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In my experience, the more money I've made, the less I actually do. When I was young and worked minimum wage jobs, the management squeezed every minute out of u

In my experience, the more money I've made, the less I actually do. When I was young and worked minimum wage jobs, the management squeezed every minute out of us. "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean," etc. Now that I'm a mid-career software developer, I'm making my highest salary so far and I do maybe two hours of work a week, so I agree with the "more pointless the job, the higher the pay" comment. At least when I flipped burgers, people were being fed.

nsxwolf 9y ago
Ha, I used to hear a similar phrase working in food service: "Meantime is clean time!"
dageshi 9y ago
Ahh but are you going to plenty of meetings? I think that's all that really counts.
- adtiustErn 9y ago
  No, I do not attend any meetings.
georgeecollins 9y ago
I feel people are being excessively cynical about this. The most valuable people often do a small amount of work but make very good decisions. Example: you can have a manager with clear, attainable goals and an excellent staff. Or you can have a manager with a poor team and changing goals. The latter manager may work harder but to less effect. Sometimes people are really busy because they are doing a bad job.
- adtiustErn 9y ago
  You make a good point. It reminds me of the Legend of the Handyman's Invoice as described on Snopes: Nikola Tesla visited Henry Ford at his factory, which was having some kind of difficulty. Ford asked Tesla if he could help identify the problem area. Tesla walked up to a wall of boilerplate and made a small X in chalk on one of the plates. Ford was thrilled, and told him to send an invoice. The bill arrived, for $10,000. Ford asked for a breakdown. Tesla sent another invoice, indicating a $1 charge for marking the wall with an X, and $9,999 for knowing where to put it.
  - Terr_ 9y ago
    Tesla? I suppose there are a lot of variations out there, but the Charles Steinmetz and Henry Ford [0] one seems most plausible to me: > Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection. [0] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-steinmetz-the-wizard-of-schenectady-51912022/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-steinm...
nulagrithom 9y ago
> I do maybe two hours of work a week This is what bothers me the most... in those 2 hours, I somehow save the company 8 hours a week because somebody was doing by hand what I did in a few lines of code. Is that "positive value"? Sure, I made the company more efficient, but what's this person doing now? Did I make their job "more pointless"? I mean, I can't see what I did as a bad thing per se but... I just don't know how it plays out in the end. I feel like there's a huge piece of the "work" puzzle that's missing in our culture.
- adtiustErn 9y ago
  You are describing the paradox of our work as programmers: when we do our job well, we are automating away tasks so they don't have to be done by hand, so there isn't any more work to do. When I was a consultant, I knew I was on track to provide positive value to a client when I was working myself out of a job by automating everything that I could and by writing thorough documentation so that the full-timers could easily maintain what I had left behind. And no, I don't think you made that person's job more pointless: you made it more comfortable by eliminating waste. As the saying goes, "Machines should work; people should think."
- mysterydip 9y ago
  When I was a contractor, some of the applications and scripts I wrote took hours of work per day off of people. I was actually thanked because now they actually had time to do their "real" job instead of a bunch of tedious data entry or whatever. So while you may be automating some jobs away, you may be freeing others.
- patmcguire 9y ago
  Yeah, I spent a day writing a tool that saved 5-6 people 4 hours a day, every day. Copying data from one system to another by ctrl+c ctrl-tab ctrl+v over and over again.
- jpindar 9y ago
  Would you feel the same way if you were an engineer who designed, say, electric saws? Would you then be harming people who used to have to use hand saws?
angstrom 9y ago
I've looked at people's commit history at work and been astonished to see maybe 12 or so commits in the last year. They are maybe 4th or 5th year tenure with the company, but I guarantee pulling more than 200K. Think about that...
- adtiustErn 9y ago
  Are those 12 or so commits making or saving your company more than $200K per year? Or is it fair to say your highly paid colleagues are dead weight? I believe I am dead weight at my company.
  - ferentchak 9y ago
    I am sure you are important to make one of your superiors look like she has a large and important team. You can take pride in that at least!
- steven777400 9y ago
  Another thing to look at is the person's overall role. Are they an IC? Or do they have other tasks? I have many fewer commits these days than I did a few years ago. Is that because I've become lazy? Maybe, but that's not the whole explanation. The whole explanation includes job duties that now involve managing a team, performing analysis and leadership functions for several business areas, setting agency standards, and so on. None of those tasks appear as commits in the version control system but still are assigned tasks that take up time. When I am working on code I often still don't have the commit. A team member may come to me, "I have a question, I'm stuck on this part..." Then together we will investigate and discover a way forward. I'll then leave it to them to complete and commit it. Their name is the only name on the commit, but did I add any value? I hope so!
  - HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
    This is a very good point. At my last company, my title was Staff Software Engineer. However, because of my seniority, by design, I was expected to spend only about 20% of the time actually producing code. The rest of the time was expected to be mentoring others, doing code and design reviews, writing documentation, collaborating with other departments, etc. The end result was that the more responsibility I had, the less code I wrote.
pmiller2 9y ago
I'm also a dev, and I'm pretty sure I'd get fired really fast if I only did 2 hours of work a day.
norea-armozel 9y ago
Hah, I'm in a similar situation. When the business side of the firm isn't giving us new feature requests or there's no new bugs found I'm basically twiddling my fingers reading over the code base (at least parts I'm utterly unfamiliar with) or learning some new library that might be useful in the future.

