of processes that are not banging out code as quickly as possible (these are all actual examples from my company). In these cases, you shouldn't have to BS your way through a standup, but you will have times where a week goes by and you haven't written a single line of code, and that is exactly what the job requires.


Or demoing to stakeholders, gathering business requirements, communicating new content that needs to be received etc. Those are all important reasons to go slower too

Moving too fast doesn't benefit anyone


By "everyone would want to move faster" I mean: ship your product, whatever it is, at a high level of quality, sooner rather than later.

I'm not sure I'm familiar with any software project were people were glad it took as long as it did.


> you will have times where a week goes by and you haven't written a single line of code, and that is exactly what the job requires.

OP is not saying that sometimes he's idle. Of course there are times when things move slowly.

OP is saying that in his entire software development career, he works 0.5-1.0 days a week, and never more.


This is how I view it. Unless you work for a startup where you need to churn out code every hour, you are paid for your expertise and ability to navigate incidents quickly and efficiently. You are a force multiplier as well as an individual contributor.


you honestly think they are this alert and actually work? Honestly most of them just watch tv all day long and sit out their shift. I've seen people's bicycles get stolen right in front of the security guy. Most security guys are useless and don't do anything all day.


I've been a software engineer and managed software engineers for 20 years and worked in all kinds of businesses. This is both normal and mostly acceptable, in my professional opinion.

Doing just as much work as your employer requires and no more is way less of a problem than employees who actively steal, commit fraud, bring drama and distract other team members, or are introducing defects because they've faked their way into a job they don't have the skills for. Your managers are likely dealing with those problems too, so they may be more aware of your situation than you think and are ok with it. Or maybe not, whatever. Not your problem either way. They can let you know if they're not happy with your performance, which it sounds like they are not doing.

However! I will say that this way of working and living comes with some significant hazard to your mental health. Doing something you don't like, care about, or believe in for decades long periods of time can really mess with your sense of self worth and happiness in life. You only have one life, do something with it that is satisfying. Get out of the rat race.

Personally, this realization has led me to switch careers. I'm now in a 2 year evenings and weekends program to get certified to do something that has nothing to do with tech. It is a huge pay cut. I also am happier than I have ever been in my adult life because I'm learning something challenging and helping people instead of coasting through 8 or 9 hours of pretending to work every day. Starting over mid-life and finding another thing that I love as much as I loved computers as a teen has been a blessing worth more than any amount of money.

Good luck!


> However! I will say that this way of working and living comes with some significant hazard to your mental health. Doing something you don't like, care about, or believe in for decades long periods of time can really mess with your sense of self worth and happiness in life.

Agree with everything you wrote except this part. I have worked jobs where I truly believed in the mission, worked hard, was paid a lot, achieved great things and was overall very satisfied. I was also massively burned out by the end of it.

On the other hand I have had stretches where I was disillusioned and disconnected from work and was completely coasting, so exactly in the situation the OP describes. I had zero stress at work and used to leave at 5pm sharp, had lots more time for family and friends, picked up some great hobbies, did a lot more weekend trips and extended travel, and my mental health and happiness could not be better because of it.

Ultimately some people derive their life's purpose from their jobs, while to others it is just a necessary annoyance for making money. There's no single "correct" approach to this.


Just wanted to point out that this

> I truly believed in the mission, worked hard, was paid a lot, achieved great things and was overall very satisfied.

and this

> used to leave at 5pm sharp

are not mutually exclusive.

We have this weird thing in tech where we think that, to be passionate, you have to work yourself into the ground. But this is stupid. There's organizational psych research going back decades showing that teams who work 40-hour weeks will quickly outperform teams working 60 hrs / week. For one thing, they make fewer mistakes and thus have less work to re-do. Fewer bugs to fix.

I've done more than one stretch of intense, focused programming and CS research work when I was a grad student. There was one period of two weeks when my buddy and I both put in about 116 hours one week and 118 hours the next week. I have basically no memory of anything that happened in those weeks, and I never have since like one month afterwards -- like a drug addict on a bender or something. I guess it worked out OK. We got our papers published. But our actual productivity in those last few weeks must have been absolute garbage.

In contrast, I spent last academic year on sabbatical building out my side project, and I don't think there was even one week where I put in more than 60 hours. Personally I can sustain 45 or 50-hour weeks basically indefinitely. But if I ever tried to push it above 55, there was a big price to be paid, and I was useless and braindead for the following day or two.

Be passionate, love what you do, but don't hurt yourself doing it.

There's a quote that I like: Most people vastly over-estimate what they can achieve with intense effort over the span of a week. And they vastly under-estimate what they can accomplish with sustained, moderate effort over the course of a year.


> going back decades

Longer than that. In WW2, factories increased hours to 60 to increase production. The workers were all on board with this. Production increased for a while, and then dipped below the 40 hour results.

Some experimentation showed that to get a sustained increase in production, the working hours would be increased for a time, and then brought back to 40, back and forth.

Personally, I'm well aware that when my tiredness exceeds a certain level, any programming work I do has to be undone (thank you, git!) and redone after I'm rested. What I do when I want to work, but am tired, is work on things that don't require much attention, like organizing my office, making backups, etc.


NPR's Planet Money just did a great look at this: https://www.npr.org/2021/10/27/1049786108/nice-work-week-if-...

Its very interesting--the research they present suggests that people worked much less before industrialization. It jumped massively as lots of low-skill people took factory jobs for the first time and worked 12+16 hour days, but since then has steadily declined again.

This was the big takeaway for me:

"...some of the leading economic thinkers of the last century expected the gradual shortening of the work week would just keep going. None other than John Maynard Keynes, one of the most important figures in economics - and imaginary friend to the show - famously predicted that we would all be working a 15-hour work week by 2030."

What a crazy idea. Or is it?


The Hawthorne experiment found something similar. If I remember it correctly. Both increasing/reducing the illumination in a factory resulted in increased productivity. Unfortunately I think managerial sciences are long dead since consultancy BS took over.


Wasn't the point that change itself caused productivity to increase?


Yep, such was the conclusion.


> Just wanted to point out that this

> > I truly believed in the mission, worked hard, was paid a lot, achieved great things and was overall very satisfied.

> and this

> > used to leave at 5pm sharp

> are not mutually exclusive.

For some people it is actually. I'm an evening person and my personal productivity starts increasing during the afternoon. If I leave at 5pm, I leave right when I reach the peak. So when I care about my job it's really hard for me to live before 7pm, and if I didn't have a family I'd probably work until 9 or 10 every night (I still occasionally enjoy staying up until 2am or later every once in a while when I'm on a really interesting subject). A good recipe for a burn-out in the long run I guess.


You can start working late in such cases. We have a lot of people who come to office at 1pm, and stay till 8pm.

If you are instead the kind of person who really works hard when "in the zone", you can try working 10-12 hours a day when you are motivated and then take a vacation/work 3 hours a day when you are out of your zone. That way you can charge up for your next "in zone" phase.

Kids get used to their parents being there all day during some days and not being there during others. As long as you can be there for them when there is something important for them, they and you would be fine.


> If you are instead the kind of person who really works hard when "in the zone", you can try working 10-12 hours a day when you are motivated and then take a vacation/work 3 hours a day when you are out of your zone. That way you can charge up for your next "in zone" phase.

> Kids get used to their parents being there all day during some days and not being there during others. As long as you can be there for them when there is something important for them, they and you would be fine.

I wish I met a boss who “got used to it” :p.

Anyways, the biggest issue for this lifestyle when you have a family isn't spending enough quality time with your children, it's helping your partner with all the stuff you need to do for the kids (bring them to school, make their dinner, give them a bath, etc. etc.).


That's what I do personally. I'm a student, so I'm not working consistently full time but there are definitely days where I'll work 9+ hours and days where I work 3 or not at all. Usually averages out to about what my hours goal for the week is, it just depends entirely on how I'm feeling on a given day (and I'm hourly, so I track all this).


And then you get the managerial types who demand your presence for morning meetings.


When I work at night I won't be in the next day. Or return in the afternoon to clean the branch for review.

Sometimes I work a weekend. Love the ability to work on the rainy days and go outside when the weather is good.


https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30793826/

Do you happen to know of good studies to back up --- organizational psych research going back decades showing that teams who work 40-hour weeks will quickly outperform teams working 60 hrs / week --- I've heard this before, but, I've never seen the studies talked about.

I found this study via Googling, it took a little longer than I would like to admit. (I'm probably using the wrong search terms)

It definitely paints a more complicated picture - from a manager perspective, they could say that more hours equals more work - except they should be measuring worker engagement according to the study I linked, because it's more heavily associated with productivity than total hours worked - but they could say this is hard to do, it's just cheaper for the company to make everyone work more? That kind of company is definitely a place I would not want to work, but more studies, might make it easier to justify a change if you find yourself in one of these organizations?


I were going to say this, but found it in the Results / Conclusions part (nice link!). So to paraphrase:

Results: Working >40 to 50 hours per week and >50 hours per week were significantly positively associated with work productivity in univariate analysis. However, the significant association no longer held after adjusting for work engagement. Work engagement was positively associated with work productivity even after controlling for potential confounders. Working hours were not significantly associated with work productivity among those with high-work engagement or among those with low-work engagement.

Conclusions: Working hours did not have any significant associations with work productivity when taking work engagement into account. Work engagement did not moderate the influence of working hours on work productivity, though it attenuated the relationship between working hours and work productivity.

In my personal experience of workplace since 90's, whenever you have the chance to "level up", work a bit extra to gain a bit more progress and experience, it's absolutely worth it. If you don't gain anything by it or have no meaningful work to do (ie. process-related tasks and projects), it is worth more to you to leave work for another day.

I've become sensitive enough I can feel the stress begin to build at the end of the day, and know which day is worth to leave work (most days), and which rare day is worth more to you to stay a bit longer just to follow that flow out to its end.

Anything new after 3PM can wait to next day. Your mind will anyways work it out in the background if it's important somehow.


Some places can thrive with lots of overtime -- if they can attract the right kind of people, like Space X can. Other places can do great if their employees have no alternatives -- like Amazon. Some can do extremely well if they use slave labor, like ancient Rome or USA.

But in the vast majority of cases a lot of hours worked cannot be sustainable or beneficial to the employee.


The main result that I’m thinking of is quite old — going back to the Ford assembly line days IIRC. NPR had a great segment on it several years ago. I’m on mobile now, but I’ll try to so some digging when I get back to a real computer.

I suppose there’s a valid question about how well those oldest results transfer from manual labor over to knowledge work like programming. The NPR guest that I’m remembering seemed to think that the effect might actually be even stronger for knowledge work, not weaker.


Exactly this, I've believed in (to varying degrees) the mission of every place I've worked, and still feel passionate about the projects I'm working on, and enjoy the work I'm doing. I've also rarely worked more than 40-45 hours a week, and fairly often work less than that. If I ever worked somewhere that actually required more than that I would find a different job, because I am not built for working many hours per week.


> There's organizational psych research going back decades showing that teams who work 40-hour weeks will quickly outperform teams working 60 hrs / week.

I feel like this has less to do with the amount of hours worked and more with the kind of organisation/manager that would have their employees actually working 40 hour weeks.


They aren't mutually exclusive. Being very interested and motivated at your job does not mean you have to work long hours, sacrafice vacation, or tune in during off hours. Some of the best (staff level) people I ever worked with absolutely killed it while at work, and would take multiple 2 week vacations and say "dont contact me while I'm out" (etc).


We spend a lot of our limited lives at work, we should strive to make work enjoyable for ourselves and others. Making work enjoyable can be many things, from changing careers, reducing hours, changing how it's done or changing your personal beliefs about it.

It's a miserable experience for you and the people around you to have constant low level subconscious resentment for working. It leaks out into your personal life and your working life.


Detachment does not equal resentment. I find that the whole “you must be fully devoted to your work or you are doing something wrong” ethos to be uniquely American, and pretty troubling when forced.

It is possible for someone to go in to work, do what they are supposed to do, and then go home, all without being overly “bought in” or making people miserable. Heck I feel more miserable when someone is forcing team building events or drinks with coworkers after work.

People also have the ability to partition their work and personal lives such that one does not affect the other at all. I personally never check my work phone after hours, while there are several people who are active on project or social channels at all times of day or night.

There’s nothing wrong with any of this. People have different approaches to the concept of corporate work and what part of their lives to devote to it.


I've seen it suggested that people tend to be level in personal growth while advancing in career growth, or level in career growth while advancing in personal growth, either more or less deliberately.


> ... jobs where I truly believed in the mission ... I was also massively burned out

This can be true but being in alienating jobs that you don't care about is also a cause for burnout. Both extremes are dangerous, it's well established.


I am with you on most of your points, but definitely not on the "normal and mostly acceptable".

The truth of our domain is that you can get great work done in 3-4 hours a day (I am referring to deep work here, not meetings). In fact, most of us become much less productive beyond that. The remaining hours can/should be spent on useful meetings, reading, learning new things, chatting to people about things, etc.

Coasting from a standup to the next with zero work in between is definitely not normal (_if done on a regular basis_) and the sign that something is not right in your current situation.

You may find it OK right now and for years on end. But you're likely going to pay a hefty bill for this many years down the road. I am not saying you should live Elon's life. But finding something meaningful to do with your life should be a goal, I believe.


> I am with you on most of your points, but definitely not on the "normal and mostly acceptable".

The "normal" part is easy to disprove: If everyone was doing near zero work and lying their way through standup about it, nothing would ever get done. That may be normal in certain zombie organizations, but those organizations can't last forever without people doing actual work. Somebody is doing the work, even if the OP isn't.

> Coasting from a standup to the next with zero work in between is definitely not normal (_if done on a regular basis_) and the sign that something is not right in your current situation.

The part about doing nothing all day and then lying their way through standup stood out to me.

Like you said, we all know that programmers aren't hands-to-keyboard programming for 8 straight hours every day, nor do we expect that. However, we do expect that everyone is putting in similar amounts of effort to their peers.

I'm surprised how many comments here are justifying the zero-work behavior because the manager hasn't caught on yet. This doesn't mean the work disappears. It means the person's teammates have to pick up the slack and carry the project forward without the OP.

Working with a deadbeat teammate is an awful experience. If you need to get anything done, the only way forward is to plead with them to get some work done, or just do it yourself. More often than not, the team ends up doing it themselves.

We've all been stuck with deadbeat team mates, from group projects in school to the workplace. It's not okay to be the deadbeat teammate.


> However, we do expect that everyone is putting in similar amounts of effort to their peers.

I think there's a distinction here between two types of "work" (at least). Work that moves the product/business forward in tangible ways, in addition to just adding features (decrease down time, reliable repeatable deployments, reproducible, easy to understand configuration, fast bug remediation) and work that doesn't.

I think we've all experienced teams who switch frameworks and libraries at a whim, or worse yet, adopted entirely new languages "just because". They usually don't ask permission, or if they do the sell the decision makers on some hula balu about "increase productivety" or whatever when they really just want to use new cool X. Or howabout the frontend teams that switch naming conventions, and never rename the old stuff before starting another naming convention?

The point being there are a lot of developers who waste a lot of time "working" on things that just don't matter. The business never asked for it, it serves no purpose or real need other than to scratch someones itch (or build their resume). I maintain if wasting time doing nothing is "stealing" from the company, then so is this.


>Working with a deadbeat teammate is an awful experience. If you need to get anything done, the only way forward is to plead with them to get some work done, or just do it yourself. More often than not, the team ends up doing it themselves.

I've never had this issue with the projects I've managed.

