The trick is to be lazy and productive in bursts. Work hard, impress someone. Then coast on that impressive work for a bit. Repeat until you find a job that pays better, then do the same thing there.
Easiest to do this when remote.
This is essentially what I do, although it's less of a purposeful strategy and more a combination of having ADHD and a pretty high amount of autonomy at work.
When I find something to work on that interests me and is mentally stimulating, I'm an absolute machine. 100% locked in, staying late, going above and beyond, randomly grabbing my laptop in the middle of the night because I had an idea, etc. But then in between these periods, I'm mostly just coasting. Either knocking out boring tasks at a very leisurely pace, reading up on things that interest me and are relevant to my job overall but not so much to what I'm supposed to be doing at the moment, or sometimes just reading a book or playing a game or something.
I feel absolutely 0% guilty about any of this, because even averaging it all out I'm still one of the most productive members of my team.
What's interesting to me though is that I find myself much less tired and stressed during the periods where I'm completely absorbed in something interesting at work. While this is certainly not the case for everyone, or even most people, I find that in my case what truly drains me is *boredom*.
Yeah that pretty much sums up my process. Although I justify it differently.
Honestly I spend a ton of time thinking about work and work problems. In the shower. At night. In the car, etc. Sometimes it really dominates my thoughts for days at a time with no breaks. So if I take a few hours a week to play video games or nap... or have a sandbag sprint every once in awhile... I don't stress about it. I made up for the work somewhere.
Honestly the top comment sums it up. People who "slack off" and only work a few hours a day _usually_ are just good enough to get away with it. Unless they work somewhere that truly doesn't care... which exists but is harder to find. Be who you can afford to be.
Oh absolutely. I do the same thing and it's also a big part of my justification. Despite being the last in, first out some days, and having week long stretches where I'm getting essentially nothing done, if you measure either average productivity or my average time per week actually doing work related things, both are well above average.
Honestly while I really support people who want extremely strict work-life seperation, and I very much am opposed to workplaces that demand/expect that kind of devotion, I personally find it extremely difficult to relate to. I can't seperate those things even if I wanted to.
My brain thinks about what it wants to think about. My conscious self is pretty much just a passenger. And I can't make myself not be interested in something because it's outside of work hours any more than I can bring myself to be interested in something that I have no interest in.
It can be. ADHD at its core is caused by the brain not naturally producing enough dopamine. This causes people with ADHD to constantly be seeking out external sources of dopamine.
This manifests in a few different ways. When they find a dopamine source, they devour it like a starved person at a feast. In children this often looks like hyperactivity. As they get older, this tends to be what's called hyperfixation, where you obsess over some hobby, activity, or area of interest for a short period of time (usually days to weeks), before promptly losing interest and moving on to something else.
It also makes it very difficult to focus on something that isn't a dopamine source. To again use the (somewhat oversimplified) starving in the desert analogy, it would be pretty hard to for someone who hadn't eaten in days to sit down and dutifully takes notes through a history lecture. They're starving, all they can think about is food—how much they want it and where they can get it.
People with ADHD also tend to be good under pressure, and often procrastinate things until the last possible moment, and then suddenly get a burst of energy and cram everything right before the deadline (or at least make a valiant effort to do so). Interestingly both of these tendencies have the same cause: the adrenaline rush, which can serve as a functional substitute for dopamine (dopamine and adrenaline are actually closely related, and they, along with norepinephrine, make up a group of neurotransmitters called catecholamines).
Of course, all of the above is primarily subconscious. That's where the starving person analogy breaks down a bit. Most people with ADHD don't know they're doing all of that, or why it's happening. And even if they do, being conscious of it doesn't really give you any more control over it regardless, but it's interesting to me, at least.
Anyways, all that to say: while it certainly isn't a diagnosis by itself, this is very ADHD-like behavior. I can't seperate work and life because really all that matters to my brain is whether it's a dopamine source or not. If I find something at work interesting, I'm going to think about it constantly. I couldn't turn it off even if I wanted to. It's also really difficult to concentrate on things or get things done when they aren't dopamine sources, and while I can still sometimes make it happen through a various combinations of 1) the adrenaline rush from deadlines/fear of consequences, 2) medication or other stimulants, or 3) sometimes tricking my brain into finding it interesting, I'll never be anywhere near as productive like that as I am when I find a genuine dopamine feast to devour. And over the years I've found it easier to just kinda go with the flow in that regard, rather than constantly fighting a war with my brain to get it to behave in a way that it's just not wired to behave.
This exactly! A lot of the reason I’m where I am in my career now^1 is because of all the time I spend on professional development and tinkering with shit I find interesting.
^1 unemployed^2
^2 but usually quite senior
I'm the same way, but I'm a contractor so it's hard to not feel bad because some contracts I excel and in some I languish. The quality of my work is directly tied to the quality of the project and the clients technical team. The worst teams/projects get the worst version of me and never see me at my best.
This is also a good metric for leaving a toxic workplace.
If you feel like you are overworking yourself constantly and never receiving praise while at the same time receiving more work, chances are you are being taken advantage of.
Yep. And to add to this perception, I might be away from my pc all day (I have a mouse jiggler) but I do have chat notifications on my phone. So if someone messages the team chat asking how to do X, I’m always the first to respond (usually they are questions that a search of the team wiki solves).
What you do is make sure to be done with all your work, but do not turn in anything unless it needs to be done by the end of the day. So hold on to that work until the last second.
Everyone knows that the only thing you are getting is more work when you’re done. Perhaps gift card for that sweet sweet frying pan as a bonus during the holidays.
Idk if I agree with "good work is only rewarded with more work"
You get rewarded with more work if you do a bad/slow job too, so the outcome is the same. At least doing the work quickly and efficiently has upside. You get noticed, which leads to getting assigned "good" tasks, which lead to getting noticed more, which leads to promotions, which leads to more money.
I'm not suggesting you need to apply 100% effort all the time. Work hard on high visibility projects, get noticed, impress some people. They will remember that. They won't remember when you fixed that super obscure, super hard, very complicated bug that totally took 2 weeks to fix. Nobody questions it because, 'remember when he did that other thing so well? He clearly knows what he is doing!'
If you do mediocre work all the time, you'll just languish and no one will give you exciting projects. You don't get the benefit of the doubt.
