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Comment by timmg | Hacker News Reader

> I already spend an embarrassing amount of time slacking off daily, it's not like I'm pressed for time to get stuff done in the office.

Just because that is true for you doesn't mean it is true in general. Like, imagine a surgeon -- would he/she spend 8 hours a week slacking? Or a radiologoist -- can he/she read the same number of slides in 32 than 40? Or a barrista at starbucks?

Also, if you worked 32 hours, would you still slack off? Is there a reason to expect that your slack/work ratio would change? You claim you'd be "in a better mood" -- but as humans we tend to adjust to the circumstances we are in. So I'm not sure that would be the case long term.

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Do you have any idea how much break time surgeons take? Tons of them work 3day weeks because it’s more efficient. The rest of their time is either at home or “in clinic” doing busywork.

https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/3-day-work-week-wit...

I suspect you’ve pulled “surgeon” from you-know-where on account of it being a high-status, high-value role. But don’t bring that baggage into the conversation.

Also my radiologist neighbor works 3 day workweeks in 12 hour shifts I think. Or used to. I forget the details. So that example from GP doesn't make sense to me either.

3x12 doesn't seem too bad to me. You are zonked after but 4 days off is pretty sweet.

I think you were a little harsher than necessary, but this is a good point. Surgeons aren't doing surgery 40 hours a week. They'd be making tons of mistakes if they did that and they'd be getting burned out. The last surgery I had the doc only did ops on Tuesdays and Fridays.

In many ways it's a good analogy to writing code 40 hours a week. It takes high concentration and the quality of output drops heavily when you're tired or need a break or rest.

What I see here that they completely exhaust thenselves with working in several hospitals parallel, consiliums etc, then they go do surgeries in between

and yet you describe in-clinic work as "busywork". Pre/post op is super important, actually having to deal with human beings... this actually sounds a lot like software developers who could use a little more practice with the non-coding aspects of their jobs.

Busy work when compared to literally manually cutting and sewing someone’s organs to make sure they stay alive, yes.

"Residents can work up to an average of 80 hours per week. The aforementioned general surgeons work an average of 60.78 hours. Meanwhile, orthopedic surgeons work an average of 54.17 hours per week, and plastic surgeons operate just under 50 hours per week."

https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/how-many-hours-do-doctors-....

If you've spent any time in the corporate world, I think you know that the majority of people slack off for part of the day. The medical profession has its own set of time problems that I don't think should be conflated with the time problems in the corporate world.

Your second point is definitely valid. Changing habits is really hard, and some of us are able to get by while spending very little time doing work because we work so much more quickly than the average drone.

"Slacking off" doesn't enter into the equation. Is your output worth more to the company than it costs to pay you to produce it? If yes, then great there is no problem to be solved.

One way to think of it is that you're not always being paid to be doing something specific, but rather to be available on short (e.g. 15 minutes or less) notice.

Sure, some roles require that, but most definitely not the majority.

In development at least, most of the times I hear this, the "availability" is only needed for random unplanned meetings from useless managers that can't actually plan or work asynchronously.

The organization as a whole or individual managers can't do their jobs well and they make the people that actually get shit done pay for it by "standing by" for no good reason.

Ironically, they also completely ruin productivity with these interruptions.

> In development at least, most of the times I hear this, the "availability" is only needed for random unplanned meetings from useless managers that can't actually plan or work asynchronously.

Really? Because it's pretty routine for me to get pinged on IRC/slack/whatever by another engineer who's looking for help with something. Obviously I set the expectation that I'm not going to be able to instantly reply to every ping so some things are going to have to be async, but there's definitely a lot more than just managers that could ping me.

Are those pings that require immediate attention? In my experience, no.

The vast majority of time in my career, if you have a minimum amount of decent planning, you won't get blocked because you can't talk to another person immediately. And on healthy organizations, even if you do get blocked, you can simply work on something else while that particular task is blocked.

If you really scrutinize all these availability claims, they pretty much all come down to lack of planning.

Planning for blockers, planning for communication gaps, planning for maximizing asynchronous work, planning for decisions that require specific people, etc.

So many people are horrified by the word "blocked" when it's most times an artificial block created by their own systems. If I can't move forward on something, I'll start on something else and come back to the other one later.

This. If you have a high-functioning team with good async culture/habits, in my experience "blockers" are not a big deal. I work closely with 5 other people and we are in 6 different time zones and I can honestly say that we are more productive than teams I have worked with in a traditional office setting. Sure, I cannot just walk over to a teammate's desk and ask a question, but I also don't have anyone walking over to my desk to interrupt me with a question.

We are all intentional about _over communicating_ what we are working on and where we will need support from from each other. Everything else pretty much just flows naturally from that. There are (rare) times were I cannot progress on something that day because I need feedback from someone who will not be online for 10 more hours, but it is just a built-in assumption that this will happen and I always have other work queued up that I can do if I get stuck....

