Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do?

Doing just as much work as your employer requires and no more is way less of a problem than employees who actively steal, commit fraud, bring drama and distract other team members, or are introducing defects because they've faked their way into a job they don't have the skills for. Your managers are likely dealing with those problems too, so they may be more aware of your situation than you think and are ok with it. Or maybe not, whatever. Not your problem either way. They can let you know if they're not happy with your performance, which it sounds like they are not doing.

However! I will say that this way of working and living comes with some significant hazard to your mental health. Doing something you don't like, care about, or believe in for decades long periods of time can really mess with your sense of self worth and happiness in life. You only have one life, do something with it that is satisfying. Get out of the rat race.

Personally, this realization has led me to switch careers. I'm now in a 2 year evenings and weekends program to get certified to do something that has nothing to do with tech. It is a huge pay cut. I also am happier than I have ever been in my adult life because I'm learning something challenging and helping people instead of coasting through 8 or 9 hours of pretending to work every day. Starting over mid-life and finding another thing that I love as much as I loved computers as a teen has been a blessing worth more than any amount of money.

Good luck!

Perhaps at large companies?

I would hope people applying to jobs at small 5-20 person startups aren't bullshitting and lying about the work they do. Or to reword the same sentiment, I hope people looking for the easiest possible path target their job search at companies with lots of bureaucracy where people not doing your job is more easily tolerated.

Edit: I like the suggestion from someone else in the comments here to "work in an environment where not being productive is not harmful."

However, I do think if you are doing the full 40+ hours only working you are likely heading towards burnout. IMO, 5->6 hours of work in an 8 hour work day is both normal and acceptable to keep people from burning out and ultimately dropping to the 5->10 hour a week range.

Yes exactly this, especially at larger companies. I know a few of those developers, and they sit right near me...

They find a way to make any task take forever...

If it was a smaller company they would be called out, but at my [very, very] large company - its very hard to get fired. So what happens is that they are just given what is essentially remedial work.

As a fellow IC, it will in no way make my life better to call this person out.

Simple tasks can take 3 weeks because there are 7-9 dependencies throwing sand in the gears.

This not only provides plenty of cover for not getting stuff done it also saps the motivation to get it done quickly. Like, if X team sits on your request for a week that prevents Y feature from getting out are you really gonna be motivated to push it to production the second it's unblocked? Or could it wait another couple days?

Contrast that with a small startup where you barely need sign off to do anything - it's much easier to get into that pleasant loop of code -> deploy -> see customers use it -> dopamine hit -> motivation to code some more.

early in my career i once worked for a spinoff of a very large tech company and was involved in a collaboration with the mothership, so to speak.

my boss pulled me aside and explained to me. "here's how this goes. time here does not work like time there does. what happens in one day here takes two weeks there, and if there's anything missing when you ask them for something, that two week timer will reset. so make sure when you communicate with them, you send them absolutely everything they need and then some. then be prepared to wait. for a long, long time. they will either cancel or eventually deliver something. whether the thing they deliver is relevant remains to be seen, but be prepared for it not to be. if this starts sapping your time and energy, bring it back to me."

he was absolutely right.

This. People get tired of the enormous overhead everything has, and gets lazy in the end.

I work for an ISP and I have my days, but some weeks I can't care less. I tried so many times to drill into people's minds how to not get tangled by complexity and then watching them just do the opposite...

Now I'm teaching myself programming so I can get out of this, but It seems I'm only going to upgrade my pay and be bitten by the same problems.

I worked somewhere once where it took 8 months to implement a two page sign-up process, and I counted about 60 people involved. A colleague said I didn't know the half of it and that there were actually more than 100 people involved.

I didn't last very long.

Whrereas I (alone) finished two client projects this month (programming) and am starting the third. Help colleagues with their stuff, and am supposed to work on an internal project ( client projects are merely a distraction from the internal project ). I'm also supposed to make a certification ( I'm not sure whether in my free time or not ). I'm paid for 24h a week. And I have bad concience every standup because I didn't manage to finsih more the day before.

We were also over a year into "how do we setup direct access between on-prem and cloud" where I stopped attending meetings because within two or three meetings we always got back to starting point, whereas I joined the first meeting with reasonable, implementable solution.

In fact, this is so common that I can name the exact people at several jobs I've had. And I could mention them to my coworkers and they'd know exactly what these people's reputation are.

Our feeling toward them is a mix of being impressed and being embarrassed. Impressed because there's something to be said for someone who works the system to their advantage like this. Embarrassed because it's hard to understand how they couldn't be more ambitious at work. It's not that companies are that great at rewarding getting things done (sometimes they are…), but it's that getting something cool done is rewarding in its own right. Why don't they want that feeling… ?

If you do something quickly, and it is of high quality, it will probably get noticed, and your reward in addition to a sense of satisfaction, is more work. The satisfaction high won't override the punishment of more work, although salary will. However, salaried employees don't get paid more to do more work (bonus notwithstanding.)

Knowing that, it's not a far jump to realize that you can minimize your work but keep your salary, so long as your work output doesn't dip enough that you get fired.

Cant speak for everyone, but in my case, Ive done the grind to get something cool done in my younger days. Ive designed, programmed and tested a differential braking system for a sizeable unmanned aircraft technology demonstrator, from hardware to drive the master cylinders, to the software with control of stepper motors following dynamic control laws, and then sat in a control room at a US Air Force base and watched the traces as the real thing was landing and purely steering with the brakes after touchdown (to test nose wheel actuator failure).

At my current company, when I got hired, I specifically said upfront that my goal is just to become a subject matter expert, and to have a more consistent and chill workload. I did what I was supposed to, nothing more, but I did it correctly, and put in extra hours when crunchtime before deadline came. I got promoted to senior after 4 years, and now Im pretty at very minimal hours of actual work per week.

But, because Ive been on the same team for so long, can answer questions about the entire tech stack, I can debug things, I am happy to sit in meeting and talk about high level things when managers don't want to, so my value is still fairly high. I no longer care to really put in hours to build something cool, instead I am focusing on things I didn't have time to do when I was younger and grinding, like travel and fitness.

