10 ms·

Are you paid to look busy?

250 points by resdirector 12y ago

higherpurpose 12y ago
There's a saying in my country for this: "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work" - meaning the salary isn't great, and they're getting what they're paying for.
- tormeh 12y ago
  I've heard that one too. It's brilliant! I don't think it's really what we're talking about here though.
comatose_kid 12y ago
I would read this article but I am busily typing my name over and over into a word document.
- Igglyboo 12y ago
  Automate it?
- girvo 12y ago
  I think Black Books[0] sums this phenomenon up nicely... [0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVGdhAetJaQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVGdhAetJaQ
  - mattbee 12y ago
    And how to suceed at board level - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WGrmTJnfIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WGrmTJnfIg
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- glesica 12y ago
  > "...work is valuable in itself." This is it. We have been fed a lie that "work" has intrinsic value and that people who don't want to work constantly are somehow inferior or immoral. Worse, "work" has come to be associated more with occupying a particular area in space during particular times than with actually accomplishing anything. I work relatively little (I'm 31 and I've literally never worked 40 hours a week) and I've actually had people ask me, incredulously, what exactly I DO all the time if I'm not working. As though there aren't a million wonderful things to do at any given time and I'm wasting my life by NOT "working" more. Very sad.
  - LeafyGreenbriar 12y ago
    Out of curiosity, how are you able to work as little as you do?
    - glesica 12y ago
      To be fair, I worked nearly full-time for several years (37.5 hours per week, government job which also had a ton of paid time off) and then I've been back in school for the last couple years, which pays me a stipend. I also work part-time as a software developer. But, basically, I just don't have a ton of expenses (I don't own a car, I have lived in cheaper areas, I have no children). I will likely end up with a full-time job in the near-ish future. If I had it my way, I would always work part-time, but it is quite difficult to find good part-time work, and that is sad.
      - desas 12y ago
        What is full time in the US? I've worked 35 and 37.5 hour jobs and considered both full time. Neither are unusual in the UK. Of course being in IT the actual hours worked are usually more than that.
        glesica 12y ago
        Full-time is generally 40 hours per week in the US, although there are always exceptions. The vast majority of "office" jobs, however, insist on 40 hours per week.
neovive 12y ago
This reminds me slightly of the scene in the movie "Office Space" when the consultants were interviewing one of the employees and he was discussing "People Skills".
gosub 12y ago
Seinfeld already did it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd9ma2UVLHM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd9ma2UVLHM
danso 12y ago
I've had this concept rolling around in my head occasionally...the best path in becoming a better programmer is to sincerely desire to automate yourself out of your job. Instead of backing up a system via GUI every week, figure out the API calls needed to hook up via a script. After a few weeks of triggering that script by hand, write a cron job and a logger that logs the relevant transactions. After awhile of manually SSHing into the backup server to verify the existence of those backups, write some kind of litmus test that fails if the backups were corrupted. Instead of checking the log every once in awhile, have it email you (and just to be safe, use other kinds of push notifications too ) when success or failure happens. And instead of lackadaisically running emergency drills to see that the backups do work, write a automated deployment system that runs off of those backups, and put that in a cron job. At the end of all that, you still should want to be "the human". You should still want to SSH in manually, check the checksums, deploy from backup on a lazy Friday just to make sure...but those are intentional actions...not just some repetitive drill you do because you have to. And if something does go clusterfuck, you're still there to handle things. So the test is: now that you've automated the robot-part of your work...which, the fact that you could automate it means it would have been automated some day...what do you feel free to do now? Does your company have the foresight to reward you, both in salary, and in discretion to pursue projects that truly require human insight and expertise? Or is the culture such that it's just better to keep your automated-workflow to yourself, and spend the day surfing the internet? Not that either of those choices are wrong...I mean, when I'm near retirement age, I will definitely choose the latter happily...but if that first option of moving ahead isn't available, then that's a sign that you might have to open your horizons. Of course, if you can't automate any of your work...congratulations, it just might mean you're working on exciting, non-repetitive things that (...for now) require the best of human insight and intelligence. edit: forgot to add the best bit...no matter what the outcome at the end of the automation process, you'll still have become a better developer by just building it out. I think 99% of my experience and knowledge of the command-line (and also, much-needed appreciation of functional design) grew out of an impatience with perfectly good GUIs. Just one of the other upsides to being a programmer...you can appreciably lessen your own workload so directly through improvement of your personal craftsmanship.
- zanny 12y ago
dsirijus 12y ago
My employee next to me is working hard. I'm in elinks in terminal on HN and on IRC, with vertical split of htop in tmux. He thinks I'm working hard too, with all those numbers, columns, scrolling output and blinking cursor. I feel so bad right now. I'm going to go actually work.
- id 12y ago
  You should actually feel bad if the two of you are working on the same thing.
  - dsirijus 12y ago
    We do, and I found another way to not feel bad - I started drinking. At least I'm not pretending to work anymore! Win-win. Thinking out of the box like a boss.
    - sillysaurus3 12y ago
      I found another way to not feel bad - I started drinking. At least I'm not pretending to work anymore! Win-win. What do you mean?
      - dsirijus 12y ago
        Well, resolution to a situation where I'm pretending to work, from an ethical point of view, is to, well, stop pretending to work. I can do that by either starting to work, or stopping to pretend to work. I now at least have a clear consciousness, if not productive output. And it is Saturday night after all. I offered him quality free beer of his choosing. He refused. I also linked him to this thread.
        sillysaurus3 12y ago
        I'm just trying to understand, why be at work on the weekend or after hours unless you need/want to get something done? (Man, I wish HN had a private messaging system, because I usually have questions that interest me but aren't really appropriate to ask publicly. Thinking of writing one...)
nirnira 12y ago
