Why I Eat Lunch at My Desk
scottndecker.com
scottndecker.com
First off, being the person that gets to put out fires is in no way a certain path to a promotion. And the experience gained from it is no different than if you just shadowed the person who would usually be fixing those problems.
Also, you mention how doing this you get an extra hour a day to do other stuff, does that mean you leave an hour earlier than your coworkers? That's definitely not going to get you promoted in most places.
I say take the lunch hour, at desk or elsewhere and spend it however you want, then work smarter for the rest of the day.
If you want a promotion, move companies - it's a safer bet.
Especially because you become too valuable where you already are given they'd need to find someone else capable of putting out fires if you were promoted.
I'm a consultant so I need to bill a certain number of hours per day. Sometimes I can snack and bill and that helps me meet the requirements.
There's nothing wrong with that; it's perfectly fine to value running with your dog or watching Netflix over working an extra hour; but the choices you make have unintended consequences. Like it or not, working involves politics, and a big part of politics is perception.
I've worked as a consultant as well; and as a consultant you can never be the first person out the door because people who don't know your situation will still form opinions about you. Considering most consultants cost 2x-4x what a salaried employee does (at least nominally), you have to appear to be "better" than the average employee. Sometimes that means you stick around the client site and do work for other clients just to look busy. But it almost always means you don't leave early. The same goes for people who have ambitions of moving up in an organization.
You are right in that people already have biases and prejudices and even though it perpetuates a wrong paradigm -- if you are consultant and try to make as much money as you can these perceptions (even though detrimental to the industry) matter.
It should really be coming from the top and be part of the culture that hours spend huddled over a monitor != better or high quality/faster/less bugs products. But we are not there yet. So should one leave for another place, and find that culture (work for a startup?), or work with it, as in just pretend you work harder to get noticed better...
So I am not defending the idea behind it, but your rationale for working with it.
Think about this scenario. It is 8:30pm, manager/owner walks by and he sees group of developers huddled over a monitor screen. What is happening? Is this a good thing or not? Are they working extra hard and deserve +$5k bonus at the end of the year, or they picked a bad technology, made bad mistakes in the implementation, allowed untested code in production and now have to put out fires. I think the opinion on the above will be pretty divided, but, unfortunately, it will mostly be seen a good thing. This spreads and becomes part of the culture, and those that are productive and finish their work faster, whose code doesn't break in production leave at 5, and are seen as lazy by incompetent managers. That is very dangerous.
The worst I have seen is people what seems like to me, intentionally allow bugs in production, things crash and burn. Then, they get to save the day with lots fanfare and visibility. That becomes a very dysfunctional environment from which one should try to escape as soon as possible.
My comment was really aimed more at the reality of the situation: when operating in a political environment (as every office is, like it or not), it's better to err on the side of being visible. Like I said; some people are perfectly content with maintaining the job they are currently in, and there's nothing wrong with that. But if you have ambition to move up into management, simply writing good code isn't enough. You've gotta play the political game at some point or another, and the political game often happens late in the day after all the senior management are done with their meetings.
This is doubly true for a consultant. An unfortunate reality of consulting is that when you're on short contracts -- as most consultants are -- you have to sell the next project while you're working on the current one. Being visible and physically present leads to the conversations that end in your client asking you to help them out with a problem. These are not "hard sell" tactics (I always hated those because it makes you come off as scummy and sales-ish); it's just making sure that you're in the right place at the right time and you're having the right conversations with the right people.
This doesn't have to mean working yourself to death -- I usually leave around 5:30 and almost never stay in the office after 6:00, nor do I typically work more than 45 or 50 hours a week. Do I wish I could go home at 4:00 some days and not be negatively perceived? Yeah, I do. But that's not reality, at least not anywhere I've ever worked. If the social norm is 9:00am-5:00pm, you should probably be there during those hours because an 8 hour work day really isn't asking much. If the social norm is 8:00am-7:00pm, well, you should probably find a better job...
