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This thread is seriously in need of some tough love. @faang0722, you're being a slacker, and not doing right by either your company or yourself. You're at one

• Ericson2314 6y ago
  OP is a freeloader at a rent seaker. Your simplistic morals fail to account for the bigger picture.
  • snowwrestler 6y ago
    Well the point is that OP is obviously not happy being a freeloader, which is why they posted here about it. This sort of tough-love feedback to really useful to someone looking for meaning in their work. The reality is, sometimes you have to make your own meaning. If what you're being handed at work is boring and easy, it can be self-love to start asking around for more interesting stuff to do. Young people in particular can have a hard transition coming out of school, where the structure and goals are handed to you, into the "real world", where a lot of the rewards flow to people who have the ability and willingness to create structures and goals for themselves and others.
  • skybrian 6y ago
    By bringing in the bigger picture, it seems you're just making the moral case stronger? That means he's profiting from rent seeking, just like the shareholders. (And probably is a shareholder too.) The money comes from the same places. To complicate things a bit though, this looks like systematic failure in some parts of the organization. Doing your bit to try to fix that failure seems like a good cause.
  • turing_complete 6y ago
    Come on, Amazon is not a rent seeker. It's quite the opposite.
• yelloweyes 6y ago
  why are "tough love" people always douchebags?
  • blaser-waffle 6y ago
    Why do so many people have thin skin?
  • qqj 6y ago
    because they don't have solutions or useful advise. They don't think anything is wrong but the person who's presenting the actual problem. It's sometimes useful to consider the possibility you're wrong, but what OP describes is clearly not unique to his team or company. Many of us are in the same boat. So at least in this particular case, the "toughlover" is indeed, a "douchebag".
    • JackFr 6y ago
      Because the tough love solution is always "Take responsibility for improving your own situation." The complainer says "It's not my fault!" The tough-lover responds, "Yes, it's not your fault. But it's still your problem."
  • chrisco255 6y ago
    Sometimes you need to be slightly offended or put off in order to change your own stubborn mindset. I see both sides in this exchange. OP has a choice they can make. They can continue to coast or strive to do better. There isn't necessarily a wrong choice here, but I do believe their long-term future outcomes will be strongly affected by the choice they make.
  • Hydraulix989 6y ago
    Isn't that the case by definition?
• smattiso 6y ago
  Don't listen to this guy. You don't have to change your own identity and your own personal compass to fit your company. You also don't have to succumb to the "starving Ethiopians" fallacy and take whatever crap job is given. This life has a billion paths you can take. Understand the tradeoffs and make a calculated decision but follow your own path. Granted you may end up homeless. But from experience there are way more people slogging it out at work doing the 9-5 putting in the bare minimum than people who find a passion and go for it. If your passion is basket weaving you are probably screwed but given that you are an engineer there are a million problems that need to be solved. Find one, might even be within your own company.
  • dbalatero 6y ago
    Parent is not asking them to do that: > So either start putting in your best work, or switch teams or company and see if it suits you better... or else accept that you're being a freeloader and pretending to do more work than you really are. It's definitely a choice here, but the point is the OP needs to actually make some active choices and decide what they're ok with.
    • smattiso 6y ago
      I agree with what you are saying. The "tough-love" message is usually to "suck it up" and stay where you are. "Life sucks, get over it." My point is if you are smart enough to be in a FAANG you are smart enough to do great work and make an impact on this world. You don't have to settle for fixing tiny bugs in some admin page for an ad company. I know there are people that are 100% cool with doing that for $$$. If you are not cool with it, then figure out a way to change it because there are enough problems to solve that if you are a smart engineer and you aren't doing shit and hating your day then you are wasting your talent.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • bumby 6y ago
        >If you are not cool with it, then figure out a way to change it >So either start putting in your best work, or switch teams or company and see if it suits you better. You and the OP are essentially saying the same thing, except they are adding that an honest days wage deserves an honest days work
• Godel_unicode 6y ago
  I have a subtly different take on this; op is cheating themselves. They work in a field famous for people deriving immense satisfaction from their job, but they aren't because they are living down to the expectations of others.
