Comment by mduerksen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mduerksen | Hacker News Reader

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(Generalisation Warning)

This is the dark side of the (otherwise desirable) trait of "getting things done" as employee.

I you don't actively manage your working hours and hold yourself back, somebody else will suck you out until you have nothing left.

At the end, you will be very unsatisfied for some obscure reason: You did everything you was asked for, yet somehow noone appreciates you and you still earn entry-level.

In my opinion, you should only use 80% of your working hours doing the "real stuff". Devote 20% of your working hours to non-technical work, active career development and image management.

1) talk with your boss about clients

2) show interest in the business side of your project

3) ask challenging non-technical questions

4) have a nice chat with your manager about non-work stuff

5) make sure everyone knows who had the interesting feature idea last week

6) make sure that the decision which overruled your recommendation is in the meeting report.

...

This is good for you and the company in the long run.

Some of your tickets will have to wait, then. Maybe the deadline won't be met perfectly.

That's fine.

Some of the best advice I've ever had was, "when you start at a company, it's tempting to try and work your arse off to prove how worthy you are. Don't - you're not proving anything, you're just establishing precedent. Instead, quickly determine what the absolute minimum you can get away with is and do slightly above that. Then work harder for the month before review time so you can justify a raise. The extra effort will be noticed now, but if you'd worked your arse off then that would just be normal behaviour."

You should spend your early time at a company gaining an understanding of its business needs (basically understand why you're there) so you can later take 'ownership' of important projects and tasks. Ultimately you'll be judged by your importance to the company, not much you work (although those two are positively correlated).

This comment horrifies me, and yet it's probably the single best piece of advice here (aside from "quit working in toxic environments").

You're also teaching your management chain to provide the minimum reward, fire frequently, and generally be unpleasant to force you to work more. And you turn your daily life into a struggle, as you and the management feel out and try to budge the line.

That may be good advice in the sense of being effective, but encouraging people to actively deceive their employers and intentionally do as little as possible is disingenuous and dishonest.

If you don't think that reflects on your integrity, or if you don't consider your integrity worth maintaining, then this really is advice that you could consider good. But telling this to impressionable people who are inexperienced and new to Real Life in general would do them and everyone they'll ever work for a huge disservice.

I think a better version of the parent comment's advice would be figure out what is a reasonable, healthy, sustainable level of productivity and try to work as close to that as possible - and no more.

Yes, this is good advice. It centers on the person and advocates a work/life balance. It doesn't center on the employer and how they can be manipulated and cheated for the employee's benefit.

For developers who are good at "getting things done" - they should really look forward to building a career as independent developers. Some people just don't care to manage other people and deal with their peculiarities (I 'm one of them) . The few developers that i knew who were really good at getting things done, they still do the bulk of the work in the same companies. Despite being given "senior" titles, i wouldn't like to be in their position. You are supposed to use your work to learn, then move on.

Absolutely true.

I think it is the 'equivalent value' principle.

Everyone should only work as much as their salary equivalent value, and no more. At least that's what I do.

The rest of the time... ssh to my private server and do stuff for me. I will appreciate it.

Most managers already know that you can't work 100%.

They expect 20% of your working week to be spent on things which support work but isn't directly the work task itself (meetings, communication, HR, training, etc). And as this is spread out across the week it's not as obvious and visible to the worker that this is the case.

One can still work unhealthily hard for those 4 days a week of real effort. I share your opinion that you should only work that hard 80% of the time (he says, as he starts another 12 hour day), but if you're not accounting for the stuff around the work that still adds up to working at 100% capacity and without the breaks to keep yourself sane, healthy and developing.

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