Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work
For as long as I've been working professionally, I have been slacking around a lot of the time, reading blog posts, HN, often even reading (tech, biz-related) books and just doing the bare minimum for appearances sake but no one seems to notice. In the office I book a booth to work in to have some peace & quiet and have a couple of code commits prepared to not arouse suspicion. In companies with perf reviews I get some useful feedback here and there but most of the time it's positive, people love to work with me, I do get stuff done if I have to, but as soon as I can get away with doing close to nothing, I'll take the chance. I don't think I'm blocking other teams and I don't think I'm preventing my own team from having accomplishments and often people refer to me as being either partially or mostly responsible for shipping something because I manage to have a clear mind and focus when things get close to a deadline.
If I am motivated and the task/project/product is fun I throw myself into it but that isn't sustainable. I've read a few of these posts from people at FAANG doing almost the same so I don't really feel bad about it. I'm just wondering how wide-spread this is. One of my theories for this behavior is that this is related to 40+ hour work weeks. I think I'd be able to get my devopsy work done in ~3 hours/day if I manage my time well and schedule most meetings on Mondays.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 410 ms ] threadDo not worry about it. It's not your job to worry about it.
If you want to work more, then get paid more.
1. Do you find yourself avoiding work you don't want to do outside of the job? 2. Was this a problem in school? 3. Have you talked to a doctor about this?
Number three is the most important. I have ADHD, and it sounds like you might too. Go see your doctor as soon as you can. Once you know what's going on, you can make yourself a plan to improve yourself.
We're humans and especially those of us with curious brains, we get bored easily doing the same unstimulating tasks over and over again
Maybe it's fine if he does what he needs to do in 3 hours and slacks off for the rest of the day, if it's enjoyable to work with him, and does what he is paid for, I only feel like this 'work yourself to the bone to make someone else rich' culture has created all this pent up guilt
Seeing a doctor and getting medication (I don't take amphetamines) has been super helpful for everything from feeling better about my work and being more productive, to handling day-to-day life. The biggest improvement is just in conversation/meetings/engaging with people, where I don't find myself wondering about bizarre hypotheticals instead of paying attention to the topic at hand.
What often occurs in conversations in my life is... We chat, we disagree on a random point and the second we start arguing it, my brain brute forces every single path possible. What if they say this? Then what if I say that, or this, or even that? And it keeps on branching out.
Eventually I come back to the chat, after what seemed like an eternity but was in fact a couple of seconds, and I am bored and dismissive because I know where the arguements will lead, and they do go one of these paths 99% of the time.
To me this just sounds like intelligence. Not a disorder.
I think the rise of ADHD as a common impediment correlates very strongly with a society that has few good career options for people who have these neurological variations.
Some ideas:
* Can you do a rotation on a different team? (For example, if you're devops, you might learn a lot on SRE/ops.)
* Can you start side projects at work, for work?
[0] https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver...
https://imgur.com/qdSltlM
The left axis is years of seniority.
This isn't a great study in general, because, realistically, there isn't a large range for the work hours. And the majority of them were grouped into one bucket => 4-8 hours.
That's the biggest problem.
The second biggest is that - presumably - not all of the respondents work 5 days per week.
The third is that - without a large sample size - your margin of error is going to cover a pretty big chunk. If your finding is 6 hours +/- 1 hour, 95% CI - that's pretty unsurprising.
You need a large sample size because there are ~115M workers in the US. What are the odds these 104 people are a decent representation of all ~115M voters??
If there's only 10,000 people this applies to that read HackerNews, then - if you fixed everything else - your CI wouldn't be super low.
When you are a developer, and you only count the minutes that you are at your computer coding, I highly doubt many would reach 3 hours per day.
You probably get a few weeks of “real 8 hours” before your best employees find somewhere less oppressive to work and leave your micromanaged company.
Your bad employees will stay because they don’t have better options.
I was the best performing engineer at that company, handling a contract that was worth >20% of their revenue by myself. They loved me at that company, and I wish I had been honest with the feedback I gave during my exit interview, but I just couldn’t tell the guy my issues were with him.
