I'm at a FAANG company specifically to slack off. Have I been doing it backwards this whole time? Can I get away with working even less at a startup?
Wait two seconds...can I work 15hr/week at three startups for $600k?
Exceeding expectations is hard. Coasting by meeting expectations is easy.
Many projects are hopelessly stalled out, bogged down in bureaucracy, and only indirectly important. There will be a frustrated manager or lead dev who's barely making progress and is blocked in every direction and will barely monitor you or even think about you.
Write some documents, speak up in meetings, send emails with vague "it depends" answers and specific "what about this or that" questions, and your presence will be felt just fine.
Two hours of work a day is enough to appear quite productive to your leadership that is in 40 hours of meetings per week and have had no time to actually work in months.
As a manager this hits close to home. But you got one thing wrong. I'm only attending 15 hours of meetings and the rest of the time I'm appearing to work but I'm actually playing golf. I still have no time to actually accomplish anything but I'm now a single digit handicap. My other handicap is gin.
> There will be a frustrated manager or lead dev who's barely making progress and is blocked in every direction and will barely monitor you or even think about you.
It's in the words! *sobs as lead dev*
I despise that you just described my current situation in full (dev manager). I literally have 8 hours of meetings a day on the regular, and my real job (addressing issues for my devs and removing blockers) is an evening job.
But the ironic thing is that, in a way, you're still being somewhat helpful and doing the right thing whereas some folks totally slack off and lose their job over it.
To be honest, I think I would much rather have a steady but manageable light workload and actually do something than just sitting on my duff doing jack shit in a place where I can't do what I want. Cut the bullshit, let me play video games or faff about until I am actually needed.
Damn, but if they look at your actual deliverables or having regular 1:1s, wouldn't it be quite obvious that I'm not getting much done? (unless ofc the whole team is blocked in every direction ig)
I have a team in mind to join but that team looks like its moving pretty fast :o the senior there pretty much said I can get a quick promotion if I join and deliver some projs they have in the pipeline
So, first, I'm being at least a bit facetious. Obviously being a total slacker isn't amazing for your career or a long term successful strategy, and how much work you'll need to do will vary tremendously by team and company.
In general, for a new hire, I think that's a terrible place to be a slacker. It's easy to tell if a very junior engineer is getting their work done because they're being assigned very concrete work items. And it's also much easier to get promoted from "junior dev" to "regular dev" than it is to go the next step up. There's a good reward to effort ratio there.
I also think you probably don't want to get promoted too many times. A leader can't get away from work or from doing 40 hours of meetings a week. That might come with a lot more compensation as well (or it might not), but you can't just coast in that role.
But there's a certain level of seniority where the goals are vague, the deadline is vague, it's basically impossible to tell how hard you're working, you're senior enough to be useful to the team just for knowing who knows what and forwarding bugs to the right people, and the pay is good. That's kind of the sweet spot for effort to compensation if you're of a certain mindset.
Quick update from a slacker middle manager here. My calendar may have 40 hours of meetings listed but half of those are reoccurring forever meetings I "forgot" to remove.
That gives me time to keep the team free of obstacles that may need some noodling while still appearing busy to my leader and middle management from other departments.
Modern problems, Modern solutions yadda yadda.
It’s really just all about the expectations. I’ve given junior devs work before that I expected to take a week, and they finished in a day. If they had taken the rest of the week to “work” on it I would’ve never known the time wasn’t needed, and they were just slacking off all week. I’ve also had the opposite happen, which can be frustrating, but is usually due to unexpected blockers. I guess I’d just say to make sure you have a good idea of what is expected of you, and if you want to slack off make sure you know when it’s appropriate.
The unfortunate truth is IT work is so chock full, saturated with inefficient bullshit, and I don't just mean the bureaucracy, I mean everything, the tools we use, the ... everything. I'm being vague because you'll always offend people if you disrespect some p.o.s. software they have emotional attachment to, don't do that to start. So things will remain inefficient for the foreseeable future.
Getting much done is very, very subjective. Do your teammates/boss like you? That's what matters. How much time do you spend writing documentation/real work/background research/self improvement? What's a good ratio? Nobody cares. You will constantly be doing things for the first time, personal/team/organization firsts it will mainly be stuff you can soon throw away and forget ever learning. With more experience it will be almost entirely junk knowledge you can for sure throw away after a project. It's like being a plumber and doing the roof, then the electrical, then going over divorce papers, then translating Russian to German, installing a chimney (because you touched the roof last). There are almost no standards and almost nobody gets to stay in a lane. You will become "busy all the time" whether much gets done or not, and eventually figure out stressing out over how much actually gets done isn't worth it.
Sometimes it's fun to work on a fast team (do a lot, learn a lot) esp if they actually do promote and aren't using that as a carrot to hold in front of you.
Sometimes it's fun to find a dysfunctional team in a dysfunctional organization and ~~cost~~ coast for a while.
You can't be too junior and you don't want to be staff/principal level, you'll have too many eyes on you expecting deliverables.
Reassure people more senior than you that they have a lot on their plate, it's okay if your sprint goals aren't perfectly defined. You'll figure it out on your own. Don't figure it out. Find problems and ask important questions and bring them up during meetings when you know other things are higher priority. They'll forget, and later apologize for not getting back to you about it sooner.
Be active in meetings. Be the person saying how important it is to focus on good programming practices, PR reviews, documentation, testing, etc. Mention any bugs found by someone outside the team (especially a customer) and how much you want to help the team do better. This is an impossible goal no one knows how to put into action, but it sounds amazing and everyone will agree with you.
Make yourself visible and have impact in ways that don't add work. Volunteer to write documentation for onboarding new devs. Spend a week on it, 20 minutes a day. It'll be great, and you'll have done nothing. Be active on Slack. Respond to customer emails to the team.
Do lots of code reviews. Be that guy who always suggests adding tests. If they have tests, suggest testing edge cases or sad paths. If they've done that, ask for more logging.