Compared to what? A guy that stays in the office 80 hours a week and barely hits the productivity level of 40 hour per week guy?
There is nothing 'obvious' about that, I bet you would judge your engineers productivity by LOC too.
Some places don't have that, I know, some have more strict policies like "come in at 9 or leave at 5 or 6 or whatever".
Some have core business hour that they expect it is reasonable to have meeting and expect people to be in "11 to 4" or something similar.
1: Got takeout lunch and came back to eat it at my desk. Would get griped at by boss for eating at desk because it seems like I am available to work (between 12pm-1pm hours?). I was told to "eat somewhere out" except the only place to get internet was at my desk. Maybe I should have had a neon sign to indicate it was my lunch hour. This was ~2003 so I guess my only option for killing an hour out at a restaurant at the time would have been some kind of portable gaming system.
2: Work provided lunch, some people ate in the break room, I brought back to desk, worked while eating (not much work to be done in 10 minutes really), then left to go home for ~45 minutes to play on computer there. Free lunch and still an appreciable break!
3: Since I drove 75 miles one way to work, I came in an hour later and ate lunch at desk. I can admit I was less productive during this time. Not to mention, I did have to drive out for lunch which cost ~10-15 minutes. Oversight was low, however, and I felt owed a bit by the huge delays on the promised opening of a new office nearby my house.
4: Lunch hour is mandatory between 12pm-1pm. Made lunch in break room, ate at desk to play on computer for my mandatory 1 hour. I had to start wearing headphones because bosses (same bosses who made mandatory lunch) would try to talk work during 12pm-1pm hours since they never ate lunch or went anywhere for lunch. I wish they had stuck to their own rule. Eventually started going to Chinese restaurant nearby for the hour to escape, made friends with order taker there, watched tv shows on iPad or read books on e-reader. You could say I did learn my lesson from #1 here and the advent of portable tech kept me satisfied. Was less happy when lunch was reduced to 1/2 hour since it made my Chinese trip impossible. Had to stick to faster food and eat in my truck, with tethered iPad or e-reader of course.
5: Currently, my office is 5 minutes from my house as is my wife's, so we meet up at home. My lunch hour is flexible whereas hers is not, so I wait for a text that she is leaving first.
In conclusion, lunch time usage greatly depends on what the employer will allow. However attempting to eat at my desk has either upset my employer by making it seem like I am available to work when I am taking an hour break, or else it probably was not productive time which my employer was probably not aware of but still wouldn't have been thrilled about.
Not to say there's anything wrong with putting an extra bit of time in unpaid, but doing it every day means it will become expected.
At my work, we get to take an hour between 12 and 2, people generally know to avoid bugging people in this window and if they do, they'll precede it by asking "are you still on lunch?".
That's only if you don't leave an hour earlier which the author says he does, not in the most clear fashion but the most logical way to read:
> I take that extra hour every day and go for a run with my Golden Retriever (40 minutes) and work on a blog post (20 minutes). I just traded an hour of sitting (like I don't get enough of that) for an hour of exercise and career growth.
EDIT: In the comments (currently the first reply to the first post) he actually says he leaves earlier, didn't spot that earlier.
That also depends on how HR defines your time. For instance, we can bank hours as flex time and use them to take personal time (separate from our paid vacation), as needed, as long as it doesn't interfere with delivering what we have scheduled. Good example, at one point the company had a couple of months where we all worked saturdays for a big release. All of that saturday time was banked as flex time and many of us took 4 day weeks for the following month or two. I'm sure my company might be in the minority of valuing employee time like this, but they aren't all like everyone in this thread is making them out to be.
