Slashdot Mirror
A Study On Time Wasted At Work
Animesh Pathak writes "C|Net News has an article about a survey of people's goofing off habits at work. From the article: 'It's interesting to note that the Internet was cited as the leading time-wasting activity. It goes to show how integrated it has become to the daily functions of our personal and professional lives,...Today, there are so many useful tools and Web sites on the Internet that have enabled people to become more efficient with accomplishing multiple tasks in a shorter amount of time.'"
The article did mention that not all waste is pure waste, as they could spark new ideas, and it's also likely to introduce ice-breaking topics so that everybody can sit together and chat about something in common.
Nowadays companies expect employees to be available from 7.30am to 6.30pm, but these employees aren't actually required all the time, the boss just wants you to be there so that when he needs you, he can find you.
The article mentions insurance industry is the worst, but what do they expect insurance call centre staff to do when nobody calls in?
Maybe start cold-calling: "Good morning Mr Anderson, this is Smith from Surely Insurance, we're wondering if you have a car accident today?"
So I normally treat non-productive time as time-out or standby periods for employees, they're getting paid to provide continuous service availability throughout the day.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
I find this story deeply ironic. Only two hours until I can leave this place...
Area IV, here I am
Wasting time on the Internet at work...what...like reading Slashdot? The powers that be will never catch me doing such a thing...
Oh shit, here comes the boss....
+++ATH
NO CARRIER
"Lame" - Galaxar
All I need to do is just walk around the office.
And here I am, still at work, posting on Slashdot....
When you get to hell -- tell 'em Itchy sent ya!
Just who is the target audience for this? Whip-wielding managers who flay anyone not fast enough on Alt-Tab?
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
How much time do you waste at work reading Slashdot?
* 1hr/week
* 1hr/day
* 2hrs/day
* 3hrs/day
* I don't read slashdot you insensitive clod (then what are you doing selecting this one)
* CowboyNeal
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I would never ... aw, dammit.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
This is ironic in so many levels...
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." E. W. Dijkstra
1) the INSURANCE INDUSTRY so... that's why insurance is to expensive! 2) the end of the article reminds of google's 20% thing. 3) no duh, the time has increased.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Did the study measure how much time was wasted filling out useless surveys?
Ya think?
i'am loving it!
well, now, all back to work
[JL] IH8U
I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
I take this job bc it allows me to ebay sniping all day.
A better poll would be
How much time do you waste at work looking at Breasts?
* 1hr/week
* 1hr/day
* 2hrs/day
* 3hrs/day
* I'm gay you insensitive clod (4hrs/day)
* CowboyNeal
"Stop reading this headline and get back to work"
Hey!! No fair!
I thought HEY! I'm getting paid to read this!
Just started a teaching gig at the local college, and my entire class for the day is off sick.
For some reason I get to stay for the entire day though. Boo! With a projector and some flash games! Yay!
at the utter irony of /. posting an article about wasting time at work. The paradoxicalness is hurting my head. I need to sit down...
"In some cases this extra wasted time might be considered 'creative waste'--time that may well have a positive impact on the company's culture, work environment, and even business results"
...I'm really not wasting time. I'm waiting for my copper PCB to finish etching... really.
Yeah, try telling that to my boss. No study will ever reduce the importance of ALT-TAB.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
but I was too busy playing Internet Scrabble.
Come on, in this day and age a "scientific" study cannot possibly think it's going to say anything meaningful about wasting time at work if it considers "the internet" as one thing. Clearly, it needs to be subcategorized into meaningful elements. Maybe something like webmailers, on-line magazines, interactive discussion groups, etc. That way the researchers could seperate the waste from the worthy.
I mean, to study people wasting time on the internet is tantamount to studying people wasting time on computers.
ACWould it save my employer anything for me to be staring at the blank screen instead?
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
with my slashdot addiction.
Please, someone make me stop. It's taking up all my time. I've started writing songs about it, so when I lose my job and am out on the street I'll have something to sing while I panhandle.
This is a lot harder to kick than nicotene, crack, heroin, alcohol, meth, overeating, bulemia, and necrophilia were.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
...just imagine the possibilities.
He doesn't waste any time reading Slashdot.
Wow, people use the internet to waste time at work? Tell me something I don't know. This is as obvious as "the number one item ingested by humans is drink, followed closely by food."
Does the article mention what the internet is being used for? Does the article link to the report?
It's 10.30pm where I am, I'm still working, I spent the last weekend working and I'll be working most nights this week, too. It seems few studies---and I admit to not reading TFA---also consider how much time workers spend working when they should not be.
But maybe this is that one time when I should have read the article.
