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(1) joking aside, please don't monitor logs like this. instead, treat your employees like real human beings and understand what they feel. not only is it more

(1) joking aside, please don't monitor logs like this. instead, treat your employees like real human beings and understand what they feel. not only is it more efficient than trying to reduce complex humans to a few "metrics", but it will allow you to detect more than just "boredom". (2) if you're thinking "how can they be bored when everything is so busy and there's so much to do?" maybe you are one of those over-managing bosses that doesn't delegate enough and, surprise, ends up running around being busy while everyone else is bored and lacking responsibilities. [i considered posting this anon, but it's not aimed at my current employers and, if you know me, you'd know i'd have said it to their face if it were...]

ora600 15y ago
(2) It is very easy to be super busy and bored. Having lots of boring work does not magically add up to become interesting all of the sudden.
Lewisham 15y ago
I worked for a 30 person database consultancy for my first job out of uni. Their Intranet home page contained a large and prominent link to "Internet access by user", which listed the amount of bandwidth being consumed by each person through their HTTP proxy. I have no idea who instituted that policy, but I instantly disliked the company . You could download large binaries for only so long to cover your tracks, so I just ended up running a constant SSH session to a Lynx browser, so casual passersby would think I was working. I quit about 6 months later for many other very good reasons, boredom being a huge one. A couple of months earlier I had asked if I could transfer to a new role (from developer to admin), which was flatly denied. When I announced I was leaving, one of the three senior management came up to me and said that in the last management meeting he had said I was bored and that they needed to find something more for me to do. Apparently he was shouted down (metaphorically). The last I heard of the company was that as a result of my departure, they would no longer hire graduates with A grades. They would look for B or C grades from now on. I can't imagine a worse lesson to learn, but there you go.
- cema 15y ago
  as a result of my departure, they would no longer hire graduates with A grades. They would look for B or C grades from now on. Wow! What an amazing... company. I am at a loss for words, really. They must be very -- what's the opposite of proud? -- of themselves.
  - DougBTX 15y ago
    The word you might be looking for is, "overqualified."
    - cema 15y ago
      Let's see: "What an amazing overqualified company. They must be very overqualified of themselves." No, I don't think so. :-) Speaking of your actual point (that the employee was overqualified), I think the company that considers A students overqualified for work for which it prefers to hire B and C students is going down a dangerous path. A,B,C here are not the qualification levels but performance levels.
      - Lewisham 15y ago
        I don't think I was overqualified for the actual job (by my own interpretation, and of the way it was advertised). I was overqualified for their interpretation of the job role. More specifically: I was the only full-time developer on a database which processed welfare payments for a smallish country, to the tune of hundreds of USD a year. This, I think, is not really the sort of system you would call trivial, nor one that the government would want a B or C grade student as the only full-time member on. The company wanted someone that would essentially keep the lights on, on a legacy system that was woefully inadequate. One particular clanger was a PL/SQL file which was 5000 lines long, and didn't have a single function in it. It had minimal comments, which were frequently wrong. No-one really knew how it worked. There was no automated testing at all (they'd never heard of unit tests). What the job should have been was thinking of how to provide value to the customer, trying to improve the system and perform code health updates. What they wanted me to do was do as little as possible to satisfy a work order from the government. This thinking was endemic in the company. One job asked another team to add an email reporting service. It worked on their internal Exchange servers, but they weren't able to figure out why emails weren't arriving at the government offices. Finally someone figured out that the emails didn't conform to SMTP at all. The people implementing this didn't know what SMTP was. The team leader/middle-manager in charge responded "They asked us to write an email sending function. We did. They didn't specify that they wanted SMTP, so they'll have to file another work order." I have many more like this.
StavrosK 15y ago
On the contrary, I think that "aggregate number of hours spent on HN this week" would be a very good metric for "interestingness of work this week". Reversely correlated, of course. I would definitely draw that graph.

ora600 15y ago

(2) It is very easy to be super busy and bored. Having lots of boring work does not magically add up to become interesting all of the sudden.

Lewisham 15y ago

I worked for a 30 person database consultancy for my first job out of uni. Their Intranet home page contained a large and prominent link to "Internet access by user", which listed the amount of bandwidth being consumed by each person through their HTTP proxy. I have no idea who instituted that policy, but I instantly disliked the company . You could download large binaries for only so long to cover your tracks, so I just ended up running a constant SSH session to a Lynx browser, so casual passersby would think I was working. I quit about 6 months later for many other very good reasons, boredom being a huge one. A couple of months earlier I had asked if I could transfer to a new role (from developer to admin), which was flatly denied. When I announced I was leaving, one of the three senior management came up to me and said that in the last management meeting he had said I was bored and that they needed to find something more for me to do. Apparently he was shouted down (metaphorically). The last I heard of the company was that as a result of my departure, they would no longer hire graduates with A grades. They would look for B or C grades from now on. I can't imagine a worse lesson to learn, but there you go.

cema 15y ago
as a result of my departure, they would no longer hire graduates with A grades. They would look for B or C grades from now on. Wow! What an amazing... company. I am at a loss for words, really. They must be very -- what's the opposite of proud? -- of themselves.
- DougBTX 15y ago
  The word you might be looking for is, "overqualified."
  - cema 15y ago
    Let's see: "What an amazing overqualified company. They must be very overqualified of themselves." No, I don't think so. :-) Speaking of your actual point (that the employee was overqualified), I think the company that considers A students overqualified for work for which it prefers to hire B and C students is going down a dangerous path. A,B,C here are not the qualification levels but performance levels.
    - Lewisham 15y ago
      I don't think I was overqualified for the actual job (by my own interpretation, and of the way it was advertised). I was overqualified for their interpretation of the job role. More specifically: I was the only full-time developer on a database which processed welfare payments for a smallish country, to the tune of hundreds of USD a year. This, I think, is not really the sort of system you would call trivial, nor one that the government would want a B or C grade student as the only full-time member on. The company wanted someone that would essentially keep the lights on, on a legacy system that was woefully inadequate. One particular clanger was a PL/SQL file which was 5000 lines long, and didn't have a single function in it. It had minimal comments, which were frequently wrong. No-one really knew how it worked. There was no automated testing at all (they'd never heard of unit tests). What the job should have been was thinking of how to provide value to the customer, trying to improve the system and perform code health updates. What they wanted me to do was do as little as possible to satisfy a work order from the government. This thinking was endemic in the company. One job asked another team to add an email reporting service. It worked on their internal Exchange servers, but they weren't able to figure out why emails weren't arriving at the government offices. Finally someone figured out that the emails didn't conform to SMTP at all. The people implementing this didn't know what SMTP was. The team leader/middle-manager in charge responded "They asked us to write an email sending function. We did. They didn't specify that they wanted SMTP, so they'll have to file another work order." I have many more like this.

StavrosK 15y ago

On the contrary, I think that "aggregate number of hours spent on HN this week" would be a very good metric for "interestingness of work this week". Reversely correlated, of course. I would definitely draw that graph.