Slashdot Mirror
Office Work Ethic In the IT Industry?
An anonymous reader writes "As a recent graduate entering industry for the first time at a large software and hardware company, I have been shocked at what seems to be a low standard of work ethic and professionalism at my place of employment, especially in this poor economy. For example, at my company, the large majority of developers seem to each individually waste — no exaggeration — hours of time on the clock every day talking about football, making personal phone calls, gossiping, taking long lunches, or browsing the Internet (including, yes, Slashdot!). Even some of our subcontractors waste time in this manner. Being the 'new guy,' I get stuck with much of the weekend and after-hours grunt work when we inevitably miss deadlines or produce poor code. I'm not in any position to go around telling others to use their time more efficiently. Management seems to tolerate it. I would like to ask Slashdot what methods others have used to deal with office environments such as this. Is my situation unique or is it common across the industry?"
Get ready to work Sundays.
They aren't going to sit down, do 8 straight hours of work, then go home. You'll burn out even trying. People work better with short, frequent breaks taken at their own rate. So long as they get the work done, there's no problem. The only issue I see here is you- first off, grow some balls and refuse to work the extra hours. Trust me, you won't be rewarded for them. Secondly, unless someone isn't making their individual units of work, mind your own business. Or maybe even join in the next time they talk football, you might make a friend or two.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
whats gives you the right to waste your office time snooping on others?
Try programming all day, every day. You end up driving home in a fog.
Many people browse IT websites at work. In this industry, how to you propose we keep ourselves updated? You sound like one of those irritating prudes who can't understand how the normal world works.
It's the same in every field of activity (banks, everything), not only in IT.
I admit it might be hard to realize at first but you should get use to it eventually ! ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
http://xkcd.com/303/
I'm starting to wonder if there is a case where no XKCD comic applies.
Hopefully they will see this while browsing /. during work and straighten their ways.
I mean, that happens all the time, doesn't it?
The more real work which is done, the less it's worth. As a supplier of work it makes no sense for you to reduce the value of that work.
Deleted
For example, match Man.Utd. - Chelsea is more important then anything you are programming anyway, so STFU and listen to elders. Your work is not something to escape and doing everything very fast for your fat stupid manager will not make you Employee of the month (or maybe it will, who cares). And your customers actually expect you will never meet deadlines anyway.
839*929
It's you, isn't it. You're the little douche bag who keeps bitching about us taking breaks. We actually have a pool going on how many times you'll say yes to extra hours before you crack. Hey, you got something brown on your nose.
This is how the world of work is. In time you'll fit in. As the new boy, expect to take the crap. You won't always be the new boy. Until then don't be a pain in the arse trying to get everyone else to change.
Give some time, you will be doing the same things in a while.
So they might be working you just don't understand it since you do "grunt" code that requires no thinking.
In a short time, there will be another new guy and you can slack off like everyone else. Or, if you really want to work at a place where everyone half-kills themselves, I hear EA games is hiring.
This is just the way it goes - nobody is able to do the same routine job they've been doing for a while for more than say a cumulative 6 hours a day. Taking a break to say read slashdot (= keeping up with developments), socialising, talking about football (= good for teambuilding!) relaxes the mind and will allow for another few hours of good, concentrated work. If you want to make a career, better to join in occasionally, otherwise you'll be the odd one out, the one who won't be part of the team, and, importantly, the snotty just-out-of-school kid who thinks he knows better that everyone loves to hate. Which in end-effect you are because a. you have no experience, b. no life-experience and c. you don't keep up with developments, whether it be professional (slashdot reading!) or social (talking about football, the families and so forth). So, relax, get used to it and participate as much as you can without screwing up your own portion of the work.
Glad you got that degree aren't you?
I used to work in an IT research group in a university. All of us were single or in relaxed relationships where the other partner was also a professional, so there was no pressure to keep to 'school run' times, pick up kids, get home for set meal times etc. Which meant we worked erratic and long hours. Some days we'd kick back and mess around, other days we'd work late, weekends etc.
We got a new guy in who laid down the rules politely but firmly with the boss. He said "I've got a 3 year old son and he's the most important thing in my life. I'll come in early, and I'll work hard from 8.30 til 5.00 and if you need me to do more hours I'll even come in earlier. But I leave here at 5.30 to get home for his meal and I don't work weekends because I spend time with my family".
The guy got a lot of respect for his stance, and he was true to his word. He'd come in bang on time, work damn hard, not goof around when we were kicking back, and leave prompt on 5.30. We all knew if we needed his help on a project we couldn't leave it til 5.25, we had to get organised and get our questions to him for lunchtime.
I think you should do the same - tell the boss you'll work the hours and you'll work hard while you're in the office but you have other commitments and you'll not be able to pull all nighters. You'll be respected for it. And if they say that this isn't fair, and you should be prepared to sacrifice your life to the job, you should be looking out for other employment.
In my experience, this is common. I've been at both ends. The weekend working newbie employee, and the casual relaxed contractor not busting my ass.
There are a number of reasons for the perceived slack of attention that you notice. One main one, which relates to something you don't necessarily learn in college, is that even in a technical environment surrounded by socially awkward geeks/nerds, there is a necessity for social bonding. It can make the work day less stressful, lead to cross-pollination of ideas, outside perspectives on problems you've been working with, etc...
We tend not to value these things when we're fresh faced and eager to code 40 hours straight. Give me a problem and let me solve it. But the older you get, the more you realise the advantages in it. For one thing, as we get older, our brains require some distraction to avoid burnout. Even when coding, sometimes you need to take a break before the subconscious can solve a problem you've been consciously wrestling with.
Basically, there's a reason management tolerate it. They've learned that if they crack down on this sort of behaviour, and start clock watching themselves (monitoring lunch breaks, toilet breaks, net usage, phone usage, etc...) the company suffers. Either because humans will strive to find ways around rules they perceive as unnecessarily restrictive, or the really talented guys get depressed and move somewhere else.
My 40 hour working week these days is very different to my 80 hour working week 15 years ago. I may not produce as much code, solve as many bugs, etc... But I have a good idea of everything that's going on in my department. I am regularly asked for advise by colleagues on technical matters. I know which of my co-workers are good people, who are the experts and in which fields, and which are assholes. I know who can be relied upon, and who can rely on me. Basically, I'm better at being able to bring my years of experience to bear on different problems. And that doesn't require me to knuckle down and concentrate fully on these problems for 40 hours in isolation.
It'll happen to you. Seriously though, it's just not possible to stay that enthusiastic about someone else's business 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 240 days a year. There are great jobs out there - but not everyone can have them. So you have to find happiness where you can. It sucks, but it's the reality of living in a modern society. You need people out there doing boring rote jobs, even if they're doing them sub-optimally.
The best interpretation of work time that I ever heard was when I worked in Germany and my boss said that 20% utilization of resources was the perfect score for his performance as a department manager.
People do spend a lot of time doing other things, that's not to say that they are lazy or unwilling to work, its just the ebb and flow of the workload in many cases.
If resources got kicked out every time there was a shortage of work, or if businesses closed their doors when revenue slowed down we would end up with a lot of people out of work and an awful lot of businesses unable to show that they can take on a project (having the resources in a workable team is part of the criteria for getting project work).
Get used to wasting more than a few cycles at the office, find informative things to study, get along with your colleagues by knowing the sports news, the entertainment news and by practicing your people skills (communication). Try to enjoy it, it should make up a big chunk of your life.
If you are only interested in going to the manager with this viewpoint, you are likely to stand out as a person who doesn't fit in. Good managers know their resources and can usually do a good job of matching resources to workload, that's the whole point of their role.
If not quit. Otherwise, be happy to have the money. Who cares whether things get or done? As long as you get your money you have nothing to worry about.
You could report it to your CEO, but if he is prone to throwing chairs about don't ask him how his mission to "f***ing bury" Eric Schmidt is going. And seeing how much he loves iPhones you'd better hide that Nexus One too.
Having worked in numerous fields (probably more than the IT workers who have thus far replied) I can say without a doubt that IT consists of the biggest bunch of slackers I've ever in my life seen. I enjoy it quite a bit, but I'm actually getting to a point where I'm starting to feel a little guilty. But only a little.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I know, I've been asked if I'm feeling okay by colleagues when seemingly all I did was to stare into the empty space, at the window or someplace else. In reality, I was working more efficiently than most of them, preferring to think about a problem before I try to implement a solution for it. Probably 90% of the work I do is designing a good architecture, making sure it's fast, scalable, robust, flexible and maintainable enough. This requires weighting dozens of different factors and thinking about a lot of "action at a distance" kind of problems.
I love my job. I would do it even if I wouldn't receive financial compensation for it. One drawback is that you can't really work office hours with it, it's hard to switch off iterating a problem in the back of your mind (resulting in several House-esque moments of some totally unrelated thing reminding me to a neat concept that helps me implement an elegant solution).
I guess the point is, different people work differently. Yeah, if someone's browsing for porn or looking at bash.org, they are probably not doing anything useful, but taking a break or if someone looks like he's idling, it's not always the case that they are not doing anything productive.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I guess its fairly apparent that some of your coworkers have stumbled upon this article. ;)
if you want to become strong, as a start out developer you need to be an environment where you learn from your peers. If you are motivated to learn and produce things it will be difficult if your peers are unproductive and management weak. The risk is that your peers are happy with the status quo and that management are not motivated to improve the engineering dept. You may find yourself getting frustrated as you grow, but your colleagues stay the same. There are some great companies out there who care about engineering, the trick is to identify them when interviewing. Asking questions such as 'how do you guys measure engineering quality' or 'what software lifecycle is predominant' are inoffensive, but tell you important things about how the engineering department operates I've 10 years experience as an engineer now. In your position, I would ask myself question 'what can i learn from my colleagues' and if after 6 or 9 months in a company, the answer is not good then you may have made a mistake joining that company. While job hopping is not good, it may be the best thing to do. Just be careful not to repeat the mnistake,I know some companies that will not hire someone with a history of changing job more frequently than once every two years.
I work for the US government. Once a year I send an email to upper management reporting the massive waste I'm forced to deal with (about 30% of all money spent, in a multi-$1B/year budget, is wasted in one way or another).
Each year management decides to ignore me. I make sure I'm not part of the problem, and do my best to deal with it.
Being at the bottom of the food chain, the system is designed to crush me if I want to take a stand for the benefit of all. So I don't. No one likes whistle-blowers, except for maybe tax-payers . . .
Maybe your managers will be more attentive? Give em a try.
I really don't get how it always ends up this way. Most jobs at IT firms are like this, and so long as a majority of the employees, and their supervisors, are barely out of college, then it is going to be idle chatter, Nerf gun fights, and decorating your workspace with 4chan memes and 'amusing' motivational posters, with work getting done in between. I worked in the administration division of a large software firm, and it boggled my mind that going through the more techie areas of the company was like a playground or a dorm room, but going through legal, accounting, marketing, et al., was like going through... a real workplace. It showed, too, in the reports I'd put together, the way general work ethic was. Of course, oddly enough, our foreign offices' tech people were entirely different. It's just the culture we live in. Then again, you're bringing this up with /., where most people are going to complain that the sofa in front of the Playstation in the lounge is starting to get uncomfortable...
...tell the boss you'll work the hours and you'll work hard while you're in the office but you have other commitments and you'll not be able to pull all nighters. And if they say that this isn't fair, and you should be prepared to sacrifice your life to the job, you should be looking out for other employment.
What do you think this is - 1999?!?
I know someone who was called in for the weekend to just be there after a previous weekend where he sat around doing nothing because his supervisor apparently just wanted her people in to show her boss that she was "cracking the whip". He didn't show that weekend of this BS and was considered to have quit - he was walked out by security that following morning and he couldn't collect unemployment. He had two lovely toddlers.
In this economy, you can be replaced easily and getting another job is near impossible - that's assuming you're not Steve Jobs or Linus.
I'm a PHB and on the rare occasions that I need help, I get swamped with resumes from qualified people - and I'm sure my boss feels the same about me - MBAs are a penny a dozen now and getting cheaper.
I've been on both sides of this, as a developer and as a manager: first off, its wholly impractical and counter-productive to try and control every thing staff do. The more controls you impose, the more time you spend policing the rules - and all that does is make for a miserable unproductive environment. One of the first rules of a "happy" productive team, a happy engineering team, is mutual trust between those doing the work and those responsible for ensuring it gets done - its a quid pro quo. And at the end of the day, in my experience, good engineers WANT to work, want to solve problems, want to design, they/we get a kick from it, job satisfaction if you will, pride in a job well done. And every single engineer needs "think" time - chaining people to a rigid set of work methods really doesnt work (unless you are working on a production line). THAT said, it is certainly true that some offices/teams are poor, thats the nature of things - and if productivity is low and people are just taking the p*** then sooner or later the manager gets replaced and the situation is rectified or the good engineers move on. My teams get total freedom, the senior designers have the flex to work from home too. But i know exactly who is and who is not productive - and I get rid of engineers who dont pull their weight - its that simple (and very rare). And that never causes an issue with the others, and nor did it when I was a "grunt" - in fact, you dont want idiots in around you who dont do any work. Gauging productivity is the managers job and responsibility - they should be able to do it, they should have a range of choices/skills/options that allow them to improve it when needed. As a new person with little industry experience your assessment may be premature - I would say dont jump to instant conclusions or be too judgemental, it may well be you've landed in a poor office - and in due course you will either understand that to be the case and move on to a better place, or you will adjust. Bottom line, if you're unhappy and remain unhappy, find somewhere else.
Do your female officemates have questionable work ethics as well? If so, then you're in good company!
Is it a sin to spend a few minutes talking about last night's game while you're on the clock for the company? No. Socialization creates camaraderie in the workplace, which ultimately increases morale and productivity. Is it a sin to spend several hours surfing sports websites while on the clock for the company? You betchya, and I'll be the first one with my boot up your ass when I review the network activity logs. As usual, it all comes down to common sense. Our network policy states "no personal surfing on the clock." Period. Do I enforce that to the letter? No way. I have no problem with someone checking their bank account or a news site while they're sitting on hold with a customer. I recognize that employees who do this are going to be more productive and happier in the office. When I review network activity, I always allow a small percentage of personal traffic even though it's technically against company policy. My superiors know I do this, and they trust my judgment. As for your situation, you have two options as I see it. You can abide by your own work ethic, which might not accomplish anything other than being able to sleep better at night; or you can lower yourself to the standards of your coworkers. Either way, until you have more seniority or move into a supervisory position, there is little you can do about it.
Don't misunderstand when I say this, but general unprofessionalism in IT is quite rampant. I don't mean large amounts of personal time or anything, but general jackassery, politics, and bad bosses seem to be exponentially more numerous in IT from my experience, especially in contracting or development. If anything, you should be glad that management tolerates it, since I work in a tight spot where bosses have cracked down on everything treating the staff like Kindergartners who can't wipe their own ass after taking a shit. Use the leniency in management to get some free time in at work, while making sure you still get your work done properly and to the best of your ability.
As for the extra hours, it varies in time from person to person, but you'll eventually grow some balls and tell them (albeit in very polite corporate speak) to get bent. My corporate balls dropped after putting in over 40+ hours on off days for various emergencies and projects, only to get a strictly average performance review from my boss with no mention of my efforts; your situation will probably differ in some respects, but all of us here have had that eye opening moment at some point.
Look at it this way. If you're being challenged, find the work interesting, and find some downtime during your normal shifts after work has been completed, then I see no problem. You'll always have asshat employees and jackass bosses, but that's the norm. Quit worrying about everyone else, and worry about what concerns you directly, and get it done.
... in a large organization where the majority of the skill-set requirements is commoditized. - The company finds the people expendable because most of the times the market has enough replacements - similar attitude grows amongst employees where there are enough companies out there to hire them if they cop a bad rating / demotion in a cycle. - The company policies apply to huge sections of the employee base - as a result a wide range of work ethics / capability will get the same benefits. People won't be motivated to go the extra mile as they would still be in the same category. Often times, people in a higher category may lose faith as fundamentally, the grading systems in large comapnies struggle to reward justly. If you want to find great / extreme work ethics, you should go to a start-up or an industry where the (talent or hard work ) vs (requirement or pay) are more closely correlated . I suggest you get out before the environment grows on you.
As others have pointed out: keep working hard. Don't raise the issue unless you want to be a pariah. And just to be sure, make sure you double and triple assess the actual work they produce - e.g. I worked in finance, and couldn't believe the lunches and goofing around of other people- but then I realised they actually were very good at their jobs and could create more useful action with a single email than me in a day. With experience and seniority you are allowed to make a tradeoff and put in slightly fewer hours alongside your very much boosted productivity. Call it social contract.
If you double and triple assess, and still feel quality is low - then work hard, *learn as much as possible*, keep your head down on complaints, and discreetly look for jobs elsewhere. There are big differences in what the top employers pay.
Welcome to the world... of the real. (IT industry, that is!)
Then maybe they're just no good and if they worked more hours, instead of better code, they'd produce more bad code.
Why is it that CEOs get to play golf as a work activity? And your statement "Why is it that coders" indicates you don't know what concentration is required to code. When you studied for exams, you were told to take a 10 minute break every 20 minutes AT LEAST or you'll not manage to do more work, just take more time.
And that's not for a day-to-day job. That's for a one-off deadline.
I know it sounds funny but your company (assuming it is a decent size shop) isn't prepared to pay for work ethic. To get a group of expert developers who are willing to work 40, 50 or 70 hours (and I mean really work) requires that they pay huge hourly rates, reward success monetarily, and provide expensive benefits that allow someone to spend that amount of time in high gear. Companies are sometimes willing to do this for jobs they view as most valuable (e.g. executives or some jobs in their core competency that accounts for revenue directly). Unfortunately companies see developers as commodities and don't want to pay these rates since the way you make a commodity more valuable is to buy it cheaply. Additionally, they don't understand the work being done (which is partially why the see developers as commodities) and can't really tell you when a developer is productive or not. They respond to their lack of knowledge by burdening the developer with all sorts of process to try to control the fact they don't understand what is really happening and lower their perceived risk.
All of this leads to an unmotivated developer who gets paid the same whether he goofs off for 90% of the time or works like a dog. As a result developers tend to gravitate toward a least common denominator or commodity level of productivity. This means the really good ones can work 1/10th speed and keep up with the average level. Heck even average developers can work half speed in this type of environment. By viewing and managing developers as commodities companies have created the very reality that they will act like commodities.
