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Comment by librish | Hacker News Reader

(This reply is written with the assumption that you're not putting in 80 hour weeks, but rather juggling multiple companies during a normal workday).

Because in a lot of software engineering jobs we are given a lot of trust in managing our own workload and this is a breach of that trust.

If you have too much on your plate you can (in well functioning teams) tell your manager "hey, we can't do X" or "we need to push the deadline on Y" and that will be taken at face value. You won't be expected to put in 80 hour weeks just to get it done outside of extraordinary circumstances.

The flip side of that is that if you have so little work that you have time to work a whole other job you're meant to tell your manager "hey, I have spare cycles, what do we need to get done?".

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> This reply is written with the assumption that you're not putting in 80 hour weeks

I'll note that even if you are, your not putting in the same quality 40 hours at either job you'd be capable if you were just working a single job. There are plenty of people who think they are capable of this pace, I've yet to meet someone who actually is.

Of course if you have good management in place this is detected via the poor performance rather than needing to worry about butt-in-seat time.

There was an hourly contractor I knew that used company A's laptop and wifi connection to do work for Company B, doing code check ins on Company B's open source github with his real name.

He would go hide into some office in Company A for a couple hours during the work day doing some kind of meeting, hoping that no one would notice him behind the glass walls.

Meanwhile his performance sucked for Company A, and he couldn't handle apparently simple tasks either. The github check-ins were flagged by the firewall, and they summarily let him go as soon as they saw it.

I would not hire him if his resume crossed my path again.

> you're meant to tell your manager "hey, I have spare cycles, what do we need to get done?".

That's absurd, unless it's accompanied with a raise. If the employer is content with the worker's output, why should the worker volunteer to perform more work without additional compensation?

This is an oversimplistic view of tech work, especially software. If you're a contractor who doesn't care about the product beyond doing your well-delineated part properly, then sure, that attitude is perfectly reasonable (no sarcasm - that's not intended as a put-down of contract work). If you are an actual part of a team working to create a product you ostensibly all care about, you obviously will work together to distribute work; to account for surprises; to fix problems without being assigned a ticket that tells you exactly how to fix it; to make a good product. It's a fluid bag of work that naturally fills into any holes that develop in people's schedules. Work of that nature isn't "doing more than you're asked", because that kind of teamwork is in fact exactly what is asked.

It’s also exactly what will burn you out and make you question life when your shares become worthless.

There’s nothing wrong with taking a contractor mentality to a full time gig. In fact, it’s one definition of professionalism.

I feel the inverse. Joyless “take tasks off the board and wait for more tasks” work is low-creativity and low-engagement work. Allowing people the freedom to not be slaves to the almighty kanban board mitigates burnout because people can actually experience some satisfaction rather than endless grind.

Working 7 hours a day will not burn anyone out.

How old are you? (I’m asking earnestly, not flippantly.)

Ditto. (Hello age neighbor!)

It’s interesting we came to different conclusions on this one — I think there’s something here worth comparing notes on, but I’m not quite sure what it is. In my experience, working a consistent 7 hours every day will quite rapidly burn me out.

I think it’s the definition we’re using for “work.” When I work, I work hard, and I dedicate my entire mental focus on the task. Doing that for seven hours straight sometimes feels like a small marathon in itself. Perhaps you’re just more effective.

I can’t imagine working any way other than this. A system where you are assigned precise little tasks with hard deadlines that sum to precisely your compensation is a low trust environment. I’d much rather hand people projects or work as a team to solve large problems than need to micromanage the hell out of people so that they’ve got enough shit to do to justify their wage without overburdening them. That sounds exhausting.

“Hey, I pay you to work on my team and build something with the team” is a much healthier and happier system. It also gives people agency about how to tackle problems and the ability to propose work or even experiment. The alternative is a joyless factory line.

I here this all the time from the people on my team. We have a mutual understanding that I expect you to put a full week in every week, but I'm not going to micro manage your week.

If youre not keeping yourself busy, it becomes pretty obvious, very quickly.

The flip side of that is that if you have so little work that you have time to work a whole other job you're meant to tell your manager "hey, I have spare cycles, what do we need to get done?".

I’m not sure where this idea came from. If you want to do that, sure, go for it. But no one is meant to volunteer for more work than they’re given.

It’s practically a recipe for burnout.

> But no one is meant to volunteer for more work than they’re given.

To use your own words, I'm not sure where this idea came from. Any manager will absolutely expect you to tell them when you've completed your assigned tasks. No one wants the employee they have to keep checking in with to make sure they haven't completed their current assignment and are now sitting around staring at their cubicle wall instead of telling anyone.

Yes. If you estimate that you’ll get something done by Thursday, and you deliver on Thursday, then everyone is happy.

If you complete it sooner, your estimates were off. It’s fine to slow down if you sense you don’t need to work quite as hard as you thought to meet your deadlines.

In general, estimation is a system of shared deadlines. If you give your manager the ability to think of you as always meeting your deadlines, I guarantee they’ll be happy.

An estimate is an estimate, not a quote. If the estimate is to get it done by Tuesday, and is turned out it will take 2 times longer, do you just work 16 hours a day or pay a second programmer to help to get it done by Tuesday?

> If you give your manager the ability to think of you as always meeting your deadlines, I guarantee they’ll be happy.

Sure, as long as they never find out that you've been padding your estimates or that the project everyone thought was going to take a week turned out to be much simpler than anticipated and you got in done on Monday and just played video games the rest of the week they'll be happy. There's even plenty of bad management out there, so in some places this might hold true for a long period of time (even a career!), but it's not because that's what your employer expected you to do, or what they think they are paying you for. And a good manager is going to figure out pretty quick when the end result of your 1-week tasks is a two line PR that's something is fishy.

* Disclaimer: I have absolutely had the tasks the boiled down to two lines, but finding the right two lines took a week. A good manager is going to have sufficient understanding of the work to tell the difference.

I think it’s fine to agree to disagree on this. I’ll just say that hasn’t been my experience, and leave it at that. You don’t appear to be interested in other perspectives, so there’s not much point in continuing.

We can certainly disagree, but I'll note the reason I'm having a hard time accepting the assertion that managers are fine with employees just doing whatever tasks they are assigned and knocking off until assigned something new is my experience as a manager, managing managers, and working with other managers across a variety of disciplines and industries. I've yet to meet one with this attitude.

I don't think employees believe it either. After all, I notice your not asserting that you wrap up your work for the sprint, then tell your manager your knocking off for the next week since your work is done. If the expectation is just that you get your assigned work done, why wouldn't you? Why would you instead keep your manager in the dark?

> Why would you instead keep your manager in the dark?

Because you're already providing enough value to justify your wage even with padded estimates and slacking off (otherwise your manager wouldn't have been happy to begin with). They just want to get more out of you via the expectation of "reasonable best effort".

In other words, your 50% effort was already good enough to provide the company the value it needed (was willing to pay for), but some managers feel entitled to 100% if you demonstrate that capacity to them. So just don't.

And the reality is that many places don't genuinely need people's best. What they actually need is "good enough", and that's already reflected in the wage via profitable business outcomes that role contributes to. Time and effort have nothing to do with it.

I disagree. This is only true if you also get shit for being late. Estimates are always off. “Hey this ended up being harder than expected” is a reasonable excuse for delays. If that’s the case then an estimation error in the other direction shouldn’t mean you can just screw around for a while.

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