Broadly speaking my job as a programmer is to turn repetitive activities into processes and code. If I’m still “working hard” a year in you should really wonder about my capabilities.
I probably spend half of my time and way more than half of my energy on removing work we shouldn’t even have to do ourselves, first the random sources (machine bookkeeping beats human bookkeeping almost every time) and then persistent drudge work that steals resources from more important matters.
One job where I was mad about not getting any credit for this, I sat and did math and in six months I had saved us one head count, and I don’t know how much stress (seriously bullshit things). I joked that I could not show up to work and still provide as much value as people who they liked.
Broadly speaking my job as a programmer is to turn repetitive activities into processes and code. If I’m still “working hard” a year in you should really wonder about my capabilities.
As much as I want to agree with this, what I've found happens if I do a particularly good job is... more work. More projects. I have "bandwidth" available to help out in new areas. When I left my last job my manager and I put together a spreadsheet listing all the projects I headed, and it was something like two pages long in excel. Everyone who saw it had their eyes bulge at the size, and I left because I was being really overworked.
But god damn it, the only reason I want to work hard is so that I don't have to in the future!
I'm seriously considering leaving tech because of this.
You get a better idea of what’s going on when you see beyond the one or two projects that used to occupy your time. That can be interesting in a lot of ways, not the least of which is figuring out that some of the problems you “solved” are just thinking too small and thus picking away at a much bigger issue.
Since I get bored easily, I usually value that sort of opportunity. Usually. If I turn into the cleanup man I start to become sour on the idea of people making messes for others to clean up and then I start looking for an exit.
You're right, in that it's great to be always given new work and interesting projects. But unless the completed work can be handed off to someone else what happens (at least in my case) is that I spend more and more of time making adjustments to past work, either due to requirements changes, competition, feature requests, or bug fixes (which is thankfully pretty rare for me)
These things typically arrive in addition to whatever new project my manager has me on, and the more projects under my belt the less time I get working on what they want me working on, and spend more time firefighting. Towards the end of that job I spent almost my entire day firefighting
I've found the best strategy here is to do rate control on your work on the interface between you and your job. I essentially just try to constantly overperform slightly and any gap that widens between my capability and the demands of the job remains hidden unless it's strategically useful to me.
I won't get paid twice as much if I can do my job in half the time, I just get another half of work. If I use the gap between their demands and my capability carefully I can spend only a portion of it to get raises/promotions and spend the rest on fucking off at lunch and just generally having a chill relaxed time.
Seems to me that you & GP both have an unhealthy relationship with your employer. I guess that’s the norm for a lot of us here, I just hate that the generally accepted solution is to hack around it rather than fix (or attempt to fix) that unhealthy relationship.
What's to fix? It seems like the prevailing business culture is to optimize the shit out of everything, and for managers it means getting the most work that you can out of the employees that you have. No matter where I go I am expected to work my ass off.
I would burn all of that down, if I could, because that principle needs to change. But then that's "leaving money on the table", and we just can't have that...
No matter where I go I am expected to work my ass off.
> ...
> But then that's "leaving money on the table", and we just can't have that...
Sounds to me like you expect to not have to "work your ass off", but also maximize your pay. I just don't see why you would expect these things to be compatible. There are plenty of opportunities to work 30-hour weeks, if that's what you want. But you're not gonna be making FAANG-level comp -- for good reason: you're giving you employer less, so they give you less in return. If you and I worked at the same company, and you were putting out half the output as me, then I would expect to get twice the comp as you. You're trying to bypass this -- produce half the output as me but still get the same pay. I just don't see why you think that's justified.
If you want to work 30 hours, then take one of the many jobs that accommodate that (hmu if you legitimately can't find one) and accept the pay cut. If you don't want to make that sacrifice, that's on you.
I think you're misunderstanding their tactic here. They aren't working less than their peers, they just also aren't working to their 100% capacity at all times because it burns you out. I've done it myself in the past, and it works, for a time, but it's really only delaying the inevitable. The solution for me was to find a different company that valued what I brought to them, instead of treating me like a functionary in their "process". But, that's a hard thing to do, so I can understand developing a coping mechanism.
I’ve slowly been making my exit from pure tech for this exact reason. 2011 got hired as the “tech guy” for an artist that was winning Grammy’s left and right, breaking world records for sales/ streams/ whatever, with an explicit part of the deal they let me sit in on marketing meetings to learn marketing.
Was able to take “marketing” (really more social science), engineering and design to epidemiology, eventually wrap that together to work in politics, now back on infectious disease (COVID vaccinations). I find “tech skills” just being something in my toolbox to enable me to tackle infinitely more rewarding projects.
