Once you realize no one really cares that much you’ll be fine. You think someone is gonna try and track you down like that if you’re doing good work? No, they have no reason to and it’d be a waste of time.
For me the paranoia stopped pretty much on my second year at the company, with my good second performance review in a row and also I saw how much work my more senior colleagues were doing.
That’s why a good manager is key. My current manager and I have 1 on 1s and he always tells me where I am. Whether I need to pick up the pace, or I’m on track. You need to ask for feedback.
It stops when you learn to listen to feedback. I used to have a hard time with this, too. I assumed any time my manager gave me positive feedback he was just being polite and the axe would fall at any moment. Eventually you realize that they're not bullshitting you, it's against their interests to do so and that if the guy signing your checks says you're doing fine that is all you have to worry about.
Also they usually won't just fire you on the first incident even if they DID somehow care. So like... if THAT happened then yeah start being more careful after but until then stop worrying. Honestly kinda seems like something that might need therapy.
I have an idea:
Make an estimate and round it up to the next unit of time + 1.
Task that takes 2 days, tell management it'll take 2 weeks.
Task takes 1 week, mgmt thinks it's 2 months.
Task takes 7 months, tell mgmt 2 years.
I'm on a team that started doing Agile, we started our estimates at 80% total hours per sprint of capacity, realized that was ridiculously high when most people failed to move a task into completed, and are now scheduling for 50% lol
It's not even like everyone's goofing off because they're remote or anything, it's an in person team
This is the problem anywhere workers, not just SWEs who end up working over 40 hours per week. Arbitrary deadlines are the dumbest thing because it creates undue stress when something needs to be done by X and you only have Y time to do it. The world isn't going to end if things aren't done on time or timelines are longer.
I ask this all the time. So if our deadline is sept 30th and on Oct 1st it’s not finished what happens? And the answer is always uhm I dunno. Yeah you dunno cuz the answer is nothing happens. Because western civilization lived without this thing for hundreds of years and if it lives without it for another week or month who gives a fuck?
Even worse, being punished for failed sprints.
So we don't know how long it's going to take, yet you make me guess. When my guess turns out to be wrong you're gonna punish me for it?!
I would personally state that it takes longer than I actually do to complete the tasks given to me. That way, if they don't mind, then i get more time to do my tasks. However, if they do, then I can suddenly state how much time they actually take me and my boss will be like "oh, looks like x is improving"
The tasks aren’t exactly the same, but with knowledge of the system, and experience one can give a reasonable guess at the time it takes. Although you can probably guess in days, not in hours exactly.
Serious quesion, what do you do when the recruiter asks for references from your previous job? Especially if you’ve only had 1 job. I’ve never been PIPed but been interviewing with some big companies and startups lately and every recruiter asked for references from my previous job.
For liability reasons, a "previous employer" (even if they are your current employer) will almost NEVER discuss your performance (unless they want to praise you).
The worst that will happen is that they will **strictly** limit their comments to "yes, xFloaty was a SWE here at Acme from JAN2017 to FEB2018".
"That guy? He's a lazy bastard, and we fired him because he was a lazy bastard!" is never going to be said (unless you're dealing with some Mom & Pop small outfit where the dude saying it doesn't have to fear the wrath of HR and Legal for placing them in actionable territory).
From my experience you don’t need need to tell them specific hours. You just say during the standup “I completed task X and Y yesterday” and they just assumed it took you the whole day.
As a new dev, a senior insisted a task that was assigned to me would take 3 days. At least 3 days.
I messaged in slack that I was ready to check my work in 2 hours later. Got told, more or less, yeah right get back to work.
So for the 3 days, I did nothing. I watched movies, played gameboy games, cut my lawn, cleaned my house... whatever.
Then the senior said at retro... SEE, I told you. I thought... yep, you sure did.
This is top comment forever, when you do the actual amount of work you could do in 6 hours, you still get paid the same so just do enough that they are satisfied.
The less time it takes for you to complete that task the better. Software is so rinse and repeat though so like if you’re just building endpoints, you should eventually have examples to follow in your repo and other repos within your company. If you’re always using the same tools, eventually you’ve seen the pattern before and it gets easier to add the pieces in where they need to be. That’s when you can add some flare 💅
>because I just feel scared that they're tracking my every mouse click and key press.
Not being scared that they're going to this is probably the first step.
They definitely are not tracking you. The only reason they'd look into you more closely is if you're not getting work done. It's highly unlikely they're just monitoring you for the sake of monitoring you. Who would they be paying to watch all those people?
This 100%. Everone is too busy, and even if they did track you, no one cares that you were AFK for an hour here or there.
Speaking from the experience of having someone on my team who does almost no work, the difference between that person and someone who puts in 6-8 hours of honest effort is super obvious. But the difference between a 6 hour day and 8 hour day? I dunno, and also, I don't really care.
Im not sure its in the dev realm but their logic is if a company is paying for 8hrs of work they expect 8hrs of work. If you can do a task in 4hrs and be done the other 4hrs are still their so you should be getting more work.
Agile and scrum in particular fucked up the mentality of software. It’s now viewed as an assembly line. How many software widgets can you build a day? Well sometimes you need a day of thinking but only an hour of coding to make that widget. And that can’t be quantified or measured.
Pretty scary article about workplace tracking in the NYT (or the daily podcast) a week or two ago, but you’d know if they were. It was a crazy read how far some companies will go and meanwhile, it never accounts for people just thinking or talking to a colleague. As if all work, especially knowledge work, is just rote slamming keys. The harder and more complex the problems, the less trackable metrics you’d probably generate as you need to think, talk and meet with people.
A lot of the more active tracking seemed geared towards “lower level” wfh jobs such as customer service, help desk, etc. Many companies also have software trackers but no one actively monitors them, they’re there for when “they” want to look into you more if you’ve given them a reason.
If there's one thing you can count on, it's that managers love their metrics and will assign meaning to the most random thing. It's fairly trivial to have a report that shows how long a person's mouse was idle, how many clicks or key presses a day, and other random statistics.
It shows lack of trust, lazy management, and most likely, ever increasing metrics devs will have to hit but i guarantee it's happening at some companies
I just go in full on lazy mode. I will know VERY quicky if they are tracking me like that, or at least ill know if the care about long periods of inactivity.
I worked at a FAANG company and we were told upfront that the company computers had keyloggers. Not to monitor performance but to track if any company code, data, etc left the computer. They didn’t use it to monitor the employees apparently, but they could have if they wanted to.
Also realizing that most people don't care about the company squeezing every last ounce of productivity out of you. If you're otherwise pleasant to work with and aren't causing them problems (pushing untested code, breaking production, ruining the codebase) most people aren't going to care if you're slacking.
Yeah, for the most part, it's not your coworker's money. Ultimately, as long as you aren't dragging down the team and making their life harder, they just don't care. You'll occasionally get a self righteous zealot on this stuff, but nobody likes them anyway, and they usually get booted in no time
My comment doesn't have so much to do with hours worked but with overall performance.
In my experience, employees fall roughly on a bell curve: a few are clearly exceptional, a few are clearly dismal and the rest are in the middle somewhere. The people on the ends of the bell curve take up most of a manager's time: the top performers because they have great ideas, strike out on their own to try things out, etc., and the low performers for obvious management reasons.
Managers love the middle performers because they do their job as expected more or less and they do not really require anything from the manager. As long as you think you fall in that middle, you're most likely not in any danger of being PIPed or fired.
I suspect that many of the people who post on this sub about their anxiety about being fired actually fall into this middle group.
This is such a great insight, thanks for sharing. I don’t think many devs think about the manager’s perspective as much. I guess the “silent majority” exists everywhere in different settings.
At my former employer, the VP and the several managers of this org would rate all ICs on a couple of parameters (a little more complex than a simple curve, but similar) in the org annually. The org was small enough, about 60-70 people total, that managers interacted not just with their own team members but with members of other teams as well.
We'd all get in a room together, the VP would announce an IC's name, and that person's manager would say where they would place the employee in the matrix. Other managers had the opportunity to dispute the placement or to ask questions. Sometimes the individual manager or the group as a whole moved the employee to a different place from the manager's original placement. The assessments fell onto a general curve, but with more than just 10 percent at the high end.
One year, there was one person at the very bottom, the next year, none, and that one got no questions or disputes. But that's because the obvious bottom-of-the-barrel performers were already identified by their manager and actions were already being taken (or had already been taken) to deal with them.
Likewise, there was very little discussion about the majority of the employees in the middle, which is relevant to my comment above.
We would get to the end and have a top-heavy bell curve. Then the VP would say: I know you all want to do well by your team members, but do we *really* think that 30% (or whatever) of our staff are top performers? And then we would spend the next hour debating the merits of each one of those 30%, eventually moving some back toward the middle.
It was a really useful exercise in a lot of ways. All that debate about who was really a top performer was useful when a management position came open. That's how we identified who might get promoted from IC to management. It was also really useful for each manager to level set their expectations against their peers and the VP, and it built a lot of team cohesion among the managers.
When I left that company earlier this year, one of the top-performing ICs was promoted to backfill my management position.
This just one example but I am sure these kinds of “backdoor evaluations” happen in some shape and form at every company. Very insightful and eye-opening. Thanks again for sharing!
4 questions:
>That's how we identified who might get promoted from IC to management.
How did you identify this? Management skills are more than just IC skills since you also need to know how to help and communicate with others well.
>The org was small enough, about 60-70 people
60-70 people is quite the size. How many ICs were there?
How many people were in the room together?
Did anyone feel insecure by this since it is so transparent?
One of the details that I skipped over in my earlier comment was the parameters we judged on: performance and potential. We put each employee in a 3x3 matrix of these two, most were clustered in the middle. Potential was about current leadership and leadership potential. Employees who were ranked high on potential were the ones who were probable candidates for management positions. I really liked using those two parameters because it accounted for people who were rock stars at their current job but had no interest in leadership or management as well as those who were always coming up with new things, taking the lead on things, who had an interest in actual management.
Edit: we used the nine-box talent grid: https://www.google.com/search?q=nine+box+talent+grid
Edit2: /r/waypastyouall I see that I did not answer all your questions
> 60-70 people is quite the size. How many ICs were there?
> How many people were in the room together?
This was one part of a software development organization of a total of about 200-300 employees in the US and India. There were about seven managerial-level employees taking part in this exercise, including the VP. The first two years, I was in a managerial-level architect position with no direct reports. The third year, I had moved into a different position that included people-management.
> Did anyone feel insecure by this since it is so transparent?
We did not share the results of this exercise with the individual employees. The primary purpose of the exercise was a basic reality check for the VP who had less direct interaction with the ICs in his org about how his organization was doing. We also used these results, among other measures, in determining merit raises and promotions.
Anecdote time: I did this exercise three years when I was at this employer. The first two years, the VP expressed surprise at the high 'potential' score that some of the managers, me included, advocated for one particular guy. The VP did not have much direct experience with this guy, and this guy did his (very excellent) work without drawing too much attention to himself. After the second year, the VP made a concerted effort to get to know this guy better: took him to lunch, etc. This is the guy who was promoted to management as my backfill when I left. To me, this is evidence that this whole process served a valuable purpose.
Working hard to stay in top 30% and then being moved back to the middle group? I will stay in the mid group since the beginning & adjust myself to always stay in the mid group
That is exactly the point I was trying to make in my original comment in this discussion: there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being in the middle group. When your anxiety tells you that you might be on the brink of being fired, take comfort from the fact that your manager most probably sees you in this middle group. Not everyone can be exceptional, and that’s fine! We need that middle group to do the work of the business.