Create a doc/Jira for the project, including timelines and tasks. Allocate tasks to all teammates. Daily/weekly go through those tasks, updating progress. If timelines are being held back by someone, I'm going to make management aware because I'm not taking the fall. If they're not then I don't care.


> those organizations can't last forever without people doing actual work.

Maybe not no work, but very little work, they can last a very long time.

>This doesn't mean the work disappears.

It may have never existed in the first place.


This isn’t about dead beat team members, this is about not having enough work to do which can happen for various reasons. Sometimes companies just want redundancy and don’t care if that costs real money. Other times a team is built and just gets less work than expected and or people are simply more productive. And of course, if you actually want to make important deadlines you want be conservative in how much work the team takes on.

Finally if you get a 10x person but don’t have 10x the stuff to do they often spend a lot of time twiddling their thumbs. You could keep giving them a larger share of work, but that’s hardly fair and you don’t want to reduce staff in case that person quits.


I would beg to differ. While I agree that some of your reasoning is valid enough I read the OP as what I would call a dead beat developer.

Its not easy to distinguish sometimes because we all know from our own experience that it just happens that you get a task that happens to have 10 pitfalls hidden in a row and what looks like an easy peasy fix is a day of debugging. Sure.

What usually is the case though is that if this happens 10 times in a row it isn't particularly bad luck. It is very very likely something else. Such as what the OP described. And especially if the manager is also overworked then distinguishing the two cases becomes even harder. Then even a manager that wants to do something can't because you don't want to fire someone that doesn't deserve it based on incomplete information.

Some managers are also just afraid of the organizational hassle, the emotional toll on themselves, might fear the overall consequences for morale too high vs. the morale impact of co workers noticing the slacking or simply couldn't care less since they are doing the same thing just one level up. What's another dead weight at a company the size of GE or a large bank or insurance etc.

I definitely say something. Many others say something as well. But we aren't the majority especially in large orgs. Usually it's known which people you try to keep away from your projects and that's as far as everyone goes.

If you really have a 10x person, there's no need to lie on stand-up 3 days in a row.


I agree that 10 hours per week is rather extreme, but I have been in similar situations. The difference is I tent to say something because boredom gets old. I see less confrontational people say stuff that everyone knows is BS, and then just add the aside about being available if something is more important/useful/pressing.

In the most extreme version of that I once had absolutely nothing to do for months at a time and my manager was completely aware of that fact. Their response, “Look you’re fully billable so if the client is happy I am happy.”


>However! I will say that this way of working and living comes with some significant hazard to your mental health. Doing something you don't like, care about, or believe in for decades long periods of time can really mess with your sense of self worth and happiness in life. You only have one life, do something with it that is satisfying. Get out of the rat race.

This is where my comment about remote work comes into play. When I worked in an office, I spent most of the day just entertaining myself on the internet. That isn't great for long-term mental health. Now that I am working from home I can put in the same level of work while spending the rest of my work day in more satisfying ways as long as I keep an eye on my Slack and email for urgent issues. I can't imagine ever returning to an office in which there is more pressure to spend 8 hours a day sitting in front of my computer.

I have thought about switching careers a few times over the years. However anything I would want to switch to would require a big pay cut. My relatively high salary as a software developer is what enables the rest of my life. Maintaining that lifestyle is my priority as that is where I find my happiness.


As a SW developer you provide two benefits to the company:

- the build phase: develop spaghetti code

- the maintain/insurance phase: maintain the spaghetti code and keep it up to date with the software package dependencies required by the spaghetti code

In the long term its easier/cheaper to have the person who originally wrote the spaghetti code be around to maintain and add one off small feature improvements to it (i.e. ensure log4j patches are handled properly) than to find/hire/train a new developer every time a 0day patch needs to be applied.


There's one more reason - the one I use to rationalize my idleness to myself: in addition to our work output, the corporations are also paying us to be a part of their "reserve army". We might work 3-4 hours a day, but when things escalate, the company taps into its reserves to get stuff done. Having doldrums about that is like soldiers worrying they only spend 3 hours a day in combat


That reminds me of this article for some reason :)

"Google has a secret ‘bench’ program that keeps execs at the company even when they’re not leading anything"

https://venturebeat.com/2015/05/09/google-has-a-secret-bench...


I used to work in Operations...there were 2 of us on shift for a 1 man job.. The extra was 'insurance' :-)


In my experience if the system is important enough, once you ship a couple of features to production you can coast there until the system is replaced. If the features were core the better.

I don´t like it but after 2 decades of coding I have come to accept it as it is.


I think a good way to frame the role of a SW developer is you are in a sense a manager of a new "team".

But instead of developing new hire training material and recruiting/managing people to do the new task, you're developing/training/creating/deploying software programs/scripts/bots to do what needs to get done for the organization.

While infinitely easier than dealing with HR problems that humans bring along, your team of programs/bots still needs some manager.

And just like a traditional manager, if you set up your "team of bots" just right and handle all the corner cases in the training manuals, a good managers job will actually ideally not be that hard day to day - particularly since the meatspace problems have been abstracted away.


> I can't imagine ever returning to an office in which there is more pressure to spend 8 hours a day sitting in front of my computer.

But this is what you are paid for. Do you not feel that this is what you should be doing in the time you are contracted to work?


In the US, very few full time professionals work under contract. In fact, companies go out of their way to assert that there is no contractual relationship (the "employment at will" principle). They do not count their hours, and are in fact not allowed to do so.

With that said, I'd find it hard to work such a short week. The time I spend that's unaccounted for, I tend to spend helping other people at my workplace, learning new stuff, etc. I enjoy the work. Granted, I don't work as a programmer.


> In the US, very few full time professionals work under contract. In fact, companies go out of their way to assert that there is no contractual relationship (the "employment at will" principle).

Americans keep saying this means "no contract", but I don't get it. You probably have some weird American-only meaning attached to the word "contract" that doesn't apply to the rest of the world, in English as well as other languages. To the rest of us, "a contract" means a formal (usually written) agreement to exchange goods or services for payment. I find it utterly hard to believe that any full-time professional, even in America, is employed without having any piece of paper signed by their employer -- and they a copy signed by him -- that states basically "John Doe and Corporation X agree that John shall work full-time for X, and receive a salary of $Y per month".

If you do, that's a contract. If you don't, how do you know how much of a salary you're going to get at the end of the month? How does HR / Accounts know how much to pay you?

Of fucking course you have a contract. It's just that the terms for termination of that contract, whether specified within it or implicit because of "at will" legislation, are much more abrupt than most everywhere else. That doesn't make it not a contract.

> They do not count their hours, and are in fact not allowed to do so.

Like, if the company wants you to work 272 hours per week (hint: 24 × 7 = 168), you can't say you won't? Or is it the company that can't say anything if you show up three hours a month? Of course they count their hours, at least roughly. Everyone does.

Not that this has anything to do with whether something is a contract or not.


>>>> I find it utterly hard to believe that any full-time professional, even in America, is employed without having any piece of paper signed by their employer -- and they a copy signed by him -- that states basically "John Doe and Corporation X agree that John shall work full-time for X, and receive a salary of $Y per month".

I never signed such a thing. Roughly a quarter century ago, I received a job offer letter with a salary level. I verbally accepted the offer. But my salary is much different today, and there's nothing with my signature on it to that effect. It's very loose and informal. The payroll software knows. This is at a huge and well managed company.

I have no doubt that the company's ability to cut my pay is constrained by regulations, like they probably have to inform me in advance. One of my employers once announced a furlough and temporary pay cut when there was a financial disaster. Nothing was signed.

About counting hours, this is a US thing. We have two classes of employees, depending on whether they are entitled to overtime pay or not. Most professionals are not. There are criteria for classifying employees, and one of them is whether they are required to work a specific number of hours.

Sure a company can say something if I show up 3 hours a month: "You're fired." Or they can cite a specific shortcoming in my performance. What I think is a sub-plot of this thread is that measuring this performance and tying it to a relative workload is not always straightforward.

Note that I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice. A lot of it sounds strange because it is strange.


> I never signed such a thing. [...] much different today, and there's nothing with my signature on it

I'm forming a hypothesis -- i.e, vaguely guessing -- that this is American culture because employers have pushed it in this direction, because an absence of any paperwork for employees to point to in case of conflict benefits the employer.

> A lot of it sounds strange because it is strange.

America sure is. :-)


A verbal contract is still a contract, including amendments to it. Being on salary vs paid hourly also doesn't mean anything about whether there is a contract.


Personally most of job happens in my head, which half the time is not at work. I should probably get paid for ~15 hours a day instead of ~8. I cant tell you how many times I had a eureka moment about a work problem on a Sunday afternoon idling away at a hobby.


Actually, no, they can't pay you based on how much time you spend on a task unless you are being paid hourly (and therefore are paid overtime if required to work more than 40 hours per week).

They can ask you to be at work at a certain time, or to do some task a certain number of hours a day, but they CANNOT pay you based on how many hours you spend doing it or they are in violation of labor laws (in the US anyway).


A software engineer is not paid to sit in front of a computer and that's only a small slice of the work.


well put! I work in consulting for a large corporation and they pay for me more than 1000 Euro per day. I don't see much of that money but I can't really complain about my salary. It's pretty good (not SV-good, though). Now on average I'd say I work no more than 4 hours. Some days even less. Occasionally I feel proud of that and even brag about it to friends. But deep down I feel how this is just not making me happy. It's also not that I am lazy by any means. I think I am burned out to some extent. This mental state comes with an inability to use the rest of the work day. I spend it procrastinating - which is actually more tiring than working for whatever reason. During office times I thought this is because I have to multitask watching my back and having a solution at hand if somebody suddenly stands next to me. Now being in home office for more than a year it seems that the origin is more something like a spiritual conflict. I'm wasting my time. And I know I'm wasting it. At the same time I feel motivated to become more structured and diciplined so I can game my employer (which I do not respect for a couple of reasons) in a way benefiting me beyond my salary. Having said that I have been taking my car to a garage, doing shopping, reparing my bike or whatever during work time - so, technically, I do benefit. My g/f earns about a third of what I do while actually working a tough, stressful job in full time. Regularly when she leaves the house in the morning I sit there browsing the internet after the obligatory daily and I feel actually a bit ashamed when she sees that. I don't know ... but, yeah, thanks for your post - got me thinking.


"My g/f earns about a third of what I do while actually working a tough, stressful job in full time"

There is only one thing i learned, life is deeply unfair, meritocracy is a myth, and noone knows why most things are the way they are.


I would suggest that you keep studying life. From what I've learned: life was never promised as being fair. Civilization is a thin veneer over the Jungle, but it does try (without ever achieving 100% success), to provide fairness. One can debate where in the world Civilization is thriving vs. struggling (it's mostly struggling). Meritocracy does exist and does work, except where it is undermined (i.e. "Equity", or assigning merit based on immutable physical traits like race and gender).


> Meritocracy does exist and does work, except where it is undermined (i.e. "Equity", or assigning merit based on immutable physical traits like race and gender).

Allowing inheritance from one generation to another is an immediate disqualifier for meritocracy as well. As is the existence of private schooling bought with money.


Apples and Oranges.

Inheritance has nothing to do with meritocracy. One can argue about whether or how much inheritance should be taxed -- but that's a wholly separate, topic.

Hiring, raises, and promotions should not be based on skin color, eye color, gender, or other immutable traits. In a meritocracy, these are instead determined _solely_ by how provably capable a person is (per Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s prescription).

In fact, Meritocracy _would_ explicitly reject the idea of "inheriting" a job (as is done in orgs with nepotism), so I'm confused as to what your point is.


"Meritocracy does exist and does work, except where it is undermined (i.e. "Equity"

You really pick 'equity' as the example? I get thats it fashionable to hate on woke politics around these parts, but aren't your forgeting that most of the world is more like Russia, i.e. jungle, where stongest rules because they can, with mirderous intent.

I mean if you are talking about principles of life, its got to be universal, not just applying in a handfull of fortunate countries.

The principles of we go by, they are in conflict with one another.


The word "meritocracy" was invented for a book about how it doesn't exist and would be a bad idea if it did.


Meritocracy is not that everyone should get the same for the same effort though. It's that everyone should get the same for the same value they sell. And yes value is subjective and always changing and not the same everywhere.

Everything is "unfair" from a perspective. Two people working the exact same job and putting in the same effort, if one person packs twice the number of boxes it would also be unfair to pay them the same as the other person who is creating only half the value for the person paying them.


well, if someone is a janitor, and the other one is a software developer, can you actually compare them properly?

if so, then training somebody to become a SEng involves more costs, than training smb to mop a floor.

the guy u responding didn't mention the job his gf does, thus assuming that she's the same software dev, would be a wrong thing to do, i believe.

besides that, she even may obtain the same level, the same set of skills as he does, thus she also has the same opportunity as he does.

that being said there is nothing to discuss about meritocracy, yet i agree with the fact that things are not that meritocratic as we want them to be. why? because there is always an asymmetry in a market, and contracts may always have some flaws (for e.g.: lemon market).

i perceive the case of him since he's not that tired as his gf is. that's just the basic compassion that one wants to feel, and even empathy.


  > that being said there is nothing to discuss about meritocracy, yet i agree with the fact that things are not that meritocratic as we want them to be. why? because there is always an asymmetry in a market, and contracts may always have some flaws (for e.g.: lemon market).
i guess that can be one issue, but my experience has been that what usually undermines "meritocracy" is basically office/org politics...


I used to work about 4 hours a day, sometimes not at all and felt terrible inside about myself.

Then I got diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Concerta. The focus is not what I want, but the reduction of impulsivity is doing wonders.

I started seeing the incompetent, manipulative and rude pieces of shit colleagues that I kept attracting (because of self immage and guilt) and that kept leaching on my time, interrupting me when it was obvious I had nothing to do with their problem(I do backend stuff and a coeague insisted I help her fix frontend stuff that doesn't work after the frontend did a deploy, the same for another system).

I realize how I tolerated bullshit from low level management,how I caved in to their frowns and how I turned into their saviour tech wizard which only compounded my problem.

How I tollerated their endless ramblings in meetings upon meetings where they decided nothing or bitterly protected their vagueness to kafquesques proportions.

How I tollerated other peoples indecision and became indecisive myself, because I thought I could not do stuff without them.

How I've ignored my own emotions and needs and played it all logical when people were playing emotional games.

And now with my impulsivity under control, I work a lot longer and stress free, because I can control my impulses so I'm not affraid to answer ironically but still professionally to an agressive email, or to say "guys I have no taks" ... "guys, I asked you for a task yesterday and guess what, I got it by telling your superior that I asked for work and you did not have any, he was delighted to get me in contact with this product owner who has a full backlog".

This makes me so glad and so sad at the same time. This explains why other people were cold and "mean" to these people.


How did you find out you had ADHD?

I often suspect I have something along the lines of ADHD or Dyslexia ( very mild ) but have no idea how to look into it. I've done a few online tests but end up very border line on most.


It was a long journey and my ADHD is not that severe so perhaps that's why it took so long.

I took hard stimulants before I even contemplated I had ADHD, I treated them just like brain steroids (which I don't advice anybody does).

The first time a psychiatrist offered an ADHD questionair was when I was diagnosed with BPD (mostly resolved since, in part due to age and in part psychotherapy and in parth ADHD treatment) because 25% of people diagnosed with BPD also have ADHD. I really doubted myself and I got a score of 6/9 on both inattentiveness and impulsivity and the psychiatrisy said I needed 7/9 but she was willing to prescribe concerta or atomoxetine (I can't remember which) but I stupidly declined since I had access to hard stimulants and I did not see the benefit at the time.