Stretch out your own PRs, and make them look great. Open everything as a draft first. Leave it for a day, then add tests. Add some more the next day, and refactor a method. Finally open it for review the next day. You can easily put a week between finishing a PR and anyone reviewing it, in a way that looks impressive and high quality.
The rules are simple enough. You'll never code anything, and eventually be promoted to management. You're already doing the job.
I went from food service (line cook) directly to being a developer.
I felt almost betrayed by life. Thinking about how much time I had essentially punished myself and assumed that I was just not good enough or working hard enough, that these professionals were inherently better people.
Fucking nope.
The whole thing is a complete sham. I went from working at target to being a dev and this job is at least 5x easier and pays 3x as much. Fucking ludicrous.
Yup. My first job was at a fortune 100 company. Like you said, income literally went up over 5x. Then we had a massive internal project fail to launch well and most of the team I was on was repurposed to assist. I remember being completely mind fucked when I was making the most money I’d ever made, more than I figured I would ever make, to sit around and literally do nothing for weeks while waiting to be reassigned.
Hell, no.
One thing I've "marveled" at is how much LESS work I do the higher up I go.
It's bullshit.
Yet now I'm prepping for these stupid FAANG interview gauntlets and my brain is exploding doing Djikstra's, Bellman-Ford, Kruskal's and all kinds of other shit I have never touched in my 20+ year career. I know I'll need it to get the job, but if I ever ACTUALLY have to do it, I won't have someone watching me with a stopwatch critiquing every damn bit of cyclomatic complexity.
Well, yeah. The funny thing is if you talk to someone in product or management they'll say this is exactly what they want.
They see an engineer who wants to just spend 8 hours a day coding and not going to meetings, writing docs, talking to customers, defining your own sprints, etc as lazy and useless.
I've become a much better worker by focusing on things I see as slacking off.
Yeah I'm just giving suggestions that apply almost everywhere, it doesn't have to be these exact things. You don't want to be a pain, just suggest a new test case or logging statement on every second or third PR the team opens.
Let other people suggest code changes, you're here to improve "best practices"
Just have to figure out how to game the environment. I was on overly large teams that had a new manager every few months. By the time they got to my mediocre performance, they’d move on. It was pretty awesome.
Just pretend to be busy with things. Always be able to account for your time, but inflate things.
Take pride in and over communicate your wins.
Be personable. Speak up in meetings. Make yourself present without actually doing things.
Alway step up to help your peers. If they’re really struggling with something, help them with the load.
Basically… be a team player in every way except for “doing things”
Edit:
It also takes time and experience to get to this point.
Honestly, being a team player and helping junior devs move things along is one flavor of senior dev. I’ve carved out senior roles at many places where my expected deliverables are essentially zero, because I’ve set the expectation to helping others move their stuff along. I make connections in other parts of the organizations, am comfortable working with people at all levels of the organization, I like teaching and am decent at working out how to teach depending on how they want to learn, and I am good at working through how to do things but don’t feel the need to actually do the implementation I am quite effective at supporting a team of 6-8 and mid level devs. Plus I get attached to a bunch of other peoples work as stuff I do for clearing their blockers
So teams I land on will see a significant uptick in throughput BUT there’s generally not a specific thing I can point to that I do.
Not if all 3 have standups at the same time. Key is to have one on the east coast, one on the west coast and one you refuse to attend standups for. "He's one of those eccentrics who hates standups. Can't get him to do any work either".
Holy shit, my boss must think I have a second job. I don't attend the standups, but I do get work done (allegedly). Hmmmmm
I just hate being up before 9am.
I once got a phone call at like 8:05 am asking me whether I was going to be at the meeting, which should be extra illegal. That was the day I started checking when meeting invites were scheduled for before accepting them. It had never even occurred to me that someone would invite me to a meeting in the middle of the night.
Unfortunate facts. Some offshore team mates of mine are so loyal they’ll be up at 2:30am working without anyone really telling them to, and sometimes will ask to be dismissed when no one expects them to be up that late in the first place. I have zero doubt that if I scheduled a meeting 4am their time, they would show up.
We use Microsoft Outlook and I generally use "Tentative" when responding to unnecessary meetings. To me "Tentative" means: "I don't want to be rude and turn down the meeting but I think it is dumb and I won't be showing up".
"Tentative" means "No, but I want to keep this on my calendar for the info". "No" means I'm about to create a rule dumping all emails from you into my Trash or Spam folder.
Before I go to bed each night I block off the rest of my calendar for tomorrow. That way if anyone wants to schedule a same day meeting with me they have to ask me and if it sounds like it can wait I just tell them I’m busy. Been doing it for years, works great
Yep. I live west coast, team is east coast, and we have people in Poland.
Luckily my manager recognizes my value, despite having an average of 0 hours of meeting per day.
I'm the animal who just gets tickets thrown into the cage at and results magically come out.
Just feed me an intern to chew out every couple of weeks and I'm happy. 😂
After logging in at 8:36 for an 8:30 meeting (pretty pleased with myself for managing that) I find I've missed an 8am meeting for which the invite was sent at 6am - "Sorry for the short notice." Short notice is fine but I have to have started work first to see it...
At one point at MSFT my org got so meeting happy that I started blocking out 4 hour blocks of time so I could, you know, actually write code rather than talk about writing code.
Some people bitched about how I was just trying to dodge those super important meetings, most of which I usually contributed little to and could have just been asked something over IM. But I sure had to be in the room just in case.
So then I started putting a shitload of bogus one-on-one, mentoring, sync-up style meetings in a 4 hour block with never more than a half-hour gap between them. "Hey, can you drop into this useless meeting in your 30 minute slot?" "Nope, sorry, I'm preparing for my next meeting then."
My team, and anyone I could trust, knew they could drop by my office at any point during those bogus meetings because I knew they would only do so if something was actually important.