I'd possibly do more in a given day, but I'd also be much less informed. Quite a few purchase decisions, new technology concepts, and water-cooler-conferences are based around news/ideas I pick up on the net...
And to go a bit further, without forums, reference sites, online howto's, and last-but-not-least the almighty google I'd would be nearly as efficient as I am at work... having a server bork with mysterious driver issues is quite often solved with part inuition/experience and part googling the error messages...
sit down and sign in ASAP read email
read slashdot
read news
rews world of warcraft forums
talk to co workers
check slashdot for new articles
attempt to hope i can come up with a witty response to an article...
then.. do work?
ps
someone came up to me while i was typing this (im at work now) and read it. wonder what they thought of it. hehe.
Yesterday its mentioned as a cheap location to film along with Roumania and Bulgaria, now it has the laziest workers in the country. How will you surprise us tomorrow o great state of scenic vistas an slacker employees.
I remember as a child being promised in TV programs about the future a shorter working week, increased leisure time, and robots and computers doing more of the work.
Instead I'm expected to be available 12 hours out of 24 instead of 8. So, when the machine is doing the job for me, or I need to take a break from a problem and come back fresh, why the hell shouldn't I goof off on the Internet. My parents' generation did it with newspapers - even if they had to lock themselves in the toilet to do so.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
I find this very hard to believe, as I contribute to my 2.09 hours of alloted goof off time according to this study.
-Randy
Installing different flavors of linux on old laptops and PCs :)
...
:(
and posting on slashdot
Through a Web survey involving more than 10,000 employees, the report found that personal Internet surfing ranked as the top method of cooling one's heels at work.
Gee, most people on a web survey spend their personal time on the Internet. Thats like going to to a Red Sox game and surveying people on what their favorite sport is! I'll post again in a few, but for right now, I'm going to go to a strip club and survey people on womens' rights.
I keep thinking, dammit, that if I didn't spend so much time working, I might be able to do something productive.
I suspect half the trolls are going to make jokes about slashdot being a waste of time.
I wish my previous CFO would spend more time on slashdot, and perhaps we'd have done far fewer stupid things like maintaining an unmaintainable mess of microsoft components and forcing them on our customers.
Slashdot, beyond the way the trolls word things, is a great place to find best-practices for the IT world.
With Management decision-making paranoia/intelligence falling rock-bottom in most companies, I am sure we can do without these asinine pseudo-productivity reports...
Where's my free iPod!? Until then, I'll settle for a kiss...
Sorry to tell you, but you wasted your time.
I hate wasting time,
Wasting valuable surfing time by doing work, that is.
Maybe start cold-calling: "Good morning Mr Anderson, this is Smith from Surely Insurance, we're wondering if you have a car accident today?"
It's an Agent! And the worst kind, an insurance Agent! They cut the hardline and replaced it with cold calls! We gotta find another exit, fast!
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
You might consider reading through slashdot as a waste of time, but every so often you learn something that helps your work life. As with any type of news service, the more we learn about what's going on around us the more we can use that information in useful ways. Granted you might waste more time then you gain in productivity, you still atleast walk away from the ordeal knowing a little bit more. The problem with slashdot is the amount of garbage that gets posted, you just have to learn how to sift through that and get the information you need.
i don't think a lot of time is wasted. most jobs are requiring more and more availibility. this doesn't mean you are working the entire time, but are there for what needs to be done. employees who are professional will drop the "goofing off" and do what needs to be done when it needs to be done. the type that want to waste time instead of working did so before the internet, and will find other ways if the internet isn't an option anymore. it's like asking "how much time does the water cooler waste?" flex time and broadband are making things even more flexible. it lets you do the work that needs to be done, while not wasting time commuting, cutting down office space, etc. of course this only works with employees who won't take advatage of it. they still have to wake up for business hours. if you are hiring ppl u don't trust to take the work seriously and have to micromanage, you aren't doing your job right.
doesn't look like you succeeded in logging in first, though!
Look! I'm creating waste with Nethack!
Just open up about 10 important sites on different tabs (in my case, PDF's of different Phys Rev or Nano Letters papers), open whatever you're surfing on the 11th tab, say arstechnica^H^H^Hslashdot. Boss comes by, just flick your mouse to the tab bar and quickly scroll the mouse wheel some. You have a 10/11 chance of landing on a work-related site. It's like playing Russian Roulette, sort of, except in the US. OTOH, in Soviet Russia, Russian Roulette plays...never mind.
refresh it yo!
Some years back in my small business I put a PC on the desk of my receptionist, around 1996 I think.
She was *supposed* to use it to do my accounting..
I didn't put it on the Internet, though she begged for it, because I wasn't about to add another phoneline for something I didn't consider important.