... and having worked in at least 12 different companies by now, i can tell you that:
a) It depends on the company - company culture, profit margins and the business the company are in all make for more or less hectic enviroments in the IT areas (and others).
b) It depends on the morale of the employees. Recessions actually mean that there are more unmotivated workers around since many which would otherwise left will stay put until "the storm passes".
c) It the depends on the point of the development cycle you are on. For all you know, a week before you joined people were over-stressed and working long hours to make a release and now they are in the decompression period before a new major project is started.
Also and to put it plainly: as a recent graduate you know nothing working in IT.
Let me break this too you now before you learn it the hard way:
I'm largely with the OP, and that after some 15 years of professional experience. Developers have made an art form of making everybody else believe that they're working on stuff that's incredibly complex, and thus best solved while playing pool or surfing the web. I've seen dudes submit estimates of several days for jobs I *knew* couldn't take them more than a few hours. I've seen differences in productivity between individuals of at least an order of magnitude, which weren't recognized/rewarded/sanctioned by management. After trying to rock the boat a few times I've concluded that this is an issue of corporate culture, and unless you are Alpha enough to take on everyone's entrenched attitudes, you can either pull everyone else's weight, you can adapt and use the "spare" time to your advantage, or you can find another place that suits you better.
You are green, so keep that in mind when I call you a proper wanker. You work the shit jobs not because everyone else is fucking off but because you need to pay your dues mate. This should be true everywhere. You may be superfly TNT mental giant wonderbra and your manager could be half a monkey's cortex but as far as management is concerned, he has shown up every day for the past 5 years and all you do it bitch. Who's the liability?
First thought is good for both women and business. If you walk around and point out flaws you see in the system, you are going to create two effects for yourself. You are going to get frustrated with the workplace and the workplace is going to get frustrated with you. The former makes you look like a know-it-all and the latter is because you question people's competence without enough experience. Similarly, if you meet a women and start to critique her decisions, the result will be the same. You have two options: 1) accept what is in front of you; 2) go somewhere else. But you don't want to go somewhere else because there's so much about THIS situation that could be fixed so we can all MAKE MORE MONEY. Don't go down that road, dog. Sit back, relax and enjoy the easy work. Have fun. Watch some football and goof off. It's a recession and people are holding on tight to their jobs. Your chances of shooting up are low. So kick it, maybe have a beer. Hopefully get laid and just do your work and listen.
Second, well, there is no second but I think a lot of you can use some advice in this area -- and by you I mean grads. Because I was the same way. Gung-ho. In a rush. Complaining about wankers. Until I realized that in fact, I was the wanker. Go watch Glengarry Glen Ross -- learn the score before you say anything.
And remember, if you don't like the way something is done, you can always go start your own business.
Working as a developer back in the 1900s, I had free subscriptions to some relevant magazines. Yes, the time I spent reading them was time I didn't spend coding, but it meant I kept abreast of developments in the field, which was a Good Thing as far as my employers were concerned.
Slashdot's "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters" are generally more useful, and certainly more timely, than those magazines ever were. I'm not in IT any more, but I'm close enough to it that people still appreciate and value me knowing what's up in technology.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
50 minutes of work & 10 minutes of rest, every hour of the working day. What i do in those 10 minutes is very much my own business. Being able to "chill out" for 10 minutes definitely boosts my productivity (especially towards the end of the day, or in fact night every once in a while). There were certainly exceptions to this, when I'm really concentrated on something and I did have cases where I literally worked non stop for 8, 12 and my own max record of ~30 hours (with small brakes to refill coffee & snatch someones half eaten sandwich from the fridge :) ), but after this non stop I'm certainly expecting a chillout period which has to at least compensates to some extent for the stress I've taken. In any case I doubt you'd see anyone working their ass off after pulling a ton of overtime the day/night before.
That being said, i've came to such "schedule" after working for ~7 years for the same company in different roles, attempting to resign 4 or 5 times (convinced not to) and actually quitting & coming back after a years break.
If you think that you can come to an 8 hour working shift and work non stop breaking for lunch only, I guaranty you that after a couple of years you will be a 110% burnout and that definitely does no good neither to your own health nor does this benefit the company you work for. I mean regardless of how enthusiastic you are about your job, or how good you are at it or anything of this nature. Work stress is stress regardless of anything.
Everyone needs space & time to "blow off some steam".
As far as people deliberately wasting time, and this affecting schedules, deadlines and quality of work - unless you are in the management/supervision, or want to pave the road into those area MIND YOUR OWN F***ING BUSINESS!
Last but not the least - work ethics & business ethics are concepts belonging to a class room, ethics have no room in business. Business is about making money, everything else is PR BS.
PS It is only unethical if you get caught!
You sure you've chosen the right profession? Sounds to me like you want to be in management, you'll fit right in.
hey our senators are playing solitare.... , that is when they actually show up. What job actually works non-stop for 8 hours, very few, cops take breaks, I have seen doctors relaxing, ....
Something I learned a long, long time ago was don't worry about your peers. Just do your work and don't worry about anyone else. Don't go crying to your boss, he'll already know the score.
Turn up on time, do your work, go home, get paid. You'll be happier with this attitude.
You probably already know that life is not fair and some people seem to get all the breaks. Life is not fair. Take it on the chin. Play the cards you have in your hand.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
As a federal employee for over 10 years I have seen it all. Trust me :). Just make sure you bring up your end and people should do right by you. Dont worry about other people's bad habits and dont go over the edge to impress your employer or burn your self out. Set a pace, be reliable and try not to judge unless its your responsibility. Be helpful but dont hurt yourself. Stay sharp, dont stay in one place too long, always have more than one way out. If you can manage to be a positive influence with in your work center and still do right by your self you are moving in the right direction. Lead by example, try not to criticize and alienate.
Most IT slackers have been effectively punished for taking initiative when they were young and idealistic so now they mosey through their existence in exchange for a modest compensation. If a company treats their staff well and encourages work, self actualization, and initiative through tangible real life benefits this doesn't happen so much.
Programming is very intensive. You can easily do project management for 8 hours straight but try do that with programming for a month and you'll understand why people take breaks. Yes, I've done both. We're plagued with project managers who don't get this because they've never been in the trenches themselves. That's a good way to make bad leaders in any field, I might add.
What you're observing are effects, not causes, so don't be so quick to judge your peers. If quality really is low and deadlines are problematic, perhaps you could read up on your Agile Methodology and gently nudge that into this workplace by acting as an example. Much of the advice I read here is about placing limitations and making your job sustainable which is an essential part of e.g. SCRUM. You working your arse off will not help, indeed., so that would be a priority, or you won't be able to do anything else. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)
"I would like to ask Slashdot what methods others have used to deal with office environments such as this."
I usually dump my extra work on the new guy so I have more time to relax and goof off. You should pressure your company to hire someone newer than yourself.
A comfortable work-life balance is important and there is no right answer for everyone.
I am happy to work as hard as possible during my working hours and will stick to them quite strictly. But I see working hard as possible involving taking short breaks every now and then otherwise I feek I would actually be a less productive developer because I'll get a fuzzy head and frustrated.
I'm a young person, but my point of view on the importance of my personal life is more that in line with an older married person or one with children. My time outside of work spent with my girlfriend or on hobbies and family / friend occasions is something I value extremely highly, and I'm not prepared to compromise that by bending over backwards to suit an employer.
Find the weakest one and start openly making sarcastic comments about how little work they do. Corporate America is all about competition and ass-kissing so you are completely entitled to shit on these people. From what you describe, sounds like fish in a barrel. Just fire away.
It gets worse... much worse. When I was working for a leading multinational computer vendor back in the 1980s, I distinctly recall beavering away at work while other team members chatted over coffee. I felt rather superior and smug, thinking "Well, even if they are letting the side down, I am making sure the work gets done".
You could have knocked me over with a feather when, at my next review, my supervisor criticized me sharply for my anti-social behaviour. He told me I should relax, chat more with the others, and generally be more human. The strong implication was that I had actually been undermining morale by failing to socialize and, perhaps, by making some of the others feel guilty.
As time went by, I found it tempting and easy to start slacking myself - especially if I was getting no credit, but actually harming my career prospects, by working flat out all shift (and sometimes several hours beyond).
That's how Wally came to be the way he is today!
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Keep in mind, this is probably why you have a job there at all. Do you think they would have hired you if everyone else was working at ~twice their current capacity?
The main way to advance is to distinguish yourself from your peers. Where I work, people are generally pretty damn smart and hard-working, so its a bit of a scrap each year at review time. Sounds like you have an opportunity to really show how much more you do than the others around you. If your management agrees, then great! If they don't see it, then start looking for something else.
Doesn't Google encourage this sort of happy go lucky environment? Did they start tanking and I wasn't aware of it?
As an IT Professional, you get paid for what you know not how long you work.
...and we'll see what he says then. It always looks different when you're outside looking in. Talk to us after your first layoff kiddo.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
[shrug] Who is John Gault?
I knew a guy who barely came into the office at all... but he did a lot of the coding and they ended up letting him go because he wasn't in any of the meetings. So the SOCIAL GATHERING thing is seems to be more important than the code itself. I've also worked in areas where people were goofing off like 50% of the day, and it was very hard to maintain focus in that atmosphere. These were guys getting paid over 70-120K a year! It was ridiculous when you go to the small business down the road to get some food and drinks, and the person there is working their best and doing their best to put on their best face, they put everyone in your office to severe shame with their superior work ethic for less than 60K. It was easier for me to work at home because the atmosphere actually made me suffer... so I would just code at home then the next day PRETEND to work in the office while I slyly pasted my code in that I did from home. I knew of other people doing the same thing. It's weird I tell you. They were even worried if you were getting valuable work done. Anyways, I figured out it is the way the software office corporate politics works in the US. They remind of those labor unions and the 'White Knights'.
Except that "everybody" as you put it does NOT work hard.
I have a very hands off management style. As long as I get reasonable results I don't care if my employees talk about sports or surf the Net. It's when it gets out of hand that I have to step in, such as two years ago duing March Madness when everyone was more interested in the pool they were running than in doing any work.
As with many things in life it's about balance. People shouldn't be worked like robots or slaves, but when they are getting paid a wage that they agreed on to perform a function it's not out of line to expect that function to be carried out and carried out well.
Ask the people at your workplace. I keep an eye on various relevant technical and social issues with Slashdot, and it keeps me on my toes to chat with sharp people here who know about other fields. A certain amount of slack at work while my code is compiling or my brain is working on other fields seems harmless, and I normally put in plenty of after hours work to cover any missed worktime. Conversely, you may be right about people slacking off: it can be due to many reasons, such as genuine frustration at not being allowed to do anything useful or watching their good ideas being thrown out by an incompetent manager.
Also, IT work is often like firefighting. You spend a lot of time cooking meals and reading magazines and keeping yourself and your equipment fit, and then at disaster time you and your equipment are supposed to go all out with skills and _plans_ to fix things and recover data. That on-call time can be valuable, too.
Welcome to the real world, where cheating is acceptable, laziness is often rewarded and the only people who succeed are those who stand up and shout for it or those who suck up for it. If you don't speak up about your own value, no one else will, or worse, someone else will try to claim your work as their own. Get used to the bad work ethic, it's here to stay, no matter what company you work for, but make sure you let your supervisor(s) know what you have done for them work-wise and you should be okay. Don't play the blame game, just do your part and let it be known that you have.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
I'm sure this will probably be an unpopular comment.. but it starts from the Top. I've recently joined a large investment bank in London (transferred back from the US) and it's IT dept 'was' run in a very similar manor. Lots of screwing around, no customer focus and a second-rate service. If management are willing to tolerate it, and are not willing to put in the extra hours/effort to fix the culture of the department, nothing will change. I'm management and it's a continual up-hill struggle to motivate not only the team, but also the other managers. Happy to report though, we're making progress. If i were the grad, either work your ass off to rise above the clutter, or ride the wave of bone-idol. Good luck!
www.redcu.be
Why, is there any Work Ethic still in America?
I think it is a lot more significant when you talk about missed deadlines. If you are doing a lot of that in your are, then something is not right. It is not unusual for people presented with tough problems to take a break and then come back with a new perspective. Missing deadlines means that people are not estimating their work correctly and not taking those esitmates seriously.
In the end your leadership is responsible. Have a serious talk with your boss. Make it positive and ask about his/her relationship to the total work of your area. Find out how you fit in, the history of the group, and what the career posibilities are. Couched this way, you will perhaps get a clue as to what is going on. If you've diagnosed a true problem and no one is interested in fixing it, you might want to be looking for a company that will be in business the next couple of years--your current one may not be around.
...to greater and lesser degrees. You will always find yourself, if you work for companies larger than 10 people in size, noticing that there are people who simply clock their time and those who actually work - regardless of whether this is in IT or at a law firm or even a hospital. Even companies of 10 or less can have unmotivated employees who are only there for the paycheck and have no interest in actually accomplishing anything.
One of the reasons people strive to work at companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, startups, and any other company that makes employment challenging, is the opportunity to be on teams that are motivated. Teams where you can learn something not only from what you end up producing, but from each other, and even (on rare occasions) from your management.
If you find yourself working someplace where people just jerk around all day you should realize a few things, first that management likely doesn't understand the projects or people they are managing so they're either just PHBs (pointy haired bosses) or nice versions of the PHB. If that wasn't the case, they would certainly not put up with that sort of behavior - it would be in their best interests to keep costs down and get rid of dead wood. Second, that unless you're division/department is not the primary revenue generator for your company, you should worry; because, your management doesn't know how to manage engineers, and your engineers don't seem to give a sh**.
If you're as junior as you seem to be, I would recommend that you learn what you can at this job and move on. Save up a few grand in the bank, keep your personal costs low (ignore that 'bimmer' you've always wanted), and find a startup or other small company that makes software. It is like being paid to attend graduate school for engineering/marketing/business usually with other highly motivated people.
Good luck!
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When I worked in England, a typical day for my coworkers consisted of: taking child to school that starts much later than US schools (roughly 9 am), taking public transportation to work, getting there at roughly 10 am, nipping off to the pub for a bite to eat, some tea, and a beer (or three) from about 12-1:30, then leaving for the day at 3. Yet my coworkers were just as productive as my current coworkers in the US are, even though we work a full 8 hours.
While this post is slightly tongue-in-cheek, the reality remains that "hard work" is a relative term across global economies and cannot be measured in hours logged on your timecard.
I knew someone who was working for a big company doing some coding. This person would show up for work on time, punch-in (or clock-in) to show that this person was there... THEN, would have the computer going, and on an occasion more than you would expect, would leave the building, get into the car, go home get into another car that had the hang glider on it, drive a couple of hours to a prime hang gliding spot, meet with friends, go soaring for much of the day, get back into the vehicle with hang glider on the top, drive home, get back into regular car, drive to work go in for an hour or so, and then punch or clock out of work. Putting in a full day at work. Management at the company was so out of touch (had no clue what folks did in IT at all) that this was possible and this person was NEVER missed while not at work. They NEVER missed this person at all. OH - collected a fat check every week doing this.
So - this is a problem. AND the problem is that people who are not geeks or IT folks have no clue what is going on in tech at all. That is their problem!
The other problem is that the work ethic has slipped off quite a bit and due to this, others are being hired or work is outsourced to places (as management is concerned that deadlines are missed, and have meeting s about this, and find that maybe the work does get done at less cost if outsourced to a firm that does enforce or encourage a positive work ethic (and each employee feels involved in the positive direction of the company SO MUCH that they want to work harder). So, the problem starts at the top... and then becomes a culture of non-workers if the proper attitude is not in place from the start. If the DNA is wrong at the start, then the only thing to do to get productivity back is to relocate, rehire everyone, and start again from scratch. OR just use Open Source GPL software where everyone is part of a larger group and is proud of their work (as it is eventually being judged by their peers).
Everyone is enthusiastic right out of school and they want to work at full throttle. Then you'll reach a point where you realise the company isn't going to shower you with praise, money and promotions and possibly will keep you stuck in your position since you're doing that job better than anyone else.
That is when your soul is destroyed and you end up like the other guys. It's not necessarily a bad thing as there is more to life than work. It is though, naive people like yourself, that causes ageism in IT. Younger people need to realise sooner that they're being taken advantage of and not accept it.
What is your problem. If you weren't just out of college you would know working I.T. is grueling. We work long hours get woke up in the middle of the night. After being in this field for 15+ years I have realized one thing. If my job take time away from my personal life then I can have some person time at work. Maybe after you have been in the field for a little while you will see that. Or are you one of those folks that heard how great I.T. is from the radio adds about training. The truth is we are very hard worked. Even more so in these economic times. Most of us are from shops that have had layoff and are wearing multiple hats. All I can say is this. In no time you will be one of those that waste time. The key is to get your work done. No offense I could do more in one day at work then you can do in three days. So get experience, learn your job, and shut up!
Basically you can't do anything without being an asshole. If I were you, I would get another job.
I've worked in offices were the comradery is great and everyone does spend an hour or two a day chatting, then I've worked in offices were you're sitting in a cube for 8-10 hours a day and you may go days without seeing the person sitting one cube away. I'd MUCH rather have the first scenario because for me I need that interaction, and honestly I think people will have a more productive 6-7 hours when 1-2 hours a day is spent getting to know your coworkers than coding for 8-9 hours. Our current office does a morning meeting each morning where we go over work related stuff and visit for about 30 minutes or so, but after that I rarely see anyone else in the office unless we leave for lunch or end of day at the same time.
My thought is that you make your coworkers as good friends as you can because you'll often see them more than your own family, which means having a management staff that hires as much on personality than skills. Unfortunately it only takes one turd in the punch bowl to ruin the whole group.
So my suggestion is don't be a stick in the mud or prude... You'll never agree with your coworkers 100% of the time, but working in technology you instantly have a few things in common -- hopefully.