I gave up illegal stimulants after my daughter was born but I kept using modafinil and nicotine as a cruth whenever shit got real at work; my psychoterapist kept asking me why I don't want to see a psychiatrist colleague of hers that's open minded about ADHD.

Eventually I did, and to my surprise the psychiatrist did a very thorough interview and concluded I most certainly do have ADHD and prescribed Concerta.

I still doubt I have ADHD sometimes, until I take a break from the meds, that's when reality kicks in and I'm sure I have ADHD again :)


same, and i feel dirty asking about it because if you don't have ADHD you're basically just asking about getting speed


What would be so dirty asking for speed?

I did strong stimulants, and while I 100% agree there are even regular people who can get addicted, and people who should not be taking stimulants period (schizophrenia), and that I may be an exception, and all that, but as long as the stimulant is taken orally and at therapeutic dosage, there's nothing wrong with stimulants.

If you don't have ADHD and take stimulants exactly as instructed by a psychiatrist mostly nothing bad will happej (you will get speedy a few times, start a few mega projects, clean your house, and after a while realize you shouldn't believe your stimulant self's has only good ideas).

You could also keep a job that's not for you because stimulants make even boring jobs seem interesting.

But you won't turn into a crackhead just because you take stimulants exactly as instructed by a doctor.


Concerta is a godsend, so is actually discovering you've got ADHD - as answers on what was "wrong" with you your whole life will be found.

I would encourage the OP to investigate this; the hyper focused mind can achieve greatness once finally in the groove. Finding this flow state can be very hard.

The meds work. As does eg weightlifting. I've been far more successful since I spent the equivalent of a highest end smartphone on a fully barbell kitted garage gym.


It appears we live much of the same life. I work 3 to 4 hours a day at best, and part of that is the standup. Wife works hard for 8+ hours a day and makes a third of my salary. I want to be productive but I just cant seem to do more hours than that. Even those hours of work are broken up.

"his mental state comes with an inability to use the rest of the work day. I spend it procrastinating - which is actually more tiring than working for whatever reason"

I feel the same way. Difference is I actually really like my employer and I still cant focus for more than a few hours a day.


My regular work is similar. Some days I don't work at all. At most, 3-4 hours. But I think this is because nothing I'm working on is particularly urgent. I'm well ahead of deadlines.

When I really get into my own side projects in code, the last of which I got heavily into about six months ago, I literally forget to eat or sleep and can go on 24-hour marathons - compulsively, without intending to, because I need to make something work. When there is a once-a-year crisis on my regular job, the same thing applies. It's actually beyond my control.

I wish I could harness that level of motivation to e.g. take on 3x as many clients and expand my studio, but just thinking about that makes me shut down. I feel lazy when I spend a whole day reading news sites or something... or even engaging in hobbies like music. But I don't want the burden of 3x as much work that I have to do. I earn low six figures and it seems enough.


You should learn a bit about adult ADHD and see if it sounds like you, and perhaps get a psychiatrist to see if you match an ADHD diagnosis. It changed my life to find out I was ADHD, and what you said has some correlation.


of course, the obligatory thing to consider is AD(H)D - which I do suffer from. anyway - interesting that you "really like your employer". do you also like the product and the work environment? looking back though it didn't seem to matter much for my productivity either. liking my employer can even complicate things further because then I feel guilt.


I do like the product. Issue might be that I see no value in what I do, the work I am doing is not going to change the world or make it a better place. I have felt this way about every job I have ever had. It will leave no lasting mark. I would love to leave tech but unfortunately the salary acts as golden handcuffs. I essentially waste 8 hours a day sitting on a chair consuming internet garbage and its somewhat soul destroying.


Why not work on some public software project in your 'spare' time?


Honestly I just don't have the motivation. Having to do what little work I do drains me. Its not that I am lazy, I will work 90 hour weeks full on cranking if there is an emergency and the success of the project hangs on it its just that I really don't like what I do for a living and it drains the will and happiness from my soul. I don't mean to be dramatic but that's what it feels like but I like the money. I think my goal is to save up a year of expenses this year and then just build something on my own. Going to tackle something like web3 or build something that I would like to use. Mainly I just want to be motivated.


I don't have the energy anymore for that. I'm 37 - that's 50%.


This isn't unique to coders. Various successful writers have also reported the same issue. They only have a few super productive hours a day.


I think the real issue arises with equity or the option for equity. Suddenly you're in a much more influential position because if you build the next unicorn internally, its going to take everyone to the moon. That equity needs to be proportional to your input to the stack. That's what i'm hearing from all the "well you can't do this in a small company!" comments.

What often happens when companies start to mature- from small to medium - the equity stops making sense. At the beginning the engineers were in the business meetings, now others are taking credit for the engineers work and you find yourself in a back room being told there's a jira list of defect and bugs to work through. Meanwhile, you wrote the source. That's where the significant hazard mentioned above plays a really wacky role in your mental health.

I'm at the point where I'm just realizing how toxic my situation has been for YEARS. And I'm ready for the change...


> This is both normal and mostly acceptable, in my professional opinion.

Perhaps at large companies?

I would hope people applying to jobs at small 5-20 person startups aren't bullshitting and lying about the work they do. Or to reword the same sentiment, I hope people looking for the easiest possible path target their job search at companies with lots of bureaucracy where people not doing your job is more easily tolerated.

Edit: I like the suggestion from someone else in the comments here to "work in an environment where not being productive is not harmful."


The 5->10 hours a week is definitely on the extreme end of laziness.

However, I do think if you are doing the full 40+ hours only working you are likely heading towards burnout. IMO, 5->6 hours of work in an 8 hour work day is both normal and acceptable to keep people from burning out and ultimately dropping to the 5->10 hour a week range.


I think there is also this topic of mental work vs. physical work. When I did physical work I could and did work 8-10hrs per day. Even if I wasn’t motivated, just illness was a problem.

But as a software dev I have mostly 5hrs a day of good work, sometimes 9hrs, sometimes 2hrs… then it’s like a block in the brain. Like running out of gas.

Today I mostly just fixed up a tiny shell script. The last couple of weeks have felt like wading through quicksand. I went from amazingly busy in my last project to burned out and „lazy“ in my new project.


At a 5-20 person startup there are probably like 5 engineers, there’s no time to waste and everyone knows what everyone is doing.


>Through most of that time I have averaged roughly 5 - 10 hours of actual work a week

>This is both normal and mostly acceptable, in my professional opinion.

If you are expected to engage for 40h/week and only show up for 5-10, this is unacceptable. It's literally theft.

If you have to spend 30 out of 40h/week in meetings, etc when it's part of your role as senior or architect etc it is acceptable.

If you have to spend 30 out of 40h/week in meetings, etc when it's not part of your role and you don't attempt to raise the issue that your time is not spent fruitfully, this is unacceptable. You're expected to be autonomous and paid handsomely for it, if this is acceptable wtf is wrong with this industry.


I'm approximately a millionaire in my late 20s and have only really built 1 little thing since 2017...

Might it catch up to me this year? Perhaps, but that's when I will go get an unrelated masters and change to my "retirement career"


Pretty much my only skill is leetcode easy/med + basic sys design and knowing some SRE principles. I almost wish the interview wasn't as gameable so I could move on with my life in a new field


> You only have one life, do something with it that is satisfying. Get out of the rat race.

How?

I find satisfaction in many things, but none of those things pay the bills or put food on the table.


> >You only have one life, do something with it that is satisfying. Get out of the rat race.

This is asking the wrong question. A few weeks ago I ran into quote on hackernews... [1]

“Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.”

I hope I'm not stretching this too far as I'm not too good about explaining stuff like this. But, my take away is that you'll discover the things that pay the bills and the things that don't are one of the same. The difficulty of life is finding that peace.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29442307


I read that one (and still do) as:

Before you know how you do something it just looks like what it is on the surface. Might even look easy for most things.

Software development is easy right? Bunch of for loops and ifs to tell a computer what to do!

Then you start learning. What do you mean 0s and 1s? That are actually different voltages somewhere on a tiny piece of silicon and metals? Assembler? Compilers? Machine code? A gate? What's an Adder? What's a program counter and what does that have to do with that German dude? (von Neumann ;))

You finally master all this and it becomes second nature or you figure out where you can 'ignore' and still be productive (I remember how I learned how multiplication is actually done on a simple computer and all that but I no longer actively need to know in my day to day work). This just an example but this applies on many many levels and one reason I see all the time for why people get stuck on a problem is because they can't ignore or figure out what to ignore. A very simple one is the ability to just read a stack trace. They simply get lost in the parts I instinctively fly over and don't even fully recognize to find the important part.

And that's when it's just a punch again. It's second nature. Don't even need to actively think. Your subconscious is doing it for you.


> this way of working and living comes with some significant hazard to your mental health

I can relate to that. I used to work not more than it was required for being perceived as a very productive person (10-15 hours / week), but at some point I couldn't stand it. I co-founded a startup and for first two years I easily crossed 60 hours/week on average, yet I was much happier and had more energy than previously. Of course 60 hours work week is not sustainable, but I definitely felt better mentally doing too much rather than too little.


60 hour workweeks are absolutely sustainable?

Desirable maybe not, but I’ve known lots of people who have worked ten hours a day six days a week. Especially if they don’t have other commitments.


I think 60 hours of debugging a compiler is different than 60 hours of wining and dining executive clients.


Sure, debugging a compiler is more fun.


I think it's largely depending on the person which of those sounds more tiring. An extrovert would thrive on these meetings, while an introvert might hate every second of them. Conversely, an extrovert might hate sitting alone in front of his PC for 60h, while an introvert might find it very fulfilling (assuming that he loves writing compilers).


I think many doctors work much more than that (60-80 hours each week) for pretty much their entire careers.


Yes, and burning out and stress are huge issues for doctors their entire careers too


No they don't. They do it for a brief period when they are interns, under the theory that if you only have 2 years to make someone a good enough doctor you need that many hours per week to accomplish it.

The majority of doctors work 41 to 60 hours per week. This is self reported, so it is likely that it is somewhat inflated. I once met someone who claimed to work 180 hours one week (do the math).


No, they work 60-80 during the 3rd and 4th year of med school, then 80-100 during residency, which lasts 4-7 years. It's absolutely an insane system.


This horrifies me. I want medical professionals, law enforcement, fire departments, basically any essential public service well rested and happy.


So what


Yeah, it depends on the work and the person. I've had periods at my company where 60h absolutely would have been sustainable for what I was working on at the time, and periods at the same company where 40h is still headed towards burnout. And I've experienced much worse elsewhere. I actually really like the periods where I have stable things that give back enough energy to keep me sustainable at 60h.


It depends on the type of work being done


" This is both normal and mostly acceptable, in my professional opinion. "

It's definitely not acceptable.

It's a form of White Collar / 1st World Corruption.

Taking money from people with expectation of value, while not providing that value is Fraud.

Just because we don't always have great oversight, does not abnegate our responsibilities towards trying to do a good job.

This notion of 'I Can Get Away With It' and 'Other People Do It' is exactly the kind of logic that someone in an corrupt and dysfunctional system would use to accept taking bribes, or to commit other forms of common crimes.

'Wealthy Nations' are wealthy because people are organized rationally and effectively, - but we can't have oversight over everything.

'Wealthy Nations' run into dysfunction and bloat often due to systematic reasons, but also due to these kinds of scenarios and it's an example of where it breaks down.

Workers are adamant that they want to be 'trusted' to do their jobs and to work remotely - at the same time they want the ability to do 'nothing' in systems which necessarily can't have a lot of oversight, or don't because 'trust' ?

This is unreasonable populism: "Pay me, trust me, but I'm going to do nothing, and if you lay me off over Zoom, you're going to see it on CNN!"

If you want to live in a world of trust, it means you have an obligation to at least try to live up to your obligations.


If OP is considered valuable by the organization and everyone is satisfied by their output then they are providing the value they are being paid for. If they feel they are overpaying OP for for the output he is providing then they would PIP him or at the very least say something. OP though has received promotions so they must feel he is doing a good job.


Yes - it's perfectly fine if OP isn't stressed or not doing a lot - if their 2-hour genius contributions are worth $200K to the company that's perfectly fine.

This however, is probably not the case.

The common case is that due to lack of proper oversight and bloat, people just coast and do nothing.

It's incredibly hard to have 'true oversight' in software, which frankly is 'just fine' if everyone does their jobs properly.

But if the cost of 'little oversight' is that slowly but surely 'nobody is doing anything', it's not going to work out now, is it?

It's also a moral dilemma.


> This however, is probably not the case.

That's obviously for the company to judge. If they continue to pay him and promote him, why is the takeaway that he is committing fraud by not working an arbitrary 40 hours a week?


Probably some puritan nonsense. The person is a worker for god's sake - why would you consider them to be worthy of something resembling profit?


I for the most part agree with you. Its probably not 100% on the up and up but a very large group of us do it. If everyone started working the full 8 hours then deadlines would be hit in half time or less. What would prevent the company from then deciding that they have to many engineers and laying off 30% of the workforce? It would save them a ton and they are still getting their goals accomplished in the same time frame as before. I feel like everyone coasting allows 25% of software engineering roles to exist. Don't get me wrong I am not saying we are angels helping our fellow man, quite the opposite; just an interesting thought experiment.


Sounds like the problem is with management not doing their jobs to provide proper oversight. So everyone is derelict in their duties.


If I go to widgetco and purchase a widget for $100, but it only costs them $50 to make that widget (including all salaries, marketing etc), what do we call that?

That's right profit. They provided me the thing I wanted for a price I agreed to, and they did so in a way that generated some extra $ for them.

Why is it Fraud then when a worker is asked to provide KPIs in exchange for $salary, and meets them in less than the expected time? Wouldn't that be profit also?


This is the wrong analogy - this is not a situation where there is transparent exchange of good or services.

The OP indicated lying literally in the title indicating there is a lack of transparency and oversight, probably at a systematic level.

So adjust the analogy:

You are buying 'Medical Grade' widgets for $100 a pop for the last 5 years for your projects.

Turns out, the Widgets you were buying were cheaply made and not up to specification.

Because it's difficult for you to check the integrity of the widgets (i.e. there is a lot of trust in the system), you 'trusted' the source only to be defrauded.

And FYI even at $100 a pop, I'm sure you could care less how much or little profit they were making, so long as the terms were clear. Much like nobody cares if an employee is only working 2 hours a week, if everyone thinks that value is provided.

But that's almost assuredly not the case.


Aren't you assuming that code quality suffers? I don't think that we can assume that in regards to code on this topic. OP's company appears to happily agree that the product is on-spec.


Is there a quantification for the value you are obligated to provide your company written down in your employment contract? If not, on what basis are you throwing around words like "crime" and "fraud"?


It's Fraud when there is payment for services not rendered.

The problem arises when there's little ability for oversight, which implies a high degree of trust in the system and the mechanism for verification can't be there.

Put another way:

If someone pays you $50 to fill their tires up with air, it's Fraud if you don't do it - irrespective of your customer's ability or willingness to verify.

If your customer was busy on the phone, or with their children, would it be 'Perfect Contractually Acceptable' to not fill their tires up with air 'Because You Can?'?

Either legally or morally - no - it's fraud.

Fortunately, most tasks involve a kind of implicit oversight - i.e. 'you know when your tires were not filled'.

In software, the mechanisms for oversight aren't so great - but that should be fine with all of us to the extent that we're professionals - we don't want Management breathing down our necks anyhow. But the inherent level of trust implies a higher degree of professional competence on the part of all of us.

FYI - this is assuming that there is a problem with oversight. If the OP is doing some 'genius 2 hours a week', the company knows it, is fine paying $150K for that bit of work, that's totally fine.