Wow, I can't understand it, why hasn't anyone informed all these corporations that they are wasting so much money paying people to do nothing? Why hasn't anyone at these companies realised what's going on? It's crazy, there must be incredible competitive advantages to be had with all the savings up for grabs - just think of how much cheaper they could make their products, they could undercut the competition like crazy! Man, you know what, I don't why this Graeber guy hasn't gotten there first, but I reckon I'm just gunna go break the good news - I bet I can charge top dollar for my advice too, these companies are gunna be so blown away, hehehe I'm gunna be rich!!
Roboprog 12y ago
Is my job a bullshit job? No, but... I'm miserably reminded every week when I do my TPS^H^H^H timesheet just what proportion of my job is bullshit activity that I have to get through so that I can get to the part where I am actually going to work on something that will matter to someone. ("Look! I actually spent almost 10 hours this week [designing/] writing [/testing] code!") Knowing what needs doing is of course important, but after the third time of hearing it, it's time to shut up and go to work, people! So many meetings, so many... (sobs bitterly in corner)
- jff 12y ago
  I'm supposed to be working about 30% time on a project at work. That translates to about 12 hours. This project has two meetings a week and the meetings almost always take 2 hours each. That means that out of my 12 hours/week on this project, I'm already spending 1/3 of it listening to people debate what conferences we should apply to (rather than, you know, what work we should do to make something conference-worthy)
- BenSS 12y ago
  Does your manager know that so much of these meetings a redundant? A good manager insulates other employees from this kind of meeting brutalization and avoids adding to it if at all possible. Unfortunately, there are many managers that think they exist to hold meetings.
- reboog711 12y ago
  I had one client; where I stopped working for two weeks because of an administration issue. Throughout that process; I was pressured heavily to continue working without resolution. Things were falling through the cracks and it looked bad on the department [and me and my manager] to have these problems. Well, we eventually sorted out the administration issue on a late Friday; and as a customer service gesture I worked over the weekend to catch up. I caught up on the two-week backlog that was crippling the department in four hours. It was at that point I realized how much time I actually 'work' for this client verse how much time I spend in meetings with them.
- albemuth 12y ago
jqm 12y ago
The worlds wasted wealth... http://www.amazon.com/The-Worlds-Wasted-Wealth-Environment/dp/0962442321 http://www.amazon.com/The-Worlds-Wasted-Wealth-Environment/d... The book is poorly written to the point it seems less than credible but it has some interesting takes on the situation. The author postulates something he calls "waste distribution territories" that have risen to take advantage of technological advancements. The basic gist is that instead of people working less as technology advances, unnecessary jobs are added to society and people work the same or even more at selling insurance, filling out forms in HR etc. etc. He points out numerous specific examples of this waste and there are many more he misses. He does offer some specific solutions to this problem that are very unlikely to be rationally implemented without a major structural collapse first. Overall, a poorly written book with some very insightful concepts.
ryandrake 12y ago
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” -- Buckminster Fuller
- christiansmith 12y ago
  Can't remember which book this quote is from, but "Critical Path" and "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" are great food for thought: http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Path-Kiyoshi-Kuromiya/dp/0312174918/ http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Path-Kiyoshi-Kuromiya/dp/0312... http://www.amazon.com/Operating-Manual-Spaceship-Buckminster-Fuller/dp/3037781262/ http://www.amazon.com/Operating-Manual-Spaceship-Buckminster...
- paulhauggis 12y ago
  This sounds great, but you still need money to survive. This would mean that the few that did work would essentially be supporting the rest of society. Why would I ever want to start a million dollar business if I knew the majority of my earnings would be taken from me by the government to support people that didn't need to do anything?? You don't have to get a crappy job and work for someone you hate for the rest of your life. I started a business 2 years ago and I don't plan on getting a job anytime soon. You have the freedom to do this..or work for someone..or you could even live in the woods on berries.
  - chasing 12y ago
    You appear to be getting downvoted, but you've struck at the heart of the issue: If we want to do away with meaningless jobs, people will still need resources to survive. And that "one-in-ten-thousand" (or whatever) will need to be taxed very heavily so the wealth can be spread. We can't have all of our financial resources siloed into an increasingly small number of people's wallets. A great benefit to this system will be that people can do important work that might not necessarily reward them financially. The downside is that, well, those who do financially well will have to share their earnings. And we'll have to detach the notion of financial success with the notion of power, which will be difficult. And all of this runs anathema to the usual sort of libertarian financial-might-makes-right of the tech world, unfortunately. [Edit, since I can't reply to zo1, yet, below: No, I wasn't trying to tie libertarianism to "financial-might-makes-right." I meant that the tech world seems to slant libertarian, and people in this world seem to aggrandize money as the supreme metric of success.]
keypusher 12y ago
No, I'm not, and it's one of the things I enjoy about programming. Some weeks I work 30 hours, others I work 60. But if I did the things I committed to doing this week, then I go home. Why sit in the office and pretend to be working? It makes no sense.
- AndrewKemendo 12y ago
  >Why sit in the office and pretend to be working? It makes no sense. Only if you think of it from the "accomplishing tasks" perspective. For example where I work, we are there even if we are not actively working to be available in case we need to immediately respond to demands of leadership. For example this week I had to answer an off the wall question about our project that they needed an answer to RIGHT NOW because they have a meeting with their boss in 15 minutes and anticipate that their boss would ask that question. Yea.
  - stingraycharles 12y ago
    Usually phones work fine in emergency situations like that.
  - pavel_lishin 12y ago
    Should your leadership be aware of the answer to the potential question without having to ask you about it 15 minutes before the meeting? This seems like something that ought not be a problem, if your leadership is attending standups and there's clear communication.
    - shawn-furyan 12y ago
      I agree. This is an organizational issue, not a legitimate job duty, irrespective of whether the rank and file should be allowed to leave when they've finished their work.
- paulhauggis 12y ago
  Most managers would not accept this. Since most developers are paid salary (as opposed to hourly), many feel like if you were leaving early, you aren't working hard enough. I've seen it at every place I've ever worked. At one place, my manager directly told me I needed to stay until 6 or 7 every night or the boss will think that I'm slacking.
tormeh 12y ago
