Ask HN: Make something of the free time at work | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Make something of the free time at work

52 pointshighhedgehog82 comments

In my job there are a lot of times where I am not doing much and slacking off. Unfortunately there is a lot of control due to security and I cannot do much on my computer (no install of software, a lot of websites are blocked by the firewall etc.).

For instance, I would like to learn a new technology, or consolidate one (for instance Node.js) that I know, but I can't because I cannot install Node.js, ore reach npm to install packages.

How can I use the time that I have available during work? What would you do?

Books are not a good idea because I don't think it would seems good to bring a book and study it at my desk

EDIT: I work in Banking and I cannot bring anything with me (such as my personal laptop). This means I am constricted to the use of my work PC. Something like repl could work, but for instance, that is not reachable for me

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I think this is asking the wrong question.

Your team lead might not have realised that the workload is becoming sporadic.

Speak to them, explain the situation, and ask if there are other smaller tasks you could use to fill in the gaps.

If it "wouldn't seem good to bring a book to study at my desk", then it's probably not a good idea to do effectively the same thing on the computer either.

y, I wouldn't draw attention to your workload, I've seen people ask about mores tasks due to not having anything to do, only to find out the company has a low level of work/revenue available and this person was let go. Maybe see about changing teams or taking on a higher level position, be careful how you frame it. Typically managers are stacking tasks/assignments/deadlines so you're as busy as possible.

> I've seen people ask about mores tasks due to not having anything to do, only to find out the company has a low level of work/revenue available and this person was let go.

I witnessed a similar scenario with a former colleague.

He would have 2ish hours of dead time each day after submitting his daily/weekly/monthly reports to different departments (he was a data analyst). He wouldn't have anything to do until the different dept. heads replied with more work based on the last report.

He asked our manager what else he could help with (on multiple occasions) and came off as super driven/motivated from my read of the situation.

I had similar dead spots and... well.. STFU. I would browse reddit/hackernews or work on a personal blog post. At the time, I felt like a dick for not doing the same and asking for more work. My rationale was "I get paid to do X, I have done X, it is not my job to load myself up with work if I can do X in 6 hours instead of 8".

Anyway, in January a few years ago, we had a restructuring (I still lol at that word every time) and several jobs were "shifted" from fulltime to partime/casual. My colleague had his position "re-evaluated" to 18 hours per week from 40. He could either accept the new role or take a redundancy package.

He took the redundancy package.

I kept my 40 hour per week job and ended up with a slight COL raise.

I chalk this up to a real life example of "what's good for the whole isn't always good for the individual".

I find that many software companies understand and aim for redundancy. We know the benefits of having redundant servers. "Bus count" is also a well known term.

I use https://observablehq.com/ when in constrained environments

Wrong question. You're being paid to work (and earn money for the bank), not work on ad hoc personal projects.

You should go to your supervisor and tell them you either need more work, or would like to establish formal career growth goals.

If your supervisor is not receptive to this, it's time to start looking for another job.

The above assumes you're in a professional role. If you're a teller/clerk and there just aren't customers, I'm not sure - the bank very well may want you sitting idle and available for the next customer. Of course, if that's true, you probably need to look for a new job because they're over-staffed.

No, they are being paid to do the work they are given.

It is up to them to look for more work if this is what they want. There is no obligation here, management runs the company as they see fit.

So the question is very reasonable : once work is done and since they apparently have to be physically present, how can they manage this free time.

That works if you're happy with the status quo, don't want a promotion, and are happy being bored half the day. The fact that the OP asked makes me believe that's not what he wants.

OP asked what to do with his free time at work, not how to manage his career

You're making assumptions about the op's situation. Their description could easily match one of my first summer jobs - also at a bank.

On a typical day I would walk in around 9:30, ask my supervisor if there is anything to do, usually the answer was no, back to my desk and sit around, leave around 3:30.

Computers were completely locked down, I did not even have Internet access. And yes, it was completely miserable. I read a lot of e-books that summer.

1. read ebook. problem solved.

2. make use of Instapaper. save a bunch of articles to read into Instapaper the previous night, come to work and read them via Instapaper.

I'd wholeheartedly recommend Glitch for this situation:

http://glitch.com/

It will give you an IDE and a VM to build projects, and a big community to share/get inspired by. It's sort of like MySpace for web apps.

Solution: https://repl.it

I learned Clojure at my last job when I had downtime. I was restricted from downloading Clojure dependencies which was a pain, so I either used mobile hotspot, or I used repl.it which has about every relevant language in the last 40 years. Many of them come with a web framework to make a web app (which they also host for you for free)

Hah REPL/Colab/Kaggle are great, did a similar thing at my last job when there was downtime. No one cared what we did while the reaction was running.

First and foremost, this is your time and you should use it how you see fit.

