6 ms·

It is interesting the number of people who see this as a problem that needs to be fixed. Since this specific comment is near the top, I might as well address t

It is interesting the number of people who see this as a problem that needs to be fixed. Since this specific comment is near the top, I might as well address that here. Why should I work more? How will that improve my life? My self-worth is derived from what I do outside of work to the extent that I don't prioritize professional validation. The primary reason I work is for money. I make enough money that I can live a comfortable life, I have few material wants, and I can be generous with my money. I am on pace to likely be able to retire in my mid-50s. I recognize that I likely could be making more money if I worked harder, but it wouldn't be proportional because compensation is not tied closely to production for individual contributors. A 50% increase in effort won't yield a 50% salary increase. Most of the added value from my increased effort would be captured by people above me in the org chart and our company's stockholders. As it currently stands, I don't find it that difficult to find a new job. I do spend some time keeping up with the industry, I am on HN after all, which tells you I care more about software development as a skill than some of my coworkers. It isn't that I dislike the profession, I simply don't see the reward in working harder primarily for the financial benefit of other people.

odonnellryan 5y ago
You shouldn't have to work more unless you think it is a problem. Admitting that you only work 2hrs a day and convincing yourself that everyone does that is not a good thing because it isn't true. Most people work fairly productive days.
throwthroyaboat 5y ago
I guess one thing that hasn't been clarified is how much time you spend dedicated work, v.s. actually working? Possibly the OP is assuming that you are only putting in effort 5-10 hours, but still at your desk (or equivalent) for the remaining 30-35, which is the soul-crushing waste-of-time part. If you are literally only spending 5-10 hours on work a week, and the remainder on avocational activities that you find fulling, then that sounds pretty ideal.
spicyusername 5y ago
Reminds me of a saying I hear woodworkers say a lot: "If it looks good, it is good" If you feel happy, you are happy. No need to over think it. If you feel you have what you need and are meeting your professional, emotional, familial, and financial responsibilities, sounds like you're good to go to me.
ineptech 5y ago
Deleted my previous reply as I didn't realize you were OP. I characterized this as a problem because a) you made it sound like one, and b) in my experience, people in this situation are usually unhappy and struggling in other areas. If you can do hard work when you want to, and simply choose not to, great. When I have coached people who are in this situation, that is not usually the case - usually, they got in to software because they liked programming, and they enjoyed their work previously, and now they don't, and want to get back to that. If that doesn't apply to you, great. I would say by way of warning though, that a) it's very likely your teammates have noticed and are frustrated with carrying you, and b) I would urge you not to get over-confident about your job prospects never changing. Any programmer over 50 can tell you that working a few hours a week was a totally viable career in 1998 and totally unviable in 2002. Oh and one more thing: if the main thing holding you back from 40 hour weeks is that you wouldn't capture the value, the solution is well-known: become a contractor. It pays better, and your income will scale linearly with hours worked. A lot of people find contract work less satisfying, but you said you don't care about that, so there you go.
prh8 5y ago
Just want to say that I am the same as pretty much everything you said. Job is to make for a good life. I will also say, most discussion usually paints the devs not working as much as less productive, whether explicitly or implicitly. But that isn't necessarily true either. I'm the top contributor for this calendar year at my company (public but not F500, about 100 developers) but averaging ~4 hours a day of actual work.
- wilkommen 5y ago
  4 hours of real work per day by someone who is already good at their domain is a whole lot of work, in my experience.
ridaj 5y ago