It's not about who can ping you. It's about the expectation of urgency behind that ping. A "ping" from a manager calling an unexpected meeting demands a lot more attention than a ping from a colleague looking for help most of the time.

> Because it's pretty routine for me to get pinged on IRC/slack/whatever by another engineer who's looking for help with something.

That's why when we were all colocated in one building, I was logged out. I made it clear they were welcome to drop by my cube whenever they wanted, but I would not be available by IM. It cut the interrupts by half, easily. People use you as a crutch. When you raise the cost even minimally, they are suddenly willing to solve their own problems.

That's the one aspect that COVID destroyed. Now I have to be online as people can't just walk to my cube.

What I have started to do is to block an hour every other day, and when someone sends me a Slack message that feels like I am just their crutch, I snooze it until that scheduled block of time. It works like a charm. I still keep an eye on the urgent questions that I have to answer quickly, and many questions have evaporated by the time I come back to them.

This is another skill that like knowing when to say no, seems counterintuitive when first entering the working world. Sometimes the correct answer is not to drop everything and slowly explain something for the third time that would have been trivial to Google in the first place. You are not doing yourself or them any favors by being overly available for every little question. The kind of person that does this often has a kind of learned helplessness that they need to be shaken out of from time to time.

> This is another skill that like knowing when to say no

Logging out of IM when busy is a simpler skill :-)

There's an opportunity cost question. If your output is worth more to the company than your costs, but it would be easy for them to hire someone at the same cost who has more output, then you're at risk.

> but it would be easy for them to hire someone at the same cost who has more output

History has shown that it's not easy at all to replace someone. It's difficult to find good people and convince them to join you and it can take a long time. If you can write code, you should always have the upper hand on your employer especially if your co-workers also realize that.

People are not replaceable parts. HR would absolutely love it if all developer 3s were the same - and it should be the case that one developer 3 is more like another developer 3 than a developer 2 - but people are different and have their own quirks and strengths.

And, of course, you're ignoring training costs which are usually a big factor in companies that aren't incompetent. That Senior Dev that's 15% above marketing asking rate but who knows your system inside and out... do you really want to spend six years training a (potentially highly proficient) newbies on all your systems and the subtle intricacies. And how long will it be until you, the manager, trust that new Senior Dev like you did the old? How many fires will you both need to walk through until you see an availability alert and just trust the Senior Dev either is dealing with it or would be ringing your phone if they need extra resources?

It can take quite a while to get a new employee (again, even a highly proficient one) to that place where in a meet your product team can be going over a proposal and your Senior Dev raises there hand and proceeds to calmly explain the incompatibility with the current system and how much it will cost to overcome those incompatibilities - and if they remain silent then you know they've done those calculations and consider it in hand.

Hiring a replacement is an extremely complicated calculations that most companies just punt on - for good reason.

The vast majority of people have been replaceable parts since the days of Henry Ford. If you're not one of those people, congratulations on your privilege, but I bet you're not as irreplaceable as you might believe.

It's a spectrum. You can replace someone to operate a cash register in a week. You can't replace a surgeon in a year, depending on how specialized and renowned. But sure, the majority of lower income work is more replaceable.

>but I bet you're not as irreplaceable as you might believe.

Given all the tech layoffs, maybe. But I think that has more to do with lacking either the money or interest to invest in certain products given economic forecasts.

The fact that your typical tech interview is a month+ and at least 3 (usually 5 or more) rounds of interviews suggest that it's not trivial to replace a dev. Tech is probably middle of the road to train, which is why they'd rather grab interns from college instead of setting up apprenticeships that can fine tailor towards the exact business needs.

It does enter the equation, because idle time «working» or slacking off at work could be better spent pursuing other interests that improve quality of life and most likely increase productivity over time.

I don't think this time should be labeled as "slacking off". It's just not working and there's nothing wrong with that if you've already met your obligations.

> Just because that is true for you doesn't mean it is true in general. Like, imagine a surgeon -- would he/she spend 8 hours a week slacking? Or a radiologoist -- can he/she read the same number of slides in 32 than 40? Or a barrista at starbucks?

My primary care doc has an assistant whose only job is to follow her around and input data into the electronic medical records system.

There are countless blog posts from doctors complaining that a 1/3rd of their time is spent on redundant paperwork.

For a related humorous take on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFGLDcTKFIY

My best friend is a radiologist and I guarantee he’s not working 32 out of his 40 reading slides - there could definitely be a way to organise them to have 32 maximum hours with the same output

FWIW, my brother-in-law is too. I and do guarantee that he is reading slides every working hour.

mkaic isn't saying definitely they would be in a better mood, just that they -think- 3-day weekends would be good for their mental health and mood.

> Just because that is true for you doesn't mean it is true in general. Like, imagine a surgeon -- would he/she spend 8 hours a week slacking?

Don't many surgeons only work a handful of weeks per year?

They're essentially already on a much better model.

Not to my knowledge. Source: I know a neuro and ortho.

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