Here are some random suggestions:

- Solve algorithmic problems on Codewars or HackerRank

- Build an app on Python Anywhere (cloud9.io was a more convenient and versatile remote coding sandbox, but its UX has become much worse after they were acquired by AWS)

- Try to answer some questions on Stack Overflow

- Take a coding course on Codecademy

- Take a ML (or any other) course on Coursera

- Take a language course on Duolingo (you won't be able to do speaking exercises, but you'll still be able to learn)

- Write for your blog (on any platform that you can access - starting a site on your own domain is a good option because it will most likely not be blocked by your filters)

Some of these sites can be blocked on your machine, so choose what is available.

Some man pages are pretty interesting, like the ones for Perl if you use the language.

You could also become really, really good at using a text editor, it becomes a bit of a game and it's going to be useful for as long as you are planning to type.

If it would look bad to read a book at your desk, that would seem to suggest there’s something else your employer expects you to be doing with your time?

Let's not pretend that "looking busy" isn't part of most office culture. There are times at most jobs, statistically, where you have nothing expected of you but are still required to be at a desk and look like a member of the workforce.

It's tolerated that you are on your phone, for instance, but I think having a book wouldn't be..

Maybe you can connect your phone to your monitor? At least Samsungs have a desktop-like interface. Don't have much experience with it, but if you got a browser with unrestricted internet, you can do pretty much everything.

HN is probably not tolerated either yet how many of us are HNing at work?

because opening a new tab in your browser is definetly less noticeable than a book open on your desk

Good point. At the same time all browsing history is logged somewhere and could be self documenting.

yes but I'm not worried about that. I see people reading news and stuff like that so

Pretty sure you employer expects you to be making them money with your time. At the same time, you should be expecting to do as little as possible for your compensation.

It's funny how culturally, we paint business practices of optimizing profit as picturesque but paint labor optimizing their profit as a sin.

It's really all a matter of perspective and somewhere, most the labor force was convinced to take the capital owners perspective.

This is because if everyone does very little the company goes bust and we are all out of work.

Organised labour movements are supposed to be about what is fair.

A fair wage for fair safe work.

I agree completely, as with most things in life, there's a healthy balance somewhere in between. One extreme or the other tend to be counterproductive to everyone involved. Theres a reasonable amount of productivity that's respectable with a reasonable compensation that considers everyone's situation.

Unfortunately, the economic system we've adopted tends to work quite well at finding extremes and many of the corrective measures to flatten these out are failing more and more.

Maybe we're in the healthy balance.

Maybe we're not.

> At the same time, you should be expecting to do as little as possible for your compensation.

As little as possible within some allotted time, or spending as little time as possible?

The first one sounds miserable.

Depends on the type of work. If time makes sense, then sure.

If other personal resources make more sense (your car/fuel, building materials you obtain, existing code bases you already created, etc.). You should be optimizing for yourself.

> but paint labor optimizing their profit as a sin.

This gets a real ugly name applied to it as well, the label of "time thief". How dark is that?

Just to add to what others already said : You could also invest in making use of your time to create values in other, more 'social' but techy ways.

I also work in a bank, and started spending some of my idle time preparing to organise meetups, invite external speakers, and find ideas that would contribute to tech for everybody. Things like pushing for the start of a tech blog for example. This usually requires finding the right people, know how to convince, and other things you won't get blocked on, while staying on the tech side. Or even spend time writing one pagers on how your company could become more efficient.

Just another perspective. Not everything you can learn has to do with your computer. you could also spend more time with some of your business pips for example and learn more from their processes.

If you really just want to iterate fast and write code all day, maybe your current environment is not the best for you :).

The old saying goes.. "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean".

Define "clean" as you will for your work context.

Trying to do things that aren't work while you're paid to do work is an easy way to short circuit your career prospects. Don't do that.

Make good use of the time. Talk to your manager about things you could be doing that would improve the codebase you work on and enable you to learn new things. Better yet, make some suggestions.

That's only if you are planning to stick around. If you are thinking of moving on soon it's a good time to learn and practice.

and I am not planning to stick around

If there's nothing to do, there's nothing to do. Also, aren't you at work? Also, in Office Space, Peter Gibbons basically gets promoted for slacking off - contrast this with Milton.

Also, aren't you at work?

No.

At my work we organized group trainings, where we all learn X technology together that is related to our jobs in that we could do more if we knew how to use it but don't actually need to use it. Maybe there is some approved software that could be installed that is semi-related to your job.

It sounds like you are in the wrong job. You are a creative thinker and deserve a better suited place for your type of mind. It sounds like you are in a prison of boredom. I would recommend working remotely and have a work machine dedicated and your own personal machine.

i definetly feel in the wrong job and I want to change it, but in the meanwhile

I've worked in three different banks and was able to bring my laptop (not connected to the bank network of course), use my headphones to cut the open space noise and listen to anything I want.

As in your bank, proxy was very restrictive, a lot of the web wasn't reachable, but with my laptop when I had free time between projects or issues I could use them for something interesting, and management/security was OK with that.

Seems like hell, just get out of there if you can and have the chance to. In the meantime try to ask for other tasks, or try to refactor some code, there's always room for improvement somewhere, and it's better than looking at the clock for hours a day.

