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"Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight." I disagree. There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company

"Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight." I disagree. There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company. The larger the team/company, the more chances of those people being around. They pretend to be always busy and doing something but don't actually get anything done. Seen it all for 18+ years. Having said that, there are plenty of people as well who would LOVE to do something meaningful but are stuck with red tape. I was one of those and quit my high paying Investment Bank Tech Job to start my own thing. I was getting paid big as a consultant and once my main project finished, they just wanted me around because traders loved me. I literally had to find things to do every day otherwise it was soooo boring unless something broke.

lujim 4y ago
I disagree with this. An entire business day is a long time to do nothing. I've always loved jobs where there was enough strategic direction to know what to focus on but enough latitude where you could actually do it. I can't think of anyone (not suffering from pure burnout) that didn't devour meaningful work that had well written requirements.
colechristensen 4y ago
If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. As long as that's the actual acknowledged situation and not "most of your job is pretending to work and making people think you're important". I wonder how successful a lot of companies would be if they openly cut required hours in half.
- granshaw 4y ago
  Yeah it’s the “pretending to work” part that’s soul crushing. If you could be explicit that “this is what I need to do this week, it’ll only take 4 hours. The rest of the time I’ll be available but I won’t do make-work”, that’d be awesome. Also a lot of people don’t realize that being available for questions or if something comes up IS work - it severely limits what you can do with that time even if working remotely. So were you near your computer 9-5 today and could respond on short notice? Well then you worked 8 hours basically. And that availability itself is hugely valuable to employers.
  - tomuli38 4y ago
    Not only is the availability, but so is the image. I had a CEO who loved the image of an office full of people all day, all week. I've been working remotely since then. I think he just wanted to feel important.
    - colechristensen 4y ago
      Happens a lot. It's also a problem with the Navy. More, smaller, near-coast ("littoral") ships would be much more effective tools for wartime and for maintaining peace on the seas. There are some. Acquisitions has been fraught with problems and weighty opinions of captains and admirals who want to feel important on enormous ships. Enormous ships which aren't as useful in the day to day operations in the Navy and would be extremely vulnerable at war with modern weaponry. A lot of what gets done around the world is heavily influenced by how a decision will influence the feelings of people in power.
      - trhway 4y ago
        >would be extremely vulnerable at war with modern weaponry. the point of those enormous ships is to minimize the chances of war happening. >More, smaller, near-coast ("littoral") ships would be much more effective tools for wartime Russia lost the big ship on the Black Sea and have the situation you're describing - ie. their fleet is several missile frigates, and such their situation is very weak. The fleet can't really operate. (And with recent successful attack on a Russian airfield in Crimea the air support for those remaining ships is expected to dwindle which will be a clear show case of how [in]capable fleet without air support (which we do actually know since WWII really), and that air support usually, until you operate near your shores, can only come from aircraft carriers)
        rocqua 4y ago
        Frigates are much, much bigger than litoral ships.
        4y ago
- refulgentis 4y ago
  At a FAANG and I can tell you it's not nearly so positive as this. It was shocking coming from startup world. It's not so much "gee I only have 4 hours of work to do this week" It's...well, it's impossible to say how long it takes to do anything in particular, so I shouldn't feel stressed trying to get it done... oh there's actually no real management style/pressure to get things done here? Promo is seniority-based? There's silly unspoken rules like after you get promoted, you're _guaranteed_ a middling performance rating because its an easy horsetrade to do? Your manager doesn't have to argue $X was super important and strategic and this newly promoted character needs a better rating, and the other manager doesn't need to argue $Y needs to keep a high rating to show continued momentum in his growth, they just do it. There's no way to rebel against this system, or work within it, other than transfer companies? It's a rather horrific situation and I don't think it's helping anyone or anyone is particularly satisfied with it. The problem is, any other solution is worse and will hurt The Vibes in the short run. Interesting to see Zuck move towards Dark Zuck and say things I've never heard at FAANG
  - nr2x 4y ago
    I don’t see how giving an up-leveled employee time to adjust to a new responsibility scope is a bad thing. Working under conditions of pressure and stress provides few long term benefits and is the refuge of those who don’t have the smarts to perform well and need to look like they do.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - baobabKoodaa 4y ago
      > I don’t see how giving an up-leveled employee time to adjust to a new responsibility scope is a bad thing. It's not a bad thing, but the parent you are replying to never said otherwise. They were talking about a fake performance rating that is given for political reasons.
      - Spivak 4y ago
- onion2k 4y ago
  If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. Would you take that over $300k to work 40 hours doing something you actually care about? I don't think I would.
  - ummonk 4y ago
    Are you incapable of doing something you actually care about with the freed up 36 hours?
    - throwaway8829 4y ago
