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You might be surprised to learn that for every dev working “few hours a day” or barely doing anything at all, there is another engineer doing all their work for

You might be surprised to learn that for every dev working “few hours a day” or barely doing anything at all, there is another engineer doing all their work for them - usually in a constant state of fending off burnout due to having to do other peoples’ work in addition to their own.

nsxwolf 4y ago
The trick is to avoid becoming that developer.
- tobyjsullivan 4y ago
  I think the trick is to give and take. And maintain teams that give and take. Sometimes I need to take my foot of the gas. But I also appreciate that, when I do, someone else has to pick up the slack. When I encounter teammates who only take, take, take, and never give, either they leave or I do (depending how much influence I have over their employment)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- orwin 4y ago
  The trick is that everyone is both in my experience. I had weeks where i worked barely 10 hours (well, a week actually, but in my defense, the onboarding was shit), including meetings and mails. Most of the time once i understand what i have to do (and that can take some time), i'm around 20 to 30 hours. But i know i can whip myself and work 45 full hours (legal duration in my country is 35), as i did during august when the team was on vacation and we had a lot of fires to tend to, for two weeks.
avgDev 4y ago
That other engineer is actually a problem. He is accomplishing nothing by grinding 8+ hours a day and will burn out, most deadlines are bullshit. Nobody can sustain that much work for a long period of time. I would much rather be a good well rounded reasonable dev than someone doing others work. That is a huge red flag. Every dev should be responsible for THEIR work, not their team mates. Unless of course they are doing code reviews.
- tobyjsullivan 4y ago
  > most deadlines are bullshit Arbitrary deadlines are bullshit but I never mentioned deadlines. At the end of the day, people get paid to do a job and businesses earn revenues by doing things. Someone needs to do those things, and if these hypothetical developers "barely doing any work at all" aren't doing it, someone has to at the end of the day or everyone is going home.
hibikir 4y ago
Is it? In my career, over 20 years by now, I've not seen that one often. When it happens, management has to be on vacation too, as it's not that hard to see that someone is doing all the work. I have seen this continue just once. It had to do with the place having very poor pay. Management wasn't firing the slackers because that's all they could hire at their rates. The hard working engineers just weren't wise enough to realize that they could often do a bit less work for a lot more pay somewhere else. What is more common is that effort levels are similar within the same department, but wildly different across companies. I've worked at places where people considered themselves slackers when they were doing 60 hours plus on call time. I've also worked at others where entire teams did about 2 hours of actual work a day, and the rest was spent on long lunches, ping pong and retro consoles.

nsxwolf 4y ago

The trick is to avoid becoming that developer.

tobyjsullivan 4y ago
I think the trick is to give and take. And maintain teams that give and take. Sometimes I need to take my foot of the gas. But I also appreciate that, when I do, someone else has to pick up the slack. When I encounter teammates who only take, take, take, and never give, either they leave or I do (depending how much influence I have over their employment)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
orwin 4y ago
The trick is that everyone is both in my experience. I had weeks where i worked barely 10 hours (well, a week actually, but in my defense, the onboarding was shit), including meetings and mails. Most of the time once i understand what i have to do (and that can take some time), i'm around 20 to 30 hours. But i know i can whip myself and work 45 full hours (legal duration in my country is 35), as i did during august when the team was on vacation and we had a lot of fires to tend to, for two weeks.

avgDev 4y ago

That other engineer is actually a problem. He is accomplishing nothing by grinding 8+ hours a day and will burn out, most deadlines are bullshit. Nobody can sustain that much work for a long period of time. I would much rather be a good well rounded reasonable dev than someone doing others work. That is a huge red flag. Every dev should be responsible for THEIR work, not their team mates. Unless of course they are doing code reviews.

tobyjsullivan 4y ago
> most deadlines are bullshit Arbitrary deadlines are bullshit but I never mentioned deadlines. At the end of the day, people get paid to do a job and businesses earn revenues by doing things. Someone needs to do those things, and if these hypothetical developers "barely doing any work at all" aren't doing it, someone has to at the end of the day or everyone is going home.

hibikir 4y ago

Is it? In my career, over 20 years by now, I've not seen that one often. When it happens, management has to be on vacation too, as it's not that hard to see that someone is doing all the work. I have seen this continue just once. It had to do with the place having very poor pay. Management wasn't firing the slackers because that's all they could hire at their rates. The hard working engineers just weren't wise enough to realize that they could often do a bit less work for a lot more pay somewhere else. What is more common is that effort levels are similar within the same department, but wildly different across companies. I've worked at places where people considered themselves slackers when they were doing 60 hours plus on call time. I've also worked at others where entire teams did about 2 hours of actual work a day, and the rest was spent on long lunches, ping pong and retro consoles.