Good luck!

Test your SQL fu: https://mystery.knightlab.com/ No installation needed. All online.

Pretty sure there is a codepen like site for nodejs too. Find it, build something.

I'd arrange meetings with colleagues in other teams and departments to find out what problems they are working on and how you might help. If they have nothing, you could arrange to shadow them for a few hours or half a day. This way you'll find new things to work on, or have a greater understanding of the business and have a larger internal network. Alternatively, if there are ways the business could be improved, you could work on a proposal, and get buy-in and ideas from your colleagues and finally present it to your management.

Use the website PlayOnDocker and run there your experiments with NodeJS, free and out of restrictions. Otherwise, consider buying a VPS or build a VPN at home and doing your experiments on your local server

Just don't put any personal credentials on those instances (e.g. github tokens, aws access keys, etc). I don't know if it's still the case but when it was first released I was able to mount other container volumes and snag them. (Reported to Docker security)

yeah right, it should be taken only as testing environment

Read man pages!

These constitute a rabbit hole of extremely interesting documentation. They will help you improve as a developer, and more importantly broaden your horizons beyond what you ever thought was possible. Enjoy!

I used to work at bank too without admin rights. Anaconda has a portable version which can be installed to My Documents folder(if space permits) without need for admin rights. This comes with lots of apps for you to tinker with. Python, numpy, pandas, flask, sqlalchemy and many more.

EDIT: One of my quants did such a great job with Jupiter notebook and anaconda that it is now added to the official list of softwares that we can request for installation.

The raspberry pi is a good suggestion, but if you don't want to be seen bringing outside hardware into the building, you could look into Amazon Workspaces or another remote workstation service, or host your own box and remote into it. Workspaces has a web client for accessing your workspace, so unless Amazon cloud services is specifically blocked at work, you should be able to access it. There's a small monthly fee, but I'd think it'd be well worth it.

If you can't bring a book, then you probably shouldn't bring your own laptop or much anything else. Do you have your phone? Maybe you could do something on that.

I indeed cannot bring my laptop. It's a bank and they are taking security seriously apparently, which is good on one side, but bad on my side because I cannot do anything.

You could answer questions on https://stackoverflow.com

If research is something that might be considered work during the day you could hop on Sci-Hub and read some interesting papers.

I used to code using a paper and pencil when away from a machine. It was actually more likely to run without error too.

Can you use https://repl.it ?

You could learn some new tech/patterns on there including NodeJS (https://repl.it/languages/nodejs)

good, I didn't know it.

EDIT: Tried, blocked (failed to connect)

Damn, sorry to hear it. Other users listed some good options, like https://codesandbox.io and https://observablebq.com/

Don't undermine your company or risk being fired.

That said, you can go to LeetCode (or just email yourself screenshots of the problems) and then work on the solutions in Notepad++. Email those solutions to yourself and then, when you get home, you can submit those solutions for credit.

If they have that many controls at the desktop, emailing code to a personal address is not going to go well.

Do you have access to codepen, scrimba or jsfiddle or something similar. There is a lot of front end stuff you could learn just with that to keep you busy for days. Bring in a book or use your phone for a tutorial. G’luck

I have the same issue I used the site glitch to learn Hopefully it works for you

I also work in a bank. We can submit request to install software. Of course we need to get manager's approval. So what kind of software do you use daily?

I'm sure many people have headphones on, download courses on your phone and listen to them, or audio books, nobody needs to know where the sound is coming from !

Nope. None. I had them in the beginning, until one day my boss asked me if I had headphones on and told me to take them off because we can't

What? No headphones? I wouldn't want to be working in such a place. I almost can't code at all without headphones on...

well my job is not coding per se. it's more like handling third parties that actually do the code

And you didn't quit on the spot, because???

oh, I will, I just don't want to end up in another shitty job like this. Unfortunately this is not an area for high quality tech companies id like to work for

Maybe use this to learn node? https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9

It would really help to have more details, like what country you're in and what industry, e.g. Banking, Defense, etc.

banking

Could you bring your own laptop? Of course not connecting it to the LAN.

Alternative: use a RPi with your monitor/mouse/keyboard.

I actually used to do this - just have it casually sitting on the side of my desk. Most of the time it was lid-open off to the side (which ostensibly signaled I wasn't actively working on it, maybe just checking something). In rare cases my manager came around, I could pretend quickly enough I was actually working. This ended up being a very productive period for me personally (maybe 3-6 months) due to this change.

RPi = Raspberry Pi ? Not sure that's commonly used enough to use without a parentheses long version :(

Pretty sure it is. Fairly ubiquitous, and I know of nothing else that would conflict with it.

RasPi is also used.

No, it wouldn't be acceptable

You could get very good at vanilla js.

How so?

Bring a laptop to work and use that when you have freetime?

are sites like glitch.com and codesandbox.io blocked? they give you a development environment in the browser

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