      For me it's less about "find a hobby/enjoy life" or more that we're likely in this field because we want to feel necessary and useful. I WFH with amazing TC and WLB. I do my hobbies all day and then work just a few hours. But I feel like an absolute piece of shit just coasting at work. Doesn't matter how well my hobbies are going, I'll always have the quiet stress of not contributing what I'm capable of doing. The times I feel good about myself are when I actually ship something cool with my team.
    - onion2k 4y ago
      People working 4 hours a week still have to pretend to be productive for the other 36 hours though. They still have to sit through meetings, and justify their time, and answer Slack messages, and have reviews. They're not free to work on their own projects - they're just 'not working'. That sounds far worse than spending time working on something you actually care about even if it's not your own idea.
      - ummonk 4y ago
        The comment that kicked this off was “ If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. As long as that's the actual acknowledged situation and not "most of your job is pretending to work and making people think you're important"”
  - colechristensen 4y ago
- data-ottawa 4y ago
  From my experience with a temporary 4 day work week: the people who want to appear busy will still find a way to schedule in the same amount of pointless meetings into the fewer hours. If those people have control over the schedules of other workers, then those workers lose their focus time. You need guardrails to prevent org & overhead from overwhelming everything else.
- geekbird 4y ago
  "If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal." Oh, you're bucking for CEO! A lot of companies could have cut out four to eight hours of meetings a week and still maintained the same level of productivity.
bartread 4y ago
Sure those people exist: but there are plenty of people who aren't that way. I've worked a couple of different places where the systems, processes and structures in place effectively rendered me as deadweight. In both cases it was incredibly stressful and had a profoundly negative impact on my mental health. In the first case I hung around for quite a while hoping things would get better (because they had been better in the past) but, actually, they got worse, so eventually I left. In the second case I stuck it out for only a few months before leaving. Not soon enough unfortunately: I think it was a significant contributor to losing a relationship. For a lot of people I've worked with over the course of my 20-odd year career not being able to make a meaningful contribution is intolerable over the medium to long term, and not much fun in the short term either. Of course, there have been useless layabouts, but they've been vastly in the minority, and tend to be spotted and managed out.
- codegeek 4y ago
  Agreed. I edited my comment to talk about the ones who do want to do something (I was one of those at my last corporate job)
flybrand 4y ago
100% Working in a +200 yr old manufacturer, and some entire teams may fit that definition.
fefe23 4y ago
I have met a few of those people, but every single one of them needed a justification. Some told me they felt wronged by the company somehow. For example they had experienced bullying, or didn't get promoted when they felt they should have been, or they had contributed something and then it got cut from the product, something like that in most cases. Now didn't feel they owed the company anything. Yet others said the pay is not enough to really get them invested in the work. The fact that they needed these excuses tells me they felt what they did to be morally wrong and didn't really want to be dead weight. I personally have done a few projects that turned out to be purely compliance based, and had no merit whatsoever. I remember the feeling of wasting my life to be absolutely soul crushing and I have been avoiding that kind of project as if my life depended on it. Your mileage may vary.
- my_usernam3 4y ago
  My millage is that it's not absolute "dead weight". It's more wanting limited responsibility and tasks that require limited scope/time spent, but does actually contribute, just a much smaller scale than others. > The fact that they needed these excuses tells me they felt what they did to be morally wrong and didn't really want to be dead weight. My guess from your comment is that you judge them for being slackers, and the feel obligated to explain to YOU that its not morally correct. Personally, I have no qualm with those that want to drift around megacorps while collecting a nice paycheck.
  - throw_nbvc1234 4y ago
    Do you feel the same way about people who put effort in but are not skilled enough to contribute (or make things worse by trying)?
    - cutemonster 4y ago
      > people who put effort in ... make things worse Dead weight? Sounds more like friendly antimatter GP: > > I have no qualm with those that want to drift around megacorps For me, that depends on what the company is doing. Let's say it's mobile games or quant trading -- then, slacking at work in a way just gives people more time away from the computer (fewer games to play?). And changes which ones of the rich people, get richer. Then what does it matter. Whilst if one is working for a hospital or a stopping-online-manipulation department, then, in such cases, slacking is sad, not good for society, right
outworlder 4y ago
> There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company Not really. Even they will carve out some niche and pretend (even to themselves) to be doing useful work. Middle managers love to schedule irrelevant meetings, but they will provide some business justification to themselves and to others. You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some internal app by themselves. It's very rare that employees are just twiddling their thumbs and doing nothing all day. Specially if we are talking about a highly skilled workforce. I've seen that more often on boring entry level jobs - because the jobs are already boring by nature, so doing nothing and doing something is not much of a difference anyway.
- chasebank 4y ago
  I probably know north of 30 people in sales, all in my somewhat close friend circle. They all brag about not working and making money. I think it's part of the sales culture. It's like a badge of honor to not work hard and make money. Hell, I don't blame them. Visit any golf course since covid and you'll see tee time and tee time stacked with people 'working from home'.
