Slashdot Mirror
Down Time At Work — What Do You Do?
An anonymous reader writes "I work in IT and find fairly often that I have 'down time.' I'll usually browse the web (Slashdot) or try to find something informative or educating to read. Sometimes, I even get caught up working on my personal webpage or other project that isn't exactly work related. What does everyone else do during these times, and how much time do they spend on non-work related things while at work?"
...is a very serious sport.
"Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day... Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime."
What IT does with Downtime? You must be new here
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
#258908 +(12416)- [X]
: If they only realized 90% of the overtime they pay me is only cause i like staying here playing with Kazaa when the bandwidth picks up after hours.
: If any of my employees did that they'd be fired instantly.
: Where u work?
: I'm the CTO at LowerMyBills.com
*** Ben174 (BenWright@TeraPro33-41.LowerMyBills.com) Quit (Leaving)
Documentation documentation documentation and more documentation. I always bitch I never have enough time for documentation and then I find myself trolling /.
It's not the most fun thing to do but it certainly something that can always keep you busy and you can never have too much of it as long as it is well written AND well organized.
"Keep at least 3-6 full bottles of hard alcohol on hand, a 2 week resignation notice,..." - Poetmatt
I honestly can't imagine what it would be like to have a job where if what's immediately in front of me is blocked, then I am blocked from working. I battle to keep my workweek hour-count at something reasonable, and have never once lacked for (way too much) to do. Tool isn't working? No worries, I've got a huge list of things to do using other tools. Hardware problem? I've got an extra box. Power failure in my wing? Sounds good: Ive got loads of people I need to meet with to hash out problems and sync up with. Fire alarm goes off in the building? I'll hang out in the parking lot with my coworkers and have some impromptu talks on things I'm working on (thank god this happens less often now that we have heat sensing, instead of smoke sensing, fire alarms).
:P )
The idea of having a job where a blocking problem means its time to browse websites, or percieving that my job would allow for that, is totally foreign to me. Seriously - are you honestly saying that in these situations that there is literally *nothing* work related for you to do?
(for those noting the time of day that I'm posting this response, I'm on vacation right now
I fold pizza boxes. Also, be sure to tip your pizza deliverer well.
I read Digg.
/.)...
(and wonder how moderators will interpret posts on
I could have sworn I heard somebody say something from underneath my bosses desk...
Hmmm...
If you'd just do what we tell you and quit yer gripin' everything would be chocolate sprinkles and rainbows! -AC
That's right, I go take a three hour shit (at a minimum). I bring some reading material and I challenge myself to see how long I can stay in there before my I lose all feeling in my legs and have to leave.
It's better than surfing the web or doing personal stuff at your desk because you could never be fired for taking too long to shit; that would be discrimination.
If I need a short break from work, I'll just wander to our cafeteria and do a round of bowling on the Wii at the corner, and after 10 mins go back.
:)
If there is no work available, such as projects on hold due to waiting for somebody else (tech support, delivery, steering board decision, project member on vacation, whatever), I'll check if there's some low-priority stuff that I might do. Usually there isn't.
Otherwise, I'll just head home. My contract says I must 7,5 hours per day - on average. Not that I must stay at office 7,5h pretending to be working when there's nothing to do. Of course, it also means that I occasionally do the 10-12 hours/day crunch through weekends when stuff finally gets moving - but you didn't ask what I do on "uptime", did you?-). (And yes, I keep tab on the hours - if I get more than +40 hours on my flextime account I either get paid the 200% overtime bonus (has never happened, they haven't needed me THAT much) or stop right there).
(Yes, our project management could use refinement - usual situation that there are 5 projects on hold and the next week all five of them start up simultaneously - but that's another issue. Personally I'm comfortable with this - once you get into the "rhythm", it's much easier to just go on with the flow and do an "all-nighter"-style session - and once stuff is done, you can again have a few 2-hour workdays which consists of lunch, checking e-mails and do nothing more than say "hi" to buddies...)