If everybody worked hard for 40 hours a week, 25% of the working population could do 100% of the work, and we'd have a 75% unemployment rate. Or 75% of the population in marketing.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
While some people take the view "you'll change to be slack" or place the blame on others - "it starts on the top" I'll just say that I started an entry level desktop support position and was shocked at slackness, lack of quality and standard. I was the only person in the team who agreed to extra work, etc. For me I didn't let it bother me (even though they were earning 2-3x my salary) - personally I just continued to improve my work skills, and increase efficiencies with the way I did my work. After six months I was resolving more incidents than the entire group put together (6 other people). Of course some people tried to use this against me by complaining to management 'he's hogging all the incidents' However I knew what management KPIs where, and were related to SLAs and thanks to my effort we were meeting targets 100% month after month. After 18 months I was promoted above people who had been working in the place 10 years + and given senior technical position. There was a slew of redundancies, which I survived, and then ending up becoming the team leader, of about 10 people. After a year my team expanded to 30 people, and I had the opportunity to implement methods to motivate people more, give them more opportunities. I looked into why people were not motivated and for some of them it was lack of internal cross training, lack of opportunities, and lack of direction. I implemented cross training and two team members successfully got prompted into areas that had been longing to work in for ages. I gave direction with people by giving them more specific tasks to achieve, and explaining more clearly our groups objectives and how to use our spare time for process improvement. I continued with a positive attitude and hard work and was finally offered what I consider my dream job as a technical architect, working on massive number of customers and industries, and get all the most interesting work headed to me. So you can see it as an opportunity for you to excel, or see it as "unfair" and possibly end up like the rest of your team.
So the perception is that your coworkers waste "hours" of time. Well, that is your perception, but may not be reality. Do you follow them home? Do you know when they get in or leave? How about when that fire hits and they solve the problem no one else could solve. Are there tasks that should take hours to complete but these people get them done in less time? See, a person's value can not be measured by how much time he/she sits in front of their desk pounding keys. It is best to not worry about how much time they are "wasting" and mind your own business. Be grateful that you have a job and the environment is laid back. Worry about getting your projects done and making sure you know who is responsible for what. The real slacker will miss deadlines, produce crap work, and be slick enough to shift blame or avoid responsibility. Just make sure you have clear communication with people so they know you are counting on them and that your superiors know what you were supposed to do and what they were supposed to do. On team efforts where someone else is supposed to handle something and they are dropping the ball you can send a polite email offering assistance or asking about status if it is something that hinders you. Make sure you 'cc the appropriate people. Good luck.
We were openly encouraged by the boss -- a lesser geek himself -- to use company time and equipment to screw off. To his perspective, if it encouraged loyalty and relaxation while dealing with tough projects, so be it.
I've seen some very tightly wound geeks in my time. Especially among the talented ones. I think if a business has to err on this issue, it's probably wiser to err on the side of relaxation.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
I've worked at companies that had both extremes. It's a sign of poor management but that's their job not yours. If you find it too offensive to put up with then leave. Just be aware the next place you work at may be the other extreme and that's MUCH worse for you
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Do what you think is right. You seem to have a decent work ethic, so don't slack off just because the others do. But don't isolate yourself. *Some* of that chatter is legitimate, and you'll be less useful and have less fun at work if you don't know your coworkers. Sometimes you can steer the conversation over to something work-related once in a while (even complete slackers usually enjoy discussing things like the possible usefulness of the product, or old war stories).
Make it clear, preferably in a friendly and non-obvious way, that work has priority in your mind. If people come and bother you while you're working, excuse yourself after a while. If you come to someone for help and that guy is e.g. in a deep discussion about soccer, don't wait around. Politely interrupt him.
I think it would be unwise to complain to management. They can figure it out for themselves, if they care to.
NB this advice is based on my experience with mostly mild slackness, and in .se
(I have been told work politics differ a lot between countries).
I had the same experience when I graduated. I had the perception that work was supposed to be 8h of work and nothing else. There are some jobs like that but not as many as you think. Does it bother you that these people aren't working 8 hours a day or that they aren't contributing as much as you to the projects? If they are getting their work done don't worry about it. I've noticed that the people that worry about how much time others are spending working generally spend A LOT of their own time not working. There was one guy that had a spreadsheet they he kept track of what time other co workers showed up at work, he wasn't a manager. Someone finally sat outside his cube with a note pad to keep track of how much time the guy was spending on his spreadsheet.
http://xkcd.com/303/
You called it!
'You are in no position to comment, being the new guy.' Although it will be of practically no use telling you this here it is. (I was just as bad in my opening days of corperate employment, and after 15 years in the workforce am only just coming to this conclusion) :
Working hard for your corperate overlords is an excercise in futility, a waste of time akin trying to keep small children and pets amused and content for long periods of time or trying to staunch a sucking chest wound with a paper towel... An ultimately useless and never-ending chore.
Unlike small children and pets these cogs in the corporate machine will keeping sucking the life and productivity out of you until your 'career' becomes a war of attrition to keep providing more justification for your existence in their machine. When you eventually and inevitably fail at that, your career will be chalked up as unnecessary overhead and your job will be shipped to the next person (or continent) that will do your job cheaper even if less effectively.
Concentrate on honing your own skills and becoming competent in your craft so that when that time comes you can either start your own business, or move onto another job...
Working hard for other people is at this point an excercise in futility because corporate entities no longer have loyalty to their people but to an ideal of a pursuing a profit at any cost for as long as it takes them to sell and get out, or until mismanagement and egotism drives it under before it can meet that end.
Serve yourself first, work only as hard as is necessary to keep yourself fed and sheltered. Spend less time observing others work habitats and start examining why they act the way they do. Hone your skills and grow your own opportunities. Once it becomes even marginally hard to do that move on as fast as you can.
When college dropouts like Bill Gates get to be the richest on earth simply because he was at the right place at the right time (and had a father who was an attorney to navigate the real world for him), it makes you doubt the concept of meritocracy. I would go so far to say that meritocracy is a phallacy shoved up the asses of the masses to keep them moving. I so much prefer the honest free exchange of ideas that we had when our work was worthless--remember the days when people used to say that computers were toys? The management types have leveraged our love for what we do so they can monetize it. I think we can respond the only sane way that an intelligent being can in order to assert our mutual respect. Bloatware with expressions of pseudopassion for it. The management types do not know passion for work. If they choose to inflate their BS then we can inflate our code.
Second thought is to tell you how it is. Yes, you will find people sliding everywhere. Keep your head about you and don't burn yourself out trying to outperform slackers. Keeping a good work ethic yourself and working your pace and you will gravitate upwards. You'll start getting all the cool projects and recognition you want. Make sure your name is on everything you do. Project Managers gravitate to those that meet deadlines with quality work, but not only that, they also like to see continuous progress. Technical people who are always J.I.T with their milestones do not continuously put out top quality product. This becomes evident during code, design and dependency reviews. They might not say anything -- a good Propject Manager probably won't, or hint so obtusely that it goes right over the slackers head .. but the others know.
Then, when times are lean and projects are scarce the slackers get culled from the herd.
Another thing, don't be so quick to assume that somebody is a slacker just because they don't work like you. People do problem solve while doing other things and people do split their day with periods of intense concentration (planning, design, layout) with down and recuperative time (browsing, chatting, foosball). It is understood for the most part that salaried people, particularly design and planning engineers generally think about their projects problems and dependencies quite a bit when not at work.
So, if you're new and starting out on the bottom rung of the ladder as a coder, coding somebody else's conceptual design or implementing their plans you are going to have a lot more hands on time at work then the more senior people.
Read Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister, and then take another look at your workplace.
Sure. Maybe they're all slackers.
Or maybe they've worked their asses off before only to be laid off, and now they realize there's no point. Maybe the company's culture is such that there is always more work to be done, and they know that they'll be called in to work overtime no matter what. So if you're going to be forced to work 10 hours unpaid on the weekend, what do you do? You slack off 10 hours during normal hours to make up for it.
You're entering the Information Technology field, not a factory to produce widgets.
IT requires creative thinking and, in my experience, creativity comes when you think and create a solution to a problem.
The next stage is implementing the solution via coding, building, or other processes.
What you seem to be expecting is everyone bent over their keyboard, hammering away at the keys, for 8 straight hours a day. That's the mentality of someone who works on an assembly line.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Occasional browsing is one thing, but when half of one's work day is related to doing nothing, then it becomes a problem.
I was responsible for a tri-branch office managing the network for about 800 desktops, 50 servers, and 300 employees on the clock around the clock. Nobody wanted to do what I did, so I had to do it by myself. Management wanted bandwidth reports. I gave it to them. Wanted email stats. Gave that to them. Over half the email was FW: FW: FW: FW: garbage, which I was instructed to /dev/null. Done. Such sites like youporn.com were in the top site lists. They wanted it blocked. It was blocked.
Needless to say, people would do nothing but talk crap about me because I'm "the web nazi" or "internet nazi" and other such crap.
And having worked at such a company for over a decade, one day, out of the blue, the same management that told me what to block was the same management that said after XX years, if I didn't take a 75% paycut, that I could take a hike.
I believe in working. If you're not working, you do not deserve to be paid.
And to this day, I still get daily status reports of all of the servers I once ran, nearly 3 years after the fact - because the guy they hired to change my passwords did only that, without checking on anything else.
I've never worked in IT since. There is no reward.
Well first thought is why worry? That's your competition there. [...] Then, when times are lean and projects are scarce the slackers get culled from the herd.
That's the bottom line.
I would say that on some days I seem to browse the web 9 hours a day. One day I decided to open a spreadsheet and track only the useful things I did for an entire week. I have become so attuned to my job that what I found out surprised me. In a 9 or 12 hour day (some go as long as 15 or 20 hours as I am judged by how well the networks I support work and yes I support more than a few). I found that in a normal 50 hour easy week I was putting in 60 to 70 hours of good work. The numbers may not add up but I know how long each task should take and how long I spend doing each task is not necessarily how long it should take. This comes from skill and experience. Translated those people there are probably highly skilled and know what they are doing so in the 20 to 30 hours of work they put in each week they are accomplishing a great deal more than you even though you are putting in twice the hours. I find that as my knowledge grows I am able to answer questions and troubleshoot issues that used to take me five or six hours in five or six minutes. You get into the zone and it is amazing what you can accomplish. I would say a networking professional who talks about football browses the web and still gets their 40 hour work load (note not 40 hours of work) is taking advantage of a hidden and well earned perk called experience. Also being able to distract yourself and take a break does make you more effective. I don't know why but when I focus on a task for 8 hours strait I end up making ridiculous mistakes and missing obvious solutions. I begin to "nuke out the problem" or make the problem a thousand times more complicated than it is. I will start pulling logs and traces and digging through RFC's and IEEE documentation to verify a certain protocol is working correctly, get frustrated and ask for help and have someone ask me (did you restart the jtapi service) and that will fix it. I think you probably get the point.
Cheers
Anonymous Coward
It will explain everything you need to know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_space/
WWSJD? (What Would Samurai Jack Do?)
Of course everyone has to make occasional phone calls, and a little web browsing eg while waiting for a long build, and you might spend 10 minutes chatting during the day - but the description indicates much more general slackness than this. I've worked for over 30 years in various companies in England doing hardware and software design and I have never come across this behaviour except in a very few individuals. I guess most people have a respect for whoever is paying them! I would get out if you can. The job can't be much fun if people around you aren't focused on the job. I'm rather astonished that there are people defending this behaviour.
As a CTO I can say that I would not want most of you on my team. Your responses are very defensive and you don't speak to how you create value for your teams. Yes people need time to think and recharge during the day. But the responder that uses the 4 hour rule (or 50%) is a true slacker. My advice is yes be social and be part of your team, do not complain about other people, but aim for 70% time on task during the day and you will do well.
... or you'll burn out faster than you'd think.
Also working around the clock is not what get's you results - is use up to 90% of my time for thinking about solving my problem, the DOING is only just 10%.
And stop citing "this economy" - it's a big bluff to get people in shakles again.
I jumped from the broadcast industry to the software industry once and had the same thought... I was shocked at how much time was spent in hallway discussions and whatnot.
Then I realized most of the discussions from the developers were centered around the code itself and creative approaches to solving problems. The sales and management folks were the ones walking around and talking about football. I decided this was part of the job. But you're right, there is a lot of time wasted in hallway discussions. ...and so, like they said earlier... enjoy your Sundays working...
There is one guy I work with, a top performer on the Windows side, who is simply pissed at the company. He tries to work no more the 4 hours a week. Prior to our corporate masters taking away our benefits and making pay cuts and demanding extra hours from us, he worked 70 hours a week. While the C level people pocketed millions and the company moved up on the fortune 100 list regular employees got laid off and the ones who stayed got taken advantage of. It is a simple balance. If the company screws you, you screw them back. The other thing you should understand is that IT is a 24 X 7 operation. I am the Lead Engineer on the Unix side and I have to be honest, I do what ever I want over the course of my day. I like my 2-hour lunches and my off site coffee breaks (I am particular about my coffee and the cafeteria doesn't make cafe Americano). Before you condemn my work ethic you should understand that I get called 5 - 6 times a week at 3AM to fix some critical system or application. I am important to the business. I have never not taken a call, after hours, on the weekend or otherwise. I have also never missed a deadline or failed to deliver a solution. How I get to that end point is my business. I am the best at what I do in my company and I am high enough in the food chain to manage my own time. One of the other posters mentioned burning out. It is a constant issue in IT. You have weeks where you do 5 hours of work. I personally have had weeks where I averaged 100 + for months at a time. You need to balance your time or you will become jaded (see above) and useless. Welcome to IT. It is a crappy job most of the time. Take a piece of advice for a guy who has been going it for 12 years. Shut your mouth and keep your head down. The only thing people care about is results. What your co-workers do it none of your business and making enemies won't help you get ahead. In the long run no one (including management) cares about your indignation.
If the person was a software engineer, or even a coder, he isn't in "IT". There is a reason why companies have an IT department, and then a completely seperate department called software engineeing. An IT guy needs to be in the building to help employees, repair and replace bad hardware, and do general system maintanence, etc. A software engineer , on the other hand, may well be working on the drive, and while actually hang gliding. This used to piss me off when I worked at a company where the management didn't get this: Just because I'm outside drinking a coffe and smoking a cigarette doesn't mean I'm not working! In fact, just because I'm sleeping, that doesn't mean I'm not working. I have woken many times with the solution to a problem I had been trying to solve for days clear in my mind, that bubbled up from my subconscious while in delta (dream state.)
If you think a true software developer should spend most of his time in front of a computer writing code, then it is you who has no idea what is involved in developing great software.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
When I first started out I also pulled the 80 hour week to get my projects done on time. My boss who's been doing this for about 30 years sat me down one day and told me one thing that fixed me.
"I get more work done in the shower in the morning than I do all the rest of the day. The whole day I'm filling my head with problems, then I go home and go to bed, and when I wake up I get a clear perspective on the problem. Then I do the easy part and come to work and write it down. Then fill my head with problems again. There's no point to working a 16 hour shift banging your head against the wall. Just relax a bit and it'll come."
It's words of wisdom.
No wonder folks in India and China are taking all the IT jobs from Americans and Western Europeans - just this kind of attitude of entitlement.
Work means work, you lazy bastards, not get paid 75K per year to surf and play games. You get paid 20X as much as someone in another country with skills that are easily transferable and as good or better than yours
Good luck finding jobs in the next 10 years. Now get to work!
Do you think Scott Adams makes up the material for the Dilbert cartoon out of thin air? It is funny precisely because it is a exaggerated version of reality. Often the exaggeration is only slight.
We have some insane proclamation with equally insane targets announced from on high with no advanced notice. We work like mad people for weeks or months to accomplish the impossible. Drained and mentally exhausted you take advantage of the down time between said proclamations. This down time can be a hours, a day or even a week or two. Learn to go with the flow.
The more experienced you are the easier the job. A task for an expert may take an hour while new guy might take a day or week. Also the Senior people most like have similar projects they have work on in the past and can re-use code and documentation. Making friends with co-workers mean they are more than likely to help you out and maybe even give you old code or documents to help start you out.
I know when I started out I did a bunch of 16 hour days... in part because I wanted to learn. And learn I did. Now as an expert in the field I can do amazing things, ask friends/co-workers for help and help them, and two hours of my work now would accomplish what took me 16 hours do to when I started. At times it may seem like I am not working (checking Slashdot stories) but my mind is working.
If you prove to be a super star you can do almost anything at work as long as you keep making them money or saving the day. But it is a dangerous game to play as there are other potential wizards who seek the same status. You see this clearly in sales orgs where the big number salesman can get away with anything short of rape or mayhem in the office.
If you need to do debugging of any sorts, yea, you need to sit in front of your computer. If you have something to write, yea, you need to sit in front of your computer. If you need to do creative work, it depends on your skill. I don't mean you suck, but if you're a recent graduate who primarily acquired your skills at the uni, and you haven't been hacking for the artistic need since early childhood, you probably do need to spend that time too. If your formalisms come as natural to you as your natural language you don't. Actually it's counterproductive. I can dream up models of an equivalent of about 10k lines of C (on a detailed level) before I NEED to write it down. I don't even think that's very exceptional for someone with real skill. Not that you have to wait until you absolutely have to spew it out so you wont drop the eggs. Point being, if you don't know what to write, don't write stuff. You will end up wasting time and use more code than needed to solve the problem. I promise. What people do to actually get the creative work done is up to them, whatever floats your boat. I like to go skateboarding, listen to music, get high, sleep on it. Some may like talking about football, not that I can even remotely get that. Now I could be wrong, maybe you're in a bad place full of mediocre people who just don't do their work, but if others do the creative work, and you're a fresh out university hacker working on well delimited bits of other peoples code, maybe you shouldn't be so quick to judge. Or maybe you should get a suit and go into management.
I've always found that I work in cycles. I'll go through a phase where I'm a little lazy, doing a little more browsing at work than I should be, but still generally getting my work done, however yes, the quality certainly does suffer.
The other cycle is I become a tried and true workaholic, where it really is quite common that I will work at least 9 hours with perhaps four 15-minute breaks spread throughout the day. Obviously these are the projects that I'm really interested in, and perhaps are evening getting the chance to learn some new skills.
At the end of the day however, I'm always getting my work done at least, so management doesn't care how much I screw around.
Try working like a dog for a year or so. Nights, weekends, without wasting any time. I did when I was new and got angry with my co-workers that wasted time. When it was time for raises, mine was not any larger and I receieved no additional compensation for my extra effort other than a few pats on the back. I now let me wife do the back rubs when I cut off my work day at exactly 8 hours, some of which is spent reading slashdot.
Programming isn't like anything else in the world and to some degree neither is administration. Go read some of Paul Graham's earlier essays on the topic and you will rethink some of what you posted:
http://paulgraham.com/articles.html. OTOH there are very few good IT people but most of the good ones do not do cool stuff at normal intervals, during normal hours using normal methods.
I suggest getting a good hobby like learning how to program in the real world.
