4 ms·

I don’t think that what you’re doing is very common, but it’s not uncommon either. What you need to do this is to work in an environment where not being product

I don’t think that what you’re doing is very common, but it’s not uncommon either. What you need to do this is to work in an environment where not being productive is not harmful. There are plenty of environments like this. For example, not doing any work but still getting paid doesn’t do any harm at Google. The company is making money anyway. At a small startup that’s under immense pressure people would realise what you’re doing because you’d harm the business. I’m a big believer in Price’s Law - the square root people produce half the value. If there are 10000 people at the company, you can very well survive in the group of 9900 that does the other half.

sombremesa 5y ago
I’ve worked at a small startup and find this to be untrue. If you’re working with people 10-100x worse than you, you can be sandbagging as hard as you can and still be miles ahead and look like a paragon of productivity. Now, will that particular startup succeed? Probably not in the way their investors would like.
dilyevsky 5y ago
I’ve had coworkers like op almost in every team that I worked for and google was one of the only places where some folks like that got walked out so may not be the best advice ;)
Kranar 5y ago
As someone who worked at both Microsoft and Google... you can get await with doing little work at those companies for maybe a year, two years at most, but after that you're gone. The expectation at those places skyrockets after the first year.
- abledon 5y ago
  hypothetically, do you think if people weren't allowed to drink caffeine or use performance enhancing drugs (adderall etc..), what % would not make that threshold of performance?
  - Kranar 5y ago
    No idea; most people I worked with drank coffee but never once was I exposed to performance enhancing drugs. At Microsoft I worked on IronPython and the people I worked with were productive not in the sense that they churned out 1000s and 1000s of lines of code a day, but they were productive in the sense that they were constantly outputting fairly novel solutions. A similar thing was true at Google, I worked in the platforms division there (storage systems, BigTable, Linux kernel tweaking), and it was mostly about identifying bottlenecks and coming up with interesting solutions to squeeze out more performance. Most of this work wasn't like massive lines of code, but you had to really understand the problem at a deep level and have the kind of rigor and discipline to make changes to large systems without breaking anything in the process. That last bit was very hard to do, since coming up with optimizations that don't break anything is surprisingly difficult.
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
    I’ve never mentioned my ADHD diagnosis and medication to my coworkers and none have ever mentioned it to me.
- paxys 5y ago
  At Microsoft at least that wasn't my experience at all. I knew several people there who hadn't done any real productive work for the last 7-10 years, probably longer.
  - agagrgar 5y ago
    I've been in Azure and GCP. IDK how anyone would get away with it. You constantly have customer issues, people from other teams pinging you, needing help with something. I don't see how it would be possible just to do nothing and survive. Maybe in some team that is further removed from customers?
    - theskypirate 5y ago
      It's easy to be productive in that context. People pinging you to get help with something, that's a "positive distraction." You'll write a block of code super fast and send it back to them.
    - sjtindell 5y ago
      Aren’t there still tons of developer jobs at Google, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, etc. where you aren’t on call and just get to write code?
    - ayewo 5y ago
      Not to disagree with your experience at Azure and GCP, but the grandparent specifically mentioned their parent entities: Microsoft and Google, each of which have several divisions apart from their respective cloud divisions. Keep in mind that Azure and GCP are playing catch up to AWS, so they necessarily have to run a tight ship in order to close AWS’ lead. So its possible for laxity to exist in other divisions in a large company, as long as the money keeps rolling in, e.g. the Windows division at Microsoft (which still enjoys a good share of the desktop market) and the Search division at Google (which still enjoys a good share of the search market).
      - agagrgar 5y ago
        Yeah, I mentioned Azure and GCP specifically, to imply that other divisions within those companies may be different. Anything where you're constantly deploying to enterprise customers, you're going to need to be responsive to issues that come up, and that alone will take a good chunk of the day.
- mathteddybear 5y ago
  As someone who put more lines of code into <50KLOC hobby project, that is not guaranteed, especially when your "little work" affects the bottom line on megabucks scale.
- dboreham 5y ago
  Love the async-ian slip
snarf21 5y ago
It also depends on the company. I've worked at companies where the #1 project can change weekly and by that I mean the previous project is completely abandoned for the new shiny. If you've worked at a place like this (there are lots of them), you have to not burn yourself out. It is very demoralizing to give your all to a UI just to have it literally thrown away. Sometimes slow rolling can let you move things forward in a protective way. If it is still #1 after 5 weeks, maybe it is time to dive in more fully. Digging holes and filling them back in is tough.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  With my current manager this has become a skill I'm honing. He's senile and asks for all sorts of things he will have forgotten about in a few days. So I slow roll any new idea he gets excited about until it has percolated for at least a week or two. The trick is figuring out how to wait long enough to avoid doing throw-away work without waiting long enough that he feels ignored. But, like I said, he's senile, so that helps with the latter.
  - snarf21 5y ago
    For my previous boss, I have the rule of 3. Until he asked for something 3 times, I just said "yep" and didn't start it. If he asked three times, he wasn't going to forget so time to start moving it forward.
  - cutemonster 5y ago
    > He's senile Figuratively speaking, right? (Or did you mean literally? Dementia? If so, is he old)
NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
Different formula but I've always liked: productivity = (time * effort)^talent Just as a general model.
- sidazhou 5y ago
  let talent=0 then productivity = (time * effort)^0 = 1 = 100% Sounds about right
  - NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
    Yup! Time and effort absolutely count. But the "star line" folk out of Heinlein's Beyond this Horizon are the ones that catapult the entire species forward. The Wright brothers, the Norman Bourlags, the Nikola Teslas, the Alan Turings.
    - cutemonster 5y ago
      What about charismatic poor decision makers, pulling everyone in the wrong direction? Or evil geniuses Maybe multiply with sign(talent)? And the exponent could be abs(talent): sing(talent) * (effort * time) ^ abs(talent)

sombremesa 5y ago

I’ve worked at a small startup and find this to be untrue. If you’re working with people 10-100x worse than you, you can be sandbagging as hard as you can and still be miles ahead and look like a paragon of productivity. Now, will that particular startup succeed? Probably not in the way their investors would like.