It's disturbing that this is even a discussion.


You are missing the core part of the question. You say it is fraud when you aren't delivering what was agreed upon – fine, that could be the case. But what were you hired to deliver exactly? Is that written down somewhere? Forget management, can you yourself judge in some objective way whether you are committing fraud at work or not?


Yes, your employment contract has likely a minimum number of hours of work stipulated (otherwise PTO etc becomes hard).

Look, i’m not saying it is a valuable way of looking at productivity at all, but the fraud aspect is reasonably clear.

So if it states 40 hours, you put in 40 hours. If you do nothing during those 40 hours, we can have a moral/ethics discussion about if and how you should change the situation etc, but at that point we’re outside of the fraud scenario in my opinion.


At will salaried (non-hourly) exempt employment contracts in the US do not generally state the number of hours you must work in a day or week (mine does not). And even if they do, how do you measure "working" hours? Are you committing fraud if you sit in the office and browse the internet for an hour every day? And how does that translate to working from home?

I will say from experience that someone who does 10 hours of good, productive work a week is still adding more value to the company than someone who works 80 but writes terrible code, ships bugs and causes outages. If you want to accuse someone of fraud for not being valuable, go after the latter.


In that case, paxys, I stand corrected and can see where the questions in this thread are coming from, indeed.

In my experience in Europe, an employment contract will state number of hours (say 36, 40, etc) and you need to be present and available for that time. These are non-hourly contracts (e.g. salary is expressed by month not hour). None of that has anything to do with productivity, to your/mine point.


Except with modern "agile" practices, management is breathing down your neck every day: daily standups, and every week: status meetings, team huddles, etc. If they can't figure out the guy isn't doing anything... well, it's not his problem.


Nobody is being defrauded. It is at-will employment. If the employer is still willing to employ the dev working this much, everything is well above board.

At-will cuts a lot harder both ways when it's remote work ;)


'At will' has noting to do with it.

When payment is made for services not rendered, it's Fraud.

If the employer has expectations that the employee 'does nothing' then it's fine, but that's almost assuredly not the case.

This posture is not only toxic, but it's also unjust will spread into much greater malaise as others take up the mantle of 'doing nothing'.

Literally a colleague I had over for dinner last night left his job, and the primary reason was 'many of my higher paid colleagues are not doing anything'.

I'm not sure if he was more frustrated or jealous, and there were other issues, but he left just the same.


Nothing in any of my FTE contracts has anything beyond "at-will." No explicit "money for such and such services rendered."

There's literally no fraud here for a typical American FTE at-will employment arrangement. The worst-case scenario is getting fired from the job with no additional repercussions.


Does it not state a minimum amount of hours worked? If so, there’s a reasonable argument for fraud?

($x for y hours, but y hours were not delivered, only a fraction was.)

Just so I’m clear; I don’t think that works at all in a knowledge worker environment, but tell that to the judge?


There's no mention of hours - only yearly salary, employed at-will.


Gotcha (saw similar reply elsewhere in this thread). Ran into a US-EU difference here it seems like.


"Literally a colleague I had over for dinner last night left his job, and the primary reason was 'many of my higher paid colleagues are not doing anything'"

Surely if this was actual Fraud he should be filling a police report or lawsuit?

Surely the all-knowing free market should punish companies that pay people to do nothing with its3 all powerfull invisible hand?


> Surely if this was actual Fraud he should be filling a police report or lawsuit?

In the US, if someone is defrauding someone else (in a civil matter), the best you an do is make a statement.

ie https://nccriminallaw.com/news/criminal-fraud-vs-civil-fraud...


I think the OP is providing value, just at a rate which can't be calculated using 19th century industrial era compensation schedules, i.e. the 8-hour work day. OK, it actually became shorter than before, but the main point is that software is not the same as machining shoes.

There's a difference between how effective the OP is at being a team player/contributor, and a worm who tries climbing the social ladder with as little risk to his/her self which I believe you allude to. It seems to me the OP is not the ambitious type and found his place in the industrial matrix.


I feel like you ignored most of the original post and are just injecting your own preconceived notions.

> Taking money from people with expectation of value, while not providing that value

If the employers in question felt that they weren't getting what they were paying for, they would tell the original poster that they were performing below expectations. According to the original poster, that has not happened, and their employers have never expressed dissatisfaction with their productivity.

> This is unreasonable populism: "Pay me, trust me, but I'm going to do nothing, and if you lay me off over Zoom, you're going to see it on CNN!"

Nobody's "doing nothing"; as established above, the employee in question is doing more than enough work to satisfy their employers. What does "you're going to see it on CNN" mean — are you talking about "cancel culture"? How is populism involved with this, and what on Earth do you think populism is if you think that your bizarre strawman is representative of it?

I'm not one to argue that politics should be considered as separate from our personal lives, but you're throwing around emotionally- and politically-loaded ideas like populism, cancel culture, and "white collar first-world corruption" in a discussion where they bear no relevance.


"It's a form of White Collar / 1st World Corruption"

Dear lord, is this The 'first world corruption'? With corporate profits at record high? Amidst *checks lists' rampant corporate tax avoidance, runaway climate change, balooning executive pay, unaccountable executives who's create Boeing Max or 2008-style events every few years Money in politics Survaliance capitalism, exploding house prices, (add whatever else bothers you)

Is this really the corruption that will destory the first world way of life?


Don’t forget wage theft!


> Taking money from people with expectation of value, while not providing that value is Fraud.

Taking time from people with expectation of opportunity to build career by building things, while not providing that opportunity to build career by building things is Fraud.

fixed it for you. j/k

this is not constructive. if i join a company and their internal dysfunction gets in the way of me getting projects done that further my career and that comes at a steep opportunity cost, that doesn't mean they defrauded me (even though it may feel good to think that when letting off steam), it just means it didn't work out.

name-calling and accusations of bad faith don't really serve anyone in the end.


"The lady left her door open, how was I supposed to know she wanted to keep her furniture? What's wrong with these stupid cops who say I can't take the TV?"

This is some serious gaslighting.

Dysfunction is normal. Teams that are unproductive because of problems, i.e. 'the vehicle is stuck in the mud' are expected. To the extent the problem is known, there's at least some attempt to redress the issue, then obviously people are going to be aware of the lack of productivity, and it is what it is - these things happen.

And it's understandable if someone doesn't want to stick around, that's a legit reason to move on.

But that's a very different thing than people who are expected to do things - who do not do them because they can obfuscate and lie about their situation.

"name-calling and accusations of bad faith don't really serve anyone in the end."

Fraud is Fraud. It's not 'name calling'.

The OP has put lying about how much he does literally in the title of the post.

It's not 'bad faith' to indicate that his lying is inappropriate, and it's frankly repulsive the lengths that people seem willing to go to support someone who wants to admittedly lie about their work and get away with it.


> The OP has put lying about how much he does literally in the title of the post.

it reads to me like the op is doing some introspection and making use of self-deprecating hyperbole in the process while looking to recruit thoughts from others about general trends in the industry.

if i were to make the same sorts of bad faith assumptions that you are, i could come back with a very simple:

"what if this whole posting is just astroturf for someone looking to make a quick buck by instilling productivity fears in insecure leaders so that they may sell more remote worker monitoring creepware?"

but i don't honestly believe that, because assumptions of bad faith, straw man arguments and gotcha style microquoting are not constructive.


It's definitely not acceptable.

It's a form of White Collar / 1st World Corruption.

Taking money from people with expectation of value, while not providing that value is Fraud.

Woaaah there buddy!

Did you read the all of the OP's post? He's never been fired and gets middling to good performance reviews. Continuing to pay his salary implies that the company it's getting a fair deal. This is obviously not fraud in any legal sense.

Characterizing this dynamic as "White Collar corruption" is a totally warped, an in my view, offensive. If there is any corruption in this scenario, it's on the side of the employer. If the OP's situation is widespread within the company, failing to recognize and remedy it could very well be a breach of fiduciary duty owed to the shareholders. Not a lawyer, but I'm pretty positive that ignorance or incompetence is not a legally valid excuse.

In my view, the real issue here is that salaried employees are almost never compensated in proportion to actual value that they generate. A flat rate arrangement, assuming no significant bonuses, results in a zero-sum game with diametrically opposed incentives for the two parties. The employer maximizes value by trying to as much work as possible from the employee. And the employee maximizes his hourly rate by working as little as possible, with the ultimate goal of infinte dollars per hour at 0 hours worked.

The incentives become perfectly aligned if the pay is based on some objective measure of generated value. Moreover, I would would argue that it would be fairly straightforward to come up with a logical metric for every single position within a company that generates revenue. These can be proxies instead trying to estimate revenue growth or cost reduction to every single employee. Moreover, the dollars tied to a given position's reward metric would be subject to market rates the same way that salaries are today.

TL;DR - Don't hate the player, hate the game.


"Did you read the all of the OP's post?"

Yes and he clearly indicated he's lying about issues.

There's likely a major gap between what the company wants/thinks he is doing, and what he is actually doing, and this is facilitated by his misdirection (i.e. admitted lying), and probably the political incompetence of the situation overall.

One one hand - it's fraudulent to misrepresent your work.

On the other hard - it's still fraudulent even if the company is not able to properly assess the work.

I agree that it's likely not some kind of legal issue - that's not the point really, but it's still a form of fraud.

If you agree to provide a service and due to your customers inherent trust, and their inability to do proper oversight, you still need to provide that service.

But what is offensive is the Peanut Galleries Commenters acceptance of a person who is admittedly lying and misrepresenting themselves as somehow 'not a problem'.

It's shameful for someone to lie, misrepresent and take advantage of another group.

What is 'warped' is this bizarre gaslighting of the employer for somehow 'being corrupt' because they are being lied to by an employee?

In what upside down universe does an employee lying about their work make the employer corrupt?

"the real issue here is that salaried employees are almost never compensated in proportion to actual value that they generate"

That's mostly separate question.

"A flat rate arrangement, assuming no significant bonuses, results in a zero-sum game with diametrically opposed incentives for the two parties. T"

This is wrong, 90% of the world is paid for their time, that doesn't make incentives 'opposed'. They are aligned, just maybe not perfectly.

"The incentives become perfectly aligned if the pay is based on some objective measure of generated value. Moreover, I would would argue that it would be fairly straightforward to come up with a logical metric for every single position within a company that generates revenue. "

I'm going to gather you're new to this, and have never hired people, set salaries or worked on a large team?

The situation that the OP is in is common - precisely because measuring value and oversight is actually really hard, especially in software.

It's a bit glib to suggest that somone could come up with some magic metric relate to profit that aligned incentive, it's the Holy Grail of HR. There's too much ambiguity in the system.

"TL;DR - Don't hate the player, hate the game. "

Players that cheat, either employers or employees should be called out.

Having some reasonable degree of professional standards, which include trust (on all sides), is what makes the system work, along with intelligent management and oversight etc..


but let me get this straight. It's OK for the monopoly-seeking/having company shareholders to become billionaires off the labor of their workers while sitting on their asses?


Just curious, but what career did you switch to? Also, congrats on finding more happiness :)


> Doing something you don't like, care about, or believe in for decades long periods of time can really mess with your sense of self worth and happiness in life.

Well, I love programming. I’d just rather work on my own personal projects than the boring stuff the business wants me to work on. Fortunately I can get done what the company wants me to do in a few hours a day and then write code for my own projects.


One thing I've found helpful to combat boredom is this: In the absence of deadlines or people nagging you to do something, pick the task you want to do most (or dislike the least), or the task that is most interesting rather than the task that's oldest or some other measure. That way, you're still chipping away at your to-do list, but you're happier to do it.


"This is both normal amd mostly acceptable, in my professional opinion."

I wonder if there is anyone reading this comment who thinks, "That does not sound normal, acceptable nor professional."


I appreciate your candid feedback about the OP's attitude at work. Especially, I like it when you, as an SDM, agree that majority of the people will be "average" and as long as they don't wreck-havoc the team, they should be appreciated, right?

> However! I will say that this way of working and living comes with some significant hazard to your mental health

I have a hard time believing that in this stage and age, especially in the US this is true. How do you justify working for a big corp big nice pay to support your family vs. getting a salary just to live by working for your life's mission? Do we just forego the opportunity cost from a bigger paycheck, not just for you but your family as well?


> I will say that this way of working and living comes with some significant hazard to your mental health. Doing something you don't like, care about, or believe in for decades long periods of time can really mess with your sense of self worth and happiness in life. You only have one life, do something with it that is satisfying. Get out of the rat race.

I am a few years out of college and this hasn't quite crossed my mind. Perhaps I've now had enough years of work experience to start feeling the long term effects of how I feel about work. The effects of stress have been evident, certainly - weight gain, for example.


> It is a huge pay cut. I also am happier than I have ever been in my adult life because I'm learning something challenging and helping people instead of

While I congratulate your career move and I am very happy for you, I want to point out that there are tons of jobs in Software Development that genuinely help people and make society go forward.


They don't seem particularly easy to find. Perhaps you could name some?


I like that point about mental health. Side projects can be great, speaking from experience. It's just a legal question, although in many countries (I can only speak for Europe), you won't get into much trouble if you stay out of the employer's business and strictly separate code for side project and your main job. It's more complicated in jurisdictions where the employer has more say about your life while being employed.

But if coding isn't your thing (not every developer likes coding), there are a lot of ways to utilize that time. Sports is a great way, spending time with family another (esp working remotely).


I'm hoping to follow after your example.... at some point. Really want to do something with my time that feels worth it. But the difficulty of starting over is this intimidating mountain that I look out my window at each day, behind a forest with no visible path. I wonder when I'll finally get fed up enough to strap on some boots and head out into the wilderness.


What did you switch to? I keep thinking I want to be an electrician or carpenter


> Doing just as much work as your employer requires and no more

Do you also think that it's acceptable for an employer to only do as much for its employees as is required by law, and no more?


Isn’t that exactly what they are doing anyway? The only reason you get anything more is they couldn’t find employees if they didn’t.


What is your certification in out of curiosity?


Story time! :)

When I was a kid, sitting in a rear row of classroom I felt invulnerable. Chatting with other kids, reading a book, playing with pencil and eraser, there was NO way teacher could POSSIBLY know what I am doing. Not when there were so many rows of other kids between us!

Decades later I visited a elementary classroom as an adult. I was shocked... it was tiny! I could practically reach the last row. I could see, in exquisite amount of detail, EVERYthing that happened in that room. Everything.

---

As a system administrator for 15+ years, I had weeks where I worked 40-60-80 even 100hrs. But most weeks, I did not work quite as hard.

Then I became a team lead, then a manager... and I have far more awareness of my team members than I thought was possible. At the end of the day, I care about targets, plan, deliverables, ownership. If you and the team are meeting those, I am far from the micro-manager who cares exactly how you spend every minute of every day. It's up to me to ensure you are challenged, motivated, productive, and delivering; and if I need you to work harder and deliver more, it's up to me to set that expectations and hold you accountable. If I don't... it's 100% fair game for you to do what is required, meet expectations, and nothing more if you're happy with where you are and don't desire growth.


There is an extremely broad range of work and effort put in by software engineers, but there's also an equally broad range of necessary and important work in most orgs.

I was a sysadmin at a company that had things extremely well-tuned and within our team we averaged a couple of hours of work a day, tops.

I've been at companies where there were 50-hour weeks of nonstop which which were necessary, followed by downtimes where almost no work was necessary (it was a very seasonal business).

