The Art of Not Working at Work | Hacker News Reader

The Art of Not Working at Work

theatlantic.com

414 pointsjamessun125 comments

It's a problem that's hard to solve: since the amount of work ebbs and flows, how do you keep your staff busy for 40 hours a week?

Some companies drastically overcommit on a permanent basis, so that 40 hours is the minimum anyone's ever scheduled for, and when there's a lot of work, everyone's on massive overtime. These jobs can suck--these are the ones where you can end up working 100+ hour weeks on occasion, and 80+ hour weeks for months on end. Ironically, I find these are also the places where people are most likely to "look busy" in an attempt to protect themselves.

Some companies overcommit on a short-term basis, but make an attempt to average 40 hours in the long term. A lot better, and way less likely to burn people out, but still periods of suckiness. But there's a lot less need to look busy--and there will be periods of undertime, where people are just kind of dicking around.

The best job I ever had, the manager attempted to commit to 40 hours of work during peak times. But during down times, instead of letting us idle, he had us actively work on infrastructure and self-improvement. Build better tools, evaluate new tools, benchmark things, upgrade things, document things, etc. He was good at making this productive, and not "busy-work" (which is the pitfall). As time went on, these investments paid off, and we got faster and better and our 40 hours of work went a long way. And as far as I can tell, nobody ever attempted to "look busy", as the actual job was enjoyable. Sadly, this could not last, and when the dotcom crash took us down the group was dissolved. :(

I don't understand this post.

Either you work for a consultency-type company that develops products for customers, but those don't really have infrastructure, right?

OR you work for a company that has it's own product, in that case, you can always work on more features or there are more bugs to fix.

Think of "work on infrastructure" as "work on developer-centric features" and maybe you'll be happier?

Also: "Always work on more features" can be a pitfall, and it's why Zawinski's law of software envelopment exists. Any feature you add can end up costing in future maintenance and difficulty in making future changes. Another thing we did during the "work on infrastructure" times was delete unused features. I was working on a 12 year old code base so there were actually a lot of those.

Just because there's work to be done within the company, though, doesn't mean every worker has related tasks assigned to them. In that case, they end up on someone else's desk. Happens at most of the places I've worked as well...work comes across my desk a few months out of the year. The rest is "easy going".

In a company of any complexity there are going to be projects that can't really be tackled by one person in total isolation. Whenever explicit teamwork and collaboration are required, scheduling conflicts become possible.

> The best job I ever had, the manager ... during down times ... had us actively work on infrastructure and self-improvement.

It sounds like there was some coordination & direction going on -- it didn't just happen automatically.

> Either you work for a consultency-type company that develops products for customers, but those don't really have infrastructure, right?

Thoughtbot strikes me as a "consultancy-type" company that has taken time out of billable hours to build infrastructure in the form of a bunch of open source libraries.

Here's an example scenario - you work in a product company, but the company lives and dies by big, custom contracts. My personal field of experience is set top boxes. Typically you sell big orders to a telco. When one of those contracts is rolling out, it's all hands on deck. Engineering, obviously, but also marketing and design. The problem arrives when you deliver. The product goes out the door after a crunch, and then... crickets.

Marketing doesn't have any new direction that they want to take the product - they've been so busy holding the big client's hand. Design doesn't have any tweaks that they want made to the base system - they too have been deep in the design language of the big client, and haven't yet started to think about where they want to go next.

The result is that Engineering find themselves with nothing to do, at least as directed by management. In the better-run companies, this is the moment when the line managers start pushing out improvements to tools, cleaning up technical debt and so on. In the less well-run companies, each engineer is left to their own devices. Unfortunately you probably can't do any of those technical-debt type problems. Most of them are large jobs - that's why they weren't done in the push to get the product out the door. And nobody wants to waste time doing half of a non-sanctioned task, just to get dragged off to do something else when an urgent bug pops up, or marketing and design wake up from their post-crunch torpor. So you see a lot of fiddling around - unimportant re-factoring of code, some half-hearted doc work etc.

Software Engineering is one of those jobs.

"Lets set a Deadline at X"

Recent ruling in England makes asking your non-salaried staff to routinely do overtime a bit more tricky: businesses now have to include that overtime when they calculate holiday pay.

My work experience pretty much was the opposite of yours. During quiet time I was not allowed to help anyone else (I would be un-busy while they'd be overflowing with work, for which I was qualified and experienced). I was to sit at my desk and look as if I was working, even though everyone knew and accepted that I wasn't. It was v. frustrating.

there is a whole fascinating theory around that in E. Goldratt books. Basically the maximum output of a system is never when every component is at its max output, but when its constraining component is at its max output capacity, all the rest needs extra capacity around to pick any slack in the system to try to keep the constraining component at its maximum. If the constraining component itself has a hiccup, you're still trying to get the surrounding components not to add their own hiccup in the output, they have to pick their own slack.

At my previous employer I was part of the most productive department in the entire company. A new CIO was hired and the crazy policies he put in place drove half of my team, including myself, to quit. During my exit interview I got a chance to have a candid chat with him. Here's a snippet:

CIO: So why are you leaving?

Me: Because we are -- were -- the most productive team by far and you are doing your best to run it into the ground.

CIO: The most productive team? Please. The IT department ran reports that showed your team spends the most time surfing the Internet.

Me: Obviously. That's an indication of the nature of our work: we spend three to four hours everyday in deep concentration and do lighter work the rest of the time, and that inevitably involves Internet usage. Look at the results we--

CIO: Wait, hold on... so what you're saying is that your team is at approximately %40 productivity?!?!