You're new to the company and fresh from school, so expect to get a lot of grunt work. Plenty of people can work 4 or 5 hours of an 8 hour day and be fine with it while other people actually believe the company pays them for 8 hours and not 5 hours of work. Most developers I've worked with have been at one of two extremes: either they hack away for 8 to 10 hours a day with a couple of quick breaks for coffee, smokes, and lunch, or they slack for half the day and plug away the other half. The quality of code isn't much different, but the volume is higher with the guy working longer shifts.
With that said, those guys that work half the day are the first people I go to for a question because I know they'll stop chatting about football to answer me and I'm very likely to get a correct answer.
My suggestion: If you feel like they aren't working enough, step in and ask a work-related question, maybe to a problem you're trying to resolve. Get them back into the work mindset and see how it goes. You'll be showing respect, but also be intelligent about what you ask and be ready to debate it a little to show you're not completely ignorant of how the code works. More likely, they will finish with you and return to their work rather than return to the conversation.
Just starting your career eh? No it's not unique to your industry, it's common across hierarchys. Newscientist had a couple of good articles recently about bureaucracy/heirarchy/cube-life etc:
Or you could watch Office Space, or better yet, do what you are doing now: live it.
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Your shock is being new to the work world, not specifically the IT world. I had the same observations as you when I entered the professional work world. To your credit you were very smart in deciding not to bring your dissatisfaction up. Many new workers before you have done that and have changed nothing but their own situation ( for the worse ).
The internet has made things worse. It and talking to coworkers is my own problem. I go through better and worse cycles with managing each. Programming tends to mentally intense demanding breaks, needed breaks, but I overdue the chatting and surfing.
If you're not the manager, you probably shouldn't try to manage your coworkers, especially if they've got more seniority than you do. It's not your place.
You *should* continue, for your own part, to do what you know is right, i.e., to put in an honest day's work for your pay. This is your duty, since you are being paid for your time.
As for the others, that's between them and their superiors.
If it really bothers you, to the point where you don't like the work environment, you could consider looking for work elsewhere. I know, jobs are a little hard to find right now, but they *are* out there. Furthermore you aren't on a tight deadline, since you do already have a job that you can continue to work ad interim, so if it takes a few extra months to find the job you're looking for, that's no big disaster.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
We were all there when we were fresh out of school and eager to make out mark. Unfortunately, heads-down hard workers rarely get the advancement they deserve. Instead its the slack-asses who spend their time "networking" around the water cooler who get the plum jobs and promotions.
Eventually you'll experience the frustration that we all did when we came to that realization. Welcome to the the real world!
Since it can be proven that They are not holding up their part of the bargain then We don't have to hold up our part either.
When it becomes fashionable for Management to give sane direction and actually pay the workers properly then yes more work will get done.
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If you're paying them by the milestone - great. If you're paying them by the hour, start cracking down.
Work your ass off. In no time you'll be their manager. Trust me. If you want to be professional, then be professional. Work as hard as you desire. It's what you get out of it, not what others do. Get used to encountering an incredible amount of idiots, morons, slackers. etc in the work place. It's pure statistics, if everyone were like you the world would be a better place, however you'll quickly realize there are more idiots in the world than not. Someone has to tell them what to do. Prepare yourself to realize that you can work your ass off, run circles around your peers, and not see an equitable compensation. You have to work your ass off, build your resume, work there 3-5 years and make a move to another company, take your experience and your professional work ethic and cash in on that. Also keep in mind that more often than not, managers are worse because the majority are managers because they caused more issues as developers.
But only the final skill you mentioned will get you promoted. You see, if you fail at something simple enough to explain to two helpers, then you are 'managing' them. If you fail at something too complicated, then your helpers you are assigned won't be able to help, and you boss will know you can't handle managerial tasks. You will be assigned to help some other idiot when THEY fail. If it's simple enough that you can be of use in a reasonable amount of time, then they will be promoted. Being good at your job means you won't fail at any task simple enough where two helpers will be of any help, so you will never rise. This is best for the organization because promoting capable people just leads to everyone rising to their level of incompetance. The best ( for the organization ) is when the incompetant are promoted and everyone believes it was for being competant. That way everyone has incentive to try hard, and those who are not competant might be reapplied elsewhere Eventually this might lead to them finding a position where they are competant. If being competant fails to get them promoted there, then the organization is most productive.
I hate people who work on weekends. Working on weekends means you were not smart enough to finish your work in the allocated project hours. If the project plan is poor and the work is impossible to complete in the regular allotted hours then lodge a complaint with your seniors or the HR and get your Project Manager fired. Freshers like you are generally not smart enough, that is understandable but if your PM also rewards weekend and late hour work then people like you will be inducing an weekend work culture. If that happens to me, that is, if my PM forces me to work on weekends, yes I will do FTP during regular hours. FTP stands for - Full Time Pass. If the FTP privileges are also curtailed then I will start looking for a new job. Simple rule - Time = Money. We earn money to earn Quality time, not the other way i.e. give away the weekend quality time for money. I regularly fire freshers who end up working into weekends.
I would have to say that's pretty typical. There's a tendency among developers (and humans in general) to do only what is expected of them. If I can meet my deadlines while doing only 4 actual hours of work in a day, then that's probably what I'm going to do, so long as its not so obvious that I get nailed for it. I'm not saying that's a good thing, necessarily, but its human nature.
The flip side is that if you're someone with sufficient discipline to actually do productive work the entire time you're at the office, and if you're reasonably skilled, then you should shine like a superstar compared to everyone else, which should theoretically translate into pay raises, promotions, etc.
Wrong, productivity does not measure profit, or paychecks! Some programmers produce more code than others, but the code is defective or unmaintainable. These other programmers may produce less, yet better, code. In either case, the code quantity does not affect the company profits.
Company profits are a function of gross income minus costs. Software (i.e. code) sales are an income source. Programmer paychecks are part of the cost. As long as the rate of income is enough to support the costs, the company stays solvent. Neither the quantity nor the quality of any software determines any company profits. Welcome to Capitalism!
The Idea that if people are browsing the internet, or having a coffee break, they aren't working is *bull*. Programming is hard... It needs problems to go round in your head for a while before you settle on the right way to do something. Doing something idle is *exactly* what's needed to get that to happen.
That's why it's hard being external contractor on an hourly rate.
It's hard to keep the stopwatch running while you're sitting or lying down and just thinking. Not only do you feel guilty about burning billable hours, it can be hard to concentrate with a running clock in the back of your mind. But the irony is that this thinking time is precisely when the real work is being done.
I'm beginning to envy full-timers.
.. is not to talk about working in 3 hour bursts. We all do. Often, only one of those per day.
Not unique but not extremely common. Your team is clearly broken and your management isn't being measured against stated goals therefore your teammates are not measured by against their sub-goals. I presume the group is failing to record and reiterate--on a daily basis--the tasks identified to accomplish them. What you need is to adopt a system that surfaces who is working on what, what the volume of work is, and how much time is required. In our group, we use scrum to manage that. You can use something else but your team should be using something as opposed to nothing and allowing chaos to reign.
Scrum is not perfect and occasionally it can be annoying (such as after having a bad day and not having progress to show), but it's simple and incurs a relatively low overhead demand on bookkeeping. We use it because it helps everyone stay informed of the bigger picture by what user stories we're working on. It gives us a visual feel of how much work there is to do, helps enforce who is working on what, and shows our progress within the sprint at a daily resolution. It also helps develop a log of milestones, and improves individual productivity because it strongly emphasizes priorities first and makes it obvious who's getting things done, who's spinning their wheels on difficult problems, and who's blocked by teammate or external dependencies.
More importantly, it's designed for sculpting a team that self-organizes and self-manages. Since your team's management is weak, pushing for self-organization is important. You will need buy-in at many levels, but you may find if you write a proposal with your recommendation and argue why it's needed, you might flesh out supporters who needed prodding.
Doing this will show initiative and motivation. You will stand out amongst your more experienced but lazy teammates. A good developer provides well written recommendations that identifies a particular problem, argues why it is a problem, enumerates a list of solutions, and finishes by selecting one of them. Unless your recommendation is ridiculous, issuing it should give you a boost by showing you have leadership skills. Management not recognizing that would truly indicate a broken team.
Scrum is not likely to be done well unless someone on the team goes through the training, so if I were you I would recommend the team experiment with selecting and using a software development model (Agile/Scrum/XP/RUP/etc). Shipping a few developers off for training, or bringing in a trainer for a few days would be a good idea.
Give it a year. If in the end you cannot cause change, then log it as a learning experience and move on. Use what you saw to identify the same symptoms during your next job search.
The new guy always tends to get stuck with the less interesting or maintenance work. That's expected because you haven't proven your value or had a chance to build relationships. It can take time to learn the system before taking on high profile tasks, but it's absolutely unacceptable if they expect you to work more hours than they work. If you're pulling weekends and they aren't then that's an abusive situation. Part of getting ahead is showing leadership and drive, but the other part is knowing how to play the defensive game by proving due diligence on your part and pushing back when required.
Camping on quad since 1996.
Wow, this struck me as strange...last time I actually 'punched a clock', it was working food service.
Seriously, does anyone in a professional job (I generally consider IT to be pro work, I get pro PAY for it) actually clock in and out??
I've worked W2 and 1099...and I've not had to deal with a time clock in decades.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If I'm messing around at work wasting time it means my brain isn't currently functioning. I've usually been sitting at my desk working on a problem for the last few hours and I need time to get up and let my mind unwind. The reason I consider this important because if I don't do this I will just sit at my desk staring blankly off into space. I don't know why but it helps me to break up what I'm doing. I consider these productive interruptions. My brain gets to go back to the problem and start solving it again with a relatively fresh start.
So basically what I'm saying is a certain amount of fucking around is important, as long as the work gets done. It's for the same reason that when I tell my boss I'm not really feeling it today he says "go home if you want". It beats me sticking around getting paid to do nothing but fill a desk. (large difference here is I'm hourly, worker owned cooperative)
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
I've seen quite a few places with this problem, and they all have one thing in common. They have promoted {coders, help desk folks, sysadmins} to be managers. In most cases these folks have no management training of any kind, and the company offers them no management support of any kind. Many times they don't even want to manage people, they went for the promotion as it was the only way to get a larger paycheck.
Management, at a high level, is simple. Set clear achievable objectives, get your team the resources they need to achieve those objections from other parts of the company, and set reasonable, but aggressive deadlines and have there be some reward for making them and consequence for missing them.
Without some training in project planning and people motivation setting objectives is actually quite hard. Indeed, one of the largest problems is managers set objectives that just don't make any sense to anyone, and so they don't work towards them. This is an area where real training is required, I believe everyone promoted to be a manager should be required to take a 5 day "management bootcamp" before they can start the job.
Getting resources from the rest of the company is interpersonal skills. You have to interact with other folks and figure out how to get what you need from them. For people who've worked the last 3-5 years head down in whatever they are doing, and are often thought of as socially awkward this is a very hard transition. Geeks simply aren't good at figuring out that dropping off a tin of cookies in finance will get your PO's out the door quicker.
And lastly, most new managers, regardless of where they come from, have major problems with rewarding people and disciplining people. They simply don't want to get involved in conflict, so they avoid it. Engineers quickly figure out they can get away with anything, because there is no consequence to not doing your job, and so they start to test how far they can go. Quickly the manager is being walked all over. When I've talked to the new managers they are always like "what am I supposed to do, fire them, I can't do that." It's another area where a management class could help. At the next team meeting give the plum assignment to the guy who worked hard, and single out the guy who goofed off the most with "Bob, you could have been doing this but you're not finished with your last project yet." Nine times out of ten Bob will work twice as hard next time. (And if he doesn't, you have deeper issues, and really need professional management training).
The fact that you've noticed the problems so quickly as a junior guy tells me that this particular place has these problems bad. Probably multiple levels of managers who don't want to be managers, have no training, and no one above them supporting them. There's very little you can do to fix this, and if you're already writing to slashdot about it the situation will probably drive you crazy. The only productive advice in that situation is to find a new job, ASAP, and take this one has a learning experience. You now know some of the things to look for at your next employer before you take the job.
As you're also a recent graduate, I'm guessing that you're also single or at most have a girlfriend you're not living with, and have no kids. Probably very few other family obligations too.
I've been there. Got shat on endlessly. Everyone else takes advantage of your situation, saying "I can't work that weekend/late tonight, I have to do something with my kids" or something like that. You're stuck on-call every week, working late 3 days a week, working every Sunday, all because everyone sees your non-work life as less important because you don't have a spouse or kids.
You need to put a stop to it. Don't refuse every time you're asked, but at least once a month if you're asked to work a weekend, you need to say no. Tell them you're going away skiing for the weekend with friends. You have to go visit your ailing grandmother. Even if it's not true. They tell you someone has to stay late on Wednesday? "Sorry, that's my dinner/poker night with the guys."
If a disproportionate amount of the after-hours/weekend work is falling on your shoulders, go to your supervisor. Being a team player is important - being a doormat is dangerous.
When I first started in I.T. my group manager left after a a few months, and they never bothered to replace him, so our group started reporting to the PHB, and he pretty much forgot about us. At first I thought it was great, I was coming in late, leaving early, working on my own projects, but eventually it just got me down. I was doing nothing productive, and my skills were stagnating, so I made the decision to up anchor and leave. What followed was a rollercoaster tour of various office hells and nirvanas. hells: *The startup with lots of work to do but insane micromanaging boss who never leaves you alone long enough to get anything done. *The established company moving into a new field with grand ideas, but which never gets around to actually signing anything off and wastes your time and theirs. *The agency who just puts you somewhere and doesn't care if your not suitable, as long as they can bill for you. All these places drove me mad, and I spoke up about it, and I had the balls to get up and leave if they weren't right for me and vice versa. heavens: *Companies who recognise your skills, and trust you to get on with the job. I'm currently contracting right now, and today I haven't wrote much. I've surfed the web, replied here, etc. But, we are in a downtime, I'm waiting for feedback and I'm refactoring bits of code, etc. The main thing I am doing however is thinking about how to make my product better, and seeing how others do things. And that looks a lot like doing nothing. Some companies are a complete waste of time, full of people happy to sit on their butts and cash money they don't earn. If your happy with that go with it, but sooner or later reality will bite and you will realise you know f**k all about anything. But, the main part of a programmers job in my expereince is thinking before they code, and if your in a company that recognises that then your are in a good position. Sounds to me though that the OP is in a sh**e company though and needs to move ASAP.
Software Development is hard work, so is construction. How often do you drive by a work site and see half the crew standing around and chatting? Fairly often I would bet. The rest of the time they are busting their ass. Software development is the same, except its the muscle between your ears you have to flex. It is part of the job, get used to it. There will be idle time, you will need to decompress.
I used to kill myself. Work my ass off. I accepted excuses as to why I couldn't get a raise or a promotion even though I was told I earned one. People I learned were making big bonuses were telling me there was no money for bonuses. Then the excuses started to pile up year after year and I watched other people who worked less and had less responsibility get paid more because they were not IT. I watched it happen to all my co-workers too so I know it wasn't something I was doing. So if I can't get paid more I just give less. I'm naturally a hard worker so I had to train myself but now I'm happy to say I am taking advantage of the fucking parasites who were ever so happy to take advantage of me. It's not a good relationship or the one I would have chosen but at least I'm no longer the bitch. I'd type more but I got in late so it's almost time for my coffee break.
Most managers do not realize that writing code is a *CREATIVE* endeavour...it's not an matter of simply putting parts together like a worker on an assembly line! Some of my best coding was done at 3 am, all the lights out except for my monitor, stereo blasting Ministry's Psalm 69 at just under ear-bleed levels. Most people couldn't code in that environment, in fact, most people would have a hard time even *thinking* in that environment...but for me, it was pure code heaven.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
If the person was a software engineer, or even a coder, he isn't in "IT". There is a reason why companies have an IT department, and then a completely seperate department called software engineeing. An IT guy needs to be in the building to help employees, repair and replace bad hardware, and do general system maintanence, etc. A software engineer , on the other hand, may well be working on the drive, and while actually hang gliding. This used to piss me off when I worked at a company where the management didn't get this: Just because I'm outside drinking a coffe and smoking a cigarette doesn't mean I'm not working! In fact, just because I'm sleeping, that doesn't mean I'm not working. I have woken many times with the solution to a problem I had been trying to solve for days clear in my mind, that bubbled up from my subconscious while in delta (dream state.)
If you think a true software developer should spend most of his time in front of a computer writing code, then it is you who has no idea what is involved in developing great software.
This is honestly why I think being a Software Engineer is more like being a writer than it is anything else. No, being a Software Engineer is NOT being a writer... just they are the most similar in working styles. The writer (as a reporter, researcher, journalist, or just fiction writer) runs off to research things and does stuff that looks a lot like goofing off for weeks at a time to sit down one day an in a flurry produce something the company then takes and sells for millions. Truly new and innovative software requires lots and lots of field work. If that SE was writing software about flying then hang-gliding might be very important research.
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Actually dipshit I spend most of my time cleaning up the devastation left in the wake of morons who think outsourcing is a good idea. If you want to hire an IT guy at my level that lives in a mud hut go ahead. I'll charge you triple to bail your sorry ass out later. Look at the ROI numbers on outsourcing. The only real advantage to outsourcing is that it raises the ratio of profit to salaried headcount. It's robbing Peter to pay Paul. It's a great way for an executive who know's he'll be out the door in the near future to get a big bonus but it fucks the company.
If it really bothers you, either start looking for another job - or join them in slacking. But be prepared to log all your hours - and those of your colleagues - so that when the inevitable gripe comes you can show that you're more productive than your colleagues, as endorsed by management. That's no way to really run a company (normal for governments though). I'm guessing they're in a segment where there isn't much competition. Once that heats up they won't know how to get into gear on time, and will either need an interim manager that wipes away the crusty crap or they'll go belly up.
It's an annoying fix to be in (although on the positive side, people in those types of organisations are usually far less stressed out, and having been burned out myself I know that's a BIG plus) and I guess you just have to choose what you want from your work and out of life in general. Some focus on career, others work for money and get enjoyment from family or sports or hobbies or whatever.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it well worth the effort.
I feel for the OP. I have a similar situation. Working 4 hour days is fine and dandy if the code is delivered clean and on time. Let's face it, the majority of americans have the holier than thou attitude and have weak work ethics. We have many developers from right here in the US. We also have about 10 H1-B's from India, Pakistan, and other parts of Asia. Percentage-wise, the H1-B's do an overall better job, I hate to say. Why? Because, their ass gets deported if they lose that job. You can find them almost always chugging away and they are just happy to be there. They will always stop and talk with you, but when they have a job to do, they concentrate on it.