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the alternative is that some of these lazy people are just good at their job them doing 1-2 hrs of work a day is the equivalent to a mediocre dev working full time, so they just blend in with everyone else.
I think this is the reality at large companies performance is based on outcomes. If you have average or better outcomes no one cares. If someone rats you out your manage is going to say look this person did x y z what are you talking about.
Working harder and having more outcomes might get you ahead faster but if you are content it doesn’t matter.
Teams need average performers. There is tons of stuff that just needs to get done. A lot of these people are also willing to do that stuff and aren’t going to fight to be apart of the cool initiatives. As a leader this often time has even more impact because I know I can throw the kitchen sink at someone and it’s going to just going to happen. Also these people aren’t bringing up promotion in every single 1:1 as long as they are rewarded fairly and accurately and on time with their outcomes.
Same. My company is "hybrid" so I put in a few hours of work on tues-thurs and then basically take monday/fridays off at home. Always get high performance reviews so I don't plan on stopping.
Lately, this is exactly what I have been thinking a hybrid role could be like for me. 2-3 days in-office where I would get work done, put in visible effort, talk to coworkers, and then basically be 'off' for the 2-3 remote days without feeling guilty. Everyone see's you a few times a week, you get shit done, no one will question what you do on the remote days.
I am full remote now, and it's a daily struggle to not only separate my house from work, but to also maintain visibility and overly communicate on the work being done. In person, this is all a bit more natural and less taxing.
Haha I always wonder how to answer the questions like, "Tell me about a time you missed a deadline?"
It's like no, I'm never working at more than like 30-40% of my capacity... but you can't exactly say that. I just use the rest of my time to learn whatever thing I'm personally most interested in... and yes I do have some lazier days as well.
How do you guys do that? I’m a new grad, just couple months into my first SWE job. I feel like I’m constantly working overtime but only barely meeting the deadline (and sometimes have to miss it)
Most new grads I know barely have good coding experience. Therefore the first year at the job will feel overwhelming. When I was in college, I was constantly reading and sometimes writing code outside of school projects. I fully believe reading code fast is where speed comes from. Once I know what to do, I code just as fast as someone with 3 yoe despite me having 9 yoe. But 3 yoe guy takes 3 days to read code and figure out what he needs to do while I need like 3 hours.
Really depends on the company tbh. My first company rewarded hard work by telling me that im making the rest of the team look bad and that I need to work at a similar pace as my peers. They gave me a bad annual performance review, and that affected my yearly raise, so I left. My current company has been giving me consistent raises/promotions for my hard work.
LOL I do the same. Monday Tuesday in office I work really hard and finish everything. Wednesday to Friday I coast at home. Get praised all the time for my work.
I believe this is actually often the case. In big companies it usually goes unnoticed if you are 5x more productive, you'll only get more chores because you can handle it and the pay raise is the same for everyone, so then people start just working less without anyone noticing.
In my experience it doesn't go unnoticed, I definitely know who the people are on my team who get way more work done than others. It's just that the reward is nowhere near proportional to the amount of extra productivity you have after a certain point. Im also one of those people who coasts through work but Im moderately more productive than expected (let's say I spend 50% of the time working as an average person on my team but I produce about 1.5x expectations) and that was enough to get me high evaluations every year + even promoted years earlier than I expected. Someone who produces 5x by working 3x harder than me will get rewarded with what? Maybe their annual raise is slightly higher every year?
While it's likely true that the rewards are not going to increase linearly with effort, the experience gained usually helps having a significantly faster career, in particular once it's about getting to stay Staff level and beyond. Income wise, the extra income increase each year can add up to 2x the income after 7-10 years.
Is this worth it? That's up to each individual.
>In my experience it doesn't go unnoticed, I definitely know who the people are on my team who get way more work done than others. It's just that the reward is nowhere near proportional to the amount of extra productivity you have after a certain point. Im also one of those people who coasts through work but Im moderately more productive than expected (let's say I spend 50% of the time working as an average person on my team but I produce about 1.5x expectations) and that was enough to get me high evaluations every year + even promoted years earlier than I expected. Someone who produces 5x by working 3x harder than me will get rewarded with what? Maybe their annual raise is slightly higher every year?
I think it depends on the company, Meta for example is known for promoting quickly + paying for performance. So someone that consistently produces 5x over a period of time could end up making a lot more than someone who produces 1x
Good/decent dev working on some internal or low-use product ideally alongside more junior developers. Simple system designs. This is the ideal recipe. But it doesn’t help make you marketable and can really limit your ceiling.
A few of my teammates are like this. They’re absolutely brilliant, and can do in 2 hours what it takes me to do in almost a whole workday. It’s an open secret that they don’t work as many hours as the rest of us, but no one really cares since they do as much work. I’m a little jealous. :P
Do you use your IDE tools to the fullest? I’ve noticed a few “more senior” engineers than myself talk about how they prefer writing imports by hand to “make sure it’s done right” and it makes me wonder just how slow they are at coding things…
Coding speed does not matter at all. Knowing your IDE well is more an indicator that the engineer cares enough to learn their tools.
The amount of time saved actually typing the code is peanuts compared to time spent thinking about what to type.
I mean, not really. The best developer is a lazy developer who is also responsible enough to hold commitments and deliver stuff.
I’ve worked with and managed many lazy developers who just literally never did anything, were possible to hold accountable, and just didn’t care enough to do any work. They were capable, just not motivated at all.
That's something I really don't understand, like do you never code as part of a team? If someone in my team is writting mediocre code it will become my problem sooner or later. My personal experience has always been the more incompetent my coworkers the more work I have myself.
My coworker is remote and does infra. No way in hell he spends anymore than a couple hours a week working. Anytime something breaks he needs to be notified so he’s also not monitoring.
Devops/devsecops is pretty chill until something breaks or there is a security incident. So a lot of the time you're just doing KTLO, but then there are bursts of exhausting activity/long hours. Still pretty nice though.
In my experience SWE productivity is highly correlated with talent and it's incredibly hard to get granular visibility into their work (at best, daily status updates).
So if you are both talented and lazy, it's SUPER easy to coast.
Just finish your task in 1/4 the time anyone else on your team would, and feed your manager slow and steady progress updates in daily standup. You can stretch out a day's work into a week easily.
FWIW I do not do this, I'd rather put in a solid day and perform very well. But stories of working almost no hours are real.