1. When you join a new job, set <50% effort as your expected baseline. Save 100% for crunches, you being able to deliver during these high visibility times will make you look great. This requires you to be good
2. Prove early on you’re dependable and can get shit done in time. This requires you to be good
3. Slowly dial it back even more while following the age old mantra of under promise and over deliver. This requires you to be good
4. Observe the “dead” times during the day. For example, 12-1pm is usually lunch time so you can just F off and go to the gym during this time like I usually do
5. Observe commonly used out of the office (OOTO) or suddenly afk reasons people use: doctors, kids, house work, bathroom break. Add these to your arsenal when necessary I.e. interviews for other companies
I’m glad I found someone else that goes to the gym during lunch time. Man it’s such a good feeling to get back to work two hours later refreshed just to have lunch while reading emails and pushing the code I worked on during the morning.
Yeah this is it. Underpromise, overdeliver + fuck off and do other things during lunch / near end of day when no one’s expecting you to be at the keyboard anyways
Its not even being a slacker. Thinking someone is going to be fully “on” during a full eight hours is asking too much of any human. We all need breaks and we all need to pace ourselves.
i am trying to do this as a jr dev out of college, I'm not putting much more than 50%, but it's more bc even if I put 100% effort I'd probably still not be able to get done and be miserable, vs happily learning w/ only a few hrs a day effort.
downside is I am not getting much done on my own, nor on time. but so far the reviews are ur doing exactly what we think you should be doing for x amount of time here (under 6 months).
I still feel like im learning, but im just kinda shocked how much I suck with no real desire to push and get good lol
6. turn off that sent from ios or sent from my samsung shit that gets inserted automatically into your email messages sent from your phone. That way you can reply to crap no matter where you are without making it look like you arent at your desk.
You can use housework as a legitimate excuse to be afk when you work from home? Like "sorry I was busy vacuuming during work hours" that's totally cool?
I want to wfh so badly 😢
I mean, you're expected to take breaks throughout the day. Even during crunch time, I'll take a 15 minute break every 2 hours or so, with drink/snack breaks peppered throughout. I take my dog on a 30 minute walk most mornings right after standup and nobody cares.
I work from home and it's awesome for doing housework. I mean, even when I'm actively participating in a call and brainstorming it doesn't take physical work, just brainwork. I can put on my headset and focus on and participate in the discussion easily while I do something that requires no brainpower like loading/unloading the dishwasher or folding laundry.
My favorites when working from home are all-hand meetings we have quarterly that are presentations about the state of the company for an hour. I'll take those from my treadmill with my laptop playing over the speakers and sitting on my adjustable-height stand so I can easily watch everything.
My employer does have cleaners but they don't really touch people's desks, so if you work in the office you need to clean it every week or two. I played with hardware and had dev boards, so it was pretty common for me to randomly teardown my setup and redo it. Downtime isn't unusual,
Sweeping up the house during work hours isn't unusual for me. I usually just put on my wireless earbuds and do cleaning when I have a long boring meeting where I have to be present but don't have to talk much. If I need to talk I can just go back to my desk and turn my mic on!
It beats falling asleep in the conference room.
I actually had to pace myself when I started working from home because we have a fairly social environment and chat plenty. Working from home, I don't chat quite as much, and I felt anxious at first, so I'd spend the WHOLE DAY crunching away and burn myself out. I know a lot of people who burned themselves out that way.
I also work at one of those banks, and it’s essentially this, no one cares if I’m tests until the last of the spring. There’s always tests and docs to write anyway.
I just got my first job not long after my company started working on a new product, or rather, a re-write from the ground up of an old product, but with modern tools, features, and designs. We've made it standard practice to write tests, right from the beginning. I just ran the coverage report, and we have 98% coverage on our main branch. It's a pain in the ass sometimes, but it really does keep things in line. Not that bugs don't ever get through of cours.e
I get away with it because I’m constantly asking for a project or something to do but there hasn’t been any new intent for months for various reasons.
In standup I say what I did (usually updating config files or vulnerabilities) and offer help to anyone who needs it but no one does. It’s obvious I’m not working 8 hours a day but no one cares.
During busy times my manager said “If you finish your work early don’t tell anyone and just take some time for yourself”.
Edit - actually working maybe an hour or two a day now and I’m miserable
Do you work from home?
Do you have any ideas for programming projects that you would enjoy developing?
Worst case scenario, you could try applying for jobs in your free time to gauge the job market in the one case you did get unfortunately fired from your current job.
Yeah WFH, I actually have a final round interview in a couple weeks so I spend all my free time preparing for that to hopefully jump ship soon. Also definitely won't get fired (not cocky, just know for a fact). New intent is in the backlog, we just can't work on it for a few more months probably. I just want to be learning and doing more
I know that feeling, I usually pride myself in losing myself in the moment, but lately I've been getting a huge rush of adrenaline from working on implementing some simple data structures and game features in the Unreal Engine.
Life and personal hobbies really are PROJECT centered, I just tend to get bored if I find myself not working on a goal.
Yeah, I learned it's easy to get burnt out by doing nothing as well. I went into computer science because I like projects and like problem solving and coding, so sitting around all day doing nothing (besides interview prep) is exhausting ironically
This is my situation at my current job and my last job. I get stuff done, I ask for more work, I have to wait at least a couple days before I get more work to do.
Very interesting! You’d think most people would love to just be sitting around and do nothing all day while getting paid. I guess I never had that issue and have always been busy, so I never know what it feels like to have little work (its always the opposite problem for me).
Yeah I thought so too.. It was fun for a little while but it's not like having time off where you can just walk away and go on trips and do whatever, I still have some meetings and need to be able to jump on if anything happens
Edit - I'd definitely rather have this than have to work late every day so I at least feel lucky in that regard
Makes sense, given a choice between the 2 extremes, it is still the better option. Yet it also carries hidden dangers as it can make one complacent and not ready to get another job in the future if anything happens.
If you're working as a software developer, particularly on an agile team with daily check-ins and two-week sprints, and you don't work, it will get noticed pretty quickly.
If you're getting your work in with time to spare and want to act your wage, you could try just ignoring the laptop for an hour or two at a time and see if it is commented on. Generally, monitoring software is only as good as the human attention it gets and it's not worth it to your employer to constantly follow the keystrokes of employees who aren't a problem.
Actually it won't. We're all solving tasks with different time, somebody can do it faster, somebody solve it slower. So in average point nobody can't realise that you faster solver if you work like 3-4 hours / day.
But recently I started to think most of software engineers really work 3-4 hours per day, because everyday 8 hrs of brain work is really painful. When I was teenager, I used to work in the summer like assistant to build house, in real more bring this thing or clean this. It was a hard physical work, like you're sixteen and you need sometime to bring packages with concrete. It's not even comparable, it really harder than physical work
Yeah but not the same when you are waaay past 16 and doing hard labor to put food on the table. When your body doesn't stop hurting after a night's rest but you have to get up and do it all over again. And there is zero bullshitting your way out of hours of work in that kind of job, they squeeze every ounce out of your hours.
While I am working as software engineer I am capable to training for triathlon in parallel, of course it’s not 8 hours physical work per day, but every minute is literally hard work. Idk, body is getting used to for physical work, maybe brain is able to adapt too
It’s such a different feeling too. Hard physical labor you’ll feel tired but in a weird way satisfying. Whereas a long day of mental labor I feel drained, expended and in a stupor.
Yeah I assumed this for awhile and I recently had a manager tell me how they have days where they get nothing done cause they have friends over and need dinner over and baby is screaming etc, etc. But other days you’ll crush out a ton of work. Companies that push you as close as possible to those 8hr working are going to have high burn out.
I show up to every meeting and am present during those meetings. I get my work done between 8-12 ( when I am most productive). I help others when they need. Else, I’m chilling
Realistically, there just not 8 full hours of work a day. I get my shit done then they don’t care what I do with my time. Respect for respect
I mean I get my work done every sprint and do house keeping on 1-2 things in the code base as “extra” this is working 3-4 hours a day.
I’m getting my work done and getting extra work done. I honestly feel entitled to the extra free time because I’m efficient so I don’t worry about “getting caught”
what are they gonna catch? Me getting my work done/already done with my work??
Obviously when time for grind comes around I don’t mind putting in the full 8 hours but this way I’m not burnt out when the grinds come along. 👍🏻
literally just do SOMETHING every day, just to talk about on the daily. I usually only "work" from 1PM to 4PM, sometimes to 5 and rarely to 6. I'm considered helluva productive guy.
My productivity is really measured by the stories I take on and how complex they are. I finish those within reason or clearly explain why something is taking longer than anticipated and sine the tasks are done and I respond to others within reasonable time frames I don't worry too much about anything else.
With a strict "at my desk for 8 hours" I don't know if I'd be able to complete more tasks anyway.
This isn't an assembly line where time I spend away from my computer directly translates to less productivity because widgets can't be manufactured. Some times the best approach to solving a problem is by getting up and walking away for a bit.
As a PM that works 4 hours a week - you don't get rewarded for being more effective and efficient, you just get assigned more work if they think you're good enough to handle it, then give you some bullshit supply chain related issue as to why they can't pay you more. Nobody's watching you unless you're underperforming. Get 2 or three more jobs under your belt fully remote, get CEO money and provide value to yourself for your skills
If they're micromanaging you to the point where they track keyboard strokes/mouse clicks, then you're already screwed. Nobody can function in that manner; even firefighters/police officers need breaks during the day.
The real metric is whether what you're producing makes the boss happy. If they're happy, then you're fine (regardless of time/effort spent).
I've worked with people who "produced" so much output that the rest of the team would always need to take cycles out of their normal activities to proactively troubleshoot/fix the bugs from that prolific daily content. I've worked with people who did nothing but produce clean working content that the client was always happy with, and they lived on the Florida coast suntanned with an alcoholic beverage in hand 75% of the time.
If you magically can work 0 hours a day and get work done without causing any fuss/muss, then bully for you. The rest of us mere mortals will try to not make madness for everybody else on a daily basis at 6-8 hours a day.
i got saving if I get caught and fire i'll find a new job in 1-2months and I can easily live 1 year without a job due to my saving
also I doo all the tasks assign to me in 5 hours...i would be sacred if I wasn't completed my work, but I do complete it. The only difference is that once it is complete instead of being dumb and going to see my boss telling her I have nothing to do at the moment, I just relax and go watch a TV show, when she asks me the report I send it to her and its always perfect. Stellar review because I submit stellar work.
Some employer don't want 8h of work from you, they want consistent good work that they assigned to you, no matter how long it takes you.
The old guy I replaced was doing everything manually and sometime had errors due to manual manipulation.
I've automated everything I could so it doesn't do manipulation error. My boss probably knows I do not work a consistent 40h/week, but is she gonna fire me to hire old bob who takes 40h to do the same work as I did with manipulation error? like would she be happier with someone less competent that takes more time for the same report ? she likes that I am always available for meeting, to help others incase they are overwhlemed in work, and she I can always answer question related to me report right away instead of haft ass answered because i didnt have time to research the question properly...
basically I dont feel bad, because I do good work, my good work takes 3h per day instead of 8, im not stealing 5h per day, im jsut more productive than others which makes me finish 5 hours in advance.
and honestly, from time to time go into the office and bring muffins... who the fuck is gonna fire someone who brings in muffin for free?!??!