I don't know if you've lived through an industry downturn but that's a risk you might want to hedge against. Software/tech has had so much growth that it hasn't really had a bad year yet. Long term, even the dot com crash or the 2008 recession weren't super impactful. My guess is, you are doing enough and aren't enough of a troublemaker that your boss cares to do anything about it, but you're not fooling anyone either. In a structural downturn, they're getting pressure to downsize and you're at the top of the list. None of your colleagues who move on to better pastures will vouch for you anywhere else because they don't trust you to pull your weight. You find yourself pretty unsupported at that point. At the end of the day, I personally choose to stay sharp at work because it's my personal ethic, but there's also a real risk component that you may want to consider, although as long as the industry is structurally growing you probably don't have to worry too much about it.
- gen220 5y ago
  I think this an underrated aspect of career planning, i.e. building a career that makes you a recession-proof hire. The OP said they’d been in the industry for 2 decades, so they may have got into the workforce at the end of the dot com bubble. It wasn’t pretty for people who had been in the industry for a 5-10 years. Many forced career changes, big salary cuts, early retirements, depending on the person’s reputation, CV, and skills. I don’t think the next contraction will be nearly as globalized as the dot com contraction, but it’s worth assessing whether your niche or specialty is prone to that kind of lull in the hype cycle. In a contraction, the interview charades of big tech are replaced by street cred, because nobody can afford to hire deadwood. It’s brutal to be mid-career with no street cred in a recession, and one should try to avoid it. I’m not saying one should avoid work in web3, autonomous driving or whatever, but it’s prudent to have an escape hatch just in case. Be known as a hard worker, smart, and genial, and invest in developing skills that legitimately create value for any company, and you’ll be OK. It can be tempting to coast, but it’s not an effective strategy if your industry i has bearish downturns during your career.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
egypturnash 5y ago
An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied, “only a little while.” The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?” The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.” The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.” The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?” To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.” “But what then?” Asked the Mexican. The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!” “Millions – then what?” The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”
- raldi 5y ago
  The next week the fisherman got a toothache.
- dchapp 5y ago
  Exactly one of the characters in that story can weather disasters.
  - 5y ago
dlisboa 5y ago
Do you find that in the hours you're not working you're constantly worried that you'll be "found out"? If so the problem is those are wasted hours, you can't just sit down and read or travel because you're still supposedly working. Which means it doesn't really matter that you're not working, you're just not doing anything productive. That leads to doing nothing but mucking about on the Internet, not actually furthering anything for yourself. So it can have an impact on you mentally. I've felt that myself before. Now, some people have a well-defined work output where the boss just says "I want this, that's all". So if you do it in 3 hours in one day or 40 hours in one week, it doesn't matter, meaning you can actually use those other hours for yourself.
- achillesheels 5y ago
  Well said! Human cultivation, such as "deep reading" - like reading Descartes or Leonard Euler - can't be sustained when one is so easily interrupted at work.
- tayo42 5y ago
  Now that i work from home, i go to the gym, do chores, take naps, cook meals etc
- ConfessionTime 5y ago
  I would be lying if I said there was zero "I'll be found out" stress and that was part of the motivation for this post. Hearing that other people do this too would reduce that stress. Although this has never been a particularly big stressor for me. That is especially true over the last couple years in which the world has presented us with so many bigger concerns. I also know that most companies aren't going to fire someone for poor performance with zero warning and I have never received any type of warning about performance in my career. I don't consider the possibility of being fired as an immediate concern. I mentioned in another comment how working remotely has been a big productivity boost for those non-working work hours. Similar to tayo42 in another reply, it provides me the opportunity to do a lot of things that I previously did outside of work hours. One example is that I used to wake up an hour earlier to get exercise in before work. Now I sleep in and get that exercise in during the work day.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