Me: No, we're at over 90% productivity because no one can "produce" our output for eight hours straight five days a week unless they are on Adderall!

---

Unfortunately I couldn't get it through his head that it's just not realistic to expect people to be productive every minute of every day. His mentality was straight up, "if you're clocked in you should be working," which may be realistic for assembly line workers, but what is commonly called "knowledge work" happens in spurts (when people are in the "zone") and that's OK.

This dude consequently never worked as a "worker" obviously. Thus your decision to quit is perfectly sound.

The problem with work is a lack of purpose, and a lack of knowledge about how to build it.

Every person wants to feel that the work that they do is meaningful. Find me a person who says they truly desire for their work—for the majority of their contributions in life—to have no purpose. We all desire it.

So the problem, then, is: how do we create a purposeful workplace?

Most workplaces operate under a complex inhuman chaos that easily leads to malaise and disengagement. The problems are cultural, structural, and endemic: infighting, passive aggressive behavior, individuality, game playing, ladder climbing, loss of motivation, complacency, self-interest, and more.

These are a consequence of an organization which fails to think systematically, fails to understand human psychology, fails to base their work methods on real knowledge, and fails to understand the statistics behind all components human or otherwise.

In essence, organizations that fail to achieve systemic quality through these means are the ones which fail to achieve purpose. Aim to improve the system, and the end result and the structure under which it's produced improves as a side effect.

It is pure and almost zen-like in its simplicity, but instead, lacking the necessary knowledge and the means to implement it, most corporate environments devolve into a haystack of individual-focused complexity, which leads to the dark center of corporate culture which we all dread: the one which robs our work of purpose.

Improve the system, understand how every part of it works, and improve everything. Begin at Deming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

Things that can kill the workplace environment (some I've seen, others I've heard about during the years from acquintances):

* Performance metrics that are too exact, defined or constrained. Where everyone turns to gaming them. Your peers' input becomes the crucial factor in your raise? "Ok, start rubbing everyone's back. Don't challange stupid decisions to avoid not being a "team player". Start seeing people let bugs slide so they can "save the day". Other stupid thing is "lines of code written and/or bugs squashed" -- Start seeing large files stretched out with useless drivel. Or stupid little bugs created and squashed to boost stats.

* Management failure. Micro-managing. Breathing down people's necks.

* Management failure. Too macro-managing. Disappear for days without letting others know. Assign projects then never check up on them later.

* Management failure. Encourage in-fighting by assigning conflicting projects to people (tell Steve to make it blue, and then tell Joe to make the button green).

* Management failure. Strategic decisions, product features are made and discussed in secret then ordered are sent from above to the workers. Workers don't know what the end goal is, just that they need to build this GUI or this Web page that does this one thing.

all of these are sadly true and happening frequently.pretty sure the company i work for went through all these phases and more after having been a little successful. (so now it dies slowly i guess?)

Why yes, this is how companies die.

> Everywhere we look, technology is replacing human labor. In OECD countries, productivity has more than doubled since the '70s. Yet there has been no perceptible movement to reduce workers' hours in relation to this increased productivity; instead, the virtues of "creating jobs" are trumpeted by both Democrats and Republicans.

When the first laws for 40 hour workweeks (or 35 hours, for countries like France) were passed, almost half a century ago, they were seen as stepping stones to shorter workweeks- the goal was to go down to 30, then 20, and maybe at some point in the year 2020 we'd only work one day a week.

Well, turns out that's not how it turned out.

France switched from 39 hours to 35 hours per week about 15 years ago. This is still very controversial and right-wings parties would like to somehow revert the change.

Sure, and right wing parties also want to tear down the banlieues and send all the "immigrants" "back home". At this point "les 35 heures" is so engrained in French society that going back is practically impossible.

Right wing doesn't mean far right. What you describe is the (non official) program of the far right "Front National" not the normal right wing "UMP".

Have you seen the election results in France recently? FN might as well be called the "normal right" in France at this point.

Consider that this is a long battle. The fight for the 40 hour work week started as far back as 1817, with Robert Owen. A century later most workers still had longer hours, despite a strong and persistent escalation in union pressure.

The decades since 40 hour work weeks became fully ingrained in most of Europe is peanuts in comparison, and yet a number of countries have gone further.

The problem is that there is no longer an opposition in the form of USSR, so it's harder to negotiate using communism as a threat. Stalin's vision was to (eventually) reduce the workday to 6-5 hours so that people would have more time for education.

Further reading:

http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/09/17/we-have-them-surrounded...

http://nydwracu.wordpress.com/2013/10/28/transcript-balaji-s...

+1 for linking Venkat's blog!

I add this epic series: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

Edit: Lol, Gervais Principle is linked two more times down the page. Obviously relevant :))

I think in large part, automation/technology has made most work unimportant. I mean, remember how people used to have secretaries? Now that's a luxury for only the elite. And it makes sense, when you have email and voicemail and so on, you don't really need a secretary. Nice to have, sure, but that's a job that technology has pretty much marginalized.

I wish I had a reference, but I remember reading a story about a steel mill that has like 1/5th the workforce it did 30 years ago, but is producing the same volume. That's one example, but I really don't think it's isolated. Everything is getting more efficient. There's this notion that more efficiency always creates more opportunity, but I find that idea suspect. Sometimes, sure, but at a certain point, sometimes things are just good enough.

Even knowledge work is susceptible. On one hand, it's great that things like programming are becoming a lot easier, but on the other hand, if your programmers are 10x more productive in Ruby than they are in C... well you probably don't need as many programmers. Remember the great recession? I think one of the interesting things that happened there is that a lot of jobs got eliminated out of necessity... and then they never really came back. The popular opinion is to blame a weak economy and I'm sure that's a factor, but I think a lot of it was, companies got rid of those people and then realized they didn't really need them.