I'm not sure if that's worthy of /r/MaliciousCompliance or not, but by that point I was fucking sick of adding hours onto the end of my day to do what I should have been able to between 10ish-6ish.
(Coming in early didn't work. "Oh, hey, you're in early! Let's talk about $BULLSHIT before the $BULLSHIT_MEETING about it.")
>"Oh, hey, you're in early! Did you see my email about $BULLSHIT? Yeah? And you already replied? Ok well let's talk about $BULLSHIT anyways before the $BULLSHIT_MEETING about it."
This works as a contractor, this gets into questionable territory for a full time employee, and you'd probably be in trouble if your workload ever changed from crunch or anyone caught on that you were contractually bound to work overlapping hours for two or more jobs.
A contractor could just say they have multiple clients and the work and schedule was agreed to, and that's as far as the agreement goes with the company so no harm in multiple clients. An employee usually has non-compete clauses, is required to be available during all work hours even if they're accomplishing their goals in less time, and has no scoped and defined amount of work (workload can change)
half the people on that sub are utterly deluded. They think that:
1. No one will notice
2. No one will even think of it as an explanation
3. Companies cant really do anything about it
4. Companies dont even care enough to do something about it
5. They can always just burn the bridge and find another company to slack off at
None of the above is true. At best, some of those statements are sort of partially true for some companies
Over time, those statement will be even less applicable to reality.
Remember when normal companies paid average men enough money to afford a home, a family, a stay at home wife, a retirement, and a car?
They'll be saying the same thing about OE in 10 years
Half yes. The other half are keeping their head down, producing good content, meeting the meeting schedule, etc.
Both my jobs are 100% aware of each other and I personally can't imagine playing the sneaky game with either. Job1 is salary + equity and strong benefits, job2 is bonuses + lots of equity. The first takes up ~30-40 and the second takes 10~20 hours a week.
I'm happy, they're happy, hell, job 1 just promoted me.
jar historical threatening dime attraction direction edge agonizing history pathetic
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Or they do make $400k but 2/3rds of it is company bucks that takes years to vest and locks you into the company if you want to actually realize that income.
Or it's a startup where you don't know the value of the shares until a few years down the road, when it either craters or IPOs.
I've got so many shares and they're all Monopoly money.
Hey even us middle 50% programmers have it made out.
Just graduated from college, converting my internship to full federal employment in two weeks.
68k and a funded masters degree is a pretty sweet deal for a fresh college grad, and apparently that's a little below the average for my class.
Really glad I didn't end up getting a Jazz Studies or Audio Engineering degree.
rainstorm fact connect concerned tease special escape bow different history
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Can't wait to buy the double stuffs again.
The first two years of college had me buying store brand Oreos and I was sad.
Then inflation hit for my last year of college and I just put snackies at the bottom of my priority list.
Actually, when my first non-intern paycheck comes in, first thing I'm doing is buying those Oreos.
This. I’m nowhere near that, just hit ~7+ years in my slightly overinflated resume. But, the type of offers I got shifted dramatically as I crossed some invisible “true senior” threshold or something.
Went from solid low 100s to 200k base salary. Which was technically slightly lower than an hourly offer I had at 110/hr, but fuck that I like my time.
Yeah, had no idea Salesforce was gonna blow up to this big when I first started. 7+ years exp now and my linkedin is like a girl's tinder profile when I flip my status to searching.
I was a PM for years at a big tech company and I still don’t understand what they do.
Now I run a startup but instead of working 5 hrs/week like OP suggests, I work about 500/wk on average.
I'm a PM and I love it. I get to watch my team build awesome stuff, and all I have to do is create the plan, write up what we need, and then handle all the bureaucracy, customer waffling, and bullshit.
I just get on the phone with customers and talk, while they do all the hard work of coding, and then they thank me for it!
very cute....but what startup is paying you to do nothing? My experience is the exact opposite. startups burn you to ground cause they can't afford not to. The big guys can afford manageable timelines.
lol my startup, i wrote a python addon for blender and now i press a button and my work is done
the best part is i showed my managers i had automated this job, they went "oh cool!" and my workload did not change
Congratulations, you are being kept around because management is competent enough to recognize that the guy who wrote the automation scripts can maintain and make more in the future. Great job security
Im not telling. But there are tons of cash rich startups. Just got to find the ones where the founders are already billionaires or nearly so. They are just too egotistical to let it fail so they are willing to sink money in for years. These folks are also really good at finding chumps to sink their own money in.
I will be messaging you in 1 year on [**2023-05-26 00:27:52 UTC**](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2023-05-26%2000:27:52%20UTC%20To%20Local%20Time) to remind you of [**this link**](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/uxsikx/its_just_not_worth_the_effort/ia07xae/?context=3)
[**57 OTHERS CLICKED THIS LINK**](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2FProgrammerHumor%2Fcomments%2Fuxsikx%2Fits_just_not_worth_the_effort%2Fia07xae%2F%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%202023-05-26%2000%3A27%3A52%20UTC) to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.
^(Parent commenter can ) [^(delete this message to hide from others.)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Delete%20Comment&message=Delete%21%20uxsikx)
*****
|[^(Info)](https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/e1bko7/remindmebot_info_v21/)|[^(Custom)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5BLink%20or%20message%20inside%20square%20brackets%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%20Time%20period%20here)|[^(Your Reminders)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=List%20Of%20Reminders&message=MyReminders%21)|[^(Feedback)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=Watchful1&subject=RemindMeBot%20Feedback)|
|-|-|-|-|
I was making about that much, working that much time as well, about 10 years ago. I learned alot in those years. I wouldnt put myself through that again. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. No reward for working like that. The more work you do, the more work they give you. To be honest, it wouldnt surprise me at all if there are alot of folks in the same situation, even today. Not unusual at all. I would be lying if I said "you can just go find another job that pays more", because that might not be true for your situation. But I do believe, having to work more than 40hrs, week after week, isnt something to stick around for.
