Comment by brutus1213 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brutus1213 | Hacker News Reader

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I get a bit annoyed hearing about the 2 hour a day folks. They are probably forcing their peers or managers to take on more work than is their fair share.

I'm in management now .. as an engineer, I most certainly used to work over 8 hours a day (probably 12 hours, counting all the time I spent studying to keep up). Now, in management, the hours have actually gone up .. I now have to worry about things my team is doing 24/7, have to deal with a ton of human, infra and organizational issues, being open to meetings at any hour of the day, in addition to staying technical (my direct code contributions have gone down but my engagement with codebase and overall non-code issues has skyrocketed). I am in a large company and do AI research (so work and what I enjoy are the same, and doing cutting edge research is pretty much as hard as it gets).

Point is .. when people boast how little work they do, it makes me wonder who is the poor slob who gets to do extra. We are software professionals, and professionals need to act by a certain creed and abide by an unspoken ethic. Maybe this is my immigrant roots showing .. as I grew up, my folks always taught me to make sure I'm worth the salt I'm paid. I certainly have had periods where I was in a funk (especially early on in my career) but when a job just didn't gel, I left and tried to find something more engaging.

I certainly don't feel I can coast for a few months. Who the heck are these companies that are so relaxed. Pls don't say FANG (or MANG or whatever). People I know at the senior level work really hard too (from my peers). It could be certain areas of a large company, and it could be for some short period where people can get away with coasting. I don't think this is really sustainable with how competitive today's software landscape is.

Maybe you need to challenge where your values come from and who they benefit. There is nothing so urgent that people need to work 12 hours a day. There is (for most people) nothing that you will value from your time of working hard for a tech company in the future, except perhaps money. If you turn your argument around, people who want a good work-life balance hate people like you because you are willing to die for your corporate master and contribute to the dog-eat-dog mentality that wrecks people. There is something reasonable between 2 hours a day and 12.

But if the output of a company is kept consistent, one worker doing less must imply that somebody else is pulling the weight more.

work-life balance should not come at the expense of some of the workers pulling more than their fair share of work.

What if the person has more skills to where it takes less time to perform the same task?

I.E a junior that is just learning terraform vs. a staff that has used it 3 years?

I get a bit annoyed hearing about the 2 hour a day folks. They are probably forcing their peers or managers to take on more work than is their fair share.

Maybe not. In the corporate world, 90% of work is work that was generated by other work. Some people are really good at not causing work for other people.

Pls don't say FANG (or MANG or whatever). People I know at the senior level work really hard too (from my peers).

They spend a lot of hours but they don't really accomplish that much. The thing about FAANGs is that above the $250k line, it's all politics. If you're any good at the game, you figure out that you'll always do better using political position to take credit for someone else's work than taking the chance of your own labor (how much can one person do?) being appreciated.

Always get a team if you can: it diversifies your apparent contribution to the company.

I think you're reading the 2 hour a day thing the wrong way. It typically refers to actual work time, meaning...doing something. The length of your work day minus all the collaboration.

It's common for office workers to have at least 3-4 meetings a day which basically destroys the day already. You'll have only tiny snippets of productive time left, which are then again interrupted by email and chat. It would actually be a challenge to come to 2 hours of productive time in such a day.

It used to be that only managers were stuck in meetings and email all day long but now the same applies to office workers that actually need to produce something. A meeting is not a product, your customers didn't order a meeting and you can't ship a meeting.

Anyway, thanks for picking up the slack. I'm back to playing flappy bird now.

> I get a bit annoyed hearing about the 2 hour a day folks. They are probably forcing their peers or managers to take on more work than is their fair share.

It's either this, or they have some unrealistically narrow view of what constitutes work.

I've worked with engineers who were concerned they only "worked" 4 hours per day because they only counted time spent writing code in the code editor. Had to remind a lot of people that communication, meetings, and other job-related activities are also work.

But there are also a lot of people who do the 2 hour per day thing by shifting as much work as possible to other people. They might do bursts of intense work when they know other people are watching, but it's back to the minimum as soon as they're not being closely observed any more.

The other half of that equation is to change jobs frequently. It can take a year or longer for some managers or companies to catch on to employees who aren't really doing much work, at which point the person can easily move on to the next job and start the process again.

If you are constantly working 24/7 despite not getting adequately compensated for it, that's on you. Why blame your colleagues and not upper management?

Right? I really appreciate OPs work ethic, but he/she should not project their inability to manage their time or their team onto others.

I will say it. FANG/MANG is as easy as it gets. These companies hire people so their competitors don't, not that the people hired are expected to generate tons and tons of value. It is easy to put these companies on a pedestal, but the more you look into it the more you learn that these companies are HUGE and that finding a team that only requires you to work 2 hours a day is pretty normal. This at least has been my experience and the experience of many friends as senior+ in FANGMA

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