The problem is, society hasn't caught up. So everyone feels the need to prove they're doing /something/, and firing someone is an awful experience, so I think most people are employed because they have to be employed, and because their employers don't really want to have to cut them loose unless they have to.

Even startups aren't really immune to this. Sure they have to be lean, but how many startup exist because the founders think they need to be doing, well, something.

Nucor Steel. High tech and highly engaged employees driven by compensation heavily based on meeting production goals keeps employees highly motivated to stay engaged.

I worked there as a temp in college when they would shut down the mill for 2 weeks for maintenance. On one of these, a billet melted in a reheat furnace, throwing off the schedule and threatening the ability to get back to rolling steel. As soon as the temperature in the furnace dropped below 150F they wrapped us up in heavy clothing, made wooden soles for our boots so the rubber wouldn't melt and sent us in with jackhammers to overhaul the furnace. They were very determined on meeting goals.

The employees got crazy good bonuses that at times exceeded their base salaries, all dependent on shipping steel.

http://www.managerwise.com/article.phtml?id=172

Sounds great except the part where they void the bonuses for an entire week every time someone uses a sick day or vacation day.

Holy crap!

"However, if they are late to work they lose their bonus for the day. And if they miss a day of work during the week they lose their bonus for the entire week."

Sounds like a recipe for the (alleged) effects of the medieval justice system.[1]

[1] The punishment for murder is death. The punishment for stealing a chicken is death. Get caught stealing a chicken? Try to kill everyone who has ever offended you.

Interesting. What was your takeaway on worker safety at the plant? Do you think it was compromised in any way to meet production goals?

Are you kidding? Entering a furnace at 150 degrees wrapped in heavy clothing, OPERATING A JACKHAMMER?

I was hoping someone might catch the tongue lodged firmly in my cheek...

The economy never actually recovered from the crash of 2001, is the root of the problem. A crash caused by technologists over promising and under delivering on a "new economy".

> I think in large part, automation/technology has made most work unimportant.

I wholeheartedly agree with you, though I find it sad that most people think it's a bad thing. In most cases, at least the way I see it, automation intends to do away with menial (human) work.

If I had to describe the true social value of technology, I'd say it resides in its ability to let us concentrate on more interesting problems, put our efforts somewhere else, for the greater benefit.

But there seems to be a ruling set of values in our society dictating that we have to have one job, between such and such hours, and that the more you do so, the more you can have a "career". This is a gross simplification, but I honestly think it isn't that far from the truth. We've intertwined time and value so poorly that we think time itself has value, whatever we do with it (looking at you crippling bureaucracy).

In an (my) ideal society, people who don't need to produce more work at any given time would add value to other areas of society by achieving different tasks for different people or learning something new.

I'd like to see more architects, electricians, plumbers, car makers etc. go into schools and show kids what they do, show University students what their purely academic professors can't. I'd like to see more theoretical mathematicians learn about the wonders of growing vegetables. I'd like to see people who generate and get actual value from others, rather than constantly proxy it through money, idle time and displays of self-importance.

I find our society tends to formalize everything, and that of course includes jobs, even when it's not necessary. The intent seems to be able to measure everything from productivity to worth, even though both these things are themselves penalized by the activity of measuring/observing them. I'm a fierce advocate of science and technology, but that certainly doesn't mean we're compelled to measure everything in controlled conditions.

Things like the incident discussed at the top interest me, because the reaction is always directed at the "lazy" person for not working hard enough and taking advantage, but never at the organization for apparently being incapable of knowing what the hell its employees are up to.

Reminds me of a Dilbert comic from over a decade ago. Dilbert was working from home, and the joke was him saying something like "Do I owe my employer the full 8 hours of work or just the 2 hours of productivity I would have if I went in to the office?"

Really should link to it:

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-02-06/

(God, I'm ashamed it took me 10 seconds to find that.) He eventually goes crazy.

Anyway, I've experienced the same in a declining company, in which people were fired or quit, and I'd get their full responsibilities, and it literally added 15 minutes of work per week to my schedule.

I would have linked to it, but I only read it in a dead-tree book at my parents' friends house a decade ago, so I had no idea where I would find it in the archives (didn't know when it was originally written). Apparently the Dilbert website has full test search for all the comics now, which would have made it a lot easier.

So, thanks for the link!

Mitchell and Webb also did a bit on working from home:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co_DNpTMKXk [NSFW: Unsavoury topics]

I remember being told the internet revolution would allow people to work shorter hours without being tied to a desk. Maybe this is just a symptom of the old 9-5 model breaking in a world where I can finish a lot of work during my commute.

Also the idea that we should be "true believers" in a job and not just there for a paycheck is so bizarre and unrealistic. Everyone hopes for one of those jobs where you really enjoy what you're doing but no one concludes the job for them is roadkill collector.

When you've increased your efficiency you've only freed up time to create additional value. If you don't do it, your competitors will.

Except when everyone just sort of naturally agrees that we're at good-enough value already and doesn't bother, which is what's happening at a lot of these places.

You don't push and your competitors don't push because all the people who are at the low level of actually doing things rather than sitting in meetings don't feel like bothering with it. Surprisingly (or not) it actually works out well with the only bad part being some fat cats in suits think they're paying money for actual work. Not that it matters if they "waste" their money, it will trickle back up to them pretty soon.

Yeah but I'm not going to create additional value for my company because it doesn't increase the reward at all so we're left with what the article describes, nothing to do.