The OP wasn't asking about working harder. They specifically said that they BS their way through standups to deceive their peers and manager into thinking that they're working, while often doing zero work at all: > There are literally days in which the only time I spend on my job is the few minutes it takes to attend the morning stand-up. Then I successfully bullshit my way through our next stand-up to hide my lack of production. At that point, it's not about grinding harder or going above and beyond. This is a problem of misleading everyone around you. It's not just the company that suffers. These situations usually result in the rest of the team having to pick up the slack to get things done. The person doing little to no work is taking advantage of their peers' productivity.
- moonchrome 5y ago
  >It's not just the company that suffers. These situations usually result in the rest of the team having to pick up the slack to get things done. The person doing little to no work is taking advantage of their peers' productivity Had a gig like this, the codebase was so shit it took days to do simple stuff, it was highly domain specific logic I cared nothing about and I was going to leave ASAP. Most of the time l bulshited my way through turns out a lot of the features got scrapped because they weren't necessary in the first place (ie. there was another way to do it for eg. or client didn't really need it), requirements got updated that would have made any progress I did worthless,etc. There were two crunch weeks before releases where I did some OT to help push stuff out the door (wasn't even my backlog) other than that yeah - did two months of work in 6 months I was there.
- abledon 5y ago
  but what if his 5-10 hours are equivalent in output to the 40 hrs of his coworkers?
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    I guarantee his 0 hour days (mentioned in the post) are infinitely less productive than his peers' 8 hour days. In the real world, someone who is 4-8X more productive than their peers is also significantly more senior and therefore paid significantly more. You don't see seasoned experts on the same teams as inexperienced juniors all getting paid the same. In my experience, the best team cohesion happens when everyone is putting in similar amounts of effort.
throw54679 5y ago
>Why work more? I founded a company and we were successful, but we really tried to continue the momentum. We had a group of 7-10 engineers, built over time and strenuously recruited and managed. And we have plateaued over the past 5 years. Now looking back I realized that probably a lot of the engineers had an attitude similar to what you describe. So they really ended up damaging their co-workers, because less growth at the company means limited advancement and less money all around, some layoffs during tough times, worse company culture, etc. It also wasted some of my professional time, because I am passionate about the industry and want to accomplish something in it. Do you feel bad when the Product Manager is eagerly contacting you and trying to pull together all requirements and engineering estimates for the next sprint, or whatever, that you are sandbagging that person's career? Now, I know what all the HN burnouts will say, "Screw them! If I can trick somebody out of a wage, that's my right!"
- gkop 5y ago
  What changed? Did your employees simply reach the cliff of their stock options?
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    I was an employee at a company that slowly declined due to employee malaise. In our case, it wasn't about options or compensation. It was a slow poisoning of the well as a few obvious slackers were allowed to persist without consequences. If your team lead is only showing up for 4 hours per day and nothing bad happens to them, you suddenly don't feel like putting in more than 4 hours per day yourself. In fact, you get paid less than the team lead, so maybe you only put in 2-3 hours. Then your junior teammate sees this happening and decides to push it even further to 1-2 hours per day. Meanwhile, the backlog piles up more and more. If you take a task, you're just inviting more work on yourself because you'll be responsible for it. You'll also have to convince the lazy teammates to help you with all of the blockers that fall in their domain, which they don't want to do. Better to just sit tight and claim you're still working on something else. From the management side, it's critical to address severely underperforming employees before the mindset is allowed to spread. Some times it's a simple matter of engaging with the employee and determining what's wrong. Other times, some people just like pushing the limits of how much they can get away with. They won't do any work unless prodded by a manager. They either need constant attention from their manager, or if that's unavailable they need to be removed from the company (sadly).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