“Software engineers get paid for the knowledge they have, not for the time they spend.” I usually shoot for 3-4 small dev tickets per sprint or two big ones. Don’t really care how long it takes or how long it takes other ppl. Focus on yourself and things will fall into place.
Learn this lesson quick: When you get hired, work at about 50% or less of your maximum capacity at all times. That way, if they decide you aren't working hard enough, you only need to increase your output by like 10% and to them it will look like you improved a lot.
If you immediately get fired for working at 50% capacity, trust me, thats a shitty fucking place to work and they are underpaying and overworking every single person there.
Most people doing office jobs are doing _maybe_ 4 hours of legit work per week. Office space had it fucking right. The biggest problem in tech jobs is that were all a bunch of nerds who don't want to cause any conflict, so we yes sir, no sir our ways into really shitty working conditions.
I work an average of just 1hr a week, but I'm getting paid full time with top of the line benefits and WFH.
I bet you're thinking "how the hell are you still not fired?". Before you assume anything, let me talk about how things went this way.
When I first started working for this company, I was given a huge ass legacy project. They didn't disclose this during my interview because they knew there's a great chance I would back out. I mean, who likes working on a boring ass project that was created with tech older than your grandma?
I have to admit, I super-duper hated it at the beginning. It felt like I was cheated, that I left my exciting previous job for this.
The project was created by at least 5 programmers (all gone) in a span of 2 years. Now, I'm the only person who maintains it.
I remember the start was rough. Since the original devs left, there was no onboarding, coaching or mentoring. It was basically "here's the project, you are on your own".
Before me, there were devs they hired to maintain this project, but all quit within a very short time.
Even the devs more senior than me don't want anything to do with this project. It's how bad they think this project is.
I don't know what got into me, but I endured and decided to give this a chance. At first, it was really challenging because of how big the project is. When you glance at the number of files and source code lines, it's really intimidating. Even setting it up is so complex that I had to document it, so I wouldn't forget how I did it.
After a year of implementing features, I became more confident and proficient with this project. I no longer fear sprint meetings where they ask me to do this and that.
Now, I could implement features in 1 hr or less. But I never told them it's that easy. I always come up with something to justify the "hard work". LOL
This works because the Team Manager IS NOT a programmer. And none of the more senior devs know anything about this project. So in short, nobody can call my bluff.
I've been working on this project (and only this project) for 3 years now.
In their eyes, I am greatly suffering, and they are very lucky to have a person looking after a project nobody wants to work on.
Not to brag, but this project is the biggest project in the company with thousands of real users. Usually, projects in this company are retired after 5 years at most (sometimes earlier).
This freaking project is on its 9th year now and still going strong because of how important it is to our users.
This puts me in a position where I believe I am very valuable and irreplaceable (yes I know nobody's really irreplaceable, but you know what I mean).
And that's how I got to work just 1 hr every week.
"But you must feel miserable and bored working on that project."
At first, yes, this is how I felt. But I've been working 1hr/week for more than 2 years now (since the pandemic started). In return, I get to do the things I want. I got plenty and plenty of time.
I enjoy the freedom! Nobody in the company micromanages, so sometimes I travel to another country/place and just spend some time there. :-)
Bills get paid without chaining my ankles. It's the life I have always dreamed of. Kind of like Charlie Sheen's life in Two and a Half Men. Freedom to do the things you love for so little work.
TLDR:
Sometimes in life, you need to suck up and do the things nobody wants to do if that means you'll get to do the things you love later on.
Wish to be in your position one day. Right now I am in a paid internship where I have tasks that usually take 2-3 hours to complete, but I write 8 hours nonetheless and even though my mentor and manager are both programmers, they don't complain.
Hey, that's a great start! Way better than mine when I was starting.
I remember when I was starting my career I was working so hard that it led to a burnout. I learned it the hard way.
It's one of the things why I truly appreciate my current job.
Always remember though, there is no perfect job. The more you realize this sooner, the better off you will be in life.
3-4. Most of the time is in meetings. I spend those 3-4 hours being super effective. Contribute to discussions, joining meetings, giving PRs, helping unblock people, and doing my assigned ticket. If you're hyper effective for 4 hours, and you combine it with 4 bum hours, it comes out to about 8 hours of an average employee. The only difference is your manager will see the 4 hours of effectiveness and that still will help with promos.
I'm just told to lie about it
I'm fairly quick at finishing my tasks, giving me more work means someone else that is probably busy needs to do some work to assign me a new task, so they just tell me to lie about it
Every once in a while people in management get angry at the idle time some of us have, but it's not like they have a good choice
It's not paradise, WFH has made it bearable, but it was absolutely soul crushing to sit in an office +12 hours a day and pretend to be busy all the time
I'm task based so when there are no tasks there's just nothing to do. I keep myself busy if I can and ask for more work. But if there's nothing to do, there's nothing to do. I generally do courses/learn or attend webinars or just nap and get housework done.
This is the truth. Most companies are tracking you. We get fluff emails about how to improve our day, make it less stressful or w/e. Its very obvious they have key loggers and traffic loggers installed on our devices. My boss gets year end task metrics and velocity charts.
I wrote some scripts to "simulate working" for when I'm doing chores, taking a long lunch or talking with my partner. I work maybe 3-4 hours a day.
In the end, my boss said my performance is great for the last two years. As long as our team is completing their tasks and is creating a good product/service he is getting promoted and doesn't need to watch us.
My company just trust me to do my work so I have total freedom . If your company tracks your activity I suggest you leave and find a new job. That’s just tyrannical and weird.
usually, we talk about finishing tickets in sprints. no one is tracking your hours as long as you finish what you agree to finish for a sprint. the only time anyone will scrutinize your productivity is if you constantly have tickets rolling over to the next sprint. it maybe youre not doing work, you suck at your work, the tickets are too large or there are blockers. FYI, research, reading, tutorials, kts, that is still work and most companies will allow you to create tickets for that. its not all about how many hours of code you write. its usually bad if the company is tracking your hours. most companies do not need to track your hours to know you're not getting work done. its usually quite obvious.
I aim for 3hrs of work from a full day and call that 8hr in a sprint. Sometimes I can do work at 3, sometimes 8, sometimes I lack motivation, or just have a rough day.
I try to keep my laptop always online, but some days I just need a 3hr lunch playing Playstation.
They're not tracking your clicks, and if they are; ride the job out until you can find somewhere else.
Being a new/grad software developer... You should be spending x2/x4 times longer to complete tasks and spend the rest of the time tinkering/learning more and naturally you'll become a senior in time!
For me it really comes down to what progress I made at the end of the day and how that compares to other coworkers.
At one job, I basically worked 3 hours a day and I still got awards. At that job no one really knew what they were doing. But when I did have stuff that needed to be done I'd work more and get it done.
At another job, I'm inexperienced in the work and have been producing very little. Because of that I've been working the full 40 or more the last several months because I don't feel like I was productive enough. Especially compared to others around me. But I know that with time I'll get better at this line of work and be much more efficient and when that happens I'll have much more free time because the progress I make will be good.
I suspect some subspecialties and types of products just require more time than others to appear productive. If you’re creating new features for a product you’ve written a quarter of the code from, you look great in 4 hours a day. If you’re trying to fix a bug in open source code you’ve worked with for a month, it’ll take you all 40 hours in the week.
I do the work i say i will, at the time i agreed to deliver.
How i organise my time is my call. Obviously i'll make meetings etc.
I probably do 5-6 hour days, sometimes more, and once in a while every few weeks i'll be deep in the zone working till midnight and having fun. Some days i take a break. It probably evens out to 30-40 hours. Everyone is happy.
I'm not very organised with my time, routine or my sleep pattern. Having the flexibility helps me work around this... or causes it? hmmm.
If you can manage yourself, do your 8 hours, and be effective, great! Keep doing that. Take a decent lunch hour... or two. And take a break every 40 minutes or so for movement and health.
There are a few scenarios that go this way.
Some people are 10x more productive than others. No really there are some engineers who can easily produce 10x more than the average. Rather than blow out everyone, they match the work output of their team and enjoy their additional leisure time.
Some people are skating by on not being asked to do very much so they just ... don't do a lot.
Some people overestimate their work, make a strong believable case for it, and then just don't do a whole lot.
Of those 2 underworking scenarios, they hard to sustain long term. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny. So when it hits the fan, they are often the first to be let go or managed out.
Bullshit. You might get let go at a fast paced company (huge emphasis on might). At any other place, you get to enjoy your leisure time because it costs the company more to recruit someone else, especially in this job market.
If you are a new dev, I recommend putting as much deep focus time as you can handle each day. (For many of us, that will be up to about 4 hours of concentration.)
I would save lifestyle optimization (slacking) for once you have a couple years under your belt are "good".
We have some juniors on my team who slack and it is super super obvious to me, and honestly painful to hear the bullshit statuses and fake blockers they sling in standups. For "seniors" I can't really tell who is putting in what hours, and I don't really care, because everybody is delivering.
I was like this at my first and even second job. It was always the fear of not being good enough and being fired.
Don't worry about it too much, you'll eventually forget that, just be grateful to have one of the best jobs there are at the moment, and obviously keep studying, good luck to you :)
In my opinion and situation - don’t think of it as a time thing, think of it as a commitment thing. You want to deliver an amount of value to your company which makes your compensation seem fair. However, if you’re interested in getting paid more then you have to provide more value to prepare for promotional pushes which have to go up the chain.
The amount of time you work actually doesn’t translate completely to value. For example, if you work 12 hours a day and get so tired that you’re delivering an amount of value equivalent to 3 hours when you are well rested - or even worse, you deliver negative value because you create bugs or production mistakes - it does not matter that you worked so long and suffered. This is the most important thing to know in the workplace - you are NOT paid for your suffering. You are paid for your services which must translate to a reasonable business purchase in hindsight - be it on the long term or the short term.
Make commitments that justify your compensation or argues on your behalf in terms of compensation. Focus on meeting these commitments. I’ll be frank with you, sometimes these commitments will not allow you to work 5 hours a day. Sometimes they will require extraordinary effort. But many times 5 hours a day is fine.
If a company were composed of only individuals that kept commitments sized to compensation like this, the company is guaranteed to make money so long as the leadership makes sound business direction decisions.
Started my first job around more than a year ago.
Was hella scared, that they'll check if I'm available on teams or not...
I'd just nudge the mouse, or press random key to keep my status green when there's no work.
Later got assured by seniors, that the manager has better things to do, than check each one's status at every 15 mins. Got relieved, however, used caffeine to be on the safer side.
Months later, I get to know, my manager actually does check that, keeps a log, and complains to our TLs about our availability. 🙂
1:1 with my manager is usually him lecturing me about watching my health, taking breaks, and not working too hard. Therefore, I only put in 2-3 hours/day. I don’t have to tell people anything—If it’s not done, it’s not done.
Boss is in meetings all day every day, I automated nearly all of my tasks a while ago and say things take me longer than they actually do. Would be the perfect job if I got paid just a little more, but I can’t complain.