I had a ton of ideas in many a job, rarely if ever I could get into conditions where I could even start working on them - usually the interesting stuff happened in secret side projects, off the company time.

I found myself spending time on leetcode, or learning emacs because I could justify those as improving my abilities. To quote Office Space "I have 4 different bosses, my only motivation is to not get hassled, that and fear of losing my job. But you know what Bob, that gets someone to work just hard enough to not get fired."

Nowadays I just want out. I'll get that feeling doing my own thing with no blockers but time and myself. I'm not at all convinced this is generally possible at any company (based on what I've heard from friends and read on HN and elsewhere). There's always something in the way.

I find it a somewhat comforting thought ... if I ever get overworked then I can always become one of those guys ...

Maybe that's why nobody ever calls them out.

> I keep this link sitting around and enjoy dusting it off every couple of months or so

> https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

OP is making a perfectly rational decision.

Don't be so sure. It is HARD to get fired in this job, sometimes. You have to be actively toxic, or your boss has to have a buddy they want to hire in your position.

The only time I felt like doing my best was for a manager who genuinely wanted to get me promoted, and he did it smartly.

1) The "good" solution is to find some work you actually give a shit about. If you can't force yourself to care about corporate software, work on an indie video game, or get a job at Amnesty International, or find some other way to get personally invested in your work product. If you can't find it doing software, become a chef, or build houses, or whatever. It will improve your life immeasurably to spend your day doing something you get intrinsic satisfaction from instead of websurfing.

2) The "bad" solution, more like managing the problem really, is to get good at using Pomodoro timers, to-do lists, and other crutches to force yourself to do enough to not fall behind. "Fall behind" in this context does not mean that you do so little work that everyone notices and calls you out on it, it means that you stop keeping up with new frameworks and new tools and the years march by and your skills atrophy and then your employer folds and you find pushing 50 in an ageist industry with weak skills and few options.

Hope this is helpful.

Sometimes I'll know I need to write some code or some function and I'll just think about it in the back of my head while doing other things, sometimes for a whole day or two. Then I'll sit down and write it in like 20-30 minutes. Did I work 20-30 minutes, or have I been working for a day or two? I would say a day or two, and the 20-30 minutes was the time needed to produce the deliverable of that work.

> He never spent a long time on a problem since he believed that the subconscious would continue working on the problem while he consciously worked on another problem.

This is definitely a thing. Intellectual labor just isn't physical labor.

The problem is making that a regular occurrence.

i told her that 1. i can only think in english when thinking about work and 2. saying stuff out loud helps me organize my thoughts and this is specially easy while showering because i don't really have to concentrate.

Ideally you shower every two days or so.

I would say that I do this too. There's a lot of stuff I can more or less do on autopilot and stuff that requires actual attention and finesse, for lack of a better word. I feel like management thinks that I'm good at my job for all of the autopilot stuff that I can crank out, and that makes up for the time I spend implementing one of the more interesting bits.

I think one of the ways that remote work changes this is that I can do other things while I think through a tricky problem; I can do dishes or walk my dog or something instead of trying to look busy in a room with 6-12 other people who are furiously typing because that's how the manager and project manager understand that work gets done.

Doing the dishes is indeed a good one too.

I will backburner a ticket for days, then when what I need to do comes together I will sit down and bang it out in an hour.

It's to the point that I will deliberately review a ticket and code segment every day, even if I'm not actively working it, just to have the pieces come together in my mind and crank out the ticket.

This method is not very scrum friendly, because in truth I'm actually brain-working all of my tickets at the same time, but I haven't shifted any electrons, just neurons.

Sometimes, when I hit a sticking point, I go do something completely different - like read Hacker News - in order to push stuff into what I call "background processing" in my subconscious.

This says two things about me: I usually underestimate the design details when estimating time, and the design takes me roughly the same time anyway.

It's a huge waste of human potential. Background processing is vital. Getting hit by the various silly hurdles in the path to shipping- having to go from the elation of getting something done to having to switch to an entirely different set of less fun tasks to get it shipping. Yet our processes, our industrial processes, are oriented towards assurity, towards treating us "human resources" like machines, to making us complete full units of work.

It's hard for me to tell exactly where this sprung up from, how it is so deeply deeply rooted. I tell my managers outright I think it's a wasteful & outright damaging practice, but that I understand that it's the expectation, that every other company acts like fools too, not just them. I don't argue, but I am quite clear that you will get much much much less out of me when I don't have some autonomy, when I have to drag, roll, push, row, swim each rock, one at a time, from end to end. Again, I'm not sure how such a demeaning & menial form of completing single-task-at-a-time happens, especially when no one in management or upper ranks is expected to live like this. My top theory is just that it's convenient for management purposes. That company's are bad at assessing progress, that we're afraid of situations that aren't ultra-well scheduled & predictable, and that we treat programmers like cogs in a machine because we're too afraid to try for better.

Creative procrastination is amazing. Not only are programmers out doing great things, but the task they're more obligated to do goes from irrelevant & stupid to something they just don't ever want to think of again. The internal pressures builds over time, even for the irrelevant everyday crap of development, until we're finally jazzed to just get it done. By procrastinating, we bank up some motivation. And we've gotten a lot of passive processing in. Productive procrastination is one well-known example, but I feel like it's just the tip of the iceberg. Having some different tasks to switch between, having a wheelhouse of obligations, allows enormous relief, allows a much higher average output to be maintained, in my view. I'm kind of in a lull of personal projects right now, because I completed some stuff, and don't have a lot of in-flight options to pick up & work between. Everything feels so slow & getting going again has been such a chore, I feel it so much. Being able to trade off, switch around, chase what feels good is a huge huge productivity increase.

More than anything what amazes me is how conventional & dogmatic companies are. They seemingly all chase the same malgining evil controlling exploitation of human-resources, and not a once has a company seemed to even understand that there are trade-offs. The whole industry is exactly the same; controlling & top-down, one-at-a-time. The people who invented Amdahl's law, surprisingly, seem utterly unable to grasp it's application to humans & our motivations. We all have diverse & wide execution units, but we are treated like in-order single-stage processors. If this were just the predominant way of treating engineers/human-resources, I'd find it unfortunate, but that it is almost entirely the rule, that it is universally expected, that there are so few systems or experiments for doing anything else: the status quo is pathetic & cruel, and lacks even the basic legitimacy to have explored other ideas.