Generally speaking, I think your comment and its parent have a poor attitude and not one that anyone should emulate. For me, it's about finding new problems and new challenges. I can't stand facing the same problems over and over again so when I do, I automate/fix those problems and then I find new ones to solve.
You should always be "trying". The idea that you corner some obscure but vital part of your company's infra and then just coast is pretty abhorrent to me. Instead, if you find something difficult, complicated and manual, you should make it easy, simple and automated.
I do believe that firing people based on big data analysis is pretty dumb as some tasks require lots of deliberation and thought without much output initially. But the idea of working hard = being dumb, seems like a pretty creative way of justifying being lazy.
I think your comment and its parent have a poor attitude and not one that anyone should emulate.
I don't think working hard is dumb. To get into my position I had to work hard and acquire a lot of knowledge / skills. I had to defer a lot of gratification, skip a lot of parties and endure a lot of stress.
But people have lives outside of work. I can accomplish in a day now what might have taken me a month early in my career. I can make better decisions now that result in much less future work... lower amounts of maintenance etc. So should I put in the same grinding effort? That makes no sense to me. I don't grind anymore. Been there, done that.
I think GP's attitude (different from 'working hard', more akin to 'overdelivering') can be "dumb", depending on the context. If someone is doing 1/100th of the work per unit of time you're able to do, why would you work the same amount of time for the same compensation? Is that any different than selling gold at the price of copper?
Of course, having equity in the business changes the equation somewhat.
Otherwise, the only issue anyone should have here is what the agreement between you and your employer calls for, and how transparent this relationship is. Just because others in the marketplace are making bad deals shouldn't mean you have to as well.
The people that have the bad attitude at my job are all of the burned out people who are now dealing with a list of problems most of which I have been bitching about for years that somehow became a giant avalanche this year.
Everything is fine is a rotten attitude when you are piling up accidental complexity all day and victim blaming anyone who can’t or won’t wade through it. If I were king I’d fire every single person who was happy with the state of affairs a year ago. And then I’d start calling all the people I liked who have left for something better and beg them to come back. We got rid of those assholes, come fix things. Please.
As someone that enjoys occasionally coasting, I get bored really fast and find new areas to contribute to and problems to solve.
I think you may have gotten downvoted from the tone of the comment by folks that have arcane mastery over some system, which I can get from their perspective, depending on how long they’ve been in the industry/ niche/ company
Comments
Broadly speaking my job as a programmer is to turn repetitive activities into processes and code. If I’m still “working hard” a year in you should really wonder about my capabilities.
I probably spend half of my time and way more than half of my energy on removing work we shouldn’t even have to do ourselves, first the random sources (machine bookkeeping beats human bookkeeping almost every time) and then persistent drudge work that steals resources from more important matters.
One job where I was mad about not getting any credit for this, I sat and did math and in six months I had saved us one head count, and I don’t know how much stress (seriously bullshit things). I joked that I could not show up to work and still provide as much value as people who they liked.
As much as I want to agree with this, what I've found happens if I do a particularly good job is... more work. More projects. I have "bandwidth" available to help out in new areas. When I left my last job my manager and I put together a spreadsheet listing all the projects I headed, and it was something like two pages long in excel. Everyone who saw it had their eyes bulge at the size, and I left because I was being really overworked.
But god damn it, the only reason I want to work hard is so that I don't have to in the future!
I'm seriously considering leaving tech because of this.
You get a better idea of what’s going on when you see beyond the one or two projects that used to occupy your time. That can be interesting in a lot of ways, not the least of which is figuring out that some of the problems you “solved” are just thinking too small and thus picking away at a much bigger issue.
Since I get bored easily, I usually value that sort of opportunity. Usually. If I turn into the cleanup man I start to become sour on the idea of people making messes for others to clean up and then I start looking for an exit.
You're right, in that it's great to be always given new work and interesting projects. But unless the completed work can be handed off to someone else what happens (at least in my case) is that I spend more and more of time making adjustments to past work, either due to requirements changes, competition, feature requests, or bug fixes (which is thankfully pretty rare for me)
These things typically arrive in addition to whatever new project my manager has me on, and the more projects under my belt the less time I get working on what they want me working on, and spend more time firefighting. Towards the end of that job I spent almost my entire day firefighting
I've found the best strategy here is to do rate control on your work on the interface between you and your job. I essentially just try to constantly overperform slightly and any gap that widens between my capability and the demands of the job remains hidden unless it's strategically useful to me.
I won't get paid twice as much if I can do my job in half the time, I just get another half of work. If I use the gap between their demands and my capability carefully I can spend only a portion of it to get raises/promotions and spend the rest on fucking off at lunch and just generally having a chill relaxed time.
