Ask HN: Do you all have enough to do at work? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you all have enough to do at work?

34 pointsedmcnulty10146 comments

I work at a big company have been there 6 months and really don't seem to have a ton to do at work. My co-workers who have all been there many years seem to have a bunch of work to do. I feel like Im supposed to be schmoozing with them for work to do which I've never had to do before at other jobsc and I'm not really good at. I keep mentioning at standups that I have bandwidth available but never get any more work to do. Is this like a tactic to drive someone out or just kind of a normal ebb and flow? It feels weird.

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Having worked at startups all my life, there's infinite work for us. At the very least, lots of tech debt and insufficient test coverage. On FE, there's also supporting a wider range of devices.

And then things that could be done better (reactive programming, declarative UI, etc).

Then finding weaknesses in the code, documenting them, educating the team. For example, we're not handling enough error codes properly like no bandwidth and when certain endpoints are down, users tend to panic. Or sometimes, certain endpoints should be combined for performance.

It could be putting down more logs, benchmarking performance, integrating analytics into the sales funnel, monitoring user frustration.

No offense, but I think asking around for things to do is a fairly junior attitude. The more experienced ones usually don't look at tickets, but instead start proposing things that can be done.

> No offense, but I think asking around for things to do is a fairly junior attitude. The more experienced ones usually don't look at tickets, but instead start proposing things that can be done.

This might be true in the startup world where product managers have less well defined boundaries on what their role entails. At bigcorp© it’s generally frowned upon to go rogue and start working on stuff at random.

There is a difference between going rogue and taking initiative though! Talk to your manager or set up some 1:1s with people on your team, just saying "I have bandwidth" during standup isn't really the best time.

While talking with your teammates try to ask what projects or tasks they would like to see done but don't have the time. Flaky integration tests? Implement a ticket flow for incoming bug reports? Improve team wiki and system documentation? There's got to be lots of things to do.

And like a previous comment said, waiting around for work is a junior mindset. Take a look around and try to improve the pain points for your team.

Depends on the culture. After working in startups, I joined a bigger company. I burned through the work they gave me & convinced myself that I’d get fired for not having stuff to work on. I started proposing stuff to work on, but the problem was I couldn’t get access to any of the systems. I couldn’t push containers to the container registry. I couldn’t access GitLab admin settings. I couldn’t commit to repos with our Chef recipes. Everything I wanted to improve was in someone else’s sphere of influence, and I had to justify extracurricular commits on my team’s projects because every change had to be review by our understaffed QA team. I finally realized that the expectations of me were really low and that I needed to accept being underutilized or I’d go crazy.

It's moving away from "I have nothing to do. Give me something to do," and towards, "I have nothing to do. Here's what I would like to do..."

It's why there's daily stand ups too, so the entire team can approve or reject.

Perhaps you mean to say don't be a bull in a china shop? That could be a problem. I've worked in large companies and taking initiative is the way to get recognition and build rapport. Company size is irrelevant to people recognizing that you take initiative. Taking on new things doesn't have to involve disrupting others, stepping on people's toes or otherwise doing things that are harmful to other teams. In fact, the larger the company, the more there is to do. People get deep in the complexity and there isn't anyone to repair duct taped stuff that that makes the giant machine run.

When I had not much to do, I'd sharpen up my own skills by building tools for others. I quickly become the guy to go to for tools. Instant credibilty in a Fortune 50 company. Making others' life easier is a quick way to win them over and be your advocate for life. If you do this enough, it compounds and pays dividends in your career.

This. At bigcorp the last thing you want to be doing is showing initiative.

I think it's a balance. I worked at a large company for years and never felt weird picking up coding tasks that weren't strictly in my task list or even immediate responsibility area if I felt they needed to be done, or if I just had an interest in learning more about that thing. To an extent it's probably about having a good overview of what kinds of tasks are "up for the taking" and being able to find the right people to communicate with if unsure.

PM at early stage startups (mostly <50 people when I join, current company is ~25) - this is 100% correct not only for engineering, but also every other department in my experience. I can think of a handful of weeks in my career when things were very light (and a couple of these were when I was doing marketing in my first job and were the weeks after our big conferences ended, so everybody just kind of took a break after working 100+ hour weeks leading up to them).

I think it was great for my career/professional development early on, and I highly recommend early stage startups for people early in their careers for that reason. It's not just that you're doing a bunch of stuff, but you're doing stuff that really matters. There's just way too much important work to give the new person pointless work. You're going to get handed real tasks that affect the business immediately, and if you show you can handle them, you're just going to get increasingly important work.

It's also one of the reasons I got recruited from marketing in my first job to PM in my second - they knew I didn't have PM expertise, but I had done meaningful, visible work, been promoted every year, and had built up domain expertise that was valuable for my second job.

It's not just junior people, either - at my current job, which I started <2 months ago, I was doing doing meaningful work in week two. It's definitely hard work, but it's also really nice that your coworkers appreciate you, because you're immediately picking up stuff that either they were having to do or that just wasn't getting done.