Now, this model works for me. For someone with a family a more stable 9-5 mode might be more preferable. For me with my 15 minute commute it's just about perfect (means that if there's a meeting from 9-10 am and another at 3-4 pm and nothing else to do, I can stop by at home). Also my employer trusts me and my coworkers - on my first day at job, my then-manager said "we have a trusting environment in here - if you want to punch in or out for tracking the hours, go ahead, but we don't require it.".
My comment is focused on the downtime, as stated in the question. There's plenty of uptime to go around
What do you do with down time?
Down what?
Down time.
What time?
Down time.
What what?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I'll just start doing whatever gets modded highest here.
I did that until I perfected myself and my work environment. Now I wander around the office improving other people.
If I have enough down time to get wrapped up in my own personal projects, I better start looking for another job. Positions with full-time pay and part-time work get out-sourced or eliminated, I'd expect.
Besides, while I don't like having way too much to do, being busy providing value to your employer and yourself is more rewarding than being paid to be paid.
Sounds like you don't like the down time or feel guilty about it. Go find another job or create a better one where you are.
Research and Development.
/., etc...
/., read about some new tech, etc... you will have earned it.
Always it's this.
Things don't reach a state of running very well without people thinking about how to get there. Your downtime is a chance to explore an idea, setup test environments, write scripts to nail annoying and recurring problems, work on your budget justification, yes --surf some
Ongoing investment in these things pays off. You are surprised less, plan better, and leverage your people, hardware and software better.
Don't worry, you won't get all the way there. Software update cockups, user error, and entropy in general will keep you busy. But, having done these things, the real downtime you get after that is rock solid! Listen to a few mp3's, surf
Blogging because I can...
I used to work for HP at a large outsource customer's site. I looked after a select group of users. After a few months, myself and another guy, managed to get everything so down pat, that requests for assistance dropped dramatically, and our quality of service was pretty high. The manager was happy.
He basically let us do anything we wanted, preferably to educate ourselves or help other team members, as long as our requests for help or special projects were attended to first, which we always did. Reading teh internet because boring after a while, because you can do all that in an hour, then you run out of things of interest to read.
I learned and managed to introduce Linux into the environment. We also developed a sophisticated network interrogation tool to gather infomration about a user's environement, applications and PC status: basically about 3 of us worked out that if we have enough information, most of the time we can fix a user's PC remotely, or do preventative maintenance prior to problems occuring. All this was done via Windows scripts which dumped data into a central folder, then another perl guru in our trio did some parsing of the reports and populated a database. This database was visible on a web site searcheable by host name. It was so useful and successful, that word reached the upper echelons of the company. We did not charge the customer anythign for this. It was all to help us do our jobs quicker. Pretty much two or three times a week we'd go out for a 2-hour lunch, and the boss sometimes joined us. On quiet days we used to even play networked games, and before the manager's responsibilities grew drastically, he used to join in.
After six years, the contract was terminated, and so the team got disbanded. That was the sad thing, the team as a whole, I later found out, was number one in terms of SLAs and customer satisfaction in the whole Asia Pacific region. It also had the lowest ratio of admin to technical staff at about 1 to 20 or so. The average in AP was about 1 to 5 and for some customers it was close to 1 to 1.
On a side note, when word reached the top of the management chain about the tools we've developed, they tried to make us stop using it because it threatened the potential sale of a "management" tool that they were trying to sell to the customer.
Back on topic, it all depends on what your manager can tolerate. A good manager would let you do whatever as long as your work comes first.
Downtime is for those projects that nobody will officially let you start, nobody "wants" and nobody will pay you to implement. Then, when you spend all that downtime putting it in, you pretend that you did it in your own time alongside your normal work, and people suddenly discover that all the projects that they considered a waste of time become something that they can't live without.
At least, that's how it's worked everywhere I've ever been employed.
For example, in a Windows-only school at which the only person who'd ever heard of Linux (the IT manager) treated mention of it like some kind of first word from a child ("Oh, you use Linux. That's cute. Tell me when you make something 'useful' out of it."), I had a few hours of downtime. Found a spare "obsolete" PC. Found a couple of network cards. Was tired of the "Linux being nothing more than a toy" digs.
