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Comment by thenerdhead | Hacker News Reader

The smartest people in the workforce know this.

They aren't useless. They are perfectly capable of accomplishment, but know that taking on more responsibilities or assisting will make them miserable in the long run.

I've seen this with some of the highest ranking & paid engineers/PMs in big tech. I usually give the benefit of the doubt that everybody:

1. Has a sense of autonomy 2. Has a sense of competence 3. Has a sense of relatedness

If at anytime any of these are put into jeopardy, a wonderful tactic is to "be useless". There's many bullshit jobs out there that use you and your abilities for the bullshit job holder's personal gain. This is one of the best tactics to take a stand for yourself in corporate America.

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I see a lot of these comments on Reddit and HN recently, but I have no idea where all of these people are working that doesn't do any sort of performance management. Outside of maybe the biggest, oldest tech companies that have so much profit that nothing matters, companies really don't enjoy burning cash on useless headcount. It's hard to tell if they're even actually practicing what they preach, or if it's just a sort of escapist fiction.

At every reasonably well-run company I've worked for, the "useless" people were steadily sifted out of the company, either through PIPs or routine layoffs.

That doesn't mean you had to monotonically increase your workload forever until you were crushed, but it did mean that management routinely did basic performance management and would look deeper into people or groups that weren't really doing anything (including maintenance, upkeep, and routine tasks that don't necessarily involve new features).

Another common technique is to periodically restructure and shuffle teams around. It may be easy for someone to wiggle into a position where they can be useless while fooling their manager, but it's much harder to maintain this state across multiple teams and even divisions.

I don't get it either, I actually enjoy getting things done and being responsible (to the extent that is reasonable) as well. Doing nothing makes me feel like a piece of shit. Not because of some kind of societal conditioning about work being inherently virtuous, I think, but because it feels good to contribute to something larger than yourself, and I think we should endeavor to contribute to society proportionately to what we receive from it.

This phenomenon of bragging about laziness or how little you work smells similar to the "I barely got any sleep last night" of yore.

Considering how much we take from society (you can look at your pay as that, or the fact we reap the benefits of centuries of technological progress, or that we have extremely physically easy jobs compared to the majority of the world's population), I think we have a duty to contribute back. It's pretty disappointing to see people in the software industry advocate for laziness considering how plum our jobs are and how much potential we have to contribute to the world.

The late Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman famously told an interviewer that his strategy for minimizing committee work was to do it really poorly so that people would eventually stop asking him for help.

"To do the kind of real good physics work, you do need absolutely solid lengths of time. When you’re putting ideas together which are vague and hard to remember … it needs a lot of concentration—solid time to think. If you’ve got a job administrating anything, say, then you don’t have the solid time. So I have invented another myth for myself—that I’m irresponsible. “I am actively irresponsible,” I tell everybody. “I don’t do anything.” If anybody asks me to be on a committee to take care of admissions … “No! I’m irresponsible. … I don’t give a damn about the students!” Of course I give a damn about the students, but I know that somebody else’ll do it! … because I like to do physics, and I want to see if I can still do it. I am selfish, okay? I want to do my physics."

I read a pretty interesting commentary on Canadian culture, not sure if it's more widespread but it seemed pretty apt: "If you ask a Canadian how hard they're working, you'll get one of two responses: 'Hardly working', or a long complaint about how hard they're working. There seems to be no correlation between the answer you get and how hard the person actually works".

I think Bill Gates (and Von Moltke before him) brought to public consciousness the value smart, lazy people bring to an organisation, and as a result, some people make a point of appearing lazy, either as a 'full disclosure' signal or to indicate the kind of role they aspire to.

you working hard or hardly working buddy?

If you can get the job done in 20 hours but you are supposed to work 40, I think that’s more of the mindset the parent comment is talking about. Doing the minimum to keep your job and staying a good employee, while not overworking.

If you always give 100% you’ll burn out, and can never give more during a crises. If you default to 60%, you can burst to 100% when needed.

If you're a 10X slacker you can default to 6%.

>At every reasonably well-run company I've worked for, the "useless" people were steadily sifted out of the company, either through PIPs or routine layoffs.

That's not even close to reality. Some totally incompetent or disinterested would get the boot, yes. Often with people doing most of the hard work but under-appreciated and not into self-promotion.

But the more useless (or even harmful) that are good into office politics and self-promotion are usually the ones promoted.

As for the regular useless (detached) as implied by the article, the kind of performance theater metrics you've mention are the easiest to game.

I don't think this is about performance. At least I wasn't referring to it in my comment.

I was just saying that top performers who I respect are very skilled at "being useless" when they need to maintain their autonomy, competence, and relatedness within their career in big tech.

I don't know what you're seeing on reddit / hn, but there's also plenty of people talking about automating their "useless"/bullshit job and feeling guilty about it.

There’s also a lot of people with skills and very useful jobs, but who don’t need 40hrs/week to add a ton of value. Playing dumb for all the BS that could end up assigned to you is a reverse-performance-management hack that keeps your free and clear to put in the hours that really matter, when they really matter.

I love CAR - Competence, Autonomy, Relatedness :D

These three I think are the pillars to a happy job!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory#Basi...

Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose were the three job satisfaction pillars in a popular RSAnimate whiteboard presentation video a few years ago... and it resonated with me (while feeling incomplete, given it omits social / interpersonal factors).

EDIT: Found the video: https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc

Very interesting! I've also seen this in a number of books about raising kids. The Self-Driven Child recently was the one on my mind.

Yep. Definitely. Especially now, as the pandemic rages on, why should one take on extra responsibility when they're stressed out? You'll wind up with a bunch of extra meetings, presentations, and bullshit you are able to do, but don't want to. Why bother? Some days I can barely get out of bed.

Another tactic that works wonderfully is pacing yourself. For engineers, if you finish your "sprint goals" early, you run the risk getting assigned more. So don't do that. Use that free time. Your work still gets done on time and everyone's happy.

Another, maybe even more simple approach is: the art of saying no.

Corporate life today has this idea that we should always be doing more. Side hassles, taking on more. Putting in extra hours, etc.

There's beauty in knowing when enough is enough and stepping back and making time for yourself.

I've always called that "learning to disappoint people". If you want to be a good and productive engineer, you have to defend your time and isolate yourself. You can't let anyone else be in control of your agenda. That means not answering to people promptly (or at all), saying no to projects, etc.

I don’t know if “side hassles” was intentional or not, but it’s genius either way.

> Corporate life today has this idea that we should always be doing more.

I too have this idea that corporations should always be doing more. Paying employees more. Offering more benefits. Paying more taxes.

It's definitely part of the art. You have to put yourself first before other people's priorities.

I'm having a hard time understanding your comment. Are you saying high performers will feign uselessness to get out of undesirable work or commitments? Or that being useless is a psychological defense mechanism for corporate survival? Something else?

All of the above.

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