Combine this with how miserable low-rank work like shopping bag packers and store work is, and you have a great clusterfuck of a society.
- markbnj 12y ago
  I don't think that's the point at all. Even low-wage work would be more satisfying, in the author's view, because your labor is directly beneficial. You can see the results of it. Of course we'd all like to make more money than a store clerk, but in the quest for money we might end up doing things that satisfy us much less than simple labor would. For my part, as a developer, I'm among the fortunate.
  - morgante 12y ago
    I think that's actually the point. On one side, we have low-wage work which is many ways the least-bullshitty. People at the bottom of the hierarchy are often the ones actually getting the work done. Then, on the other side, we have the layers of HR reps and people who exist only to mind the hierarchy—in many cases, being very well-compensated to do so. Between the two, there are few meaningful and well-paid positions left.
  - twistedpair 12y ago
    Have you ever unloaded a truck with a group of teamsters? I did one summer. I was shocked how aggravated they became at me for hustling. I got sent back to my department because "at that rate we'll have it unpacked in an hour and we've got 4 hours to do it." Nothing special about white collar jobs here.
hippich 12y ago
If you are developer or some sort of IT engineer, don't automatically think your job is not BS. Like job of developing thin client to a windows server running licensed software to get around license costs of software, where price is based on number of users... Yes, this types of businesses generate TONS of money from essentially the fact, that supplier and customer could not get in agreement for more reasonable license...
- zanny 12y ago
  I'd argue (as would most of the free software community) the creation of proprietary software is entirely bullshit. Because you have to eventually reinvent it with either permissive or copyleft licenses to just avoid the huge black hole that is legal bullshit and bureaucracy around licensing rights to a number that is not even scarce once its made. And until it is foss, you are just denying the users their freedoms to the stuff they are paying you for, and until it is sufficiently free it really isn't even a working product in my book. Hell, even projects like Tizen vs Android and ZFS vs BTRFS vs XFS and KVM vs Xen vs Vmware vs Virtualbox are all bullshit jobs and unnecessary work reinventing the same wheel over and over to either satisfy a boss need out of the chief developers, the inability for the forerunner to accept others opinions into their project, or just raw license and legalese incompatibility bullshit. It is, though, 99% bs. And every time someone tries to reinvent IMing after xmpp (without being able to, in a paragraph, describe the intrinsic flaw in xmpp you can't fix through amendments to the standard, and how their alternative immediately fixes them) it is just more BS. All the photo sharing websites, all the web apps, 99.99% of them are all bullshit because someone already did it before, and you just want to tweak a few knobs (which you could have easily done if all involved projects were open contribution and pliable to change and forking) and had simple results, but no, you have to start from scratch and spend a million LOCs reinventing wordpress. And you still write it in Lua! If you wrote it in, say, python, I'd be all over that because that presents a tangible benefit - "Lua is awful, I don't like it, and as a user of my software, you don't like it either, and you can't just patch fix that, so here is a replacement in python".
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    I'd argue (as would most of the free software community) the creation of proprietary software is entirely bullshit. Because you have to eventually reinvent it with either permissive or copyleft licenses to just avoid the huge black hole that is legal bullshit and bureaucracy around licensing rights to a number that is not even scarce once its made. Game engines are a counterexample. There are probably dozens of others. I'm trying to figure out what people are arguing against. Would you help me understand? Let's assume your argument is true: creation of most proprietary software is entirely bullshit. Ok, so?
Totient 12y ago
The guy I work for really has no idea how easy certain tasks are once you automate them. I have done nothing to correct his misconceptions. (I'm a CS grad student, working under a professor who somehow got tenure despite being unable to program his way out of a cardboard box. I swear, half of this job is tricking him into thinking I'm doing his work, so I can focus on doing actual research. ...I really need to find a new advisor.)
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  What research are you working on?
reboog711 12y ago
The bulk of my clients pay me hourly, on an as needed basis. I've had a few clients; where it sometimes it feels like they are making stuff up for me to do just so I'll be available when real work comes down the pike. I have mixed feelings about this.. on one hand--billable hours. On the other hand--it is not satisfying to do things with absolutely no business value.
- spinlock 12y ago
  You should hire a VA to do the BS work they give you.
- KMag 12y ago
  If your client is a medium to large sized company, it may also be a case of needing to use budget or have budget reduced the next year. A place I once worked one year had a big budget surplus. They bought a Winnebago, affectionately named the Waltabago after Walt, the guy who ran the team. The next year, Walt bought a Sunfire V1280 with his leftover budget. Walt was a good manager and generally a good guy. It's just that the nature of his business had unpredictable ups and downs, so he was incentivized to make justifiable but wasteful purchases in order to avoid over-spending in peak cost years.
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    Did you get to borrow the Winnebago? We call this need to spend the budget thing 'slippage' in the UK. Once we had a little bit of slippage, about £1k, so we bought some Sony Mavica floppy disk cameras when they were new and exotic. We just lent them out to staff to learn how to take digital pictures. That lead to digital editing, storyboards &c and quite a lot of upskill. Much better powerpoints. Just a thought...
  - reboog711 12y ago
    > it may also be a case of needing to use budget or have budget reduced the next year. That could very well be a consideration.
- Havoc 12y ago
hawkharris 12y ago
This reminds me of a study focusing on soccer games. It analyzed A) how often players shot goals toward the left, middle and right sides of the net; and B) how often goalies responded by jumping toward the left, middle and right sides. The stats revealed a surprising phenomenon. Though opposing players shot toward each area of the goal evenly — about 33% of the time — goalies jumped toward the left or the right 80-90% of the time. So what explains the irrational behavior of these highly skilled goalies? The researcher who presented this to me and others at a conference argued that it came down to the appearance of productivity. If a goalie leaps left or right and fails to stop the goal, he can claim that he tried his best. But if a goalie remains in the center, even if doing so is the most effective option, he risks looking like he did nothing. I call this "productivity theater." In other words, there's sometimes a disconnect between what it means to be an effective worker and what it means to appear effective. To offer just one example from the workplace: in some offices, the culture dictates that employees must stay from 8 to 6 each day. Their schedules may make them look like hard workers, but some are probably checking Facebook or email much of the day. Contrast this with offices that emphasize owning and completing projects rather than working an amount of time. With the second policy, you're likely to find some workers who appear less busy but make more meaningful contributions.