I'm not saying that American born and bred automatically leads to mediocrity, but the percentages are not in our favor.
In my office, I see the same thing. Myself and some others tend to be heads down, work work work, but that's because we have a LOT of work to do, and only 8 hours a day to get it done in. The joys of working in a large production environment that is constantly growing
Beside our group are 2 groups of people who work in labs, testing things before they go into prod. they seem to frequently have time to stand around, chat, have lunch (what a novelty!) etc, while myself and a couple others rarely have enough free time to grab some lunch and eat it in peace.
For a long time, it drove me nuts (and still does when I'm having a hectic day and hear them laughing it or, or worse, they come into our group just to chat), but I came to the conclusion that so long as i am getting what I have committed to doing done, I don't care what others do. My teamlead and manager have set expectations, I have my own expectations, and so long as I meet those, then I am content. It can get frustrating when work isn't evenly distributed, but I look at that as partly my fault, for taking on extra work and striving to deliver something that doesn't simply meet requirements. I can't fault others for my own expectations.
Plus, I decided to try and join them occasionally for social time,and find that it actually helps. When everyone is standing around chatting, I not only get a break, but I get to know my coworkers better, so when I, or they, need help with a problem, it's much easier to approach and relate and get things done quickly. It's a tradeoff in time, and I use it liberally, but it's good to get up from my desk and give my brain a break sometimes.
The sooner you realize that you can't change how others work, only how you work, and that some people will always seem to get away with doing nothing for some reason, the sooner you'll find comfort/peace in the workplace. If you really want to fix things, work your way into a TL position, or even just a leadership position of some sort, so you can nudge people the way you think they should go. ultimately though, it's up to the person, and their manager, to adjust a work ethic.
Best of luck!
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
Get a job pushing a wheelbarrow, IT is not for you!
"We inevitably miss deadlines"
This is completely meaningless. I have never worked for a company which had sane deadlines. If I've been lucky, I've had an especially good manager who has been able to push back some of the pressure from his manager and the managers of other groups toward deadlines. If you search Google for "death march", the #1 entry is for the famous Bataan death march, the #2 entry is the Wikipedia entry for a Software development death march. I don't know how many times I've been brought into projects in the middle of them, where the project manager points to a flow chart on my first day in and says "you should have finished your part last week". In other words, I'm already a week behind because the original person slated quit, or went on vacation, or whatever. I have been in the industry since 1996, have worked at everything from very small startups to Fortune 100 companies and it is the same everywhere, unless your lucky to find some oasis in an academic job, government job or even, rarely, within a company. Deadlines use in modern companies is as a tool for management to overwork and exploit employees.
"I'm not in any position to go around telling others to use their time more efficiently. Management seems to tolerate it."
Exactly. You are NOT in a position to go around telling others to use their time more efficiently, you are not a manager, so shut the hell up! What are you, the little dork with a hall monitor armband? What damned business is it of yours? If there's something I can't stand, it's some whiny low-level developer who thinks he is a manager. Guess what, you're not a manager. It's not your job to say anything about someone who puts out crap code or doesn't work a straight 10-12 hours a day like everyone else. Especially if you are a recent graduate. Every once in a while I get these developers who are ultimately low level peons just like all of us not in management who whine and gripe about how certain developers are lazy and certain developers write crap code. And I don't mean when this has a *direct* effect on said complainer, as that is understandable and I would even complain myself about it. I mean people who make such complaints when this has no direct effect on them. Why do you care, and more so, why the hell should I care? I don't own the company, I just get a paycheck, so I don't give a shit. If the company wanted me to care, they can give me a 1% piece in the company, otherwise, caveat emptor, for them. Something exists to deal with these people, it is called management, if you are not a manager, and it does not directly effect you, then shut the hell up, stop giving yourself airs of being more important than you are when you're not.
My attitude is thus: if they give me significant options or a piece of the company, then my attitude changes and I become "concerned with the company". The other possible motivator is if I want to climb the corporate ladder. One ladder I am not on, thank heavens, but have seen is from low-level (A+/MCITP) help-desk guy to a position of seniority within the helpdesk group to a low position on the group running Exchange/file/domain control servers, to a position of seniority in that group, and then on to a position in the engineering/architecture group. So the desire to be promoted to a better position is another motivator. Other than those two factors, what motivation is there for me to anything other than the bare minimum to keep my job and keep sharp on my skill set? These companies will put hard-working employees who work extra hours when half the department quits due to crap working conditions, who spends years waking up from being paged in the middle of the night to fix something, out on the street in the worst economies the second their profit margin looks like it might dip slightly. They will give you inferior equipment, too littl
In working with intellectual property professionals for a long time, I understand both sides of this. The work is hard. Every "knowledge worker" has their own way of doing things. You cannot schedule creativity. The value of human relationships in the workplace often cannot be quantified. But - and this is a BIG BUT - if left to their own devices, a lot of these folks will go totally overboard with the non-productive activities and even begin to rationalize it (as we have clearly seen in these posts) as an entitlement and a necessary part in the process - even when it is not. Work is supposed to be hard, and to meet a deadline sometimes one has to push their way through a problem rather than waiting for the solution to eventually present itself (if it ever does). Maybe the resulting code is not as elegant and will have to be optimized at some point, but at least progress is being made.
The situation the original post describes exists because 1) it is often hard to observe the difference when someone is mulling over a problem, taking a needed break, or is just goofing off; 2) management is doing the same thing and cannot lead by example; 3) management is totally ill-equipped to deal with "knowledge workers" to help them better self-monitor the use of their time; 4) the bubble has yet to burst in this situation so no one cares enough to fix it yet.
As far as this newbie is concerned, if you don't like it, you can start looking for a place to work that is more suited to your work style. Don't be surprised if you cannot find it, however. You may have to find a few folks who think like you and create your own business to get the environment you seek.
In the meantime:
Keep your mouth shut about your opinion of the lack of work ethic for now, as the person who rocks the boat is the most likely to get thrown overboard by the others.
Try to maintain your work ethic by getting your work done in a reasonable time frame and a reasonable rate.
Check out other places doing the work your company does and see if the work culture is any different.
When you can do it without ticking off the bosses, stop working the overtime when others are not. The group should not be counting on you to prop up their lazy and sloppy work habits.
Start taking management courses. If you are actually the most productive member of the team, one day you may be called upon to lead- at least informally. Be ready to do it. Be ready to accept a promotion IF it comes your way (just remember, though, advancement is often who you know, not what you know, or what you can do). If you get lucky and get promoted to management, be ready to lead by example and help clean up this mess.
Start looking for other opportunities, because if this place is a bad as you say, the bubble will burst someday and you might be out of a job before you are ready to move on your terms.
Regards.
Good developers working 1/10th to keep up with the average level happens when good developers are allowed to work on their own code, not that of others. When everyone is working on everyone elses code, then everyone craps up the codebase ( the only incentive to keep a nice codebase being the ability to deliver as much as the 'average' at 1/10th speed ) and so everyone must work at 100% speed to deliver less than they would if everyone had incentive to build the ability to work less and deliver more into their code.
Yes. And I bet you do to, but you just don't know it. If you have to badge-in to get in your office, you are clocking in. And don't kid yourself that HR doesn't check those records. We recently used them to let go of an individual who regularly couldn't be reached but claims he was coming to work.
I work at a competing software company. We're diligent and enjoy our work and all of us put in more then 7 productive hours a day. We'll be succeeding while your company is failing. I will keep my job and thrive, your company will tank.
They deserve it.
Yeah....NO missed deadlines or shoddy work from outsourced companies has been reported.
In other news...Nothing like this happens from outsourcing:
We did not write the code to your specifications because it did not include pseudo-code and all the appropriate functions, diagrams and specifics that you asked for. We are glad to charge you for our effort, however. Remember, we have 3,000 coders here who have 15yrs experience and would love to work for $11US/hr......
If your company was really missing deadlines and producing poor code, somebody would have noticed and the situation would have changed. Our policy is as long as the work gets done, and we aren't doing anything illegal, whats the difference? Either you need to change or change jobs, if you get everybody else fired I'm sure you won't be too happy.
Call me when you can bill those hours spent in bed.
Seems to be everywhere I go.. The managers, who have their 2 year degree in business admin, think they're special, and waste all the time in the world because they have workers under them. The workers under them, realize their boss has no idea what they're saying when they speak, so they know they can slack, and just throw a few big words in, to avert the attention from their boss's notice of lack of work. And to the person who says 'people aren't robots' in reponse to this post, you are a douche. Of course they're not, but the serious lack of work ethic has developed over the years, because the introduction of less intelligent managers over the years, because of the decreasing standards by which someone can achieve the term 'manager'. I hate it all, it makes me want to just quit IT all together and become a chef in a diner in a town of 500. But of course, I don't see a resolution for the IT industry to become what it should be as long as the immature "college = success" attitude exists. But of course some have defied this reality, and that's what we call 'google' or any of the other umpteen companies, started by tech nerds, in their garages, with no degrees. Those are truly the people who need to be managers. And then "get to work" would cease to be, because it would become "hey let's try this!".
Keep in mind, that some of these developers can outperform a newbie 100 fold. They can probably code for 1 hour what you do in 8. Hell even devs with similar experience have a 10-1 ratio when you include bugs and design clarity.
Ignore the haters telling you to relax and join the herd. They wouldn't know what a hard day's work or real productivity looks like anyhow, so you can't turn to them for good advice on making use of your solid work ethic. They'll do nothing but try to bring you down to their level because you make them look bad or face the uncomfortable truth that they suck at their chosen profession. Look to people giving you positive advice that will let you grow and succeed.
That said, don't bust your ass doing a buch of work for lazy coworkers who will take credit for your sweat and/or managers too corrupt or stupid to notice what you're doing. These people will suck your soul and waste your valuable time during these years when you could be learning so much about how to reach new levels of personal performance. If you're going to stay where you are, you need to "manage up" to see if you can start getting noticed for the job you're doing. Avoid the temptation to take on a lot of small tasks in your current environment. You'll never get any more credit for all the hard work than the guy next to you who simply manages to look busy but web surfs half the day. Get your manager's agreement to break down the current project into specific pieces that you can take ownership of and deliver apart from your coworkers. That way, when you deliver your piece it's obvious who did it, how well it works, and how on time it was. On a technical level, it's also great to break things out anyway to avoid overly tight component coupling.
Maneuvering things so that you can better benefit from your work ethic involves some politicking, which sucks, but you don't want to be used by those around you and never get anything out of it.
If you spend a few months working the personal ownership angle and it gets you nowhere, then you may need to cut your losses and switch to another company. My personal preference is to work at small companies where you can negotiate for better merit-based rewards like stock options, profit sharing, or performance bonuses. At a small company, your efforts will be obvious and your opportunities to learn and succeed will be greater. You'll also find more people like you from whom you can learn at small companies. They'll be looking to create successful products rather than to just punch in to collect a paycheck. Screw-ups normally latch on to the big companies where they can fade into the cubicle farms.
Look at the pathetic work ethic of your current environment as an opportunity to outshine them and people like them.
Good luck!
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
We launched a major Agile effort in our shop and the daily deliverables and scrums seem to help keep people on track. Fortunately, the scrum masters aren't horse-driver types.
Corey
First off, you are the new guy, who are you to worry about others, just worry about your own work.
Second, no one likes a tattle tale, especially when it involves so many people....what happens when you mention that this guy was surfing the web (it happened to be to look up info on projects) and you get him fired, then he slaps a lawsuit on your company for wrongful dismissal....you see what I am getting at.
Third, like most highly efficient programmers, there tends to be development of efficiency with coding and reusing code, sometimes you need some de-stress time to get your head on straight, before jumping into the project, and avoid coding so many bad errors, instead take the time to relax, and flow.
Fourth, coding is a bit like magic, although you don't see it (well most bosses don't review your code) it works. So when the guy that is looking like he is goofing off , ends up putting out a product that works without too many errors, and you seem to be staying weekends because you have so many bugs or missing deadlines, I would actually take a look at their work habits more then you think. If they are however missing deadlines and creating bad code, they shoudl not be used as a role model.
I remember my first internship (turned into a job), I had this hardcore programmer (CoolJoe)
who knew all about everything, and he would come in at about 10 and leave at 4 with a big lunch in the middle, I never once said anything....most of his time was spent on casino websites during his day....so how did he get all 6 projects done on time, and without 1 line of code to be redone or corrected. While everybody else in that same office had many errors, and at most 2 projects and worked 9 to 5. He was my programming role model. Today (12 years later) I so look back at that time and see what he was doing as necessity for keeping a cool head and a clear picture of what needed to be done. He is still at that same job today, peanuts compared to what he could be making if he looked for a better job, but much happier , probably.
Some jobs yes...some jobs no.
I know at some places, they do NOT want to know...as that often they might find people are working actually MORE hours than are being billed, and it is a big no-no to do free work for the govt...by govt law.
I also have worked with some people that worked that system up, and know for a fact this was the case.
I think it is mostly for security...never really had to do that much till post 9/11 with badging in/out of buildings. Unless you are really trying to defraud the company/govt...they aren't looking at that data.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The other problem is that the work ethic has slipped off quite a bit
The work ethic has been slipping since WW2 ended. Organizations (not just companies) got so large that a manager could take actions adversely affecting thousands of anonymous employees with impunity. As managers were rewarded for these actions, others copied and amplified their actions. In the 70s, the phrase became popular, "Don't love your company because it can't love you back." This is true; the only time to love an organization is if it has fewer than ~150 people. Any larger and it becomes impossible for a person to know everyone, meaning that it's impossible to care about everyone. Since the 70s, the process has only accelerated. To chose just one example, Bernie Madoff was, by all accounts, a decent man. The only people he swindled were strangers, so he tried to protect his family and friends as things fell apart. Had he only been allowed to invest the money of his friends, I doubt he would have even started his scheme. As it is obvious that the people at the top don't care about the people at the bottom, the people at the bottom have reciprocated. No one cases about doing a good job, just about doing whatever's needed to avoid getting fired.
On a more positive note, there was a recent TED Talk about new social organizations starting to emerge. The speaker (I can't find the talk via Google right now) was mostly discussing NGOs, but his remarks also apply to Open Source and other movements. New organizations are being created that are remaining small and tightly focused. The membership is committed to their organization's ideals, and everyone in the organization knows everyone else well enough that no one can hide misbehavior. Because of this, these new organizations are able to accomplish things (humanitarian or coding) that larger ones cannot.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
and pay your dues like everyone else. It is your job as the FNG to pick up my slack. I earned that right with all the late night, weekend, and during my kids birthday roll outs so some a-hole in management could get all the credit for a successful project. If you open your mouth again we'll make sure you remain FNG status for a very long time.
regards
your peers
You know, if you had a problem, you could have just turned your chair and talked to me, or IMed me, you did not have to post to Slashdot. Didn't think I would find out, did you? Go Cowboys!
It's pretty obnoxious, isn't it? But I still feel guilty about it. I think I probably waste about an hour to an hour and a half. It takes me a little while to get ready when I get in and sporadically through the day one takes little five minute breaks while waiting for the code to compile or whatever. That time adds up. But in practice, most of us in most workplaces, waste a certain amount of time each day. If it's more than a certain amount or if it's endemic, it might be a bad workplace. Watch "The Office." If it seems comparable to the show or worse, it's too much.
I still remember the surprise I had when I first started working in high school. I had an internship with the county government that started right after school (3 PM). By the time I got there, most everyone was already cruising for 5 and I was fired up wanting to get some stuff done. I thought they were shockingly lazy. That summer I had a full time internship for the local electric company. You just can't keep all processors going at 100% for 8 hours straight.
Flee before you become like them, soulless homunculi marking time until death calls.
My favorite professor has a set of scales on his bookshelf to remind him that everything must be kept in balance, and that very much includes your personal life. What most people don't realize is that everyone has a limit to how much time they can effectively work. Working 12 hour days will eventually lead to working 0 hour days surfing the internet or processing your divorce. Put work under a time axis. No matter what you do, the area under the curve remains consistant, all your doing is changing the window. Remember that what the company is saving in money by making you work hard you will most likely pay on the backend in your health, personal life and mental state. THESE THINGS ARE IMPORTANT! Finally, sometimes a deadline can't be hit, if you work hard to make the deadline be sure to make it apparent that this is a temporary burst that requires adequet recovery time. If not you will be continously worked hard until you break and they fire you for not performing.
Most software engineering projects do not require "great software", they require reliable, good software and great process. There are by now scads of published algorithms, and most of the problems you face have already been solved.
If you're thinking that hard, either
1) your formal education in computer *science* is lacking or nonexistent, and thus you lack sophistication in algorithm fundamentals and/or research methods,
2) you're making things harder than they need to be (prematurely optimizing, getting too clever, etc) because, let's face it, a challenging puzzle is a lot more fun than doing something mundane,
3) your ego is getting in the way and thus you'd rather reinvent the wheel than use someone else's, or
4) you're actually fortunate enough to have a real challenge, either because your resources are inadequate (in which case the company is certainly undercapitalized given that meat is way more expensive than silicon), or because you exist in a the teensy weensy sliver of the field that's doing original research.
I didn't realize this until I started to lose interest in software engineering. Ironically my productivity, and the quality of my code, skyrocketed when I started thinking of it as "just a job" to which I wasn't personally attached. I've seen this happen again and again.
Now, on the other hand, I think we all DO need to take a break every now and then. People are just more effective at working when they get to goof off every now and then, because let's face it, doing tedious things all day long for blows.
This is honestly why I think being a Software Engineer is more like being a writer than it is anything else. No, being a Software Engineer is NOT being a writer... just they are the most similar in working styles.
Yeah, right, except for the FACT most coders will stop coding when the code simply parses and writers must continue writing until the sentences are polished masterpieces. Saying that coding is like writing is like saying making a batch of mac and cheese for your kids is like cooking in a five-star restaurant. The kids will eat anything and as long as it doesn't kill them you're safe. In the restaurant you must have perfection AND style.
Now go read a book! :-) -- BFD
I already do. It is called a salary. It seems you are suggesting that you can write off the fact that I work in my sleep as meaningless, but there is a reason why you see people who are not being bothered by management when you think they are getting away with goofing off. In a well managed environment productivity talks and "keeping busy" walks.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
That's not a problem - just pad the next billing period a bit. Done all the time in the consulting world.