  - jrh206 4y ago
    I usually assume that I can't take sales people at face value. If it's a badge of honour, they're incentivised to say that they don't work hard even if they are in fact actually working hard (this includes pretending to enjoy golf). Having said that, 30 people is a lot of people, so I'm inclined to accept your assessment at face value.
- barking_biscuit 4y ago
  >You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some internal app by themselves This.
- Tehdasi 4y ago
  > Even they will carve out some niche and pretend (even to themselves) to be doing useful work. ... You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some internal app by themselves. In my experience, internal apps need far more love. Maintaining internal apps is far more useful than most 'real' work, just because it can be a multiplier on so much other 'real' work.
Silverback_VII 4y ago
I have seen it in many places. It's like you can watch the emergence of Orwell's Animal Farm in every human setting. A small fraction doing more and more, which in turn let the others do less and less.
- Spivak 4y ago
  > which in turn let the others do less and less. Force the others to do less and less. I’ve seen this a million times, you have one dev going absolutely buck wild building a cathedral of abstractions that only they can understand. The rest of the devs struggle to implement basic features because, and I can’t overstate this enough because it’s true every time the code is a horribly written tightly coupled shoddily architected ball of chewing gum of twine spooky action at a distance with no isolation between components (usually because “DRY”) which is impossible to reason about unless you wrote it. That dev becomes insanely productive in that codebase, the hero of to all managers, and everyone grinds to a halt gets demotivated because they can’t tackle anything ambitious.
  - lowercased 4y ago
    I've been that person in a couple of projects, and it wasn't just because I went off and did my own thing. In at least one case the other people on the team were simply not very capable. As in... I've been building web applications for 25 years, and some of the other folks on the team came out of a bootcamp. And... they don't talk. "Please, joe, let's connect and you can follow along with what I'm doing". Silence. "Hey, dave, I see the PR is only a few days late. We still have some time left, can you write a test for it?" I can get stuff done or I can 'corral and build up' the others, but I can't do both. If you want stuff done by a deadline, and you will not discipline the non-contributors (discipline doesn't mean fire, but it might mean "you have to come to these meetings and pair and follow along and document and write tests")... what's left? FWIW, I know the difference between decent teams and non-decent teams. The non-decent ones were poorly managed, largely because management could not determine who was skilled and who wasn't. The decent teams I've been on were situations where I still generally had more overall experience (function of age) but the other less-experienced people will still good, engaged, and already contributing, and were measurably improving month to month.
zeruch 4y ago
"Plenty" is not a good measure, and often seems more based on role and type of firm than just related to a lack of drive. I've observed whole teams that are effectively 'dead weight' and ones where there is all killer, no filler. Of the DWs I've seen, many are DW not always by choice, but because other factors shove them into odd corners and they can't figure out (or are too constrained by other factors) You are never going to 100% all-in motivation even from top performers in perpetuity, and even anecdotally most people don't want to be moribund for decades on end, and certainly not the majority of workers.
e40 4y ago
I think it varies widely by job. I've met few programmers, percentages wise, that want to be dead weight. At generic office jobs (where my SO works) it seems to be the norm, and it's a problem for her because she's not like that and people load her up with work because they know it will be done right and on time.
mortenjorck 4y ago
The two types you describe can also be the same person at different times. At my last company, my workload started to thin out considerably. Initially, it was pretty great having so much free time, even as I made my extra bandwidth clear to my manager (while being careful not to overstate the case!). There was a period of novelty to coasting, but after a few months, it began to wear off. My ideal workload may not be being plugged in a full 40+ hours a week, but I learned I also need something far north of 4 hours a week. When a combination acquisition and spinoff took even more off my plate, it looked like I'd have months ahead of very nearly nothing at all. With a promise of no layoffs post-transaction, it looked like a coaster's dream. Instead, I left.
closeparen 4y ago
In particular, people who never really figured out how to do more than bare minimum technical work tend to fail upwards into primarily "collaborative" roles.
- Spivak 4y ago
  Unless I actually have substantive impact — like truly meaningful like people not one bacon distance away from me really feel it you’re getting the bare minimum. This is the downside of trying to make knowledge workers a commodity and replaceable — work gets coasting and my side projects get my real creativity.
  - closeparen 4y ago
    I'm not talking about people who have technical side projects.
goodpoint 4y ago
>> "Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight." > I disagree. There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company. No, the parent is right. Psychological research shows clearly that people don't want to be dead weights. They lose motivation and become burned out for many reasons. And it's entirely the company responsibility to address the problem.
jollybean 4y ago
They are not 'pretending' in most cases. They are busy, and think they are adding value. So do their managers. Also - sometimes the inverse! I've caught myself feeling 'useless' at BigTech until some feedback/situation made me realize 'OMG this matters' kind of things. It's hard. That is maybe Management's #1 job is to get people focused on things that matter.