- jacques_chester 12y ago
  DeMarco and Lister called it "undertime".
  - sitkack 12y ago
    Is that my version of "homing from work" ?
- TylerJay 12y ago
  As a counterpoint, I remember being taught in a Game Theory course that both the shooters and the goalies acted in accordance with the Nash Equilibrium which (IIRC) happens to be equal amounts to each option. You would think that if such a vulnerability actually existed, coaches and analysts would have figured it out and it would be exploited.
jacques_chester 12y ago
My employers are actually serious about pair programming, so I am easily getting more work done now than I've ever done before. We take lunch, we take breaks, we work fixed hours, but holy moly we also get a helluva lot done every day. It's both exhausting and refreshing.
dantheman 12y ago
"And then I thought, well, maybe that explains some other things, like why is it there’s this deep, popular resentment against people who have real jobs? They can get people so angry at auto-workers, just because they make 30 bucks an hour, which is like nowhere near what corporate lawyers make, but nobody seems to resent them. They get angry at the auto-workers; they get angry at teachers." I thought people were angry at these people because of their unions - all the other jobs he listed are nonunion and thus the higher wage is actually a market wage.
- Artistry121 12y ago
  Lawyers are not unionized but the bar exam definitely does limit supply. You are correct though - one major reason why teachers and auto-workers might get criticism is because they pay an organization to make sure companies and other individuals cannot contract freely.
Tycho 12y ago
Case in point: last week Barclays bank announced they were laying off 20,000 staff. Share price immediately went up 8%.
qwerty_asdf 12y ago
There's an aspect of this frustrating, forced busy-work behavior that can get baked into software development, and it isn't going away anytime soon. Technology innately gives rise to a behavior called yak shaving, and it's not limited to software development, but pretty much any form of technology-related behavior is prone to it, when layers upon layers of technology compound one another and accumulate their own accretion disks of cruft. http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/old-archive/gsb-archive/gsb2000-02-11.html http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/old-archive/gsb-archive/gs... A very simple example is needing anti-freeze to drive a car. If there were no chemical companies producing millions of gallons of anti-freeze a year, and no auto-stores to distibute periphery car necessities, and gas stations, and auto mechanics didn't supply anti-freeze, because it's beyond the scope of their expertise, how would I produce the right anti-freeze for my car on my own? Well, what are the requirements for producing industrial grade ethylene glycol? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene_glycol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene_glycol A similar open-source software example would be dependency hell. Just compare the differences in dependencies between two very popular open-source web browsers: http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/web/chromium-browser http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/web/chromium-browser http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/web/firefox http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/web/firefox In order to accurately compare the two applications, how would you take advantage of the fact that these are open-source projects, and actually review the source code, and then build from source? Each application is built upon many other independent software projects, each sub-project with it's own disciplines, specializations and dependencies. It's time consuming and painstaking behavior to dig into the source trees for these programs and all their dependencies. How deep can you go before you give up?
3minus1 12y ago
5 years ago I worked as a consultant at a large enterprise software company. There were definitely large periods of time (months long) where I was averaging 3 hours a week of actual work. Insane, insane work hours. There would be a 5 person team (Analysts, QAs, developer) spending 5 weeks on a release that consisted in 45 min worth of text changes. I don't usually hear people on HN talk about not having work to do. I guess it's different at start ups. It's just fucking unbelievable to me though that I would get paid so much to do so little. And I feel like some kind jerk complaining about it.
noonespecial 12y ago
When all you pay for is butts in the seats, don't be surprised if the only thing you get is a bunch of asses.
appreneur 12y ago
I always felt most people in IT offices occur very busy, when their work is harldy any time consuming, just to keep their job, they act busy all the time...I felt this false pretense is the primary reason most people loose confidence in trying new things and being experimental.
frik 12y ago
Office Space (1999) is a great and rather funny movie about this topic: [7,9 stars on IMDb] * IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/ * Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IwzZYRejZQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IwzZYRejZQ
hownottowrite 12y ago
For Reference: David Graeber's original article: http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ David Graeber's Book, "Debt: The First 5,000 Years": http://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290/ http://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290/
zobzu 12y ago
well they sure have a point. then i work from home (telecommute then) i dont work "as long" but i certainly get much more done AND i am also happier. thats mainly because i dont have to "look busy" or "browse sites for a moment until my brain is able to function decently enough to work again" instead i can go for a job, do the laundry, what not. works much better than sitting on the computer.
torbit 12y ago
Just two weeks ago I was talking to a guy in the military. His government job was to monitor military test taking. At times only 2 people would show up in one day to take a test. He gets paid $20+ an hour. I didn't ask how many hours a week he worked, but I got the impression it was his current main job.
acc01 12y ago
Relevant short, "el Empleo": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxUuU1jwMgM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxUuU1jwMgM
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sidcool 12y ago
I was in Houston for a couple of years in 2011-2012 for a big bank in the capacity of a Software Engineer. The environment there was caustic and anti-relaxation. The people introduced artificial stresses to sound and seem important (mostly to avoid being laid off). There's one manager especially who reminded me of a wolf on prowl. He roamed about in the office from time to time and shouted orders arbitrarily at people. Most of them ignored him, but he seemed important to many. I got tired of the constant bickering and unnecessary meetings, left the job.