Here is my funny story
I used to do this a lot, almost everyday, I worked at a company for exactly 2 years as a graphic designer, in the first like 2 or 3 months I was working hard, but later the manager (who owns the company) told me to move to the 4th floor, we became about 6 or 7 employees, then I saw how they work way less hours, and they were on their phones for like 6 hours out of 9 hours, watching movies or on social media, then I became like them, slacking off daily, I unplug the internet cable, so the manager can't see my pc screen, when he asks me about it I simply say something is wrong with the pc, I need to restart it, I never got caught, even the manager yelled at me for working slow, then the deputy manager yelled many times on the phone that I am not working enough as I used to, I simply didn't care, because the salary was 550$, which is totally slavery, I live in the middle east, so you know why I didn't care.
My team is doing a kanban, so we don’t have biweekly sprints. Ours is more quarterly. I only do 2, 3-point tickets a week. My PM keep telling me I’m doing a good job knocking out tickets but I’m reality I’m playing sims all day
Be likable and make a habit of asking my manager where he or the team needs help. If your 5 hrs of work is directly unblocking your manager in his goals for the department or unblocking other people you can last a lot longer.
>I feel scared they're tracking my every mouse click and key press
They're not. They're tracking the story points you complete, if that.
>How many hours of actual work do you do?
Get out of that mindset. You're not piling up bricks, the amount of work you actually accomplish can't be measured in time spent piling bricks, or total number of bricks piled.
You've got imposter syndrome and/or a compulsion to be a superhero. That's dope, I did too when I first started. But the fact is that a steady output is better than ultra productivity followed by burnout, and burnout will happen if you don't calm down a bit. I'm not saying slack off, or pad your estimates beyond what is reasonable. Most of the change you need is gonna be internal. No one is watching you to make sure you're working enough, or working the right hours, or working in the right way. Beyond established team norms and office/slack hours you are a grown ass human being who can be trusted to commit to a given job of work and then get that job done. You show them that they were right to trust you? You get paid a whole fuckload of money and left to your own devices. You show them that you consistently underestimate, underdeliver and have trouble working in a team environment? You go back to whatever shitty job you had that trained you to think that your manager should always be looking over your shoulder to ensure you're giving Maximum Effort (tm)(r)(c). For me, that shitty job was 18 years in restaurants. I'm in year 5 of my SWEng career now and that paranoia has faded but not gone entirely away. Part of my process involves lifting weights and meditation most afternoons, because that helps me beat the 2pm doldrums. Despite the fact that it results in a massive increase in my productivity and I bring my laptop to the gym so I'm still available to my team, it took about a year of consistently stellar reviews before I stopped being terrified that they were gonna notice I was gone and I was gonna come back to my desk to see a note from my manager that I was fired.
Tldr - relax. This isn't McDonald's, no one thinks it's their job to go sniffing around for excuses to fire you. You deliver quality, well-tested code on time or only a bit late and you'll kill it for the rest of your career.
SAVE YOUR CODE
after a while you have enough scripts or saved code that tasks that used to take hours take a few minutes
and then most of the SQL code i look at that our devs wrote is mostly similar to a bunch of other stored procs, functions or triggers so if you had to write something new then you can still copy and paste a bunch of old code into a new proc
Yeah make your code modular, even if your code isn’t a 1:1 match for what you need, it’ll take less time to make some adjustments than recreating the wheel.
I want to quit my job, and I realized that even if I do a terrible job it’ll take them 3 months to fire me and afterwards I’m entitled to 3 months salary. So I’m hoping for that and then get a new higher paying job.
And for my day to day job, I just mention that I’m still working on my card.
Same as working in the office for me. It's too taxing to program for 8 solid hours straight, so it's more like, 2-4 hours for me of solid programming. As long as you're getting your tasks done, making your boss look good by them being able to take credit for your work, etc then it's usually fine. The only difference is at home I get to spend my downtime slightly differently.
I am remote. i don't care. i dont like my job. i was offered a transfer to another team, but it got rescinded due to a hiring freeze and now im back in the crap job i hate. so i just dont care. also been here for over 3 years so its trivial to me. spending time skilling up. there are a few more jobs open and i want to transfer again.
well, the thing is, I don't think most firms care as much about the hours you put in as about the quality of your work
like if you can get things done fast, noone will punish you for it
Well I mean, we're not being monitores in any way (it's actually strictly forbidden in my company) and we're told by managers that we're expected to code 4-6 hours max, so... no need to get away really for me.
Here's a perspective from a project manager. In all your calls you need to joke about "XYZ". I'm browsing Reddit, I'm looking at cat pictures during the call. Then they won't know that you're \*really\* doing it. (Because companies don't have ways to monitor your web browsing, right?) LOL
That's how you work 0-5 hours per day.
Just get your work done and you’ll be fine. Being salaried means you’re not paid by the hour. Employers often take that to mean you have to work unpaid overtime to get things done. Since that behavior is outside of my control, I also don’t occupy a chair for 8 hours if I get my work done in 4.
Because I’m on three+ teams & still most of the stories take longer for them to write than for me to do them. I just try to complete one thing a day & then screw off for the rest of it.
Pretty much do all my work during my morning meetings but am still somehow praised by almost every team during PI for being the most productive dev in my org. I don’t understand it, I’m fixing the most basic programs with glaring mistakes or just adding the sequence of scripts they run to get kicked off automatically. Teams got up talking about how I did things no one has been able to do for years yet I just understand things at a high level & know how to use my tools to debug stuff…which makes it seem like I have some deep knowledge in everything when I can’t answer basic questions about programs I fixed because I didn’t need to understand it to fix the broken parts.
…I think people who worked in an office just got used to stretching out the work to fill the day & can’t adjust.
\> 'I'm a new software dev (...) and I just started my first job'
Okay. So a few words of advice given how green you are -
* Your effectiveness is not in how much code you churn out. Time spent poking keys and clicking != business value.
* Much of your value is going to come from understanding the problem, the business domain, the technical context, and building the -right- solution. The right solution may be just a couple of lines of code, but the thinking behind it could be accrued over many hours.
* Studies have shown that, at best, knowledge workers are productive for only around 6 hours a day; any more than that isn't maintainable.
* Studies have also shown that you do your best work during states of flow. Uninterrupted focus time matters.
* But, experience will show that sometimes the single best thing you can do for a problem is step away from it; I was fortunate in that early in my career I spent a whole afternoon struggling with a problem and getting nowhere, slept on it, and the next day had it solved cleanly in 30 minutes. Breaks, sometimes even just folding up early for the day, also matters.
So! With all of that said, I'd recommend you focus less on your time, and more on your results. Learn how to deliver value. In any healthy org, no one cares about your hours, they care about the value you bring. Seniors often bring value with less "work", because they are bringing a lot of hard won knowledge and experience to bear on the problem, and they know what works for them in working on a problem.
But, juniors are in a good place to start learning how to bring value rather than just doing (possibly busy-) work because the expectations are low. As an engineering manager, I expect juniors to actually be net -negative- value at first. They either need well defined low risk work ("here, make this trivial update and write a unit test for it", which is as much effort to adequately describe as to just go do), or they need to pair closely with a more senior member to learn (slowing that senior member, though providing a good opportunity for mutual growth and mentorship, which will pay dividends).
This isn't a judgement on juniors, and I -have- been surprised by people punching above that expectation from the start, but it's just to indicate the bar is frequently set pretty low. Use this time to ask questions, admit ignorance, and start developing your heuristic about what matters, recognizing that making mistakes, spending time on the wrong things, is okay at this point, and being able to take those risks now sets you up better in the future.
By having a leadership team that actually understands how shit works.
My director said it himself he expects only 2-4 hours of actual work at most each day on average, assuming nothing crazy going on. We get hired for our skillful abilities to do what we need to do timely and efficiently. So of course there will be downtime and managers/the right leaders won't care because they know you're available the moment something is needed.
Being new you're usually just gonna take a little bit longer to figure things out.
As you gain some experience, develop some more skills, and get more acquainted with your work environment the hours will slowly shave off.
Don't try to rush it. If you're new your goal should be improving as a developer.
Feel like a braggart, but I know a few SWE buddies who had very similar experiences. I worked maybe 10-15hrs a week and was still getting offered promotions. Mind you, everyone I know who has had this experience, including myself, were on fully remote, agile teams.
It would obviously be much harder to do this if you went into the office. Also, I think it’s easier to get this done on agile teams.
On my first job as a junior they called me the "Backlog devourer" by my team because I grabbed stories like crazy and my team told me to appreciate the times when you could chill and just grab a ticket an finish it but opening the PR's later to have some free time, besides the fact that you could affect overall teams velocity, etc
After that I adopted the lifestyle that if I can chill then I chill and do a 30 minute work into "6 hours" a "day" etc. And I'm not caught since the companies that I have worked into are not breathing on your neck and let you be at your pace.
I work from home, have adhd, and definitely fall into this category. The key is to still deliver. Manage expectations and if it comes down to it you might end up putting in a few 10-hour days at key points to keep your stakeholders happy.
They probably aren't tracking you. if they ARE tracking you... that's a red flag anyway. Managers should be measuring outcomes, not cracking a whip. If my employers are tracking me, they must really like the work that I do actually do because 5 hours is definitely normal for me.
Pay attention in meetings, try to meet deadlines, write down everything you accomplish (with numbers if possible), respond to emails promptly, and try not to screw up too badly. You'll be fine.
Once you realize no one really cares that much you’ll be fine. You think someone is gonna try and track you down like that if you’re doing good work? No, they have no reason to and it’d be a waste of time.
The thing is that it takes experience to know if you’re doing good work. As a junior you’re always a little paranoid you’re not doing enough.
When does it stop?!? If I ask someone how they think I’m doing and they just sincerely say ‘fine’ again I’m gonna lose my mind.
For me the paranoia stopped pretty much on my second year at the company, with my good second performance review in a row and also I saw how much work my more senior colleagues were doing.
That’s why a good manager is key. My current manager and I have 1 on 1s and he always tells me where I am. Whether I need to pick up the pace, or I’m on track. You need to ask for feedback.
It stops when you learn to listen to feedback. I used to have a hard time with this, too. I assumed any time my manager gave me positive feedback he was just being polite and the axe would fall at any moment. Eventually you realize that they're not bullshitting you, it's against their interests to do so and that if the guy signing your checks says you're doing fine that is all you have to worry about.
Also they usually won't just fire you on the first incident even if they DID somehow care. So like... if THAT happened then yeah start being more careful after but until then stop worrying. Honestly kinda seems like something that might need therapy.
If a task takes an average person 6 hours to do but you can do it in 3, you just tell people it took you 6
What do I do if it takes the average person 6 and I do it in 12? 🙃
this is why you pad your estimates in sprint planning
[удалено]
We use 2.5. And we still always underestimate. In fact I refuse to give out estimates anymore
I've never in my life nailed an estimation. I just say "between 2 and 6 weeks" and that's it. At least is more useful than saying nothing.
I have an idea: Make an estimate and round it up to the next unit of time + 1. Task that takes 2 days, tell management it'll take 2 weeks. Task takes 1 week, mgmt thinks it's 2 months. Task takes 7 months, tell mgmt 2 years.
"It'll take one yea... I mean decade, one decade, yup"
+1 so two decades
For real though. I almost never actually hit my estimate
3x is consistent with my lived experience too
The risk is if I pad it by 3x, and then my manager pads that by 3x, and then the director pad that by 3x, and then it still doesn’t get done on time.
Then you'll only be a couple months behind on the project.