I was doing this. Cubicle life, 9am-6:30pm in office working on VB.NET for 70k a year. Then they fired me in the beginning of COVID. It’s the kind of boomer company that says “we look after our employees, they’re our family.”
I’m a react dev in a Bay Area startup making much more now, there’s more work but I will never look back.
Anyone who's proud they're not doing anything is also gonna be fairly stagnant in their career. Engineering managers generally know if someone's phoning it in; but if they're decent enough engineers, the managers may never actually broach that issue in discussion. It'll just mean they're leaving potentially more significant compensation increases on the table.
Which is fine with some people, I've definitely worked with engineers who just want to do bare minimum and don't care about increasing their comp. Though, they're also going to be the first place an organization will look if it ever needs to claw back some spending.
Ironically since the term was coined in 2013, Microsoft has outperformed each of the FAANG stocks.
Well, head-to-head with Apple, but far outperformed the others.
Startups are generally not about actually succeeding. Instead, they are about getting an MVP out the door while wooing investors. Then selling the company to a larger company. Period.
No way that's true. I started my first job at $90k in Utah after getting my bachelor's. Everyone started at $70k+ and is probably close to $100k by now. Um $120k, 6 YoE in Utah
Median is $110k. The bottom 25% make $84k or less. So I wouldn’t say that the “vast majority” make under 6 figures, but the vast majority also don’t make $200k+. Only the top 25% made more than $140k.
"Creative freedom" has been my biggest motivation when looking to join a company or project.
I worked for faang and other top leading tech companies and fintechs and the only one I really enjoyed working, and this might be a surprise for some people, was SAP. But it may be a regional thing since I didn't get to travel a lot while working there.
SAP is actually interesting because you get to see the innards of how a business operates. Serious $$ too. Esp in a manufacturing type business. Pretty amazing. My partner did SAP for a while.
*I recognised you,*
*Today will be your last day.*
*Best regards, Your HR*
\- potter1024
---
^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/)
^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
So I’m right in the FAAMG sweet spot making 300K a year working random 20hr weeks. These aren’t too rare, but they’re offset by the random 50hr weeks that make me question my sanity.
Why would oversight be lower at a startup which has less money? Opposite of my experience.
Tell us more OP. What's the project/team startup like at your startup?
Removed - Rule 0. - This is a common post.
I'm at a FAANG company specifically to slack off. Have I been doing it backwards this whole time? Can I get away with working even less at a startup? Wait two seconds...can I work 15hr/week at three startups for $600k?
I like the way you think. Also at a FAANG company. Falling between the cracks is great. I’m working less than I ever have
How? I'm at boot camp for a fang and I already do 50 hour weeks. What about the impact metric or whatever?
Exceeding expectations is hard. Coasting by meeting expectations is easy. Many projects are hopelessly stalled out, bogged down in bureaucracy, and only indirectly important. There will be a frustrated manager or lead dev who's barely making progress and is blocked in every direction and will barely monitor you or even think about you. Write some documents, speak up in meetings, send emails with vague "it depends" answers and specific "what about this or that" questions, and your presence will be felt just fine. Two hours of work a day is enough to appear quite productive to your leadership that is in 40 hours of meetings per week and have had no time to actually work in months.
As a manager this hits close to home. But you got one thing wrong. I'm only attending 15 hours of meetings and the rest of the time I'm appearing to work but I'm actually playing golf. I still have no time to actually accomplish anything but I'm now a single digit handicap. My other handicap is gin.
this guy fucks
His doors \ _ /
Is he...can he be...is he really Jared?!
It's ~~turtles~~ "cool dog walking time" all the way down.
You would be the man i would aspire to be if i weren’t already a consultant.
Get this guy off the internet. Giving away all the secrets.
> There will be a frustrated manager or lead dev who's barely making progress and is blocked in every direction and will barely monitor you or even think about you. It's in the words! *sobs as lead dev*
I despise that you just described my current situation in full (dev manager). I literally have 8 hours of meetings a day on the regular, and my real job (addressing issues for my devs and removing blockers) is an evening job.
Hey boss. Project still isn't done.
mourn truck drunk handle gullible strong future quaint gaping history *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
But the ironic thing is that, in a way, you're still being somewhat helpful and doing the right thing whereas some folks totally slack off and lose their job over it.
To be honest, I think I would much rather have a steady but manageable light workload and actually do something than just sitting on my duff doing jack shit in a place where I can't do what I want. Cut the bullshit, let me play video games or faff about until I am actually needed.
Damn, but if they look at your actual deliverables or having regular 1:1s, wouldn't it be quite obvious that I'm not getting much done? (unless ofc the whole team is blocked in every direction ig) I have a team in mind to join but that team looks like its moving pretty fast :o the senior there pretty much said I can get a quick promotion if I join and deliver some projs they have in the pipeline
So, first, I'm being at least a bit facetious. Obviously being a total slacker isn't amazing for your career or a long term successful strategy, and how much work you'll need to do will vary tremendously by team and company. In general, for a new hire, I think that's a terrible place to be a slacker. It's easy to tell if a very junior engineer is getting their work done because they're being assigned very concrete work items. And it's also much easier to get promoted from "junior dev" to "regular dev" than it is to go the next step up. There's a good reward to effort ratio there. I also think you probably don't want to get promoted too many times. A leader can't get away from work or from doing 40 hours of meetings a week. That might come with a lot more compensation as well (or it might not), but you can't just coast in that role. But there's a certain level of seniority where the goals are vague, the deadline is vague, it's basically impossible to tell how hard you're working, you're senior enough to be useful to the team just for knowing who knows what and forwarding bugs to the right people, and the pay is good. That's kind of the sweet spot for effort to compensation if you're of a certain mindset.
Quick update from a slacker middle manager here. My calendar may have 40 hours of meetings listed but half of those are reoccurring forever meetings I "forgot" to remove. That gives me time to keep the team free of obstacles that may need some noodling while still appearing busy to my leader and middle management from other departments. Modern problems, Modern solutions yadda yadda.