250 points by resdirector 12y ago

There's a saying in my country for this: "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work" - meaning the salary isn't great, and they're getting what they're paying for.

tormeh 12y ago
I've heard that one too. It's brilliant! I don't think it's really what we're talking about here though.

comatose_kid 12y ago

I would read this article but I am busily typing my name over and over into a word document.

Igglyboo 12y ago
Automate it?
girvo 12y ago
I think Black Books[0] sums this phenomenon up nicely... [0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVGdhAetJaQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVGdhAetJaQ
- mattbee 12y ago
  And how to suceed at board level - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WGrmTJnfIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WGrmTJnfIg

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glesica 12y ago
> "...work is valuable in itself." This is it. We have been fed a lie that "work" has intrinsic value and that people who don't want to work constantly are somehow inferior or immoral. Worse, "work" has come to be associated more with occupying a particular area in space during particular times than with actually accomplishing anything. I work relatively little (I'm 31 and I've literally never worked 40 hours a week) and I've actually had people ask me, incredulously, what exactly I DO all the time if I'm not working. As though there aren't a million wonderful things to do at any given time and I'm wasting my life by NOT "working" more. Very sad.
- LeafyGreenbriar 12y ago
  Out of curiosity, how are you able to work as little as you do?
  - glesica 12y ago
    To be fair, I worked nearly full-time for several years (37.5 hours per week, government job which also had a ton of paid time off) and then I've been back in school for the last couple years, which pays me a stipend. I also work part-time as a software developer. But, basically, I just don't have a ton of expenses (I don't own a car, I have lived in cheaper areas, I have no children). I will likely end up with a full-time job in the near-ish future. If I had it my way, I would always work part-time, but it is quite difficult to find good part-time work, and that is sad.
    - desas 12y ago
      What is full time in the US? I've worked 35 and 37.5 hour jobs and considered both full time. Neither are unusual in the UK. Of course being in IT the actual hours worked are usually more than that.
      - glesica 12y ago
        Full-time is generally 40 hours per week in the US, although there are always exceptions. The vast majority of "office" jobs, however, insist on 40 hours per week.

neovive 12y ago

This reminds me slightly of the scene in the movie "Office Space" when the consultants were interviewing one of the employees and he was discussing "People Skills".

gosub 12y ago

Seinfeld already did it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd9ma2UVLHM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd9ma2UVLHM

danso 12y ago

I've had this concept rolling around in my head occasionally...the best path in becoming a better programmer is to sincerely desire to automate yourself out of your job. Instead of backing up a system via GUI every week, figure out the API calls needed to hook up via a script. After a few weeks of triggering that script by hand, write a cron job and a logger that logs the relevant transactions. After awhile of manually SSHing into the backup server to verify the existence of those backups, write some kind of litmus test that fails if the backups were corrupted. Instead of checking the log every once in awhile, have it email you (and just to be safe, use other kinds of push notifications too ) when success or failure happens. And instead of lackadaisically running emergency drills to see that the backups do work, write a automated deployment system that runs off of those backups, and put that in a cron job. At the end of all that, you still should want to be "the human". You should still want to SSH in manually, check the checksums, deploy from backup on a lazy Friday just to make sure...but those are intentional actions...not just some repetitive drill you do because you have to. And if something does go clusterfuck, you're still there to handle things. So the test is: now that you've automated the robot-part of your work...which, the fact that you could automate it means it would have been automated some day...what do you feel free to do now? Does your company have the foresight to reward you, both in salary, and in discretion to pursue projects that truly require human insight and expertise? Or is the culture such that it's just better to keep your automated-workflow to yourself, and spend the day surfing the internet? Not that either of those choices are wrong...I mean, when I'm near retirement age, I will definitely choose the latter happily...but if that first option of moving ahead isn't available, then that's a sign that you might have to open your horizons. Of course, if you can't automate any of your work...congratulations, it just might mean you're working on exciting, non-repetitive things that (...for now) require the best of human insight and intelligence. edit: forgot to add the best bit...no matter what the outcome at the end of the automation process, you'll still have become a better developer by just building it out. I think 99% of my experience and knowledge of the command-line (and also, much-needed appreciation of functional design) grew out of an impatience with perfectly good GUIs. Just one of the other upsides to being a programmer...you can appreciably lessen your own workload so directly through improvement of your personal craftsmanship.

zanny 12y ago

dsirijus 12y ago

My employee next to me is working hard. I'm in elinks in terminal on HN and on IRC, with vertical split of htop in tmux. He thinks I'm working hard too, with all those numbers, columns, scrolling output and blinking cursor. I feel so bad right now. I'm going to go actually work.

id 12y ago
You should actually feel bad if the two of you are working on the same thing.
- dsirijus 12y ago
  We do, and I found another way to not feel bad - I started drinking. At least I'm not pretending to work anymore! Win-win. Thinking out of the box like a boss.
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    I found another way to not feel bad - I started drinking. At least I'm not pretending to work anymore! Win-win. What do you mean?
    - dsirijus 12y ago
      Well, resolution to a situation where I'm pretending to work, from an ethical point of view, is to, well, stop pretending to work. I can do that by either starting to work, or stopping to pretend to work. I now at least have a clear consciousness, if not productive output. And it is Saturday night after all. I offered him quality free beer of his choosing. He refused. I also linked him to this thread.
      - sillysaurus3 12y ago
        I'm just trying to understand, why be at work on the weekend or after hours unless you need/want to get something done? (Man, I wish HN had a private messaging system, because I usually have questions that interest me but aren't really appropriate to ask publicly. Thinking of writing one...)

nirnira 12y ago

Wow, I can't understand it, why hasn't anyone informed all these corporations that they are wasting so much money paying people to do nothing? Why hasn't anyone at these companies realised what's going on? It's crazy, there must be incredible competitive advantages to be had with all the savings up for grabs - just think of how much cheaper they could make their products, they could undercut the competition like crazy! Man, you know what, I don't why this Graeber guy hasn't gotten there first, but I reckon I'm just gunna go break the good news - I bet I can charge top dollar for my advice too, these companies are gunna be so blown away, hehehe I'm gunna be rich!!