When people ask me what I do at bars/parties, I've taken to saying that I'm a writer in a language known by few. And if I do my job well, very few people will ever read my work and no one one will buy my work to read it.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
I have woken many times with the solution to a problem I had been trying to solve for days clear in my mind, that bubbled up from my subconscious while in delta (dream state.)
So now you're trying to tell us that you're a Delta operator? Psssshhh. You Keyboard Kommandos are all alike...
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
The problem here isn't that the coders are spending alot of time slacking off, talking about football, or browsing the web. The problem is that their output is of poor quality and consistently late.
If the code was high quality and delivered on time, than the apparent slacking behaviour could go on indefinitely unnoticed. Or who knows, perhaps even noticed. But when somebody in upper management walks through and questions the slacking, the direct manager would be in a position to say "the code is good and is delivered on time." Ask the same question now, and the direct manager would have no defense.
Situations like this can not go on indefinitely. The quality of work may improve (unlikely) and this will no longer be a problem. Management may lay down the law and put a stop to the slacking (somewhat likely). Your customers may get fed up with a poor quality product (quite likely) and take their business elsewhere putting you and your team out of work. In either case, don't think that nobody will notice your effort. If you have a strong work ethic, stick true to it. If and when the axe falls, you might be spared. And even if your not spared, some day you might wind up working for one of the slackers you were working with and that work ethic of yours will likely be the reason they remembered you.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
shut up, watch, and learn. Spending years dealing with unreasonable drop-dead dates developed by clueless PMs and managers who pulled the date out of their butt instead of evaluating the true effort to complete the project THEN set the date, then you can complain. Spending years rewriting/reconfiguring your work because the requirements change but the date doesn't, then you can complain. Spend years dealing with people who have to finish their task before yours can be completed but since you are the last guy, you get the blame if it's late, then you can complain. Spend years dealing with vendors who promise "our product can do that!" but turns out that the limitations of the tool are not discovered before some non-techie manager buys it and all you have to do is "make it work", then you can complain. So, have a cup of coffee, mind your business, and enjoy your halcyon days.
Soon I discovered this rock thing was true. Jerry Lee Lewis was the devil. Jesus was an architect, previous to his career as a prophet. All of a sudden, I found myself in love with the world, so there was only one thing that I could do: was ding-a-ding-dang-my-dang-a-dang-a-long-ling-long.
That is correct with regard to generic patterns and algorithms. They have been solved in many ways, a few good and many bad, or not less than ideal for some reason or another in a particular system context ...
I get paid to solve problems. If those problems were already solved I wouldn't have a job. Knowing when to apply a pattern or algorithm, which one is best to apply, what the implications are with regard to system performance, reliability, and scalability, etc., as well as other implications such as licensing, etc. is what makes a great software engineer great, and is the definition of being truly productive.
Measure thrice, cut once. By your argument there shouldn't be any software engineers, since all of the problems have been solved.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Changing the culture in an organization isn't easy. I think the best thing to do is lead by example and try and get people excited about work again. Try and spark up discussions about projects and try and get people excited to do their work.
Being the new guy is rough, but remember, everyone was the new guy once and put in their 80 hour weeks, now it's your turn. Really you should take advantage of it and think of it as a crash course in the business. That being said, if you feel it is becoming excessive, you need to sit down and talk about it with your supervisor. And don't wait until you're ready to walk out the door. It's much harder to have a rational discussion after you've been bottling up resent for months.
*lol*
There are *bad* writers and there are *bad* coders dude. There are crappy chefs and there are good chefs.
And there are good Trolls and bad Trolls.
[signature]
I'd bet that more people than you'd realize prefer that type of environment for writing code. I know it works for me. Although my copy of Psalm 69 wore out long ago and I have a good brutal mix of other bands on my mp3 player now.
Addlepated - punk & metal
Nothing ticks me off more than watching coworkers have a pissing match about how much overtime they put in and how much they come in on the weekend to work. The then look down on me for actually sticking to scheduled work hours, like I am not working hard enough or something. I always feel like saying, the reason is I don't waste time all day screwing around and I get my stuff done on time. If I can't it is because I have been assigned more work that is reasonable, or a deadline that is unattainable. In some instances I will work OT or on weekends if I feel it was an unavoidable and only the occasional thing. More often than not, the reason is some other douchebag is holding things up by wasting time, or not being organized, and I don't see how that is my problem. I will deal with work during work hours, and there is always more work to be done.
Anyway, a bit of a sore spot with me. I never actually say it, but the reason some of these people need to work 12 hours of their weekend (supposedly, as no one else is there) is because they don't work efficentially during normal work hours. I love how in our culture this is looked upon as being good, all the while these people collect either more money or time in lieu of for their efforts, while those that are able to handle their assigned tasks in a more reasonable manner are looked down upon, and are thought to not have the same work ethic. Nothing could be farther than the truth.
I am always reminded of the Seinfeld episode where Castanza figures out, that if he acts like he is angry and busy all day, people will leave him alone, and assume he is working hard thus allowing him to screw off. I see people pulling this everyday and the Manager buying it hook line and sinker.
Your definition of IT and most companies don't seem to jive. What I've seen is that at any company whose business isn't the production of software for others to use, everyone who does "computer stuff" is in IT. In our organization we have "techs", network admins, database admins, programmers, etc, and all of us fall under the umbrella of IT. Hell even our receptionists are in IT even though all they do is answer the phone. It's been the same way at 3 other companies I've worked for. The only exception I've seen is with working with outside vendors, but in that case since they're producing computer software as their business it wouldn't make sense (since in that case almost the whole company would be IT).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I've had to do it. We did away with the clock about 3 years ago, but I was at the same company I am in now doing IT work (kinda - I was the Software Trainer, though I've changed positions now). I also did a stint as an instructor at one of those small "certificate factory" schools and clocked in and out there too. It typically didn't bother me.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Agree!
It all depends on your environment. I have a pack of 8 HID cards (badges). They were all used for different places. There were weeks I never went to my "office". I'd work from home, drive to a datacenter, fly to another datacenter, etc, etc. Sometimes they couldn't get me on the phone, depending on the datacenter. I could have lied and been asleep at home, but said "I was down in the datacenter doing work. The phone doesn't work in there." Then again, all my work was always done, and done right, so there was never a need to question me, and I really worked at least 60 hrs/wk.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Sales people are on the road, they get breaks in travel, pumping gass, getting a lunch, talking to people, drinking coffee. Their work has constant interruptions.
For a coder, a lot of the work is sitting behind a desk, pumping out code, which is a creative process for many. Where are the natural interruptions, the breaks you don't see as breaks in other jobs?
Take a truck driver, when he shoots the breeze with someone while his truck is unloaded, does that count as a break? Or is it work? He is working, but still, sipping coffee while checking the right cargo is unloaded, is a welcome break in the routine.
For a lot of coders there is a time spend between pumping out code that is called thinking and only a few people can look busy while thinking.
Productivity is hard to measure and our proffesion is no different. Who is the better code, someone who writes the entire project code on time or on schedule OR the person who spends 5 minutes working in the 2 years of the project, but fixes the 1 mistake that would have cost the company miljoens if it hadn't been fixed?
Am I to be judged by the code I produce or by the mistakes I didn't make?
IBM tried the pay-per-line approach. Ask them how well it worked.
I have literally dreamed up code myself. I keep a notepad and pencil on my nightstand for that very reason.
I've wondered if there was a reason such dream solutions often came on the heels of a nightmare, usually one where I was being chased by vampires (seriously). Management perhaps?
Is it significant that since I've become self employed, the solution dreams still happen, but the vampires are gone...?
Would it surprise you to find out that most software engineers work at companies whose primary business is to produce software?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Now that you work for yourself, you may be missing the creepy guys trying to "get with you", so here goes:
... I actually am a fairly hot SE looking for my ideal Geek Girl; forgive the cheesy line ;-)
Hey Data Babe, what do I have to do to get you to grant me access get to your stack?
Seriously, though. Dreams are important. You might want to read Jung's work on dream analysis, but I think you might be on to something. Of course there is a bit of a kind of Heisenburg Uncertainty at play analyzing your own dreams.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
It would surprise me, because every time when I've had that job title, it was at a company whose primary business was to produce medical devices.
That said, 'IT' people are the janitors of business. The data janitors. Basically high-tech file clerks.
For I am your boss !!
I know a lot of programmers that get screwed by management, but thats a little to much to ask for.
They're not being paid for the amount of work they do -.they're being paid for their *experience*.
CONNECT THE GODDAMN DOTS!
I love that term software engineer. You're a fucking codemonkey, you are more expendable than anyone else in IT. And guess what? Software is an "information technology". You are not any better than the guys who fix your computer when you infect it with spyware. Get over yourself, you are the easiest IT worker to outsource and management doesn't appreciate pompous assholes sneering at the guys who make the magic boxes happy.
This reminds me of an XKCD cartoon that had the programmers in a fake sword fight during work because their programs were compiling, which can take a long time depending on the code.
Also everyone has their own way to get a job done. It is great to be busy with trivial programming or IT tasks, but when many creative people hit a road block on a non trivial problem, they have to "space out" or take a break to get past the road block.
To add, a mentor of mine says that if you are busy over 80% of the time with normal day-to-day stuff just to keep up with your work load and projects you will NOT have enough time to deal with the inevitable emergency or rush project that will arise. At that point your project work will suffer greatly. You are essentially overloaded and you will burn out. This is true for IT people as well as Software Engineers. I know, I've been in both camps.
Let me make a comparison. I and another analyst are working similar projects with a similar timeframe. He has worked here for a year after college. I have worked for ten. We have four weeks to finish the project. I finish mine in two weeks at about four hours a day, five days a week. He takes all four weeks, working ten hour days, seven days a week. The difference between us is really experience. I will spend my time up front learning my users wants and needs, while he works on the rock methodology of requirements analysis. (User: I want a rock. Analyst: Is this the rock you want? User: No, find a different rock. Goto Beginning.) I take time every week to network with my users and learn their business processes and what their problems are. My cohort just is to busy showing everyone how smart he is and how hard he works. That is why I read the WSJ, Slashdot, Wired, the Economist, some industry rags (our core business, not IT), and Tech Review at work. It helps for me to understand what my customer needs are, sometimes before they do. Design iterations are quicker and more complete solution wise. Trying to explain it to a fresh face out of college who has been taught just to code is very difficult.
In God we trust, all others require data.
There's also a little something to do with Circadian rhythms. Many programmers are night owls. Corporate policies are based on on what's defined as a "Normal" work day schedule. For type A executives, HR reps and others, this means 8 AM to 5 PM. So naturally, that's when you're expected to be there. In my company, we had a "flexible" arrangement where you could start your day anywhere between 7 and 9 AM. It didn't seem to matter to HR whether you were at your most productive at that hour, they just wanted an arse warming the chair at that time.
That's still too early for me. So I'd drag myself in usually closer to 9:30, sit in my chair and drink coffee and surf the web to try and stay awake until my brain came online. The earliest that would happen was around 10:30 where I could start to manage some feeble output. I didn't really kick into gear until 2 or so, and maximum productivity was from 4-7 PM. It actually went from 4-11, but staying that late wasn't approved by the other policy maker, my wife. Fortunately, my productivity late in the day more than made up for the farting around in the morning and I generally had far better and higher quality output than my morning people peers. I'd also often log in from home later and put in a few tweaks thanks to creative thinking during the drive home. These days I telecommute 100% and set my own schedule and generally disregard the concept of "office hours" but it takes demonstrated performance to your employer to get to that point.
Companies have shown they have no loyalty to employees.
You can work hard, invent new ideas, and then as the company is profitable, they lay you off and bring in a college grad.
The people that work hard and those that do not get very similar outcomes ( tho I do think hard workers who are "lucky" to fix a problem important to the right manager get better results- so it's a percentage game and part of how I got promoted ).
Most managers don't give a crap about their employees. Our manager went to christmas parties and held none for our staff (despite our recommendations as line supervisors starting weeks before).
Paperwork has reduced our productivity to about 8% of what it was in 2000. As long as your paper work is correct, there can be weeks where you have no new work to do unless you slow down and pace yourself.
I'd go to a smaller company, but the option there is 12 hour slave drive death days and then being told by a manager there is no money for raises and "what have you done for us lately anyway" as happened to a friend of mine.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
They make you set up an entire network while hang gliding.
Don't mistake activity or attendance for productivity.
Most new grads think they already know it all from what they learnt at school, but trust me your real learning experience is only just beginning.
Even if you, the new grad, regularly work 80 hour weeks and the other guys still come in late and surf the web a lot, the chances are that they are actually still way more productive and valuable to the company than you.
The reason is they have enough experience and specific product knowledge to be able to work much more effectively and deal with much bigger issues than a fresh grad who doesn't know anything about working in the real world, and hasn't yet had enough time to get intimately familiar with your companies products, technologies, target markets and customers.
It sounds to me like they also already know another thing that you will inevitably come to realise: you can't win a marathon by trying to sprint the whole way.
I'm in the embedded system arena myself. Firmware is still software, and I was including products where software ships to and is required by the consumer, as opposed to inhouse code such as intranet, etc. Apologies for not making that clear.
I admire your willingness to speak the truth even though it will likely get modded down by some people who don't know the definition of troll and flamebait.
;-)
Oh, look! Here comes a data janitor now
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
My previous position was as a consultant at FEI. There were several other people on the project, but I was the only one who consistently fixed defects quickly. One day the project manager (who had it in for me anyway) came into my cubicle after the status meeting and said "You've completed everything defect assigned to you? Good... you're off the project! Go home immediately." The other contractor, who had several dozen pending defects he hadn't touched in months, remained there for another year. When your manager is trying to drag the project out as long as possible because he knows HE will be let go as soon as it is completed, then being extremely productive can actually be damaging to your career.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I know programmers have this soft touch for believing they are creative types just because they are eccentric, which creative types tend to be as well.
The problem is that professionally done programming has to abide to a set of standard rules and procedures, the very anathema of a creative profession.
But of course the programmers that believe that programming in the fly in front of the screen, without any prior planning or analysis, is the way to go are legion, and there is even extreme programming and agile development that legitimises lazy engineering practices...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Yup, and you see it a lot in small to medium-sized companies, too. They don't want to know how many hours their IT people are working, nor what they're doing, exactly, because it'd almost certainly force them to pay overtime as "salary, non-exempt".
Remember, folks, it's not what your title is that determines whether or not you're exempt, it's *what you do* (among other things).
Since you are doing all of the work you'd better quit surfing slashdot and get back to work. And please, please quit whining!
That is a romanticized, inaccurate view of the office of writing.
Most writers I know of don't have a sudden rush of creativity, the mundane truth is that they work very hard, starting early, working for quite a long time, breaking fur lunch and then working some more, they have to structure what they write in a coherent way, some writers go to great pains to give their work internal coherence.
Now, there you have some good practices programmers could emulate from writers.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Out of touch management can be a real problem. Take my job (and you will see why I post anonymously)
We are all salary but asked to fill out a timesheet every week for time justification (almost like billing but more "justifying the budget you give us every year"). In theory they go over this timesheet every week, and use it to determine who has free time for more projects etc.
We were also told... this MUST equal 40 hours each week at a minimum.
Of course, our boss can't even see our sheet, its only seen by people above him. So... if we had a light workload... we wouldn't dare report less than 40 hours... as we have been told we will get in trouble, as will our boss. So we all inflate the time sheets to a full 40... which makes us look busy....so they wont approve more projects.... so we have less to do... so we inflate time sheets more..... so they wont approve more projects....
Of course, nobody wants to point this out, because it means admitting that you inflate your time sheet. However nearly everyone does it, because, we have been told we have to. In fact, when it has come up in small venue conversations, even the managers throw up their arms and say "look this comes from people above me".
I occasionally liken it a king letting the messenger into the throne room, putting a sword to his throat, and asking for the good news. It may get him a lot of good news, but its not going to help him make good decisions.
Crazy BS is all it is.
...It’s Not Worth Doing Right.
Working with impossible deadlines, broken design, non paid extra hours, and intense pressure, there is a point where you spend daily 12 hours working in the office, except you are not working, why would you? you are just fooling working half of the time, and tagging along until the next gig. Putting all your effort you could finish in 3 years instead 4, but when management was hoping to finish in less than two, what would be your reward? exactly the same.
Your project may not be like this one, but no doubt about it there is something extremely wrong on it, other than what you are telling.
Have you read Dilbert yet? Don't laugh - its not funny.
Please, what does that have to do with working efficiently?
People certainly have to be reined in if they are wasting time, but if you enforce a dress code (Why? Really, Why?) you will now have a team of well dressed time wasters.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... have insisted in dress codes.
All of them.
Coincidence?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
No. I'll agree with you about the coffee and the smoking, but the guy going hang gliding on the company dime was most likely not working. He was just a bastard trying to game the system, and get paid for doing nothing.
The discussions about the difference between IT folks and software developers is spot on! As a software developer, it is hard to be productive from 9 to 5, but month after month I always perform above expectations. :)
Personally I enjoy wakeboarding and spending time on the lake. My boss has no technical skills and always wants to mother hen her staff.
My fix has been to ensure I always have a clicky keyboard around when she calls. We'll stop the boat, turn off the music, and while I talk to her I'll mash random keys. 90% of the time that's all I need to do to make her happy.
If she asks a question that requires computer access to answer, I'll tell her it is taking me longer than I thought and I'll call her right back. Only then does the laptop come out...
My advise is to get used to it. People are generally lazy and alot of them have this sense of entitlement where not working for 8 hours a day is ok. I was brought up on a farm where we routinely worked 10+ hours a day. When I became a programmer, coding for 8 hours a day was easy by comparison.
I understand the creative side of development and that some people here seem to suggest that not working enables them to be more creative. Personally I think this is BS. Talking about football is not a good way to generate ideas regarding how to implement a new framework.
Keep working hard. If the company does not recognize the effort you are putting in, find a new employer.