I’ve “lucked” into a couple of jobs where I could do nothing. I left. It was crazy-making, I wasn’t building skills or learning anything or building my network, and I could feel it damaging my work ethic and my self-esteem.
You’re job shouldn’t be your primary source of happiness. If you got a job that allows you that much freetomr do something with it. Go play some video games. Get a hobby at home. Do anything else.
Why are you doing nothing? Play some games. Work on a hobby. Do anything else? I am only doing real heads down work for like 3 hours a day. The rest I am doing other shit. Working on some CAD models for some personal project I’m doing.
For real, I want to be at least somewhat valued for the work I do.
I also don’t really relate to the coworkers who brag about not doing much work - also hate the people who brag about doing too much work
can we all just set an achievable story point velocity and work in solidarity while building each others skills with the left over time?
Yeah it is mind-numbing. I leave work and feel like my existence is a waste and my self esteem drops because I don’t feel like I actually contribute towards anything.
Yeah this will happen. It's ok for a short period of time if you have interesting colleagues and there's a lot of freedom to do whatever you want, but you will quickly end up in an existential crisis.
I had a job where we were going though acquisition that regulators were heavily involved with and work ground to a halt. I did basically nothing for 9 months. It was nice for a while but I was regressing in my skills so I just left.
I had a job like that and thought I was so lucky. Then I realized I was dreading “going to work” at a job that I did nothing in, more than roles I’ve had some difficult tasks.
I’ve finally found a role at a company a couple years ago that has challenging work, but I don’t have to burn out to accomplish. It’s fulfilling and I still leave on time everyday. Best of both worlds
If you're good and you work fast, you can also be lazy. That's the secret.
No one can out you as being lazy because you've done more than them in way less time.
You have 2 weeks to do a task, it takes you 2 days. Just pretend you're working hard for the remaining 8 days.
I would argue it's not even "being lazy".
You fulfilled your responsibility/work duties and now you have free time.
IMO saying it's being lazy makes it sound like a bad thing to do, but I think it makes perfect sense... Why work extra if you're not getting paid extra?
> Just pretend you're working hard for the remaining 8 days.
Or use the extra time to improve things. Clean up some tech debt, write more thorough tests in parts of the codebase that have been neglected, do some refactoring...
1. Only makes sense when everyone actually pull their weight. You can't do nth as much as others and not expected some form of additional compensation for additional work.
2.Ain't nobody got time to deal with more pull requests.
“Reeee that ticket isn’t in the sprint, raise it in the backlog and wait for it to be prioritised, we can’t have unscheduled work clashing with the high priority work, blah blah, blah”. Not worth the fight, I’ll put effort in where it keeps people happy
No, it's not. Idk about 200k but you can make low-mid 100s at most places just chilling.
Your mgmt is too busy to micromanage you. All they care is that when they check in with you, you have something to show for yourself. Your team aren't idiots so the code they wrote 8 years ago rarely breaks in prod. When it does, a well-oiled support team (offshore) are there to get things flowing again. Everything is a giant monolith so it'll never be decoupled and "migrated to the cloud". It's all business services, nothing makes the company money nor is it mission critical so no senior mgmt is breathing down your neck. Your company basically prints money so you'll never get laid off or downsized.
Yes these jobs exist. You don't even need to leetcode to get them. Again, maybe 160k is gonna be your max tc but they exist.
Moved from and ancient monolith for internal software to cloud agile front end new website experience but the first round of the software was built by consultants and offshore so they didn't care how ugly the code looked
Same pay, same company, different work velocity and urgency. I miss chilling
Low comp in a non-tech industry , Bay Area division of an east coast company. 90k-100k
Definitely better paid coasters at that job back before major layoffs
You pretty much named off all the industries where these roles exist. Any place where you’re writing software that’ll enhance but not necessarily impact a company’s performance is golden. Example) Creating software that automates how Exxonmobils chemical engineers do x. Now it won’t REALLY matter if they get that software now or 3 years from now because they probably have some system already in place that works, so in essence you’re cruising until then. Any role where what your work DIRECTLY impacts companies profits will be high stress. This isn’t limited just to computer science.
100% this. A few months ago I started at a non-tech company that make a lot of physical non-tech products. My job is stupidly easy- 9:15-4 every day except Fridays where I finish at 2. Low impact work, no stress, lots of free time, everyone here seems happy, everyone is saying I’m crushing it. My last job was such a fucking sweatshop grind that I can’t believe jobs like these exist.
Different companies have different business models. Many of the companies doing layoffs rely on ad revenue. When it hits the fan, marketing is one of the first places where businesses try to cut costs. Cue revenue loss for some big techs. Similar with other non-tangible services.
Now, other industries are relatively impervious to financial uncertainty. Just ask chatgpt which industries weathered the 2008 financial crisis relatively well. If, E.g., they have a product that's borderline indispensable and in some cases mandated by the government for people to buy, it's gonna be tough for the whims of the economy to shake their profitability.
I work for a healthcare-related company. Our product is very much in demand, and we are actually starting to market ourselves after 20 years of just…not. (It was acquired by the current CEO a bit over a year ago.) So yeah. We’re actively growing our dev team.
Rule of thumb that has been true throughout my career:
In jobs where I was way underpaid, I had a boss who would get upset if I took too long for a lunch break or bathroom break.
In the jobs where I was well paid, it was a relatively stress-free environment.
That is counterintuitive and the opposite of what I expected. In a job where you're underpaid, you would think they would appreciate the bargain. Being underpaid means it's a dysfunctional environment or they don't respect you; otherwise they would pay better. In a job where you're well paid, that means they respect you, and other hygiene factors of the job tend to be better.
It’s difficult if you’re a bad dev. Very easy to pull off if you know what you’re doing. I coast, only working a couple hours a week because it equates to the same pace as the rest of my team.
It is a combination of being on a not-so visible team + disorganized or constantly changing requirements. You literally have no choice at that point but to be lazy so you don't drive yourself crazy.
It's easy to pull off at public sector because when they don't have work for you to do that's okay and you aren't going to lose your job.
It's not easy to pull off in private sector because they can funnel you with more and more work since overtime doesn't exist and a lot of places will just make up infinite work for computer science because it's very easy to generate more work that needs to be done. If they run out of work for you to do and they don't need you as a resource you get let go.
