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Hey kids - important lesson here. You don't realize how hard it will be to receive permission to do work at work. Of course, you will still be expected to look

Hey kids - important lesson here. You don't realize how hard it will be to receive permission to do work at work. Of course, you will still be expected to look like you are working and to even put in overtime pretending to work. My recommendation is to find things to do that look like work. If you are a programmer, learn new languages or develop your own projects. If you are expected to write, work on your own blog articles. If you sometimes work offsite or in different parts of the building, go sleep or read in your car (away from where you could get caught.) If you are writing or programming, nobody can tell over your shoulder if it is work related or not. Hell, your manager probably has no clue what you are supposed to be doing anyhow and is just pretending to do his job too. Help the guy out and give him the warm fuzzy feeling that you are working. Telling everyone you meet how much work you have to do and how hard you are working on it won't hurt either. I know it sucks but you can't fix it. The ability to look like you are working while not losing your mind is a critical survival skill. The sooner you cultivate that skill the happier you will be.

antocv 11y ago
I wish there was a way to fix this. Not easy. One guess is, its just not in human nature, its not possible, to be productive 8h between X and Y hours of the day. Not for you, programmer, not for the manager either. So we start learning how to pretend and eventually all we do is pretend. Thats just one of the reasons. To fix the problem - an organization and contract which is not time or space based, you dont have to sit there in that open space, or be there between X and Y. But then we woudl've been back to quite radical economy, quite radical model of society than we have now - where you dont sell your labor, where you would sell your produce. And thats problematic because we cant really measure or quantify "what programmer/manager produces". So we end up in this circus of pretending to know what that value is of programmer when in a cubicle on a timeclock, and pretending to care, and then come the backstabbing and office politics.

antocv 11y ago

I wish there was a way to fix this. Not easy. One guess is, its just not in human nature, its not possible, to be productive 8h between X and Y hours of the day. Not for you, programmer, not for the manager either. So we start learning how to pretend and eventually all we do is pretend. Thats just one of the reasons. To fix the problem - an organization and contract which is not time or space based, you dont have to sit there in that open space, or be there between X and Y. But then we woudl've been back to quite radical economy, quite radical model of society than we have now - where you dont sell your labor, where you would sell your produce. And thats problematic because we cant really measure or quantify "what programmer/manager produces". So we end up in this circus of pretending to know what that value is of programmer when in a cubicle on a timeclock, and pretending to care, and then come the backstabbing and office politics.