This is what automation will create if we continue the logic that everyone has to work and if you don't have a job it's because you're a lazy freeloader.

If we keep this mentality of a full time job for every person we are in for a rude awakening in the next couple decades. Automation is going to replace large segments of the economy and they will do that work better than a human ever did.

The idea that everyone needs a job to be able to survive is an idea we need to let go of if we want to continue to progress.

well thats like the industrial revolution but at a different layer.

i think another real difference is that we have way more people on the planet now (way too many, all scientific evidence points that out, too) thus this will be worse than the industrial revolution.

Added to that, computers can automate a lot of "thinking jobs" as well, in fact.

At some point we've to realize that:

- you cant keep pooping babies because you feel like you're more important than the planet

- you cant have a 8h work day for everyone, and you also can't enslave some people to these and have the other as the manipulative ultra powerful individuals

Unfortunately that's exactly the state of the world today. If ever we solve this, we might even solve more important problems like energy, life, and what not - much more quickly than ever before.

(and I therefore vote to be governed by skynet any day of the week)

> way too many, all scientific evidence points that out, too

The hallmark of scientific evidence is citation. You don't provide any.

> you cant keep pooping babies

Developed countries typically have birth rates lower than the "sustaining" birth rate.

> you also can't enslave some people to these and have the other as the manipulative ultra powerful individuals

This is the elephant in the room. Labor vs capital is stacked as it is, and automation will make it worse. We have to try to figure out a way to deal with it before things get violent (and they will get violent if we don't).

"One day, in the middle of a meeting on motivation, I dared to say that the only reason I came to work was to put food on the table. There were 15 seconds of absolute silence, and everyone seemed uncomfortable. Even though the French word for work, ‘travail,’ etymologically derives from an instrument of torture, it’s imperative to let it be known, no matter the circumstance, that you are working because you are interested in your work"

I would be coding and making software anyway, most likely. I often play with it in spare time anyway. But if you weren't going to pay me, I sure as hell wouldn't be doing it for you. And I'd be a liar if I said otherwise. Even if what you have me doing the exact same thing I'd be doing at home for nothing, sure as hell the only reason I come to work is because you pay me.

I don't see why we can't be honest about this.

This is also one of the reasons I'm a contractor/freelancer these days. So I don't have to pretend to care about your business, or pretend to be committed body and soul to the project. That's beyond the scope of my contract.

Hypothesis: Purposefulness is limited by upstream = it can only decrease as you go deeper in a hierarchy. A.k.a. you can't build a (non-faked) purposeful company in a bullshit field.

Think for example a would-love-to-feel-purposeful software development company supplying to some redundant government agency or corporate branch.

In such a purpose-less field, you can only create a fake sense of purpose, and that only works as long as you find short-sighted people that don't realize that what they are living for is fake. Lot of 'creative' ad agencies do that, wasting best years of great 20-30 year olds to create award-winning animated microsites for cereals.

What happens next is that these guys & girls drink away their unrealized frustration on countless parties (the work-hard-party-hard falacy), before realizing that things won't get better, and finally trying to find a purposeful place.

Also, Zappos.

Problem: The more you understand what's going on, the harder is to find a place that you would find purposeful. You become more and more unemployable by a majority of companies and are left with a choice of devoting your life to non-profit stuff (the important/non-urgent quadrant) while scraping by, or compromising your beliefs in some job-for-cash. Or trying to be that one lucky guy who built a lifestyle business that doesn't lie in bullshitting others.

Ronald Coase is one of the most famous economists of the the previous generation. His most influential work is 'The Nature of the Firm' which starts fro a very interesting premise. Why do Firms exist?

If bargaining, prices & markets are such an awesome and efficient thing, why don't the different employees in a firm just form markets, ecosystems where they buy and sell good and services and make ipods or packaging materials. Why do firms get so big? Why are firms run like market-less totalitarian dictatorships internally? If 10 year plans created by bureaucrats about how much lubricates, steel & cutlery should be produced fail so terribly relative to a prices/markets based economy, why are big plans dictated by executives and filtering down layers of management any better?

His answer was transaction costs. Markets have transactions costs. Every transaction needs to be negotiated, sold, etc. That's a cost. To get efficient transactions really need to be repeated. The market needs to be big enough and transparent enough. The totalitarian nature of the firm has costs too. But, as long as these are less than transaction costs, it's preferable.

Anyway, back to the slacking… I think a lot of the pathologies of our life at work are a result of this sort of totalitarianism. They are the inefficiencies. People are estranged from their work because they are estranged from it. There's a strong social pressure to express (or even feel) deeply connected to your work. It's an explicit demand from employers. The demand isn't as far fetched as wise guy cynics think because there's an inherent human tendency to vend meaning in work and in groups of people. We're wired that way

Still, we're in this system where the motivation to work is unnatural (money, social pressures, your boss) to us. The feedback from our work is disconnected. For every Leonardo there have been a million oil painting sweatshop monkeys. A million poor shmucks trained to implement agile development in some dark dingy bank tech consultancy.

Our personality at work is different. A meek, boring shell. Non work is one pathology among many. But, if you like positivity, it also means that our world is full of unutilized people.

I see this a lot in the industry I work in, which is design. As a web designer, we're either on a tight, impossible deadline or we have nothing to do. Although it's common, I feel this is a problem that has to be taken into account and corrected at the project management level. I can only speak for the company I work for, but our project managers typically have a hard time planning design as they don't fully understand the process, which then makes it impossible for the designers to allocate time correctly.