workshy 5y ago
Throwaway for this one... It's possible that you've got cause and effect the wrong way round: consider maybe that your self worth is derived mostly from your extracurricular activities because you're failing at work. You put almost no effort in, achieve very little, are almost entirely disengaged, but, since you're a normal human, being a loser doesn't fit your self-image so you look to find meaning elsewhere in areas where you are engaged, connected, even passionate. It's a coping strategy. Finding meaning at work doesn't mean you no longer get to derive self worth from your family or your hobbies, rather it just enlarges the pie of your self worth. The advice given in the comment you're replying to is to find a job or career where you will be able to apply yourself. It really isn't bad advice. You should work more because you cannot exist without working, and what you're doing now is damaging yourself psychologically. Now I'm not trying to be mean here. I was in your shoes VERY recently. I suspect you've got yourself to a point where a couple years of pandemic stress and working from home has disconnected you from your colleagues and your company and you no longer want to reconnect. Whatever mission you are working towards was probably never all that engaging for you, but take away the human connection and that's been laid all too bare. And I expect you're worried about this ending, and having to go back to a grey office and a shit commute and losing the freedom that you think you have today. You don't want to "lean in" (as awful managers would say) because you recognize the mission as unfulfilling, but you can't separate yourself entirely because you need the money. It's not healthy. It could be time to take a risk and move. You know you can work remotely, there are jobs out there. There are better missions, companies with values that perhaps align closer to your own. That's scary, but finding a new gig where you'll have to work will not erase all the progress you've made in your hobbies and domestic life; those are things which make you more rounded, and they're yours forever. You can keep up with all that - because, after all, you're mostly just wasting time on the internet today. I say all this as someone who's struggled with your situation in the past and made a move recently to tacke it. It was frightening for me. I will say that I am considerably happier when my days are full of work, and it hasn't got in the way of any of my side projects or interests, which are numerous and very consuming. If anything, it is more energizing.
- kelnos 5y ago
  > consider maybe that your self worth is derived mostly from your extracurricular activities because you're failing at work. You say that like it's a bad thing. I would much rather my self worth be derived from the things that I choose to do, versus something I have to do in order to survive.
fromfar 5y ago
I think if you're working 10-15 hours a week and spending the extra time with your family and doing things that are fulfilling to you that's great. But the strategies mentioned to find more meaningful work are probably more useful if you're doing 10-15 hours of real work a week and then spending the remaining hours sitting in front of your computer browsing YouTube and doing nothing of value while pretending to be at work. If you have to pretend to be at work, then you can at least fill that time at the computer with something productive.
winterplace 5y ago
What is a better way for the company to give you increases?
Zvez 5y ago
> I am on HN after all, which tells you I care more about software development as a skill than some of my coworkers well, if you measure skills by amount of time people spend on HN, I think you miss something. Yeah, you don't have to work more. But imaging what would be if you wanted to work more. Not because you have to or forced to. But because you find your work so interesting that you want to put more hours where just to do it. Thats what at least some of commentors are trying to tell you. I were in positions where I could simply don't do anything the whole week and nobody would care (I was TL of the great team). But I didn't want to. Even when I actually avoid doing tasks my manager wants from me, I always find some cool stuff to do, to improve code I already have or investigate something or just bring shiny new tehcnology thing.