  • lykr0n 6y ago
    It's selection bias. We're inundated with stories of how Person X changed the world with their software, or Person Y who solved this amazing issue, or Company Z is doing this cool thing- with out realizing that we're only seeing the people who broke through the mundane. Working at a FANNG means you might get a chance at being in the room where they're picking people for a new team that might do something cool. Where I work, we have this amazing internal database system we're going to open source. It's amazing tech, but for the 10 developers who made it, we have 1000 doing grunt work solving problems like "We need to get Apple Sign In working, but to do that we need to add X to Service A, Y to Service B, and refactor how we store accounts to make it work." It's not exciting.
    • throw51319 6y ago
      Yeah good post here. Even within each of these organizations, there's always people starting to work on the "cool" project. You could get yourself to work on it, but if you're not spearheading it you'll prob end up as one of the guys who does 80% of the work to make the last 20% of the design work. Essentially my job right now. Learning a lot, but man is it frustrating.
  • icedchai 6y ago
    Seriously? I don't know anyone in this field who derives immense satisfaction from their job. Maybe if they're less than 5 years out of school and reality still hasn't hit yet...
    • sokoloff 6y ago
      I loved every week (though not every hour) of my computer programming jobs. I literally do it for free in my spare time and here some fools are willing to pay me handsomely to do it at their little glass and concrete spreadsheet/Powerpoint mine. The only "catch" is I have to work on problems they pick instead of ones I pick. Sounds fair enough to me; where do I sign?!
• mrfredward 6y ago
  >You say the company is evidently pleased with your work and that may be true, but now you're part of the problem. You think the company tolerates shitty work, so you've decided to tolerate shitty work. Don't. For a non-manager in a large organization, the choices are pretty much accept your work environment or leave it. Fighting the entire company's culture as a low level employee is like trying to move a mountain by pushing harder. To OP: Accept the pace your department moves at, and look for little victories. Your never gonna get to write a new app in a week and be a hero in your current company/department, but there is still some satisfaction to be found in ironing out little wrinkles one at a time. If/when you leave, look for a job you want to go to, rather than just looking for a way out of your current job.
• qntty 6y ago
  AKA, please work harder for your corporate masters because poor people are suffering. What's that? You want your corporate masters to pay a fair share of tax so poor will suffer less? No, just work harder and that extra work won't benefit people who need it.
  • khazhoux 6y ago
    Yes, he should work harder -- he admits to working only one day a week, and then actively pretends (by "trickling out" work) that it took longer. Let's please not pretend that it's normal or OK to have 6-day weekends every single week. He is being compensated (I infer) very well for a safe and comfortable job, except he doesn't like the tooling and he's realized that people trust him and he doesn't need to be honest to collect his paycheck.
    • newen 6y ago
      What's with this moralizing? If you can get away with working only one day a week, there's nothing wrong with doing exactly that. Is this like some Protestant work ethic thing?
      • cameronbrown 6y ago
        It's also possible that this one day of intense work is unsustainable for 5 days, and this is just their working style. There's nothing wrong with that as long as this isn't done out of laziness.
        • qntty 6y ago
          So what if it's done out of laziness? There's no law that says that a lazy person can't participate in the economy without giving up their laziness. There are jobs out there that are well suited for lazy people. Maybe OP has found one of them.
      • ghaff 6y ago
        In general, I certainly wouldn't advocate trying to do the least work possible to get by in some job long-term. It doesn't sound fulfilling and likely isn't good for one's career long-term. But I don't get this moralizing about cheating the company.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• unethical_ban 6y ago
  I wonder your background. Do you know how demoralizing it is to work in an organization where the people trying to lead have no power to effect change, and the leaders are incompetent and force bad decisions on a constant basis? Where there is no real vision for the company? The OP is describing being trapped in a tar pit, and you're saying "run faster".
  • khazhoux 6y ago
    He's not describing a tar pit, though. He says he works one day a week -- he could, in fact, be running faster. The simplest thing to do would be to sign up for more tasks (his calendar is open, after all) and/or tell his manager he wants more challenging work.