Looking back at it, I understand why I quit, but back then I couldn’t even put it in words. Thankfully, I managed to keep all the friendships I made, including my ex boss.
If you're my boss, and I'm reading your question, will the average boss communicate clearly?
I simply can't sit and focus working for 8 hours a day. Especially if its hard. I'm not a robot.
If I thought you were sitting there just to watch me to try and force me to work more, I'd leave.
I think for me doing dev, 4 hours is about the max before the quality of work drops off significantly.
From my perspective, as long as you're not holding anyone back, I think you're doing a decent job of modulating your energy for moments when you need it, as opposed to marathon running all day long.
I tried doing the stretches, but it ended up just creating scar tissue (wouldn't recommend).
Plus, those other things you're doing sound like they overall, in the long-term, probably give you a wider range of knowledge, improving your usefulness.
Just wanted to add a voice against that sort of Taylorism perspective on work.
What this means is that often when crunch time hits, I've got excess capacity I can use to help "row the boat" (or maybe bail out water from leaks?). Excess capacity is extremely valuable as lots of folks are really bad at time estimation, so having some more senior "floaters" around can really help get projects completed.
Excess capacity is also useful for longer-term efforts. You need at least a few folks who can get out of the low-level crunch mindset and figure out what needs to be done for sustainability of efforts, or else you just end up in mega-crunch forever.
People ended up doing most work towards end of sprint and Friday would usually be really busy - basically he always had to be present and management would offload priority stuff to him since he was done. So he'd end up busting his ass all week. Eventually he got tired and reverted to standard schedule - but this meant his relative performance dropped - I saw him get singled out in a review for performance drop (and not a lot of people noticed when he was going above the norm).
I don't think its better for the company as you suggest. It is possible to use good sense of prioritization and still have 'extra capacity'.
I think that it's really difficult for a lot of people to see the value they're providing outside of the proper business tasks they're assigned, and once there are tasks assigned to fill up all the time, everything breaks down. It doesn't matter if your task is something as irrelevant as "provide documentation regarding this vendor relationship," once it's on the board it can't be dropped and so you're no longer available to try the new tool people are looking for feedback on, or whatever.
The other thing doesn't even have to be high-priority, but if you're at a large enough organization, there are lots of things you'll realize can't be done well because too many people need to be involved, even if it's just a little bit of time. My org can't make any movement on, for example, API clients or API documentation because there are lots of different needs, but by the time you've gotten through the initial conversations it's a six months later, because people weren't available. There are many efforts we can't get done because that effort isn't priority for the team's involved, but requires time from people on those teams.
Ideally, of course, we try to minimize those things. But I've yet to hear of a sizeable org that has none of those kinds of things.
Working in a retail store/break-fix repair/MSP environment, for a small business in a small city, this is absolutely the case. There is nothing more frustrating than having three customer projects on your plate, all of which are important (think "the email server is down"), and then the doorbell or phone rings and you end up spending half an hour walking an old lady through resetting her facebook password. It's an absolutely massive productivity killer, as well as making the day feel longer.
More employees would be the normal solution, but that's not possible here (we've had more in the past, it wasn't financially viable, apparently). Unless of course they started paying commission based on what people actually got done instead of a regular wage, which I'm not a fan of. (Though to be fair, if we did switch to that, the one employee who barely does anything would either get his ass in gear, or leave, so win/win maybe?)
This was expected for the reasons you noted. When there was an emergency someone needed to be idle in the first place so they could immediately respond fully focused.
I played a lot of Civilization 3 and Quake 3 on company time.
So while day to day there might not be immediate obvious work, much like a fire fighter or life guard; if the servers go down or coworkers leave there needs to be some ballast that can steer the ship.
That said, if you don't actually know much of the companies code base other than stuff you've directly written, you could very much be providing only perceived insurance versus actual insurance.