Rather than doing my accounting, she spent 98% of her time playing solitaire.. Nothing pissed me off worse than to walk in and see her clicking away at that frigging retarded game while on the clock.
I was paying her to play games and have a good time.
So I went in after closing and deleted the damn games.
She whined and cried about it, I told her the computer crashed and they were "eaten up"..
She managed to click around and find some other BS game to play, which I also deleted.
Again, more whining.
I then told her she was paid to work, not play games.
She said she could do her job in 45 minutes and that the rest of the day there was nothing else to do.
I would have fired her if I hadn't needed her to answer the phones and dispatch jobs. That and she was my cousins wife.. (don't hire relatives.....)
She told me if I didn't put the games back on she would quit.
Finally, cell phone service came to our area, (yes, we were very backwards here) and I fired her, took the computer home, cut 4 of my land lines and forwarded them all to my cell phone.
I know this won't work for most people, it's just my experience with employees wasting MY time and MY money...
You never know who else is wasting time at work: http://bash.org/?258908
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
If I wasn't spending precious minutes preparing food, I could be on the Internet that much longer!
Complaining about dupes on slashdot. The rest is spent on trying to get the elusive "first post" on various message boards all around the innernet.
Wasting time at work: Read Slashdot
Wasting time in the university: Perform useless studies
Wasting time at Slashdot HQ: Post results of above study.
Some settling may occur during posting.
Reading Slashdot led me to learn how to architect a web application server about six months before my employer discovered it needed to deploy one. :-)
Twelve months later the whole office was laid off, but that's another story. Er, I hope.
My employer encourages us to use the Internet. I can even read Slashdot freely, because it means that I stay up to date of what's going on in IT business. My boss says it's important part of my job. I'm a Unix system administrator.
Dude, the boss is coming! Quick, take a call! (your neighbor in Cube-Farm Hell)
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
...that the sort of people who get upset about surveys like this are exactly the same people who want you to work evenings and weekends without compensation/overtime?
My favourite of recent times was having worked 5 weekends in a row or something, I wanted to work from home one day because I was getting a new PC delivered (I had no holiday allowance left). You wouldn't believe the excuses that came out as to why that couldn't happen.
("Well, what if everyone wanted to do that?")
It is what you do with the time you dedicate to your job. My employer whats certain things done. I have timelines. As long as I meet or exceed those timelines they are more than happy.
Yes it has been commented that I surf a lot. However to have your VP rebut that comment with praise for the quality and consistency of your work does say that some people do get it.
Hell there are people not making calls or surfing that waste more of a companies time just by being there. I cannot tally the number of hours spent doing something someone else supposedly did. I cannot tally the hours spent on some high level persons personal directive that only was tossed at a later date.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
ChrisLMB : If any of my employees did that they'd be fired instantly.
Ben174 : Where u work?
ChrisLMB : I'm the CTO at LowerMyBills.com
*** Ben174 (BenWright@TeraPro33-41.LowerMyBills.com) Quit (Leaving)
http://www.bash.org/?258908/
I just had my annual review, and one of the things my boss ranked me high on was 'being informed' and 'proactively seeking solutions'. He was most impressed with the fact that I found, downloaded, and provided lots of Oracle technical information just an hour after we had decided to evaluate Oracle as a vendor. I also got high points for 'taking the lead' in learning about business rules and use cases and presenting that information to our team. Guess where I got all my information? Since the development project we worked on all year went belly up a couple of months ago, frankly cruising the 'net was the only thing I did all year that got me points in my evaluation. So which time was actually wasted? the hundreds of hours I spent on a project that was scrapped, or the time I spent on the 'net that got me bonus points with the boss?
Go figure.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
I am still somewhat amazed that people fail to see "The Internet" for what it is -- a communications medium.
I use Television, Telephone, Radio, Cell phone, FAX, Newspapers and even the U.S. Postal service. None of these things are thought to be remarkable, ground-breaking or otherwise remarkable media. They aren't new but they are certainly very well integrated into the way we do business.
People are, instead, distracted by the newness and novelty of the applications that use the internet medium. We all know how people think "the web" == "the internet" and how wrong that is. So here again, we're talking about how the internet is changing the way we do business. It is and it isn't. We have a new medium with which we exchange information. In some ways it's superior to existing media and in other ways it's not. As the dust settles, people will use the medium that works best for their use. The Net obsoletes nothing specifically.
Oh that's what my squid logs are trying to tell me!
Crunch!
I could be playing golf and working on my novel!
If you want the truth behind this "survey", just look at the who participated in the survey:
"Populations surveyed included AOL users, Salary.com Salary Wizard users and corporate human resource professionals."
Let's see...
Almost 4 -weeks- lost to a new project management methodology.
Much of it literally just sitting at the desk after secretly finishing the work but not being allowed to check it in to the code bases.