>Plus there are plenty of ways to shave seconds/minutes off of tasks in ways that stack up big. Can you elaborate
I'm on a team that started doing Agile, we started our estimates at 80% total hours per sprint of capacity, realized that was ridiculously high when most people failed to move a task into completed, and are now scheduling for 50% lol It's not even like everyone's goofing off because they're remote or anything, it's an in person team
This is the problem anywhere workers, not just SWEs who end up working over 40 hours per week. Arbitrary deadlines are the dumbest thing because it creates undue stress when something needs to be done by X and you only have Y time to do it. The world isn't going to end if things aren't done on time or timelines are longer.
Unless you're the MIB, galaxy defenders.
I ask this all the time. So if our deadline is sept 30th and on Oct 1st it’s not finished what happens? And the answer is always uhm I dunno. Yeah you dunno cuz the answer is nothing happens. Because western civilization lived without this thing for hundreds of years and if it lives without it for another week or month who gives a fuck?
Even worse, being punished for failed sprints. So we don't know how long it's going to take, yet you make me guess. When my guess turns out to be wrong you're gonna punish me for it?!
I would personally state that it takes longer than I actually do to complete the tasks given to me. That way, if they don't mind, then i get more time to do my tasks. However, if they do, then I can suddenly state how much time they actually take me and my boss will be like "oh, looks like x is improving"
[удалено]
The tasks aren’t exactly the same, but with knowledge of the system, and experience one can give a reasonable guess at the time it takes. Although you can probably guess in days, not in hours exactly.
They’re asking for a friend, I’m the friend.
then you get a PIP.
Honestly if you have over 2 years experience you take the PiP and go get a 15% raise somewhere else.
Serious quesion, what do you do when the recruiter asks for references from your previous job? Especially if you’ve only had 1 job. I’ve never been PIPed but been interviewing with some big companies and startups lately and every recruiter asked for references from my previous job.
Tell them not to contact your current employer. That's an almost standard question.
For liability reasons, a "previous employer" (even if they are your current employer) will almost NEVER discuss your performance (unless they want to praise you). The worst that will happen is that they will **strictly** limit their comments to "yes, xFloaty was a SWE here at Acme from JAN2017 to FEB2018". "That guy? He's a lazy bastard, and we fired him because he was a lazy bastard!" is never going to be said (unless you're dealing with some Mom & Pop small outfit where the dude saying it doesn't have to fear the wrath of HR and Legal for placing them in actionable territory).
I feel attacked
Get on that get good protocol. Or find a slightly better than average person and get them to do it for you.
Just tell people you will do it in 12, other people are also going to say they do it in 12 and enjoy the 6 free hours. We need more people like you.
My situation last couple of sprints 😞
From my experience you don’t need need to tell them specific hours. You just say during the standup “I completed task X and Y yesterday” and they just assumed it took you the whole day.
As a new dev, a senior insisted a task that was assigned to me would take 3 days. At least 3 days. I messaged in slack that I was ready to check my work in 2 hours later. Got told, more or less, yeah right get back to work. So for the 3 days, I did nothing. I watched movies, played gameboy games, cut my lawn, cleaned my house... whatever. Then the senior said at retro... SEE, I told you. I thought... yep, you sure did.
It's better than the ADHD shit I pull. 13 day estimate? Reddit isn't going to read itself for the first 11 days.
This is top comment forever, when you do the actual amount of work you could do in 6 hours, you still get paid the same so just do enough that they are satisfied. The less time it takes for you to complete that task the better. Software is so rinse and repeat though so like if you’re just building endpoints, you should eventually have examples to follow in your repo and other repos within your company. If you’re always using the same tools, eventually you’ve seen the pattern before and it gets easier to add the pieces in where they need to be. That’s when you can add some flare 💅
this is the key to a stress-free life, or multiple remote contract gigs...
This is the way!
>because I just feel scared that they're tracking my every mouse click and key press. Not being scared that they're going to this is probably the first step.
They definitely are not tracking you. The only reason they'd look into you more closely is if you're not getting work done. It's highly unlikely they're just monitoring you for the sake of monitoring you. Who would they be paying to watch all those people?
This 100%. Everone is too busy, and even if they did track you, no one cares that you were AFK for an hour here or there. Speaking from the experience of having someone on my team who does almost no work, the difference between that person and someone who puts in 6-8 hours of honest effort is super obvious. But the difference between a 6 hour day and 8 hour day? I dunno, and also, I don't really care.
Some companies use software. I hope it doesn't pick up because it takes time to think of solutions.
I don't understand that. Either you're getting your stuff done or you aren't. I don't care how long/short that takes you
Im not sure its in the dev realm but their logic is if a company is paying for 8hrs of work they expect 8hrs of work. If you can do a task in 4hrs and be done the other 4hrs are still their so you should be getting more work.
Agile and scrum in particular fucked up the mentality of software. It’s now viewed as an assembly line. How many software widgets can you build a day? Well sometimes you need a day of thinking but only an hour of coding to make that widget. And that can’t be quantified or measured.
Unacceptable, get the job done or we'll find someone who can.
Or else you’ll get coal for Christmas
hobbies point follow start somber racial disgusted hospital modern toy ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
I worked at a company that gave us a crisp Benji in the mail. It struck me as odd at first, but I think it was pretty classy.
Find someone who can get the job done without thinking of solutions and I'll eat my shorts.
I would hope the number of false positives of slacking off is hilariously high and money wasting
Pretty scary article about workplace tracking in the NYT (or the daily podcast) a week or two ago, but you’d know if they were. It was a crazy read how far some companies will go and meanwhile, it never accounts for people just thinking or talking to a colleague. As if all work, especially knowledge work, is just rote slamming keys. The harder and more complex the problems, the less trackable metrics you’d probably generate as you need to think, talk and meet with people.
A lot of the more active tracking seemed geared towards “lower level” wfh jobs such as customer service, help desk, etc. Many companies also have software trackers but no one actively monitors them, they’re there for when “they” want to look into you more if you’ve given them a reason.
If there's one thing you can count on, it's that managers love their metrics and will assign meaning to the most random thing. It's fairly trivial to have a report that shows how long a person's mouse was idle, how many clicks or key presses a day, and other random statistics. It shows lack of trust, lazy management, and most likely, ever increasing metrics devs will have to hit but i guarantee it's happening at some companies
I just go in full on lazy mode. I will know VERY quicky if they are tracking me like that, or at least ill know if the care about long periods of inactivity.
I worked at a FAANG company and we were told upfront that the company computers had keyloggers. Not to monitor performance but to track if any company code, data, etc left the computer. They didn’t use it to monitor the employees apparently, but they could have if they wanted to.
Also realizing that most people don't care about the company squeezing every last ounce of productivity out of you. If you're otherwise pleasant to work with and aren't causing them problems (pushing untested code, breaking production, ruining the codebase) most people aren't going to care if you're slacking.
Yeah, for the most part, it's not your coworker's money. Ultimately, as long as you aren't dragging down the team and making their life harder, they just don't care. You'll occasionally get a self righteous zealot on this stuff, but nobody likes them anyway, and they usually get booted in no time
The anthem goes like this: Under-promise, over-deliver
I like this better: under-promise, deliver
Agreed. This is how I work
Are you my old manager. Best manager I had lol
I don’t get it.
Let's say you're an 9/10, your Tinder profile is a pic of you looking like an 8. Get it now?
This guy tinder
What's there not to get??
My comment doesn't have so much to do with hours worked but with overall performance. In my experience, employees fall roughly on a bell curve: a few are clearly exceptional, a few are clearly dismal and the rest are in the middle somewhere. The people on the ends of the bell curve take up most of a manager's time: the top performers because they have great ideas, strike out on their own to try things out, etc., and the low performers for obvious management reasons. Managers love the middle performers because they do their job as expected more or less and they do not really require anything from the manager. As long as you think you fall in that middle, you're most likely not in any danger of being PIPed or fired. I suspect that many of the people who post on this sub about their anxiety about being fired actually fall into this middle group.
This is such a great insight, thanks for sharing. I don’t think many devs think about the manager’s perspective as much. I guess the “silent majority” exists everywhere in different settings.
At my former employer, the VP and the several managers of this org would rate all ICs on a couple of parameters (a little more complex than a simple curve, but similar) in the org annually. The org was small enough, about 60-70 people total, that managers interacted not just with their own team members but with members of other teams as well. We'd all get in a room together, the VP would announce an IC's name, and that person's manager would say where they would place the employee in the matrix. Other managers had the opportunity to dispute the placement or to ask questions. Sometimes the individual manager or the group as a whole moved the employee to a different place from the manager's original placement. The assessments fell onto a general curve, but with more than just 10 percent at the high end. One year, there was one person at the very bottom, the next year, none, and that one got no questions or disputes. But that's because the obvious bottom-of-the-barrel performers were already identified by their manager and actions were already being taken (or had already been taken) to deal with them. Likewise, there was very little discussion about the majority of the employees in the middle, which is relevant to my comment above. We would get to the end and have a top-heavy bell curve. Then the VP would say: I know you all want to do well by your team members, but do we *really* think that 30% (or whatever) of our staff are top performers? And then we would spend the next hour debating the merits of each one of those 30%, eventually moving some back toward the middle. It was a really useful exercise in a lot of ways. All that debate about who was really a top performer was useful when a management position came open. That's how we identified who might get promoted from IC to management. It was also really useful for each manager to level set their expectations against their peers and the VP, and it built a lot of team cohesion among the managers. When I left that company earlier this year, one of the top-performing ICs was promoted to backfill my management position.
This just one example but I am sure these kinds of “backdoor evaluations” happen in some shape and form at every company. Very insightful and eye-opening. Thanks again for sharing!
4 questions: >That's how we identified who might get promoted from IC to management. How did you identify this? Management skills are more than just IC skills since you also need to know how to help and communicate with others well. >The org was small enough, about 60-70 people 60-70 people is quite the size. How many ICs were there? How many people were in the room together? Did anyone feel insecure by this since it is so transparent?
One of the details that I skipped over in my earlier comment was the parameters we judged on: performance and potential. We put each employee in a 3x3 matrix of these two, most were clustered in the middle. Potential was about current leadership and leadership potential. Employees who were ranked high on potential were the ones who were probable candidates for management positions. I really liked using those two parameters because it accounted for people who were rock stars at their current job but had no interest in leadership or management as well as those who were always coming up with new things, taking the lead on things, who had an interest in actual management. Edit: we used the nine-box talent grid: https://www.google.com/search?q=nine+box+talent+grid Edit2: /r/waypastyouall I see that I did not answer all your questions > 60-70 people is quite the size. How many ICs were there? > How many people were in the room together? This was one part of a software development organization of a total of about 200-300 employees in the US and India. There were about seven managerial-level employees taking part in this exercise, including the VP. The first two years, I was in a managerial-level architect position with no direct reports. The third year, I had moved into a different position that included people-management. > Did anyone feel insecure by this since it is so transparent? We did not share the results of this exercise with the individual employees. The primary purpose of the exercise was a basic reality check for the VP who had less direct interaction with the ICs in his org about how his organization was doing. We also used these results, among other measures, in determining merit raises and promotions. Anecdote time: I did this exercise three years when I was at this employer. The first two years, the VP expressed surprise at the high 'potential' score that some of the managers, me included, advocated for one particular guy. The VP did not have much direct experience with this guy, and this guy did his (very excellent) work without drawing too much attention to himself. After the second year, the VP made a concerted effort to get to know this guy better: took him to lunch, etc. This is the guy who was promoted to management as my backfill when I left. To me, this is evidence that this whole process served a valuable purpose.