I suggest 2 tests to see if you're lazy or dumb:

1. Try to be more productive by sheer effort of will. Just say to yourself "this month I will write more code than usual" and set to it with a positive attitude. If you succeed you were being lazy and now you know how to not be lazy. If, as is more likely from what you've said, you fail, then you're not lazy. You're working at your maximum capacity but you have a poor understanding of what constitutes "work" in the job you do.

2. If, by the above test, you are not lazy, then look at how well you do relative to your peers. If you're holding your own (as you say you are), you're not dumb either.

To add to this, even if for a time, you can increase your productivity, sometimes that's not sustainable. There's nothing wrong with having ebbs and flows. On days when you have a larger workload of smaller tasks, you may find yourself to be incredibly productive, and days when you have smaller workloads, or larger tasks, and you may be less productive.

The thing is, if your boss is happy with your pace and work, then why be worried? It is literally your boss's job to notice if you aren't pulling your weight, and to ensure you are compensated fairly for your work.

The work-place hierarchy (hopefully, and usually) is set up so you don't have to govern whether you are working at the proper pace, that is the problem of your superiors, it's only up to you to accomplish the tasks you are given, or give advice about those tasks if they are wrong.

It's not like the security guard at all, the security guard is not lying or consciously giving a false sense of what his contributions to the team are.

So you'd be lying to your managers with the end goal of behaving as the company expects you to.

This kind of internal tension is normal in lots of organizational structures. It's better if no one has to lie but it isn't (in my opinion) a disaster or anything.

I’m a big believer in Price’s Law - the square root people produce half the value. If there are 10000 people at the company, you can very well survive in the group of 9900 that does the other half.

Now, will that particular startup succeed? Probably not in the way their investors would like.

Maybe in some team that is further removed from customers?

A similar thing was true at Google, I worked in the platforms division there (storage systems, BigTable, Linux kernel tweaking), and it was mostly about identifying bottlenecks and coming up with interesting solutions to squeeze out more performance. Most of this work wasn't like massive lines of code, but you had to really understand the problem at a deep level and have the kind of rigor and discipline to make changes to large systems without breaking anything in the process. That last bit was very hard to do, since coming up with optimizations that don't break anything is surprisingly difficult.

I've never heard of any colleagues doing it either. I would never snitch if it happened, but I would certainly consider that person untrustworthy or think that they have an undisclosed condition that is between them and HR.

As you covered in your post, we don't write code 8 hours a day. This is normal. Meetings, context switch and times when focus is unachievable are expected and mostly understood by my experienced management. So are times when we are monitoring technology advancement and keeping an eye on the industry and community (e.g. lurking at HN but not overly posting and commenting) and times of social activity between workers (e.g. talking about the weekend).

Most of us take mental health breaks between meetings and need to take time to think through issues. Many also need to periodically break focus to think about personal life issues or hobbies. As long as you generally strive to work, this is not a problem either.

But walking into a stand-up and then lying about your day? To me, that's unethical.

The real question to me is:

Do you do that on purpose or is this something that happens even if you are trying to focus? There are many conditions, from stress and anxiety to diagnosed mental health issues that can prevent you from focusing. Burn-outs and bore-outs also come to mind.

In my eyes, the fact that you asked the community about it shows that you have some form of concern towards that behavior. Would you say it is negatively impacting your life?

Working 5 to 10 hours a week seems very low to me, though as a lead or as a coworker I would judge OP by the impact, not by the time spent behind the computer. But I doubt anyone can have serious impact in such time.

I had the chance to work with a brilliant coworker who preferred to slack off - and have passed on recommending him for this very reason.

World is a big place and there are many ways to go through life, so I'm not judging - but if you're asking if this is common, then the answer is "no, not at the places where I worked, and not how I work".

Of course you would have to pay/promise me fortune to get more than 40hr weeks from me, but I'm not hiding that. :-)

Why is the onus always on the bottom workers to be honest? Why are we trying to feel guilty about our working hours vs how much we're paid? Because it's clear salary is not tied to better performers given how much upper management is compensated.

Just enjoy your life. Management probably lowballed you coming into the job anyway, but if they are happy with your work, then spend that extra time you're saving to enjoying other things in life.

What do you want to do, OP? The new year is coming up.

10x programmers don't make 10x the pay. They might make slightly more, but not even 2x what a 1x programmer (of the same level, no comparing seniors to juniors) makes at the same company.

After ~5 months off I started working as a contractor (for one employer) which has made me realize getting 35 hours of actual work done in a week is a Herculean task for me. I only run my time tracker when I'm actually working, and in a week I might have 2 to 4 hours of meetings, and through pushing myself, can get 15 to 30 hours of work done.

It's pretty rough, I'm not going to lie, and I don't understand how so many people can regularly work more than 40 hours a week (but I was also on medication for ADHD as a child and currently not treating it, so I understand I may operate differently than most people)

Basically to get 35 hours per week of work done, I have no life now other than trying to work. Fortunately it's not the end of the world if I only get 25 hours, though it's not great for my savings.

I was a sysadmin at a company that had things extremely well-tuned and within our team we averaged a couple of hours of work a day, tops.

I've been at companies where there were 50-hour weeks of nonstop which which were necessary, followed by downtimes where almost no work was necessary (it was a very seasonal business).

In my experience most engineers have no more than 4-5 hours of real work in them a day. After that, mental performance drops dramatically and while you can definitely respond to emails and attend meetings and do less intense work, deep thought is just a finite resource and heavily influenced by your mood, anxiety, and motivation. Keep it up for too long in an org that doesn't value clean code and good tests and your performance can definitely be negative.

It's also true that good organizations and teams know and work with these limits rather than push people into unrealistic goals. People can switch around between deep architecture work and planning, managing a sprint, writing reams of code based on well-understood specs, debugging, etc. You can take turns when your personal life gets intense or you feel drained.

I think that most works vastly underestimate the importance of deep work and being strategic about what gets done. The right product spec and the right amount of work researching solutions can easily save an order of magnitude of coding work. It's amazing how little you need to do if you know the happy path for implementing the right solution instead of iterating through multiple broken attempts.