For anyone currently facing this situation, I would highly suggest using your free time to work on personal skills (if possible, as dictated by your company's leniency). Whenever I have free time, I try to learn development practices, new languages, new techniques, etc. as much as possible so I don't rot with boredom.

Or I come here and read article after article until all the links are grey.

There already were quite a few posts about this phenomenon on HN, most notably from David Graeber, author of "First Five Thousand Years of Debt". Even I, who worked as a programmer experienced this phenomenon, even though my then employee was desperately looking for programmers. Some of my colleagues even evaded work voluntarily. Management had failed us. Asking about 10 people who work at desks (not specifically offices, for example I talked to electrical engineers), all of them had experienced the phenomenon either first hand or second hand.

Edit: The Graeber article was linked to in another comment :)

I had a job like this. My boss/owner of the business abused a provision in the California unemployment system designed for seasonal lulls in labor pools. When ever I was out of work to do, I was sent home and those hours were paid for by the state at the usual unemployment rate. I was doing high level graphic production and design to which I am quite skilled. At crunch time I can get through mountains of work quickly. Then at normal work flows I could quickly run out of work if I gave it my all. Then there was days of work trickling in... Annoyed me to no end. Here I am in the best paying job I'd had so far in my career and the only time in my life I've been on unemployment all at the same time. I was making enough at full hours to pay bills and have a decent lifestyle but boy did that unemployment rate cut in to that. I became a master of looking really busy doing absolutely nothing. Or working a quick half hour job in to an hour and a half. Of course it helped the other hat I wore at the job was being the main IT guy...

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/08/the-rise-of-bullshit-...

3 hours of personal time in the office might be a bit much, but the figure of 60% of purchases being made during work hours doesn't surprise me and I don't think it's a big deal. There is only so much output that can come from a person in a day. When I work for 3 or 4 hours straight, I can physically feel the brain-drain and need a break. A few minutes of personal time taking a walk outside or ordering stuff I need at home is all it takes to get back in my zone. I actually once fainted publicly after working too many hours straight without taking the slightest hint of a break. There's a balance that you need to strike. Take care of yourself. Get stuff done. Don't work 9 hours straight without taking a few breathers to stay on your game.

They also dated that statistic to ~15 years ago, when most people had internet access only at work (or broadband only at work).

I'm reading this at work to not work.

Same here, I work quicker than most. I can get a day done in 3 hours and my employer wont incentivize me to work consistently at this pace (more capacity = more work). So I just limit capacity.

That's really not something to brag about. I've worked at two software companies in the Bay Area with people like you. At both companies, I put in well beyond a solid eight hours each day picking up the work that people like you are not doing. There are honest, hard working people you are screwing over.

I wouldn't be so sure, depending on his role in the operational scope he could be underutilized. I frequently find myself with too little to do because I can work quicker so I'm typically waiting for the people that need 8 hours+ a day to complete their responsibilities before I can make progress.

In my case, it's the people that think they're impressive working 8 hour+ days that need to learn to be more efficient that are causing issues.

Exactly. Some people work better when they're 'up against it' under a crushing deadline, or just don't take as long as the average person.

Personally, I am able to achieve a lot more when I am under the gun, and often find myself procrastinating until the last minute and then pull a rabbit out of a hat. This is not a new phenomenon, nor is it misunderstood. Some people work like marathon runners, some people work like cheetahs. The cheetah cannot be expected to be at full capacity 100% of the time.

If two people both produce the same output, but one of them needs 40 hours and the other can do the same work in 2, who is the 'inefficient' person here? Let's evaluate the product, not the workflow.

This article very clearly describes the anxiety I felt as I melded into the workforce a few lifetimes ago. Not to say that I could have possibly articulated why I felt such a need to get away from the employers of the day, but one can reminisce...

Back then I was doing on-site tech support for a market-data software company serving the major investment banks of the time (a major partner and competitor to Knight Ridder, DTN, and Reuters for those who might have any idea). My days we very full, supporting DOS-based servers and workstations; In the evenings I spent my hours working on an intranet, which, as I understand, still remains in what's left of the expired once-incredibly-successful company.

Soon after, I was laid off as the company downsized to almost nothing. As I took on a couple jobs from former customer contacts, I found it far too easy to waste time on the clock. I hated it. I hated the water cooler. I hated the extended lunches. Getting paid relatively well for little output was nice in a way, as I had plenty of friends my own age back home who would kill for such a position and wage. But it wasn't for me. I didn't care as much about wasting company resources (though I did care), but I felt it was a complete waste of my own time.

Within a year of being laid off, I went full-time freelance, and within three years I was able to pick my clients. Most of the time, my contacts at my clients' companies were as incredibly intelligent as they were underutilized. At odd hours, we'd get into the nitty gritty of what was really needed for the client to succeed and I was able to propose interesting solutions, not only to offer what was asked, but what would take them further. And my attempts to give credit to said employees usually (not always) seemed to fall upon deaf ears.

As a freelance developer, I was able to continue to pick clients, work on interesting things, meet incredibly interesting people, get the job done, all from my own desk on my own time, and when it was done - move on. Meanwhile, I saw friends and contacts fall into stagnation as they remained underutilized. Some happy, with the stability to support their families and lifestyles. Many, less so.

I'm obviously very lucky as a programmer - someone who can jump into almost any industry, learn as much as possible about their needs, remain busy for as long as the project exists, and then move on. I think that's what drives my interest in software more than anything. Provided I can ask the right questions to the right people, there is never a shortage of interesting things to figure out for a good wage. I don't pity those who don't currently have such an option, as that would undermine the respect I have for them.