dijonman2 4y ago
Corporate dead weight aka corporate welfare. It happens a lot more often than you think.
fzliu 4y ago
> There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company. Very true. It's an unfortunate occurrence at many larger companies (not just in tech).
daniel_iversen 4y ago
I have seen the “floaters” but it’s rare. What is worse are the occasional people (and some companies have lots more of this than others) that are a net negative impact to the productivity. There are different reasons but sometimes they believe that their work adds value but in the end it’s really just creating inefficiencies (like creating processes for process sake, work about work etc). That’s how large companies with everything going for them can easily start loosing their edge - when there’s more “no” people than “yes” people!
hackerlight 4y ago
I have worked in one of those companies. Most were lazy and did barely any work. They were there for a paycheck and it showed. Not everyone works in a mission driven startup where the employees are intrinsically motivated to contribute. Many are just free riders and hide under a middle manager hoping they don't get noticed. Such B teamers need to be weeded out quick. Then I switched companies and everyone was motivated and hard working. The leader there hired better (less stragglers to begin with) and fired better (fired stragglers within 3 months).
naikrovek 4y ago
People want to grow, they want to do better. They also, crucially, want recognition and to feel valued for it. That means they must (must) be treated with respect by their employers, and rewarded or at least recognized when they achieve personal or professional growth. If you don’t reward and respect people who try to grow, why would they ever continue that?
Montaque 4y ago
I think spending about 20 minutes on r/antiwork will get most folks to agree with you. I think most people want a purpose. Many are perfectly happy for that to be something other than their work or means of earning an income. Nothing wrong with this of course but try be the person where some of your purpose is tied up in your work on that forum, or even this forum at times, and you get accused of having Stockholm syndrome toward your employment captors.
prawn 4y ago
"There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company." One of my favourite corporate laziness stories was a friend of my brother's who would regularly nap for most of the working day in some unused basement room. After a while, his preferred room got converted into something else and he had to find a new sleeping spot. He eventually found a room where a large laundry hamper would be left full of towels until they were washed or folded. Perfect, he thought. Secretive and soft! He went to get in and go to sleep, only to find someone else already in there asleep.
vegetablepotpie 4y ago
It’s really sad when people who want to be meaningful, are stymied by the floaters. The floaters stick around by inserting themselves into an essential process that needs non-advocate reviewers infrequently, this is usually supply chain, quality assurance, and security. Then they collude by scheduling meetings for each other, which is really just socializing. When meaningful people need to use a process, and engage the floaters. They find that they are impossible to engage because they are in meetings. And if there’s special considerations that need to happen in a process, which is a given when you’re innovating, it means that the floaters have more opportunities to schedule more meetings, and sap the productivity of the meaningful people. Not only do the floaters succeed in slowing down the productivity of the meaningful people, they also impose an opportunity cost, which is that the meaningful people cannot engage in another activity while the former activity is going through process. They have to also spend time engaging the floaters in meetings for the process to continue.
fiveyearsinarow 4y ago
As a current FANNG employee, I have seen so many dead weights here, especially the new-hires after COVID. They took advantage of the lenient WFH policy. Some travels around the world for a year; some becomes a social media influencer; some comes up with all sorts of excuse like wife/kids/parents being sick to take unlimited sick day. It pains me to see how a great company gets abused like this. The cycle to put people on PIP is so long that they can coast at least a year before anything can be done.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  What level are they hired at though, and are you talking developers?
  - fiveyearsinarow 4y ago
    Mostly level 4 SWEs, a few L5s.
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      So these are devs on base salaries over 160k+, presumably considered to be somewhat senior, and their teams just let them get away without contributing their share? Not even showing up to stand ups or whatever regular team meetings there are? Something seems very off for that to be the case.
    - fiveyearsinarow 4y ago
      Our org doesn’t have daily standup. We have weekly meetings but they dial in with camera off. When asked to give updates, they usually mention some small change, being blocked by other teams, or waiting for test result/releases. When you look at their code review, they often take 1 day to reply to comments so each diff could take a few days to submit.
      - wizofaus 4y ago
        So why do you put up with that? I'd absolutely be bringing that up as an issue with the coworker first and if that went nowhere with our manager if it was regularly causing issues within the team.
type0 4y ago
> people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company. Jim Keller had an interesting perspective on how you should think if you are in managing position and need to fire people https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TmuJSbms9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TmuJSbms9c he and Peterson discuss it somewhere in the middle
iancmceachern 4y ago
I think the dead weight is a given, in either circumstance. It's not about motivating them, that's a sunk cost. It's more about making the 90% of folks that aren't dead weight not suffer under the burden of the stuff OP mentions that overtakes day to day life as organizations get bigger. That's the issue.