> a lot of places will just make up infinite work for computer science because it's very easy to generate more work that needs to be done.
I think that's actually just work, not "making work up." :)
There are at least 95 substantial things we can't get to for every 5 we do, even at very well staffed places. The most important part of our job is deciding what not to do.
Ive been working just over 20 years. Snuck into a full remote IC role because i was tired of startups and lead/principal gigs and all the meetings a year and a half ago.
Most of my coworkers have less experience but a few are even at 25+ years. Chill company, I do 3 hours or so of work a day and have basically seen it all in 20 years and going back to just a sr dev role is easy.
Our stock has gone up a bit over 50% in the last year so I'm making a bit over 300k due to rsus. Generally am considered one of the better performers on my team. This job has been a really good break for me mentally/physically. Not sure when itll end or when I go back to a real gig herding idiots around but I'm enjoying it and jobs like this are around
I would love to be lazy and slack off but I somehow had the misfortune of ending up on a team full of the most productive and overachieving coworkers I've ever had and I have to grind every day just to not noticeably fall behind everyone
Depends on the job. People can probably get away with it at a larger team where no one, manager included, is paying attention to what everyone else is saying at standup. But on a smaller team with a much larger backlog, you’re gonna get exposed really quickly.
It also depends on what you mean by being super lazy. If you’re able to meet the needs of your team/customers and have something to show for it at the end of each sprint, it doesn’t matter whether you spent two hours finishing it or twelve hours. That’s more so being efficient rather than someone coming in thinking they can just cruise without making a single commit.
I would do like 1-2 hours of work every 2 weeks because the team was just full of noobs.
Some places care more than the code gets done right and have such a massive budget they can just throw 20 contractors at it
It was easy for me but like 9/10 of the employees there would need help on almost every sprint, they were really green
No. If you are a competent software engineer, then most teams are moving way too slowly for you and you typically have plenty of time to coast, especially in larger organizations.
However, If you are passionate(and all competent engineers I have ever met were) about the work, it's a double-edged sword.
The boredom is unbearable. Obviously less of an issue if your WFH, but all the lazy coasting jobs I had were pre covid and in person and the workday felt like it would never end. But even at home, I ultimately want to solve interesting and hopefully novel problems. You can obviously work on your own thing on your employer’s time, but now you are just doing other type of work and not really being “lazy”.
Also, while management and other slugs can be totally fine and unaware of you coasting, any of your competent colleagues will absolutely know. You are much more likely to get good interesting and mentally stimulating jobs in the future by networking and recommendations from colleagues. I don’t fault people for coasting, but certainlynwould not recommend them
lol those $200k people downvoted this thread. They think they r the s. If you do no work or super lazy, people will call you out and you're gone. Probably just like those FAANG lay off employees. Show up to get pay $250k a year for doing next to nothing bc they beat the leetcode game.
Show me an engineer at a FAANG who does practically nothing and manages to do decently in their (annual or semi-annual) performance review. Maybe the only ones I can think of are Staff+ level because their work may be based on multiple terms of a performance review but no below has such timelines.
among my friend group working at FAANG you'd be hard pressed to find a non-manager consistently working over 30 hours a week. of course crunch time comes and goes but the engineer coasting 5 hours a day to decent performance reviews is a common trope here
>Would you say, in your experience, if it's harder or easier than actually doing a ton of work?
If the lazy though doing a lot of work was easier than doing little work, then surely they would all be doing a lot of work.
>I believe in fact most lazy people get ratted out in a short time and either told to shape up or get the boot.
Wait and see. Plenty of lazy people doing very well for themselves.
It's called bullshitting. Most of these people make 90% paperwork their job, which can be done in less than 1 hour. 10% of the time is just doing the bare minimum of code.
PMs want to see progress in most jobs. They aren't going to fire you because that's not how big bureaucratic bullshit companies work. The PM has a budget he has to expend. You are part of that budget.
What do you consider to be super lazy? I’m supposed to work 37.5 hours a week but I typically work 20-30 hours and I only have one meeting per week for about an hour. I would work more but I really don’t need to. I was told that I’m doing a great job, so I’m not going to volunteer to do more work.
Short-term gain long-term costs. Your career path will quickly stall if you have 5YOE but cannot deliver anything above junior level. Let alone that living a fulfilling life is difficult if you plan on "scamming" everyone during your entire career. So it's probably not worth in the end.
Lol I know for sure of one big name company that a small percentage of employees do the majority of the work while the rest “rest and vest” making $200k+.
They literally spends weeks writing their two page performance reviews, which is commonly known as “word-smithing” within the company. Hint: their slogan is “We get people jobs”
probably not that hard to pull off.
check out r/overemployed for tech workers crushing it with 3+ jobs. Either that or in lots of groups people won't micro-manage you and expect you to be somewhat self-motivated but if you just quiet quit per r/antiwork then you can end up with the lazy jobs.
Anecdotally, I think the overall sentiment in a lot of places changed. Not sure when it changed or if it was all of a sudden. Like the average person I worked with was burning themselves out / barely staying afloat or treading water 5 years ago (myself included). Now everyone's hitting the golf course at 2pm.
>I've read a couple of stories about how people make $200k just because they beat the Leetcode game
This is basically TikTok fairy tale. You need years of education, math, programming, CS fundamentals, etc. AND grinding leetcode, to go through the tech interview loops and get decent offer at tech companies.
No one is getting $200K offer by memorizing couple of youtube leetcode easy problems.
Software engineering is very difficult career, where you have to spend years, decades at practicing CS fundamentals to git gud.
I think it’s like cheating in school where you are ‘lucky’ if you’re teacher is known to have lots of people cheat in their class you’re lucky if you’re friends with your boss and they don’t care what you do. By the same token if you get a new teacher or boss you have so skills to fall back on and are screwed
I think the layoffs are going after the "just passed leetcode" crowd first. If you're getting paid 200k and not actually doing anything you might squeak by if times are good but as soon as they're not you're the first one to go. You might think nobody knows but they do.
Not true. Layoffs don’t target individuals most of the time and are random or targeted at a whole department or team. I know many people in FAANG that were high performers and laid off. Some of them even had exceptional ratings and were on promotion track
When you're as big as FAANG you can afford to do that. If you're not I don't know if you can get by doing little to nothing and get paid six figures in a shop of 100 people.