    • unethical_ban 6y ago
      "Hey boss, I'd like to move faster on Project X, but there are too many review processes" That's just the way it is, John. "Hey, I'd like to change the change review process to streamline it from a catch-all form, to one more appropriate to our workflow" Sorry John, QA will never sign off. "Hey, why are we wasting 30% of our team on Project Z? It's a total duplication of work for Project Y, and brings no value to the company - it's the pet of that VP of finance, because he ate dinner with an Azure rep three months ago." Man, I hear ya, John. What a stupid project. But that VP has the ear of the Board. "Hey, I'd like to work my way into a design role, to help craft more common-sense engineering and be at the table when we talk about backlog priorities" Let's put that in your development plan for 2022. We need to knock out Project X. --- Working at large companies can be soul sucking. There is a comic called "Dilbert" that touches on it.
      • bumby 6y ago
        I agree it can be demoralizing but what you've presented takes the perspective that you are just a victim to an organization rather than part of that organization. >That's just the way it is, John. Maybe you didn't communicate the value of moving faster that speaks to your boss's incentives. >Sorry John, QA will never sign off. Maybe you didn't show QA how the improved workflow actually improves the quality of the work >Man, I hear ya, John. What a stupid project. But that VP has the ear of the Board. Maybe you can find a way for that VP to get credit for that 30% reduction in waste >Let's put that in your development plan for 2022. We need to knock out Project X. Maybe you can take a lead in project X so you can build the trust needed to be given a role in design with more responsibility I know these can come off as glib, but the point is that sitting on the sidelines talking about how things can't get done only ensures things won't get done.
• didibus 6y ago
  To be fair, they didn't say they're working one day a week, they said it takes them only one day to provide equal value to what their teammates achieve in one week, a value that seems to meet their company's expectations. FAANGS employees are salaried, and not paid by hour, because you are compensated for ROI. If it takes you one hour and you bring in lots of value, that's still a good deal. On the flip side, you could also work 60 hours week if that's what it took you to meet and exceed on the value expectations. Still agree with much of your comment though. Since they're complaining about the situation, something does feel off.
  • tmyrden 6y ago
    > I normally work about one day trickle out my changes during the the week. The other days I only open my computer for standup and if I get an IM. They said exactly that though. They work one day a week and otherwise just log on for standup and when messaged.
    • didibus 6y ago
      Ya that's why I still agree mostly with OP in this particular case it seems something is off. I just wanted to explain that with software, a small effort can deliver huge returns. So the idiom of: "Don't work hard, work smart" is in full effect. If you can deliver on the expected business value with less effort on your part it is still a win/win scenario. A business who'd replace you for someone who fills up all 40 hours would not necessarily gain anything, in fact, might lose on ROI. Hours put into software does not translate directly into the output delivered. And, there's only so much creative juice per week you can deliver on, so that cleverness of solutions you can come up with, and those good ideas you have which don't take very long to implement, but deliver big returns, you can't necessarily just be asked to come up with them twice as often by working more hours either. In fact, sometimes those come by taking a break, a step back, getting more rest, etc. And maybe since we're on the topic, I've had a fare share of jobs prior, server, construction, military, and yet nothing drains me more than software engineering at the end of the day, even if it was only a 6 hour day. There's something about just thinking all day and discussing heavily all day that is super draining mentally. Where other jobs I've had that were more physically demanding tired me, but in a good way, that almost energized me in my off time. The mental work is hard.
• turing_complete 6y ago
  I agree. Especially with the part about cheating yourself. Have some integrity and self-respect. Otherwise, you will just become miserable and cynical.
• codeviking 6y ago
  This seems like good advice, but is presented poorly. You're meeting expectations, which is great, but don't stop there. You recognize that you (and your teammates) could be doing more, so make it happen. You're entirely capable and empowered to do so: - Fix that technical debt. - Identify better tooling and demonstrate it's value to your teammates. - Proactively find things your software could do better and write about them. Don't be discouraged if people don't bite on the first few, you'll find one eventually that's too good to not pursue. Sure, you could accept the status quo and coast like some of your teammates, but you'll be unhappy (and bored). Do what makes you happy -- identify, evangelize, prototype and build. All of this doesn't mean you're lazy for having posted this -- just that you need encouragement to make the things happen that'll make you happier and more fulfilled at the end of the day.