odonnellryan 5y ago

You shouldn't have to work more unless you think it is a problem. Admitting that you only work 2hrs a day and convincing yourself that everyone does that is not a good thing because it isn't true. Most people work fairly productive days.

throwthroyaboat 5y ago

I guess one thing that hasn't been clarified is how much time you spend dedicated work, v.s. actually working? Possibly the OP is assuming that you are only putting in effort 5-10 hours, but still at your desk (or equivalent) for the remaining 30-35, which is the soul-crushing waste-of-time part. If you are literally only spending 5-10 hours on work a week, and the remainder on avocational activities that you find fulling, then that sounds pretty ideal.

spicyusername 5y ago

Reminds me of a saying I hear woodworkers say a lot: "If it looks good, it is good" If you feel happy, you are happy. No need to over think it. If you feel you have what you need and are meeting your professional, emotional, familial, and financial responsibilities, sounds like you're good to go to me.

ineptech 5y ago

Deleted my previous reply as I didn't realize you were OP. I characterized this as a problem because a) you made it sound like one, and b) in my experience, people in this situation are usually unhappy and struggling in other areas. If you can do hard work when you want to, and simply choose not to, great. When I have coached people who are in this situation, that is not usually the case - usually, they got in to software because they liked programming, and they enjoyed their work previously, and now they don't, and want to get back to that. If that doesn't apply to you, great. I would say by way of warning though, that a) it's very likely your teammates have noticed and are frustrated with carrying you, and b) I would urge you not to get over-confident about your job prospects never changing. Any programmer over 50 can tell you that working a few hours a week was a totally viable career in 1998 and totally unviable in 2002. Oh and one more thing: if the main thing holding you back from 40 hour weeks is that you wouldn't capture the value, the solution is well-known: become a contractor. It pays better, and your income will scale linearly with hours worked. A lot of people find contract work less satisfying, but you said you don't care about that, so there you go.

prh8 5y ago

Just want to say that I am the same as pretty much everything you said. Job is to make for a good life. I will also say, most discussion usually paints the devs not working as much as less productive, whether explicitly or implicitly. But that isn't necessarily true either. I'm the top contributor for this calendar year at my company (public but not F500, about 100 developers) but averaging ~4 hours a day of actual work.

wilkommen 5y ago
4 hours of real work per day by someone who is already good at their domain is a whole lot of work, in my experience.

ridaj 5y ago

I don't know if you've lived through an industry downturn but that's a risk you might want to hedge against. Software/tech has had so much growth that it hasn't really had a bad year yet. Long term, even the dot com crash or the 2008 recession weren't super impactful. My guess is, you are doing enough and aren't enough of a troublemaker that your boss cares to do anything about it, but you're not fooling anyone either. In a structural downturn, they're getting pressure to downsize and you're at the top of the list. None of your colleagues who move on to better pastures will vouch for you anywhere else because they don't trust you to pull your weight. You find yourself pretty unsupported at that point. At the end of the day, I personally choose to stay sharp at work because it's my personal ethic, but there's also a real risk component that you may want to consider, although as long as the industry is structurally growing you probably don't have to worry too much about it.

gen220 5y ago
I think this an underrated aspect of career planning, i.e. building a career that makes you a recession-proof hire. The OP said they’d been in the industry for 2 decades, so they may have got into the workforce at the end of the dot com bubble. It wasn’t pretty for people who had been in the industry for a 5-10 years. Many forced career changes, big salary cuts, early retirements, depending on the person’s reputation, CV, and skills. I don’t think the next contraction will be nearly as globalized as the dot com contraction, but it’s worth assessing whether your niche or specialty is prone to that kind of lull in the hype cycle. In a contraction, the interview charades of big tech are replaced by street cred, because nobody can afford to hire deadwood. It’s brutal to be mid-career with no street cred in a recession, and one should try to avoid it. I’m not saying one should avoid work in web3, autonomous driving or whatever, but it’s prudent to have an escape hatch just in case. Be known as a hard worker, smart, and genial, and invest in developing skills that legitimately create value for any company, and you’ll be OK. It can be tempting to coast, but it’s not an effective strategy if your industry i has bearish downturns during your career.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

egypturnash 5y ago

An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied, “only a little while.” The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?” The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.” The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.” The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?” To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.” “But what then?” Asked the Mexican. The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!” “Millions – then what?” The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

raldi 5y ago
The next week the fisherman got a toothache.
dchapp 5y ago
Exactly one of the characters in that story can weather disasters.
- 5y ago

dlisboa 5y ago

Do you find that in the hours you're not working you're constantly worried that you'll be "found out"? If so the problem is those are wasted hours, you can't just sit down and read or travel because you're still supposedly working. Which means it doesn't really matter that you're not working, you're just not doing anything productive. That leads to doing nothing but mucking about on the Internet, not actually furthering anything for yourself. So it can have an impact on you mentally. I've felt that myself before. Now, some people have a well-defined work output where the boss just says "I want this, that's all". So if you do it in 3 hours in one day or 40 hours in one week, it doesn't matter, meaning you can actually use those other hours for yourself.

