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Ask HN: Do you all have enough to do at work?

• kimchisoup 4y ago
  sigh Yes.
• pisspool 4y ago
  • MehdiHK 4y ago
    I don't have enough HN points to downvote this comment, otherwise I would. You don't know how comments like this affects people with anxiety, which probably led them to search for a solution online in the first place. Anyway, you are person unworthy of any attention. I'm just trying to make sure op isn't taking you seriously.
  • abc_lisper 4y ago
    Lol. That's not how real-world™ works at all.
  • hu3 4y ago
    You don't have even close to enough context to say something like that. And if it is a joke then it is of extremely bad taste about something that affect people's life and mental health. Please do better.
  • icedchai 4y ago
    He's probably getting promoted, since he's finishing his work too quickly. You gotta learn to pace yourself. That was one thing I learned in my first corporate job. If you can finish something in a day but it's expected to take a week, don't rush. Whenever you hear the comment "wow, you finished that fast!", you know you screwed up. In higher level positions, you're not paid for output, you're paid to be available when the shit hits the fan. Basically, you're an insurance policy.
• halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
  If I don’t have stuff I make stuff up that I wanna do and it’s usually something the business needs but I usually have a decent backlog.
• xyzzy4747 4y ago
  There’s an infinite amount of work to do especially at a tech company. I’ve been in your shoes before and when I was more immature I would just browse the Internet and not do much. However, as I became a more experienced engineer (and currently CTO of my startup), if I ran out of things to do I would think “how can I make this product better?” and just start working on stuff. Or if you can’t figure out what to do on your own, you can always ask your manager or product owners. From a management and personal growth perspective, you should try to become as autonomous as possible where you provide value even if nobody directly commands you to. This will also grow your skillsets. People don’t like micromanaging other people - ideally you would just be a useful employee without anyone continually asking or assigning you things. Also just imagine - what if you owned the company? Surely there is something to do that makes it more appealing to the end-users, makes the product better, makes the code quality better, or so forth? If your issue is you don’t feel incentivized, or are just bored, then maybe look for a new job. If you are just staring into space at work then there are better things you could be doing with your time.
  • anon2020dot00 4y ago
    Your talking more about your experience rather than what the OP is saying. The OP is saying that he is not immature and he is not content to browse the internet and that he is trying to be autonomous but since he is not the product owner, it is unlikely that he will find ways to make the product better. Your message sounds like a spiel from a CTO given to his employee in order to motivate them and it's like you used this opportunity to practice a spiel that you have to give instead of looking at the OP's situation.
    • xyzzy4747 4y ago
      One of my points is, nobody has to officially be a product owner to figure out things to do. Everyone should care about the product and can use their imagination to come up with tasks, or like I said, can just ask others. If he can’t figure out how to be useful, that is also a sign of immaturity (at least in the workforce context), and also points to communication issues and incompetency.
• oneforty4 4y ago
  ~6 months is still relatively new in my opinion. That's unfortunate that they aren't giving you more tasking, especially if you're asking for more. But, without knowing too many details, it probably is just the normal ebb and flow. My experience is that it can take several months to a year before I get really fully spun up on a new job. A lot of more senior people generally feel that it will take longer to hand off a task to someone new than to do it themselves. So it takes time for them to know and get comfortable with your skills and abilities.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• acchow 4y ago
  In software? Isn’t there infinite work?
  • hotpotamus 4y ago
    At one previous place, some of the devs seemed to think so - they continually rewrote an internal tool I used that broke all my integrations every time but provided no additional features that I could ever find. Often they took things out, but they were quite proud of how many lines of code they changed. I've become a skeptic of this attitude.
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    There is, but for a new starter they will need pointers and recommendations. It is unlikely they can dive into any ticket and make a bunch of changes. They need the team’s help to succeed.
• muzani 4y ago
  Having worked at startups all my life, there's infinite work for us. At the very least, lots of tech debt and insufficient test coverage. On FE, there's also supporting a wider range of devices. And then things that could be done better (reactive programming, declarative UI, etc). Then finding weaknesses in the code, documenting them, educating the team. For example, we're not handling enough error codes properly like no bandwidth and when certain endpoints are down, users tend to panic. Or sometimes, certain endpoints should be combined for performance. It could be putting down more logs, benchmarking performance, integrating analytics into the sales funnel, monitoring user frustration. No offense, but I think asking around for things to do is a fairly junior attitude. The more experienced ones usually don't look at tickets, but instead start proposing things that can be done.
  • Our_Benefactors 4y ago
    > No offense, but I think asking around for things to do is a fairly junior attitude. The more experienced ones usually don't look at tickets, but instead start proposing things that can be done. This might be true in the startup world where product managers have less well defined boundaries on what their role entails. At bigcorp© it’s generally frowned upon to go rogue and start working on stuff at random.
    • roland35 4y ago
      There is a difference between going rogue and taking initiative though! Talk to your manager or set up some 1:1s with people on your team, just saying "I have bandwidth" during standup isn't really the best time. While talking with your teammates try to ask what projects or tasks they would like to see done but don't have the time. Flaky integration tests? Implement a ticket flow for incoming bug reports? Improve team wiki and system documentation? There's got to be lots of things to do. And like a previous comment said, waiting around for work is a junior mindset. Take a look around and try to improve the pain points for your team.