In my experience most engineers have no more than 4-5 hours of real work in them a day. After that, mental performance drops dramatically and while you can definitely respond to emails and attend meetings and do less intense work, deep thought is just a finite resource and heavily influenced by your mood, anxiety, and motivation. Keep it up for too long in an org that doesn't value clean code and good tests and your performance can definitely be negative.

It's also true that good organizations and teams know and work with these limits rather than push people into unrealistic goals. People can switch around between deep architecture work and planning, managing a sprint, writing reams of code based on well-understood specs, debugging, etc. You can take turns when your personal life gets intense or you feel drained.

I think that most works vastly underestimate the importance of deep work and being strategic about what gets done. The right product spec and the right amount of work researching solutions can easily save an order of magnitude of coding work. It's amazing how little you need to do if you know the happy path for implementing the right solution instead of iterating through multiple broken attempts.


I've been there. Maybe not 5 hours a week but certainly 10. I was in a small company that got acquired, and the organizational bloat really killed my productivity. Having to deal with paperwork for payroll and pointless meetings was a distraction from the actual work. I think this contributed to a creeping burnout, which led to me actually working 10 to 25 (tops) hours per week for maybe a year or two. Eventually I was put on a performance improvement plan and I decided to quit to take some time off.

After ~5 months off I started working as a contractor (for one employer) which has made me realize getting 35 hours of actual work done in a week is a Herculean task for me. I only run my time tracker when I'm actually working, and in a week I might have 2 to 4 hours of meetings, and through pushing myself, can get 15 to 30 hours of work done.

It's pretty rough, I'm not going to lie, and I don't understand how so many people can regularly work more than 40 hours a week (but I was also on medication for ADHD as a child and currently not treating it, so I understand I may operate differently than most people)

Basically to get 35 hours per week of work done, I have no life now other than trying to work. Fortunately it's not the end of the world if I only get 25 hours, though it's not great for my savings.


Rather than charging per hour start charging per day. Your client will get the output of a day's worth of work that will include your necessary breaks. That should make it easier for you.


when i was contracting i had this same epiphany. the trick is to double your rate and halve your hours. then you don’t feel guilty about not being uber productive and ironically the clients listen to you more because they’re paying more for it.

edit: also wanted to say that billable hours are NOT the same as working hours, pretty much for all the reasons outlined elsewhere in this post. so don’t beat yourself up about it. just work the system.


> I only run my time tracker when I'm actually working, and in a week I might have 2 to 4 hours of meetings

Are the meetings mandatory for getting your work done? If not, skip them. (If you're tempted to reply "I can't", they're mandatory.) If they are, they're work, so run your timer.

Same goes for a lot of other stuff you're probably doing and not timing.


Maybe I wasn't clear, but I'm definitely billing for the meeting time. They're absolutely mandatory as that's generally when we talk about requirements and challenges


Ah, good. Yeah, the sentence about time tracking was a bit ambiguous; "meetings" and "work" could apparently be read as opposites... At least it seems I did.


Could I ask you how old are you ?


mid 30s


Long time manager here. I call this "work-shy" and it is neither ubiquitous nor rare, I'd guess about 10%-20% of all employees, and it's certainly not unique to software or even to white-collar work. You should think of this as a problem. Even if it's not for your boss or your teammates (and it will be, eventually), it is for you. It is soul-crushing to fill up the hours. Two pieces of advice:

1) The "good" solution is to find some work you actually give a shit about. If you can't force yourself to care about corporate software, work on an indie video game, or get a job at Amnesty International, or find some other way to get personally invested in your work product. If you can't find it doing software, become a chef, or build houses, or whatever. It will improve your life immeasurably to spend your day doing something you get intrinsic satisfaction from instead of websurfing.

2) The "bad" solution, more like managing the problem really, is to get good at using Pomodoro timers, to-do lists, and other crutches to force yourself to do enough to not fall behind. "Fall behind" in this context does not mean that you do so little work that everyone notices and calls you out on it, it means that you stop keeping up with new frameworks and new tools and the years march by and your skills atrophy and then your employer folds and you find pushing 50 in an ageist industry with weak skills and few options.

Hope this is helpful.


It is interesting the number of people who see this as a problem that needs to be fixed. Since this specific comment is near the top, I might as well address that here.

Why should I work more? How will that improve my life? My self-worth is derived from what I do outside of work to the extent that I don't prioritize professional validation. The primary reason I work is for money. I make enough money that I can live a comfortable life, I have few material wants, and I can be generous with my money. I am on pace to likely be able to retire in my mid-50s. I recognize that I likely could be making more money if I worked harder, but it wouldn't be proportional because compensation is not tied closely to production for individual contributors. A 50% increase in effort won't yield a 50% salary increase. Most of the added value from my increased effort would be captured by people above me in the org chart and our company's stockholders.

As it currently stands, I don't find it that difficult to find a new job. I do spend some time keeping up with the industry, I am on HN after all, which tells you I care more about software development as a skill than some of my coworkers. It isn't that I dislike the profession, I simply don't see the reward in working harder primarily for the financial benefit of other people.


An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, “only a little while.” The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.

The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?” The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”

The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.” “But what then?” Asked the Mexican.

The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”

“Millions – then what?”

The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”


FYI: this is a variation of a story by Heinrich Böll (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arbei...). The original story is set on the west coast of Europe and the tourist is of unknown nationality.


First sentence of that WP article:

> "Anekdote zur Senkung der Arbeitsmoral" ("Anecdote concerning the Lowering of Productivity" in Leila Vennewitz' translation) is a short story by Heinrich Böll about an encounter between an enterprising tourist and a small fisherman, in which the tourist suggests how the fisherman can improve his life.

I don't know Leila Vennewitz, but her translation of at least the title isn't all that great: "Anekdote zur Senkung der Arbeitsmoral" means not "Anecdote concerning the Lowering of Productivity", but "Anecdote for the Lowering of Productivity".


Actually, "zur" can mean both and I think the ambiguity is intentional. It's maybe just not possible to translate it into English without removing one of the two meanings.


Yes, the other usage occurred to me later. But it's secondary, significantly rarer, isn't it? So I'd still say the translator chose the wrong alternative in English. Or maybe they were equally prevalent back in the day, or I've got the current relationship wrong.


This parable is completely unrelated to the topic at hand unless you add in some catch like

> The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

> I don't catch them. I just go to one of the other fisherman's boats from my company and take a few of their tuna. That way they get up at 5am and work there asses off and all I have to do is carry a couple of their tuna in to earn a living.

Note: I didn't say he stole the tuna. All the tuna needs to be carried in. He just didn't do as much work as the others. He did the minimal work, "carrying in a few tuna", instead of the full work, "spending hours catching tuna and also carrying them all in".

The OP isn't running their own business. If they were sure, they could decide to only work enough to pay the bills and enjoy the extra time. Instead the OP is at a company. If they're not doing the work then others are probably picking up the slack and the OP's possibly effectively riding off their work. I get that's harder to account the larger the company but it becomes very clear on small team or small company.


> The OP isn't running their own business. If they were sure, they could decide to only work enough to pay the bills and enjoy the extra time.

What an incredibly odd moral distinction, if you step back and think about it from an objective perspective. As long as there exists an idle class that lives off of previously accumulated capital (including intellectual or social capital), 5-10 hours a week will be a commendable contribution to society in my book.

Why does owning a business exempt you from contributing to society? That's an extraordinarily value-laden judgement.

So. If we're going to moralize like this, I'll flip the tables and assert that receiving stock dividends from companies at which you've never worked is theft that should be criminalized ;-)

Morality is no guide here because we immediately happen upon deep issues of political-economy. It's more productive to focus on the law. OP's employer carefully chose their corporate structure and hired devs into exempt salaried roles FOR A REASON. If they want him to work a certain number of hours and have recourse if he doesn't, then they can switch the role to hourly non-exempt. They won't. For a reason.

Excusing all the ways in which corporations short-change tech workers while moralizing about watercooler talk or reddit time or whatever is textbook master-slave morality.

General hard agreement on the "is this really how you want to spend your life?" comments, though.


> …receiving stock dividends from companies at which you've never worked is theft that should be criminalized

No, because when you receive dividends, you have provided something of value to the company (capital). Without your money, the company wouldn’t be able to generate that revenue.

When you steal fish, you are providing absolutely no value.


> when you receive dividends, you have provided something of value to the company (capital). Without your money, the company wouldn’t be able to generate that revenue.

No, for the absolute majority of stock and stockholders that's not true. You only provide capital to the company when you buy stock in an IPO. Otherwise, the money you paid -- usually much more than the company received in the IPO, which could have been a century or more ago -- went to the previous owner of the stock, who sold it to you.

> When you steal fish, you are providing absolutely no value.

As I understood the parable, carrying fish to market for the more hard-working fishermen was the protagonist's cushy sinecure of a job.


There's no shortage of moral critiques of financial capitalism. But my point was not to spark a moral debate about political economy.

My point was simple: the moral question here is far from obvious. Whole books have been written, whole wars have been fought. We will not resolve this issue in an HN thread. But it is an issue on which people disagree.

So. Focus instead on legality.

And, in a legal sense, you are absolutely 100% dead wrong. Even in the US, which is extremely friendly to capital and has very lax labor laws, OP is NOT stealing. Not in a legal sense.

There is nothing illegal about a salaried employee sitting at his desk and twiddling his thumbs. To the extent that you could build a case, it would be PR suicide to actually prosecute.

If the company OP works for wants to count unproductive time as theft, then they would make their devs hourly non-exempt employees. They choose not to do so for good reasons.

But what's good for the goose is good for the gander. If the company is constrained only by law, then labor should be constrained only by law. Don't impose moral boundaries on yourself when your employer insists on at-will contracts, non-competes, NDAs, and exempt status.

Again, I think working 5-10 hours a week at a job where you're nominally expected to work 40 hours is probably not the ticket to a good life. But the issue isn't one of morality or even shop ethics. OP's employer almost certainly doesn't give two shits about any sort of morality or ethics that aren't enforced by the law or the marketplace. So imposing a moral expectation on OP is gross asymmetry.

Should OP think of this as a problem and fix it? Yes. But sure as fuck not because some trust fund kid's dividend is slightly smaller than it could've been.


My point is your analogy is not comparable, not that OP is acting morally or not morally. When a company issues dividends, it voluntarily (consensually) gives to those who have provided it value.

When you steal from other fisherman and call it your own, that's different because there is not necessarily consent from the other fishermen. So the two are different scenarios.

I'm not saying that OP is in the right or in the wrong. In OP's case, it seems like the company usually consents. And it's unclear whether OP is actually plagiarizing others' work. Maybe the company is just happy with their "low" output.

To be 100% clear, I'm not making a statement about whether it's ethical/moral/legal to twiddle your thumbs on the job or not. I'm pointing out that your analogy is not a good one.


(Another way to understand this, from the perspective of the company, is that it's often advantageous to have an excess of trained labor in stock. Not saying that's true in OP's case, necessarily, but having a "back bench" is definitely something some engineering orgs intentionally plan for.)


Truly appreciate your ability to articulate these moral grey areas.

I’ll definitely be referring back to your comments when I need to convey my similar thoughts.


People are taking the one extreme example I gave of a day of not working as my typical day. That isn't the case. I do put in work. Maybe not as much as my coworkers, but I ship features, I close tickets, I do everything that everyone else does. I never try to pass anyone's work off as my own. The only dishonest part is that I'm not truthful about how much time it takes me to do the work that I do.

I don't take fish off other people's boats. I tell people I was fishing for 8 hours when I was really fishing for 2 and maybe blame the weather for why I didn't catch more.


Lemme just qualify my general point of "fuck working hard for The Man for some vague promises of happiness much, much later in life when you can just do whatever the fuck you like to do right now" here with another quote:

----

Take an electric pencil sharpener

Take a case of white-out; you might need it one day

Take stuff from work

It's your duty as an oppressed worker to steal from your exploiters

It's gonna be an outstanding day

- King Missile, Take Stuff From Work, emphasis mine.


The next week the fisherman got a toothache.


Exactly one of the characters in that story can weather disasters.


Why would an individual have to defend themselves against disasters when they are so simple to mitigate against collectively?


First, I claim there exist disasters that are not simple to mitigate against collectively. Civil unrest (the full spectrum, from vigorous protest to outright governmental collapse) being the big one I have in mind.

Second, I claim that the wealthy character in the story above has significantly greater ability than the non-wealthy character to: (1) have accurate situational awareness about disasters (e.g., can distinguish shit actually hitting the fan from shit narrowly missing the fan (possibly via superior sensing apparati, more likely, just by delegating the task)); and (2) have well-equipped (read: expensive) bug-in/out plans in place. Thus, even in cases where disasters are mitigated against collectively as you claim is possible, the wealthy character will be in a better position to maintain their pre-disaster quality of life than the non-wealthy character.

That said, this is all a little too removed from a concrete comparison for my liking. Maybe you have one in mind? Ideally, an example where collective efforts at disaster mitigation basically made outcomes for individuals insensitive to the wealth of those individuals.


So he would retire once his kids were grown & out of the house.


Do you find that in the hours you're not working you're constantly worried that you'll be "found out"? If so the problem is those are wasted hours, you can't just sit down and read or travel because you're still supposedly working. Which means it doesn't really matter that you're not working, you're just not doing anything productive.

That leads to doing nothing but mucking about on the Internet, not actually furthering anything for yourself. So it can have an impact on you mentally. I've felt that myself before.

Now, some people have a well-defined work output where the boss just says "I want this, that's all". So if you do it in 3 hours in one day or 40 hours in one week, it doesn't matter, meaning you can actually use those other hours for yourself.


I would be lying if I said there was zero "I'll be found out" stress and that was part of the motivation for this post. Hearing that other people do this too would reduce that stress. Although this has never been a particularly big stressor for me. That is especially true over the last couple years in which the world has presented us with so many bigger concerns. I also know that most companies aren't going to fire someone for poor performance with zero warning and I have never received any type of warning about performance in my career. I don't consider the possibility of being fired as an immediate concern.

I mentioned in another comment how working remotely has been a big productivity boost for those non-working work hours. Similar to tayo42 in another reply, it provides me the opportunity to do a lot of things that I previously did outside of work hours. One example is that I used to wake up an hour earlier to get exercise in before work. Now I sleep in and get that exercise in during the work day.


Now that i work from home, i go to the gym, do chores, take naps, cook meals etc


Well said! Human cultivation, such as "deep reading" - like reading Descartes or Leonard Euler - can't be sustained when one is so easily interrupted at work.


Deleted my previous reply as I didn't realize you were OP.

I characterized this as a problem because a) you made it sound like one, and b) in my experience, people in this situation are usually unhappy and struggling in other areas. If you can do hard work when you want to, and simply choose not to, great. When I have coached people who are in this situation, that is not usually the case - usually, they got in to software because they liked programming, and they enjoyed their work previously, and now they don't, and want to get back to that.

If that doesn't apply to you, great. I would say by way of warning though, that a) it's very likely your teammates have noticed and are frustrated with carrying you, and b) I would urge you not to get over-confident about your job prospects never changing. Any programmer over 50 can tell you that working a few hours a week was a totally viable career in 1998 and totally unviable in 2002.

Oh and one more thing: if the main thing holding you back from 40 hour weeks is that you wouldn't capture the value, the solution is well-known: become a contractor. It pays better, and your income will scale linearly with hours worked. A lot of people find contract work less satisfying, but you said you don't care about that, so there you go.


I don't know if you've lived through an industry downturn but that's a risk you might want to hedge against. Software/tech has had so much growth that it hasn't really had a bad year yet. Long term, even the dot com crash or the 2008 recession weren't super impactful.