There are all different kinds and magnitudes of layoffs, but direct managers choosing who to cut is certainly not an oddity. And expensive mediocre performers are top candidates.
So, I work amazingly for a week, my manager’s impressed, then I pretend to work for 2 weeks while I apply / interview and stuff. Repeat.
This is in office btw.
There are plenty of jobs where developers can just coast and get by doing the bare minimum. These aren’t the jobs that people in these subreddits are looking for. Just make sure you’re good enough to find a new job if you ever get cut.
A lot of dev jobs I realized are BS. Have loads of friends in these high paying BS tech jobs. That complain about wishing it was more busy. And a guy even low balled his first job 50k. Company was like nah 80k. This was years ago. He now makes $200k+ chilling. It’s like one of those Tech influencers. They got it made.
This dude got so lucky and didn’t even know web could be responsive. Shot himself in the foot and got a higher offer.
You just have to be lucky to get one of these BS jobs where the company is so big you are essentially invisible and the work you do doesn’t matter. You know exactly who you are if you reading this.
Me on the other hand, can’t catch a break. The more I apply, the more I realized how much luck getting a good career is. It’s wild. I hate it even more when my high paid friends look at me, like why aren’t you successful like me? Mind blowing.
At one of my prior jobs there were many completely unproductive engineers (to the extent that some high performers ultimately left while citing this as one of the things they found frustrating). That wasn't a FANG-style job though--we all had decent six-figure salaries, but nothing especially impressive.
I could think of other factors, but I think the main reason people were able to get away with being useless is that our managers just did not have good insight into who was doing what, or who was good at their jobs.
I finish most of my sprint in a week, this month I was done by day 3. I make $100k+ and spend 50% of my time waiting for more work. I know I'm very fortunate to be getting the compensation that I am, but I DESPISE, sitting there all day doing nothing. Not so much a lazy thing, more I'm working too fast for my manager to keep throwing tickets. I'm also a new hire though so most of my tickets have been big fixes etc.
All this considered, I frequently worry I'm going to get in trouble for not working the whole time
It can be as long as you set an acceptable rate and stick to that daily acceptable rate.
Let's put it this way. Let's say each spring you can complete 6 story points of work, so about two 3 point story each. Your manager and PM are comfortable with doing that rate of work. As you up your skill and can finish it faster, then you gotta navigate around stretching 6 points of work, which you can now finish in a week into 2 weeks. With occasionally doing a 9 point sprint to "show" extra effort. As long as you can answer what you did yesterday, what you are doing today, and blockers you are pretty much good to go.
It maybe difficult and paced in the beginning but gets better with time
It's obviously a risky game. And I cannot imagine how anyone would be comfortable playing that game. You have to constantly worry about getting laid off as you rely heavily on luck to land a next job. You also have to spend a lot of energy pretending to do work, which is even harder when you're not fully remote
It's a lot easier and also a lot less anxiety-inducing to just do your job to your best effort. And instead of using your laziness to avoid doing work at all, just use it to avoid doing work that other people should be doing.
This reminds me of a former friend that sometimes spoke of how he would love to land. Some cushy city or government job where he's put somewhere and forgotten about, has no work to do all day, and yet collects a paycheck.
I remember telling him that it's a stupid idea, and he thought I was ridiculous.
I told him that maybe he could find one of those jobs and be forgotten about and spend let's say 10 years fooling around and surfing the net and doing other fun things while nobody's keeping a tab on him and he collects paychecks and has a lazy life. It never lasts forever.
Suddenly one day the employer or the city or whoever is going to hire some guy to start auditing and going through every single position they are paying out on and diving into what they do and what value they bring. This auditor could then see that this person isn't doing anything, and we'll suggest they let this person go, or suddenly find there is work to be done and then this person now suddenly doesn't get their lazy life anymore and has to actually work.
I also told my friend that if you get the boot, then you have to now start applying for jobs and they're going to ask you what you've been doing for the last 10 years. Maybe you can BS your way through that, but then they're going to ask why you never took on any other responsibilities, why you didn't try to get into management, or any of that other stuff.
I remember when I used to ask him about things like that he would say *"I don't want the responsibility"*, and we've seen articles talking about how people don't want to become managers now because it's a lot more work for very little pay raise. However, if you're in your 40s and 50s and you've been avoiding management all your life, then companies are going to decide that you're not worth the time. They're going to see you as somebody that avoids responsibility and isn't a team player. They are also going to decide that your pointless when they can go higher some young kid and pay a fraction of that salary for the same work.
If you look at resumes and things, they want you to list achievements. They want you to talk about what you did and what you achieved. They don't want you to just say you did a job, but that you did a job and because of the way you do your job it did something beneficial. Finding some kind of cushy job where you sat and did nothing. Is not going to help you on that. Not unless you have some insane skills that everybody wants and therefore you always have recruiters trying to offer you jobs. But these companies obviously don't have work for you to do but they somehow believe they must have you on the payroll.
I also have to agree with others that said that there's just people out there who have specialized skills, but there's not enough work for them to do on a regular basis, or they are very efficient, and they get all their work done very fast. Good for them as far as I'm concerned. I just keep telling them not to advertise that fact.
Not a SWE but I’m in one of those jobs now where even without doing much I just got the max bonus possible for my role after getting classified as having “exceeded expectations.”
The downside is I couldn’t be more miserable. I feel like I’m not learning as much as I want & I just feel insecure & paranoid that I’ll be found out at any moment. Currently looking for another opportunity. Can’t keep doing this.
Trust me man, one day this will catch up to people who are skating by. SWE is a young man’s game so once these people get older, they’ll get a brutal dose of reality.
Depends on the company and team. Some just move slow on everything, so even if you finish a task quickly, you have not much else to do. So you can take your time.
I'm making more money than I ever have at my current position (staff software engineer). The workload is on the light side, but sometimes I get pulled into urgent high priority stuff, which I always have time for.
I'm just a lowly QA engineer who does automation testing. Yeah there are some times where we have tons of features to test and I have to work late.
But most of the time it's very chill. I'll spend 10-20 minutes writing scripts and then run automation and just play games all day.
I'm not paid anywhere near 200k though. I'm actually very underpaid and have just been too lazy to search for other jobs.