Who do you propose things to? The boss? What if you've proposed numerous things but they've been turned down?

The people who have the most to gain from it. Boss is a blurry concept. Someone who has ownership over the proposal.

If it's some bit of refactoring or performance improvement, then the tech team or engineering manager.

If it's a feature, perhaps the designer or product lead.

If it's marketing related, then the marketing team, mostly to see how they work and whether it affects them as expected.

If it saves money... then not finance, but whoever takes credit for cost cutting.

If you've been turned down, why? Is it not helpful? Unnecessary? Are you misunderstanding the situation? Are you making them look bad? Do they not trust you?

I have no idea.

There’s an infinite amount of work to do especially at a tech company.

I’ve been in your shoes before and when I was more immature I would just browse the Internet and not do much.

However, as I became a more experienced engineer (and currently CTO of my startup), if I ran out of things to do I would think “how can I make this product better?” and just start working on stuff. Or if you can’t figure out what to do on your own, you can always ask your manager or product owners.

From a management and personal growth perspective, you should try to become as autonomous as possible where you provide value even if nobody directly commands you to. This will also grow your skillsets. People don’t like micromanaging other people - ideally you would just be a useful employee without anyone continually asking or assigning you things.

Also just imagine - what if you owned the company? Surely there is something to do that makes it more appealing to the end-users, makes the product better, makes the code quality better, or so forth?

If your issue is you don’t feel incentivized, or are just bored, then maybe look for a new job. If you are just staring into space at work then there are better things you could be doing with your time.

Your talking more about your experience rather than what the OP is saying. The OP is saying that he is not immature and he is not content to browse the internet and that he is trying to be autonomous but since he is not the product owner, it is unlikely that he will find ways to make the product better.

Your message sounds like a spiel from a CTO given to his employee in order to motivate them and it's like you used this opportunity to practice a spiel that you have to give instead of looking at the OP's situation.

One of my points is, nobody has to officially be a product owner to figure out things to do. Everyone should care about the product and can use their imagination to come up with tasks, or like I said, can just ask others.

If he can’t figure out how to be useful, that is also a sign of immaturity (at least in the workforce context), and also points to communication issues and incompetency.

He is 6 months on the job. He doesn't know the proper context of the business and it is normal and expected to be handheld at the start. If he was already at some length in the company, then it would be normal and expected that he would be able to come-up with his own initiatives and ideas on how to improve the product beyond the directions that the superiors give-out.

At this point, he is being frozen-out by his teammates or maybe it is just normal ebb and flow like usually newcomers take some time to be integrated in a big company but it depends.

6 months is a fairly long time in my opinion, plus he can use his spare time to learn more about the business. I will just stand by my opinion that he probably has incentive issues, communication issues, and/or various types of incompetencies or lack of experience, or maybe even a lack of vision of what he wants to do with his life (e.g. doesn’t care about or focus on making super cool/useful stuff). I highly doubt others are “freezing” him out.

6 months is an eternity at an early stage startup and barely touching the surface at a tech giant.

There's no sign that he is lacking in incentive/incompetent/lack of experience, in fact, he mentions that he is actively making it known to his teammates that he has spare time and is not loaded during meetings.

He hasn't mentioned any struggles to deliver or challenges with his past tasks; it just comes across that he is much less busy than his peers and he is wondering why. Maybe he is not liked and that's why I mention freezing him out, I guess one can classify that as a "communication issue" or the other possibility is that it just takes time to be integrated in a big company like other commentators have said.

By freezing-out, I don't mean that his teammates are actively hostile against him but just that maybe they don't trust him yet to give more tasks, just like how any newcomer is treated with some unfamiliarity at the start. I guess that counts as a "communication issue".

You seem to like to point the blame at the employee only while others have mentioned that it just takes time to build trust and to be given tasks and others have mentioned that he might have already lost the trust of his teammates which I guess does point to a failing in his part if so.

In a big company, there is also usually more room to coast and that is another possibility in that the manager is just not pushing that much and that is normal for a new-hire. I think there are just more possibilities than the fact that the employee is incompetent which seems to be your immediate conclusion without sufficient evidence.

How to be useful means many things to many people. It’s not uncommon to spend time performing useful work that’s not viewed as such by the right people. Back when engineers actually interfaced with stake holders these types of issues were less prevalent.

~6 months is still relatively new in my opinion.

That's unfortunate that they aren't giving you more tasking, especially if you're asking for more. But, without knowing too many details, it probably is just the normal ebb and flow.

My experience is that it can take several months to a year before I get really fully spun up on a new job. A lot of more senior people generally feel that it will take longer to hand off a task to someone new than to do it themselves. So it takes time for them to know and get comfortable with your skills and abilities.

In 20 years. I told a boss I didn’t have enough to do, exactly once.

Never again. I didn’t have a spare moment for 3 years.

Now I ask for priorities.