My guess is, you are doing enough and aren't enough of a troublemaker that your boss cares to do anything about it, but you're not fooling anyone either. In a structural downturn, they're getting pressure to downsize and you're at the top of the list. None of your colleagues who move on to better pastures will vouch for you anywhere else because they don't trust you to pull your weight. You find yourself pretty unsupported at that point.

At the end of the day, I personally choose to stay sharp at work because it's my personal ethic, but there's also a real risk component that you may want to consider, although as long as the industry is structurally growing you probably don't have to worry too much about it.


I think this an underrated aspect of career planning, i.e. building a career that makes you a recession-proof hire.

The OP said they’d been in the industry for 2 decades, so they may have got into the workforce at the end of the dot com bubble. It wasn’t pretty for people who had been in the industry for a 5-10 years. Many forced career changes, big salary cuts, early retirements, depending on the person’s reputation, CV, and skills.

I don’t think the next contraction will be nearly as globalized as the dot com contraction, but it’s worth assessing whether your niche or specialty is prone to that kind of lull in the hype cycle.

In a contraction, the interview charades of big tech are replaced by street cred, because nobody can afford to hire deadwood. It’s brutal to be mid-career with no street cred in a recession, and one should try to avoid it.

I’m not saying one should avoid work in web3, autonomous driving or whatever, but it’s prudent to have an escape hatch just in case.

Be known as a hard worker, smart, and genial, and invest in developing skills that legitimately create value for any company, and you’ll be OK. It can be tempting to coast, but it’s not an effective strategy if your industry i has bearish downturns during your career.


>Why work more?

I founded a company and we were successful, but we really tried to continue the momentum. We had a group of 7-10 engineers, built over time and strenuously recruited and managed. And we have plateaued over the past 5 years. Now looking back I realized that probably a lot of the engineers had an attitude similar to what you describe. So they really ended up damaging their co-workers, because less growth at the company means limited advancement and less money all around, some layoffs during tough times, worse company culture, etc. It also wasted some of my professional time, because I am passionate about the industry and want to accomplish something in it.

Do you feel bad when the Product Manager is eagerly contacting you and trying to pull together all requirements and engineering estimates for the next sprint, or whatever, that you are sandbagging that person's career?

Now, I know what all the HN burnouts will say, "Screw them! If I can trick somebody out of a wage, that's my right!"


It's kinda weird to blame your employees for your poor hiring choices, and for failing to recognize at the time that your current slate of employees wasn't pulling their weight.

But also think about why they weren't pushing harder to help the company grow. Were you not compensating them enough? Did you allow morale to go down, and then do nothing about it? Did you push your people to work unreasonable hours because you should have hired more people, but didn't want the added expense?

Or maybe your product just wasn't compelling enough, or your addressable market not big enough.

There are plenty of places where I would expect the blame to go, and "my employees didn't work hard enough" is likely at the bottom of that list.


What changed? Did your employees simply reach the cliff of their stock options?


I was an employee at a company that slowly declined due to employee malaise.

In our case, it wasn't about options or compensation. It was a slow poisoning of the well as a few obvious slackers were allowed to persist without consequences. If your team lead is only showing up for 4 hours per day and nothing bad happens to them, you suddenly don't feel like putting in more than 4 hours per day yourself. In fact, you get paid less than the team lead, so maybe you only put in 2-3 hours. Then your junior teammate sees this happening and decides to push it even further to 1-2 hours per day.

Meanwhile, the backlog piles up more and more. If you take a task, you're just inviting more work on yourself because you'll be responsible for it. You'll also have to convince the lazy teammates to help you with all of the blockers that fall in their domain, which they don't want to do. Better to just sit tight and claim you're still working on something else.

From the management side, it's critical to address severely underperforming employees before the mindset is allowed to spread. Some times it's a simple matter of engaging with the employee and determining what's wrong. Other times, some people just like pushing the limits of how much they can get away with. They won't do any work unless prodded by a manager. They either need constant attention from their manager, or if that's unavailable they need to be removed from the company (sadly).


Reminds me of a saying I hear woodworkers say a lot: "If it looks good, it is good"

If you feel happy, you are happy. No need to over think it. If you feel you have what you need and are meeting your professional, emotional, familial, and financial responsibilities, sounds like you're good to go to me.


The OP wasn't asking about working harder. They specifically said that they BS their way through standups to deceive their peers and manager into thinking that they're working, while often doing zero work at all:

> There are literally days in which the only time I spend on my job is the few minutes it takes to attend the morning stand-up. Then I successfully bullshit my way through our next stand-up to hide my lack of production.

At that point, it's not about grinding harder or going above and beyond. This is a problem of misleading everyone around you.

It's not just the company that suffers. These situations usually result in the rest of the team having to pick up the slack to get things done. The person doing little to no work is taking advantage of their peers' productivity.


>It's not just the company that suffers. These situations usually result in the rest of the team having to pick up the slack to get things done. The person doing little to no work is taking advantage of their peers' productivity

Had a gig like this, the codebase was so shit it took days to do simple stuff, it was highly domain specific logic I cared nothing about and I was going to leave ASAP.

Most of the time l bulshited my way through turns out a lot of the features got scrapped because they weren't necessary in the first place (ie. there was another way to do it for eg. or client didn't really need it), requirements got updated that would have made any progress I did worthless,etc. There were two crunch weeks before releases where I did some OT to help push stuff out the door (wasn't even my backlog) other than that yeah - did two months of work in 6 months I was there.


but what if his 5-10 hours are equivalent in output to the 40 hrs of his coworkers?


I guarantee his 0 hour days (mentioned in the post) are infinitely less productive than his peers' 8 hour days.

In the real world, someone who is 4-8X more productive than their peers is also significantly more senior and therefore paid significantly more. You don't see seasoned experts on the same teams as inexperienced juniors all getting paid the same.

In my experience, the best team cohesion happens when everyone is putting in similar amounts of effort.


Seasoned expert here. I think your reasoning is just wishfull thinking.

What if the seasonal expert is the 5 minutes work person, and the juniors the 5 hour work people (yeah, I said 4 hours because I don't believe any developer can output 6+ hours per day consistently)

On the other hand, as a seasoned expert, I sometimes solve an issue in 5 minutes which took a junior a day to still not figure it out.


How many years of experience would you put to seasoned expert?


I have 18 years of professional experience (after getting my Masters degree in CS), so I would count that as seasoned :).

I think 15 years would do, to be named a such.


at one point you had to work hard to learn the things that you did, no chance you're a seasoned expert working 5 minutes per day


No that is true and I definitely agree with that.

I guess you end up in a 5 minute job when your work is really boring.


yeah, but maybe each of his 1 hours on his 5 hour work day, is more productive than the 8 hours of the coworker. e.g. code-reuse instead of bloating system with unnecessary classes/interfaces/designpatterns

> You don't see seasoned experts on the same teams as inexperienced juniors all getting paid the same.

But don't you? There are tons of accounts now of juniors joining and getting inflation adjusted salaries, and a loyal old dog discovering that his 'high salary' is actually just a smidgen above what this new young buck is getting


I guess one thing that hasn't been clarified is how much time you spend dedicated work, v.s. actually working? Possibly the OP is assuming that you are only putting in effort 5-10 hours, but still at your desk (or equivalent) for the remaining 30-35, which is the soul-crushing waste-of-time part. If you are literally only spending 5-10 hours on work a week, and the remainder on avocational activities that you find fulling, then that sounds pretty ideal.


Throwaway for this one...

It's possible that you've got cause and effect the wrong way round: consider maybe that your self worth is derived mostly from your extracurricular activities because you're failing at work. You put almost no effort in, achieve very little, are almost entirely disengaged, but, since you're a normal human, being a loser doesn't fit your self-image so you look to find meaning elsewhere in areas where you are engaged, connected, even passionate. It's a coping strategy.

Finding meaning at work doesn't mean you no longer get to derive self worth from your family or your hobbies, rather it just enlarges the pie of your self worth.

The advice given in the comment you're replying to is to find a job or career where you will be able to apply yourself. It really isn't bad advice. You should work more because you cannot exist without working, and what you're doing now is damaging yourself psychologically.

Now I'm not trying to be mean here. I was in your shoes VERY recently. I suspect you've got yourself to a point where a couple years of pandemic stress and working from home has disconnected you from your colleagues and your company and you no longer want to reconnect. Whatever mission you are working towards was probably never all that engaging for you, but take away the human connection and that's been laid all too bare. And I expect you're worried about this ending, and having to go back to a grey office and a shit commute and losing the freedom that you think you have today. You don't want to "lean in" (as awful managers would say) because you recognize the mission as unfulfilling, but you can't separate yourself entirely because you need the money. It's not healthy.

It could be time to take a risk and move. You know you can work remotely, there are jobs out there. There are better missions, companies with values that perhaps align closer to your own. That's scary, but finding a new gig where you'll have to work will not erase all the progress you've made in your hobbies and domestic life; those are things which make you more rounded, and they're yours forever. You can keep up with all that - because, after all, you're mostly just wasting time on the internet today.

I say all this as someone who's struggled with your situation in the past and made a move recently to tacke it. It was frightening for me. I will say that I am considerably happier when my days are full of work, and it hasn't got in the way of any of my side projects or interests, which are numerous and very consuming. If anything, it is more energizing.


> consider maybe that your self worth is derived mostly from your extracurricular activities because you're failing at work.

You say that like it's a bad thing. I would much rather my self worth be derived from the things that I choose to do, versus something I have to do in order to survive.


This doesn't have to be either/or. Once upon a time, your "work" would've been weaving baskets or gathering berries or whatever, and you would get immediate satisfaction from seeing how you are improving your own life and the lives of those around you. Nowadays, for a lot of us, the connection between doing work and improving the world is very tenuous, maybe non-existent; but it doesn't follow that it never existed or that it's gone for good. I know a lot of people who genuinely get a sense of accomplishment from their job, including people who do stuff that seems pretty pointless (a lot of the software industry, honestly) in the grand scheme of things.

The bottom line is, you have to find a way to get satisfaction from somewhere to be mentally healthy, and if have to work anyway, getting some satisfaction out of it is preferable to not getting any.


It doesn't have to be either/or, but in practice for most people in the world, it is.

Even in tech, we don't always get to work on what we want, or what we'd find most fulfilling. Often the best we can do is put up with bullshit 75% of the time while we try to carve out some meaning in the other 25%.

Sure, "well find another job". Often easier said than done, and there are no guarantees that the new job will be more fulfilling.

I know a lot of people who get satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment from their jobs. I also know a lot of people who don't. I also know a lot of people in a weird middle state: they derive that sense of accomplishment, but they have to deal with so much bureaucracy/politics/bullshit, that it erases most or all of the good feelings they get from that accomplishment.

> The bottom line is, you have to find a way to get satisfaction from somewhere to be mentally healthy, and if have to work anyway, getting some satisfaction out of it is preferable to not getting any.

Absolutely! But I think you overestimate the number of people who are truly able to do that (HN is definitely a skewed population in that regard). And there's nothing wrong with just punching the clock, and deriving happiness outside of work.


You are describing a concept known as alienation in leftist discourse.

> Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation


They're not mutually exclusive, as I said in my comment. They are additive, and, especially without a commute, deep involvement in one doesn't preclude the same in the other.


No, they're not mutually exclusive, but the level of control you have over your extracurriculars is orders of magnitude higher than the level of control you have over your job.

If you so choose, you can set up your life so your non-work time is damn near close to 100% happy and fulfilling (and if you find something lacking, you have the ability to change it). I doubt there is a person alive who can claim their work time is 100% happy and fulfilling and that they have control over it.


Professional athletes? Artists? Researchers?

I have a hard time imagining Steven King doesn't enjoy writing. Same for people like Ken Thompson.


I think if you're working 10-15 hours a week and spending the extra time with your family and doing things that are fulfilling to you that's great.

But the strategies mentioned to find more meaningful work are probably more useful if you're doing 10-15 hours of real work a week and then spending the remaining hours sitting in front of your computer browsing YouTube and doing nothing of value while pretending to be at work. If you have to pretend to be at work, then you can at least fill that time at the computer with something productive.


Just want to say that I am the same as pretty much everything you said. Job is to make for a good life.

I will also say, most discussion usually paints the devs not working as much as less productive, whether explicitly or implicitly. But that isn't necessarily true either. I'm the top contributor for this calendar year at my company (public but not F500, about 100 developers) but averaging ~4 hours a day of actual work.


4 hours of real work per day by someone who is already good at their domain is a whole lot of work, in my experience.


> I am on HN after all, which tells you I care more about software development as a skill than some of my coworkers

well, if you measure skills by amount of time people spend on HN, I think you miss something.

Yeah, you don't have to work more. But imaging what would be if you wanted to work more. Not because you have to or forced to. But because you find your work so interesting that you want to put more hours where just to do it. Thats what at least some of commentors are trying to tell you. I were in positions where I could simply don't do anything the whole week and nobody would care (I was TL of the great team). But I didn't want to. Even when I actually avoid doing tasks my manager wants from me, I always find some cool stuff to do, to improve code I already have or investigate something or just bring shiny new tehcnology thing.


You shouldn't have to work more unless you think it is a problem. Admitting that you only work 2hrs a day and convincing yourself that everyone does that is not a good thing because it isn't true. Most people work fairly productive days.


What is a better way for the company to give you increases?


> You should think of this as a problem. Even if it's not for your boss or your teammates (and it will be, eventually), it is for you

Low output engineers can often coast for years before something forces them back on to the job market. Usually, routine layoffs force companies to take a hard look at who's producing and who's not, at which point the lowest productivity individuals are the most likely to be cut.

This is where the real problems begin: If someone has spent years or even a decade doing very little actual work, they're now effectively years behind their peers with similar career lengths. Even if they could cram enough to skate through interviews, they can struggle when forced to work at normal productivity levels in a normal organization. Years of accumulated habits can be hard to break.

I've interviewed a significant number of employees who (I suspect) fit this mold: They landed an easy job at a big company that didn't look too closely at their output, spent years coasting while doing little work as possible, but then something forces them out of the job and into interviews at other companies. It's surreal to speak to someone with a decade of confirmed experience but a level of knowledge equivalent to what I see out of the average motivated college graduate.


This is so true.

Early in my career, I was in a big organization, surrounded by people like this. Our direct manager was not competent to assess their work output on any technical level. He might not have cared anyway, since the true measure of management is how large your pool of subordinates is.

It was truly soul-sucking to be surrounded by such mediocrity. I'm all for work-life balance, but having counterparts who accomplish so little is demoralizing.

I can almost convince myself that there's a strategy in it -- with 15 people doing the work of 3 people, a very large bus accident will probably have very little impact on business operations.

It killed me though. I left and went into consulting for a few years. Then startups, where 3 people are expected to do the work of 15. Which can be its own problem, of course!

The aforementioned co-workers? Still at the same place, and honestly they're probably pretty safe (financial industry, revenue is barely affected by macro economy). Goodness help them if they ever need a new job.

EDIT: Nowadays, I hire and manage people. My expectation of the team is to be "productive" about 20hrs/wk, ebbing and flowing according to personal life flux, but making an honest attempt to give the rest of us enough to rely on.

I hope to hire the kinds of people who will use some part of the remaining time to reflect on how to improve something, somewhere -- sometimes including our work product or processes. This is where the interesting stuff happens, when it does.


The alternative is to embrace minimalism / the FIRE lifestyle and hopefully skate by long enough to not have to work by the time the company folds and live off of investments -> then into retirement).

