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I've never really had an office job, and I am having a very hard time believing this. Can I get a corroborating account or two?

windsurfer 17y ago
I'll just chip in an "aye" and leave it at that.
- jkmcf 17y ago
  With government contractors, gov employees, and union workers, they actively avoid helping anyone out if it is outside their specialty, even if they are severely under tasked. In fact, they will actively try to avoid doing their own jobs. I've seen it happen too many times. I've heard worse than I've seen from people I trust. The disgusting part is this is accepted as normal behavior. There's rarely punishment because these people earn their employer serious money. Contractors tend to be paid 1/2 - 1/4 of the money they actually bring in. For gov't contractors, there go your tax dollars. People complain about government workers being lazy. No, they are just as lazy as most regular Americans[1]. [1] I have no idea if this applies to other countries, but human nature tells me it probably is.
reedlaw 17y ago
It think it's more like the 80/20 rule in most offices. 80% of the employees only work two hours a day and a handful work frantically to get all the real work done.
andrewljohnson 17y ago
That's why I work for myself now. I used to work 12 hours a day for my employer, but it never got me anywhere. I don't think I'm the type suited for a 2-hour workday.
mrtron 17y ago
Some people do more, some less. Most people think they do much more. At several large companies I worked at, it was absolutely impossible to do anything more that. Their structure made crushed any attempt at it with meetings. There were weeks where I had over 30 hours of meetings scheduled. Meetings where everyone felt productive but nothing really was accomplished.
Dobbs 17y ago
The amount of work I do is largely dependent on the number of projects our boss has for us to work on that day. So I can range from actually having work to do for 10 hours straight to having maybe a half hour of real work in the day to do. When I do have work to do I would say maybe about 80% of my time/focus is actually on doing the work.
- brandnewlow 17y ago
  As someone that runs a startup with a handful of interns, this is one of my biggest anxieties, that my interns will be sitting around waiting for "the boss" (me) to give them something to do. To remedy this, I try never to give them tasks, but instead to give them expectations, targets, and responsibilities. Then my job becomes one of checking in on them and assisting from time to time if they appear to be struggling. They know they'll be held accountable for how things turn out, so they tend to work hard. That said, getting away from task-driven management is a constant struggle.
nostrademons 17y ago
Varies a lot between particular companies. When I started at Google, one of the nearly universal comments from my fellow Nooglers was how much higher expectations were than at their previous jobs. (The workload is a little lower than when I had my own startup but higher than at both of the previous startups I've worked at, which was quite a bit more than I expected.) The two-hour workday seems fairly common among large companies in the valley though. I've also seen it at poorly-managed startups - those are the ones that either go bust or become small businesses. I think that 20% time has a lot to do with this. I dunno about other folks, but I view 20% time as "All those other things I could be doing with access to Google's data that I try to squeeze in when I don't have an official project to do." Given the near infinity of nifty things to do with the web and a few zillion computers at your fingertips, that's quite a lot. Another big factor seems to be whether companies assign tasks to individuals or to products. The number of tasks you're assigned is limited by your manager's bandwidth: if you're a fairly talented worker at the bottom of the totem poll, it's very likely that you'll be able to complete tasks faster than your manager can dream them up. But if tasks are just assigned to the product - "Well, we could be better in X, Y, and Z ways. Oh, and anything else you can think up" - there are a potentially infinite number of ways that the product could be better. If you just pick them off one by one as soon as you finish your previous task, without worrying about who owns them, you end up perpetually busy.
sireat 17y ago
This is true and does apply to most of Europe, as well. It is not as bad as 15 minutes for Peter Gibbons, but you never actually work for full 8 hours. IMHO, if you get the job done in 4 hours, someone else does it in 3 hours, someone else in 10 hours, and someone else in 13 hours, there is nothing wrong with being that 4 hour guy.
pasbesoin 17y ago
It varies by location and role, but yes, it does occur. In my last position, some of the goofs spend probably a minimum of 3 hours / day purely socializing. (You can then add on browsing and whatnot to that.) One person spent hours on their cell phone while sort of typing. Needless to say, the quality as well as the quantity of output of these people was hardly stellar. Yet they were the social bugs, and in this part of the organization, that apparently was what succeeded. If where you are doesn't value your kind of input, then however good it is, it is others who will "succeed". And they did "finish" things. Just in such a state, that others had to clean up the shortfall. But that wasn't really measured. I find most corporate "metrics" I've encountered akin to all the jokes you hear about statistics (lies, damned lies, and...). Well, I've said before that I need to curb my "bitter old man" comments. But you asked for collaboration, so: Yes, this really does exist.
jasonkester 17y ago
Yes, it's like this. Depressingly so. I used to work 3-month contracts, broken up by 9 month roadtrips, so coming back to the office I'd be stoked to get back to writing code, with months of pent-up energy ready to burst out in the form of productivity. On two occasions, I took over projects from another developer who had been working on them the entire time I'd been away, and rebuilt them from scratch in less than a week. While it's certainly possible that I'm 100x-500x as productive as those guys, more likely is that they'd simply been coasting along that whole time. It took a lot of diplomacy not to rock that particular boat. "Uh... yeah... it must be this new technology that's just so darn efficient. Certainly not any fault of the team or anything... Say, did you catch the game last night?"
fatdog789 17y ago
It's not true in the legal field. Clients demand very specific breakdowns of hours worked, down to the specific issue researched/briefed/discussed, and will refuse to pay for fluff work. In the public sector end of the legal field, there's just too much work to take a break, especially in the DA and public defender offices.