I feel like I am in a similar boat to OP. Often feeling like my regular work doesn't take up a full week and not trying to fill up every bit of that 40 hours. I also spend a lot of my time "poking around" and not doing my own work. Seeing what others are working on, learning random things that may or may not be applicable to my job. But performance reviews come around with words like "very responsive!" and "always knows what's going on in the program and can jump in to any project"
My solution was to just switch jobs and take a pay cut. I work a lot less now (with the same kind of arrangement), but I feel a lot less guilty about spending chunks of my time on my own thing.
Relevant pg essay, under the 'working harder' heading: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html?viewfullsite=1
Before that I had worked at least 6 hours a day. And I assumed that to be "right" i should be working at least 8.
From the feedback I got, I wasn't much more productive working more hours. At first I felt guilty and then I realized in my career that working harder isn't going to make any difference in terms of $, career security, or opportunity to work on cooler stuff. So, I just upped my anxiety meds and got back to working 2 hours a day.
I've had this feedback too and I feel like it is likely not true. Really what it is is that your managers aren't paying much attention to your output and have sort of written you off for promotions, raises, etc.
This was feedback I got a couple of months after I had been working my ass off trying to impress management and then a couple of weeks before getting fired. C'est la vie.
This is the messaging I got every single quarter: """David, your work is very good. All the people you work with say you're great and it's clear you are adding value, but you need to spend more time finding metrics that demonstrate that value and improving those. Also, if you want to get higher ratings, here is a whole bunch of extra management work and document-writing to do. If you do that, we can make a case for Exceeds and eventually a promotion"""
What I concluded was that I was better as an L6 than an L7 (L7 at google has a lot more responsibility, and far fewer job opptys) and I knew the value I was adding to the company without having to spend weeks cooking up metrics dashboards.
At google you're not going to be fired, if you're an FTE, with anything less than 6-9 months of feedback and runway to get back in the air (few exceptions)
I have always had trouble with this type of nebulous goal.
For example, in my case (sending machines causing invisible data corruption to be replaced) I could have been promoted by doing the following:
1) Finding a metric that correlated with the user pain that I was fixing. In this case, it would be something like "number of jobs that die with a NaN in 1 hour" while running an A/B test (half the jobs in the fleet have some feature enabled) and showign that, with significance, our fix reduces the number of NaNs significantly. (data driven)
2) Demonstrate that the NaN rate corresponds to user productivity (this could be # of papers published, # of models trained per hour, whatever) and that high NaN rates really did have an effect (impact)
3) filter the data carefully, because the vast majority of nans are actually caused by user error, not silent data corruption (this was the actual hard part and nobody has a better solution than "run a determinstic calculation on 8 cores and use majority vote to find the baddie")
Run the above for 6 months, show it to all the execs in your division, get a few people from Search, Ads, YouTube or Research/DeepMind to say it increased revenue or decreased costs by 10%. Bingo: promotion, along wiht a full time job maintaining a dashboard with constant requests to add new features, fix code broken by other teams, and making even more presentations to execs on how dysfunctional it is.
Or, I could just focus on fixing the machines, hearing anecdotally from the ML Whisperers that it's working again, and go back to surfing hacker news and getting another 100 karma in a day.
How does that work? Can they genuinely tell that this is the case or do they just give an anecdote or rubber stamp?
I’m sure there are dozens/hundreds of other experiments that are going on too. How do you establish the causality at that scale?
This generalizes: often people want a promotion because it's the "next thing", but in many cases once you are mid career a promotion can make you pretty unhappy. Having a clear idea of how the work & responsibility will differ, and whether it is what you actually want.
"Do you know the Peter Principle? It's the idea that you get promoted when you do good work, but at some point, you'll be promoted to a level you're not competent to do, and get stuck there, or fired." He then expanded: "In this case, I perceive that the additional responsibilities and stress associated with a higher level position or management would make me unhappy, and I don't truly need the extra money."