  • skrtskrt 6y ago
    This is good... only IF he can actually get to work on this stuff without being stomped on and blocked from every corner of the organization.
    • mkoubaa 6y ago
      None of the FAANGs block personal projects from staff who are productive enough in their primary responsibility
      • skrtskrt 6y ago
        What if the "personal" project is like "introduce this new tooling to the team, get it integrated into our CI pipeline"? Anything that introduces new technology or has the potential to require some time from other teams (Devops, SRE) I can see running into organizational roadblocks in the final stages of the project, even if the individual is free to start the experimentation and justification steps them on their own.
        • nuclear_eclipse 6y ago
          If they're willing to do the integration and support work on their own, then it shouldn't be a roadblock, and they should be able to prove the impact that it offers to other engineers and be rewarded if they did all of the work.
• mylons 6y ago
  you’re right if the person was not working at a FAANG. so what if they’re one of tnt most valuable companies in the world? one way they became so valuable is by vacuuming up all the talent and giving them tedious work to do so they don’t compete with FAANG itself.
• goldenManatee 6y ago
  It’s a transaction. The goals of the company and employee parties is to maximize their own gains with as little effort as possible. The moral imperative argument is very dubious, and sounds one-side to further the gains of the company party at the expense of additional energy from the employee. Raising matters of social change as if the employee should have some gut wrenching “come to Jesus” because “they’re so lucky” relative to global social and market changes is a bunch of smoke and mirrors to, again, unevenly place the gains from the employee-business relationship on the company. Business is only a transaction; maximize gains for minimal effort, between all parties. That “million people would kill for a chance” to be at a FAANG is not the employee’s problem anymore. The moment the company extended the job offer already created “a million” job applicants who didn’t get an offer. Behaving in a way that suggests continually begging “to stay in” just to get to create the net gains for other people, the investors and top management, deserves a therapy session on personal self-worth, which is a personal problem not a business matter. Now, as for the matter of personally going above and beyond, that’s actually a separate matter - no need for emotional entanglement of the the business reality and personal reality. If the employee wishes, as they’ve expressed, to go above what is satisfying the business (given they’ve reported no management has complained) then by all means, find more work with outside teams within the company, tactfully speak to the manager about the concern, or just leave and start a new job or venture. The moral guilt argument over the transactional relationship between an employee and the business, though, is at best naive, and at worse unevenly extracting more energy from the employee than the business. If the company has continued to pay the employee without complain, that’s their own moral dilemma for allowing it.
  • ghaff 6y ago
    You're seeing some responses to this that are very cultural. Personally, I don't think a slow coast is a good long-term strategy for most people under a lot of circumstances (for many reasons). But putting the least effort in is seen as pretty normal in a lot of cultures. As someone else said, you're seeing a lot of Calvinist moralizing here IMO.
• sophacles 6y ago
  No - the company appears satisfied with OP's performance. Therefore they're not freeloading, rather they are selling the company services at the price point the company set. If someone comes to my business and we agree that I'll provide a widget for $10k, if it costs me only $1k to make it, we call that profit - i don't give them 10 widgets or a refund. A salaried job is an agreement that i will provide X KPIs, if it takes me more than 40hrs I don't get extra money, so if it takes me less an 40hrs I shouldn't give back money. Now there may be laws or authoritarian morals around how I should lick the boots of my boss and give away more hours or outperform the KPIs, but basic capitalism says that's just a thing for suckers.
• mssngpnt1 6y ago
  Oh ok, Superman It’s so easy turning over corporate culture, and the real peer pressure to avoid making others look like slackers. Perhaps if you know how to do even better than your industry of peers, you’d be off doing so much more you’d not have time for babysitting others on social media.
• RobLach 6y ago
  Nonsense and completely detached from reality. Every worker's duty is purely to themselves, not some sort of bizarre worship of their employer. Your duty to yourself under capitalism is to extract as much capital and benefit as possible from the market in exchange for your labor. If you can commit a line of code a week and still get paid your salary, you're working EXTREMELY efficiently. Even better if you manage to get a job where they're failing to get any labor from you at all. Conversely every employer is focused on extracting as much production as possible from their employees. Efficient companies will cut off under-producing workers without a second thought and will continuously strive to minimize the cost of any employee.
