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Comment by ineptech | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

So he would retire once his kids were grown & out of the house.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Now that i work from home, i go to the gym, do chores, take naps, cook meals etc

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

>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.

>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!"

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

What is a better way for the company to give you increases?

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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_.

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.

(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.

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%.

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.

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.

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.

Sure, but you could also find a job you like better and embrace FIRE doing that.

> 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.

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.

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