In three hours (including install, configuration and a lot of testing) I implemented a caching, transparent proxy/filter which to this day is still filtering the Internet (with zero configuration changes either on the clients, servers or any other devices) for over a thousand users without anybody noticing any difference and saving the school in question several thousand pounds on buying their own filtering appliance (from the prices we were quoted). I implemented it in an afternoon and it went into full live service when school finished that day and is still there churning away. It's zero-maintenance (unless someone wants a particular website blocked, in which case they just stick its name into a plain text file), "invisible" to the network users so, unlike some of the other network equipment, the kids don't try to "hack" it and even if they do only the squid port actually does anything.
It's never been rebooted, never caused a problem, is the only thing standing between the kids and the nasty side of the Internet, is now the de facto and only Internet filtering within the school and if it ever "breaks" it has a Cat5-coupler taped to it with instructions - couple the "In" Ethernet cable to the "Out" cable and, without doing anything else, you bypass the filter without anyone noticing more than a seconds downtime. Obviously, it's in a secured cabinet so that only the IT manager can do that, but the demonstration of "now we're filtered, *click*, now we're not, *click*, now you're running off my proxy, *click*, now it's all back how it was before today, *click*"... was enough to silence the Linux-critic once and for all.
Then there's the school running a Jabber IM system that they "would never use". Then there's the school running the PHP helpdesk for which they had no use. Then there's the one whose IT department are running their own recording CCTV computer which nobody but the IT department know about, which emails them movies of any movement in the IT office overnight or when nobody is supposed to be in - it's already caught several "wanderers" who just happened to walk through the locked IT office when they had no need to and "just looked" at the pile of laptops hidden away. That system later got re-used to record classes for approximately £500 less per camera then our usual CCTV supplier.
All the best projects are done when you let the people who know how just let loose with their own ideas and not worry about whether the end product will be useful. Downtime is perfect for this and turns the most boring moments into the most interesting, especially if you have a large IT team who can all "show off" to each other.
If you don't find yourself needing a few minutes of non job-related "downtime" every two or three hours to work out the mental kinks, you're probably not working that hard to begin with. Have fun congratulating yourself on your "superior work ethic" as you shuffle windows on your desktop all day, and pray your management never institutes meaningful performance metrics.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Dude, calm down. Perhaps if you took a break from your work once and again, you wouldn't be so stressed out. I work 50 hours a week on average, and sometimes in the middle of the day, I'll take a break from working (oh noes); sometimes when I've worked 4 12 hour days in a row, I'll take a day off, a weekday! Work is not slavery, nor servitude; you provide a product to your employer, for which you are duly compensated - that's it.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
I've worked for a lot of failing companies. I'm not management so I didn't have anything to do with the failures. Usually what will happen is the work volume slacks off but they can't get rid of me because I know important things so it'll limp along like that for a bit before deteriorating finances force a layoff.
During the normal workday, it's always nice to check the news for a few minutes between tasks. When a company is in the death spiral, it's tempting to do nothing but. But that's the time when study becomes the most important. With the last couple of death spirals I've been in, I've self-studied to the point of being able to land the next job with the skills I picked up while on the clock. If the company isn't wanting to pay for new kit or approve new systems, there's still plenty of skills that can be picked up via simulation or installing the packages on VMware.
If I'm honest with myself, I have to admit I was on the lax side with the self-study. I picked up my skills and got my next job after the layoff but I could have advanced the time table a bit. But I'm in a better position than other co-workers I've been with who have let their depression with the job turn into paralysis and then the layoff comes out of the blue and they have no prospects, no current skills.
So yes, there is the temptation to goof off during downtime but you're not cheating the company -- they'll fuck and chuck without a second thought, you owe them nothing -- but you will cheat yourself. In this economy, you should keep one eye on your current job and one eye on what you plan to do next after you get laid off from this one. If your current job has you working with hot shit technology, no worries. If you end up in a tech ghetto with skills that won't be applicable on the general market, make the time to self-study.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
This is why I spend my "down-time" scripting away my job to generate more down-time.