Ask HN: Make something of the free time at work
In my job there are a lot of times where I am not doing much and slacking off. Unfortunately there is a lot of control due to security and I cannot do much on my computer (no install of software, a lot of websites are blocked by the firewall etc.).
For instance, I would like to learn a new technology, or consolidate one (for instance Node.js) that I know, but I can't because I cannot install Node.js, ore reach npm to install packages.
How can I use the time that I have available during work? What would you do?
Books are not a good idea because I don't think it would seems good to bring a book and study it at my desk
EDIT: I work in Banking and I cannot bring anything with me (such as my personal laptop). This means I am constricted to the use of my work PC. Something like repl could work, but for instance, that is not reachable for me
85 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadIt's funny how culturally, we paint business practices of optimizing profit as picturesque but paint labor optimizing their profit as a sin.
It's really all a matter of perspective and somewhere, most the labor force was convinced to take the capital owners perspective.
Organised labour movements are supposed to be about what is fair.
A fair wage for fair safe work.
Unfortunately, the economic system we've adopted tends to work quite well at finding extremes and many of the corrective measures to flatten these out are failing more and more.
As little as possible within some allotted time, or spending as little time as possible?
The first one sounds miserable.
If other personal resources make more sense (your car/fuel, building materials you obtain, existing code bases you already created, etc.). You should be optimizing for yourself.
This gets a real ugly name applied to it as well, the label of "time thief". How dark is that?
Alternative: use a RPi with your monitor/mouse/keyboard.
RasPi is also used.
2. make use of Instapaper. save a bunch of articles to read into Instapaper the previous night, come to work and read them via Instapaper.
That said, you can go to LeetCode (or just email yourself screenshots of the problems) and then work on the solutions in Notepad++. Email those solutions to yourself and then, when you get home, you can submit those solutions for credit.
Make good use of the time. Talk to your manager about things you could be doing that would improve the codebase you work on and enable you to learn new things. Better yet, make some suggestions.
No.
Pretty sure there is a codepen like site for nodejs too. Find it, build something.
You could learn some new tech/patterns on there including NodeJS (https://repl.it/languages/nodejs)
EDIT: Tried, blocked (failed to connect)
Your team lead might not have realised that the workload is becoming sporadic.
Speak to them, explain the situation, and ask if there are other smaller tasks you could use to fill in the gaps.
If it "wouldn't seem good to bring a book to study at my desk", then it's probably not a good idea to do effectively the same thing on the computer either.
I witnessed a similar scenario with a former colleague.
He would have 2ish hours of dead time each day after submitting his daily/weekly/monthly reports to different departments (he was a data analyst). He wouldn't have anything to do until the different dept. heads replied with more work based on the last report.
He asked our manager what else he could help with (on multiple occasions) and came off as super driven/motivated from my read of the situation.
I had similar dead spots and... well.. STFU. I would browse reddit/hackernews or work on a personal blog post. At the time, I felt like a dick for not doing the same and asking for more work. My rationale was "I get paid to do X, I have done X, it is not my job to load myself up with work if I can do X in 6 hours instead of 8".
Anyway, in January a few years ago, we had a restructuring (I still lol at that word every time) and several jobs were "shifted" from fulltime to partime/casual. My colleague had his position "re-evaluated" to 18 hours per week from 40. He could either accept the new role or take a redundancy package.
He took the redundancy package.
I kept my 40 hour per week job and ended up with a slight COL raise.
I chalk this up to a real life example of "what's good for the whole isn't always good for the individual".
Define "clean" as you will for your work context.
You could also become really, really good at using a text editor, it becomes a bit of a game and it's going to be useful for as long as you are planning to type.
These constitute a rabbit hole of extremely interesting documentation. They will help you improve as a developer, and more importantly broaden your horizons beyond what you ever thought was possible. Enjoy!
http://glitch.com/
It will give you an IDE and a VM to build projects, and a big community to share/get inspired by. It's sort of like MySpace for web apps.
You should go to your supervisor and tell them you either need more work, or would like to establish formal career growth goals.
If your supervisor is not receptive to this, it's time to start looking for another job.
The above assumes you're in a professional role. If you're a teller/clerk and there just aren't customers, I'm not sure - the bank very well may want you sitting idle and available for the next customer. Of course, if that's true, you probably need to look for a new job because they're over-staffed.
It is up to them to look for more work if this is what they want. There is no obligation here, management runs the company as they see fit.
So the question is very reasonable : once work is done and since they apparently have to be physically present, how can they manage this free time.
On a typical day I would walk in around 9:30, ask my supervisor if there is anything to do, usually the answer was no, back to my desk and sit around, leave around 3:30.
Computers were completely locked down, I did not even have Internet access. And yes, it was completely miserable. I read a lot of e-books that summer.