4 ms·

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 al

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...)
        dsirijus 12y ago
        Well, you do have a new unread mail now. :)
  - BSousa 12y ago
    Not sure if you are just making a joke or not, but please, if you started to drink more due to a boring job (including drinking before/while on the job) either talk to someone for help (a sibling/wife/friend if you don't want to go the professional route) and try to change jobs as quickly as possible (if you feel the drinking is related to the job). I've seen some colleagues becoming borderline alcoholics (even if highly functional) by using alcohol as a coping mechanism for work. Nothing wrong with a few drinks, or a night out where you get plastered, but if the drinking is related to the job, please ask for help/do something.
    - icedchai 12y ago
      maybe he's drinking on the job? might be a good way to pass the time.
- jes5199 12y ago
  Maybe! but sometimes the net productivity win comes from letting the frantic person spin their gears down until you reach a velocity where thinking clearly is possible
xr09 12y ago
When reading stuff like this I wonder, how do the Windows folks manage to do the same? A browser disguised as Visual Studio? doubledesktop.exe? I'm so thankful for my *nix with all these little toys.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- igl 12y ago
  Visual Studio has a browser ;)
- pdkl95 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key These days, the Boss Key is probably mapped to the "minimize" keyboard shortcut. //well, at least that how they used to do such things; a new solution may be needed in the "open plan" offices that have been trendy
- AimHere 12y ago
  When I was stuck in a meaningless office job with too much time, I took to learning myself a perl (that was used for some login scripting so there was an interpreter lying about) using notepad to edit, and the windows cmd.exe to execute the scripts. One other (more senior) employee did get curious and asked me what I was up to, but I did have a script that was actually useful to get part of my job done, so I just showed that off. Then I went back to teaching Perl to play scrabble!
- stephengillie 12y ago
  Yes, VS and SSMS open do help. I keep RDCMan open on my 2nd screen, always connected to an administrative RDP server in the production domain, usually with Perfmon pulling occasional counts of IIS users and connections from our clusters. Sometimes I'll have ADUC or DNS or DFS or WSUS or SSMS up instead. Half of my monitoring tools and error logs, and all of my ticket systems, use web interfaces. So do Sharepoint and parts of TFS and Office365. I use Chrome and keep a dozen tabs pinned, most of which are work-related. HN and Imgur are among those. And then there's the spattering of Office applications (Outlook, Word, Excel), and Lync and other chat clients, and Notepad++ and Snip tool and Fiddler and Putty and other utilities... It's not hard to hide anything at all.
qwerty_asdf 12y ago
Don't worry. The network administrators know how lazy you really are.
- Havoc 12y ago
  >The network administrators know how lazy you really are. Not always. The clients net admin can't see it (encrypted VPN) and my own companies net admin would catch hell for looking at my traffic too carefully (NDAs). Everything is logged though...so people behave.

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...)
      - dsirijus 12y ago
        Well, you do have a new unread mail now. :)
- BSousa 12y ago
  Not sure if you are just making a joke or not, but please, if you started to drink more due to a boring job (including drinking before/while on the job) either talk to someone for help (a sibling/wife/friend if you don't want to go the professional route) and try to change jobs as quickly as possible (if you feel the drinking is related to the job). I've seen some colleagues becoming borderline alcoholics (even if highly functional) by using alcohol as a coping mechanism for work. Nothing wrong with a few drinks, or a night out where you get plastered, but if the drinking is related to the job, please ask for help/do something.
  - icedchai 12y ago
    maybe he's drinking on the job? might be a good way to pass the time.
jes5199 12y ago
Maybe! but sometimes the net productivity win comes from letting the frantic person spin their gears down until you reach a velocity where thinking clearly is possible

xr09 12y ago

When reading stuff like this I wonder, how do the Windows folks manage to do the same? A browser disguised as Visual Studio? doubledesktop.exe? I'm so thankful for my *nix with all these little toys.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
igl 12y ago
Visual Studio has a browser ;)
pdkl95 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key These days, the Boss Key is probably mapped to the "minimize" keyboard shortcut. //well, at least that how they used to do such things; a new solution may be needed in the "open plan" offices that have been trendy
AimHere 12y ago
When I was stuck in a meaningless office job with too much time, I took to learning myself a perl (that was used for some login scripting so there was an interpreter lying about) using notepad to edit, and the windows cmd.exe to execute the scripts. One other (more senior) employee did get curious and asked me what I was up to, but I did have a script that was actually useful to get part of my job done, so I just showed that off. Then I went back to teaching Perl to play scrabble!
stephengillie 12y ago
Yes, VS and SSMS open do help. I keep RDCMan open on my 2nd screen, always connected to an administrative RDP server in the production domain, usually with Perfmon pulling occasional counts of IIS users and connections from our clusters. Sometimes I'll have ADUC or DNS or DFS or WSUS or SSMS up instead. Half of my monitoring tools and error logs, and all of my ticket systems, use web interfaces. So do Sharepoint and parts of TFS and Office365. I use Chrome and keep a dozen tabs pinned, most of which are work-related. HN and Imgur are among those. And then there's the spattering of Office applications (Outlook, Word, Excel), and Lync and other chat clients, and Notepad++ and Snip tool and Fiddler and Putty and other utilities... It's not hard to hide anything at all.

qwerty_asdf 12y ago

Don't worry. The network administrators know how lazy you really are.

Havoc 12y ago
>The network administrators know how lazy you really are. Not always. The clients net admin can't see it (encrypted VPN) and my own companies net admin would catch hell for looking at my traffic too carefully (NDAs). Everything is logged though...so people behave.