• lowbloodsugar 6y ago
  We could get into the conversations about entitlement, sociopathy, whatever, but lets try to help: Situation: "I only have to work one day a week to keep up, and so I only work that one day and slack off the rest of the time". Possible causes: 1. Depression / Mental health issues Seek help. I know: depressed; so hard to do. 2. Doesn't actually enjoy programming. Wait till the pandemic is over and get a different job or start a company doing something you enjoy. 3. Enjoy programming, Team sucks. FAANGs are huge companies with thousands of teams. Find a different team.
• c1b 6y ago
  lol. this is insane. he's doing his job and asking a question. Lets say he decides to start being more diligent and taking the initiative to do as much work as is possible. His company is the only entity that benefits from this arrangement, and the benefit is marginal at best. Ultimately, this literally provides the resources for the company to pay the salaries of more useless workers and perpetuates the issue this post is trying to address.
• minimuffins 6y ago
  This is nuts. This guy doesn't owe the maximally extractive amount of his labor to the FAANGCorp. If they're happy with his work output, fine. He fulfilled his end of the bargain. Totally deranged protestant work ethic run amok to think otherwise. It's also extremely not this guy's fault other people have to work exploitative shit jobs during a pandemic, and his working harder (for FAANG!) isn't the thing that will fix it.
  • khazhoux 6y ago
    > If they're happy with his work output, fine. He fulfilled his end of the bargain. Totally deranged protestant work ethic run amok to think otherwise. By this reasoning... Manager: Our users are asking for this feature, how long will it take us to ship it? Developer: I can do it in six weeks. Manager: Ok, I'll let them know. (Six weeks later) Manager: I just found out that this was actually super simple for you and only took a few days. What were you actually doing the last month? Our users were waiting this whole time. Developer: You said you were OK with six weeks! Your protestant work ethic is deranged! ;-)
    • minimuffins 6y ago
      I guess I'm supposed to sympathize with the manager in this hypothetical (which is different from the OP's situation anyway). But I don't!
      • khazhoux 6y ago
        How about the people who were waiting for the work to be done? Users and customers.
• rsanek 6y ago
  > Millions of people are desperate to receive $600-1600 from the government this month because they are unable to work. Millions are putting on shitty facemasks and still showing up to work at grocery stores and warehouses and wherever, risking disease because they have no other choice. Meanwhile you can't be bothered to work at home on your laptop more than one day a week, because the build system and tech debt makes you sad? I'm always impressed at how much American culture promotes labor vs. labor infighting instead of recognizing that the issue is not the 1%. It's the top 0.1% (and 0.01%) that's causing this problem. https://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2017/article/never-mind-1-percent-lets-talk-about-001-percent https://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2017/article/never...
• adrianmsmith 6y ago
  The danger here is that others might be happy with the pace and lack of stress, or they might simply not be good enough to do any better. In either case, they're happy with the situation, and don't want it to change. If you do good work, they'll fear managers might notice, and it'll make them look bad. So they won't be happy with that. They'll sabotage you, bully you, not proactively tell you things you don't know you don't know, etc. Before you start that fight, make sure you want to fight that fight, and that if it happens you stand a good chance of winning. Otherwise you'll just put in more effort than now, and the result will be that more people than now will hate you, and eventually you'll get fired because your work will suck because your colleagues have deliberately withheld information.