From my work experience, about 90-95% of people do barely any work (have tasks that take months). I would get in a team of 15 people and I'd be the only one doing something, everyone else is just making some slides for weekly presentations and not even that. The amount of part-time people that do nothing is even greater. The amount of consultant experts that work for consultant agencies and get loaned to other companies that do nothing is massive.

I think it's the standard way of life in most cities. I do not quite understand why that percentage of the workforce won the work lottery.

Your accidentally achieving what needs to be done with less effort than another.

A lot of the work assigned wasn’t actually needed in the first place

Lazy people can find the best effort/reward trade off

Maybe many of us are.

But the bigger lie by far is the allegedly meritocratic standard of performance we are held to -- to be always relentlessly efficient, always "on" and in love with what we do, always striving to be in the top 10 percent of our pile, always keeping tabs on the latest shiny, etc. Meanwhile the years slip past, our relationships falter, the commute is the same damn commute (or if you're WFH the chair is the same damn chair). And while our salaries are above median, we aren't the ones really getting rich off the work we do.

So it shouldn't be -- in the least -- surprising that some of fall into that "fuck all y'all, I'm just going to coast" mode. In some cases permanently.

I've never outright lied, though certainly hemmed and hawed. And occasionally blatantly "I haven't done anything this week". And yeah, certainly work-from-home makes it easier to shut down and ignore everything. Which is great, except you feel like crap afterwards.

But like I said, it depends on the project. Next job I take, money is going to be less of a consideration. Just want to work on something interesting. And there's a reasonable likelihood that I fall into the category of "needs professional help", but I've tried a few times without much success.

And, no I don't think it's super-common. At least not to this level. Most of my coworkers seem to genuinely work pretty hard. Though some don't.

On the other hand, I assume that people typically have 2-4 hours of good thinking in them per day; that it takes time to learn complex systems; that a smoothly running system should not need attention every moment of the day.

"I have probably bombed more tech interviews than I have passed." This is perfectly normal for almost everyone.

What I've found for myself is this greatly demotivates me. Why am I putting in 6-8 hours of pure coding a day when I see the guy next to me doing 1 hour of work and getting payed 2x as much?

I legit have an ic7 on a sister team that has made 40 diffs in the past 2 years, I don't think a single one has been > 50 LoC and it was mostly config changes. Crazy world we live in.

- you don't know how much the others are doing so why putting more effort (humanly naive classical economic strategy)

- things are opaque, people may not know what you do, and how hard it is.. if they say something and are wrong, they're reputation is tainted, only your superiors are responsible for this but they may be busy (or faking too)

- some people will willingly delay work, they don't like it, there's too much, so they'll stash tasks until people come and ask, then they'll pretend to be overwhelmed with so many things (unless management has clear views of what's going on, you're back to point 2).

- oh and often people will act as if they're super tense and busy and having the worst job in the building. Just before going back to their office, and sitting watching netflix on their phone.

Another thing, have you ever noticed people slowing things down ? and impeding you to improve things ?

ps: I'm deeply hurt by testimony like these (you're not the first one I read), having been in chaos and near homelessness ready to work twice the amount for min wages, it's unbearable. When you know that this happens, it's near impossible to not hate HR/interviews.

pps: few places where this can't really occur: public facing jobs, you don't want to look like a moron, or a lazy douche so you have no choice. Hospitals are probably free of that too. retail. There's a natural flow of timely tasks there.

We're not flipping hamburgers or soldering widgets on an assembly line. We're constantly adding to systems that get increasingly complex over time. The UX that the product manager sees is just a small percentage of the work. Haste makes waste, and a stitch in time can save nine.

There are times I have spent a day banging on some problem, and I am up to even 1 AM trying to fix it and I give up and go to sleep, after a few hours of hitting my head against a brick wall. I wake up in the morning relaxed, and am hit with an epiphany, I go to the computer to code it and it works. I don't know if I am dreaming up a solution while I sleep, or a couple of seconds of a clear head beats hours of tiredly banging my head against the wall, but it has happened more than once to me, and I have heard the same from others.

You’d easily spend a lot more time on the projects. Many of my coworkers work nights and weekends. It’s not uncommon to see people starting around 8-9am and logging off around 7pm for a regular schedule. And then pressure hits and weekend work starts showing up too.

It’s gonna vary so much by your place of employment. I’m gonna guess you don’t do any project work or significant projects and management is entirely disengaged.

I’ll move on after a year or two. I just wanted some name brand recognition and to give the company a chance. I was tired of going with unknown places.

I know someone who is "leading" an internal initiative I got STUCK on currently who is like that. Nice guy, talks a good game, but when the rubber meets the road, he has not delivered in any capacity. Not even in the technical implementation capacity, the easiest part of the project.

I saw another person at my last company who did absolutely nothing, but was VERY present in meetings and constantly battling other people who trying to improve stuff. Then you do `git blame` on the code-bases and you don't see their fingerprints ANYWHERE.

It was a problem throughout the company, to the point they introduced a ton of really strict agile processes to micro-manage points and work. Guess what? The bullshitters played that system successfully too.

It is common. And it is hard to detect from a management perspective. They don't know what ad-hoc meetings/reading/research/other work is happening, so it is hard to pin people down when they are not working.

I've actually mentioned this before in a previous comment[0].

> Are most of us secretly lying about how much we are working?

My motto is 3 good hours a day is an excellent day. You can't really realistically expect more from yourself. I consider anything over that a nice bonus.

> Do people regularly run into coworkers like me during their career and simply ignore it because they find it too awkward to criticize them? Have I just been incredibly lucky and every boss I have had is too incompetent to notice?

I have regularly run into people who do 0 work during their career, and I just tolerate them. One, because I have seen it enough to know it is normal. Two, because it isn't worth burning my social capital to attack that person. Like... what do I care? It's your manager's problem, not my problem. I just think it is hard to quantify.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28069689

Back when I worked in the office as freelancer, I did bill 8 hours a day, since I was expected to sit in the office 8 hours a day, regardless if I performed or not.

In the past I worked at large and small organizations and I did see it’s generally much easier to slack in large organizations.