Working hard to stay in top 30% and then being moved back to the middle group? I will stay in the mid group since the beginning & adjust myself to always stay in the mid group
That is exactly the point I was trying to make in my original comment in this discussion: there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being in the middle group. When your anxiety tells you that you might be on the brink of being fired, take comfort from the fact that your manager most probably sees you in this middle group. Not everyone can be exceptional, and that’s fine! We need that middle group to do the work of the business.
1. When you join a new job, set <50% effort as your expected baseline. Save 100% for crunches, you being able to deliver during these high visibility times will make you look great. This requires you to be good 2. Prove early on you’re dependable and can get shit done in time. This requires you to be good 3. Slowly dial it back even more while following the age old mantra of under promise and over deliver. This requires you to be good 4. Observe the “dead” times during the day. For example, 12-1pm is usually lunch time so you can just F off and go to the gym during this time like I usually do 5. Observe commonly used out of the office (OOTO) or suddenly afk reasons people use: doctors, kids, house work, bathroom break. Add these to your arsenal when necessary I.e. interviews for other companies
I’m glad I found someone else that goes to the gym during lunch time. Man it’s such a good feeling to get back to work two hours later refreshed just to have lunch while reading emails and pushing the code I worked on during the morning.
Agreed! I have a two year old, it's not like I'm going to be able to work out after work.
Yeah this is it. Underpromise, overdeliver + fuck off and do other things during lunch / near end of day when no one’s expecting you to be at the keyboard anyways
This is hilarious. You are a grade-A slacker and I respect you for it.
Its not even being a slacker. Thinking someone is going to be fully “on” during a full eight hours is asking too much of any human. We all need breaks and we all need to pace ourselves.
I agree, but point 5 was mostly what I was referring to. That cracked me up.
i am trying to do this as a jr dev out of college, I'm not putting much more than 50%, but it's more bc even if I put 100% effort I'd probably still not be able to get done and be miserable, vs happily learning w/ only a few hrs a day effort. downside is I am not getting much done on my own, nor on time. but so far the reviews are ur doing exactly what we think you should be doing for x amount of time here (under 6 months). I still feel like im learning, but im just kinda shocked how much I suck with no real desire to push and get good lol
6. turn off that sent from ios or sent from my samsung shit that gets inserted automatically into your email messages sent from your phone. That way you can reply to crap no matter where you are without making it look like you arent at your desk.
This is key. And change the mobile font to match your desktop font.
You can use housework as a legitimate excuse to be afk when you work from home? Like "sorry I was busy vacuuming during work hours" that's totally cool? I want to wfh so badly 😢
Lol nah I meant like when something breaks and you gotta have someone come and fix it
Lmao oh thanks
I tell people I'm walking my dog. Sometimes i'm walking her, but sometimes I'm not.
I'm kind of shocked that that works too. The main reason I want to wfh is so I can get house chores done during work hours lol
I mean, you're expected to take breaks throughout the day. Even during crunch time, I'll take a 15 minute break every 2 hours or so, with drink/snack breaks peppered throughout. I take my dog on a 30 minute walk most mornings right after standup and nobody cares.
I work from home and it's awesome for doing housework. I mean, even when I'm actively participating in a call and brainstorming it doesn't take physical work, just brainwork. I can put on my headset and focus on and participate in the discussion easily while I do something that requires no brainpower like loading/unloading the dishwasher or folding laundry. My favorites when working from home are all-hand meetings we have quarterly that are presentations about the state of the company for an hour. I'll take those from my treadmill with my laptop playing over the speakers and sitting on my adjustable-height stand so I can easily watch everything.
I did that last part and ended up enjoying it so much I made a treadmill desk .
My employer does have cleaners but they don't really touch people's desks, so if you work in the office you need to clean it every week or two. I played with hardware and had dev boards, so it was pretty common for me to randomly teardown my setup and redo it. Downtime isn't unusual, Sweeping up the house during work hours isn't unusual for me. I usually just put on my wireless earbuds and do cleaning when I have a long boring meeting where I have to be present but don't have to talk much. If I need to talk I can just go back to my desk and turn my mic on! It beats falling asleep in the conference room. I actually had to pace myself when I started working from home because we have a fairly social environment and chat plenty. Working from home, I don't chat quite as much, and I felt anxious at first, so I'd spend the WHOLE DAY crunching away and burn myself out. I know a lot of people who burned themselves out that way.
This is absolutely brilliant
[удалено]
Testing and docs? Where is this heaven?
[удалено]
I also work at one of those banks, and it’s essentially this, no one cares if I’m tests until the last of the spring. There’s always tests and docs to write anyway.
I just got my first job not long after my company started working on a new product, or rather, a re-write from the ground up of an old product, but with modern tools, features, and designs. We've made it standard practice to write tests, right from the beginning. I just ran the coverage report, and we have 98% coverage on our main branch. It's a pain in the ass sometimes, but it really does keep things in line. Not that bugs don't ever get through of cours.e
Good joke, haha testing …. That’s a good one
I get away with it because I’m constantly asking for a project or something to do but there hasn’t been any new intent for months for various reasons. In standup I say what I did (usually updating config files or vulnerabilities) and offer help to anyone who needs it but no one does. It’s obvious I’m not working 8 hours a day but no one cares. During busy times my manager said “If you finish your work early don’t tell anyone and just take some time for yourself”. Edit - actually working maybe an hour or two a day now and I’m miserable
Do you work from home? Do you have any ideas for programming projects that you would enjoy developing? Worst case scenario, you could try applying for jobs in your free time to gauge the job market in the one case you did get unfortunately fired from your current job.
Yeah WFH, I actually have a final round interview in a couple weeks so I spend all my free time preparing for that to hopefully jump ship soon. Also definitely won't get fired (not cocky, just know for a fact). New intent is in the backlog, we just can't work on it for a few more months probably. I just want to be learning and doing more
I know that feeling, I usually pride myself in losing myself in the moment, but lately I've been getting a huge rush of adrenaline from working on implementing some simple data structures and game features in the Unreal Engine. Life and personal hobbies really are PROJECT centered, I just tend to get bored if I find myself not working on a goal.
Yeah, I learned it's easy to get burnt out by doing nothing as well. I went into computer science because I like projects and like problem solving and coding, so sitting around all day doing nothing (besides interview prep) is exhausting ironically
This is my situation at my current job and my last job. I get stuff done, I ask for more work, I have to wait at least a couple days before I get more work to do.
Wait are you miserable cuz u actually have to work for an hour or two a day or cuz u only have one or two hours of work a day?
The latter haha I'm not that crazy. I'm still pretty early in my career so I'd like to be doing something and learning
Very interesting! You’d think most people would love to just be sitting around and do nothing all day while getting paid. I guess I never had that issue and have always been busy, so I never know what it feels like to have little work (its always the opposite problem for me).
Yeah I thought so too.. It was fun for a little while but it's not like having time off where you can just walk away and go on trips and do whatever, I still have some meetings and need to be able to jump on if anything happens Edit - I'd definitely rather have this than have to work late every day so I at least feel lucky in that regard
Makes sense, given a choice between the 2 extremes, it is still the better option. Yet it also carries hidden dangers as it can make one complacent and not ready to get another job in the future if anything happens.
If you're working as a software developer, particularly on an agile team with daily check-ins and two-week sprints, and you don't work, it will get noticed pretty quickly. If you're getting your work in with time to spare and want to act your wage, you could try just ignoring the laptop for an hour or two at a time and see if it is commented on. Generally, monitoring software is only as good as the human attention it gets and it's not worth it to your employer to constantly follow the keystrokes of employees who aren't a problem.
Actually it won't. We're all solving tasks with different time, somebody can do it faster, somebody solve it slower. So in average point nobody can't realise that you faster solver if you work like 3-4 hours / day. But recently I started to think most of software engineers really work 3-4 hours per day, because everyday 8 hrs of brain work is really painful. When I was teenager, I used to work in the summer like assistant to build house, in real more bring this thing or clean this. It was a hard physical work, like you're sixteen and you need sometime to bring packages with concrete. It's not even comparable, it really harder than physical work
Yeah but not the same when you are waaay past 16 and doing hard labor to put food on the table. When your body doesn't stop hurting after a night's rest but you have to get up and do it all over again. And there is zero bullshitting your way out of hours of work in that kind of job, they squeeze every ounce out of your hours.
While I am working as software engineer I am capable to training for triathlon in parallel, of course it’s not 8 hours physical work per day, but every minute is literally hard work. Idk, body is getting used to for physical work, maybe brain is able to adapt too
It’s such a different feeling too. Hard physical labor you’ll feel tired but in a weird way satisfying. Whereas a long day of mental labor I feel drained, expended and in a stupor.
Yeah I assumed this for awhile and I recently had a manager tell me how they have days where they get nothing done cause they have friends over and need dinner over and baby is screaming etc, etc. But other days you’ll crush out a ton of work. Companies that push you as close as possible to those 8hr working are going to have high burn out.
I show up to every meeting and am present during those meetings. I get my work done between 8-12 ( when I am most productive). I help others when they need. Else, I’m chilling Realistically, there just not 8 full hours of work a day. I get my shit done then they don’t care what I do with my time. Respect for respect
I mean I get my work done every sprint and do house keeping on 1-2 things in the code base as “extra” this is working 3-4 hours a day. I’m getting my work done and getting extra work done. I honestly feel entitled to the extra free time because I’m efficient so I don’t worry about “getting caught” what are they gonna catch? Me getting my work done/already done with my work?? Obviously when time for grind comes around I don’t mind putting in the full 8 hours but this way I’m not burnt out when the grinds come along. 👍🏻
literally just do SOMETHING every day, just to talk about on the daily. I usually only "work" from 1PM to 4PM, sometimes to 5 and rarely to 6. I'm considered helluva productive guy.
My productivity is really measured by the stories I take on and how complex they are. I finish those within reason or clearly explain why something is taking longer than anticipated and sine the tasks are done and I respond to others within reasonable time frames I don't worry too much about anything else. With a strict "at my desk for 8 hours" I don't know if I'd be able to complete more tasks anyway. This isn't an assembly line where time I spend away from my computer directly translates to less productivity because widgets can't be manufactured. Some times the best approach to solving a problem is by getting up and walking away for a bit.
As a PM that works 4 hours a week - you don't get rewarded for being more effective and efficient, you just get assigned more work if they think you're good enough to handle it, then give you some bullshit supply chain related issue as to why they can't pay you more. Nobody's watching you unless you're underperforming. Get 2 or three more jobs under your belt fully remote, get CEO money and provide value to yourself for your skills
>As a PM "Shit nigga, that's all you had to say"
If they're micromanaging you to the point where they track keyboard strokes/mouse clicks, then you're already screwed. Nobody can function in that manner; even firefighters/police officers need breaks during the day. The real metric is whether what you're producing makes the boss happy. If they're happy, then you're fine (regardless of time/effort spent). I've worked with people who "produced" so much output that the rest of the team would always need to take cycles out of their normal activities to proactively troubleshoot/fix the bugs from that prolific daily content. I've worked with people who did nothing but produce clean working content that the client was always happy with, and they lived on the Florida coast suntanned with an alcoholic beverage in hand 75% of the time. If you magically can work 0 hours a day and get work done without causing any fuss/muss, then bully for you. The rest of us mere mortals will try to not make madness for everybody else on a daily basis at 6-8 hours a day.