nsxwolf 9y ago

Ha, I used to hear a similar phrase working in food service: "Meantime is clean time!"

dageshi 9y ago

Ahh but are you going to plenty of meetings? I think that's all that really counts.

adtiustErn 9y ago
No, I do not attend any meetings.

georgeecollins 9y ago

I feel people are being excessively cynical about this. The most valuable people often do a small amount of work but make very good decisions. Example: you can have a manager with clear, attainable goals and an excellent staff. Or you can have a manager with a poor team and changing goals. The latter manager may work harder but to less effect. Sometimes people are really busy because they are doing a bad job.

adtiustErn 9y ago
You make a good point. It reminds me of the Legend of the Handyman's Invoice as described on Snopes: Nikola Tesla visited Henry Ford at his factory, which was having some kind of difficulty. Ford asked Tesla if he could help identify the problem area. Tesla walked up to a wall of boilerplate and made a small X in chalk on one of the plates. Ford was thrilled, and told him to send an invoice. The bill arrived, for $10,000. Ford asked for a breakdown. Tesla sent another invoice, indicating a $1 charge for marking the wall with an X, and $9,999 for knowing where to put it.
- Terr_ 9y ago
  Tesla? I suppose there are a lot of variations out there, but the Charles Steinmetz and Henry Ford [0] one seems most plausible to me: > Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection. [0] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-steinmetz-the-wizard-of-schenectady-51912022/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-steinm...

nulagrithom 9y ago

> I do maybe two hours of work a week This is what bothers me the most... in those 2 hours, I somehow save the company 8 hours a week because somebody was doing by hand what I did in a few lines of code. Is that "positive value"? Sure, I made the company more efficient, but what's this person doing now? Did I make their job "more pointless"? I mean, I can't see what I did as a bad thing per se but... I just don't know how it plays out in the end. I feel like there's a huge piece of the "work" puzzle that's missing in our culture.

adtiustErn 9y ago
You are describing the paradox of our work as programmers: when we do our job well, we are automating away tasks so they don't have to be done by hand, so there isn't any more work to do. When I was a consultant, I knew I was on track to provide positive value to a client when I was working myself out of a job by automating everything that I could and by writing thorough documentation so that the full-timers could easily maintain what I had left behind. And no, I don't think you made that person's job more pointless: you made it more comfortable by eliminating waste. As the saying goes, "Machines should work; people should think."
mysterydip 9y ago
When I was a contractor, some of the applications and scripts I wrote took hours of work per day off of people. I was actually thanked because now they actually had time to do their "real" job instead of a bunch of tedious data entry or whatever. So while you may be automating some jobs away, you may be freeing others.
patmcguire 9y ago
Yeah, I spent a day writing a tool that saved 5-6 people 4 hours a day, every day. Copying data from one system to another by ctrl+c ctrl-tab ctrl+v over and over again.
jpindar 9y ago
Would you feel the same way if you were an engineer who designed, say, electric saws? Would you then be harming people who used to have to use hand saws?

angstrom 9y ago

I've looked at people's commit history at work and been astonished to see maybe 12 or so commits in the last year. They are maybe 4th or 5th year tenure with the company, but I guarantee pulling more than 200K. Think about that...

adtiustErn 9y ago
Are those 12 or so commits making or saving your company more than $200K per year? Or is it fair to say your highly paid colleagues are dead weight? I believe I am dead weight at my company.
- ferentchak 9y ago
  I am sure you are important to make one of your superiors look like she has a large and important team. You can take pride in that at least!
steven777400 9y ago
Another thing to look at is the person's overall role. Are they an IC? Or do they have other tasks? I have many fewer commits these days than I did a few years ago. Is that because I've become lazy? Maybe, but that's not the whole explanation. The whole explanation includes job duties that now involve managing a team, performing analysis and leadership functions for several business areas, setting agency standards, and so on. None of those tasks appear as commits in the version control system but still are assigned tasks that take up time. When I am working on code I often still don't have the commit. A team member may come to me, "I have a question, I'm stuck on this part..." Then together we will investigate and discover a way forward. I'll then leave it to them to complete and commit it. Their name is the only name on the commit, but did I add any value? I hope so!
- HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
  This is a very good point. At my last company, my title was Staff Software Engineer. However, because of my seniority, by design, I was expected to spend only about 20% of the time actually producing code. The rest of the time was expected to be mentoring others, doing code and design reviews, writing documentation, collaborating with other departments, etc. The end result was that the more responsibility I had, the less code I wrote.

pmiller2 9y ago

I'm also a dev, and I'm pretty sure I'd get fired really fast if I only did 2 hours of work a day.

norea-armozel 9y ago

Hah, I'm in a similar situation. When the business side of the firm isn't giving us new feature requests or there's no new bugs found I'm basically twiddling my fingers reading over the code base (at least parts I'm utterly unfamiliar with) or learning some new library that might be useful in the future.