lujim 4y ago

I disagree with this. An entire business day is a long time to do nothing. I've always loved jobs where there was enough strategic direction to know what to focus on but enough latitude where you could actually do it. I can't think of anyone (not suffering from pure burnout) that didn't devour meaningful work that had well written requirements.

colechristensen 4y ago

If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. As long as that's the actual acknowledged situation and not "most of your job is pretending to work and making people think you're important". I wonder how successful a lot of companies would be if they openly cut required hours in half.

granshaw 4y ago
Yeah it’s the “pretending to work” part that’s soul crushing. If you could be explicit that “this is what I need to do this week, it’ll only take 4 hours. The rest of the time I’ll be available but I won’t do make-work”, that’d be awesome. Also a lot of people don’t realize that being available for questions or if something comes up IS work - it severely limits what you can do with that time even if working remotely. So were you near your computer 9-5 today and could respond on short notice? Well then you worked 8 hours basically. And that availability itself is hugely valuable to employers.
- tomuli38 4y ago
  Not only is the availability, but so is the image. I had a CEO who loved the image of an office full of people all day, all week. I've been working remotely since then. I think he just wanted to feel important.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    Happens a lot. It's also a problem with the Navy. More, smaller, near-coast ("littoral") ships would be much more effective tools for wartime and for maintaining peace on the seas. There are some. Acquisitions has been fraught with problems and weighty opinions of captains and admirals who want to feel important on enormous ships. Enormous ships which aren't as useful in the day to day operations in the Navy and would be extremely vulnerable at war with modern weaponry. A lot of what gets done around the world is heavily influenced by how a decision will influence the feelings of people in power.
    - trhway 4y ago
      >would be extremely vulnerable at war with modern weaponry. the point of those enormous ships is to minimize the chances of war happening. >More, smaller, near-coast ("littoral") ships would be much more effective tools for wartime Russia lost the big ship on the Black Sea and have the situation you're describing - ie. their fleet is several missile frigates, and such their situation is very weak. The fleet can't really operate. (And with recent successful attack on a Russian airfield in Crimea the air support for those remaining ships is expected to dwindle which will be a clear show case of how [in]capable fleet without air support (which we do actually know since WWII really), and that air support usually, until you operate near your shores, can only come from aircraft carriers)
      - rocqua 4y ago
        Frigates are much, much bigger than litoral ships.
        4y ago
refulgentis 4y ago
At a FAANG and I can tell you it's not nearly so positive as this. It was shocking coming from startup world. It's not so much "gee I only have 4 hours of work to do this week" It's...well, it's impossible to say how long it takes to do anything in particular, so I shouldn't feel stressed trying to get it done... oh there's actually no real management style/pressure to get things done here? Promo is seniority-based? There's silly unspoken rules like after you get promoted, you're _guaranteed_ a middling performance rating because its an easy horsetrade to do? Your manager doesn't have to argue $X was super important and strategic and this newly promoted character needs a better rating, and the other manager doesn't need to argue $Y needs to keep a high rating to show continued momentum in his growth, they just do it. There's no way to rebel against this system, or work within it, other than transfer companies? It's a rather horrific situation and I don't think it's helping anyone or anyone is particularly satisfied with it. The problem is, any other solution is worse and will hurt The Vibes in the short run. Interesting to see Zuck move towards Dark Zuck and say things I've never heard at FAANG
- nr2x 4y ago
  I don’t see how giving an up-leveled employee time to adjust to a new responsibility scope is a bad thing. Working under conditions of pressure and stress provides few long term benefits and is the refuge of those who don’t have the smarts to perform well and need to look like they do.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - baobabKoodaa 4y ago
    > I don’t see how giving an up-leveled employee time to adjust to a new responsibility scope is a bad thing. It's not a bad thing, but the parent you are replying to never said otherwise. They were talking about a fake performance rating that is given for political reasons.
    - Spivak 4y ago
onion2k 4y ago
If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. Would you take that over $300k to work 40 hours doing something you actually care about? I don't think I would.
- ummonk 4y ago
  Are you incapable of doing something you actually care about with the freed up 36 hours?
  - throwaway8829 4y ago
    For me it's less about "find a hobby/enjoy life" or more that we're likely in this field because we want to feel necessary and useful. I WFH with amazing TC and WLB. I do my hobbies all day and then work just a few hours. But I feel like an absolute piece of shit just coasting at work. Doesn't matter how well my hobbies are going, I'll always have the quiet stress of not contributing what I'm capable of doing. The times I feel good about myself are when I actually ship something cool with my team.
  - onion2k 4y ago
    People working 4 hours a week still have to pretend to be productive for the other 36 hours though. They still have to sit through meetings, and justify their time, and answer Slack messages, and have reviews. They're not free to work on their own projects - they're just 'not working'. That sounds far worse than spending time working on something you actually care about even if it's not your own idea.
    - ummonk 4y ago
      The comment that kicked this off was “ If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. As long as that's the actual acknowledged situation and not "most of your job is pretending to work and making people think you're important"”
- colechristensen 4y ago
data-ottawa 4y ago
From my experience with a temporary 4 day work week: the people who want to appear busy will still find a way to schedule in the same amount of pointless meetings into the fewer hours. If those people have control over the schedules of other workers, then those workers lose their focus time. You need guardrails to prevent org & overhead from overwhelming everything else.
geekbird 4y ago
"If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal." Oh, you're bucking for CEO! A lot of companies could have cut out four to eight hours of meetings a week and still maintained the same level of productivity.