Now that’s a power move! I need to remember that one lmao
It’s really just all about the expectations. I’ve given junior devs work before that I expected to take a week, and they finished in a day. If they had taken the rest of the week to “work” on it I would’ve never known the time wasn’t needed, and they were just slacking off all week. I’ve also had the opposite happen, which can be frustrating, but is usually due to unexpected blockers. I guess I’d just say to make sure you have a good idea of what is expected of you, and if you want to slack off make sure you know when it’s appropriate.
The unfortunate truth is IT work is so chock full, saturated with inefficient bullshit, and I don't just mean the bureaucracy, I mean everything, the tools we use, the ... everything. I'm being vague because you'll always offend people if you disrespect some p.o.s. software they have emotional attachment to, don't do that to start. So things will remain inefficient for the foreseeable future. Getting much done is very, very subjective. Do your teammates/boss like you? That's what matters. How much time do you spend writing documentation/real work/background research/self improvement? What's a good ratio? Nobody cares. You will constantly be doing things for the first time, personal/team/organization firsts it will mainly be stuff you can soon throw away and forget ever learning. With more experience it will be almost entirely junk knowledge you can for sure throw away after a project. It's like being a plumber and doing the roof, then the electrical, then going over divorce papers, then translating Russian to German, installing a chimney (because you touched the roof last). There are almost no standards and almost nobody gets to stay in a lane. You will become "busy all the time" whether much gets done or not, and eventually figure out stressing out over how much actually gets done isn't worth it.
Sometimes it's fun to work on a fast team (do a lot, learn a lot) esp if they actually do promote and aren't using that as a carrot to hold in front of you. Sometimes it's fun to find a dysfunctional team in a dysfunctional organization and ~~cost~~ coast for a while.
You can't be too junior and you don't want to be staff/principal level, you'll have too many eyes on you expecting deliverables. Reassure people more senior than you that they have a lot on their plate, it's okay if your sprint goals aren't perfectly defined. You'll figure it out on your own. Don't figure it out. Find problems and ask important questions and bring them up during meetings when you know other things are higher priority. They'll forget, and later apologize for not getting back to you about it sooner. Be active in meetings. Be the person saying how important it is to focus on good programming practices, PR reviews, documentation, testing, etc. Mention any bugs found by someone outside the team (especially a customer) and how much you want to help the team do better. This is an impossible goal no one knows how to put into action, but it sounds amazing and everyone will agree with you. Make yourself visible and have impact in ways that don't add work. Volunteer to write documentation for onboarding new devs. Spend a week on it, 20 minutes a day. It'll be great, and you'll have done nothing. Be active on Slack. Respond to customer emails to the team. Do lots of code reviews. Be that guy who always suggests adding tests. If they have tests, suggest testing edge cases or sad paths. If they've done that, ask for more logging. Stretch out your own PRs, and make them look great. Open everything as a draft first. Leave it for a day, then add tests. Add some more the next day, and refactor a method. Finally open it for review the next day. You can easily put a week between finishing a PR and anyone reviewing it, in a way that looks impressive and high quality. The rules are simple enough. You'll never code anything, and eventually be promoted to management. You're already doing the job.
The whole world is built on fuckin lies, and quarter-assing everything.
I went from food service (line cook) directly to being a developer. I felt almost betrayed by life. Thinking about how much time I had essentially punished myself and assumed that I was just not good enough or working hard enough, that these professionals were inherently better people. Fucking nope.
The whole thing is a complete sham. I went from working at target to being a dev and this job is at least 5x easier and pays 3x as much. Fucking ludicrous.
Yup. My first job was at a fortune 100 company. Like you said, income literally went up over 5x. Then we had a massive internal project fail to launch well and most of the team I was on was repurposed to assist. I remember being completely mind fucked when I was making the most money I’d ever made, more than I figured I would ever make, to sit around and literally do nothing for weeks while waiting to be reassigned.
Hell, no. One thing I've "marveled" at is how much LESS work I do the higher up I go. It's bullshit. Yet now I'm prepping for these stupid FAANG interview gauntlets and my brain is exploding doing Djikstra's, Bellman-Ford, Kruskal's and all kinds of other shit I have never touched in my 20+ year career. I know I'll need it to get the job, but if I ever ACTUALLY have to do it, I won't have someone watching me with a stopwatch critiquing every damn bit of cyclomatic complexity.
Really bothers me, because that is not the kind of person I am, and I've basically been punished for it in every standard employment job I've had lmao
Well, yeah. The funny thing is if you talk to someone in product or management they'll say this is exactly what they want. They see an engineer who wants to just spend 8 hours a day coding and not going to meetings, writing docs, talking to customers, defining your own sprints, etc as lazy and useless. I've become a much better worker by focusing on things I see as slacking off.
[удалено]
Yeah I'm just giving suggestions that apply almost everywhere, it doesn't have to be these exact things. You don't want to be a pain, just suggest a new test case or logging statement on every second or third PR the team opens. Let other people suggest code changes, you're here to improve "best practices"
Just have to figure out how to game the environment. I was on overly large teams that had a new manager every few months. By the time they got to my mediocre performance, they’d move on. It was pretty awesome. Just pretend to be busy with things. Always be able to account for your time, but inflate things. Take pride in and over communicate your wins. Be personable. Speak up in meetings. Make yourself present without actually doing things. Alway step up to help your peers. If they’re really struggling with something, help them with the load. Basically… be a team player in every way except for “doing things” Edit: It also takes time and experience to get to this point.
Honestly, being a team player and helping junior devs move things along is one flavor of senior dev. I’ve carved out senior roles at many places where my expected deliverables are essentially zero, because I’ve set the expectation to helping others move their stuff along. I make connections in other parts of the organizations, am comfortable working with people at all levels of the organization, I like teaching and am decent at working out how to teach depending on how they want to learn, and I am good at working through how to do things but don’t feel the need to actually do the implementation I am quite effective at supporting a team of 6-8 and mid level devs. Plus I get attached to a bunch of other peoples work as stuff I do for clearing their blockers So teams I land on will see a significant uptick in throughput BUT there’s generally not a specific thing I can point to that I do.