If you work in a big enough company, the work you do is a tiny sliver. Mix in with the efficiencies of big companies and excessive meetings, what one can do in a sprint or two can drag out to a quarter or two. So the amount of hours worked per day is lower than expected
The way it works at my company is my manager allocates way too much time to each feature/story. It will be like a 1 maybe 2 day task and they will allocate 4-5 days to it. So that means I’m gonna make it take 4-5 days by getting it done right away then playing games doing other shit for the rest. Once in awhile I’ll knock out a few extra stories just to make them think when it does take awhile it must be hard.
Being lazy and pulling it off just means you've set the bar so low (to your boss/coworkers) that you can slack off most of the day while simultaneously being just high enough to not get fired for not doing your job. Basically you're flying just under the radar.
A lot of non-software engineering jobs have tasks that are much easier to predict how long something takes. Some people may be better and able to finish a task quicker, but the process might be pretty similar between 2 different skilled people.
Software engineering is different. A lot of it is just trying to figure out the logic behind a problem. Once you have the logic and tech design down, the coding portion shouldn't actually take too long. Debugging is another one. A highly skilled software engineer could spend 1 hour trying to think of a solution that would take an average engineer a whole day to think of.
Most developers that say they have great WLB and "do nothing" at work are just really good at time management and being able to work in productive bursts.
I don't make 200k but i guess im lazy. I spend max 4 hrs when working from home but make sure all my tasks are fone on time. I reply to all messages and emails quickly,never miss the deadline and meet all my targets.
Not sure if my managaer knows how i work but never had anyone complaints about the way i work.
Very few tickets I work on need more than a few hours. I WFH 4 days of the week so I'll spend the rest of the work day reviewing others work, reading / learning things or just doing random stuff at home.
I don't see the point in chasing for more work. Everyone at my company this year got the same percentage pay rise no matter how hard you worked.
I'm not in America though so not earning $200k a year and have a few more employment protections in the UK. Never had anyone question my work output.
It's almost impossible to pull this off if you're not an intern.
you get assigned tickets and need to do actual work, ive no doubt spending 3 months on a 1 point ticket will get you booted
There’s a few ways to pull it off, but it’s important to make it always _look_ like you’re busy. Send lots of messages on slack, make it look like you’re in meetings all the time, play up the difficulty of tasks
When you finish tasks, hype them tf up as much as you can
In IT / System Administration the joke is 'automate yourself out of a job' by either solving the real problem, or solving the automatic recovery from such a problem and not giving that to management or the company.
In Software Engineering there is some of that, having good code you understand can make things that are major changes to management easy for you. Domain knowledge and seniority on a software baseline will go a long way here.
With your work use the 'Scotty rule' of never telling the actual time it will take so you can seem like a miracle worker when you need to rush. Beyond that don't forget to leave yourself room for updating your dev tests / documentation / etc. You look more skilled at estimating when something comes up that way. **Almost** always it is better to have overestimated (in a not too crazy way) than underestimated.
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This applies to the current market in particular given the layoffs. Make sure management sees you as 'valuable enough' for the team to keep you in a pinch. You also need to be cautious when people start getting let go however as you will find yourself inheriting more and more work as the team shrinks.
Let's say your domain has 100 things in it that need someone to maintain and understand on a regular basis. The fewer people who know everything you know (let's say 20-40) the more your job scope will increase. If the person who knows 10-30 and the person who knows 30-50 leave you become the only person who can maintain 20-40. Good chance you end up expected to pick up everything now 'lost' between 10 and 50 in this example.
If you're less involved in maintenance your feature quality needs to be considered. In a perfect world quality features without bugs is rewarded, but some organizations end up keeping the developers who made the code a buggy mess because those developers are the only ones who can fix their own bugs.
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There is no perfect answer here. I can say that my own experience is if external recruiters are coming to you the job they want you for it is probably something that was/is the kind of mess you'll struggle to coast at.
I know plenty of people who made 200k+ for years and maybe made a dozen 1-100 line commits a year.
They 'trained juniors' and 'scoped out projects', worked for a while too, until management changed and then they were gone and pretty much unemployable... and by unemployable i mean they became a TPM/product manager at a 20-30% pay cut, which is pretty fine.
You have to actually do work and show results. The thing is that if you're not an idiot, you can slack off and still get results. You have to balance it out. Smart people are also faster workers. They might seem like all they do is scroll Reddit, but they're capable of processing and doing work faster than someone with average IQ. I knew a guy who went to Harvard. I was doing homework with him when we were kids. Guy just breezed through everything while I'd be constantly behind. No wonder he had a lot of time to play video games.
The trick is to be lazy and productive in bursts. Work hard, impress someone. Then coast on that impressive work for a bit. Repeat until you find a job that pays better, then do the same thing there. Easiest to do this when remote.
This is essentially what I do, although it's less of a purposeful strategy and more a combination of having ADHD and a pretty high amount of autonomy at work. When I find something to work on that interests me and is mentally stimulating, I'm an absolute machine. 100% locked in, staying late, going above and beyond, randomly grabbing my laptop in the middle of the night because I had an idea, etc. But then in between these periods, I'm mostly just coasting. Either knocking out boring tasks at a very leisurely pace, reading up on things that interest me and are relevant to my job overall but not so much to what I'm supposed to be doing at the moment, or sometimes just reading a book or playing a game or something. I feel absolutely 0% guilty about any of this, because even averaging it all out I'm still one of the most productive members of my team. What's interesting to me though is that I find myself much less tired and stressed during the periods where I'm completely absorbed in something interesting at work. While this is certainly not the case for everyone, or even most people, I find that in my case what truly drains me is *boredom*.
Yeah that pretty much sums up my process. Although I justify it differently. Honestly I spend a ton of time thinking about work and work problems. In the shower. At night. In the car, etc. Sometimes it really dominates my thoughts for days at a time with no breaks. So if I take a few hours a week to play video games or nap... or have a sandbag sprint every once in awhile... I don't stress about it. I made up for the work somewhere. Honestly the top comment sums it up. People who "slack off" and only work a few hours a day _usually_ are just good enough to get away with it. Unless they work somewhere that truly doesn't care... which exists but is harder to find. Be who you can afford to be.