bartread 4y ago

Sure those people exist: but there are plenty of people who aren't that way. I've worked a couple of different places where the systems, processes and structures in place effectively rendered me as deadweight. In both cases it was incredibly stressful and had a profoundly negative impact on my mental health. In the first case I hung around for quite a while hoping things would get better (because they had been better in the past) but, actually, they got worse, so eventually I left. In the second case I stuck it out for only a few months before leaving. Not soon enough unfortunately: I think it was a significant contributor to losing a relationship. For a lot of people I've worked with over the course of my 20-odd year career not being able to make a meaningful contribution is intolerable over the medium to long term, and not much fun in the short term either. Of course, there have been useless layabouts, but they've been vastly in the minority, and tend to be spotted and managed out.

codegeek 4y ago
Agreed. I edited my comment to talk about the ones who do want to do something (I was one of those at my last corporate job)

flybrand 4y ago

100% Working in a +200 yr old manufacturer, and some entire teams may fit that definition.

fefe23 4y ago

I have met a few of those people, but every single one of them needed a justification. Some told me they felt wronged by the company somehow. For example they had experienced bullying, or didn't get promoted when they felt they should have been, or they had contributed something and then it got cut from the product, something like that in most cases. Now didn't feel they owed the company anything. Yet others said the pay is not enough to really get them invested in the work. The fact that they needed these excuses tells me they felt what they did to be morally wrong and didn't really want to be dead weight. I personally have done a few projects that turned out to be purely compliance based, and had no merit whatsoever. I remember the feeling of wasting my life to be absolutely soul crushing and I have been avoiding that kind of project as if my life depended on it. Your mileage may vary.

my_usernam3 4y ago
My millage is that it's not absolute "dead weight". It's more wanting limited responsibility and tasks that require limited scope/time spent, but does actually contribute, just a much smaller scale than others. > The fact that they needed these excuses tells me they felt what they did to be morally wrong and didn't really want to be dead weight. My guess from your comment is that you judge them for being slackers, and the feel obligated to explain to YOU that its not morally correct. Personally, I have no qualm with those that want to drift around megacorps while collecting a nice paycheck.
- throw_nbvc1234 4y ago
  Do you feel the same way about people who put effort in but are not skilled enough to contribute (or make things worse by trying)?
  - cutemonster 4y ago
    > people who put effort in ... make things worse Dead weight? Sounds more like friendly antimatter GP: > > I have no qualm with those that want to drift around megacorps For me, that depends on what the company is doing. Let's say it's mobile games or quant trading -- then, slacking at work in a way just gives people more time away from the computer (fewer games to play?). And changes which ones of the rich people, get richer. Then what does it matter. Whilst if one is working for a hospital or a stopping-online-manipulation department, then, in such cases, slacking is sad, not good for society, right

outworlder 4y ago

> There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company Not really. Even they will carve out some niche and pretend (even to themselves) to be doing useful work. Middle managers love to schedule irrelevant meetings, but they will provide some business justification to themselves and to others. You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some internal app by themselves. It's very rare that employees are just twiddling their thumbs and doing nothing all day. Specially if we are talking about a highly skilled workforce. I've seen that more often on boring entry level jobs - because the jobs are already boring by nature, so doing nothing and doing something is not much of a difference anyway.

chasebank 4y ago
I probably know north of 30 people in sales, all in my somewhat close friend circle. They all brag about not working and making money. I think it's part of the sales culture. It's like a badge of honor to not work hard and make money. Hell, I don't blame them. Visit any golf course since covid and you'll see tee time and tee time stacked with people 'working from home'.
- jrh206 4y ago
  I usually assume that I can't take sales people at face value. If it's a badge of honour, they're incentivised to say that they don't work hard even if they are in fact actually working hard (this includes pretending to enjoy golf). Having said that, 30 people is a lot of people, so I'm inclined to accept your assessment at face value.
barking_biscuit 4y ago
>You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some internal app by themselves This.
Tehdasi 4y ago
> Even they will carve out some niche and pretend (even to themselves) to be doing useful work. ... You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some internal app by themselves. In my experience, internal apps need far more love. Maintaining internal apps is far more useful than most 'real' work, just because it can be a multiplier on so much other 'real' work.