windsurfer 17y ago

I'll just chip in an "aye" and leave it at that.

jkmcf 17y ago
With government contractors, gov employees, and union workers, they actively avoid helping anyone out if it is outside their specialty, even if they are severely under tasked. In fact, they will actively try to avoid doing their own jobs. I've seen it happen too many times. I've heard worse than I've seen from people I trust. The disgusting part is this is accepted as normal behavior. There's rarely punishment because these people earn their employer serious money. Contractors tend to be paid 1/2 - 1/4 of the money they actually bring in. For gov't contractors, there go your tax dollars. People complain about government workers being lazy. No, they are just as lazy as most regular Americans[1]. [1] I have no idea if this applies to other countries, but human nature tells me it probably is.

reedlaw 17y ago

It think it's more like the 80/20 rule in most offices. 80% of the employees only work two hours a day and a handful work frantically to get all the real work done.

andrewljohnson 17y ago

That's why I work for myself now. I used to work 12 hours a day for my employer, but it never got me anywhere. I don't think I'm the type suited for a 2-hour workday.

mrtron 17y ago

Some people do more, some less. Most people think they do much more. At several large companies I worked at, it was absolutely impossible to do anything more that. Their structure made crushed any attempt at it with meetings. There were weeks where I had over 30 hours of meetings scheduled. Meetings where everyone felt productive but nothing really was accomplished.

Dobbs 17y ago

The amount of work I do is largely dependent on the number of projects our boss has for us to work on that day. So I can range from actually having work to do for 10 hours straight to having maybe a half hour of real work in the day to do. When I do have work to do I would say maybe about 80% of my time/focus is actually on doing the work.

brandnewlow 17y ago
As someone that runs a startup with a handful of interns, this is one of my biggest anxieties, that my interns will be sitting around waiting for "the boss" (me) to give them something to do. To remedy this, I try never to give them tasks, but instead to give them expectations, targets, and responsibilities. Then my job becomes one of checking in on them and assisting from time to time if they appear to be struggling. They know they'll be held accountable for how things turn out, so they tend to work hard. That said, getting away from task-driven management is a constant struggle.

nostrademons 17y ago

Varies a lot between particular companies. When I started at Google, one of the nearly universal comments from my fellow Nooglers was how much higher expectations were than at their previous jobs. (The workload is a little lower than when I had my own startup but higher than at both of the previous startups I've worked at, which was quite a bit more than I expected.) The two-hour workday seems fairly common among large companies in the valley though. I've also seen it at poorly-managed startups - those are the ones that either go bust or become small businesses. I think that 20% time has a lot to do with this. I dunno about other folks, but I view 20% time as "All those other things I could be doing with access to Google's data that I try to squeeze in when I don't have an official project to do." Given the near infinity of nifty things to do with the web and a few zillion computers at your fingertips, that's quite a lot. Another big factor seems to be whether companies assign tasks to individuals or to products. The number of tasks you're assigned is limited by your manager's bandwidth: if you're a fairly talented worker at the bottom of the totem poll, it's very likely that you'll be able to complete tasks faster than your manager can dream them up. But if tasks are just assigned to the product - "Well, we could be better in X, Y, and Z ways. Oh, and anything else you can think up" - there are a potentially infinite number of ways that the product could be better. If you just pick them off one by one as soon as you finish your previous task, without worrying about who owns them, you end up perpetually busy.

sireat 17y ago

This is true and does apply to most of Europe, as well. It is not as bad as 15 minutes for Peter Gibbons, but you never actually work for full 8 hours. IMHO, if you get the job done in 4 hours, someone else does it in 3 hours, someone else in 10 hours, and someone else in 13 hours, there is nothing wrong with being that 4 hour guy.

pasbesoin 17y ago

It varies by location and role, but yes, it does occur. In my last position, some of the goofs spend probably a minimum of 3 hours / day purely socializing. (You can then add on browsing and whatnot to that.) One person spent hours on their cell phone while sort of typing. Needless to say, the quality as well as the quantity of output of these people was hardly stellar. Yet they were the social bugs, and in this part of the organization, that apparently was what succeeded. If where you are doesn't value your kind of input, then however good it is, it is others who will "succeed". And they did "finish" things. Just in such a state, that others had to clean up the shortfall. But that wasn't really measured. I find most corporate "metrics" I've encountered akin to all the jokes you hear about statistics (lies, damned lies, and...). Well, I've said before that I need to curb my "bitter old man" comments. But you asked for collaboration, so: Yes, this really does exist.

jasonkester 17y ago

Yes, it's like this. Depressingly so. I used to work 3-month contracts, broken up by 9 month roadtrips, so coming back to the office I'd be stoked to get back to writing code, with months of pent-up energy ready to burst out in the form of productivity. On two occasions, I took over projects from another developer who had been working on them the entire time I'd been away, and rebuilt them from scratch in less than a week. While it's certainly possible that I'm 100x-500x as productive as those guys, more likely is that they'd simply been coasting along that whole time. It took a lot of diplomacy not to rock that particular boat. "Uh... yeah... it must be this new technology that's just so darn efficient. Certainly not any fault of the team or anything... Say, did you catch the game last night?"

fatdog789 17y ago

It's not true in the legal field. Clients demand very specific breakdowns of hours worked, down to the specific issue researched/briefed/discussed, and will refuse to pay for fluff work. In the public sector end of the legal field, there's just too much work to take a break, especially in the DA and public defender offices.