3 ms·

Is some of this inherent to tech jobs in general? 90% of my work is reactive, so once I finish my 10% proactive work all I do is wait for people to give me task

by soared 5y ago

Is some of this inherent to tech jobs in general? 90% of my work is reactive, so once I finish my 10% proactive work all I do is wait for people to give me tasks. Some weeks I work 15 hours, sometimes I work 45. But I don’t think there is anything useful to the company I could be doing in the off time, as I’d need to be able to drop it instantly for other work. I can’t build new things/etc.. the company is 1000 people, does mostly deep learning, and the product is insanely complicated. Of course there are little things I can do, but nothing that impacts the bottom line. But just like in the article, my friends and I are all gainfully employed and play video games together most days. (To be honest I only got through 30% of the article, it’s pretty dam long)

ryandrake 5y ago
These comments seem so alien to me! Everywhere I've worked in tech, there was at least 10x more work to do than people to do it. Every company has a "Idea guy" to engineer ratio so high that there are more ideas being generated than capacity to do them. Every company has bug lists that grow faster than they can be drained. If you were done fixing your bug, there was always another one of sufficiently high priority waiting for you to do next. And outside of a few breaks to brainstorm, mess around on HN, go to the bathroom, etc., we were expected to fill our queue up (or for junior folks, our managers were expected to fill them for us). Very much the blue-collar "If You've Got Time to Lean, You've Got Time to Clean" mentality, but moved into the white collar development world. When someone says "Oh, I only do about N hours of actual work a week" where N is significantly less than the amount of time you're in the office, it seems so strange. I get that this must happen somewhere but hell if I've ever worked in a place like that.
- mecha_ghidorah 5y ago
  I think the issue is more at many places people don't feel empowered to just go and fix/build something. I've worked places where if I pull stuff in from the next sprint my manager gets annoyed because it screws with the metrics being reported, and where if I were to start any projects started on my own initiative and it was noticed I'd be reprimanded or at best be given busy work instead (some fuzzy bullshit task which I'd hate). Because of this whenever I had down time I'd goof off instead of say, writing optimizations to our parser which was slowing down a big data ingestion process. I literally did start doing that once when I had nothing on and I basically told "yeah it's not worth your time because it isn't billable". Of course later clients complained it was slow and I was told to look for optimizations (but not to that part, because that part was complicated, even though that part was the slowest part and I had already half implemented something).
- soared 5y ago
  Part of it is likely that engineers/etc can build, where as the entirety of my job is ensuring things continue to run as they should. I have ~5 clients, and if things are going well the machine runs without me doing much. If the data doesn’t look good or the client wants a change, then I go do some work. There are prebuilt alerts in the system, but I don’t have any sort of access to create or automate my own. For me there literally isn’t work I can do outside of that. I’ve automated a few things here and there, but that’s about it. Like the other commenter said, I’m definitely not allowed to do anything else. I don’t even have admin access to download software on my laptop. Pay is great, hours are low. No complaints here :)

by soared 5y ago

ryandrake 5y ago

These comments seem so alien to me! Everywhere I've worked in tech, there was at least 10x more work to do than people to do it. Every company has a "Idea guy" to engineer ratio so high that there are more ideas being generated than capacity to do them. Every company has bug lists that grow faster than they can be drained. If you were done fixing your bug, there was always another one of sufficiently high priority waiting for you to do next. And outside of a few breaks to brainstorm, mess around on HN, go to the bathroom, etc., we were expected to fill our queue up (or for junior folks, our managers were expected to fill them for us). Very much the blue-collar "If You've Got Time to Lean, You've Got Time to Clean" mentality, but moved into the white collar development world. When someone says "Oh, I only do about N hours of actual work a week" where N is significantly less than the amount of time you're in the office, it seems so strange. I get that this must happen somewhere but hell if I've ever worked in a place like that.

mecha_ghidorah 5y ago
I think the issue is more at many places people don't feel empowered to just go and fix/build something. I've worked places where if I pull stuff in from the next sprint my manager gets annoyed because it screws with the metrics being reported, and where if I were to start any projects started on my own initiative and it was noticed I'd be reprimanded or at best be given busy work instead (some fuzzy bullshit task which I'd hate). Because of this whenever I had down time I'd goof off instead of say, writing optimizations to our parser which was slowing down a big data ingestion process. I literally did start doing that once when I had nothing on and I basically told "yeah it's not worth your time because it isn't billable". Of course later clients complained it was slow and I was told to look for optimizations (but not to that part, because that part was complicated, even though that part was the slowest part and I had already half implemented something).
soared 5y ago
Part of it is likely that engineers/etc can build, where as the entirety of my job is ensuring things continue to run as they should. I have ~5 clients, and if things are going well the machine runs without me doing much. If the data doesn’t look good or the client wants a change, then I go do some work. There are prebuilt alerts in the system, but I don’t have any sort of access to create or automate my own. For me there literally isn’t work I can do outside of that. I’ve automated a few things here and there, but that’s about it. Like the other commenter said, I’m definitely not allowed to do anything else. I don’t even have admin access to download software on my laptop. Pay is great, hours are low. No complaints here :)