For nearly my entire career I have pursued advancement with the utmost drive. Originally that was going to be grad school->postdoc->professor at major research university->make amazing discovery but at some point I realized that I was only ever going to be a professor as a minor reesarch university (and spend hundred+ hours a week treading water) and switched to the postdoc->software engineer->tech lead path. It wasn't until I did the Tech Lead role, got promoted to L6 and started to think about being a manager or getting to L7 (or getting Exceeds at L6) that I started to realize the truth of what my dad was saying. I've reached a level I'm perfecetly comfortable at, and could stay here until retirement. I was mainly chasing the advancement for ego and money reasons.
I relate with this a lot. Maybe it is that I burned out or its my Age (40 later this year), but after being 8 years churning along in startup leadership (as tech lead and then Head of Engineering in two startups), now I accepted an "Architect" role which does not have all the craziness of being "in charge" of the whole system all the time, and "herding cats" managing people. I am SO HAPPY now I cannot believe I landed this role, and I hope I keep it for some time.
I think the only time I am going to "run very fast" is if I make my own company. Which won't be VC backed (in all these years in VC land, I've not liked the VC model).
I don't get it, but if I feel like I'm working hard I now take it as a very serious alarm bell. Some of my best feedback has come when I was starting to get nervous because I felt like I was hardly doing anything.
Sometimes the person who is fixing problems is seen as better than the one who is not - it's hard for people to tell which challenges are self inflicted.
Sometimes I think the way to get noticed is to spend money. Someone always has to approve your purchases so you get noticed. Sitting in your cube hammering out code, or design, or documentation isnt visible.
These things aren't optimal ways to measure effectiveness, but I think they all come into play.
With negative I meant that you might spend 1h to do something that will then take more than 1h to be debugged/reworked/discussed and ultimately removed.
Or something that cause breakage that could be avoided.
You need to be well rested and clear-minded to foresee a problem and take the right decision, especially around software.
At least in FAANG, you mostly get paid for what your employer thinks you can do, in theory. Not for what you actually do, in practice.
If you're only self-interested - you're much better off spending all your time learning valuable skills and checking boxes to get promoted, and then job hopping - and doing nothing valuable for your employer again and again...
You're not going to move up if you spend all your burning through your backlog of work items, and you'll get next-to-no monetary reward or meaningful recognition.
127.0.0.1 arstechnica.com
#127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com
127.0.0.1 reuters.com
127.0.0.1 techcrunch.com
127.0.0.1 slashdot.org
127.0.0.1 www.youtube.com
127.0.0.1 youtube.com
Maybe the theory you should post instead of an excuse is that you are lazy and the skill you perfected is hiding that you don't do anything.
There is no shame or immorality in occasionally bringing down output enough that you sometimes find where that crossover point is. Or, surprisingly, perhaps you find there _is_ no crossover point?
At any rate, stick with it while you can stay sane, then jump ship to something new and exciting. Done.
But: Turning it back to you: how is that working out for you? The title of your post — "feeling guilty" — may be telling you something. Either do it and enjoy it or don't.
You can be a genius "slacker". If that's fulfilling for you, great. Otherwise, focus on what you want to be getting out of the situation and not on the guilt.
That five hours a day of paid time off is the profit you earn for doing a good job. It is up to you to efficiently reallocate those resources as demanded by CAPITALISM because the company is unable to.
Yes, I currently for the lack of a better definition coast at my job. I work maybe 20hrs a week and get paid the full degree, increased hours a bit to still get a raise after my last review.
This is okay to heal and get back to normal, but will undoubtably stagnate your motivation, mental health and career advancement long-term.
I'm probably going to leave this current job (since perception of my velocity is now set in stone) take a 2-3 weeks off and then start interviewing for a job with better pay.
The way I see it, I'm just gaming the system to maximize my efficiency with a large bias for recovering my mental health. This is why companies are scared of work from home long term ;)
If you have any interest, consider trying management? A lazy manager is a good manager, in the same long-term sense as a lazy developer is a good developer. Knowing what the real priorities are despite the bluster is a key manager skill. Nothing more wasteful than putting in tons of hours on a project that sounds important but ultimately isn't to the stakeholders that run the company, and the best managers have an incredible ability to read between the lines and predict what will end up mattering, and prioritize their own teams work accordingly.