      • devoutsalsa 4y ago
        Depends on the culture. After working in startups, I joined a bigger company. I burned through the work they gave me & convinced myself that I’d get fired for not having stuff to work on. I started proposing stuff to work on, but the problem was I couldn’t get access to any of the systems. I couldn’t push containers to the container registry. I couldn’t access GitLab admin settings. I couldn’t commit to repos with our Chef recipes. Everything I wanted to improve was in someone else’s sphere of influence, and I had to justify extracurricular commits on my team’s projects because every change had to be review by our understaffed QA team. I finally realized that the expectations of me were really low and that I needed to accept being underutilized or I’d go crazy.
• cableshaft 4y ago
  I've had jobs like that, that were pretty much in "keep the lights on" mode, they were doing well enough and new initiatives were few and far between. But I've had several jobs where there's way too much to do and you'll never get it all done, so you have to prioritize. My current job at a consulting firm is like that. Working at startups tended to be that way as well.
• treeman79 4y ago
  In 20 years. I told a boss I didn’t have enough to do, exactly once. Never again. I didn’t have a spare moment for 3 years. Now I ask for priorities.
• 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago
  > I feel like Im supposed to be schmoozing with them for work to do which I've never had to do before at other jobsc and I'm not really good at. I would suggest that you hone in on this, and given the size of your company, I would also hazard the suggestion that you ask HR if they have any supplemental training that they can provide to help you grow in that area. There are a tremendous number of resources on the internet for how to improve your social skills, such as https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=how%20to%20win%20friends%20and%20influence%20people&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
• pixelfog 4y ago
  I'm in a similar situation at my second project, in my first project I had a lot of work but in this project I barely have anything to do, I probably work less than 10 hours in a week atm and I'm fine with it until I switch to another job.
• xs83 4y ago
  Yep agree with most of what is written below, I am CTO at a listed company that is still very much a start-up (we went public too early IMO). I have infinite work and I expect the same to be true of most "start-ups". Likewise all of my team - never a shortage of work - even if all client work is done there are a billion internal product things to be worked on!
• 71a54xd 4y ago
  Definitely not, I work above standard but all in all maybe top out at 18 hrs per week - I backfill the rest with personal interview prep (fml leetcode) and contracting at 3x my work pay. TLDR; TPM work is a breeze - idk why I spent so much time slaving away as an IC.
• ge96 4y ago
  In the same boat. Keep working on tooling, docs... been a bit since I solved something/wrote code. Also just setting up random vm's, environments to work on things. Sprints go by I feel like I have not accomplished anything tangible.
• zem 4y ago
  yes for me - i'm in a big company, but in an understaffed team within that company, so there's always more that we want to get done than we can actually do.
• teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  I felt similar and quit my team for a project that has a clear backlog and no one else working on it. Feels good to read through public bug reports with lots of people affected and actually fix things. My last team was losing pretty much everyone. Half the team has quit since about a year ago. There just wasn't much bandwidth to get me the attention I wanted - 1:1 time learning and working with experienced people. I'd rather just work alone and see my direct impact than wander aimlessly.
• synicalx 4y ago
  Enough to do in terms of work that is directly assigned to me/my team; no not always. Enough to do in terms of stuff I've found that needs doing; always. I guess I'm lucky to have a degree of autonomy that lets me shape a percentage of my workload towards stuff that just needs to get done, so I never really run out of stuff to do. I find the biggest challenge is actually finding stuff that needs doing and also motivating/organising myself to actually do it. Moral of the story; if you find you've got nothing to do then go out and look for stuff to do. Have a look at stuff like ticket backlogs, documentation that needs doing/cleaning up, analytics, bug reports, feature requests etc.
• noud 4y ago
  I work in a big company as one of the more experienced guys in the department. There's definitely more work to do than I can do. Some coworkers work hard to get rid of as much work as possible by putting it on other peoples desks. In the mean time I've become efficient in being assertive and saying no to anything I don't like doing (and which is not my responsibility to do). So you say you don't have much to do at work? Are others complaining about that? If not, good for you. It's better to do less, but do it well, than the other way around.
• itisit 4y ago
  How big of a company? Is it a consultancy?
• barbariangrunge 4y ago
  I have so much to do at work that I couldn’t get it done even if I worked weekends and split into two people. If you want more to do, work hard and find somebody like me with tasks that they either don’t have time to do, or don’t want to do; then volunteer to handle one that you want to learn how to do. They will shrug and say, “I guess.” You could even get started on it ahead of time so that you can present an idea for how to solve it at the pitch stage — after all, you say you have nothing else to do. If you do that enough times over the years, you’ll learn so much that it will be you who the company depends on to do way too much, and you’ll start being thankful (if a tiny bit skeptical) when a junior offers to take a task off your hands…
• THENATHE 4y ago
  I have bursts of works. Some days it seems like there is a never ending stream of bullshit thst keeps me busy, and others I am scrambling to find something to keep me busy so I don’t look like I’m slacking off. I work as a sysadmin and manage a small data center that hosts about 1200 websites and other apps
• gamjQZnHT53AMa 4y ago
  I'm in the same boat as you. 6 months into a job, don't have much to do. When I raise this, I'm often given some busy-work to do. Something meaningless to keep me quiet for a day or two. Frustrating.
• akudha 4y ago
  My previous job - I had nothing to do. I was watching Netflix. In my current job, I have so much work that I don’t have time for eat lunch. Neither of the two situations is good. I’d suggest looking for another job. Life is too short to schmooze. The other option is to spend the extra time learning. Most important - don’t feel bad about getting paid for not doing much work. It is not your fault, it is your employer’s fault