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Imagine a security guard at an office building. 90% of the time might be sitting in a booth watching monitors. The other 10% of the time is buzzing people in or

Imagine a security guard at an office building. 90% of the time might be sitting in a booth watching monitors. The other 10% of the time is buzzing people in or making rounds. But that 90% of the time when they are sitting around is important, since they are on call. So you are like a security guard. Your employer gladly pays you for the 90% of the time you are doing nothing, because they need the comfort of having a developer on call for when something needs to be done ASAP. They won't have to go to Upwork or wherever to find someone because you're already there. As long as you are 10x 10% of the time, you average out to a competent FTE and you are tolerated.

pvarangot 5y ago
I think if that was his situation he wouldn't have to "bullshit through standup". Just say "nothing showed up" or "having a creative block" or whatever and then either get help or something. It's not like the security guard at all, the security guard is not lying or consciously giving a false sense of what his contributions to the team are.
- Ardon 5y ago
  Part of the problem is that 'the company' accepts this 90% downtime, but managers running standups are paid to maximize productive output of their staff. So you'd be lying to your managers with the end goal of behaving as the company expects you to. This kind of internal tension is normal in lots of organizational structures. It's better if no one has to lie but it isn't (in my opinion) a disaster or anything.
alexk307 5y ago
This is how I view it. Unless you work for a startup where you need to churn out code every hour, you are paid for your expertise and ability to navigate incidents quickly and efficiently. You are a force multiplier as well as an individual contributor.
khazhoux 5y ago
Like most analogies, this one fails completely. It's well-understood that the security guard does nothing but stay alert 99% of the time. He very explicitly needs to "do nothing" for long stretches of time. Software development operates largely on trust that everyone on the team is putting in real effort. The manager trusts that when it takes you a week to finish a task, it's because it actually took a week of work, not a few minutes on Monday and then you watched YouTube vids and were on your XBox the rest of the week. And not just the manager -- everyone at the company would almost certainly like to move faster, and wouldn't be happy to know that features and bugfixes could be landing 5x faster, except for people who figured out that no one's checking up on them.
- byoung2 5y ago
  everyone at the company would almost certainly like to move faster Not necessarily true. This is certainly the case at a startup, but at a more established BigCorp, things move slowly, and the ability of an engineer to work at a slower pace is an asset. You may be waiting on legal approval for weeks or months, or a software review from infosec, signoff from finance on integration testing for a new payment processor, or any number of processes that are not banging out code as quickly as possible (these are all actual examples from my company). In these cases, you shouldn't have to BS your way through a standup, but you will have times where a week goes by and you haven't written a single line of code, and that is exactly what the job requires.
  - khazhoux 5y ago
    > you will have times where a week goes by and you haven't written a single line of code, and that is exactly what the job requires. OP is not saying that sometimes he's idle. Of course there are times when things move slowly. OP is saying that in his entire software development career, he works 0.5-1.0 days a week, and never more.
  - swaggyBoatswain 5y ago
    Or demoing to stakeholders, gathering business requirements, communicating new content that needs to be received etc. Those are all important reasons to go slower too Moving too fast doesn't benefit anyone
shetill 5y ago
you honestly think they are this alert and actually work? Honestly most of them just watch tv all day long and sit out their shift. I've seen people's bicycles get stolen right in front of the security guy. Most security guys are useless and don't do anything all day.

pvarangot 5y ago

I think if that was his situation he wouldn't have to "bullshit through standup". Just say "nothing showed up" or "having a creative block" or whatever and then either get help or something. It's not like the security guard at all, the security guard is not lying or consciously giving a false sense of what his contributions to the team are.

Ardon 5y ago
Part of the problem is that 'the company' accepts this 90% downtime, but managers running standups are paid to maximize productive output of their staff. So you'd be lying to your managers with the end goal of behaving as the company expects you to. This kind of internal tension is normal in lots of organizational structures. It's better if no one has to lie but it isn't (in my opinion) a disaster or anything.

alexk307 5y ago

This is how I view it. Unless you work for a startup where you need to churn out code every hour, you are paid for your expertise and ability to navigate incidents quickly and efficiently. You are a force multiplier as well as an individual contributor.

khazhoux 5y ago

Like most analogies, this one fails completely. It's well-understood that the security guard does nothing but stay alert 99% of the time. He very explicitly needs to "do nothing" for long stretches of time. Software development operates largely on trust that everyone on the team is putting in real effort. The manager trusts that when it takes you a week to finish a task, it's because it actually took a week of work, not a few minutes on Monday and then you watched YouTube vids and were on your XBox the rest of the week. And not just the manager -- everyone at the company would almost certainly like to move faster, and wouldn't be happy to know that features and bugfixes could be landing 5x faster, except for people who figured out that no one's checking up on them.

byoung2 5y ago
everyone at the company would almost certainly like to move faster Not necessarily true. This is certainly the case at a startup, but at a more established BigCorp, things move slowly, and the ability of an engineer to work at a slower pace is an asset. You may be waiting on legal approval for weeks or months, or a software review from infosec, signoff from finance on integration testing for a new payment processor, or any number of processes that are not banging out code as quickly as possible (these are all actual examples from my company). In these cases, you shouldn't have to BS your way through a standup, but you will have times where a week goes by and you haven't written a single line of code, and that is exactly what the job requires.
- khazhoux 5y ago
  > you will have times where a week goes by and you haven't written a single line of code, and that is exactly what the job requires. OP is not saying that sometimes he's idle. Of course there are times when things move slowly. OP is saying that in his entire software development career, he works 0.5-1.0 days a week, and never more.
- swaggyBoatswain 5y ago
  Or demoing to stakeholders, gathering business requirements, communicating new content that needs to be received etc. Those are all important reasons to go slower too Moving too fast doesn't benefit anyone

shetill 5y ago

you honestly think they are this alert and actually work? Honestly most of them just watch tv all day long and sit out their shift. I've seen people's bicycles get stolen right in front of the security guy. Most security guys are useless and don't do anything all day.