Then there are the documents -- about 8 hours a week on documents put on a hard drive and -never ever- looked at again (except 1% by auditors to confirm we did those useless documents).
I remember what it was like to be productive but I'm so hamstrung by red tape it is hard to get in that mode any more.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I am so tired of "studies" like this one who survey a miniscule number of employees, and then extrapolate the measurements across the entire population. If one RTFA, it says they only surveyed 10,000 employees out of over 200 Million in the U.S. Hardy a representative sample. These crappy statistics are then used to make business decisions like taking away Internet access from employees who probably "waste time" doing their personal business so that they can work more in the first place.
tom?
is that you?
TFA says that work days are getting longer because people are wasting more time. That's a load of crap. I "waste" time because of the long hours. I'm not mentally capable of coding 100% 24/7. The reality is that there are a limited # of hours in the day that I can effectively develope in. If you tell me I have to be here, I'll just sit and read slashdot. If I could leave the office without management frowning on a less than 40 hour week then I could just do an 8-4 every day and I would not *have* to slack off.
Even more time is wasted on the Internet since Slashdot reposts every article doubling the wasted time online having to rereply to the article.
hahaha... *sigh* Tom...
I can identify my boss's footsteps in a high traffic area at least 20 yards away to trigger an Alt-Tab.
The average worker admits to frittering away 2.09 per day Those in Missouri wasted an average of 3.2 hours , per person, according to the report.
Hawaiian workers reported only wasting an average of 0.01 hours per day. "Eh, you know da kine," said Kimo Kamaka, a resident of O'ahu's North Shore. "Da sooner you pau hana, the sooner you cruising at the beach catching waves, yah?"
I only get caught goofing off at work while I'm on slashdot. I argue with my boss because I'm actually learning something!
erin go bragh!
--Chag
Peter: I generally come in at least 15 minutes late. I use the side door, that way Lumbergh can't see me. And after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.
Bob: Space out?
Peter: Yeah I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about 15 minutes of real, actual work.
Yeah, right.
I say we just grow up, be adults and die.
I'm amazed that there's no mention of smoking in the article at all. I wonder if it was even considered. Our workplace, like many others recently, has gone smoke free which means all the smokers are likely to disappear for 1/2 hour or more 3-4 times a day to get off the grounds to have a smoke. Some even get around the "no smoking on any company property" rule by standing in the street. It may not be the number one time waster, but it'd got to be up there.
The real question is, how much time did the people at Salary.com and AOL waste at work to produce this study enough the amount of time everyone ELSE wasted at work?
my time on the internet is research
... on /.
your time on the internet is wasted AND a threat to network security
get back to work!
i'm researching productivity issues
+1 fashionably cynical
Slashdot is not a waste.
paintball
I'd write a longer response but I've exceeded my 2.5 hours of personal Internet usage. I guess it's back to IM and IRC now.
I am reading this at work, I have not read the article, do they mention /. specifically?
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
A friend of mine had a chess clock and labelled the two clocks 'work' and 'doss' (slang for not work). Whenever he was busy proving theorems, running statistical models, the 'work' clock was running. If you went into his office and asked him about the soccer game last night, he would hit the clock and 'doss' would start ticking.
His days worked out with a 50:50 work-doss ratio!
Baz
The sysadmin at my office is almost constantly making life difficult by reconfiguring permissions on directories I'm trying to serve web documents from, or just moving my home directory altogether, or removing my ability to restart my development webserver. It drives me crazy.
I'm glad he wastes an hour or two every day browsing random websites and chatting to his friends on MSN Messenger. It means I can actually get some work done! (Of course, when he's broken something for the nth time it does give me a handy downtime opportunity, which is useful if I need a break without it counting against me. I do actually prefer to get work done at work, though; maybe I'm just weird.)
That's a little off-topic, though. I think you were a little hard on your receptionist. You were paying her to be available to answer the phone, and that is what she was doing. What did you expect her to do when there were no phone calls to deal with?
But I'm a support technician. If I'm busy it means stuff is broken and other people can't do their job. And if that's more than 1 person it's probably costing the company more than it costs them to have me sitting around doing nothing. I'm like insurance: got to have it, but using it means you have bigger problems than paying the premiums.
But I still feel like a slacker for sitting around surfing the net.
It's not fair.
You Just space out at your desk
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/200507 11/bs_nm/financial_morganstanley_dc_3
this guy must have not wasted a single second!
Jigsaw puzzles
More puzzles
Computer Stupidities (warning: may provoke laughbursts)
Math articles
Quicktime panoramas
The world's most famous debunker
Variously educational, baffling, entertaining, or just pretty.
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
Peter: Yeah.