If that was your intention though, imagine if another freelance dev has performed justifiable calculations that determine their 3 hours of work should be billed at 2.5x your 3 hour rate. How could they possibly compete with you?

What if the deliverable was the same? What if the other devs just billed on deliverable instead of hours with strong renegotiation clauses? Would that be more acceptable to you than playing games with the hours just to get passed bean counters?

For me on the other hand, I cannot do any deep work for more than 3-4 hours during a normal day. However, to comply to the historic 8 hours work day, the rest of the day gets filled with __other__ stuff, which may or may not is reasonable.

As others have mentioned already, I think it totally depends on company size, culture and people if you are able to gaze through a day by doing only a few hours at any given day. This completely coincides with my experience as well.

This came down to 8 hours per day as the labour movement grew stronger. The concept of burnout makes no sense outside of the present, it was just politics. The move to 8 hour days was faster in countries that had tighter labour supply and/or greater political representation for working people (i.e. Australia and the US).

The structure of work has rarely been determined by efficiency. There is a greater context of norms, other obligations that people have, economics, politics, etc. Even within the developed world and within individual countries, there is significant variation. Indeed, the only limits within most countries is at the extreme i.e. an employer requiring 12 hours of labour without a break or something.

The most "efficient" kind of work is piece rate. Some people do this today but I think that most people chose not to do this because it is inconvenient.

I ran into people like but don’t care because I am not your boss. I (and others) do our fair amount of work which is usually enough to get the job done, despite you. I would never work late to cover you not working, but I never had to do that so far. I also don’t have a moral opinion about you cheating the company (after all you signed an agreement that you are not fulfilling just because you do not get caught). So I don’t mind either way.

The thing is, it’s easy to cheat employers being a software developer on a place where people don’t know much about software and/or don’t care much. Just don’t assume everyone does it.

I do feel the same as you, though - I'm always concerned somebody's going to put me on the spot and say, "what have you done for me lately?" I will say, I've been doing this a long time and that's never really happened. I go through the performance review song-and-dance every year and I can point out quite a few things I actually have done when the time comes, and so far it's made them happy.

I’m in that state right now, so I’m making an elastic search database and flapping grafana on top of it to injest and visualize all our logs. It’s been a pain point for a long time so I think it’ll go over well. I’m also compiling a c++ qt app to emscripten so we can host the app and connect with a smartphone instead of lugging a tablet around.

This might be wildly unrelated but... how attractive are you, physically? Are you thin? Are you taller than most people in your peer group?

Do you more or less resemble the "dominant" demographic where you live? That is, the same gender presentation, ethnicity, etc. as most of your government and business leaders.

Are you a citizen of the country where you live?

You're capable of being a 4-5x developer compared to what you're doing currently (if you think about 5-10 hours versus 40 hours a week). But perhaps you lack mechanisms for motivation and continuing to explore spaces that benefit your team/org and might lead to faster promotions/career growth.

I.e., just haven't figured out as many intersections yet for what's sustainable and enjoyable for yourself and what directly benefits the businesses, teams and people you work with.

My suggestion is to add a few "virus" candidates (i.e., potentials for exponential growth) to your day to day. And push yourself more.

Getting a lot more productive starts with getting productive and gaining confidence/experience in small things. Assuming that's something you want (i.e., being even more effective) and that you're not just happy with the current steady state of where you are.

But to your points - a lot of software developers don't realize that they're in a steady state and are living a comfortable life (still a good deal for the company you're working for) when they could be making a lot more / having greater impact.

Part of the issue is that with programming our jobs are focused around 'automation' (in the form of software), so that very often we reach a point where our required effort really plateaus (and yet for the business still scales and provides value). If you want to really have exponential growth for yourself, you have to push yourself in those plateaus (i.e., find intrinsic motivation).

Flow state is a thing. You can't fake it.

Yes, but I would venture it's the other way - most of us are probably working our butts off and thinking we make a decent wage for 40 hours a week when we're putting in 60 hours a week. I didn't really notice this until I had a family and started bumping into family activities. At first, I was really pissed off that something was getting in the way of work, then I reassessed by values and got pissed off that I was putting in that sort of time.

> Have I just been incredibly lucky and every boss I have had is too incompetent to notice?

Pretty much. It's likely the problem is systemic (your boss doesn't work either). One of two things are going to happen, by my guess. You are going to get re-orged when some efficiency expert comes in and they're going to apply arbitrary metrics which are designed to "accelerate delivery" or something. Since you don't do anything already, you can't meet those metrics. The good news is people who do work probably can't meet them either since it's designed to make people uncomfortable, so you'll be one of many getting a parachute. Feign indignation and leave with the herd.

The second thing that might happen is someone updates the tech stack in a significant way. This happens when consultants come through and a company tries to "buy the devops" or "buy the kubernetes". They have a vested interest in delivering a solution, so they're going to want to train people on the new thing. If you're not participating in the existing workflow in a meaningful way, it's going to be rapidly apparent that you're also not using the New Expensive Thing(tm). Since the New Expensive Thing is indeed quite expensive, there's going to be a lot of eyeballs on it, and you'll probably either get noticed for not using it or for being one of the people "not adopting the New Expensive Thing".

Of course the third option is you live in like Cornfield, Kansas and you're actually pretty cheap compared to everyone else across the country and so you're really not going to attract any scrutiny whatsoever. Who knows!

Best of luck, either way.

I do recall briefly a (publicly traded) company where there would be weeks of almost nothing to do and then a frenetic rush to implement whatever had come down from on high. Guess you've got to decide what you want in your career... for many people if they can coast along and make good money, it's a good deal. My concern in that scenario would be what happens when the company hits a rough patch or gets bought out and you find yourself a 50 something who has been semi retired in place for a decade.

My brain is bad at focusing on things, so it takes a lot of effort to engage, become productive, and then stop. There's a lot of time build up inertia, but then it's difficult to reduce that inertia as well. As a result I'm fairly inefficient by default.

I have a practice of never billing for inefficient time. I don't feel right doing it. As such, I tend to work an average of 10 hours per day but end up billing for more like 7 or 7.5. It's just a reality that I live with now.