I think most "underwork" on the job is a motivational issue and stems from one of a few overlapping reasons: 1) No way to promotion/advancement (dead end job) 2) Overqualified and bored 3) Unclear goals, no feedback, and/or undiagnosed ADHD. 4) None or negative social value to the job - for example selling shady financial products to seniors (so that slacking becomes a social good)


I've read about the FIRE theory time and again. For some reason, I don't buy it. I fail to believe in the plan that consists in building enough FU money to then "be free".

Free to do what? What was the plan originally?

I think the real meaning of life is to do what you care about today, _with the constraints you have today_.


(I think) very few people intrinsically want to work for someone else, in pursuit of someone elses goals, for monetary compensation. Most people do that because the monetary compensation allows them to meet their basic needs and pursue their own goals in turn. In this context, 'be free' means chopping out that extra step and removing the need to work for someone else - You have the necessary means and can now pursue whatever goals you personally have independent of needing continual financial input from an employer, for which in return you must dedicate 40+ hours of each week.

For some people, they might start their own business and be their own employer. Others might still go for part-time work in something they enjoy but couldn't support them financially. Others might remain in full-time employment because knowing they can quit at any point removes a large stressor and makes the work itself enjoyable. Others might move to a shack in the woods and spend their time growing food and posting drivel on the internet.

Edit: I've missed out here people who genuinely want to be a small cog in a large machine, working towards a greater collaborative goal e.g. someone working at spacex. That has to be a pretty big motivator for some people in some sectors.


Firstly, being able to walk away from a job or career with your income secure can be psychologically valuable even if you never do it.

Secondly, what I really want to do is exactly what I'm doing right now, except for three days a week while still supporting a family. That means supplementing income with investments and owning a home to cut down on expenditure.

The opinion that the meaning of life is to be laser-focused on a single goal for a hundred hours a week is common, but I disagree with it. I don't think I'm productive or happy working even 40 hours, while in 32 or 24 I get much more done and can take better care of myself.


Being free might mean that you take a traditional full-time job, if doing so is the best way to "do what you care about today". But the great thing is that you can take that job without all the normal financial stress that goes with it, and with the knowledge that you can just quit if you don't like it or end up with a bad manager.

Aside from that, though, I really think you should step back and try to reexamine "life". Why does life have to revolve around "work"? Why do people define themselves by what they do professionally? The world is very rich, and I personally don't find it very hard to find meaning outside of a job (traditional or otherwise).

I get that a lot of people who go the traditional route end up retiring at 65 or whatever, and then have no idea what to do with themselves for the rest of their lives, and that adding another 10, 20, or more years to that retirement period sounds scary. I think of this as a result of societal brainwashing. From a young age we're asked what we want to do when we grow up, and then during much of our teens we are pushed hard to pick a university, pick a major, and pick a career. And this is right while our brains are still developing; the focus on employment fundamentally affects the shape of our minds for the rest of our lives.

Free to do what, you ask? Literally anything. Learn how to play an instrument, join or form a local band, and play at coffee shops, bars, whatever. Learn new languages and travel (or just travel!). Get involved with your community, whether that's youth outreach, volunteering to help homeless people, or whatever you like. If you're a software developer, get involved with (or start your own) open source projects. Attack that ever-growing stack of books you keep telling yourself you're going to read but never seem to find the time. Find and grow new hobbies, whatever they may be, especially those that have nothing to do with your former job. Commit to improving your physical fitness by doing something (running, lifting, a martial art, etc.) for a certain number of hours per week. Go back to school and learn things you thought were too impractical to make a living off of back when you were 18. If you're a parent, you can spend a ton more time with your kids (raising a child is more than a full-time job anyway).

There is enough in this world to fill multiple lifetimes, and restricting yourself to spending 40 hours a day drawing a paycheck is a very small part of the possibilities. Relying on a job to define ourselves and fill our time is the easy way out because it "automatically" takes up half of our waking hours (or more). I get that it can feel like a daunting task to figure out what to do with all that extra time, but I can't believe it wouldn't be worth it to do so.


Thank you for your reply. I found it very profound and insightful.


I'm glad you found it helpful! One thing to add that just occurred to me: filling your waking hours with a job is "easy" because a full-time job usually takes up a large amount of our free time (half or more!). If you don't have the job, it might be hard (or even impossible) to find just one thing that fills up your time to that degree.

So when a person who is fully employed might in addition have one or two other activities that they use to fill up the rest of their time, a person with no job might have to come up with 10 or 15 other activities. I can get why that might seem daunting... the can be a lot of mental overhead just deciding what you want to do, and then some overhead around organizing that time and keeping up with your various activities. So I can see why that might be a little off-putting as well. But to me, I think it's worth it. And with a larger amount of smaller things that you do, it's probably easier to stop doing one and find something else if you decide you're tired of it. Much easier than changing jobs, at any rate.


Free to enjoy life as you wish.

It could be learning mathematics, physics, playing instruments, composing, writing, walking, meditating, making films, going to museums etc. It feels like endless possibilities for me. I think having the freedom to do something that you want to do rather than contractual obligation is one of the wonders of life. It may be different for many and luckily if you live in a place where you have the freedom to choice, those who wish to work can work and some of those who have the privilege of FIRE can do so too.


How large should your earnings be for FIRE?

250K? 1M? 4M?

How can you model stock investments in a way that your capital does not diminish as you withdrawal?


There is a subreddit dedicated to answering those questions:

https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/wiki/faq


Look into the 4% rule. Once you have 25 to 30x your yearly expenses invested, you’ll be in the right ballpark.


The 4% rule is wildly optimistic. You're assuming that there exists an investment that:

- is 100% liquid - will return 4% consistently over decades - every single year - post-tax - post-inflation

Good luck finding that one.

So that's why I am saying that the FIRE theory is a theory. A much more realistic number is 2% (and I am still being optimistic here). That means that for someone who needs $5K/month (not insane if you want to have kids), you need $5K x 12 months x 50 = $3M. To get that sum post-tax, you need roughly $5M of income somehow. The set of people who make that amount early enough in their career is very limited.


You may want to look into it more. You don't need consistent returns, you need 4% yearly returns on average over a long time period. Looking at historical returns for a broad index fund (like VTSAX), this is very achievable. However, 4% may still be aggressive. This is why I am personally targeting closer to 3%.


I actually think that other than underwork you might have to hire people that you have enough "burst" performance but regularly don't have to do much.

There is a real example with global markets like the stock market. Most trades are done electronically but, if those electronic systems fail you can activate an automatic backup system which is a bunch of traders on a trading floor.

Hypothetically the recent Facebook outage could have been minimized by just having a security guard that could open and close a door. I know that DNS propagation would have still fixed it and yes the AS systems would had to have time to propagate but it still would have been a better solution.


> Unclear goals, no feedback, and/or undiagnosed ADHD

This makes me wonder how many people who secretly believe they may have undiagnosed ADHD are actually suffering from unclear goals and no feedback.


My theory is that ADHD exists on a spectrum, and a lot of people have it, and at the lower levels it's not difficult to be high functioning. But still suboptimal and leads to other issues and distress.


Sure, but you could also find a job you like better and embrace FIRE doing that.


I was once at a job where I didn't do much. One day I did nothing, the next day I fixed a bug in 15 minutes, etc.

I got excellent reviews. So I asked myself the question: If I get excellent reviews with this kind of work, what the fuck are those other guys doing???

> about 10%-20% of all employees

I highly doubt it. Do you have a 10x developer on your team? That's probably the only person doing any serious work. Does he get paid 10x? No? Well that's why the other guys are slacking off. Maybe the person you gave an excellent review is slacking off like crazy.


It's possible to do a little work that is very high value as opposed to a lot of work that is not valued by management. I've seen this a lot.


> 1) The "good" solution is to find some work you actually give a shit about.

Or think about why you do the work, what it allows you to do with your life. Doing what you love / loving what you do is one way to be happy, but it isn't a requirement, as long as you have a reason for doing the work. Life is full of things that don't directly bring fulfillment and happiness, such as brushing your teeth, doing the dishes, exercising (for many people), shopping for clothes (ymmv), and (for most parents on most days) cleaning up after messy children. All preaching about how you really ought to feel fulfilled by stuff like that aside, most people don't, yet it doesn't ruin their lives to keep doing it day after day.


Experienced manager as well. I highly concur.

Sadly, the "good" solution is much harder to accomplish than one might think.

One way to address it is to take it from the People perspective. Are there people you've really enjoyed working with? Go talk to them, see what they work on, etc.

This may get you out of your current (deep) local minimum. Doing this on your own is really, really hard.


I so much agree with the part of it being soul crushing, especially from remote.

If I liked videogames maybe I could fill that void in my working days.

In the end I choose to program other things, I still get to learn and be a better dev every day for my employer.


I think I've been on both ends of this, sometimes being highly productive and working long hours, and other times just doing enough to not get fired. Remote work and the pandemic have had an interesting effect in that it intensifies both passion and disinterest. IE, if I'm passionate about something, I'm much more likely to work on it more than I would in an office because I don't have the commute, have to worry about locking up the office, etc. etc.. But if I'm disinterested, it's easy to be really disinterested and watch a day slip away. When I was in an office, there was only so much pretending-to-work I could do before I got bored and actually had to force myself to do the work. Usually it was more of a grind, but I'd say my average performance was more consistent, whereas now it's either much higher or much lower, depending on what I'm doing.

I'd say if it's career long though, and not just related to a job or a project, I don't think it's abnormal per-se... I've seen a lot of devs like this... but I think it wouldn't hurt to explore things you might be more passionate about. Like others have said, you're probably not going to get fired if you're doing just-enough, but it might have bad effects on your mental health.


There's this idea that half of the value created by a company is produced by the square root of the total number of employees. So you're experience is probably typical.

In my experience, most developers fall into the category. Outside of the startup world, there's not really this huge push to move quickly. Established software works well enough that most companies can afford to have highly paid professionals dillydally through most of the work day. As long as everyone is doing something each day, and the right people can shift into low gear when urgent action is needed, things will move along pretty smoothly.

People who are both very competent and can sustain large volumes of work tend to gravitate towards startups. There's really no point in working 10x faster than everyone else at an established company because someone else is going to be the bottleneck.

> Have I just been incredibly lucky and every boss I have had is too incompetent to notice?

They are probably just as good at BSing during meetings with their boss as you are in standups. They either talk up the accomplishments of other team members, discuss future plans, or some other team is the focus of the conversations that week.


I've noticed people bullshitting at stand ups and I've done it myself at the one somewhat toxic place I worked at that mandated them. But never consistently over a longer stretch of time. I think occasionally this is normal, and as a (now) CTO I accept it, we're not macnines.

That said, I had a similar feeling once, and then I actually started tracking my time, just for myself. Even reading HN I counted as "personal development". While I did spend about as little time coding as I thought I would, I was surprised how off my feeling about how much time I work was. I easily tracked 10 more hours per week than I thought I was doing. Not sure you're interested in trying that, but I can really recommend it. Made me a lot more conscious how I spend my time. 10 hours per week solving important problems beats 40 hours of stuff that leads nowhere.

While it's hard to count, I also wouldn't discount all the thinking I, and probably others, do both consciously and unconsciously, that allow us to get several hours of work done in half an hour, already having found the right approach without touching the keyboard.

Anyway, regardless of what hours you actually work - if the company you work for is happy with your results and you're happy with the pay, I would argue that's all that matters. Great for you if 5-10 hours per week is actually all it takes for you.


Love seeing a CTO chime in explaining the nuance of this discussion while individual contributors act appalled.

Personally, and this is indicative of my contributions, I believe we work in waves, having periods of high and low productivity.

My current organization pays for both my median level of productivity and deep project knowledge. I wish my contributions could be boiled down to 5-10 hours each week, but alas, I’m more of a 25 hour performer.


5 hours a week is barely getting any work done at all and falls in the category of slacking. I’m surprised how this work ethic can survive and yet get promoted/rewarded. I have come across cases like the OP and have seen them either being fired or see good developers leave because bad work ethic is rewarded the same as developers with good work ethic and people who get things done and make progress are treated the same as slackers.

I believe it depends on how you look at work. The higher you climb the career ladder the more responsibilities you get. Everyday is an opportunity to make some progress — get something done, move forward, show up and make progress. Some days you are at the best of your mental capacity and some days you are not. It’s important to recognize those days and focus on low hanging fruits on low mental capacity days vs getting high value work done on good days. Managing yourself is a part of your job that’s not in the job description.

As a professional, it’s my responsibility to get my part done and make progress everyday. Things add up over long time. Similarly not getting work done does the opposite, let’s lot of backlog pile up.

If slacking is the result of procrastination or lack of attention or lack of motivation, I recommend people get help.

Imagine calling customer service rep and they just work 5 hours a week and imagine them responding to your requests a week or month from now. Imagine everyone working like this, society won’t function. Not doing your part for what you’re getting paid for seems unethical to me personally.


This is the case for other parts of the workforce. I admire those in service that really work their ass off (drivers, cleaners, cooks, etc.)

From my work experience, about 90-95% of people do barely any work (have tasks that take months). I would get in a team of 15 people and I'd be the only one doing something, everyone else is just making some slides for weekly presentations and not even that. The amount of part-time people that do nothing is even greater. The amount of consultant experts that work for consultant agencies and get loaned to other companies that do nothing is massive.

I think it's the standard way of life in most cities. I do not quite understand why that percentage of the workforce won the work lottery.


I don't know about "most of us", but certainely not all of us. I work a solid 7h a weekday (not all of which is at 100% productivity, but all of which is work), and I know for a fact my colleagues work at least as much as I do (I personally think most of them work too much).

And I seriously doubt you'd be able to reach anywhere near an acceptable output working <= 10h a week in the sort of company I work at, no matter how good you are. I don't mean that my company is special, it's a pretty standard start-up environment, but I mean that it probably depends a lot on what company you work for rather than being a "developer thing". I recon that a lot of big corporates have no idea the sort of people they're hiring and do not have a feedback loop to assess performance.

Personally, it makes me uncomfortable to think that there might be so many other people with this mindset around, lying to coworkers and doing the absolute minimum to get by. In my current role, I feel passionate about what we're building and being a startup, we need to maximise efficiency: I'd have zero remorse flagging that somebody is doing close to nothing when everybody else is so involved and relying on each other to do their job. In a corporate environment, I suppose I'd either join you or quit out of lack of respect for coworkers and company.


You work at a startup. Try being engineer number 2348219589211 at <INSERT_BIG_COMPANY_HERE>. You can work your ass off on real work and still get out climbed in a heartbeat by people better at politics and schmoozing. Most companies are like this for employees; they extract your potential business value for their direct sales value.

In these environments you don't feel so bad when people are gaming the system. If it's all a popularity contest at the end of the day anyways, what does it matter? Do your bare minimum to fulfill the contract such that you can sleep peacefully.


In big offices, lying often happens due to:

- you don't know how much the others are doing so why putting more effort (humanly naive classical economic strategy)

- things are opaque, people may not know what you do, and how hard it is.. if they say something and are wrong, they're reputation is tainted, only your superiors are responsible for this but they may be busy (or faking too)

- some people will willingly delay work, they don't like it, there's too much, so they'll stash tasks until people come and ask, then they'll pretend to be overwhelmed with so many things (unless management has clear views of what's going on, you're back to point 2).

- oh and often people will act as if they're super tense and busy and having the worst job in the building. Just before going back to their office, and sitting watching netflix on their phone.