Yeah I've adopted that strategy for my current employer. It is exhausting in its own way and difficult to maneuver without being blatantly dishonest.
Seems to me that you & GP both have an unhealthy relationship with your employer. I guess that’s the norm for a lot of us here, I just hate that the generally accepted solution is to hack around it rather than fix (or attempt to fix) that unhealthy relationship.
What's to fix? It seems like the prevailing business culture is to optimize the shit out of everything, and for managers it means getting the most work that you can out of the employees that you have. No matter where I go I am expected to work my ass off.
I would burn all of that down, if I could, because that principle needs to change. But then that's "leaving money on the table", and we just can't have that...
Sounds to me like you expect to not have to "work your ass off", but also maximize your pay. I just don't see why you would expect these things to be compatible. There are plenty of opportunities to work 30-hour weeks, if that's what you want. But you're not gonna be making FAANG-level comp -- for good reason: you're giving you employer less, so they give you less in return. If you and I worked at the same company, and you were putting out half the output as me, then I would expect to get twice the comp as you. You're trying to bypass this -- produce half the output as me but still get the same pay. I just don't see why you think that's justified.
If you want to work 30 hours, then take one of the many jobs that accommodate that (hmu if you legitimately can't find one) and accept the pay cut. If you don't want to make that sacrifice, that's on you.
That's my $.02, anyway.
I think you're misunderstanding their tactic here. They aren't working less than their peers, they just also aren't working to their 100% capacity at all times because it burns you out. I've done it myself in the past, and it works, for a time, but it's really only delaying the inevitable. The solution for me was to find a different company that valued what I brought to them, instead of treating me like a functionary in their "process". But, that's a hard thing to do, so I can understand developing a coping mechanism.
I’ve slowly been making my exit from pure tech for this exact reason. 2011 got hired as the “tech guy” for an artist that was winning Grammy’s left and right, breaking world records for sales/ streams/ whatever, with an explicit part of the deal they let me sit in on marketing meetings to learn marketing.
Was able to take “marketing” (really more social science), engineering and design to epidemiology, eventually wrap that together to work in politics, now back on infectious disease (COVID vaccinations). I find “tech skills” just being something in my toolbox to enable me to tackle infinitely more rewarding projects.
Generally speaking, I think your comment and its parent have a poor attitude and not one that anyone should emulate. For me, it's about finding new problems and new challenges. I can't stand facing the same problems over and over again so when I do, I automate/fix those problems and then I find new ones to solve.
You should always be "trying". The idea that you corner some obscure but vital part of your company's infra and then just coast is pretty abhorrent to me. Instead, if you find something difficult, complicated and manual, you should make it easy, simple and automated.
I do believe that firing people based on big data analysis is pretty dumb as some tasks require lots of deliberation and thought without much output initially. But the idea of working hard = being dumb, seems like a pretty creative way of justifying being lazy.
I don't think working hard is dumb. To get into my position I had to work hard and acquire a lot of knowledge / skills. I had to defer a lot of gratification, skip a lot of parties and endure a lot of stress.
But people have lives outside of work. I can accomplish in a day now what might have taken me a month early in my career. I can make better decisions now that result in much less future work... lower amounts of maintenance etc. So should I put in the same grinding effort? That makes no sense to me. I don't grind anymore. Been there, done that.
I think GP's attitude (different from 'working hard', more akin to 'overdelivering') can be "dumb", depending on the context. If someone is doing 1/100th of the work per unit of time you're able to do, why would you work the same amount of time for the same compensation? Is that any different than selling gold at the price of copper?
Of course, having equity in the business changes the equation somewhat.
Otherwise, the only issue anyone should have here is what the agreement between you and your employer calls for, and how transparent this relationship is. Just because others in the marketplace are making bad deals shouldn't mean you have to as well.
The people that have the bad attitude at my job are all of the burned out people who are now dealing with a list of problems most of which I have been bitching about for years that somehow became a giant avalanche this year.
Everything is fine is a rotten attitude when you are piling up accidental complexity all day and victim blaming anyone who can’t or won’t wade through it. If I were king I’d fire every single person who was happy with the state of affairs a year ago. And then I’d start calling all the people I liked who have left for something better and beg them to come back. We got rid of those assholes, come fix things. Please.
As someone that enjoys occasionally coasting, I get bored really fast and find new areas to contribute to and problems to solve.
I think you may have gotten downvoted from the tone of the comment by folks that have arcane mastery over some system, which I can get from their perspective, depending on how long they’ve been in the industry/ niche/ company