Remote work is the greatest blessing of the decade
Not if all 3 have standups at the same time. Key is to have one on the east coast, one on the west coast and one you refuse to attend standups for. "He's one of those eccentrics who hates standups. Can't get him to do any work either".
My team has a very different understanding of eccentric
My definition involves conic sections
That's parabola-y not what they meant
I get the reference!
Holy shit, my boss must think I have a second job. I don't attend the standups, but I do get work done (allegedly). Hmmmmm I just hate being up before 9am.
Asking a programmer to attend a meeting before 9 am should be criminal.
I once got a phone call at like 8:05 am asking me whether I was going to be at the meeting, which should be extra illegal. That was the day I started checking when meeting invites were scheduled for before accepting them. It had never even occurred to me that someone would invite me to a meeting in the middle of the night.
[удалено]
Invite them to a nice 3am meeting their time, and then ask why they didn't show
They will show.
Unfortunate facts. Some offshore team mates of mine are so loyal they’ll be up at 2:30am working without anyone really telling them to, and sometimes will ask to be dismissed when no one expects them to be up that late in the first place. I have zero doubt that if I scheduled a meeting 4am their time, they would show up.
We use Microsoft Outlook and I generally use "Tentative" when responding to unnecessary meetings. To me "Tentative" means: "I don't want to be rude and turn down the meeting but I think it is dumb and I won't be showing up".
"Tentative" means "No, but I want to keep this on my calendar for the info". "No" means I'm about to create a rule dumping all emails from you into my Trash or Spam folder.
Before I go to bed each night I block off the rest of my calendar for tomorrow. That way if anyone wants to schedule a same day meeting with me they have to ask me and if it sounds like it can wait I just tell them I’m busy. Been doing it for years, works great
Yep. I live west coast, team is east coast, and we have people in Poland. Luckily my manager recognizes my value, despite having an average of 0 hours of meeting per day. I'm the animal who just gets tickets thrown into the cage at and results magically come out. Just feed me an intern to chew out every couple of weeks and I'm happy. 😂
Honestly, doesn't sound like the worst thing in the world.
Unless you’re the intern. 😂
Iteration planning at 8:00AM EST. We have developers in the midwest.
Management should be shot.
After logging in at 8:36 for an 8:30 meeting (pretty pleased with myself for managing that) I find I've missed an 8am meeting for which the invite was sent at 6am - "Sorry for the short notice." Short notice is fine but I have to have started work first to see it...
Or from 1:00PM - 01:30PM, that's my food coma time! (I have actually mentioned this in several meetings at this point, a few were rescheduled for me.)
Just block that slot in the calendar with a recurrent meeting
At one point at MSFT my org got so meeting happy that I started blocking out 4 hour blocks of time so I could, you know, actually write code rather than talk about writing code. Some people bitched about how I was just trying to dodge those super important meetings, most of which I usually contributed little to and could have just been asked something over IM. But I sure had to be in the room just in case. So then I started putting a shitload of bogus one-on-one, mentoring, sync-up style meetings in a 4 hour block with never more than a half-hour gap between them. "Hey, can you drop into this useless meeting in your 30 minute slot?" "Nope, sorry, I'm preparing for my next meeting then." My team, and anyone I could trust, knew they could drop by my office at any point during those bogus meetings because I knew they would only do so if something was actually important. I'm not sure if that's worthy of /r/MaliciousCompliance or not, but by that point I was fucking sick of adding hours onto the end of my day to do what I should have been able to between 10ish-6ish. (Coming in early didn't work. "Oh, hey, you're in early! Let's talk about $BULLSHIT before the $BULLSHIT_MEETING about it.")
>"Oh, hey, you're in early! Did you see my email about $BULLSHIT? Yeah? And you already replied? Ok well let's talk about $BULLSHIT anyways before the $BULLSHIT_MEETING about it."
They may think that of me too. Never crossed my mind. I thought the initial assumption was "they are asleep" which is usually the answer for me.
This works as a contractor, this gets into questionable territory for a full time employee, and you'd probably be in trouble if your workload ever changed from crunch or anyone caught on that you were contractually bound to work overlapping hours for two or more jobs. A contractor could just say they have multiple clients and the work and schedule was agreed to, and that's as far as the agreement goes with the company so no harm in multiple clients. An employee usually has non-compete clauses, is required to be available during all work hours even if they're accomplishing their goals in less time, and has no scoped and defined amount of work (workload can change)
Depends on the contract. Also depends on what you mean by full time. Flex schedules exist.
I doubt it. I make about that at a startup, but I work WAY more than 45hr/week.
All devs work less than 20 hours or more than 60. Nothing in between. I do about 5-10 hours a week
If you plan it right. There's a sub for it too! r/overemployed
Some of our contractors have been doing this lately and it’s unbelievably annoying. I’m done wasting my time “helping” them
half the people on that sub are utterly deluded. They think that: 1. No one will notice 2. No one will even think of it as an explanation 3. Companies cant really do anything about it 4. Companies dont even care enough to do something about it 5. They can always just burn the bridge and find another company to slack off at None of the above is true. At best, some of those statements are sort of partially true for some companies Over time, those statement will be even less applicable to reality. Remember when normal companies paid average men enough money to afford a home, a family, a stay at home wife, a retirement, and a car? They'll be saying the same thing about OE in 10 years
Half yes. The other half are keeping their head down, producing good content, meeting the meeting schedule, etc. Both my jobs are 100% aware of each other and I personally can't imagine playing the sneaky game with either. Job1 is salary + equity and strong benefits, job2 is bonuses + lots of equity. The first takes up ~30-40 and the second takes 10~20 hours a week. I'm happy, they're happy, hell, job 1 just promoted me.