Alright so I have read the postings and am concerned. You asked for an answer so here it is. Most of the time if you confront you boss or anyone else about their annoying behavoir they take it as a total assault on their character and turn the whole issue into a days of our lives episode. sometimes this is necessary sometimes not. other times it is better to avoid bringing things up altogether. The real question you need to ask yourself is what do you want out of this job. are you afraid that the poor quality of code is going to result in job loses? if so do you think that mentioning the issue to your boss or coworkers will change things. if so you want to talk to your boss about I would suggest taking an indirect approach about it. talk to him or her about what they did over the weekend then tell them you are really concerned about the software quality and you wanted to know what you can do about it. attack the issues that you see not the people. people usually only hear personal attacks when you mention something about their behavoir. on the flip side, if you find that when you examine your motivations that you are just mad at your coworkers because they are not of the same frame of mind as you then change your frame of mind. remember, unless you are under duress (i.e. someone is holding a gun to your head) you are 50 % responsible for the situation you are in.
Of course there have to be software engineers, in much the same way there have to be civil engineers. Knowing how to build a bridge is not the same as actually doing it. I'm saying that most problems to be solved do not require a lot of puzzle solving or thinking, they require a lot of "doing", activities which cannot be automated but are nonetheless not all that intellectually challenging.
If the person was a software engineer, or even a coder, he isn't in "IT". There is a reason why companies have an IT department, and then a completely seperate department called software engineeing.
It is not strictly true that a software engineer or coder is not in IT, although I agree that SHOULD be the case. IT and Engineering/Development SHOULD be distinct. For example, in a large company like Disney, enterprise application engineers (i.e. the development teams that write the enterprise applications that run the parks (such as reservation systems, payment systems, or even fast pass ticket systems) are actually lumped in as part of the larger IT department that includes the people who provide typical help desk service to office works.. Not how it SHOULD be, but often how it is, particularly since they often have radically different cultures when it comes to work ethics, resource management, etc.
If you think a true software developer should spend most of his time in front of a computer writing code, then it is you who has no idea what is involved in developing great software.
Amen! A software engineer should be spending less than half their time coding! Much more should be spent in design, planning, and analysis! As an aside, I found the hang gliding comment particularly funny as I was once hang gliding when my pager went off (it was stowed in a pocket in my harness) on a weekend to help troubleshoot a production issue! Too funny!
Is my situation unique or is it common across the industry?
It's normal. We like it. Now shut up before you fuck it all up for the rest of us.
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
Advice from a 20+ year veteran of IT who retired at 45.
Study method acting as it will serve you far better in the current IT work culture than any tech related degree.
... the BOFH
Then he'll REALLY understand how IT works.
We are the 198 proof..
The way to Succeed, and the way to Suck Eggs...
-A. Crowley
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
It would surprise me. Most of the folks I know who write software work as internal developers for airlines, banks, insurance companies, etc., and not for software houses.
I personally suspect that most programmers work in places which create software for internal corporate use and not for external customers. There's a HUGE demand for such software, still.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
p>You do realize that the majority of /. readers are in the UTC-8, UTC-7 and UTC-6 time zones, don't you?
And did you realize that Slashdot itself is more or less in UTC-5 (Dexter, Michigan). And please, can you tell me where you got the statistics for where all the slashdot readers are coming from? I'm sure Rob Malda would like to know how you were reading his log files too.
I must agree with the sentiment if not the expression of this comment.
I see a lot of people on /. who write as if software production is and should be an art form, whereas in almost all (i.e. commercial) cases it is a product to be sold.
A programmer is useful to the company, and therefore a valuable employee, if they help make the product more easily sold, not if they make it more perfect.
It's all too common.
Don't fall into that trap though - learn good time management, set clear goals for yourself, keep a detailed log of how you spend your paid time. Don't think of missing goals as bad- but do keep track of it.
In the end (which could be years) - such behavior is recognized, and will cover your ass in the end.
Stay calm, cool, collected, be clear about what who expects what from you (deliverables) - keep timelines and things communicated clearly, and stay focused on YOU.
That doesnt' mean abandon the team, as teams are often judged on what the team does, but, especially as the new guy, dont' rock the boat. If a project fails, someone should be doing post-mortem analysis as to why, and those details matter. Those notes you keep will save your ass. The guys with good record keeping come out on top, and advance faster in the long run. Don't get jealous, don't worry if you are doing more work than others - just think of it as practice (which it is). KEEP RECORDS. Did I mention keep records?
And be clear about deliverables.
Don't be passive-aggressive, and don't worry about what others are doing - just do good work.
I while back I was thinking about this, in terms of selling time .. versus selling work. Some of the people I work seem to regard employment as selling time, they come to work, sit on their ass for 8 hours and expect to get payed .. on the other hand, I usually get complaints because I finish what I have to do early and want to leave .. Mostly this is the management fault, because they fail to recognize the difference between being there ... versus working there.
Possibly. THey also might just be sitting pretty because IT in general is often not well managed. Just because you have some value because you can fix product A faster than anyone else in the company, well, that doenst' help much down the road when new management dumps product A. A smart new grad can surpass lazy old-timers awfully quickly with a good work ethic and the ability to learn and adapt.
Code monkeys are also easily replaced. I can go to an offshore firm and hire an individual who can do 10,000 lines a day of good code. I can hire a firm to do 100,000 or more lines of guaranteed bug free code a day. All I need is a guy on this end to just watch the show and that change requests are taken care of. So while other company people are flying kites as release day comes, I pay some guys out of India 1/4 what a coder's salary would cost and end up with a quality SLA, and a product that is ready come shipping deadline.
I agree completely. My companies experience with outsourcing has mostly been disappointing. The in house dev's spend a disproportionate amount of time cleaning up code that has been handed off to us. much of it is due to poor coding
* copy and paste coding techniques by the offshore teams
* not reading/looking at the code and using the API's that we've already provided
* re-inventing the wheel... poorly
As a result, we have tended to tended to migrate the offshore teams to extremely repetitive QA tasks. UI validation, etc etc. Which after about 3 years they finally seem to have a handle on.
Also the GP doesn't seem to realize that the Cost of Living is 20x higher in the states and that a salary of 75K in places like New York is barely enough to support a family.
My wife is Malay, my father in law is a high level banker for CIMB, and I've spent a good deal of time in K.L. and while the cost of living is definitely lower, after seeing how even the above avg person there lives, I'd rather live in the states *any day*
Given the quality of code produced by most developers maybe the developers ARE doing it wrong.
Thank you! Four any four weeks of coding you will spend of maybe be one of it writing code. Three weeks is getting a handle on the problem, giving time for the "art" to coalesce. Usually the bigger the ratio of percolation time to coding time the better the quality of the code.
Sounds like you may need to find a better class of small company. Unfortunately for you, though, those years of working as a cog inside a large company may have dulled your skills to the point where you'll have difficulty finding work at a better small company, because (almost by definition) they'd be picky about that kind of thing.
When you have learnt the rules, the mundane use them to grind out mundane code. he great never need to think about them anymore and program creatively. It is a creative act. "The Mystique of the Programmer" is a real thing. If you playing filling in the blanks you are not a programming.
SMBs have some advantages. If you can keep making yourself appear to be useful, and at least hang on until some people get hired after you, it is harder to get laid off.
What I see happen with some SMBs is the offshoring death spiral. Management drinks the Kool-Aid, and fire some veterans on the firm with a high salary. Then because they have lost some crucial product experience and glitches start happening, they blame it on getting used to offshoring. When they start seriously hurting because customers are getting issues, they think that their domestic employees have bad morale, or just lazy, so they push more off, which means even less experience with the company's product where it needs to be. Then the company is either essentially a slave to whatever offshoring group, essentially branding an OEM product.
It's rare that an entire team or department would be a bunch of useless slackers. The problems is usually 1 of these 2 issues:
1) There are several useless slackers on the team and the others were once like you who worked hard and took up the slack, but they got the same pay, bonuses and raises as the useless guys, so they gave up.
2) Management has put increasing pressure on the team with unreachable deadlines, changing requirements, and random punishments so the team finally realized that whether they work hard or don't work, the same thing is going to happen, so they're going to take what they can in terms of time off and time out.
The work ethic at my company is excellent so that anyone who slacks off stands out like a sore thumb.
Not just creative, but there's problem solving involved. That's often the hard part, figuring out what the problem is that's causing the bug; when that's done the solution often involves very little creativity. More than once I've figured out what was going wrong with software while in the shower and half awake.
I once worked at a large company that called it IS and IT. IT was the technology (network admins, helpdesk, etc.) and IS was the systems (internal apps developed to run the company -- prorgammers). Both reported up to the CIO. At the time I didn't understand the distinction, but now (10 years later), I do now and think that company had one of the better run IT (generic term) shops......
The other problem is that the work ethic has slipped off quite a bit
Oh...Please spare us the moral panic ....
The work ethic has been slipping since WW2 ended. Organizations (not just companies) got so large that a manager could take actions adversely affecting thousands of anonymous employees with impunity. As managers were rewarded for these actions, others copied and amplified their actions.
...times 2.
How about this...As people have become more productive, they don't need to work the full eight hours of a day to complete what was 8 hours of work 10 years ago.
Bernie Madoff was, by all accounts, a decent man.
Actually, most accounts I have read is that he was an eccentric, ADD freak who pushed a lot of people around. Ripping off strangers or family, I doubt it would make a bit off difference. (Hint: He was moving money to people he trusted he could manipulate into moving it back to him while he was in jail, not because he didn't want to screw them.)
Poor example maybe, but I'll concede "normal" people are less likely to rip off family. Bernie - and a whole lot of other people - though is not normal.
... everyone in the organization knows everyone else well enough that no one can hide misbehavior.
Or that they feel comfortable / open enough knowing that they can discuss the matter before acting unilaterally. For example, leader makes decision I'm not comfortable with...I go to leader and make my case. Leader explains issues I wasn't aware of or takes my advice and adopts my position.
Basically, leaders have to be secure in themselves and be willing to elucidate their positions. The current corporate environment doesn't really facilitate this. Indeed, the desperation most managers feel to maintain their positions makes it unlikely they will ever get to this point. Younger people have less to lose and thus can afford to respond in a more flexible manner.
OK, I didn't read all of the responses, so this opinion will inevitably be redundant, there are many like it, but this one is mine.
I am a software developer. I am paid a salary to solve problems and create software. I am not paid a salary to spend X number of hours per day typing code. If I meet or exceed the requirements of my projects, I am golden. If I screw up the projects because I didn't work hard, I am crap.
Some days I work like a fiend, like a bloodhound on the scent. Those days I look up from my computer and say, "oh, hell, when did the sun go down? My wife is gonna kill me..."
Some days I twiddle my thumbs waiting for the pointy haired ones to decide which direction I should go. (Guess which sort of day leaves me reading /.)
Some days I spend walking around outside the office building with problems and potential solutions chasing themselves around my psyche.
Never do I spend a day screwing off doing nothing while a project goes down the tubes, provided there is something for me to do about it.
I don't know what the situation is with your teammates. If the projects are failing and they aren't pulling their load, then in time either they will shape up or or they will be gone. (Perhaps taking the company down with them.... but that's another story.) Meanwhile, you do the best you know how, and don't spend too much time worrying about what others are doing. It will all change soon, anyway. Nature of the business.
WALSTIB!
It was 1996, the boss was a guy who had previously worked in the computer graphics industry and worked his way up and had done his share of all nighters as a coder there. My impression was that he wanted our team to be long term sustainable and not burn out like he'd seen other people burn out.
I think the boss's approach was that he wanted to get a day's work out of us but wanted to keep us enthusiastic and pace us as well. He knew for us young and single types, that meant being in the office for 10 hours or so and having a mix of kicking back and working hard, whereas for the family man this meant a much more directed working day and knowing he could leave on the dot each day to see his kid. The boss could ask the family man to do the occasional conference or even an evening shift very occasionally, but he had to ask in advance.
This was in the UK. I now work in a different organisation which has managers with a similar approach, here in 2010. Maybe it's a UK / USA cultural thing, the better organisations here try to hold onto good people.
Maybe also you've had bad experiences, in 20 years of working I've not had managers who play those kind of power games.
None of us in the story had MBAs. Computer degrees and another qualification, generally.
The OP should read http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/
Only then will he understand that working hard and getting ahead are not the same thing.
First of all, congratulations on recognizing some important truths about your situation ... that you are new to the workforce in general, that you are new there, that you had probably not go around telling people how to do their jobs, and so on. Off to a great start in the work-a-day world, there.
Now about the particulars of your office ... what you are observing is the culture of that office. Just like in school and after school, so far in your time here on the planet, you have to accept cultural norms for the group you intend to fit in with. And trust me ... you want to fit in at work. There is a real financial penalty for not doing so; in essence you will be out of the loop and miss important opportunities if you fail on that score.
That doesn't mean you can't be a leader at work; it means you have to lead within the culture. That doesn't mean you must be a leader at work; it means you have to follow within the culture. Whatever fits your personal style, ambitions, and goals, go there accordingly.
It's OK to work harder than those around you. Don't get me wrong, here. But, if you do decide that's how you're going to play it, work smart. Wait to get noticed, don't call attention to what you think is hard work. It may not be, actually. You don't really know how or why the people around you are there, or what the company values in them as employees, going beyond just what they do for "work".
Here's a hot tip ... make an effort to get along with other employees. Even the ones no-one else seems to get along with. That is an attribute that can get your ass saved when things are not so rosy and somebody has to go. No guarantees ... some companies do actually see you as just a number, but sooner or later you will end up somewhere where that isn't the case, and then it will provide job security, as far as there is such a thing, anyway.
And when I say "make an effort", that's exactly what I mean. Suck it up, go with the flow, and avoid being seen as a griper. It's OK to hear griping, it's OK to listen to griping, and it's OK to hang out with everyone. Just don't add fuel to the fire yourself. You can listen without adding fuel to the fire; don't enthusiastically agree with every little grumble.
Different workplaces, different companies, different careers; they all have a culture. Some places treat you like a slave; some people are OK with that because they enjoy working hard, and if there are long term employees around, chances are they pay well for slavery. Some places are about keeping it fun on the job, while still excelling at the work they do. Those are the hardest to fit in with, actually. You can't just simply work your way through them.
You don't have to change your personality, or try to be someone you're not. That won't work, actually. Be yourself but be seen as a team player. Management knows (or should know) they need all kinds of people to succeed.
Regardless, a work culture is important. Learn it and live within it, and make your mark with "the bosses" by doing well within that culture. If you can't live within it, move on.
Same here, IT and IS are separate groups but both are under CIO. The funny part is that most of the people outside IS think we are IT even though it is clearly not the case(the departmental listings say Information Services for us not Information Technology). To be honest I don't bother correcting people when they say IT, they could care less about the distinction between the terms and I have better things to do than be pedantic and piss people off.
Windows Haiku Chaos reigns within. Reflect, repent, and reboot. Order shall return.
In fact, just because I'm sleeping, that doesn't mean I'm not working. I have woken many times with the solution to a problem I had been trying to solve for days clear in my mind, that bubbled up from my subconscious while in delta (dream state.)
Not to be picky here.. but delta waves are a product of slow wave sleep (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_wave) and are present in non-REM sleep stage III (and stage IV, depending on who you talk to).
There are no delta waves in REM sleep, where most dreaming occurs.
Otherwise, totally agree with you ;)
Back in the 70s (yes I am that old), there was an old saying...
When you have to fire a computer programmer (as everyone involved in creating programs was called then) and there are two, keep the one with his feet up on the desk staring at the ceiling and fire the one frantically pounding away on the keyboard (the later hasn't thought the problem through).
Remember, of course, that if you only work just hard enough to not get fired, you'll only be paid just enough to not want to quit.
The general idea that your main motivation for working well is loyalty to the company seems a bit off, to me. The first reason to work well is you feel better when you do. It's very satisfying to be proud of the work you've done, and that can have an impact on every aspect of your life. It's extremely helpful if your managers recognise your good work, too, but motivation is not a one-way street, and the more self-sufficient you are with respect to motivation, the better you'll do generally. You can't start your own business if you require external motivators, for instance!
The next reason to work well is that you have loyalty to your immediate manager. If they're doing their job well, they'll be supporting your professional development, representing you to higher management, shielding you from the shit spattering out of the fan, and providing you the autonomy, environment, and feedback to enable you to do the best you can. If you're not delivering to your manager, your manager won't be delivering to their manager, and it's going to adversely affect them.
(If your immediate manager doesn't give a shit, well, have fun riding the cushy job wave, but remember reason #1 - maybe you should manage upwards a little, or perhaps look for promotion opportunities or a new job).
Mark me down as hypocrite for posting this while at work, of course. :-)
My neighbour claimed 10 to 12 hours studying per day. In reality I caught her more than once just staring out of the window, not really studying. For her that was part of "studying" but in reality it isn't.
Yes it was.
At such times she might have been:
- Thinking about what she had just read and working through the implications.
- Transferring information from mid-term to long-term memory.
- Clearing the fatigue biases in certain neurons/synapses so they'll process the next chunk of information more normally.
- Quiescing parts of the brain (such as the visual-verbal connection used in reading) that would otherwise send signals that would "jog the elbow" of the part she was using at the time to "study".
or performing any of several other neural operations that are definitely part of "studying".
So it seems to me it may be your definition of what constitutes "studying" that's in need of revision.
Also: There's a lot of variation both in how brains work and in how people use them. You might be able to absorb a subject well in concentrated chunks, performing some of the above tasks in such short bursts that you don't notice them. You might have stronger interconnections between some parts of your brain that let you avoid some of the techniques that might require you to look at something neutral - or weaker links between others that avoid interference or let you do things in parallel (like backgrounding the transfer to mid-term to long-term memory of one item while processing and short-term memory are working on the next.) Or you might just have a different "studying" skill set, resulting in a different set of behaviors.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What you see has nothing to do with working for a bunch of lazy unprofessional bums. It has nothing to do with the passing of time or the decline of the American work ethic. I've seen what you have seen and been shocked by it every time. The difference is that I'm now 57 and it doesn't surprise me anymore. I first saw this kind of problem in my first job pumping gas in 1972 and it hasn't changed since.
So what is going on? What is the cause? Well, some people are just lazy unprofessional bums. That has been true as long as there have been people. But, most people will do a good job, act professionally, and put in 8 to 12 solid hours of hard work in exchange for a few things. What motivates people the most is the freedom to do a good job without fear of being punished for doing it. That wasn't what you expected me to say was it? It is also nice to get reasonable pay.
In most of the places I've worked people were punished, in some way or another, for taking any kind of risk. They are punished for taking any kind of initiative. They are rewarded for doing what they are told to do. They are rewarded for fixing blame rather than fixing problems.