Bob: Great.
Peter: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh - after that I sorta space out for an hour.
Bob: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter: Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
For about the past year I averaged about four hours of actual work a day: 07:00 - Stare at computer 07:15 - Go get a sandwich and a Mountain Dew from the vending machine 07:30 - Socialize with coleagues and surf the net 09:30 - Boss gets in and I get to work 11:30 - Take lunch 12:30 - Get back from lunch and socialize with coleagues and surf the net 14:00 - Boss gets back from lunch and I get to work 16:00 - Leave for the day On occasion I might have done more or less work depending if the boss was in and/or if there was pressing issues that needed attention. Since my company decided to move our jobs to East Bumblefuck GA so they could hire some South Georgia rednecks to do NT, UNIX, and Oracle Systems Administration for $10.50/hr, my schedule has become this: 07:15 - Go get a sandwich and a Mountain Dew from the vending machine 07:30 - Socialize with coleagues and surf the net 08:00 - Laugh with colleagues about the fact our SLA is a 54% out of a required 93% 08:30 - Bitch about our replacements not doing any work when the go live is in ten days 09:30 - Discuss with colleagues on how it is possible that our replacements will be able to do anything when they're having problems scrolling in Excel and the instruction "click on 'Start' and then 'Programs.'" 10:00 - Surf the net 11:30 - Lunch 12:30 - Surf the net 13:45 - Discuss with colleagues that they get what they pay for 14:00 - Discuss with colleagues that senior management are idiots 14:30 - Try and figure out how they think our jobs is just basic data entry 14:45 - Discuss on the many reasons why this shit is going to Hell in a handbasket with a pink bow on the top 15:53 - Leave for the day Anyone need an NT and/or UNIX Sys Admin?
You're lookin at it right now.
SIGFAULT
Last year whilst idly sitting about thinking about stuff I realised that a form my company uses had a major problem as it was asking for the same information twice in such a way that the data collected could be misconstrued.
I requested the form was changed and we saved over £ 1,000,000 (UK) in that year alone. For my toubles I got a bonus of a couple of thousand (UK)
So I am now happy to spend the rest of my fucking working life doing nothing but surf the net, goof off and idle away the hours. Who knows I may have another idea ?
For the morons that still dont get it. It's not how long you spend at a job that matters.. ITS WHAT YOU FUCKING DO.
Fucking idiot clock watchers should be gassed.
My personal experience - as in, why I waste time at work - is probably quite contrary to so-called conventional "wisdom". Conventional wisdom says that if people aren't being watched, they're "wasting time" and slacking off. Unfortunately, a lot of companies still take this approach, as does my current employer.
My experience is that when I'm wasting time, it's due to some combination of lack of motivation to find work, an unwillingness of management to give me work and responsibilities to fill my time, and a very totalitarian mentality about subservance and authority. Basically, they treat me like I'm in grade school.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
A study on life wasted at work. Now that is some seriously scary shit, man, and I am not joking here.
You can't handle the truth.
If someone really loved their job, whatever it is, they might very well spend their "wasted" time looking at something that interests them, and is quite relevant to their job. They could then put this newly-gained knowledge to use, and increase their productivity and value to the company for which they work.
Let's see a survey about how much of employees' time is wasted by their MANAGERS.
Let's see how much work time is pointless 'face time' put in by workers to avoid being the first one out/last one in.
Let's see how much the CEO makes in the average company that's going under.
Really. Why is there this idea that we exist only to WORK? Is this is a USA thing? I was under the impression the Euros were much more sensible...
Just curious, but if the internet is the #1 time waster now, what would have been the #1 thirty years ago?
-Colin
Coworker A: Makes you wonder how they wasted time in the workplace, before the days of the computer...
Coworker B: Yeah, what were they clicking on?
Coworker A stares at coworker B to see if he's serious...
The SlashTitle made me think of:
...
1. Extended meetings where people aimlessly mull and nothing is produced
2. Following ingrained procedures which triple the time to do simple activities
3. Reinstalling failing software and OSes
But then it's about what people do with their spare time?? I want solutions to the above!!!
8-PP
I think this was meant to read
"'It's interesting to note that Slashdot was cited as the leading time-wasting activity."
Where I work at, most meetings especially with our counterparts on the East Coast (Maryland near DC) are a waste of time. I attend a status meeting every two weeks. It should be a short meeting but it usually takes about 4 or 5 hours to go through. There are quite a few people who decide to go on and on to try to impress the high ups like the Program Manager. I unfortunately have to give status on the labs since I am a part of the lab team. My status takes about a minute or two. I get to the point, be done and get the hell out ! I got many things that need my time and I am not into playing politics.