dilyevsky 5y ago

I’ve had coworkers like op almost in every team that I worked for and google was one of the only places where some folks like that got walked out so may not be the best advice ;)

Kranar 5y ago

As someone who worked at both Microsoft and Google... you can get await with doing little work at those companies for maybe a year, two years at most, but after that you're gone. The expectation at those places skyrockets after the first year.

abledon 5y ago
hypothetically, do you think if people weren't allowed to drink caffeine or use performance enhancing drugs (adderall etc..), what % would not make that threshold of performance?
- Kranar 5y ago
  No idea; most people I worked with drank coffee but never once was I exposed to performance enhancing drugs. At Microsoft I worked on IronPython and the people I worked with were productive not in the sense that they churned out 1000s and 1000s of lines of code a day, but they were productive in the sense that they were constantly outputting fairly novel solutions. A similar thing was true at Google, I worked in the platforms division there (storage systems, BigTable, Linux kernel tweaking), and it was mostly about identifying bottlenecks and coming up with interesting solutions to squeeze out more performance. Most of this work wasn't like massive lines of code, but you had to really understand the problem at a deep level and have the kind of rigor and discipline to make changes to large systems without breaking anything in the process. That last bit was very hard to do, since coming up with optimizations that don't break anything is surprisingly difficult.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
  I’ve never mentioned my ADHD diagnosis and medication to my coworkers and none have ever mentioned it to me.
paxys 5y ago
At Microsoft at least that wasn't my experience at all. I knew several people there who hadn't done any real productive work for the last 7-10 years, probably longer.
- agagrgar 5y ago
  I've been in Azure and GCP. IDK how anyone would get away with it. You constantly have customer issues, people from other teams pinging you, needing help with something. I don't see how it would be possible just to do nothing and survive. Maybe in some team that is further removed from customers?
  - theskypirate 5y ago
    It's easy to be productive in that context. People pinging you to get help with something, that's a "positive distraction." You'll write a block of code super fast and send it back to them.
  - sjtindell 5y ago
    Aren’t there still tons of developer jobs at Google, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, etc. where you aren’t on call and just get to write code?
  - ayewo 5y ago
    Not to disagree with your experience at Azure and GCP, but the grandparent specifically mentioned their parent entities: Microsoft and Google, each of which have several divisions apart from their respective cloud divisions. Keep in mind that Azure and GCP are playing catch up to AWS, so they necessarily have to run a tight ship in order to close AWS’ lead. So its possible for laxity to exist in other divisions in a large company, as long as the money keeps rolling in, e.g. the Windows division at Microsoft (which still enjoys a good share of the desktop market) and the Search division at Google (which still enjoys a good share of the search market).
    - agagrgar 5y ago
      Yeah, I mentioned Azure and GCP specifically, to imply that other divisions within those companies may be different. Anything where you're constantly deploying to enterprise customers, you're going to need to be responsive to issues that come up, and that alone will take a good chunk of the day.
mathteddybear 5y ago
As someone who put more lines of code into <50KLOC hobby project, that is not guaranteed, especially when your "little work" affects the bottom line on megabucks scale.
dboreham 5y ago
Love the async-ian slip

snarf21 5y ago

It also depends on the company. I've worked at companies where the #1 project can change weekly and by that I mean the previous project is completely abandoned for the new shiny. If you've worked at a place like this (there are lots of them), you have to not burn yourself out. It is very demoralizing to give your all to a UI just to have it literally thrown away. Sometimes slow rolling can let you move things forward in a protective way. If it is still #1 after 5 weeks, maybe it is time to dive in more fully. Digging holes and filling them back in is tough.

rootusrootus 5y ago
With my current manager this has become a skill I'm honing. He's senile and asks for all sorts of things he will have forgotten about in a few days. So I slow roll any new idea he gets excited about until it has percolated for at least a week or two. The trick is figuring out how to wait long enough to avoid doing throw-away work without waiting long enough that he feels ignored. But, like I said, he's senile, so that helps with the latter.
- snarf21 5y ago
  For my previous boss, I have the rule of 3. Until he asked for something 3 times, I just said "yep" and didn't start it. If he asked three times, he wasn't going to forget so time to start moving it forward.
- cutemonster 5y ago
  > He's senile Figuratively speaking, right? (Or did you mean literally? Dementia? If so, is he old)

NaturalPhallacy 5y ago

Different formula but I've always liked: productivity = (time * effort)^talent Just as a general model.

sidazhou 5y ago
let talent=0 then productivity = (time * effort)^0 = 1 = 100% Sounds about right
- NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  Yup! Time and effort absolutely count. But the "star line" folk out of Heinlein's Beyond this Horizon are the ones that catapult the entire species forward. The Wright brothers, the Norman Bourlags, the Nikola Teslas, the Alan Turings.
  - cutemonster 5y ago
    What about charismatic poor decision makers, pulling everyone in the wrong direction? Or evil geniuses Maybe multiply with sign(talent)? And the exponent could be abs(talent): sing(talent) * (effort * time) ^ abs(talent)