achillesheels 5y ago
Well said! Human cultivation, such as "deep reading" - like reading Descartes or Leonard Euler - can't be sustained when one is so easily interrupted at work.
tayo42 5y ago
Now that i work from home, i go to the gym, do chores, take naps, cook meals etc
ConfessionTime 5y ago
I would be lying if I said there was zero "I'll be found out" stress and that was part of the motivation for this post. Hearing that other people do this too would reduce that stress. Although this has never been a particularly big stressor for me. That is especially true over the last couple years in which the world has presented us with so many bigger concerns. I also know that most companies aren't going to fire someone for poor performance with zero warning and I have never received any type of warning about performance in my career. I don't consider the possibility of being fired as an immediate concern. I mentioned in another comment how working remotely has been a big productivity boost for those non-working work hours. Similar to tayo42 in another reply, it provides me the opportunity to do a lot of things that I previously did outside of work hours. One example is that I used to wake up an hour earlier to get exercise in before work. Now I sleep in and get that exercise in during the work day.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

The OP wasn't asking about working harder. They specifically said that they BS their way through standups to deceive their peers and manager into thinking that they're working, while often doing zero work at all: > There are literally days in which the only time I spend on my job is the few minutes it takes to attend the morning stand-up. Then I successfully bullshit my way through our next stand-up to hide my lack of production. At that point, it's not about grinding harder or going above and beyond. This is a problem of misleading everyone around you. It's not just the company that suffers. These situations usually result in the rest of the team having to pick up the slack to get things done. The person doing little to no work is taking advantage of their peers' productivity.

moonchrome 5y ago
>It's not just the company that suffers. These situations usually result in the rest of the team having to pick up the slack to get things done. The person doing little to no work is taking advantage of their peers' productivity Had a gig like this, the codebase was so shit it took days to do simple stuff, it was highly domain specific logic I cared nothing about and I was going to leave ASAP. Most of the time l bulshited my way through turns out a lot of the features got scrapped because they weren't necessary in the first place (ie. there was another way to do it for eg. or client didn't really need it), requirements got updated that would have made any progress I did worthless,etc. There were two crunch weeks before releases where I did some OT to help push stuff out the door (wasn't even my backlog) other than that yeah - did two months of work in 6 months I was there.
abledon 5y ago
but what if his 5-10 hours are equivalent in output to the 40 hrs of his coworkers?
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  I guarantee his 0 hour days (mentioned in the post) are infinitely less productive than his peers' 8 hour days. In the real world, someone who is 4-8X more productive than their peers is also significantly more senior and therefore paid significantly more. You don't see seasoned experts on the same teams as inexperienced juniors all getting paid the same. In my experience, the best team cohesion happens when everyone is putting in similar amounts of effort.

throw54679 5y ago

>Why work more? I founded a company and we were successful, but we really tried to continue the momentum. We had a group of 7-10 engineers, built over time and strenuously recruited and managed. And we have plateaued over the past 5 years. Now looking back I realized that probably a lot of the engineers had an attitude similar to what you describe. So they really ended up damaging their co-workers, because less growth at the company means limited advancement and less money all around, some layoffs during tough times, worse company culture, etc. It also wasted some of my professional time, because I am passionate about the industry and want to accomplish something in it. Do you feel bad when the Product Manager is eagerly contacting you and trying to pull together all requirements and engineering estimates for the next sprint, or whatever, that you are sandbagging that person's career? Now, I know what all the HN burnouts will say, "Screw them! If I can trick somebody out of a wage, that's my right!"