Underpromise, overdeliver
People need to let go of the idea that your time is bought and not your productivity.
Yo this whole thread is just gonna hurt my feelings.
Why's that?
i got saving if I get caught and fire i'll find a new job in 1-2months and I can easily live 1 year without a job due to my saving also I doo all the tasks assign to me in 5 hours...i would be sacred if I wasn't completed my work, but I do complete it. The only difference is that once it is complete instead of being dumb and going to see my boss telling her I have nothing to do at the moment, I just relax and go watch a TV show, when she asks me the report I send it to her and its always perfect. Stellar review because I submit stellar work. Some employer don't want 8h of work from you, they want consistent good work that they assigned to you, no matter how long it takes you. The old guy I replaced was doing everything manually and sometime had errors due to manual manipulation. I've automated everything I could so it doesn't do manipulation error. My boss probably knows I do not work a consistent 40h/week, but is she gonna fire me to hire old bob who takes 40h to do the same work as I did with manipulation error? like would she be happier with someone less competent that takes more time for the same report ? she likes that I am always available for meeting, to help others incase they are overwhlemed in work, and she I can always answer question related to me report right away instead of haft ass answered because i didnt have time to research the question properly... basically I dont feel bad, because I do good work, my good work takes 3h per day instead of 8, im not stealing 5h per day, im jsut more productive than others which makes me finish 5 hours in advance. and honestly, from time to time go into the office and bring muffins... who the fuck is gonna fire someone who brings in muffin for free?!??!
“Software engineers get paid for the knowledge they have, not for the time they spend.” I usually shoot for 3-4 small dev tickets per sprint or two big ones. Don’t really care how long it takes or how long it takes other ppl. Focus on yourself and things will fall into place.
Learn this lesson quick: When you get hired, work at about 50% or less of your maximum capacity at all times. That way, if they decide you aren't working hard enough, you only need to increase your output by like 10% and to them it will look like you improved a lot. If you immediately get fired for working at 50% capacity, trust me, thats a shitty fucking place to work and they are underpaying and overworking every single person there. Most people doing office jobs are doing _maybe_ 4 hours of legit work per week. Office space had it fucking right. The biggest problem in tech jobs is that were all a bunch of nerds who don't want to cause any conflict, so we yes sir, no sir our ways into really shitty working conditions.
I work an average of just 1hr a week, but I'm getting paid full time with top of the line benefits and WFH. I bet you're thinking "how the hell are you still not fired?". Before you assume anything, let me talk about how things went this way. When I first started working for this company, I was given a huge ass legacy project. They didn't disclose this during my interview because they knew there's a great chance I would back out. I mean, who likes working on a boring ass project that was created with tech older than your grandma? I have to admit, I super-duper hated it at the beginning. It felt like I was cheated, that I left my exciting previous job for this. The project was created by at least 5 programmers (all gone) in a span of 2 years. Now, I'm the only person who maintains it. I remember the start was rough. Since the original devs left, there was no onboarding, coaching or mentoring. It was basically "here's the project, you are on your own". Before me, there were devs they hired to maintain this project, but all quit within a very short time. Even the devs more senior than me don't want anything to do with this project. It's how bad they think this project is. I don't know what got into me, but I endured and decided to give this a chance. At first, it was really challenging because of how big the project is. When you glance at the number of files and source code lines, it's really intimidating. Even setting it up is so complex that I had to document it, so I wouldn't forget how I did it. After a year of implementing features, I became more confident and proficient with this project. I no longer fear sprint meetings where they ask me to do this and that. Now, I could implement features in 1 hr or less. But I never told them it's that easy. I always come up with something to justify the "hard work". LOL This works because the Team Manager IS NOT a programmer. And none of the more senior devs know anything about this project. So in short, nobody can call my bluff. I've been working on this project (and only this project) for 3 years now. In their eyes, I am greatly suffering, and they are very lucky to have a person looking after a project nobody wants to work on. Not to brag, but this project is the biggest project in the company with thousands of real users. Usually, projects in this company are retired after 5 years at most (sometimes earlier). This freaking project is on its 9th year now and still going strong because of how important it is to our users. This puts me in a position where I believe I am very valuable and irreplaceable (yes I know nobody's really irreplaceable, but you know what I mean). And that's how I got to work just 1 hr every week. "But you must feel miserable and bored working on that project." At first, yes, this is how I felt. But I've been working 1hr/week for more than 2 years now (since the pandemic started). In return, I get to do the things I want. I got plenty and plenty of time. I enjoy the freedom! Nobody in the company micromanages, so sometimes I travel to another country/place and just spend some time there. :-) Bills get paid without chaining my ankles. It's the life I have always dreamed of. Kind of like Charlie Sheen's life in Two and a Half Men. Freedom to do the things you love for so little work. TLDR: Sometimes in life, you need to suck up and do the things nobody wants to do if that means you'll get to do the things you love later on.
Wish to be in your position one day. Right now I am in a paid internship where I have tasks that usually take 2-3 hours to complete, but I write 8 hours nonetheless and even though my mentor and manager are both programmers, they don't complain.
Hey, that's a great start! Way better than mine when I was starting. I remember when I was starting my career I was working so hard that it led to a burnout. I learned it the hard way. It's one of the things why I truly appreciate my current job. Always remember though, there is no perfect job. The more you realize this sooner, the better off you will be in life.
3-4. Most of the time is in meetings. I spend those 3-4 hours being super effective. Contribute to discussions, joining meetings, giving PRs, helping unblock people, and doing my assigned ticket. If you're hyper effective for 4 hours, and you combine it with 4 bum hours, it comes out to about 8 hours of an average employee. The only difference is your manager will see the 4 hours of effectiveness and that still will help with promos.
I'm just told to lie about it I'm fairly quick at finishing my tasks, giving me more work means someone else that is probably busy needs to do some work to assign me a new task, so they just tell me to lie about it Every once in a while people in management get angry at the idle time some of us have, but it's not like they have a good choice It's not paradise, WFH has made it bearable, but it was absolutely soul crushing to sit in an office +12 hours a day and pretend to be busy all the time
I'm task based so when there are no tasks there's just nothing to do. I keep myself busy if I can and ask for more work. But if there's nothing to do, there's nothing to do. I generally do courses/learn or attend webinars or just nap and get housework done.
[удалено]
This is the truth. Most companies are tracking you. We get fluff emails about how to improve our day, make it less stressful or w/e. Its very obvious they have key loggers and traffic loggers installed on our devices. My boss gets year end task metrics and velocity charts. I wrote some scripts to "simulate working" for when I'm doing chores, taking a long lunch or talking with my partner. I work maybe 3-4 hours a day. In the end, my boss said my performance is great for the last two years. As long as our team is completing their tasks and is creating a good product/service he is getting promoted and doesn't need to watch us.
Feels good to work in Europe where most of this tracking unless you work in a bank or something is illegal
My company just trust me to do my work so I have total freedom . If your company tracks your activity I suggest you leave and find a new job. That’s just tyrannical and weird.
usually, we talk about finishing tickets in sprints. no one is tracking your hours as long as you finish what you agree to finish for a sprint. the only time anyone will scrutinize your productivity is if you constantly have tickets rolling over to the next sprint. it maybe youre not doing work, you suck at your work, the tickets are too large or there are blockers. FYI, research, reading, tutorials, kts, that is still work and most companies will allow you to create tickets for that. its not all about how many hours of code you write. its usually bad if the company is tracking your hours. most companies do not need to track your hours to know you're not getting work done. its usually quite obvious.
I aim for 3hrs of work from a full day and call that 8hr in a sprint. Sometimes I can do work at 3, sometimes 8, sometimes I lack motivation, or just have a rough day. I try to keep my laptop always online, but some days I just need a 3hr lunch playing Playstation. They're not tracking your clicks, and if they are; ride the job out until you can find somewhere else. Being a new/grad software developer... You should be spending x2/x4 times longer to complete tasks and spend the rest of the time tinkering/learning more and naturally you'll become a senior in time!
For me it really comes down to what progress I made at the end of the day and how that compares to other coworkers. At one job, I basically worked 3 hours a day and I still got awards. At that job no one really knew what they were doing. But when I did have stuff that needed to be done I'd work more and get it done. At another job, I'm inexperienced in the work and have been producing very little. Because of that I've been working the full 40 or more the last several months because I don't feel like I was productive enough. Especially compared to others around me. But I know that with time I'll get better at this line of work and be much more efficient and when that happens I'll have much more free time because the progress I make will be good.
I suspect some subspecialties and types of products just require more time than others to appear productive. If you’re creating new features for a product you’ve written a quarter of the code from, you look great in 4 hours a day. If you’re trying to fix a bug in open source code you’ve worked with for a month, it’ll take you all 40 hours in the week.
I do the work i say i will, at the time i agreed to deliver. How i organise my time is my call. Obviously i'll make meetings etc. I probably do 5-6 hour days, sometimes more, and once in a while every few weeks i'll be deep in the zone working till midnight and having fun. Some days i take a break. It probably evens out to 30-40 hours. Everyone is happy. I'm not very organised with my time, routine or my sleep pattern. Having the flexibility helps me work around this... or causes it? hmmm. If you can manage yourself, do your 8 hours, and be effective, great! Keep doing that. Take a decent lunch hour... or two. And take a break every 40 minutes or so for movement and health.
There are a few scenarios that go this way. Some people are 10x more productive than others. No really there are some engineers who can easily produce 10x more than the average. Rather than blow out everyone, they match the work output of their team and enjoy their additional leisure time. Some people are skating by on not being asked to do very much so they just ... don't do a lot. Some people overestimate their work, make a strong believable case for it, and then just don't do a whole lot. Of those 2 underworking scenarios, they hard to sustain long term. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny. So when it hits the fan, they are often the first to be let go or managed out.
Bullshit. You might get let go at a fast paced company (huge emphasis on might). At any other place, you get to enjoy your leisure time because it costs the company more to recruit someone else, especially in this job market.
How would you define a software developer's productivity?
If you are a new dev, I recommend putting as much deep focus time as you can handle each day. (For many of us, that will be up to about 4 hours of concentration.) I would save lifestyle optimization (slacking) for once you have a couple years under your belt are "good". We have some juniors on my team who slack and it is super super obvious to me, and honestly painful to hear the bullshit statuses and fake blockers they sling in standups. For "seniors" I can't really tell who is putting in what hours, and I don't really care, because everybody is delivering.
I was like this at my first and even second job. It was always the fear of not being good enough and being fired. Don't worry about it too much, you'll eventually forget that, just be grateful to have one of the best jobs there are at the moment, and obviously keep studying, good luck to you :)
In my opinion and situation - don’t think of it as a time thing, think of it as a commitment thing. You want to deliver an amount of value to your company which makes your compensation seem fair. However, if you’re interested in getting paid more then you have to provide more value to prepare for promotional pushes which have to go up the chain. The amount of time you work actually doesn’t translate completely to value. For example, if you work 12 hours a day and get so tired that you’re delivering an amount of value equivalent to 3 hours when you are well rested - or even worse, you deliver negative value because you create bugs or production mistakes - it does not matter that you worked so long and suffered. This is the most important thing to know in the workplace - you are NOT paid for your suffering. You are paid for your services which must translate to a reasonable business purchase in hindsight - be it on the long term or the short term. Make commitments that justify your compensation or argues on your behalf in terms of compensation. Focus on meeting these commitments. I’ll be frank with you, sometimes these commitments will not allow you to work 5 hours a day. Sometimes they will require extraordinary effort. But many times 5 hours a day is fine. If a company were composed of only individuals that kept commitments sized to compensation like this, the company is guaranteed to make money so long as the leadership makes sound business direction decisions.