Roboprog 12y ago

Is my job a bullshit job? No, but... I'm miserably reminded every week when I do my TPS^H^H^H timesheet just what proportion of my job is bullshit activity that I have to get through so that I can get to the part where I am actually going to work on something that will matter to someone. ("Look! I actually spent almost 10 hours this week [designing/] writing [/testing] code!") Knowing what needs doing is of course important, but after the third time of hearing it, it's time to shut up and go to work, people! So many meetings, so many... (sobs bitterly in corner)

jff 12y ago
I'm supposed to be working about 30% time on a project at work. That translates to about 12 hours. This project has two meetings a week and the meetings almost always take 2 hours each. That means that out of my 12 hours/week on this project, I'm already spending 1/3 of it listening to people debate what conferences we should apply to (rather than, you know, what work we should do to make something conference-worthy)
BenSS 12y ago
Does your manager know that so much of these meetings a redundant? A good manager insulates other employees from this kind of meeting brutalization and avoids adding to it if at all possible. Unfortunately, there are many managers that think they exist to hold meetings.
reboog711 12y ago
I had one client; where I stopped working for two weeks because of an administration issue. Throughout that process; I was pressured heavily to continue working without resolution. Things were falling through the cracks and it looked bad on the department [and me and my manager] to have these problems. Well, we eventually sorted out the administration issue on a late Friday; and as a customer service gesture I worked over the weekend to catch up. I caught up on the two-week backlog that was crippling the department in four hours. It was at that point I realized how much time I actually 'work' for this client verse how much time I spend in meetings with them.
albemuth 12y ago

jqm 12y ago

The worlds wasted wealth... http://www.amazon.com/The-Worlds-Wasted-Wealth-Environment/dp/0962442321 http://www.amazon.com/The-Worlds-Wasted-Wealth-Environment/d... The book is poorly written to the point it seems less than credible but it has some interesting takes on the situation. The author postulates something he calls "waste distribution territories" that have risen to take advantage of technological advancements. The basic gist is that instead of people working less as technology advances, unnecessary jobs are added to society and people work the same or even more at selling insurance, filling out forms in HR etc. etc. He points out numerous specific examples of this waste and there are many more he misses. He does offer some specific solutions to this problem that are very unlikely to be rationally implemented without a major structural collapse first. Overall, a poorly written book with some very insightful concepts.

ryandrake 12y ago

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” -- Buckminster Fuller

christiansmith 12y ago
Can't remember which book this quote is from, but "Critical Path" and "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" are great food for thought: http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Path-Kiyoshi-Kuromiya/dp/0312174918/ http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Path-Kiyoshi-Kuromiya/dp/0312... http://www.amazon.com/Operating-Manual-Spaceship-Buckminster-Fuller/dp/3037781262/ http://www.amazon.com/Operating-Manual-Spaceship-Buckminster...
paulhauggis 12y ago
This sounds great, but you still need money to survive. This would mean that the few that did work would essentially be supporting the rest of society. Why would I ever want to start a million dollar business if I knew the majority of my earnings would be taken from me by the government to support people that didn't need to do anything?? You don't have to get a crappy job and work for someone you hate for the rest of your life. I started a business 2 years ago and I don't plan on getting a job anytime soon. You have the freedom to do this..or work for someone..or you could even live in the woods on berries.
- chasing 12y ago
  You appear to be getting downvoted, but you've struck at the heart of the issue: If we want to do away with meaningless jobs, people will still need resources to survive. And that "one-in-ten-thousand" (or whatever) will need to be taxed very heavily so the wealth can be spread. We can't have all of our financial resources siloed into an increasingly small number of people's wallets. A great benefit to this system will be that people can do important work that might not necessarily reward them financially. The downside is that, well, those who do financially well will have to share their earnings. And we'll have to detach the notion of financial success with the notion of power, which will be difficult. And all of this runs anathema to the usual sort of libertarian financial-might-makes-right of the tech world, unfortunately. [Edit, since I can't reply to zo1, yet, below: No, I wasn't trying to tie libertarianism to "financial-might-makes-right." I meant that the tech world seems to slant libertarian, and people in this world seem to aggrandize money as the supreme metric of success.]

keypusher 12y ago

No, I'm not, and it's one of the things I enjoy about programming. Some weeks I work 30 hours, others I work 60. But if I did the things I committed to doing this week, then I go home. Why sit in the office and pretend to be working? It makes no sense.

AndrewKemendo 12y ago
>Why sit in the office and pretend to be working? It makes no sense. Only if you think of it from the "accomplishing tasks" perspective. For example where I work, we are there even if we are not actively working to be available in case we need to immediately respond to demands of leadership. For example this week I had to answer an off the wall question about our project that they needed an answer to RIGHT NOW because they have a meeting with their boss in 15 minutes and anticipate that their boss would ask that question. Yea.
- stingraycharles 12y ago
  Usually phones work fine in emergency situations like that.
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  Should your leadership be aware of the answer to the potential question without having to ask you about it 15 minutes before the meeting? This seems like something that ought not be a problem, if your leadership is attending standups and there's clear communication.
  - shawn-furyan 12y ago
    I agree. This is an organizational issue, not a legitimate job duty, irrespective of whether the rank and file should be allowed to leave when they've finished their work.
paulhauggis 12y ago
Most managers would not accept this. Since most developers are paid salary (as opposed to hourly), many feel like if you were leaving early, you aren't working hard enough. I've seen it at every place I've ever worked. At one place, my manager directly told me I needed to stay until 6 or 7 every night or the boss will think that I'm slacking.

