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?"
"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