But I do firmly believe the closer we get to enabling such a world for those of us who are not so well versed in translating business requirements to tech solutions would be a societal benefit. I certainly don't think everyone should be a business entity unto themselves. But the flattening of the company structure - beyond the walls of the institutions that hold said structures dear - has a good deal of potential for the creative possibilities of the most competent workers therein.

I am so sorry you has to work in DOS :(

I didn't mind it back then. Considering the servers and workstations were completely dedicated to a single application, managing them was very straightforward. What was far worse, was teaching incredibly impatient traders - with hundreds of thousands on the line at any given moment - how to use a mouse, as more recent versions of our software became their initial introduction to Windows.

I worked with DOS as recently as 6 years ago. It's actually not all that bad, assuming you've got them on a network. We had a Novell server and they all mounted a network share on that at boot. From there, backups (and restores) were just a simple xcopy script. I ran a script to create 'flag' files to trigger the backup on reboot and the machines were shut down every night, so it was quite simple to manage.

I was able to deploy updates via a similar mechanism. There was a network script called from autoexec.bat. I would make a few changes to have it pull in the new updates from the network, then tell them to reboot at their convenience. So I almost never had to leave my desk to deal with them, except for a restore from backup.

How did one do network programming in dos? Did it have a tcp/ip stack and winsock.h funtions or equivalent? And threading? Did you use Djgpp? I've always wondered about that.

Edit: browsed the DJGPP website and found answers, there are libs available.

winsock may have come a bit later ;)

Read up on the Wollongong TCP stack - very much an MS-DOS stack that I have mixed memories (some fond, some horrendous) of.

You didn't, mostly.

In DOS times you only had one core, so there was no particular necessity for multithreading. Network card drivers were available using the NDIS standard: http://www.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Networking_FreeDOS_-_N...

DOS games tended to roll their own protocol on top of the raw packet drivers. This is why they were often LAN-only. Generally in the DOS era you didn't have Internet; it existed, but wasn't widely deployed.

DJGPP got some use (see the PCGPE as well), but professional game development tended to use Watcom: http://www.openwatcom.org/index.php/Project_History

We didn't do anything like network programming where I worked. We just copied files on and off of network shares with batch files or such and let the Novell drivers handle the network.

So you'd download the day's schedule or updates by copying the file off the network and use a few primitive means of coordinating things like using 'flag' files for signaling and then if exists xxx / echo foo > do_bckup.txt type things in your batch files.

It's very primitive, but most things were at least doable and you could always write small programs to extend your scripts if need be.

Some folks aspire to the minimum amount of work and the maximum amount of pay. And they are shocked when they get laid off after a decade of that, that nobody wants to hire them. Like you I really enjoy the work so if I'm not getting the work I need at work I'm doing various things outside of work. (lately it is designing a 3D printer) I'm not sure when I realized that time doing nothing was just getting closer to dead with nothing to show for it, but once I had internalized that, idling wasn't really an option any more.

"Some folks aspire to the minimum amount of work and the maximum amount of pay. And they are shocked when they get laid off after a decade of that, that nobody wants to hire them."

Wholeheartedly agree. However don't forget those who worked hard but were just got stuck doing something that was ONLY relevant in that organization. Once laid off, they belatedly find out their 'skill' isn't a skill outside of the organization.

Hence I believe you should be extra vigilant about stagnating skill set when working at a company for more than just a few years. A lesson I'm learning now.

Exactly the position I am in now. After a couple of years I am looking to move on but I am finding that no one needs the experience I have. Everything I have done for my current company is desktop development and the vast majority of the nearby jobs are web development. Companies these days don't want to hire anyone who can't hit the ground running so it's a rough situation. Better to get out now than many years from now though.

I think this article may be of some interest to you.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/09/05/desktop-aps-versus-web-a...

Also, ever look into trying out micro ISV? You may not get rich but doing doing something like it will help you work on techs that are popular/relevant, not what your managers wants done. Or try working on side projects with free time?

"Hence I believe you should be extra vigilant about stagnating skill set when working at a company for more than just a few years."

I have some experience in this and some autonomy is vital. If you negotiate something approximating a consultative relationship with your boss, then you're pretty safe.

Interesting, can you talk about how this came about in your situation?

What, you're saying my 6+ years' experience in FORTE 4GL won't be relevant in the outside world???!! :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forte_4GL

I wish I was kidding about the FORTE4GL bit, but I do acknowledge the need to stay current, though it's sometimes hard to get the drive to do so.

*...time doing nothing was just getting closer to dead with nothing to show for it..."

I realized the same, however I understand and appreciate that others do not share this same view.

The question becomes "What would you do if you were financially independent?" For me, it still would be to create, build, explore, learn, and tinker - basically what I do at, and outside of, work.

You make an excellent point. I tend to think of it as "What would you do if you knew you were going to be dead in 6 months" but that tends to skew toward the 'fun' side of things rather than the 'meaningful' side.

I'm heavily depressed and don't work at the moment, my shrink think that taking a job where I wouldn't care and just do my stuff and go back home would be good for my brain. There might be something good about the life of the people who don't care about their job actually. I'm not one of them.

I tried sending you an email to both email addresses I could find. Both bounced. If you ever need to talk, I'm here: gall amine at google's email service.

that's very nice, thanks. I fixed my profile.

In a moment of stupidity I lost the email server that was serving the wildcard email address, so now, I have bouncing email addresses all over the web.

I have found that when I have people at home that need me - a significant other and kids - work is an afterthought. Maybe what you really need is a girlfriend.

I concur. I used to be all about passions, that was before my existential needs shifted to family, home and sharing life.

Yes, finding one of those is a piece of cake when you're heavily depressed and unemployed.