So no, I can't get by on 5-10 hours per week. I would be fired quickly.

Although I have the knowledge to do my job well, I lack the executive function. Improving that is one of my main objectives but it's much easier said than done. I think it's the one thing that would improve my career and personal life the most.

All that is to say, there are plenty of reasons why some people work more or less. I work more than you because I'm not a productive person. I'm not a 10xer, I'm not more committed, I'm not more effective. I simply have to in order to get an acceptable amount of work done.

No, not all are like us, but there are a lot of club members from other professions.

At first it feels quite strange and you tell yourself,that can't last for long. But it does. I accepted my fate after about five years and learned to live with it. It's not allways easy to cope with it, but my wife suffers from the same condition, so we can support each other.

Heads up mate, life goes on. You're not alone.

Fortunately for me, a certain amount of my job is to directly innovate with UX for a device used in Life Sciences / Pharma research. It's not unreasonable for me to take a walk and think a lot about challenges.

But at the same time, it's easy to fall into the "I'm thinking about it still" trap and not work. And there can be a certain level of depression involved too. Am I inactive because I'm depressed or depressed because I'm inactive?

(1) deep institutional knowledge - code debt / knowing how to work with peers in company system to get things done / understanding business objectives / etc

(2) ability to think dynamically and react quickly within institutional systems - edge case bugs / outages / competitive feature response

It's like having a fully staffed fire station in a small town

Most of the time the guys are there playing foosball, turning out for events, and saving kittens in trees but boy are you glad to have them when the shit hits the fan.

If it is due to a lack of motivation, I would recommend WOOP, a science-based way to increase motivation and help people achieve their goals. Meditation, sleep, and exercise are all helpful too of course, as is cognitive-based therapy.

But again, if you're just cruising through your job as a means to an end and you enjoy goofing off on the clock, then I genuinely think all the more power to you. Just make sure that whether you are productive or not is an intentional decision.

If you're a slacker, almost everyone around you knows.

The usual reasons I've seen for keeping slackers around include:

1. maintaining resources like budgets and office space

2. it hard to fire and rehire a position just because someone is a slacker. If HR thinks you are able to get by with a person slacking, then they will let you fire the slacker and not let you rehire someone else.

3. You could always end up with a worse employee. I'd personally rather work with someone who was predictably slow at working, but was otherwise a good employee than chance having hiring someone who has poor hygiene and body odors (usually a heavy smoker, who doesn't regularly bathe or wash their clothing, that douses themselves in musky cologne)

That company is underwater now.

And I seriously doubt you'd be able to reach anywhere near an acceptable output working <= 10h a week in the sort of company I work at, no matter how good you are. I don't mean that my company is special, it's a pretty standard start-up environment, but I mean that it probably depends a lot on what company you work for rather than being a "developer thing". I recon that a lot of big corporates have no idea the sort of people they're hiring and do not have a feedback loop to assess performance.

Personally, it makes me uncomfortable to think that there might be so many other people with this mindset around, lying to coworkers and doing the absolute minimum to get by. In my current role, I feel passionate about what we're building and being a startup, we need to maximise efficiency: I'd have zero remorse flagging that somebody is doing close to nothing when everybody else is so involved and relying on each other to do their job. In a corporate environment, I suppose I'd either join you or quit out of lack of respect for coworkers and company.

i looked back and was getting 1k lines merged every 2 weeks on average. nothing crazy I know but theres much more then just coding to my job, thats just reality.

Days/weeks where i dont get a certain amount of code done i feel like actual garbage (like the last 2-3 weeks actually). So i try hard to make sure im moving the ball forward daily. The biggest obstacle to this for me is poor planning upstream, missing/bad requirements, missing APIs that are presumed finished, etc.

> The biggest obstacle to this for me is poor planning upstream, missing/bad requirements, missing APIs that are presumed finished, etc.

This is the best reason to go into management or take on role where you spend more time on this part of the process. If you do go into management, I recommend positioning yourself as a player/coach.

So I have been called out and punished for it.

That would be the entirety of my workday. You should complain about this, meetings are incredibly costly to a company and must have a limit.

I know if I have a meeting starting in 30 minutes, I am not able to go into the deep thinking required to solve difficult problems.

If I am in a flow state, and the meeting is an 1 hour away, it tends to break that and I look up at the clock once in a while to make sure I don't miss it (which can happen in flow state!)

It doesn't help that many of the folks involved (scrum masters, PMs) are utterly clueless. If you have a particularly weak team, you may not even need to pace yourself... just do whatever.

It could just be what you are doing isn't fundamentally that difficult and doesn't require a 40 hour work week and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. If people think you're worth the money you are getting paid, then you are worth that money. They pay you to get things done, not to sit in a desk for 40 hours a week or be stressed for performance reasons.

If I were your manager, we would have a talk about what motivates you and what you need to be productive.

I work fast and while custom tooling[0] and multiple VMs help, it's mostly about grit, skill, and meta thinking about what's slowing me down. If there is something I find so dull I can't muster the motivation to do it, I'll find a teammate for the feature that's more interested in it. It's in the company's interest.

[0] Custom written scripts stack up over time. I highly recommend automating problems. Check out https://xkcd.com/1205/ but remember to Google or ask on a slack first how others do it.

Ultimately, if no one is taking issue with you, you are getting your tasks done, and you are happy with your pay, then you are exactly where you should be.

To answer the question in the thread title: I don't think most developers are lying about how much work they do, I just think it skews higher online, and the people who work less don't really care to share, or aren't around to share.

I don't really have any opinion one way or the other in most of this, but this part of your comment I completely agree with. Sure there are incredible talented people writing code, but the vast majority, even those writing Linux, Kubernetes or Postgresql, they aren't smarter than you and me, at least not by much.

There where a blog post by Jacob Kaplan-Moss "Embrace the Grind" which I pretty much agree with. Doing the work no one else care to do and just stick with it, even if it's boring for two weeks, that's the stuff that will make you look like a 10x developer (well maybe 2x).

And aggravated in my experience because:

- Its really hard to work with multiple people on the same project ( and when you do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law )

- People Managers usually think they are buying bus-factor insurance and throughput for each additional developer. Additionally they want more devs to indicate they are an important team.