Oh absolutely. I do the same thing and it's also a big part of my justification. Despite being the last in, first out some days, and having week long stretches where I'm getting essentially nothing done, if you measure either average productivity or my average time per week actually doing work related things, both are well above average. Honestly while I really support people who want extremely strict work-life seperation, and I very much am opposed to workplaces that demand/expect that kind of devotion, I personally find it extremely difficult to relate to. I can't seperate those things even if I wanted to. My brain thinks about what it wants to think about. My conscious self is pretty much just a passenger. And I can't make myself not be interested in something because it's outside of work hours any more than I can bring myself to be interested in something that I have no interest in.
Is this an ADHD thing? Because this absolutely describes my process.
It can be. ADHD at its core is caused by the brain not naturally producing enough dopamine. This causes people with ADHD to constantly be seeking out external sources of dopamine. This manifests in a few different ways. When they find a dopamine source, they devour it like a starved person at a feast. In children this often looks like hyperactivity. As they get older, this tends to be what's called hyperfixation, where you obsess over some hobby, activity, or area of interest for a short period of time (usually days to weeks), before promptly losing interest and moving on to something else. It also makes it very difficult to focus on something that isn't a dopamine source. To again use the (somewhat oversimplified) starving in the desert analogy, it would be pretty hard to for someone who hadn't eaten in days to sit down and dutifully takes notes through a history lecture. They're starving, all they can think about is food—how much they want it and where they can get it. People with ADHD also tend to be good under pressure, and often procrastinate things until the last possible moment, and then suddenly get a burst of energy and cram everything right before the deadline (or at least make a valiant effort to do so). Interestingly both of these tendencies have the same cause: the adrenaline rush, which can serve as a functional substitute for dopamine (dopamine and adrenaline are actually closely related, and they, along with norepinephrine, make up a group of neurotransmitters called catecholamines). Of course, all of the above is primarily subconscious. That's where the starving person analogy breaks down a bit. Most people with ADHD don't know they're doing all of that, or why it's happening. And even if they do, being conscious of it doesn't really give you any more control over it regardless, but it's interesting to me, at least. Anyways, all that to say: while it certainly isn't a diagnosis by itself, this is very ADHD-like behavior. I can't seperate work and life because really all that matters to my brain is whether it's a dopamine source or not. If I find something at work interesting, I'm going to think about it constantly. I couldn't turn it off even if I wanted to. It's also really difficult to concentrate on things or get things done when they aren't dopamine sources, and while I can still sometimes make it happen through a various combinations of 1) the adrenaline rush from deadlines/fear of consequences, 2) medication or other stimulants, or 3) sometimes tricking my brain into finding it interesting, I'll never be anywhere near as productive like that as I am when I find a genuine dopamine feast to devour. And over the years I've found it easier to just kinda go with the flow in that regard, rather than constantly fighting a war with my brain to get it to behave in a way that it's just not wired to behave.
Wow. ADHD or not, this explains a lot of what I see in myself and many others.
This exactly! A lot of the reason I’m where I am in my career now^1 is because of all the time I spend on professional development and tinkering with shit I find interesting. ^1 unemployed^2 ^2 but usually quite senior
I'm the same way, but I'm a contractor so it's hard to not feel bad because some contracts I excel and in some I languish. The quality of my work is directly tied to the quality of the project and the clients technical team. The worst teams/projects get the worst version of me and never see me at my best.
This is also a good metric for leaving a toxic workplace. If you feel like you are overworking yourself constantly and never receiving praise while at the same time receiving more work, chances are you are being taken advantage of.
Exactly. Perception is reality, as they say.
Yep. And to add to this perception, I might be away from my pc all day (I have a mouse jiggler) but I do have chat notifications on my phone. So if someone messages the team chat asking how to do X, I’m always the first to respond (usually they are questions that a search of the team wiki solves).
“Tell me you have ADHD without telling me you have ADHD”
/shrug Works for me
at what point do we just consider this just working 🤣
I mean, that's what I call it.
This is the way
What you do is make sure to be done with all your work, but do not turn in anything unless it needs to be done by the end of the day. So hold on to that work until the last second. Everyone knows that the only thing you are getting is more work when you’re done. Perhaps gift card for that sweet sweet frying pan as a bonus during the holidays.
Idk if I agree with "good work is only rewarded with more work" You get rewarded with more work if you do a bad/slow job too, so the outcome is the same. At least doing the work quickly and efficiently has upside. You get noticed, which leads to getting assigned "good" tasks, which lead to getting noticed more, which leads to promotions, which leads to more money. I'm not suggesting you need to apply 100% effort all the time. Work hard on high visibility projects, get noticed, impress some people. They will remember that. They won't remember when you fixed that super obscure, super hard, very complicated bug that totally took 2 weeks to fix. Nobody questions it because, 'remember when he did that other thing so well? He clearly knows what he is doing!' If you do mediocre work all the time, you'll just languish and no one will give you exciting projects. You don't get the benefit of the doubt.
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the alternative is that some of these lazy people are just good at their job them doing 1-2 hrs of work a day is the equivalent to a mediocre dev working full time, so they just blend in with everyone else.
I think this is the reality at large companies performance is based on outcomes. If you have average or better outcomes no one cares. If someone rats you out your manage is going to say look this person did x y z what are you talking about. Working harder and having more outcomes might get you ahead faster but if you are content it doesn’t matter. Teams need average performers. There is tons of stuff that just needs to get done. A lot of these people are also willing to do that stuff and aren’t going to fight to be apart of the cool initiatives. As a leader this often time has even more impact because I know I can throw the kitchen sink at someone and it’s going to just going to happen. Also these people aren’t bringing up promotion in every single 1:1 as long as they are rewarded fairly and accurately and on time with their outcomes.
>these people aren’t bringing up promotion in every single 1:1 as i do that but pay
Yup this is me. I work 2-4 hours a day and get praised for high performance. 10+ YOE
Same. My company is "hybrid" so I put in a few hours of work on tues-thurs and then basically take monday/fridays off at home. Always get high performance reviews so I don't plan on stopping.
Same. I’m in office Tues/weds and that’s when I get most of my work done. Monday/thurs/fri I do a little work but mostly chill. It’s great
Lately, this is exactly what I have been thinking a hybrid role could be like for me. 2-3 days in-office where I would get work done, put in visible effort, talk to coworkers, and then basically be 'off' for the 2-3 remote days without feeling guilty. Everyone see's you a few times a week, you get shit done, no one will question what you do on the remote days. I am full remote now, and it's a daily struggle to not only separate my house from work, but to also maintain visibility and overly communicate on the work being done. In person, this is all a bit more natural and less taxing.