I didn't say it was easy. Though I find it's more common for people to miss opportunities for love due to unreasonable expectations of others. There are overweight girls and single mothers out there that need love, if your pathetic, depressed and unemployed self doesn't think you are too good for them.

"if your pathetic, depressed and unemployed self doesn't think you are too good for them"

You didn't need to include 'pathetic, depressed and unemployed' in that sentence.

I do have one.

Interesting. I share some of your experience, but our conslusions differ somewhat. The absolutely most frustrating thing with being a freelancer is that all the time see what the customer needs to succeed, but it's impossble to change. Sometimes because there is not budget, sometimes because you are contracted by the wrong department, and sometimes just because of change aversion.

A related (somewhat humorous) article from The Economist:

Quoting the article:

"The first principle of skiving (or shirking, as Americans call it) is always to appear hard at work....The second principle is that information technology is both the slacker’s best friend and his deadliest enemy. ...The third principle is that you should always try to get a job where there is no clear relation between input and output. The public sector is obviously a skiver’s paradise. In 2004 it took two days for anyone to notice that a Finnish tax inspector had died at his desk. "

Full Article: http://goo.gl/HftcFx

Why the tracking link? Yes, it's a serious question.

I wondered the same thing. Used unshort.me for this.

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21627649-how-thrive-w...

Oh I remember the case. The tax inspector was working alone late friday evening and he was found on monday morning. In this case I wouldn't blame the other employees for slacking...

Automation and massive amounts of available resources are primarily responsible for my idle time at work - once you build a reliable infrastructure, with automatic setup and failover configurations, running on machines that are basically 90% idle outside of peak hours, what exactly are you supposed to do?

This ideal situation won't last forever. Figure out what is next, and start training for it. (Otherwise you become one of the old admins clinging to your way of doing things, and slowly becoming obsolete).

Agreed 100%. Always expect that sooner or later there will be a housecleaning, and if keep current you will be prepared.

Make sure there's a code for that activity on your weekly TPS report!

I'm here at Hacker News keeping current - it's part of what I do with my idle time at work.

I generally use the fireman analogy when talking about idle time for admins. There's not always a fire.

This is VERY common in university and municipal jobs. Many people at those insitutions are supurfluous and literally do nothing useful, or they may have one or two responsibilites carefully assigned to justify their position but in reality it's nothing someone else doesn't have plenty of time to handle. They get away with it because there's no pressure to show a profit, or penalty for a loss, at the end of the day. They have their budgets, and they spend that money. Ultimately these jobs are controlled by politicans, who hate to fire anybody because a) that might make them unpopular and b) political power in those organization correlates highly to the number of people who work under you.

I used to work for a beltway bandit and I experienced the same stuff described in the article. If you want an easy, comfortable job, that sort of work is perfect. If you want to do impactful work, it's the worst place you could be. Yet, that is exactly what you are promised: the opportunity to do purportedly important work, when all evidence points to the contrary. I just wish we could be honest with each other about this sort of stuff.

> If you add any actual value to your company today, your career is probably not moving in the right direction. Real work is for people at the bottom who plan to stay there.

Does anyone know what he means by this? I'm afraid it hits too close to home for me.

Probably related to the Gervais Principle.

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

In most corporations (at those I've been involved with), the people who actually get the work done very rarely advance.

Your career is not the work you do. It's how you're perceived socially within a company structure.

This essay is actually very good: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

My personal experience is that those who are highly skilled and add value become an immediate threat to those who are just "punching a clock". It's important to note that those people may be at any level of an organization.

Damn, thanks for that :/ That's the situation I am currently in, looks like I'm going to have to stop actually working and playing the politics game instead. Or just get another job that's not as soul-crushing.

This might also apply to maintainers of legacy systems (especially ones that are in constant state of reengineering)

I wanted to open an Ask HN for this but now that this article is here, let me ask it here.

I'm really frustrated with my current situation. I'm extremely passionate about my work. Whatever I do, I want to make it perfect by spending a good amount of time on it. In every tram I go, I'm the one that does most of the work and move things forward. But after a while I lose steam. I see others are abusing the situation and leaving all the work for me. For example, right now my team is doing open source work and anyone can see your commits. I commit at least 20 times a day while my co-workers commit 2 times per week average(actual numbers). Maybe they are on their regular routine but I'm too hyper active and think they are slacking but at the end I leave. I changed jobs 5 times in 4 years and ever time I got a better job because I achieved so much in a short period of time in previous position.

I'm not ready for starting my own company and want to work for others to learn enough for it. But with this situation I'm really confused what to do? I know not 5 companies doing it wrong. It's probably like this everywhere.

I enjoy working hard and making shit happen but I don't want others abuse it. How can I solve this conflict?

I would probably recommend one of the big software consulting houses. Capgemini, Accenture etc.

Thanks! How working for consulting companies is better?

I think this advice is supposed to be sarcastic. Some consulting firms are known for having high stress, high pressure environments with high turnover.

Well, not sarcastic, really. It's just that if you want to work a lot, then those companies will let you. You'll get paid correspondingly.

I'll tell you my story from being in this situation from both sides. Like the OP I consider myself able to do a lot more work in a lot less time than others. Companies I work at tend to take advantage of this. So last year I decided to look for a new job. It didn't take long before I found something and gave my resignation letter to my employer. They immediately setup a mtg with myself and the bigwigs and essentially asked me for what it would take for me to stay. Knowing the rule that you never take a counter-offer, I made the numbers extremely high. Huge raise, huge bonuses for multiple years guaranteed. To my surprise, they gave me everything I asked for.