Several times a month, some high level executives (VP level) come to our site and it seems they like to come on a Friday afternoon like 3 in the afternoon. I blow off those meetings since they are a BIG WASTE of time ! It is usually a big ego thing such as how wonderful they are to the company employees or to pat themselves on the back. I gone to one or two of those and I learned not to waste my time. Besides, I am usually out of the office by Noon on Friday.
I encourage you to post many, many comments to Slashdot!
because i know most of my wasted time is diagnosing computer screw ups caused by my co-workers downloading spyware, viruses, and screwy active x controls.
so that should be added to the "time wasted by using the internet" category, right?
I got my oil changed on my Jeep today and the controller for the shop was playing card games on her computer the whole time I was there. I commented about this to one of the workers and he mentioned that she doesn't do anything. Her computer was positioned to where it could be seen by everyone.
I admit I do some 'net surfing at work including Slashdot. But, I have my computer setup in such a way that pople would have to come into my office and come behind me to see what is on the screen. I am discreet about it.
Congratulations. Now everyone on Slashdot knows you for the asshole you really are. There are few things in America more pathetic than the small-fry miserly businessman. I guess you are just too "backward" for social skills and common decency, eh?
Read my sig. It was designed for pricks like you.
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
At my job, the work isn't really hard, there's just a never-ending amount of it.
Most of the people where I work don't even have internet access. By most of the people..I mean the ones with computer access. Even if it would make their jobs easier. We're the only department there with internet access. Because we require it.
The other departments and managers are getting jealous, and are whining that we don't REALLY need it, that all we do is sit around and play games.
So if I'm eating lunch, I can expect all kinds of crazy stares and people telling me I'm not allowed on the internet unless I'm on lunch. Every day.
Even then they bitch about everything I look at. Slashdot? "Whats that?! Are you hacking something?!" Fark? "Are you looking at naked women?! That will get you fired in a heartbeat!" etc.
Of course, a third of the people in my department take all of 10 calls a day, as oppoosed to 40-50 that the others take, because they find ways to be unavailable.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
In an office filled with coworkers incessantly chitter-chattering among themselves about nothing of any consequence, it's sometimes a wonder I get anything done at all. I estimate about a third of my "work" time is spent losing my train of thought due to the incessant meaningless chatter and then attempting to regain it.
Losing my train of thought due to the ringing phone and then attempting to regain it afterwards also accounts for a significant portion of my time, but there's nothing my employer could do about that; we have to answer the phone, of course.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
but my boss wastes the other 6 hours!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
With the Nuke Anything extension I was able to remove the ad banner laying On Top of the artical :P
And if 3 hours is Average in some states that means there's people out there f'ing off for like 5 hours a day! That's madness considering my BS time is measured in minutes1!
"Unproductive hours on the job may have something to do with workdays growing longer." What complete bull shit. American workers are the hardest and most productive workers in the world. The reason why Americans work long hours is because employees can't say no. There is no protection for American workers. It is my experience that the same amount of work gets done in 40 hours as gets done in 60 hours. Any gains...are marginal at best...and at worst...productivity goes down. But companies live for marginal gains...oh well.
I am an electrical engineer for a moderately large company.
My work is quite challenging and usually I am at work for 10 hours per day, sometimes more. The real question here is: how do you define "productivity"?
It is easier to quantify when dealing with such things as factory or production work: in those cases, the goal is to produce A Thingy every X number of minutes. When it comes to the design and development side of engineering, the value of time spent cannot be quantified in the same manner as it can for more assembly-line type situations where tasks and outcomes are clearly defined and standardized.
Much of the work I do requires thought. If I am examining a particular design for electromagnetic compatability, or attempting to discern the operation of a particular system by looking at the schematic, etc., I cannot simply stare at various pieces of paper and hope to absorb the necessary information by osmosis. In order to really learn something, or design something, I need to examine an idea or product description and process the information I receive. Processing does not occur instantaneously. Perhaps it does for some lucky few, but despite my ability to come to eventual deep understanding of various electronic devices and concepts, my processing speed is at the mercy of the way my brain works.
Sometimes, the best way to figure out how something works (or design a way to make it work better) is to step back and let the information you have taken in over the past few hours settle and shift in your mind. I try to stay off the Internet while working but I will not say I spend 10 hours every day doing absolutely nothing but observable "work". Sometimes it is necessary to pause and let ideas mingle and process them without putting pressure on yourself to come to an immediate solution or conclusion.
There have been times when I've spent hours staring at a piece of code, trying different tactics to get it to work, and coming up with nothing. Sometimes I will think of the solution after only a few minutes of "Internet break time": while reading an article about cryonics or neuroscience or something else that is interesting to me but not necessarily work-related. If I was not reading these articles I would just be staring into space, so I figure that the time is well spent as long as I produce something for my employers in a timely manner.
