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Comment by kelp | Hacker News Reader

I think this is the better advice here, and fits with some comments I left elsewhere in this thread about people I know working at MSFT and putting in only a handful of hours a week and still getting raises and promotions.

It's easy to do little when everyone expects everything to take forever because of how heavy the processes are in the organization.

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It's not necessarily just processes.

There are also more experienced people who are just very good at certain types of tasks with the result that they can bang something out in a half day and everyone else assumes they must have spent a week on it. They're still generally available the rest of the time but they can produce what's considered high quality work in very little time. Of course, one needs to have that skillset and it helps to be mostly autonomous.

Working in govt is the way to achieve what OP wants. Especially in positions that are unionized. We call these people "lifers" or "gamers". They know how to game the union seniority system. Most of these people know how to phone in their work just enough to not get noticed and hop from one seniority-based position to the next before anyone catches on. By the time they've put in their 25 years, you've got a guy who majored in chemistry getting ready to retire from a senior software dev position. You can't fire them because they're union and it would take 6 months to a year to get all the documentation in order. And by that time, they've transferred to a different position.

Is THIS why Satya Nadella is so keen on getting everyone back in their cubicles. It makes everyone look like they're banging on their keyboards, nevermind that they're sending pictures on .... Teams? Can you do that on Teams? We use Slack. I was curious why he thought, "So much work gets done around the watercooler." I just thought he was a holdover from an earlier time. He's a smart dude, I'm not denying that. And I'm not young, but I'm not really working, usually, when I'm chatting in the snack room.

Maybe I'm too low level, though. That's a real possibility. I 100% admit that.

I think what he meant was that by being together and discussing problems we solve them a lot faster. This is absolutely true in my job. If I didn't know my team loved being remote so much, we would have been back in the office as soon as was safe.

pretty sure it's not safe yet. unless you're in israel/new zealand.

Yes, we do solve problems faster if we're around the watercooler, but we're also miserable, and wondering how to escape. Be careful what you wish for.

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