tormeh 12y ago

Combine this with how miserable low-rank work like shopping bag packers and store work is, and you have a great clusterfuck of a society.

markbnj 12y ago
I don't think that's the point at all. Even low-wage work would be more satisfying, in the author's view, because your labor is directly beneficial. You can see the results of it. Of course we'd all like to make more money than a store clerk, but in the quest for money we might end up doing things that satisfy us much less than simple labor would. For my part, as a developer, I'm among the fortunate.
- morgante 12y ago
  I think that's actually the point. On one side, we have low-wage work which is many ways the least-bullshitty. People at the bottom of the hierarchy are often the ones actually getting the work done. Then, on the other side, we have the layers of HR reps and people who exist only to mind the hierarchy—in many cases, being very well-compensated to do so. Between the two, there are few meaningful and well-paid positions left.
- twistedpair 12y ago
  Have you ever unloaded a truck with a group of teamsters? I did one summer. I was shocked how aggravated they became at me for hustling. I got sent back to my department because "at that rate we'll have it unpacked in an hour and we've got 4 hours to do it." Nothing special about white collar jobs here.

hippich 12y ago

If you are developer or some sort of IT engineer, don't automatically think your job is not BS. Like job of developing thin client to a windows server running licensed software to get around license costs of software, where price is based on number of users... Yes, this types of businesses generate TONS of money from essentially the fact, that supplier and customer could not get in agreement for more reasonable license...

zanny 12y ago
I'd argue (as would most of the free software community) the creation of proprietary software is entirely bullshit. Because you have to eventually reinvent it with either permissive or copyleft licenses to just avoid the huge black hole that is legal bullshit and bureaucracy around licensing rights to a number that is not even scarce once its made. And until it is foss, you are just denying the users their freedoms to the stuff they are paying you for, and until it is sufficiently free it really isn't even a working product in my book. Hell, even projects like Tizen vs Android and ZFS vs BTRFS vs XFS and KVM vs Xen vs Vmware vs Virtualbox are all bullshit jobs and unnecessary work reinventing the same wheel over and over to either satisfy a boss need out of the chief developers, the inability for the forerunner to accept others opinions into their project, or just raw license and legalese incompatibility bullshit. It is, though, 99% bs. And every time someone tries to reinvent IMing after xmpp (without being able to, in a paragraph, describe the intrinsic flaw in xmpp you can't fix through amendments to the standard, and how their alternative immediately fixes them) it is just more BS. All the photo sharing websites, all the web apps, 99.99% of them are all bullshit because someone already did it before, and you just want to tweak a few knobs (which you could have easily done if all involved projects were open contribution and pliable to change and forking) and had simple results, but no, you have to start from scratch and spend a million LOCs reinventing wordpress. And you still write it in Lua! If you wrote it in, say, python, I'd be all over that because that presents a tangible benefit - "Lua is awful, I don't like it, and as a user of my software, you don't like it either, and you can't just patch fix that, so here is a replacement in python".
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  I'd argue (as would most of the free software community) the creation of proprietary software is entirely bullshit. Because you have to eventually reinvent it with either permissive or copyleft licenses to just avoid the huge black hole that is legal bullshit and bureaucracy around licensing rights to a number that is not even scarce once its made. Game engines are a counterexample. There are probably dozens of others. I'm trying to figure out what people are arguing against. Would you help me understand? Let's assume your argument is true: creation of most proprietary software is entirely bullshit. Ok, so?

Totient 12y ago

The guy I work for really has no idea how easy certain tasks are once you automate them. I have done nothing to correct his misconceptions. (I'm a CS grad student, working under a professor who somehow got tenure despite being unable to program his way out of a cardboard box. I swear, half of this job is tricking him into thinking I'm doing his work, so I can focus on doing actual research. ...I really need to find a new advisor.)

sillysaurus3 12y ago
What research are you working on?

reboog711 12y ago

The bulk of my clients pay me hourly, on an as needed basis. I've had a few clients; where it sometimes it feels like they are making stuff up for me to do just so I'll be available when real work comes down the pike. I have mixed feelings about this.. on one hand--billable hours. On the other hand--it is not satisfying to do things with absolutely no business value.

spinlock 12y ago
You should hire a VA to do the BS work they give you.
KMag 12y ago
If your client is a medium to large sized company, it may also be a case of needing to use budget or have budget reduced the next year. A place I once worked one year had a big budget surplus. They bought a Winnebago, affectionately named the Waltabago after Walt, the guy who ran the team. The next year, Walt bought a Sunfire V1280 with his leftover budget. Walt was a good manager and generally a good guy. It's just that the nature of his business had unpredictable ups and downs, so he was incentivized to make justifiable but wasteful purchases in order to avoid over-spending in peak cost years.
- keithpeter 12y ago
  Did you get to borrow the Winnebago? We call this need to spend the budget thing 'slippage' in the UK. Once we had a little bit of slippage, about £1k, so we bought some Sony Mavica floppy disk cameras when they were new and exotic. We just lent them out to staff to learn how to take digital pictures. That lead to digital editing, storyboards &c and quite a lot of upskill. Much better powerpoints. Just a thought...
- reboog711 12y ago
  > it may also be a case of needing to use budget or have budget reduced the next year. That could very well be a consideration.
Havoc 12y ago

hawkharris 12y ago

This reminds me of a study focusing on soccer games. It analyzed A) how often players shot goals toward the left, middle and right sides of the net; and B) how often goalies responded by jumping toward the left, middle and right sides. The stats revealed a surprising phenomenon. Though opposing players shot toward each area of the goal evenly — about 33% of the time — goalies jumped toward the left or the right 80-90% of the time. So what explains the irrational behavior of these highly skilled goalies? The researcher who presented this to me and others at a conference argued that it came down to the appearance of productivity. If a goalie leaps left or right and fails to stop the goal, he can claim that he tried his best. But if a goalie remains in the center, even if doing so is the most effective option, he risks looking like he did nothing. I call this "productivity theater." In other words, there's sometimes a disconnect between what it means to be an effective worker and what it means to appear effective. To offer just one example from the workplace: in some offices, the culture dictates that employees must stay from 8 to 6 each day. Their schedules may make them look like hard workers, but some are probably checking Facebook or email much of the day. Contrast this with offices that emphasize owning and completing projects rather than working an amount of time. With the second policy, you're likely to find some workers who appear less busy but make more meaningful contributions.