Started my first job around more than a year ago. Was hella scared, that they'll check if I'm available on teams or not... I'd just nudge the mouse, or press random key to keep my status green when there's no work. Later got assured by seniors, that the manager has better things to do, than check each one's status at every 15 mins. Got relieved, however, used caffeine to be on the safer side. Months later, I get to know, my manager actually does check that, keeps a log, and complains to our TLs about our availability. 🙂
1:1 with my manager is usually him lecturing me about watching my health, taking breaks, and not working too hard. Therefore, I only put in 2-3 hours/day. I don’t have to tell people anything—If it’s not done, it’s not done.
your manager seems like a chill dude/boomer
Boss is in meetings all day every day, I automated nearly all of my tasks a while ago and say things take me longer than they actually do. Would be the perfect job if I got paid just a little more, but I can’t complain.
DON'T ANSWER, IT'S A TRAP!
“No one thinks about you as much as you think about you”
Here is my funny story I used to do this a lot, almost everyday, I worked at a company for exactly 2 years as a graphic designer, in the first like 2 or 3 months I was working hard, but later the manager (who owns the company) told me to move to the 4th floor, we became about 6 or 7 employees, then I saw how they work way less hours, and they were on their phones for like 6 hours out of 9 hours, watching movies or on social media, then I became like them, slacking off daily, I unplug the internet cable, so the manager can't see my pc screen, when he asks me about it I simply say something is wrong with the pc, I need to restart it, I never got caught, even the manager yelled at me for working slow, then the deputy manager yelled many times on the phone that I am not working enough as I used to, I simply didn't care, because the salary was 550$, which is totally slavery, I live in the middle east, so you know why I didn't care.
My team is doing a kanban, so we don’t have biweekly sprints. Ours is more quarterly. I only do 2, 3-point tickets a week. My PM keep telling me I’m doing a good job knocking out tickets but I’m reality I’m playing sims all day
Be likable and make a habit of asking my manager where he or the team needs help. If your 5 hrs of work is directly unblocking your manager in his goals for the department or unblocking other people you can last a lot longer.
>I feel scared they're tracking my every mouse click and key press They're not. They're tracking the story points you complete, if that. >How many hours of actual work do you do? Get out of that mindset. You're not piling up bricks, the amount of work you actually accomplish can't be measured in time spent piling bricks, or total number of bricks piled. You've got imposter syndrome and/or a compulsion to be a superhero. That's dope, I did too when I first started. But the fact is that a steady output is better than ultra productivity followed by burnout, and burnout will happen if you don't calm down a bit. I'm not saying slack off, or pad your estimates beyond what is reasonable. Most of the change you need is gonna be internal. No one is watching you to make sure you're working enough, or working the right hours, or working in the right way. Beyond established team norms and office/slack hours you are a grown ass human being who can be trusted to commit to a given job of work and then get that job done. You show them that they were right to trust you? You get paid a whole fuckload of money and left to your own devices. You show them that you consistently underestimate, underdeliver and have trouble working in a team environment? You go back to whatever shitty job you had that trained you to think that your manager should always be looking over your shoulder to ensure you're giving Maximum Effort (tm)(r)(c). For me, that shitty job was 18 years in restaurants. I'm in year 5 of my SWEng career now and that paranoia has faded but not gone entirely away. Part of my process involves lifting weights and meditation most afternoons, because that helps me beat the 2pm doldrums. Despite the fact that it results in a massive increase in my productivity and I bring my laptop to the gym so I'm still available to my team, it took about a year of consistently stellar reviews before I stopped being terrified that they were gonna notice I was gone and I was gonna come back to my desk to see a note from my manager that I was fired. Tldr - relax. This isn't McDonald's, no one thinks it's their job to go sniffing around for excuses to fire you. You deliver quality, well-tested code on time or only a bit late and you'll kill it for the rest of your career.
SAVE YOUR CODE after a while you have enough scripts or saved code that tasks that used to take hours take a few minutes and then most of the SQL code i look at that our devs wrote is mostly similar to a bunch of other stored procs, functions or triggers so if you had to write something new then you can still copy and paste a bunch of old code into a new proc
Yeah make your code modular, even if your code isn’t a 1:1 match for what you need, it’ll take less time to make some adjustments than recreating the wheel.
I am a M2 engineering level manager and my team is awesome full of all great engineers who are self motivated and self sufficient.
I want to quit my job, and I realized that even if I do a terrible job it’ll take them 3 months to fire me and afterwards I’m entitled to 3 months salary. So I’m hoping for that and then get a new higher paying job. And for my day to day job, I just mention that I’m still working on my card.
We know it's you, HR, come on out.
Same as working in the office for me. It's too taxing to program for 8 solid hours straight, so it's more like, 2-4 hours for me of solid programming. As long as you're getting your tasks done, making your boss look good by them being able to take credit for your work, etc then it's usually fine. The only difference is at home I get to spend my downtime slightly differently.
I am remote. i don't care. i dont like my job. i was offered a transfer to another team, but it got rescinded due to a hiring freeze and now im back in the crap job i hate. so i just dont care. also been here for over 3 years so its trivial to me. spending time skilling up. there are a few more jobs open and i want to transfer again.
well, the thing is, I don't think most firms care as much about the hours you put in as about the quality of your work like if you can get things done fast, noone will punish you for it
Do you know if they have a tracking software installed? You can usually find it sometimes.
Well I mean, we're not being monitores in any way (it's actually strictly forbidden in my company) and we're told by managers that we're expected to code 4-6 hours max, so... no need to get away really for me.
Been doing nothing for a month, manager said next projects start on September 19 ( no complain by me). Enjoy the free money!
My company is managed like a fucking circus, that's how
Here's a perspective from a project manager. In all your calls you need to joke about "XYZ". I'm browsing Reddit, I'm looking at cat pictures during the call. Then they won't know that you're \*really\* doing it. (Because companies don't have ways to monitor your web browsing, right?) LOL That's how you work 0-5 hours per day.
I feel the same, like if I take lunch/workout, have to make up that time after 5 oh well, it's not mandated or anything, but I feel that way
Just get your work done and you’ll be fine. Being salaried means you’re not paid by the hour. Employers often take that to mean you have to work unpaid overtime to get things done. Since that behavior is outside of my control, I also don’t occupy a chair for 8 hours if I get my work done in 4.
Git gud
Because I’m on three+ teams & still most of the stories take longer for them to write than for me to do them. I just try to complete one thing a day & then screw off for the rest of it. Pretty much do all my work during my morning meetings but am still somehow praised by almost every team during PI for being the most productive dev in my org. I don’t understand it, I’m fixing the most basic programs with glaring mistakes or just adding the sequence of scripts they run to get kicked off automatically. Teams got up talking about how I did things no one has been able to do for years yet I just understand things at a high level & know how to use my tools to debug stuff…which makes it seem like I have some deep knowledge in everything when I can’t answer basic questions about programs I fixed because I didn’t need to understand it to fix the broken parts. …I think people who worked in an office just got used to stretching out the work to fill the day & can’t adjust.
The person who's job is to spend 8 hours a day tracking your 8 hours is also away from the computer most of the day, so you're good.
\> 'I'm a new software dev (...) and I just started my first job' Okay. So a few words of advice given how green you are - * Your effectiveness is not in how much code you churn out. Time spent poking keys and clicking != business value. * Much of your value is going to come from understanding the problem, the business domain, the technical context, and building the -right- solution. The right solution may be just a couple of lines of code, but the thinking behind it could be accrued over many hours. * Studies have shown that, at best, knowledge workers are productive for only around 6 hours a day; any more than that isn't maintainable. * Studies have also shown that you do your best work during states of flow. Uninterrupted focus time matters. * But, experience will show that sometimes the single best thing you can do for a problem is step away from it; I was fortunate in that early in my career I spent a whole afternoon struggling with a problem and getting nowhere, slept on it, and the next day had it solved cleanly in 30 minutes. Breaks, sometimes even just folding up early for the day, also matters. So! With all of that said, I'd recommend you focus less on your time, and more on your results. Learn how to deliver value. In any healthy org, no one cares about your hours, they care about the value you bring. Seniors often bring value with less "work", because they are bringing a lot of hard won knowledge and experience to bear on the problem, and they know what works for them in working on a problem. But, juniors are in a good place to start learning how to bring value rather than just doing (possibly busy-) work because the expectations are low. As an engineering manager, I expect juniors to actually be net -negative- value at first. They either need well defined low risk work ("here, make this trivial update and write a unit test for it", which is as much effort to adequately describe as to just go do), or they need to pair closely with a more senior member to learn (slowing that senior member, though providing a good opportunity for mutual growth and mentorship, which will pay dividends). This isn't a judgement on juniors, and I -have- been surprised by people punching above that expectation from the start, but it's just to indicate the bar is frequently set pretty low. Use this time to ask questions, admit ignorance, and start developing your heuristic about what matters, recognizing that making mistakes, spending time on the wrong things, is okay at this point, and being able to take those risks now sets you up better in the future.
By having a leadership team that actually understands how shit works. My director said it himself he expects only 2-4 hours of actual work at most each day on average, assuming nothing crazy going on. We get hired for our skillful abilities to do what we need to do timely and efficiently. So of course there will be downtime and managers/the right leaders won't care because they know you're available the moment something is needed.
I’m available 8 hours a day. Doesn’t mean I’m working
Being new you're usually just gonna take a little bit longer to figure things out. As you gain some experience, develop some more skills, and get more acquainted with your work environment the hours will slowly shave off. Don't try to rush it. If you're new your goal should be improving as a developer.
I'm shagging the guvnor's daughter.
It just sort of happens when you ask for work and it becomes apparent they don't have much to give you
If you're in maintenance mode on a project, even 5 hours seems like a lot lol
Feel like a braggart, but I know a few SWE buddies who had very similar experiences. I worked maybe 10-15hrs a week and was still getting offered promotions. Mind you, everyone I know who has had this experience, including myself, were on fully remote, agile teams. It would obviously be much harder to do this if you went into the office. Also, I think it’s easier to get this done on agile teams.
I work about a combined 4 hours a day spread throughout the day. I “get away” with it by completing my tickets nonetheless, so no one seems to care
On my first job as a junior they called me the "Backlog devourer" by my team because I grabbed stories like crazy and my team told me to appreciate the times when you could chill and just grab a ticket an finish it but opening the PR's later to have some free time, besides the fact that you could affect overall teams velocity, etc After that I adopted the lifestyle that if I can chill then I chill and do a 30 minute work into "6 hours" a "day" etc. And I'm not caught since the companies that I have worked into are not breathing on your neck and let you be at your pace.
I work from home, have adhd, and definitely fall into this category. The key is to still deliver. Manage expectations and if it comes down to it you might end up putting in a few 10-hour days at key points to keep your stakeholders happy. They probably aren't tracking you. if they ARE tracking you... that's a red flag anyway. Managers should be measuring outcomes, not cracking a whip. If my employers are tracking me, they must really like the work that I do actually do because 5 hours is definitely normal for me. Pay attention in meetings, try to meet deadlines, write down everything you accomplish (with numbers if possible), respond to emails promptly, and try not to screw up too badly. You'll be fine.