Another thing, have you ever noticed people slowing things down ? and impeding you to improve things ?

ps: I'm deeply hurt by testimony like these (you're not the first one I read), having been in chaos and near homelessness ready to work twice the amount for min wages, it's unbearable. When you know that this happens, it's near impossible to not hate HR/interviews.

pps: few places where this can't really occur: public facing jobs, you don't want to look like a moron, or a lazy douche so you have no choice. Hospitals are probably free of that too. retail. There's a natural flow of timely tasks there.


The facts are these:

I work for a Fortune 100 company. Everyone reading this knows the company.

In my entire time at the company (>5 years, I think), I've written maybe 30k lines of code.

I'm terrible at responding to e-mail. Whatever you think this means, I'm worse than that.

I skip meetings all the time. Sometimes I just don't dial in. Sometimes I say I have a conflict, sometimes it's true. I probably attend a total of 4 hours of meetings in any given week.

Not too long ago, I had 3-4 weeks in a row where all I did was attend those few meetings.

I have ADHD. I dick around a lot. I spend hours and hours reading/watching random stuff. 60% tech stuff, 40% random Youtube rabbit holes. Very little of it is applicable to my work.

I take naps and often sleep in. Some days I don't show up for work at all.

For the most part, what I do is review people's stuff and tell them why it won't work as well as they hope. Occasionally, I'll tell them what to do instead but with a lot of hand-waving. I believe it's called "being an architect".

However:

I'm at the highest individual contributor level the company has. It's a tech company, btw.

I get consistently stellar reviews. My boss says she hears great things about me all the time, so "I shouldn't not even bother asking around" when we do 360 reviews.

I've gotten off-schedule, totally unexpected stock grants as thanks for "all my good work".

I make $15k/year more than any of my peers and $100k+ more than some of them. Some of that is due to regional differences (I'm in the Bay area), but it's all the US.

This year, we weren't even supposed to get bonuses. 2020 had been a shit year. The board decided to give us bonuses anyway, but "no one would get their full bonus". I got 120%.

If I ask if I can attend a conference, I've never gotten a "no". My boss even suggested a few more I should attend.

None of this would make any sense, were it not for those (on average!) 2-5 hours a week of good, actually productive time I have. The ADHD means I can't do it on command, but when it hits me, it's apparently gold.


What’s the company? Asking for a friend


I 100% notice when ppl are slacking - especially at the levels you mentioned. I'm a team lead - it's to much of a pain in the ass to fire people so it's easier to just keep them and give them the minimal salary increase possible. If someone is from a protected class 100% forget about firing them but I realize not all companies are like mine but I suspect a lot are.


Are you sure you notice? I don't think there's any way to tell how long a coding problem really took to solve, unless you're literally standing behind them the whole time. The same bug can sometimes be super fast to fix, sometimes take ages, depending on the ideas I have while tracking it down. No one apart from me can say if I really was as fast as I could've been.


It’s pretty easy to tell. One mid level dev on my team will work on a trivial change to a PR for a full day when it would take me literally 15-30 minutes. Trivial stuff like changing a few names and adding a basic test case. It’s kind of annoying to make multiple deploys of useful things per day and then get given more work when other people can maybe get a small thing out every few weeks. I’m trying to scale my effort back since it’s not really noticed


Do you give feedback to these employees? Because if you work 10 hours a week and yet every review the feedback is "good" with no indication of any need for improvement I don't see why they should try doing more.


I've hired people like this by accident, and let them go as soon as I figured out they weren't going to change. I have not noticed them having trouble finding other jobs -- almost always at much larger companies.

On the other hand, I assume that people typically have 2-4 hours of good thinking in them per day; that it takes time to learn complex systems; that a smoothly running system should not need attention every moment of the day.

"I have probably bombed more tech interviews than I have passed." This is perfectly normal for almost everyone.


But you mean people who don't work and you see it in their output. What if someone works 5 hours per day but produces as much output as other team members? I understood that this is more OP's case.


OP says:

"Then I successfully bullshit my way through our next stand-up to hide my lack of production."

and

"I often don't understand the technical details other engineers discuss in meetings."

The implication that I took away is that OP is not productive.

I have no problem with a productive team where it happens that some (or all) of them work best by letting issues sit in the back of their head until their subconscious produces results. My work always has unpredictable interruptions which need to be addressed at various levels of urgency, so we need to have the capacity to address emergencies, then settle down and get back to projects. I encourage everyone on my team to allocate time during the workday for education, current events in the field, and discussion with other employees about what they are doing. That last has been particularly difficult over the last eighteen months...


Scrolling through I didn't see anyone address this question from an organizational perspective, so let me -

You are not operating in isolation.

Your work has upstream dependencies (well defined requirements, things owned by other people being done first, communication from other parties, etc), that will form blockers on being able to execute on what is important.

Likewise, there are downstream bottlenecks; code you write has to be peer reviewed, tested, released, whatever else.

This, alone, is like a Kanban process; so long as you are not the bottleneck, you are going to have a lot of downtime, even while some other part (that is the bottleneck) may feel stressed and overworked.

But that's not even the only consideration! The 80/20 rule applies to software development, same as everywhere else. Is there more you -could- be doing? Almost certainly! Does it have anywhere near the value to you, the team, or the business, to warrant it getting attention? Assuredly not. Even if you devoted your remaining hours to things you felt you could get some traction on, the return on investment would be super low; likely so low as to not even be noticed.

Between the two of those, it is quite possible for people, a majority within a company even, to still provide close to if not their actual maximal value, while not actually being productive 40 hours a week, and with it being neither organizational dysfunction (not to dismiss that as being true some places, but just to highlight it doesn't have to be), nor individual laziness (also not to dismiss that as a possibility, just that it doesn't have to be).


If I have a story to complete during a sprint, and I spend an hour looking through the specifications and looking at the existing code and APIs etc., the company would probably be worse off if I immediately began coding a solution. I have two weeks to do the work, so why rush it? The company will be better off if I implement a better solution.

We're not flipping hamburgers or soldering widgets on an assembly line. We're constantly adding to systems that get increasingly complex over time. The UX that the product manager sees is just a small percentage of the work. Haste makes waste, and a stitch in time can save nine.

There are times I have spent a day banging on some problem, and I am up to even 1 AM trying to fix it and I give up and go to sleep, after a few hours of hitting my head against a brick wall. I wake up in the morning relaxed, and am hit with an epiphany, I go to the computer to code it and it works. I don't know if I am dreaming up a solution while I sleep, or a couple of seconds of a clear head beats hours of tiredly banging my head against the wall, but it has happened more than once to me, and I have heard the same from others.


I'm shocked how many support or at least 'it is ok' comments here, so I won't go to tell my opinion about OP or if this is acceptable in general. Instead just my personal answer. Yeah, I lie about how much time I put to work, when I for some reason decided to put some of my personal time to solve some problem, or improve something, or simply experimenting. I'm not proud of it, but it happens.

Anyway, I never was in a team where such behaviour OP described was acceptable. Maybe it is cultural thing (I'm not from the western country), or just social (you try to be closer to people with the same values). Yes, you probably won't get fired immediately. But it is all clear and visible if person work so little. Visible to teamlead and other team members. You won't get promotion or bonus. And eventually your direct manager will try to remove you from the team. Even i firing is not so simple, there are usually ways to rotate him to different team. And if person gets the same 'recognition' in the next team, his case usually goes to HR and they would find they to 'let him leave'. I still agree that it is ok to work just as much as you are required for your pay. But if developer simply wants to work as little as possible, he eventually is asked to go work somewhere else. Because it is simply more enjoyable to work with developers who give a shit.


Totally agree. I'm already astonished about the general frequency of comments on HN that as a developer one can't get more than ~4 hours of serious work done per day due to mental exhaustion. That's really not a lot. Doing only 5-10 hours/week, however, is outright ridiculous.


For what it's worth, I'm from a Western country (the U.S.) and I don't find it acceptable. These threads are always disheartening to me. I think you're right that we don't always see it because we associate with like-minded people.


Well, to make you feel worse, my non-western-country friend: this developer probably makes over $150-200K a year, for 5 hours of work every week. And almost everyone here is OK with that.


> Are most of us secretly lying about how much we are working?

Yes, but I would venture it's the other way - most of us are probably working our butts off and thinking we make a decent wage for 40 hours a week when we're putting in 60 hours a week. I didn't really notice this until I had a family and started bumping into family activities. At first, I was really pissed off that something was getting in the way of work, then I reassessed by values and got pissed off that I was putting in that sort of time.

> Have I just been incredibly lucky and every boss I have had is too incompetent to notice?

Pretty much. It's likely the problem is systemic (your boss doesn't work either). One of two things are going to happen, by my guess. You are going to get re-orged when some efficiency expert comes in and they're going to apply arbitrary metrics which are designed to "accelerate delivery" or something. Since you don't do anything already, you can't meet those metrics. The good news is people who do work probably can't meet them either since it's designed to make people uncomfortable, so you'll be one of many getting a parachute. Feign indignation and leave with the herd.

The second thing that might happen is someone updates the tech stack in a significant way. This happens when consultants come through and a company tries to "buy the devops" or "buy the kubernetes". They have a vested interest in delivering a solution, so they're going to want to train people on the new thing. If you're not participating in the existing workflow in a meaningful way, it's going to be rapidly apparent that you're also not using the New Expensive Thing(tm). Since the New Expensive Thing is indeed quite expensive, there's going to be a lot of eyeballs on it, and you'll probably either get noticed for not using it or for being one of the people "not adopting the New Expensive Thing".

Of course the third option is you live in like Cornfield, Kansas and you're actually pretty cheap compared to everyone else across the country and so you're really not going to attract any scrutiny whatsoever. Who knows!

Best of luck, either way.


> putting in 60 hours a week

I would just get a new job. Unless you're volunteering for it and getting paid overtime, that is unacceptable.


A lot of workers in technology are getting paid in equity. For many, it makes it more than acceptable. It's not really anyone's place to tell someone else that the way they're making money is unacceptable without knowing all of the details.

I put in 60-70 hour weeks routinely. I work at companies I founded and own. I don't make overtime. Is my work schedule unacceptable?

What is the percentage of equity between 0% and 100% that makes working above 40 hours per week "acceptable"? Who picks?


I think it should be obvious that that's not what I'm talking about. If I'm employed to work 40 hours a week, I'm not going to work more than that on a regular basis.


What if you are employed "full time" with the expectation that that means substantially more than 40 hours (and your compensation package includes equity in the company)?

That is the (commonplace) situation that I am describing, that almost all of my friends and acquaintances in this industry (developers) find themselves in.

They don't find it unacceptable, or they'd go do something else.


If you go in expecting to work that much, great, but I think it's easy for people to be manipulated and overworked for the good of a company when they should push back for their own good.


I guess my point is that it's not your place to tell other professional adults what they should do "for their own good" when their own opinions contradict yours in practice, as they would be the top world expert on what is or isn't in the interest of their own good.


Beyond pedantic. Very few people are in positions of legitimate control in early stage situations. It is generally good advice to not give more than you are worth.


You aren't a 10X developer whose laziness makes you a 1X developer. You're a 1X developer period. 10X developers wouldn't be on HN posting about how they coast and pretend, they would be doing literally 10X the coding as you (and me too).

The reality is this: spend your attention wisely and don't worry about anything else. Attention is the real value of time. The more attention you can pay to producing good things, the more benefits you'll create. The more attention you pay to frivolity, to mindless consumption, the less positive impact society will feel from your existence.


I know many talented but not exceptional Engineers that made their way to middle management and above at a FAANG company and are now happy to work a couple of hours a day while collecting close to million dollar salaries. I also know equally talented people that worked their tails off for decades in startups that did not work and that now have trouble supporting their families. So, it depends, but for sure if you optimize for work-life balance software development in the US is likely the best gig in the world.


This varies a lot on the job. I can guarantee you’d spend more time at my current place. In fact, half of that time you’re currently spending would be at least on interviewing people - and another half would be on the mandatory meetings.

You’d easily spend a lot more time on the projects. Many of my coworkers work nights and weekends. It’s not uncommon to see people starting around 8-9am and logging off around 7pm for a regular schedule. And then pressure hits and weekend work starts showing up too.

It’s gonna vary so much by your place of employment. I’m gonna guess you don’t do any project work or significant projects and management is entirely disengaged.


You and your co-workers are working too hard and need to press back against it.


"working too hard" is an individual decision, and these people have lots of job mobility - they have opted in to this particular circumstance.


why


Why so much work? Understaffed orgs and exceedingly high expectations of engineers. A lot of management has no social life or life outside of work - so they expect the same of their subordinates.

I’ll move on after a year or two. I just wanted some name brand recognition and to give the company a chance. I was tired of going with unknown places.


Not why so much work, but rather why do you put up with it?

I've never understood how companies like this can still exist in today's job environment. Does everyone get paid significantly more than market rate or have equity doubling in value every quarter or something?


The parent said how. I know a company where people are forced to come on weekend, get underpaid, and work on patents filed under someone else’s name. Just because it’s a well-known company and looks good on the CV.


From my experience it isn't companies like Google or Microsoft running these tech sweatshops. Large prestigious companies generally have great work life balance and take care of their employees. It's the bottom tier ones who get away with hiring desperate talent and exploit them.


I will say - people here are not chronically underpaid. It depends a lot on how the stock is doing but a lot of people here are from pre-IPO. So, it's not uncommon for people to have a 7-figure TC. The company basically 50x'd its valuation in <3 years. So, even if you got a kinda not-so-great amount of stock back when you joined, you still are getting a ton of money.

For newer candidates such as myself who joined post-IPO, the pay is definitely nowhere near competitive for the level of effort. I'm making a good amount but I'd say it's closer to average-slightly-below for FAANG but it's also my first big name. I didn't have a competing offer to push that could push them to the top of the band or into the next level. My offer was for about $360K recurring TC (I have ~8years of xp). Now, it's worth like $330K because the market went down so hard but just a month ago... It was $450K. So, the stock is very tumultuous and frustrating to deal with. I wish I had joined a Google or something because my last company IPO'd but the stock tanked 75% since IPO. I've held the entire time and am wondering if this shit is gonna be a penny-stock now. I went from thinking I could buy a home in the next year or two to "well, I'm fucking nowhere and I spent nearly $100k on those options. FML."

A lot of my peers have been here before IPO and are putting up with the shit because they make so much money. A lot of people here are making crazy money even if they joined just a month before IPO because it 3x+ just before they listed. The people who are post-IPO (like myself) tend to put up with it because it's their first big name - although blind leads me to believe a lot of people quit... Just not from my immediate team. We'll see. I'm surprised no one has left on my team in the 6 months I've been here.

I'm in SV, obviously.


Keep in mind not everything is in SV.


> There are literally days in which the only time I spend on my job is the few minutes it takes to attend the morning stand-up. Then I successfully bullshit my way through our next stand-up to hide my lack of production.

This is the key point that makes your situation problematic: You're actively deceiving your manager and peers.

Reasonable managers don't expect everyone to be in crunch mode all of the time, to produce 8 hours of work in an 8 hour day, or even to be productive every single day they were.

But they do expect you to make an honest effort, and to tell the truth about your progress. If you're going out of your way to feed them information to make yourself seem productive while doing as little as possible, that's a problem. It will catch up with you eventually, one way or another. They either know already, or they will know once they start looking more closely. Usually the people who aren't working are at the top of the list to be cut when layoffs are necessary.


I have to confess, it really, really makes me pissed when other people on the team aren't putting forth the same effort. I'd say I work 40 hours a week at least, counting real actual work, and I'm on a project right now where I think the other person is dragging their feet and making almost zero progress, not communicating, not asking for help, etc. A large part of that is because this person is a little more junior, but I get the feeling they're hiding and not doing what they should be.