So this all conspires to you being in the 80% doing the remaining 20% of the work without getting payed less or being called out.

I will also say that I personally am basically anywhere on the spectrum of productivity on any given week, ranging from like ~10 hours of work done total to a "rockstar" "10X" developer single-handedly keeping the team/company afloat. It can really be due to any number of factors whether in my control or not, so no one is going to question me when there's a day when I seemingly have not done any work.

Ultimately we aren't paid to punch the clock 9-5 but to create value for the company in the long term.

I worked my ass off for almost 20 years. But later than sooner I learnt. Now I coast.

Work hard if you want, slack if you want too. The defining factor for your success is who you are "friends" with.

My coworkers tend to put in 10 hour days in the fall and winter during our busy season, in which we are bombarded with smaller tasks and bug fixes. They thrive on knocking out a large number of small things quickly.

But they then do “almost nothing” the other half of the year, when we should be working on large new initiates and better tooling.

I’m the opposite - give me a list of small soul crushing manual tasks, and I’ll procrastinate like crazy. But give me some vague user stories and a big new project with the freedom to be creative, and I’ll be pulling nights and weekends happily.

One question I think you’re asking without asking it is, “is this ok?”

And that depends on two things.

One, are YOU happy with this? Is your job just a means to an end, or do you want to have a bigger impact, be more productive, and enjoy your work?

If the latter, then you’re likely not in a position that properly challenges you or meshes with your motivations.

If the former, then the next question to ask is, “am I providing my employer with value?”

Are you doing work that would be hard to find others that could do it? Do you bring any unique skills or knowledge? Are you getting enough done that it helps the organization achieve goals, get new customers, or keep existing ones happy?

If so, great, you’re adding value and you aren’t draining the organization.

If not, then you might want to consider what and how you can improve.

And frankly every engineer and developer should be at least vaguely aware of what value they provide, both to make a case for yourself if needed, but also to make sure you’re satisfied in your current role and not just a butt in a seat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

Yours sounds like a textbook case. Reading it may give you some understanding of what's going on, and possibly what to do about it.

Perhaps you are a "duct taper" - your main job is actually to just be around ready to jump in when something goes wrong, not to ever actually change, fix or build anything.

I worked at a company where someone like this was eventually unearthed, and the result was all manner of big-brother-esque counts of commits, etc.

Is the argument about morality or managerial structure?

- Peter Gibbons. Office Space 1999

There's often wide variation in how long something takes to do, and you have been given the benefit of the doubt. Also, however, you may have been judged relatively underperforming, and missed out on some fun & interesting opportunities as a result.

Hopefully you can find a way to spend your workdays that feels better and more honest. You've already taken the first step.

There probably are people like that out there but i strongly suspect they're very much the minority.

I am generally quite open about my lack of aptitude, as I result I've never really been promoted, I've just bounced around between different junior roles. It always seems obvious that I'm the most junior member of any team I'm on, but I'm starting to wonder if that's all in my head.

Your post kinda makes me wish I'd tried a bit harder at bullshitting. Maybe I could've at least made a bit more money.

I often worry about this, but unless you're at the Staff+ level, I think the chances of you knowing the intricate details of ~other~ peoples' work is low. And that's probably not a problem.

> makes me wish I'd tried a bit harder at bullshitting.

Honestly, I'd highly encourage it (a little). Being able to market yourself and your skills is very valuable.

That's insane about our field, the sheer variance in so many things we do.

How much are the heirs collecting dividend checks from the wealth I create working? Should I crawl at the boots of some St. Grottlesex graduate, telling them I could have worked harder, trying to gain some Stakhanovite hero of labor award from them?

If you have time to spare, which apparently you do, study CS so that you can be an L5, L6, L7 etc. at some FAANG. That benefits you and them.

At least theoretically loops at these levels try to gauge what you've seen in your career and how you have grown from it, possibly try and project to what you would do in the current situation. I am sure there are folks who game this by reading blogs and leetcoding away, but there is a lot of survivor bias in those statements. Most of the time, folks have their bullshit radars up high for higher level interviews and this is hard. I wish I had some kinda stats on how hard though :/

The other 50 hours a week is process, support, debug, test, documentation, attending meetings… We’re not paid for ESLOCs, we’re paid for all the crap around it.

This exists at the other end, too: I've seen a lot of people in management positions who had enough assistants that I can just about guarantee their average workday is also about two hours of actual work, though with some very long days and some near-zero-work days. I've seen founder-CEO types who know (and are) the right people so it's easy to get early funding for their ventures, and make an "executive assistant" for that company (so, paid with investor money) a very early hire so they can get away with barely doing any work on it (they're always doing like 5 things at once, if you check their LinkedIn, and that's how: they're putting very little time in to any but maybe one of them at any given time)

You won't find too many of those in startups though, because there work getting done actually matters.

We have the ability to "work" this little and still be valuable because writing code has a very high barrier to entry. That 5-10 hrs of work took years of learning.

This is the key point, I think, and the only thing that matters. Does OP ship stuff too? If so, he's got imposter syndrome.

I've had weeks where I do nothing, and then have two hours of real insight and solve a problem my team has had stuck in the backlog on for month/years in an afternoon.

I've had mornings where I browse HN, then take a shower, and suddenly realize the solution to a problem that ultimately brings my employer potentially millions in revenue.

At the same time, I can't perform these quick moments of brilliance for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

I've also had weeks were I put in long days quickly building a prototype needed to test out a new product idea, it's hard work but the results impress important clients and help everyone look good. But I can't keep up weeks like that for long without burnout.

The most import things:

- are you getting the things done you and your team agree are important, on time

- when you're involved with other people, where do the find you on the "oh god no" -- "oh thank god!" scale

If your team is on track solving the problems that need to be solved, and whenever someone pings you with a question or in need of help they leave feeling like you saved them a ton of time, it doesn't really matter if you work 5 minutes a day.

The inverse is also true. If people find that adding you to a project is a time suck, and things never seem to work right, it doesn't matter if you are putting in 70 hour work weeks.