What you are seeing is the result of modern business management at its best. The people you see wasting time know, they know down in their guts, that they will not be fired for wasting time and they will not be rewarded for doing a good job. They know that they could be laid off, but they also know that people will be laid off for political not for being incompetent. They will not be laid off because they stand around in the hall talking about nothing important. But, they will be laid off for not spending enough time talking to their boss about this weeks football games. In fact, the highest paid person, they guy with the most experience and/or the greatest skills, is more likely to be laid off than the new guy who still can't find the coffee filters. Why? Because laying off the expensive people has more impact on the quarterly report.
The mid level managers tolerate all this crappy behavior because the know the same things.
A while back, I went to work for a new company and as I walked around I noticed this guy with a green Mohawk who was reading Slashdot.com. In fact, that is how I found out about Slashdot.... It seemed he was our "IT Guy" or as he called himself "the system manager". Awesome system manager. Nothing ever broke and he did all his serious work at night after every one had left so it didn't impact our daily work. Shortly after that I overheard the President asking the CTO why this guy was on the pay roll. The president described him as looking weird, being disrespectful, and he never saw him actually do anything. Then he went on to say that nothing ever went wrong anyway so why did we need a system manager? BTW, the president and the CTO both have technical masters degrees from MIT. They should know better. The CTO couldn't or wouldn't defend Green haired Mohawk guy.
I had a chat with GHMG that in which I told him to 1) stop doing his work at night, you must be seen to be doing work. When your work starts to interfere with day to day operations offer to come in at night to do it. But, ask for more money for night work. 2) let little things break once in a while so they see you fix them. They need that to understand the value you the bring to the company. 3) Do not read Slashdot where management can see you reading Slashdot. 4) Walk around and talk to people, ask them what you could do to make them more productive. Then pass that list on to your manager and ask him to prioritize the list. You have to be seen adding value over the long run. You have to be seen taking an interest in the success of the company. 5) Create an online database for reporting problems and tracking their solutions. You need that to document all unscheduled tasks you perform. Make sure that all work requests go through your database. You must be able to document all the work you really do.
Ok, so what happened? He did what I suggested. A couple of month
Write it up however you want, the truth is ALL PEOPLE in ALL JOBS are pretty damned lazy, short of maybe diamond mines in Africa. Also, all of them think they work really hard and deserve more money. Welcome to the real world.
Have you ever driven past a road crew when everyone was actually working? I mean, working a shovel like they mean it... not just 'there'. Have you ever seen an executive put in 10 straight hours of REAL work? No, no you haven't. They'll be there for 10 hours, but I've worked a lot of places, I've never seen anyone actually do solid work for 10 hours. It's because people don't work nearly as hard as they think they do. It's a fact of life far older than any of us.
I agree with this. I have previously worked for a large-ish corporation, and now I am working for my family-owned business of less than 20 people. Thinking about it, my work ethic has changed. I'm much more motivated in my current job, partially because it's the family business, and partially because I know everyone, and I'm not just a number.
I hate to break the news to you, but she's not likely to be interested after learning that you consider people in her line of work "data janitors".
Why, she might even conclude that you're an asshole, as quite a few of us here already have.
the last part... i work in a small company, and quite much have got that welcoming.... Despite most likely being the most productive. Also, i learned early on that anything i'm asked to has to be thought pretty freely, just go directly to the easiest possible solution, and don't try to be a hero and get a work of 400hrs done in 20.
I don't know about you, but some large fraction of what I'm paid (gross) is removed from my paycheck directly (payroll taxes, witholding) or indirectly (sales taxes, etc.). I don't work for that proportion of my time. Now if everyone does that, taxes would have to go down!
I just googled "Heisenburg Uncertainty". Damn you, there goes my whole evening. :-)
If you start a new job and try to start "fixing" people, they will hate you. If the workplace doesn't suit you, then get another job.
Move out to the low-paid, low status jobs, and particularly ones with lots of female or migrant workers and there are heaps of slave-driven jobs (admittedly not as bad as African diamond mines).
Some examples: call centre workers on "forced feed" schedules, paid-per-word typists, paid-per-piece garment workers, nurses, cleaners, etc. I also found working at fast food restaurants was pretty hard work, although the hours tended to be short.
What makes you so sure that the lousy work ethic is unique to the IT industry? It is the same everywhere. I was a senior manager in provincial government in Saskatchewan, Canada, and I found that the same problems existed. Most people are lazy and stupid and only interested in feathering their own nests. Does that surprise you? If so, then you are either naive or stupid. Everyone, except those of a certain age [those that learned to work as a result of the depression], expects a rewarding job where their employers consider them as being worthy and deserving of advancement to senior positions because of their intrinsic values as human beings, without consideration of actual contributions, merit or value contribution to the enterprise, especially those who are "most deserving" such as Indians or other minorities. It is a losing game because competence, skill, educations level, and experience, are not valid anymore. If you are too stupid to see this, then, too bad for you. I am glad I am old enough to be dead before too long, and not have to deal with this crap for too much longer. Myron Kuziak former lawyer, judge, etc.
...welcome to the world of IT, dude. Where we compare salaries by how much we get paid to take a shit, see how much we can NOT get done, and do just enough to keep from getting fired. You've never seen Office Space, have you?
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.
I swear the below is 100% truth.
:) Did such thing happen to you as well?
About 4 days ago, my wife woke me up because it was pretty late in the morning (as I spent a long night working). As I woke up, still half sleeping, I asked her: "where's the Debian source package?" (even if she doesn't even know what a package is). I insisted and asked many times, as I really wanted to know where it was, not giving much more details. Later she told me she wanted to laugh but tried not to. I can clearly remember that it was being very important to me to know where that "Debian source package" was when being half awaken, although I can also tell that I didn't know what software I was thinking about.
I guess you and me are working a way too much!
Hell even our receptionists are in IT even though all they do is answer the phone. :)
Well, they are using technology (a receptionists phone), and they do provide information over that technology! So, they really ARE IT people!
What I see as the biggest issue facing IT is that too little of the management out there is savvy enough to be able to manage all aspects - managing people, budgets, tasks and technology. Every single day I see insane decisions made which ultimately waste time, money and materials. If you want a reason why people have no work ethic, its because they know they know that the people making the decisions have already doomed everyone to failure.
It happens to old companies. Over time, a company accumulates a lot of people, who can't leave for a variety of reasons. They don't want to work either. You don't have to do anything with that. Bankruptcy will take care of things. If it does not do it quick enough, leave the company. This attitude is contagious.
Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive. We worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week. from The Graphing Calculator Story
In fact, just because I'm sleeping, that doesn't mean I'm not working. I have woken many times with the solution to a problem I had been trying to solve for days clear in my mind, that bubbled up from my subconscious while in delta (dream state.)
Confirmed: It's not what's in the coffee. I've had a few "Eureka!" moments at really odd times. Mostly when I'm outside having imbibing caffeine/nicotine. The one's I *really* hate are when something wakes me in the dead of night.
If I don't commit it to paper right then, I'll lose the idea. Worse yet, my grasp around the details starts to slip as I feverishly scribble on the back of an envelope.
"When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."
You know I hate do-gooders straight from college.. Remember this: 1. Your degree confers NO certification of experience. You are simply a Padawan learner sitting at the feet of your Jedi Knight and Jedi Master colleagues. 2. Forget your college learning and instead be a sponge. 3. IT requires a combination of liberal arts and science. It is abstract in its beginnings and concrete in its scientific application.is 4. IT management is different than Software Development/Engineering... You require more time and distractions to think a problem through.. You cannot be at full go all the time, you will burn the fuck out. 5. You should spend the first 3 years of your life reading publications and listening to webcasts. 6. Your co-workers involved in water cooler talk means that they are human, try it sometime you might like it. 7. Mind your own damn business... No one likes a cubicle porcupine... And STOP Snitching!! That will get you alienated quickly and I can assure you it will get you fired. 8. Remember young Padawan the path to the Dark Side... See Yoda for more details.. or your resident Master Jedi in your office.
25 years ago I asked my co-worker about my work habits. He said "You goof off for eight hours a day, then you work for 20 minutes and earn your salary."
20 years ago I was training a new system administrator. I explained to her that some days you only needed to work four hours, but when the network is down you don't go home at night until it is back up.
Programmers do not work by the clock, nor by the lines of code. If you are happy with what I produce, it doesn't matter if it is 10,000 lines that took me 90 hours in one week, or 5 lines that took me one hour. If it works, and is readable, and is maintainable, it is worth what you paid me.
And, ironically, the best programmers produce the smallest, lightest, most readable code. Vast quantities of work and code are often a sign that the coder doesn't understand the problem.
Is this your personal definition of "IT" ? .. according to my experience, software engineering is a part of IT.
I've worked in mega-corporations on two continents for 15 years in "IT" doing software development and engineering
Did you just pull out your definition out of your ass or is there some region on earth where theres a difference between IT and software engineering ?
Judging from the other posts - your definition of "IT" seems fairly unique..
I'm shocked, shocked I say.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
See that? We haven't even met yet, and I already found a way to hold your attention for a whole evening ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Well ... I don't have distribution nightmares, because I use Mandriva :-)
I meditate and do a lot of Yoga these days, so my stream of consciousness flows pretty easily now, but before I started doing that my subconscious did use these kinds of techniques to get the attention of my conscious mind quite a bit.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Well, I've been a software engineer for more than 20 years, working for companies that ship software in their products (embedded systems), and of the hundreds of times the term IT was used it never once referred to the very seperate software engineering department in which I worked.
;-)
There is a great deal of misuse of the term these days, with many people claiming that if it involves information and technology then it is IT. I can accept that definition as long as we can agree that the maintanence department is part of IT, since the maintanence guy sends and receives E-Mail, accesses a computer to see open tasks, and uses a walkie talkie and a pager
If you look at the various schools that specialize in training people to work in IT, you will find that none of them have a clue how to teach software engineering. They may teach an admin how to do some basic programming to automat admin tasks, but knowing how to write code to create a few scripts is a far cry from actual software engineering.
You are quite lucky, but unfortunately many employers/clients require a great deal of accountability. Working as I do for the NYC gov't, for instance, the very existence of consultants is a political football. Minute by minute accounting of money spent on our contracts is pretty much required, because at least half of the people we are working with are actively trying to get us fired at any point in time. Our group was recently told to be careful to clock in and out for lunch or going down to smoke because the office manager, a Dept. of Ed employee, had taken to scrutinizing the surveillance footage of the building entrance and comparing it to consultant timecards in an attempt (successful in at least two cases) to get people fired.
snig
Given the amount of quality experienced talent in the marketplace right now, you wouldn't have been hired in the first place if the hiring organization wasn't fairly dysfunctional to begin with. In this business, a small team of experienced and well-compensated developers with a strong work ethic (the latter doesn't necessarily have anything to do with hours they put in - only measured by their work product) will run circles around teams twice their size. Teams like this simply don't hire new grads (unless the new grad is already well known to them and proven themselves through an internship or open source project). As the economy has slowed, most organizations have cut back compensation increases, reduced or eliminated bonuses, and perhaps implemented a week or two of furlough - this serves to further demotivate those who survived the last round of job cuts and makes plain the reality that in general hard work is not itself rewarded with anything but more hard work. You'll continue to struggle in your current position until you accept that the nature of your relationship with your employer is mutually parasitic.
That said, you don't need to sink to the level of your co-workers if they are not delivering quality product. Unless you're happy working long hours and weekends, set reasonable limits on work hours that you'll only bypass under extraordinary circumstances (you'll need to have some notion in advance what qualifies so that isn't abused). Your co-workers and boss will respect those limits if you're clear about them and demonstrate a high level of dedication during work hours. Until you have specialized skills and experience that entitle you to become choosy about work assignments, consider your current career stage one of "paying your dues" and hopefully you won't waste the resulting seniority like your co-workers. Whatever you do, don't waste your time worrying about what your co-workers do. Find ways to carve out areas of responsibility that you own and prioritize your efforts such that your best efforts are always spent on those projects that your leadership chain knows are owned by you. Be conscious of what your boss gets credit for as well and be sure to prioritize accordingly - but don't make a show about it and be careful about that which might be interpreted by your co-workers as making them look bad or "sucking up" - over time you will find that it's possible to get the respect of your peers and your co-workers as well, particularly if you take the to socialize with your co-workers--you still need their experience and they'll share the important details you need if you gain their trust on a personal level. Above all, be realistic. While you need to pay lip service to all the idealistic things your corporate culture and individual upbringing values, your actions should be based on realistic assumptions about what's possible. Sometimes extraordinary things will happen, but planning for the extraordinary is usually a recipe for failure.
In short, quit wasting time worrying about everyone else and recognize that entry-level positions always come with organizational dysfunction. Learn everything you can in this position so you can become qualified for a better one down the road. Repeat ad infinitum and you will have a full and rewarding career.
Shut up and do your job.
1) Do not go to the bosses with this complaint. No one likes a tattle tale, and the boss will see this as a complaint against her/his ability to manage the team.
2) There is a very large possibility you do not know what you are talking about. Are you in position to know what deliverables these folks are responsible for and how they are doing in delivering?
For example, I work with several consultants who spend most of the business day chatting, surfing the web, smoke breaks, etc. These may be the folks you are complaining about. What you may not know is, at the end of the day they go back to their hotel and pump out code til 1 or 2 AM.
They get done what needs to get done, and it gets done on schedule. They work that way because in the office, we get at most 20 or 30 minutes of uninterrupted work time between pointless meetings and questions from managers we've already answered multiple times.
3) Teams count. The lone wolf coder is fiction. Any project of real utility may be born of a single mind, but matures with testing, revision, documentation, etc. Socialization generally should not be the only focus of the day, but people do work together better when they like and get along with each other.
4) If everything you say is true, then when you are the boss and it is your job to keep track of what everyone else is doing, you can fire the bums. Until then, it is not your job to monitor what everyone else is doing.
"Coders are like writers", haha, yeah right. Why don't you "writers" use some of that inspiration of yours to comment your code when you do spend 20 minutes of your day, between eating bagels and drinking coffee, to actually write a few lines of exploit-infested, non-sanitized-SQL-input-riddled "code"... so that us IT guys don't have to spend 3 days digging through your scribbles, trying to find that memory leak or unchecked loop that's hanging that particular w3wp.exe process on a server shared by 120 of you guys, all blaming IT for it while chatting in the hallway with each-other. Thanks.
Bow before me, for I am root.
"guaranteed bug free code"
Hah; sure it is. Even good dev shops cannot achieve this feat.
I am lazy and lack self control.
But 20% utilization? That will kill business unless it's are a monopoly.
Excellence is an attitude.
And it's not just trust, either. Where I work, programmers, IT, project implementation teams... all salaried. Helpdesk is hourly, as you might expect (except for the managers there). Oddly enough, QA is also hourly. I can't figure that one out.
Why, no, I haven't meta-moderated lately. Thanks for asking!
Whoops, submitted a little to early. Some of it is trust, however.
We also use HID cards (I'm imagining most places do these days). Some managers actually review the swipe logs for their salaried employees. I had a manager once who had MIS generate logs of our logins and logouts from our computers. When he realized that my coworkers with desktops never logged out, and I always put my laptop to sleep... that didn't work so well.
These days, I have many days where my boss is out of the office... and his boss is out of the office. And his boss... she works in a different location. You still have to show up, and work all the hours you're supposed to.
Why, no, I haven't meta-moderated lately. Thanks for asking!
delta (dream state.)
BatsDR ... beta alpha theta spindles delta rem ...
I thought REM was most associated with dreams and delta was in-between/start+end of dream events.
(Yes, I remember using "Bat's DR", as in, Batman's Doctor, cause he does stuff at night)
There's also a good chance that some of the new guy's peers, especially the coders, are doing work while out of the office, too. I was in one such environment where management expected to see everyone in the office during the day, but many on the team got their best work done at home on nights and over weekends--usually after playing a few hours of Half-Life or whatever the game du jour was at the time.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
It's not that most places have HID cards. Most big places do. Most small businesses don't. I kind of ended my post before I finished saying my thought too. My pack of HID cards were for various buildings, suites, and datacenters. Individually each knew when I came and went, but to them I was a customer. My company didn't know when I went through any of those doors. As far as I know, no one but me ever called to check up on anything. Even then, it was rare.
I used last a lot to make my own timeline on events, but that was just to notate a report on a job.
It's better to log in and out properly, so you can see what you did, but your coworkers are getting around that by staying on. Eventually it may catch up with them, if someone finally asks, "Why are you shown as working 24/7/365?"
When I was in charge of the department, I didn't really care how many hours people worked. I cared that the tasks were accomplished in a timely fashion. I told them on day 1, they have to work what the job dictates. If it's 20 hours or 80 hours in a week, you have to do it. I was very fair with them though, and the weeks were usually 20 to 30 hours. Occasionally things got busy, and they were happy to work the longer hours as required. They knew if I said "I need you for this.", it was because I really did, not because of an artificially created deadline to squeeze extra work from them. If it was something that could wait, I'd cut them off at about 8 hours, and say "just finish it tomorrow." But, if it was mission critical, we stayed on it. By "we" is was usually all of us. Since I was in charge, I took a lot of the really important tasks myself, so they weren't overworked, and then they'd volunteer to help. It made for a really good teamwork environment. That's something that is overlooked by most places these days.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Its not really your job to rate other peoples work. It also sucks that you have to come in and finish their work. You can simply make the comment to your supervisor/manager, and let them handle it. If they choose not to respond, then it truly isn't a concern for them, and they are happy with the current work-levels.
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
"Organizations (not just companies) got so large that a manager could take actions adversely affecting thousands of anonymous employees with impunity."
Before WWII, managers and other company leadership took "adverse actions" such as hiring gunmen to kill union activists and strikers. Let's not get too dewy-eyed about "work ethics" often driven by desperation and coerced by threat and force.
http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newcentury/5168
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Before WWII, managers and other company leadership took "adverse actions" such as hiring gunmen to kill union activists and strikers. Let's not get too dewy-eyed about "work ethics" often driven by desperation and coerced by threat and force.
http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newcentury/5168
I used to work in the coal industry, so I'm well aware of the history of union-management strife. Situations back then were (to me, anyway) more reminiscent of modern ideological/ethnic conflicts, where the enemy (who may be your neighbor) is painted as evil and both sides work to desensitize violence against the other.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
...stereo blasting Ministry's Psalm 69 at just under ear-bleed levels.
I wouldn't count on being able to do that for the rest of your life.