It is similar to the situation in which "sleeping on" a decision results in a more satisfying solution. Allowing the brain to put the problem on its background-processing circuits is often a very important and valid tactic for solving complex problems. If I never read articles online at all I would most certainly be a less productive, unhappier employee and I don't think my bosses want that.
And in case anyone is wondering, I am not posting this from work. I generally try to reserve longer comments for the home environment.
I am an I.T. Manager
being up on tech is part of my job
my no 1 resource for that is slashdot
therfore reading slashdot is part of my job
I remember a few years back when my boss walked up behind my co-worker and asked him to stop listening to music off his PC and use the CPU cycles to get things done faster...
Not really all that suprising (I would have thought health care administration). The less tangable the product, the more room for bloat in the back office. My health insurance and auto insurance have skyrocketed in the past few years, even though I haven't been sick enough to file a claim, and haven't had a wreck in about 15 years. Meanwhile, the insurance companies keep saying they are loosing more money all the time, for largely unprovable reasons.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Holy cow, reminds me of my exploits... before my current job (which has built in 'down time' that is darn near expected when nothing is pressing (awesome job, by the way... hint: it's government)), I was making $80k/year at a major telecom firm (the name of which I won't mention) as a Senior Program Manager (in my twenties). I ostensibly 'worked form home' two days a week on the average (simply woke up to send an email "I'll be working from home today", then went back to bed) and when I did go in, I went in at about 10am (again, was ostensibly 'working from home' those first few hours of the morning) and would leave at 3pm (as if I had been working since 7am). During those 5 hours I was at work, I made a few phone calls and took care of a few things (quite effectively I might add) and surfed the web 90% of the rest of my time there. Unethical? Yes and no. I had as much a workload as every other person in my team, and got it done more effectively with less problems. The unethical part was not sharing my secret of how I was so effective and efficient with my co-workers. On the ethical side, I carried my cell phone on me at all times, even on vacations, and answered phone calls and made decisions on my own time. I figured it was the least I could do with so much freedom at work. But then again, it was not hard at all to be pool-side and get a call from a vendor at a remote POP site who tells me there's a problem in Santa Barbara. I'd say "You have till Monday to get it done. If you foresee a problem getting it done by then, call me so I can hire a different vendor". Vendors have an amazing ability to meet deadlines when you have other eager vendors in the wings awaiting your call. Ah, the dot com boom... those were the golden years.
"Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity."
Hee hee, for once there's a story we're *all* qualified to speak on as true experts!
So, lets have +5 informative for everyone please.
As we know since yesterday (*) a life is only worth 100mio$. There is lots of potential here sentencing the laziest workers to death: $759billion a year (RTFA).
/ 134259&tid=172&tid=17
That means the laziest 7590 workers every year will be sentenced to death. And if that's all hacker one could even double the number!
And the economy will start to flourish from the next year on. Let's party.
(*)http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/12
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
...and the only thing I have done last week was that I moved a server in another room. :-)
I read some time ago that the average programmer at IBM only writes only 30 lines of code/day. Now I know why. :-)
Amatures :-)
Soon we'll have computers inside our brains so we'll be able to browse the web AND play solitare at the same time, all while pretending to work.
Keyboards will have more multimedia keys instead of Alt and Tab.
I am thankful that I have a lot less unpaid mandatory overtime than most people in IT, though that may be changing with my new boss, but I still resent it every time I have to do it. (For example, today is a 9 to 7 day, and there's no guarantee it will end at seven.)
An additional problem is that my job has changed radically since I started working at this company due to constant mergers, reorgs and managers quitting. It is now much more narrowly defined and I have to beg abjectly to do anything resembling programming. (Incidentally, I now feel almost as nervous doing any programming task at work as I do goofing off because I know that, for me, it is considered a "low priority" task that I should drop the minute some much more tedious "high priority task comes along.")
Thanks to the current employment crises in IT, at least where I live, I can look forward to huge competition when I seek a new position. The last interview I had the interviewer said I didn't get the job because even though I knew my stuff I was "nervous and fidgety" during the interview. Since he had interviewed at least 15 other candidates for the same position, that was enough to disqualify me.
So, I slack off at work. I am, however, trying to cut down on alleviating my boredom by using one of my workstations for any of the following "fun" activities during slacking off periods: a) Surfing, b) Playing Solitare or the like, or my favorite c) Programming. I never really was much for Solitaire, but the web surfing is a problem as is the programming.
Lately it's been rough as my girlfriend has been running up huge credit card bills on our joint credit card which is stressing me out though I try not to let her know that.
