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Comment by chamberecho | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea if it was good for their culture since I never worked there... but I reckon a lot of corporate software engineering jobs have the same luxury, informally. I work at a big US bank where you might not expect such freedom, but in reality there is great flexibility to do things outside of the normal day to day BAU, simply because it's not hard to deliver a sufficient amount of work in less time than you're expected to be in the office (or covid equivalent), and nobody keeps that close an eye on what you do anyway. Still, with all that freedom people don't always use it for good, they may actually just bunk off...

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> Still, with all that freedom people don't always use it for good, they may actually just bunk off...

This is the right call. If you ever actually move the needle on anything important your fun 20% project will assuredly be taken over by middle management and you will get pushed out. If you have free time at a bank either slack off or work on low-effort projects that look good on your performance reviews.

As a counterpoint, I've been promoted so that I could maintain leadership of a successful 20% project before. And I didn't go into it expecting it to get any visibility, it just happened.

Not all workplaces are toxic. You generally have to take charge of your own career. But often the politics align such that it'd be strange to kick someone off their 20% project if it's successful.

Agreed, it absolutely depends on where you work and sometimes your management chain. I'm mostly referring to the finance industry where I've seen this pattern repeated many times.

Still, with all that freedom people don't always use it for good, they may actually just bunk off...

I imagine no one at Google used their 20% time project to bunk off, simply because it was 20% of their working time, and not 20% of their contracted hours. If you're supposed to do 40 hours a week but you actually spend 80 hours working on work and 20 hours on your 20% project then you aren't bunking off.

Why would one do twice the hours that one is paid for? That makes no sense. :)

At some places that is the culture, and I'll do it for a couple weeks during a crunch, but I refuse to do more than that. After a week or two your efficiency goes down incredibly unless it is "your baby" or your passion and it's basically "fun" for you. I've never had real fun working on someone else's baby. Burn out is a real thing. We didn't evolve to sit on our asses in front of computers 16 hours a day, it's a simple matter of biology. We are adaptable, but we're not that adaptable.

Exactly. I can’t work 12 straight hours on an average day, my mind wouldn’t have allowed me to.

> Still, with all that freedom people don't always use it for good, they may actually just bunk off...

Working smart and not hard and reaping the rewards is not "bad".

The Protestant work ethic and living to work aren't healthy for everyone and I don't really see why we need to assign value judgements to people who do or don't subscribe to it.

I don’t trust software engineers without sufficient laziness.

> don't always use it for good, they may actually just bunk off...

Which is good if you're tired, overworked, didn't sleep well or just want to spend some time with family. I usually use it to read books not closely related to my daily work, but related to what my coworkers do. Like about subscription models, devops, scrum master roles.

I worked in a company that did not keep tabs unemployees at all. I was able to eventually reduce the amount of work it took to do my job to about 20 minutes per week. I use that time to learn how to program, then left and started an agency.

Tell us about your agency.

What have you worked on? How did you find your clients or customers or projects?

Is it a consultancy? Or did you develop a marketable product?

What technologies, programming languages, databases, and tech stack did you use?

Keep the information anonymous, of course, if you want to maintain your privacy.

Business siders including HR, marketing, sales, product, execs, managers etc ALL universally don't work Fridays. They (used to) come in for a couple hours then "bunk off" to the bar for lunch and happy hour (starts at 3). I find it ridiculous that engineers actually do work on Fridays, much less Friday after 3pm.

Depends on the place for both counts.

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