Silverback_VII 4y ago

I have seen it in many places. It's like you can watch the emergence of Orwell's Animal Farm in every human setting. A small fraction doing more and more, which in turn let the others do less and less.

Spivak 4y ago
> which in turn let the others do less and less. Force the others to do less and less. I’ve seen this a million times, you have one dev going absolutely buck wild building a cathedral of abstractions that only they can understand. The rest of the devs struggle to implement basic features because, and I can’t overstate this enough because it’s true every time the code is a horribly written tightly coupled shoddily architected ball of chewing gum of twine spooky action at a distance with no isolation between components (usually because “DRY”) which is impossible to reason about unless you wrote it. That dev becomes insanely productive in that codebase, the hero of to all managers, and everyone grinds to a halt gets demotivated because they can’t tackle anything ambitious.
- lowercased 4y ago
  I've been that person in a couple of projects, and it wasn't just because I went off and did my own thing. In at least one case the other people on the team were simply not very capable. As in... I've been building web applications for 25 years, and some of the other folks on the team came out of a bootcamp. And... they don't talk. "Please, joe, let's connect and you can follow along with what I'm doing". Silence. "Hey, dave, I see the PR is only a few days late. We still have some time left, can you write a test for it?" I can get stuff done or I can 'corral and build up' the others, but I can't do both. If you want stuff done by a deadline, and you will not discipline the non-contributors (discipline doesn't mean fire, but it might mean "you have to come to these meetings and pair and follow along and document and write tests")... what's left? FWIW, I know the difference between decent teams and non-decent teams. The non-decent ones were poorly managed, largely because management could not determine who was skilled and who wasn't. The decent teams I've been on were situations where I still generally had more overall experience (function of age) but the other less-experienced people will still good, engaged, and already contributing, and were measurably improving month to month.

zeruch 4y ago

"Plenty" is not a good measure, and often seems more based on role and type of firm than just related to a lack of drive. I've observed whole teams that are effectively 'dead weight' and ones where there is all killer, no filler. Of the DWs I've seen, many are DW not always by choice, but because other factors shove them into odd corners and they can't figure out (or are too constrained by other factors) You are never going to 100% all-in motivation even from top performers in perpetuity, and even anecdotally most people don't want to be moribund for decades on end, and certainly not the majority of workers.

e40 4y ago

I think it varies widely by job. I've met few programmers, percentages wise, that want to be dead weight. At generic office jobs (where my SO works) it seems to be the norm, and it's a problem for her because she's not like that and people load her up with work because they know it will be done right and on time.

mortenjorck 4y ago

The two types you describe can also be the same person at different times. At my last company, my workload started to thin out considerably. Initially, it was pretty great having so much free time, even as I made my extra bandwidth clear to my manager (while being careful not to overstate the case!). There was a period of novelty to coasting, but after a few months, it began to wear off. My ideal workload may not be being plugged in a full 40+ hours a week, but I learned I also need something far north of 4 hours a week. When a combination acquisition and spinoff took even more off my plate, it looked like I'd have months ahead of very nearly nothing at all. With a promise of no layoffs post-transaction, it looked like a coaster's dream. Instead, I left.

closeparen 4y ago

In particular, people who never really figured out how to do more than bare minimum technical work tend to fail upwards into primarily "collaborative" roles.

Spivak 4y ago
Unless I actually have substantive impact — like truly meaningful like people not one bacon distance away from me really feel it you’re getting the bare minimum. This is the downside of trying to make knowledge workers a commodity and replaceable — work gets coasting and my side projects get my real creativity.
- closeparen 4y ago
  I'm not talking about people who have technical side projects.

goodpoint 4y ago

>> "Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight." > I disagree. There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company. No, the parent is right. Psychological research shows clearly that people don't want to be dead weights. They lose motivation and become burned out for many reasons. And it's entirely the company responsibility to address the problem.

jollybean 4y ago

They are not 'pretending' in most cases. They are busy, and think they are adding value. So do their managers. Also - sometimes the inverse! I've caught myself feeling 'useless' at BigTech until some feedback/situation made me realize 'OMG this matters' kind of things. It's hard. That is maybe Management's #1 job is to get people focused on things that matter.