Incidentally, my last review was great and full of praise for the great work I've been doing. So, I just want to cut out things that can be monitored and not actually work any harder. (It's important to stretch tasks out so I don't end up with no work to do, that's much worse than goofing off. Then they have to find other tedious things for me to do and maybe someone higher up in management says, "Why do we keep employing this guy when he spends so much time idle?" I've tried looking for useful work to do, but that always ends up with me getting tasked with things that are either tedious or politically dangerous "hot potatos.")
2.2 hours? Pfft I waste months of time!
...or playing online games... or analyize your personal funds to the point of knowing the penny... or read the dilbert archives (ahh that took a long time)
If you play spider solitaire long enough you can start beating it on hard regularly...
How much time do we really actually work per day in software?
I'm going to vote 1.2 ~ 1.5 hours per day on average.
Physically stuck here 9 hours a day though... wtf happened to 9 - 5 with paid lunch?
that the "study" that concluded a 40-hour week is "optimal" was a PHB doing simple arithmetic like: with 24 hours per day, I need three 8-hour shifts to keep my factory running 24x5. So I have to pay workers working 8*5=40 hours per week in order to maximize the utilization of the capital I invested in all that expensive machinery.
The WoW boards kill brain cells more effectively than huffing paint. With that said, this is usually my routine as well.
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
I can work and goof-off at the same time. :-P
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
yeah, I am actually too lazy to read the article, or replies that are longer than 2 sentences. So maybe laziness is good for productivity
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
...everyone needs their 10 or 15 minutes break every hour or two. Now that there's no smoking in most buildings, most people who do need to light up use that time to do so.
Otherwise, just taking a break from work helps quite a bit. Getting up and going for a walk have health benefits for people who sit in front of the computer all day. For stressful jobs, relaxing once in a while either by surfing the 'net or chatting with coworkers help to reduce mistakes from fatigue or carelessness. Morale usually rises as well (though it could be argued that morale goes down when the breaks become disallowed). And then, are countless benefits to taking a break when stuck trying to solve a problem.
People are being paid to perform a specific function. It is only natural to expect people to busy themselves when they have nothing to do, and if they have done everything they're supposed to do work-wise, then it's only natural to expect them take care of personal things. Of course, finding things beyond the scope of the position to do in such times should reflect positively on an employee, but not doing so or being able to do so should not reflect negatively either.
Imagine the following: You are a web site developer, and while waiting around for something to do, you think to yourself, "You know - I could tweak these few things, and the web site would perform 25% better for users" - a great deal for the company, and for you, and for the users. So - you get right on to it. However, while you are making these changes, you notice that more in-depth things need to be modded - things that could break the whole system unless they are all implemented at one shot, and quickly (because other projects might hit on those areas you are changing).
One could argue "Well - what about source code control, or do you have multiple test machines, etc, etc" - in some shops this is feasible, but you are probably in a shop, like many programmers, which servers and equipment are afterthoughts and cast-offs - making things work at the cheapest you can go. There is no time or money or equipment to set up a real and proper development environment (cue sound of managers telling you to build it now and quick!) - you do what you gotta do...
So - you are now deep in a project (with no approval or assignment to do it, btw - because you are doing it under your own initiative, remember?) that you know will help the company in great ways (support more users, give current users a better experience so they will come back, etc) - when the boss walks in and hands you a spec for big change to the system and says "Have it done by Monday!"...
Do you:
Which choice is most likely? Which one will let you keep your job? Which one will you choose to keep your sanity? Which one is likely to cause you to burn out?
Option one might cause the whole thing to fail - and whose fault is that? YOURS. Option two will have your boss screaming at you as to why you are working on something not assigned. Unfortunately you still have to finish it, or the system will be hosed (unless you are able to roll back to the old system). You might be fired on the spot. Option three is what many programmers take, which invariably leads to great stress, then burnout if such situations happen often (and believe me, they do - oh, do they). Stress and burnout either lead to a massive nervous breakdown or you are fired, or you quit - basically a delayed version of options one and two.
So - what is the SANE option? Option four - do nothing, mull around on small projects if you must, plan out the larger time saver project (which, after the new project your boss just handed you will probably not work anymore because you are basing changes on the way the system works NOW), or dink around and wait. Ideally, you can present your ideas to your boss and let him decide when to slot the project into your schedule based on other requirements and deadlines. Hopefully in the planning you can see where problems might crop up that will cause a complete system redesign or such, or a way to work around such things.
All too often, though, most developers will still be hacking away on an ad-hoc system under crazy deadlines, and never be able to implement the great ideas that will really save the company money and time - unless they want to go insane and burn out doing it...
Who needs alt+tab these days...?
http://www.stealthswitch.com/
The gerbills?
The Martians?
The Ninjas?
Who are they?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.