Then I notified the company I was planning to leave for that I was planning to stay where I was working. They asked me what the offer was and I told them. Within a day they offered me even more! What an embarrassment of riches this seemed to be. So I went back to my employer at the time and said I was actually leaving. This made them really mad. But Left and went to the new job.

It turned out that the new job was completely different from what I was sold. I was leading a team of well over 30 devs (all but 2 were consultants from large consulting firms) across multiple countries around the globe with the intent of performing 24 hour development. We had meetings every 8 hours to do handoffs between the timezones. My first day was over 14 hours of work in the office. The first weekend was completely consumed by a horrible deployment. The team members were absolutely exhausted, sleeping at their desks. This was an absolute nightmare. I was essentially brought in to get rid of the consultants (to save money) and replace them with in-house staff. I was initially brought in as a lead architect/dev. So I went to my boss, who hadn't talked to me my entire first week and never even introduced me to the team, and asked him what the timeframe was for me taking over this team and he said "within a month we'll be letting go most of the consultants". I was absolutely shocked and immediately begin trying to find a new job and it took a few months of true hell to do that.

There is a lot more to this story, you can email me if you want to hear it. But my points would be, if you're talented, people will take advantage of you. And you could end up in a situation where a company will take advantage of you up to your limit. The consultants I worked with were from large well-known consulting firm and I'm sure they were paid well but their lives were hell and they had no recourse. Almost all of them smoked chronically to deal with their stress, amongst other things. If you're like me, you'll find that you certainly can be more productive but you'll end up with two choices. One, work at a normal job where most of your time is free for you to be productive at things you want to do. Or two, be your own boss and choose your own workload.

In the context of the original question of "how do I avoid being used", I also thought your advice of joining those specific companies was sarcastic.

Aim for the top. Go for the very best companies (Google), learn everything you can, then build something to call your own.

In the meantime...

> I commit at least 20 times a day while my co-workers commit 2 times per week

Commit 1 time a day (5 per week), use the rest of your time to develop personal projects which will look good on your CV. You'll keep outdoing your co-workers but also make something for yourself.

I tend to think that you have a more chance to learn something in smaller companies, where it is more likely that your role is vital, compared to being a cog in the wheel of some monstrous organization.

I can only speak from my own perspective. I realized, that for me, I would always feel like someone was taking advantage of me. If it wasn't other developers, it was BAs/sales or even the management (or owner for small companies). The only way I got over it was to become a consultant. This allowed me to completely emotionally divest myself from stupid mistakes the company makes. I never have to think about how my review is horribly inaccurate, or anything else. I make my hourly wage, I do a good job, and people like it when I work for them. At the end of the day I go home and no one is calling me in the middle of the night to deal with issues. Everyone is different, so there's no telling what will make you happy, but for me, that changed my whole outlook on working and dramatically improved my emotional fitness.

This. When you get a whiff that you are good, its time to go solo.

When people accumulate some experience and wisdom, they tend to work less whilst accomplishing much more compared to less experienced [hard] workers. Are you sure this is not the case for you as well? Raw commit numbers say nothing. Take a closer look, maybe their 1 commit per week has same or more value than your 100 commits?

This x 1000. If you're pounding away implementing features no one asked for (or were only vaguely hinted at in a meeting once), or building complex 'future proof' architectures rather than implementing simple one off for the problem in front of you, or rewriting existing code because it doesn't fit your sense of 'right', then you're doing it wrong imo.

This never happened to me, but I know people who had to quit their job because they were too bored. In reality, it's often the case that there are many people doing too much 9+ ours a day and people totally wasting their time. The sweet spot IMO is 8 hours per day the most productive you can be (you'll never get 8 hours of productivity).

Sometimes, does it matter at all? Once all important things get done eventually and relatively in time and the company earns enough money to chug along, it's just cost of doing business. The idle hours couldn't sometimes be cut away without hampering the productivity during active hours either.

In public sector the situation is trickier. There are no objective indicators of how productive the office is. Unnecessary hours can easily pile up. There needs to be something that forces prioritization and tries to improve effectiveness. I'd say a fixed tax percentage might work: if the government can fund more of itself by raising taxes then it must work to prioritize its activity to only do the necessary work and to support the companies in that country to generate more profits.

As a system admin and developer second I tend to code to make my primary job even less of a burden. My direct boss jokes he could care less how busy I am not as long as I am there when it hits the fan.

Yet it can be a brain drain when you run out of things to do, being a social butterfly was a skill I had to learn. In the course of that activity I did find work through helping others as we did work on the same platform. I could code and work up wonders in SQL simply because I had the idle time to learn what I wanted to do.

Still it would be nice to not be in a box. Then again I am not sure what I would do with not so integrated and reliable systems that I do watch over.

You need to decide what you want to do and where you want to go. If you work for the government, your masters are ultimately politicians and bureaucrats. If your goal is to move to the top of the pyramid, you need to play there game. That means kissing babies and being visible.

Other times, there is a ceiling you can't go through. If you're an IT guy working at an engineering firm, you'll never be a PE, so you're pigeonholed. If you're an accountant, you'll never be the CEO of Microsoft.

If you're not a daylaborer, you're not working every hot of the day.

When I used to work at jobs like this, where I had not a lot of responsibility part of what made it OK was "the art of looking busy." This could be anything from" reading work emails, printing and highlighting sentences, making lists of people, places and things, taking notes of activities. The list could go on and on.

This is an interesting article in light of patio11's about doing business in Japan: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/ reply

Too many 'Just So' stories.

The fact no one missed a dead person for two days is meaningless.

In a good business, with good employees, you should be able to do 2 days work straight uninterrupted.

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