> I feel like Im supposed to be schmoozing with them for work to do which I've never had to do before at other jobsc and I'm not really good at.

I would suggest that you hone in on this, and given the size of your company, I would also hazard the suggestion that you ask HR if they have any supplemental training that they can provide to help you grow in that area.

There are a tremendous number of resources on the internet for how to improve your social skills, such as https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I have so much to do at work that I couldn’t get it done even if I worked weekends and split into two people.

If you want more to do, work hard and find somebody like me with tasks that they either don’t have time to do, or don’t want to do; then volunteer to handle one that you want to learn how to do. They will shrug and say, “I guess.” You could even get started on it ahead of time so that you can present an idea for how to solve it at the pitch stage — after all, you say you have nothing else to do.

If you do that enough times over the years, you’ll learn so much that it will be you who the company depends on to do way too much, and you’ll start being thankful (if a tiny bit skeptical) when a junior offers to take a task off your hands…

Enough to do in terms of work that is directly assigned to me/my team; no not always.

Enough to do in terms of stuff I've found that needs doing; always.

I guess I'm lucky to have a degree of autonomy that lets me shape a percentage of my workload towards stuff that just needs to get done, so I never really run out of stuff to do. I find the biggest challenge is actually finding stuff that needs doing and also motivating/organising myself to actually do it.

Moral of the story; if you find you've got nothing to do then go out and look for stuff to do. Have a look at stuff like ticket backlogs, documentation that needs doing/cleaning up, analytics, bug reports, feature requests etc.

I'm in a similar situation at my second project, in my first project I had a lot of work but in this project I barely have anything to do, I probably work less than 10 hours in a week atm and I'm fine with it until I switch to another job.

I work in a big company as one of the more experienced guys in the department. There's definitely more work to do than I can do. Some coworkers work hard to get rid of as much work as possible by putting it on other peoples desks. In the mean time I've become efficient in being assertive and saying no to anything I don't like doing (and which is not my responsibility to do).

So you say you don't have much to do at work? Are others complaining about that? If not, good for you. It's better to do less, but do it well, than the other way around.

I felt similar and quit my team for a project that has a clear backlog and no one else working on it. Feels good to read through public bug reports with lots of people affected and actually fix things. My last team was losing pretty much everyone. Half the team has quit since about a year ago. There just wasn't much bandwidth to get me the attention I wanted - 1:1 time learning and working with experienced people. I'd rather just work alone and see my direct impact than wander aimlessly.

In software? Isn’t there infinite work?

At one previous place, some of the devs seemed to think so - they continually rewrote an internal tool I used that broke all my integrations every time but provided no additional features that I could ever find. Often they took things out, but they were quite proud of how many lines of code they changed.

I've become a skeptic of this attitude.

There is, but for a new starter they will need pointers and recommendations. It is unlikely they can dive into any ticket and make a bunch of changes. They need the team’s help to succeed.

My previous job - I had nothing to do. I was watching Netflix. In my current job, I have so much work that I don’t have time for eat lunch.

Neither of the two situations is good.

I’d suggest looking for another job. Life is too short to schmooze. The other option is to spend the extra time learning. Most important - don’t feel bad about getting paid for not doing much work. It is not your fault, it is your employer’s fault

I've had jobs like that, that were pretty much in "keep the lights on" mode, they were doing well enough and new initiatives were few and far between.

But I've had several jobs where there's way too much to do and you'll never get it all done, so you have to prioritize. My current job at a consulting firm is like that. Working at startups tended to be that way as well.

If I don’t have stuff I make stuff up that I wanna do and it’s usually something the business needs but I usually have a decent backlog.

Yep agree with most of what is written below, I am CTO at a listed company that is still very much a start-up (we went public too early IMO). I have infinite work and I expect the same to be true of most "start-ups".

Likewise all of my team - never a shortage of work - even if all client work is done there are a billion internal product things to be worked on!

I have bursts of works. Some days it seems like there is a never ending stream of bullshit thst keeps me busy, and others I am scrambling to find something to keep me busy so I don’t look like I’m slacking off. I work as a sysadmin and manage a small data center that hosts about 1200 websites and other apps

In the same boat. Keep working on tooling, docs... been a bit since I solved something/wrote code. Also just setting up random vm's, environments to work on things. Sprints go by I feel like I have not accomplished anything tangible.

I'm in the same boat as you. 6 months into a job, don't have much to do. When I raise this, I'm often given some busy-work to do. Something meaningless to keep me quiet for a day or two. Frustrating.

Definitely not, I work above standard but all in all maybe top out at 18 hrs per week - I backfill the rest with personal interview prep (fml leetcode) and contracting at 3x my work pay. TLDR; TPM work is a breeze - idk why I spent so much time slaving away as an IC.

yes for me - i'm in a big company, but in an understaffed team within that company, so there's always more that we want to get done than we can actually do.

How big of a company? Is it a consultancy?

sigh Yes.

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