1) I do not care to look like some of my heavier colleagues, who get this way by where they eat every day. 2) I do not care to spend the money they do each week on eating out, meals are from a very low of five bucks a day to more than ten. 3) I already spend enough time with many of them at work, some of them I care not to spend another minute with, doubly so when its my time and my lunch is my time 4) surfing at lunch is relaxing, that and reading on my kindle
I hadn't thought of the "be forced into addressing emergencies" aspect, but that's a good one. If you can pull it off, you'll get mad props and great experience.
But ultimately, it's a decision each person should make for themselves. Company culture, social habits, work habits, finances, diet, all may play a role. Do what's right for you in the environment you find yourself in.
1. I eat lunch away from work and alone, to give me an hour a day to get away from the people they work with. Not that they're bad people, but I can't take being around anyone for too long a stretch. I get along with my co-workers better when I can take a break from them.
2. I don't know how other employers handle thisn, but where I work, his 4 hours a week less wouldn't fly. According to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) most computer workers are exempt. They are paid salary, not hourly, and in fact (if you believe our HR department) you are not even allowed to to hour by hour accounting of time with exempt employees. So eating lunch at my desk would be a "thank you, but you still have to work until five" thing. If a server goes down at 2am and I have to come in to fix it, there is no hourly accounting of that time, it is just part of my job. We've tried to sneak flex time or comp time by our HR department, but they don't allow it for exempt employees.
Really did help with the way the team worked together.
Hell I even try to time bathroom breaks for just before 9:30 and after 4.
As for cleanliness, just use a wet wipe once in a while. I've never understood how people let their keyboards get dirty.
I use a pretty expensive keyboard so maybe that's the key to keeping a clean desk. Only use expensive keyboards and then you'll be more likely to keep it clean?
I kind of miss being able to get up and walk around the block to hash out an idea. The upside is that someone brings lunch to our desks so its not all bad:)
Break areas work fine for that too if your office has them. If your boss asks just say you wanted to grab some quiet coding time.
I've never had any problems doing this, I think we're lucky that programmers are mostly judged on the output of their work and their ability to solve stuff; yet few people exploit this.
The mental fatigue thing is true though. However most of the time I just screw around on the internet during that time. I usually get up around 5-6am and have breakfast so I'm ready for lunch around 11. Everyone else seems to eat lunch closer to 1 which is just too long to wait for me.
I'm not sure how I would feel about a consultant that is billing me by-the-hour at, presumably a not insignificant rate, claiming that they work with the same focus and productivity while they are eating lunch as they would during the other 7 hours of the day.
I would say the OP should count himself lucky that he has a fairly lenient employer, as I would estimate that the vast majority of employers would not give credit for this "hour worked". Also, at least where I'm located (Canada), lunch "hour" is actually 0.5 hours and the work-day is 7.5 hours.
If you take the lunch at the same time as everyone else, this doesn't apply of course. But why would you time your lunch by someone elses schedule if you eat alone anyway?
If you are worried about 1st benefit, you can take the lunch on different time. The second benefit is.. well. Eating lunch from home in break room takes about the same time as in front of the computer. But you count that as work... so...
Although the article makes an interesting point about how doing work while everyone else is out to lunch can lead to accelerated career advancement; I think going out to lunch provides a valuable networking opportunity that is an important aspect of career advancement inside any organization.
EDIT: I eat AT my desk... I don't actually eat my desk...
My current office has a kitchen adjoining the main workspace, so there's always some kind of food smell lingering in the air.
Prior to this job, I would often bring a sandwich and/or fruit and eat at my desk. We had cubes there, so I'd just slide my door shut for a bit of privacy, eat lunch and surf the web mostly.
There's always the person who decides it's a good idea to heat up their tuna casserole and stroll through the department, though.
That's a very positive attitude to take about production support.
But I think if you are looking to take on more responsibility then ask for it. If they won't give it then leave.
"Working" through lunch and then leaving early is almost certainly detrimental to your career prospects at that place.
How do you know? Are you familiar with his workplace?
If not, then please stop telling him what his workplace is like. Different companies have different cultures and different requirements.