• _vertigo 6y ago
  Have you ever worked for a company like this? I have worked for a startup which was acquired by a FAANG company and later transferred internally to a "normal" team within the FAANG company. That's three different scenarios: 1) startup 2) recent acquisition; small startup-cultured enclave in a big company 3) pure big company. I was an extremely motivated worker in scenarios 1 and 2. I had a lot of "momentum" and worked extremely hard. Burnout was a consideration not just because of long hours, but because I liked working so much that it was easy to overwork over the course of a couple months. In scenario 3 it is a constant struggle to remain motivated and I constantly feel as though all of my momentum is lost. Here are some differences I noticed: Scenarios 1 and 2: a. Extremely aggressive goals and deadlines. Deadlines constantly missed, but our velocity was impressive. Goals were very short term - few goals were more than 1 business quarter in the future. This changed once we were acquired because the acquiring company demanded longer term deadlines. b. Scrappiness and the pride in your work and yourself that accompanies scrappiness c. Iteration speed prioritized highly. Build and deploy times to a staging environment often less than 3 minutes. d. I wore many hats. DBA, sysadmin, full stack software engineer, product guy, security person, devops. Worked in many domains - search, distributed systems, building in the Cloud, etc. e. Hard work and ownership are seen and rewarded. ---- Scenario 3: a. Smaller goals. Every goal was designed to be hit, since missing goals is anathema in my FAANG company. b. No scrappiness whatsoever. Just meet the deadlines. c. Iteration speed barely prioritized. Since your tasks have been mapped out months ahead of time, what need do you have to iterate quickly? Just build to the spec. Build times were extremely long. Deploy times were often 12 hours (you think it wouldn't take that long to deploy something, but when your company has strict rules about only deploying to 1 region at a time and taking 30 minutes to monitor metrics in each region before moving to the next, it adds up). Many of the best tools or tricks I used to iterate quickly in scenarios 1 and 2 don't work due to security measures, or more likely, due to the FAANG company leveraging their own tools rather than open source ones I used in scenario #1 and #2. d. I wear 1 or 2 hats. e. Hard work and ownership aren't really seen unless you're in the right project. I can't tell you how many times I've told my manager I feel like I haven't done a lot of work recently, or feel like I could be doing more. I'm always assured that I'm doing very well in his eyes and meeting all my deadlines. From my perspective I've done a disgustingly tiny amount of work since I started. Anyway, I wrote all of this out to try and illustrate that it is really hard to work hard in a scenario where you are actively discouraged from working harder. I didn't really do a good job of doing that, but I hope I've kind of hinted at the problem. Most of your teammates at FAANG companies have worked at FAANG or other large companies their entire careers and have no idea how slow the entire freight train is moving. They have no idea that in other companies the role of being a software engineer is much more dynamic than their experience has been. There are a lot of compounding issues other than just unimaginative deadlines that I don't have time to touch on. Legacy systems, defined promotion processes that make it so that you know ahead of time which projects actually stand a chance of promoting you, a strong hierarchy, entrenched politics, etc etc. I just want to say that I have been in scenario 3 for a year and it has taken about that long to build my momentum up again to where it was in scenario #1 and #2. It is really, really hard to keep your motivation to work harder when almost every part of the job is incentivizing you to just sit down and meet your pathetic deadlines.. Trying to motivate someone by shaming them is never going to work here.
• blitmap 6y ago
  I agree with this guy. You feel the bar is being set very low. The hard part of your job is working within the established environment (the technical debt?). You're choosing to put the effort in 1 day a week because you're comparing your contributions to your coworkers. If you're unhappy in this dev environment that's one thing, and if you're unhappy with your contributions that's another. I would try setting expectations for yourself if it's easy to impress the company. You could be a huge asset even assisting your team. It's concerning that you aren't aware of why their progress is slower and that no one has spotted your complacency. Perhaps you have something to offer as a mentor and maybe that will give your work more meaning/value (something to consider). As the guy above me said, a lot of people are facing crisis right now. I honestly don't blame you for having an easier time of it if most of the week you're just collecting money. PS: I learn best by teaching others. I think you should get more involved with your team to help them :-) PPS: I have grown SO MUCH as a developer by forcing myself to "do as the Roman's do". Watch your mental health. If you feel like you're losing your identity you should walk, but otherwise try immersing yourself in understanding your companys' stack and design decisions. Make your contributions indistinguishable from all that code that together makes something amazing. It's bad to measure progress by SLOC. You can always switch to Sprite if you don't like the Koolaid. PPPS: You may be able to be honest with your supervisor and ask for time at work to work on passion projects. They care about your meaningful contributions and would likely do whatever you need to keep those rolling in. A FAANG company would accomodate this.