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> Are there any persons who can work, say, 8+ hours? I mean, really work, not be at office. Being at the office, doing office things IS WORK. Where does the i
by crispyambulance 6y ago
> Are there any persons who can work, say, 8+ hours? I mean, really work, not be at office.
Being at the office, doing office things IS WORK.
Where does the idea come that you're only "working" when you're coding?
If you're filling out a TPS report, you're WORKING. If you're sitting in mind-numbing status update meeting with a 1000 yard stare on your face, you're WORKING. If you're researching something on the internet to solve a problem for you or someone else, you're WORKING. If you're watching an HR-mandated online learning presentation about IT security consisting of Kevin Mitnick clips droning endlessly, you're WORKING. If you're thinking about work, you're WORKING.
- kd5bjo 6y ago> Where does the idea come that you're only "working" when you're coding? When performance review time rolls around, it can be very hard to get credit for all of those other things. Coding, on the other hand, has products with direct business value that you can point to and say, "That's what I did this quarter."
- bgirard 6y agoYou have to look into where that overhead falls: 1) Things that everyone has to do like HR/Legal compliance. 2) Things that you should have opted to avoid like useless status meetings. 3) Things that are productive but have in-direct business value. That's largely a bug in the review process if it doesn't value those.
- ironmagma 6y agoOne huge waste of time is red tape. Corporations love adopting procedures that are directly antithetical to getting work done in a timely manner, like “IT support” tickets that consist of getting access to an internal database, even if that database contains no sensitive information. These do not affect teams in an even way, since some projects’ critical paths will depend on these labyrinthine workflows more than others.
- ozim 6y agoSo let's go with typical reply: if you work in such place that does not understand that and don't want to pay for it, you should pimp up your resume and find better place.
- VoodooJuJu 6y ago>filling out a TPS report >sitting in mind-numbing status update meeting Technically yeah, we are "WORKING" when we do these things, but we distinguish the types of above-quoted trivialities from "real work" because it's useful to distinguish them. Why is it useful? For one, as a kind of relaxant or a release; a release from working myself too hard, and from not feeling like something's wrong with me when I'm unable wrap my head around some code after writing for the last 12 hours straight. We'll hear from time to time about someone "WORKING" 80-hour weeks and that will lead us to think that maybe we could be "WORKING" longer, harder. Except "WORKING" to that 80-hour-a-week guy is a lot of business lunches & dinners, social media, golf, or other busywork, while "WORKING" to another guy is high-intensity focus and creative output. By qualifying their hours worked with what constitutes "WORKING", we find comfort knowing that no - something is not wrong with us if we can't engage in a 14th hour of intense-focus creative output.
- crispyambulance 6y agoThose things like meetings, lunches, dinners, golf and social "trivialities" are really work. They do take a toll on you and they're not relaxing. Sure, it's different from intense problem solving, different from digging a ditch, but still very much work.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- collyw 6y agoSo if I look at facebook while sitting at my desk I am working? I don't think so.
- crispyambulance 6y agoYet that's exactly what happens. No one is "on" or at 100% intensity all the time. Ditch diggers take breaks, so do people in cubicles. It's OK.