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Ok, thanks for sharing this. I made this observation for the last 3 years myself, not as an employee even, but as a contractor. I had three positions at two com
by geff82 9y ago
Ok, thanks for sharing this. I made this observation for the last 3 years myself, not as an employee even, but as a contractor. I had three positions at two companies, all paying quite high (150k$/year). I changed the positions because the workload was so low that I had an hour of work a day, then pretending I was doing work for the rest of the day which I can't stand for more than a few months. Now I changed again in the hopes of having real work to do, comes out that they contracted me only for "if there will be work in a few months". Interviewing several people on what I can do for them: essentially nothing. "Maybe you could google if using docker would make sense". On the one hand this kind of "work" feeds my family and hives me lots of freedom, but on the other hand it leads to nothing. And I am usually not the only one who has no idea why they are going to work.
- ashark 9y agoIt's kind of an open secret, I think, that (at least in the US) there's not anywhere near an average of 8 hours of work a day per "full-time" employee. Probably closer to 3 by the time you average out the overloaded and the ones who are doing almost nothing.
- kentt 9y agoI agree, but there is something I just can't make sense of. I would love to just work my ass off for 4 hours a day but you won't get through any part of an interview if someone finds that out.
- shostack 9y agoFor knowledge workers, there may be 3 hours of actual "doing stuff" time, but for me at least, I'm constantly thinking about work, even when I try not to. It just bleeds into my thoughts in the shower, at dinner, lying in bed, etc. The way I see it to anyone who might question why I'm lying on a couch at work with headphones is that the hard part of my job happens in my head. The easy part is what I mash into the keyboard after I've spent hours finalizing my plan of attack in my head.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoThat. And if someone objects about paying me for browsing HN, I'll reply that they are not paying me for me solving their problems during evening shower.
- richardknop 9y agoIt's the same in the UK. If you average it out, it's probably closer to 5 hours of work per day though (3 seems a bit low?).
- 1024core 9y ago> I changed the positions because the workload was so low I knew someone who basically took full advantage of this. He was a contractor too, but just added a clause that he'd be allowed to work from home/remotely. So he was doing multiple gigs simultaneously; so instead of making $100/hr (or thereabouts, I'm not sure about the exact numbers), he was making $400/hr. It's probably not legal to do what he was doing, but he sure was livin' large.
- pault 9y agoI'm curious if people that do this ever get a "perfect storm" of all clients having unplanned work at the same time. It sounds great in theory but I feel like it would just tangle you up in a web of lies.
- pdimitar 9y agoI ain't a swindler for sure but I had to do this several times during my life, in order to provide for my family, to kill debts, to fix health problems and a load of other things life loves to hit you under the belt with. That perfect storm you described indeed happened several times and I was indeed lying about it but you know what? I was willing to own up to every single promise and engagement I made -- and I did, even though it took a toll on my mental health and work motivation. And no, I wasn't living large at all at the time.
- Mediterraneo10 9y ago> I'm curious if people that do this ever get a "perfect storm" of all clients having unplanned work at the same time. That is why it is a good idea to make the acquaintance of some subcontractors that you can further contract the work out to if a "perfect storm" happens.
- bshimmin 9y agoThe next step after that is telling the various people you work for that, actually, you've got subcontractors doing the work now and your job is to manage them. At that point, boom, you've just built a development agency.
- icelancer 9y agoI've been in those jobs before. (Though never paid as much as your examples.) The only way I stayed sane was to basically take Coursera classes and teach myself things while being paid to do so. It felt enough like work and was obviously an incredible opportunity to be paid to learn. You do start to go insane and there is an effect on your resume/CV as the black hole widens there.
- geff82 9y agoYou sound like my colleague Michael. It is you? ;) Essentially we were doing Coursera stuff together.
- Grustaf 9y agoYou could spend the extra time learning about new technologies and languages. Become an expert at Haskell or AI. Since you're probably in America I suppose they'd sue you if you started working on a side project but you can at least get thoroughly prepared for one!
- geff82 9y agoWell, as someone who can not sit doing nothing, I accumulated a lot of knowledge. I did Coursera courses, studied some courses at university, studied for a total of 5 boat- and radio licenses (Europe...), I did about 6 IT certifications that I prepared for at work, set up complete mail servers and recently dove into the topic of data science.
- pdimitar 9y agoDid you learn how to self-host your own email? If so, I'm very interested in learning how and which resources did you use.
- sevenfive 9y agoNah, go for gold. Learn math and physics!
- lucaspiller 9y agoI also had a similar cushy contract a while ago. I was 5 years out of university, but I was the most senior developer and effectively in charge of training everyone else - who were mostly juniors with absolutely no clue what they were doing. Eventually I felt I was stagnating my career prospects and switched. I'd be happy to do the same if I could work with peers who were at the same level as me though.