jacques_chester 12y ago
DeMarco and Lister called it "undertime".
- sitkack 12y ago
  Is that my version of "homing from work" ?
TylerJay 12y ago
As a counterpoint, I remember being taught in a Game Theory course that both the shooters and the goalies acted in accordance with the Nash Equilibrium which (IIRC) happens to be equal amounts to each option. You would think that if such a vulnerability actually existed, coaches and analysts would have figured it out and it would be exploited.

jacques_chester 12y ago

My employers are actually serious about pair programming, so I am easily getting more work done now than I've ever done before. We take lunch, we take breaks, we work fixed hours, but holy moly we also get a helluva lot done every day. It's both exhausting and refreshing.

dantheman 12y ago

"And then I thought, well, maybe that explains some other things, like why is it there’s this deep, popular resentment against people who have real jobs? They can get people so angry at auto-workers, just because they make 30 bucks an hour, which is like nowhere near what corporate lawyers make, but nobody seems to resent them. They get angry at the auto-workers; they get angry at teachers." I thought people were angry at these people because of their unions - all the other jobs he listed are nonunion and thus the higher wage is actually a market wage.

Artistry121 12y ago
Lawyers are not unionized but the bar exam definitely does limit supply. You are correct though - one major reason why teachers and auto-workers might get criticism is because they pay an organization to make sure companies and other individuals cannot contract freely.

Tycho 12y ago

Case in point: last week Barclays bank announced they were laying off 20,000 staff. Share price immediately went up 8%.

qwerty_asdf 12y ago

There's an aspect of this frustrating, forced busy-work behavior that can get baked into software development, and it isn't going away anytime soon. Technology innately gives rise to a behavior called yak shaving, and it's not limited to software development, but pretty much any form of technology-related behavior is prone to it, when layers upon layers of technology compound one another and accumulate their own accretion disks of cruft. http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/old-archive/gsb-archive/gsb2000-02-11.html http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/old-archive/gsb-archive/gs... A very simple example is needing anti-freeze to drive a car. If there were no chemical companies producing millions of gallons of anti-freeze a year, and no auto-stores to distibute periphery car necessities, and gas stations, and auto mechanics didn't supply anti-freeze, because it's beyond the scope of their expertise, how would I produce the right anti-freeze for my car on my own? Well, what are the requirements for producing industrial grade ethylene glycol? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene_glycol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene_glycol A similar open-source software example would be dependency hell. Just compare the differences in dependencies between two very popular open-source web browsers: http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/web/chromium-browser http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/web/chromium-browser http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/web/firefox http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/web/firefox In order to accurately compare the two applications, how would you take advantage of the fact that these are open-source projects, and actually review the source code, and then build from source? Each application is built upon many other independent software projects, each sub-project with it's own disciplines, specializations and dependencies. It's time consuming and painstaking behavior to dig into the source trees for these programs and all their dependencies. How deep can you go before you give up?

3minus1 12y ago

5 years ago I worked as a consultant at a large enterprise software company. There were definitely large periods of time (months long) where I was averaging 3 hours a week of actual work. Insane, insane work hours. There would be a 5 person team (Analysts, QAs, developer) spending 5 weeks on a release that consisted in 45 min worth of text changes. I don't usually hear people on HN talk about not having work to do. I guess it's different at start ups. It's just fucking unbelievable to me though that I would get paid so much to do so little. And I feel like some kind jerk complaining about it.

noonespecial 12y ago

When all you pay for is butts in the seats, don't be surprised if the only thing you get is a bunch of asses.

appreneur 12y ago

I always felt most people in IT offices occur very busy, when their work is harldy any time consuming, just to keep their job, they act busy all the time...I felt this false pretense is the primary reason most people loose confidence in trying new things and being experimental.

frik 12y ago

Office Space (1999) is a great and rather funny movie about this topic: [7,9 stars on IMDb] * IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/ * Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IwzZYRejZQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IwzZYRejZQ

hownottowrite 12y ago

For Reference: David Graeber's original article: http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ David Graeber's Book, "Debt: The First 5,000 Years": http://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290/ http://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290/

zobzu 12y ago

well they sure have a point. then i work from home (telecommute then) i dont work "as long" but i certainly get much more done AND i am also happier. thats mainly because i dont have to "look busy" or "browse sites for a moment until my brain is able to function decently enough to work again" instead i can go for a job, do the laundry, what not. works much better than sitting on the computer.

torbit 12y ago

Just two weeks ago I was talking to a guy in the military. His government job was to monitor military test taking. At times only 2 people would show up in one day to take a test. He gets paid $20+ an hour. I didn't ask how many hours a week he worked, but I got the impression it was his current main job.

acc01 12y ago

Relevant short, "el Empleo": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxUuU1jwMgM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxUuU1jwMgM

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sidcool 12y ago

I was in Houston for a couple of years in 2011-2012 for a big bank in the capacity of a Software Engineer. The environment there was caustic and anti-relaxation. The people introduced artificial stresses to sound and seem important (mostly to avoid being laid off). There's one manager especially who reminded me of a wolf on prowl. He roamed about in the office from time to time and shouted orders arbitrarily at people. Most of them ignored him, but he seemed important to many. I got tired of the constant bickering and unnecessary meetings, left the job.