gkop 5y ago
What changed? Did your employees simply reach the cliff of their stock options?
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  I was an employee at a company that slowly declined due to employee malaise. In our case, it wasn't about options or compensation. It was a slow poisoning of the well as a few obvious slackers were allowed to persist without consequences. If your team lead is only showing up for 4 hours per day and nothing bad happens to them, you suddenly don't feel like putting in more than 4 hours per day yourself. In fact, you get paid less than the team lead, so maybe you only put in 2-3 hours. Then your junior teammate sees this happening and decides to push it even further to 1-2 hours per day. Meanwhile, the backlog piles up more and more. If you take a task, you're just inviting more work on yourself because you'll be responsible for it. You'll also have to convince the lazy teammates to help you with all of the blockers that fall in their domain, which they don't want to do. Better to just sit tight and claim you're still working on something else. From the management side, it's critical to address severely underperforming employees before the mindset is allowed to spread. Some times it's a simple matter of engaging with the employee and determining what's wrong. Other times, some people just like pushing the limits of how much they can get away with. They won't do any work unless prodded by a manager. They either need constant attention from their manager, or if that's unavailable they need to be removed from the company (sadly).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

workshy 5y ago

Throwaway for this one... It's possible that you've got cause and effect the wrong way round: consider maybe that your self worth is derived mostly from your extracurricular activities because you're failing at work. You put almost no effort in, achieve very little, are almost entirely disengaged, but, since you're a normal human, being a loser doesn't fit your self-image so you look to find meaning elsewhere in areas where you are engaged, connected, even passionate. It's a coping strategy. Finding meaning at work doesn't mean you no longer get to derive self worth from your family or your hobbies, rather it just enlarges the pie of your self worth. The advice given in the comment you're replying to is to find a job or career where you will be able to apply yourself. It really isn't bad advice. You should work more because you cannot exist without working, and what you're doing now is damaging yourself psychologically. Now I'm not trying to be mean here. I was in your shoes VERY recently. I suspect you've got yourself to a point where a couple years of pandemic stress and working from home has disconnected you from your colleagues and your company and you no longer want to reconnect. Whatever mission you are working towards was probably never all that engaging for you, but take away the human connection and that's been laid all too bare. And I expect you're worried about this ending, and having to go back to a grey office and a shit commute and losing the freedom that you think you have today. You don't want to "lean in" (as awful managers would say) because you recognize the mission as unfulfilling, but you can't separate yourself entirely because you need the money. It's not healthy. It could be time to take a risk and move. You know you can work remotely, there are jobs out there. There are better missions, companies with values that perhaps align closer to your own. That's scary, but finding a new gig where you'll have to work will not erase all the progress you've made in your hobbies and domestic life; those are things which make you more rounded, and they're yours forever. You can keep up with all that - because, after all, you're mostly just wasting time on the internet today. I say all this as someone who's struggled with your situation in the past and made a move recently to tacke it. It was frightening for me. I will say that I am considerably happier when my days are full of work, and it hasn't got in the way of any of my side projects or interests, which are numerous and very consuming. If anything, it is more energizing.

kelnos 5y ago
> consider maybe that your self worth is derived mostly from your extracurricular activities because you're failing at work. You say that like it's a bad thing. I would much rather my self worth be derived from the things that I choose to do, versus something I have to do in order to survive.

fromfar 5y ago

I think if you're working 10-15 hours a week and spending the extra time with your family and doing things that are fulfilling to you that's great. But the strategies mentioned to find more meaningful work are probably more useful if you're doing 10-15 hours of real work a week and then spending the remaining hours sitting in front of your computer browsing YouTube and doing nothing of value while pretending to be at work. If you have to pretend to be at work, then you can at least fill that time at the computer with something productive.

winterplace 5y ago

What is a better way for the company to give you increases?

Zvez 5y ago

> I am on HN after all, which tells you I care more about software development as a skill than some of my coworkers well, if you measure skills by amount of time people spend on HN, I think you miss something. Yeah, you don't have to work more. But imaging what would be if you wanted to work more. Not because you have to or forced to. But because you find your work so interesting that you want to put more hours where just to do it. Thats what at least some of commentors are trying to tell you. I were in positions where I could simply don't do anything the whole week and nobody would care (I was TL of the great team). But I didn't want to. Even when I actually avoid doing tasks my manager wants from me, I always find some cool stuff to do, to improve code I already have or investigate something or just bring shiny new tehcnology thing.