The basic strategy I've used is to write notes on every status update they give in the daily standups. The updates go right into our sprint planning tool. Then every day they are confronted with the fact that their prediction to, "Get it done today" failed to come true like six days in a row. They either realize the jig is up and get better or I fail to renew their contract if they're a contractor or manage them out/fire them if they're a full time employee.

I had one employee though that would do nothing for about 6 days in a row and then get two weeks of work done in a few days. I could work with that. And she only made like $75k per year (this was about 15 years ago) so it's not like she was getting rockstar salary.

But, no, I don't spend days in which I spend no time on my job (maybe an occasional day in which I'm in bad physical or emotional health and can't get it together to get any work done, but don't take leave; these are not typical). Overall, most days, I'm mostly working.

I think I'd actually go crazy if I was in your situation, I don't think it would make me happy, it would make me feel useless and unfulfilled. i've been in situations like that at non-coding jobs, and while in theory getting paid not to work sounded great to me, in fact it was not good for my mental/emotional health to be sitting around all day not working and not doing much else.

Unless I was remote maybe, perhaps I'd just do other things that I wanted to do that really had nothing to do with work (learn a musical instrument, learn a foreign language, make art), and feel fulfilled, as long as I wasn't guilty about ripping off my employer (which I guess could depend on the employer).

You say you weren't remote before pandemic. I'm curious what you did with all that time you aren't working? and how you think it makes you feel to be in this situation, are you happy with it, does it make you feel crappy even though you think you oughta be happy with it, other?

I am also curious what you think of the work you hypothetically could be doing. Is it horribly boring? Does it seem really useless, like nobody is going to care or benefit even if you did it? Are there barriers in the organization such that you don't think you could produce anything that really benefited anyone even if you tried?

I think maybe part of it is that programmers might be wildly variant in productivity? If you're getting good perf reviews, could there be someone else working more of their full time, but producing no more than you? I think maybe at a lot of places, the people doing evaluation simply have no ability to evaluate engineers, they have no idea.

I have worked before with people who produced literally nothing. If they got good perf reviews, I guess it's because their supervisors didn't expect anything? Perhaps their supervisors weren't working much either? Or just didn't know how emotionally to deal with a bad review? I had one coworker who (many years pre-pandemic) "worked from home", but when a rare urgent thing in their domain happened to come up, it turned out they didn't actually have the tools to work on it at home; I suspect they were never working at all from home. I wasn't very happy with this overall condition, but I'd never try to "turn them in" -- not necessarily that it would be "too awkward", but, I'm no snitch and don't want to be one. Who knows what's going on in that person's life.

I would have appreciated a coworker who could carry the load instead, but I've realized that I am significantly motivated by doing a good job, making high-quality products... and many people, and many whole organizations just aren't, they have other motivations. I've learned I'm not going to be happy unless I'm at a place where doing quality work is a motivation of many people.

Also... I actually enjoy writing code?

I know a company where engineers publicly set their own twice-yearly objectives, which are then linked to their bonuses. You can imagine a number of advantages to this system from the perspective of someone trying to optimize a firm: high performers will set difficult goals, sandbaggers will set easy goals that look difficult. Telling the difference is still hard because often only an already-expert person can estimate a problem's difficulty, but at least the loop gets closed in theory.

If the companies you work for never catch you sandbagging, then you're good .. until they go out of business because of all the other dead weight they're carrying and you find the remaining firms use technologies that require you to re-adapt your sandbagging strategy. The firms hope that this adaptation itself will refresh your motivation for a decent percentage of your vest period (since you're one step closer to being truly obsoleted and need to build resume points). Anyone who stays past their vest period can assumed to be a sandbagger, so 2-5 years looks good.

Yeah basically you're fine for now; just remember that this business will kick you out on your ear eventually if you don't keep up. This can happen real fast sometimes. If you don't use some of your fallow time to do continuous learning, you might slip out of your salary range or out of employability entirely-- that's the tail risk you're taking.

Maybe that's why you feel some anxiety: you have a fat-tailed existential risk that hasn't triggered yet. You should feel anxious, it totally can and will trigger eventually.

It's a dystopian feeling when you go Friday on 21:00-22:00 ( tired) and say to the boss: "we need to talk on Monday" and just leave the office a couple of times. ( I was also working on the weekends at home, had my laptop when I went swimming Sunday morning and when/if I went out fyi ).

Those promotions were directly valued to the value outputted. And were then transferred to my new job with normal hours.

Conclusion: it's not about the hours. It's at the value you create and that ( eg. For small companies) they can count on you more than someone else. But ofc. There is a limit, which is why i happily left my previous job.

Fyi: To me, It seems so obvious when people are slacking. I get that people have an off day, but spending 8 hours and they don't even know yet which component they need to adjust is a no-brainer about their effort after working in that project for a year. ( When I saw that, we went to the html and there it is: the name of the angular component "<dp-setting-create>" -> 1 minute. Ugh)

I happen to be very productive when I like what I do, and very lazy when I don't. I even work weekends for free when im loving my work, but I slack for days and weeks when I don't.

It's fine.

I might work 6-8 hours if I don't have any meetings scheduled.

I tend to work about two or three if the meetings are scheduled in such a way that I can't accomplish anything worthwhile in between them.

Most businesses just don't need all their employees running at full capacity. I've been professionally programming for nearly 30 years and I've seen this be true in small businesses with < 10 employees and in Fortune 500 megacompanies. So there's often an unspoken agreement to be comfortable and cruise. This can extend even to upper management and owners.

The weird thing is you can often get yourself into trouble if you get too ambitious in such situations. People don't want their comfy little boats rocked too much.

From my experience the places that require running on all cylinders all the time are either incompetently managed (which includes understaffing) or very ambitious. Or both I suppose. The thing is, real ambition is much rarer than you'd think given how much society claims to value it.

I've had times when I was happy at both ends of the scale. Cruising is comfortable. Ambition is exciting. Both work for me at different times, but I do eventually tire of too much of either.

I will say ambition and full-speed-ahead only works for me when the goal is something that has value to me. Either a big financial reward or I believe in what we're building. I'm not going to do it as a cog writing your accounting software package.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Yes, after 20 years of doing it, I believe you've at last discovered that you're an incredible talent.

Not sure about your intelligence IQ but your emotional IQ is in the gutter.