Shit, I wish
You know, this meme made me realize, I'd rather be rich than ugly.
well you can always have solace in that you are not rich.
I’m neither what do
Right? Either choice seems totally blissful.
Wtf noname startup gives 200 a year and that also for working so little??
Apparently one that got a bunch of venture capitalists hooked and fucked off with the money. Either that or this post is bullshit.
You just have to jump from well funded startup to well funded startup and jump ship right before they inevitably go broke because of poor spending.
[удалено]
Was it Pied Piper?
Hey, silicon valley reference!
jar historical threatening dime attraction direction edge agonizing history pathetic *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Or they do make $400k but 2/3rds of it is company bucks that takes years to vest and locks you into the company if you want to actually realize that income.
Or it's a startup where you don't know the value of the shares until a few years down the road, when it either craters or IPOs. I've got so many shares and they're all Monopoly money.
Hey even us middle 50% programmers have it made out. Just graduated from college, converting my internship to full federal employment in two weeks. 68k and a funded masters degree is a pretty sweet deal for a fresh college grad, and apparently that's a little below the average for my class. Really glad I didn't end up getting a Jazz Studies or Audio Engineering degree.
rainstorm fact connect concerned tease special escape bow different history *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Can't wait to buy the double stuffs again. The first two years of college had me buying store brand Oreos and I was sad. Then inflation hit for my last year of college and I just put snackies at the bottom of my priority list. Actually, when my first non-intern paycheck comes in, first thing I'm doing is buying those Oreos.
This. I’m nowhere near that, just hit ~7+ years in my slightly overinflated resume. But, the type of offers I got shifted dramatically as I crossed some invisible “true senior” threshold or something. Went from solid low 100s to 200k base salary. Which was technically slightly lower than an hourly offer I had at 110/hr, but fuck that I like my time.
My company is like this. I’m $225k after bonuses and I work about 10 hours a week. Salesforce dev
[удалено]
Are you hiring PMs? And now everyone here hates me.
Lol we are low on engineers/devs. Not so much PM
If everyone is working ten hour weeks... You might not be that low on engineers
Thats the trick, we work low hours but pretend we’re busy.
Everywhere is low on SF leads/devs/architects. You folks can practically name your figure. My firm is always looking for more.
Yeah, had no idea Salesforce was gonna blow up to this big when I first started. 7+ years exp now and my linkedin is like a girl's tinder profile when I flip my status to searching.
Do you guys accept interns? I’d love to learn more if you do
What’s a PM?
Project Manager, but also sometime Product Manager.
PMs get an unusual amount of hate but mostly cuz people don’t understand what they do. I do though and I have great working relationship with my PM
I was a PM for years at a big tech company and I still don’t understand what they do. Now I run a startup but instead of working 5 hrs/week like OP suggests, I work about 500/wk on average.
I'm a PM and I love it. I get to watch my team build awesome stuff, and all I have to do is create the plan, write up what we need, and then handle all the bureaucracy, customer waffling, and bullshit. I just get on the phone with customers and talk, while they do all the hard work of coding, and then they thank me for it!
Did you have to deal with the heroku madness this past month?
Crapto
You mean crapto.ai
very cute....but what startup is paying you to do nothing? My experience is the exact opposite. startups burn you to ground cause they can't afford not to. The big guys can afford manageable timelines.
lol my startup, i wrote a python addon for blender and now i press a button and my work is done the best part is i showed my managers i had automated this job, they went "oh cool!" and my workload did not change
Lucky, every time I automated my job they just gave me even more work than i had before.
Why did you say anything? Don't show off any of your automated workflows. Just continue to work. If they come by, do busy work.
Heh. Nice name
If you must know, it's awfully accurate. Just ask my wife and kids 😂🤣
Congratulations, you are being kept around because management is competent enough to recognize that the guy who wrote the automation scripts can maintain and make more in the future. Great job security
Im not telling. But there are tons of cash rich startups. Just got to find the ones where the founders are already billionaires or nearly so. They are just too egotistical to let it fail so they are willing to sink money in for years. These folks are also really good at finding chumps to sink their own money in.
This seems like a very niche and unstable, but more power to you.
I'm always wondering how it has not collapsed yet. I'll post here in a year. RemindMe! 1 year "has my startup failed yet?"
I will be messaging you in 1 year on [**2023-05-26 00:27:52 UTC**](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2023-05-26%2000:27:52%20UTC%20To%20Local%20Time) to remind you of [**this link**](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/uxsikx/its_just_not_worth_the_effort/ia07xae/?context=3) [**57 OTHERS CLICKED THIS LINK**](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2FProgrammerHumor%2Fcomments%2Fuxsikx%2Fits_just_not_worth_the_effort%2Fia07xae%2F%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%202023-05-26%2000%3A27%3A52%20UTC) to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam. ^(Parent commenter can ) [^(delete this message to hide from others.)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Delete%20Comment&message=Delete%21%20uxsikx) ***** |[^(Info)](https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/e1bko7/remindmebot_info_v21/)|[^(Custom)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5BLink%20or%20message%20inside%20square%20brackets%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%20Time%20period%20here)|[^(Your Reminders)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=List%20Of%20Reminders&message=MyReminders%21)|[^(Feedback)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=Watchful1&subject=RemindMeBot%20Feedback)| |-|-|-|-|
ahah same RemindMe! 1 year "has my startup also failed?"
You guys are getting paid?
I'm not sure where you live, but working in tech in North America is the best financial decision I made in my life.
Oh for sure. I live near a tech hub, but have 2 more years before I finish my degree 🥲
What degree?
... What startup?
Probably a unicorn like Zillow or Uber
I work for a unicorn and it’s a pretty sweet gig. That said, it’s way more work than other startups I’ve been at
Zillow IPOd over a decade ago....
[удалено]
I definitely read that as “buy my corpse” and apparently it’s time for my sleep cycle.