dijonman2 4y ago

Corporate dead weight aka corporate welfare. It happens a lot more often than you think.

fzliu 4y ago

> There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company. Very true. It's an unfortunate occurrence at many larger companies (not just in tech).

daniel_iversen 4y ago

I have seen the “floaters” but it’s rare. What is worse are the occasional people (and some companies have lots more of this than others) that are a net negative impact to the productivity. There are different reasons but sometimes they believe that their work adds value but in the end it’s really just creating inefficiencies (like creating processes for process sake, work about work etc). That’s how large companies with everything going for them can easily start loosing their edge - when there’s more “no” people than “yes” people!

hackerlight 4y ago

I have worked in one of those companies. Most were lazy and did barely any work. They were there for a paycheck and it showed. Not everyone works in a mission driven startup where the employees are intrinsically motivated to contribute. Many are just free riders and hide under a middle manager hoping they don't get noticed. Such B teamers need to be weeded out quick. Then I switched companies and everyone was motivated and hard working. The leader there hired better (less stragglers to begin with) and fired better (fired stragglers within 3 months).

naikrovek 4y ago

People want to grow, they want to do better. They also, crucially, want recognition and to feel valued for it. That means they must (must) be treated with respect by their employers, and rewarded or at least recognized when they achieve personal or professional growth. If you don’t reward and respect people who try to grow, why would they ever continue that?

Montaque 4y ago

I think spending about 20 minutes on r/antiwork will get most folks to agree with you. I think most people want a purpose. Many are perfectly happy for that to be something other than their work or means of earning an income. Nothing wrong with this of course but try be the person where some of your purpose is tied up in your work on that forum, or even this forum at times, and you get accused of having Stockholm syndrome toward your employment captors.

prawn 4y ago

"There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company." One of my favourite corporate laziness stories was a friend of my brother's who would regularly nap for most of the working day in some unused basement room. After a while, his preferred room got converted into something else and he had to find a new sleeping spot. He eventually found a room where a large laundry hamper would be left full of towels until they were washed or folded. Perfect, he thought. Secretive and soft! He went to get in and go to sleep, only to find someone else already in there asleep.

vegetablepotpie 4y ago

It’s really sad when people who want to be meaningful, are stymied by the floaters. The floaters stick around by inserting themselves into an essential process that needs non-advocate reviewers infrequently, this is usually supply chain, quality assurance, and security. Then they collude by scheduling meetings for each other, which is really just socializing. When meaningful people need to use a process, and engage the floaters. They find that they are impossible to engage because they are in meetings. And if there’s special considerations that need to happen in a process, which is a given when you’re innovating, it means that the floaters have more opportunities to schedule more meetings, and sap the productivity of the meaningful people. Not only do the floaters succeed in slowing down the productivity of the meaningful people, they also impose an opportunity cost, which is that the meaningful people cannot engage in another activity while the former activity is going through process. They have to also spend time engaging the floaters in meetings for the process to continue.

fiveyearsinarow 4y ago

As a current FANNG employee, I have seen so many dead weights here, especially the new-hires after COVID. They took advantage of the lenient WFH policy. Some travels around the world for a year; some becomes a social media influencer; some comes up with all sorts of excuse like wife/kids/parents being sick to take unlimited sick day. It pains me to see how a great company gets abused like this. The cycle to put people on PIP is so long that they can coast at least a year before anything can be done.

wizofaus 4y ago
What level are they hired at though, and are you talking developers?
- fiveyearsinarow 4y ago
  Mostly level 4 SWEs, a few L5s.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    So these are devs on base salaries over 160k+, presumably considered to be somewhat senior, and their teams just let them get away without contributing their share? Not even showing up to stand ups or whatever regular team meetings there are? Something seems very off for that to be the case.
  - fiveyearsinarow 4y ago
    Our org doesn’t have daily standup. We have weekly meetings but they dial in with camera off. When asked to give updates, they usually mention some small change, being blocked by other teams, or waiting for test result/releases. When you look at their code review, they often take 1 day to reply to comments so each diff could take a few days to submit.
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      So why do you put up with that? I'd absolutely be bringing that up as an issue with the coworker first and if that went nowhere with our manager if it was regularly causing issues within the team.

type0 4y ago

> people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company. Jim Keller had an interesting perspective on how you should think if you are in managing position and need to fire people https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TmuJSbms9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TmuJSbms9c he and Peterson discuss it somewhere in the middle

iancmceachern 4y ago

I think the dead weight is a given, in either circumstance. It's not about motivating them, that's a sunk cost. It's more about making the 90% of folks that aren't dead weight not suffer under the burden of the stuff OP mentions that overtakes day to day life as organizations get bigger. That's the issue.