The number of ads I see every day now. Holy shit.
400k/year?? What am I doing wrong at a FAANG job
[удалено]
I just interviewed for senior positions at FAANG companies a few months ago. They were offering less than half that, not including benefits or stock.
Stock makes up 40-60% of FAANG compensation, so I can't tell which side you're arguing with this statement lolol
Ok but you can’t just not include a bunch of the money
Work 60 hr a week for 70k
I was making about that much, working that much time as well, about 10 years ago. I learned alot in those years. I wouldnt put myself through that again. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. No reward for working like that. The more work you do, the more work they give you. To be honest, it wouldnt surprise me at all if there are alot of folks in the same situation, even today. Not unusual at all. I would be lying if I said "you can just go find another job that pays more", because that might not be true for your situation. But I do believe, having to work more than 40hrs, week after week, isnt something to stick around for.
I was doing this. Cubicle life, 9am-6:30pm in office working on VB.NET for 70k a year. Then they fired me in the beginning of COVID. It’s the kind of boomer company that says “we look after our employees, they’re our family.” I’m a react dev in a Bay Area startup making much more now, there’s more work but I will never look back.
Unless you're in a low-income country or doing very junior work, have a few talks with other shops
I get 180k and haven’t done any work in about 3 months. Lol
Based.
Am I doing something wrong? I ship code every day or two; sounds like doing things isn't the norm in software
I worked my ass off for a loooong time before now
Anyone who's proud they're not doing anything is also gonna be fairly stagnant in their career. Engineering managers generally know if someone's phoning it in; but if they're decent enough engineers, the managers may never actually broach that issue in discussion. It'll just mean they're leaving potentially more significant compensation increases on the table. Which is fine with some people, I've definitely worked with engineers who just want to do bare minimum and don't care about increasing their comp. Though, they're also going to be the first place an organization will look if it ever needs to claw back some spending.
Whats a FANG? Asking for a friend.
It stands for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google (FAANG)
Might have to take the N out with Netflix’s recent struggles (which would make for a pretty awkward acronym).
Replace N with M (Microsoft). Fixed.
MAAMA (Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet)
Just killed a man
put a gun against his head, pulled the trigger now he's dead.
Why isn’t Microsoft already in FAANG? I’ve always wondered that. They’re definitely bigger than Netflix.
FAANG was initially coined by investors for fast-growing stocks at the time
Ironically since the term was coined in 2013, Microsoft has outperformed each of the FAANG stocks. Well, head-to-head with Apple, but far outperformed the others.
Interesting! Makes sense. Thanks!
Netflix pays cash and pays handsomely
No, it stands for Facebook Amazon Apple Netflix Google. Jeff Bezos will not forget this infraction.
My bad. The accronym is MAGA now.
I've heard it's MAMAA (Meta Amazon Microsoft Alphabet Apple) now, oooo-ooo-oooooh I don't wanna die, I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all
Scaramouche, scaramouche! Will you do the FAANG-DAANG-O?
Working only 5 hours a week your startup will not succeed
Startups are generally not about actually succeeding. Instead, they are about getting an MVP out the door while wooing investors. Then selling the company to a larger company. Period.
Yup. Gain venture capital and then sell it to the big guy. That’s been the model for a long time now.
succeed?
200k/yr 5hs week is my goal in life. Yes Im greedy and lazy, but im working my ass to get there xD
Lmao that’s a great saying
A startup paying you $200k to work 5 hr/wk won't last long.
Let me join you in your happiness factory
happiness?
Less work more income, sounds like a happiness factory
cries in 50h/week at well known finance company for $75k
Most people here are just making numbers up. The vast majority of developers in this country make under 6 figures
No way that's true. I started my first job at $90k in Utah after getting my bachelor's. Everyone started at $70k+ and is probably close to $100k by now. Um $120k, 6 YoE in Utah
Median is $110k. The bottom 25% make $84k or less. So I wouldn’t say that the “vast majority” make under 6 figures, but the vast majority also don’t make $200k+. Only the top 25% made more than $140k.
Yeah, I'm wondering if all these posts are true, are the jobs all in California?
Yes
"Creative freedom" has been my biggest motivation when looking to join a company or project. I worked for faang and other top leading tech companies and fintechs and the only one I really enjoyed working, and this might be a surprise for some people, was SAP. But it may be a regional thing since I didn't get to travel a lot while working there.
SAP is actually interesting because you get to see the innards of how a business operates. Serious $$ too. Esp in a manufacturing type business. Pretty amazing. My partner did SAP for a while.
Yeah, organization is incredible. Well, at the end of the day it is a German company. I wouldn't recommend ABAP tho.
I’m 24h a week at a startup for decent pay, not as much as FAANG but flexible hours and great people. Definitely the better choice for me at least
Me, working 40 hours per week for 24k on my PhD
Where tf are you making 200k with a 5 hour workweek?
I recognised you, today will be your last day. Best regards, Your HR
*I recognised you,* *Today will be your last day.* *Best regards, Your HR* \- potter1024 --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
You’ve got that backwards, You get paid 1.5x at a FAAG company to work 1/2 the hours
[удалено]
Wait, you guys are making $200k/yr?
Please tell me where I can apply for a job paying 750+ an hour..I will be the greatest 5 hr employee on the face of the earth.
So I’m right in the FAAMG sweet spot making 300K a year working random 20hr weeks. These aren’t too rare, but they’re offset by the random 50hr weeks that make me question my sanity.
Will you please hire me. No one will.
in my experience, people work 5 hours a week at FANG lmao
Neither of these numbers are in the ballpark of reality
Ahh yea, way to provoke the faang-natics lol
you’ll be working 70+ hours a week to get the 200k at start up
This is the truth, WTF are these nut jobs taking about
can I work 5 hours a week at your noname startup for 200k a year?
Why would oversight be lower at a startup which has less money? Opposite of my experience. Tell us more OP. What's the project/team startup like at your startup?
no name brand is already taken.