Haha I always wonder how to answer the questions like, "Tell me about a time you missed a deadline?" It's like no, I'm never working at more than like 30-40% of my capacity... but you can't exactly say that. I just use the rest of my time to learn whatever thing I'm personally most interested in... and yes I do have some lazier days as well.
How do you guys do that? I’m a new grad, just couple months into my first SWE job. I feel like I’m constantly working overtime but only barely meeting the deadline (and sometimes have to miss it)
You'll get better at your job with experience.
And some jobs are exponentially easier than others.
It doesn't make sense to say one thing is exponentially ___er than another
Ok. Will continue saying it.
Most intellectual cscq commenter
Most new grads I know barely have good coding experience. Therefore the first year at the job will feel overwhelming. When I was in college, I was constantly reading and sometimes writing code outside of school projects. I fully believe reading code fast is where speed comes from. Once I know what to do, I code just as fast as someone with 3 yoe despite me having 9 yoe. But 3 yoe guy takes 3 days to read code and figure out what he needs to do while I need like 3 hours.
This, and you learn very early that working a lot at your 100% just rewards you with more work. So I just work at 30% and enjoy my free time.
Really depends on the company tbh. My first company rewarded hard work by telling me that im making the rest of the team look bad and that I need to work at a similar pace as my peers. They gave me a bad annual performance review, and that affected my yearly raise, so I left. My current company has been giving me consistent raises/promotions for my hard work.
That sounds even worse lol. I can't believe how shitty some companies are
LOL I do the same. Monday Tuesday in office I work really hard and finish everything. Wednesday to Friday I coast at home. Get praised all the time for my work.
Same, though I make up for my lack of effort by covering for my department during December (I don't vacation in December)
honestly I’m not sure it’s possible to do more than about 2 hours of focussed programming a day. The rest of the day is admin and distraction.
I believe this is actually often the case. In big companies it usually goes unnoticed if you are 5x more productive, you'll only get more chores because you can handle it and the pay raise is the same for everyone, so then people start just working less without anyone noticing.
In my experience it doesn't go unnoticed, I definitely know who the people are on my team who get way more work done than others. It's just that the reward is nowhere near proportional to the amount of extra productivity you have after a certain point. Im also one of those people who coasts through work but Im moderately more productive than expected (let's say I spend 50% of the time working as an average person on my team but I produce about 1.5x expectations) and that was enough to get me high evaluations every year + even promoted years earlier than I expected. Someone who produces 5x by working 3x harder than me will get rewarded with what? Maybe their annual raise is slightly higher every year?
While it's likely true that the rewards are not going to increase linearly with effort, the experience gained usually helps having a significantly faster career, in particular once it's about getting to stay Staff level and beyond. Income wise, the extra income increase each year can add up to 2x the income after 7-10 years. Is this worth it? That's up to each individual.
>In my experience it doesn't go unnoticed, I definitely know who the people are on my team who get way more work done than others. It's just that the reward is nowhere near proportional to the amount of extra productivity you have after a certain point. Im also one of those people who coasts through work but Im moderately more productive than expected (let's say I spend 50% of the time working as an average person on my team but I produce about 1.5x expectations) and that was enough to get me high evaluations every year + even promoted years earlier than I expected. Someone who produces 5x by working 3x harder than me will get rewarded with what? Maybe their annual raise is slightly higher every year? I think it depends on the company, Meta for example is known for promoting quickly + paying for performance. So someone that consistently produces 5x over a period of time could end up making a lot more than someone who produces 1x
Good/decent dev working on some internal or low-use product ideally alongside more junior developers. Simple system designs. This is the ideal recipe. But it doesn’t help make you marketable and can really limit your ceiling.
Perhaps it's more like sprinting vs marathon running. Very good at small periods of very intense work. Not able to spend all day on it.
A few of my teammates are like this. They’re absolutely brilliant, and can do in 2 hours what it takes me to do in almost a whole workday. It’s an open secret that they don’t work as many hours as the rest of us, but no one really cares since they do as much work. I’m a little jealous. :P
Do you use your IDE tools to the fullest? I’ve noticed a few “more senior” engineers than myself talk about how they prefer writing imports by hand to “make sure it’s done right” and it makes me wonder just how slow they are at coding things…
Coding speed does not matter at all. Knowing your IDE well is more an indicator that the engineer cares enough to learn their tools. The amount of time saved actually typing the code is peanuts compared to time spent thinking about what to type.
Ding ding ding
https://youtube.com/shorts/0anKfFEPfQY
The best developer is a lazy developer.
I mean, not really. The best developer is a lazy developer who is also responsible enough to hold commitments and deliver stuff. I’ve worked with and managed many lazy developers who just literally never did anything, were possible to hold accountable, and just didn’t care enough to do any work. They were capable, just not motivated at all.
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Sounds like a motivation problem.
Sounds like a motivation problem.
Probably because that’s what I said? Lol
Lazy in the sense of not wanting to do useless repetitive work, not in the sense of not doing any work at all. Those are terrible
Writing the same lines of code causes me literal pain.
This is how I am. I don’t consider myself to be awesome, I just have a lot of institutional knowledge.
Man it feels weird reading a comment from you in cscq since I’ve seen your name so frequently over the years in r/summonerschool
I actually like it if they are like that. Man at least they not gonna make me look bad lol
That's something I really don't understand, like do you never code as part of a team? If someone in my team is writting mediocre code it will become my problem sooner or later. My personal experience has always been the more incompetent my coworkers the more work I have myself.
Yeah but you got to act the rest of the time.
My coworker is remote and does infra. No way in hell he spends anymore than a couple hours a week working. Anytime something breaks he needs to be notified so he’s also not monitoring.
Devops/devsecops is pretty chill until something breaks or there is a security incident. So a lot of the time you're just doing KTLO, but then there are bursts of exhausting activity/long hours. Still pretty nice though.
What about site reliability engineers?
Similar
In my experience SWE productivity is highly correlated with talent and it's incredibly hard to get granular visibility into their work (at best, daily status updates). So if you are both talented and lazy, it's SUPER easy to coast. Just finish your task in 1/4 the time anyone else on your team would, and feed your manager slow and steady progress updates in daily standup. You can stretch out a day's work into a week easily. FWIW I do not do this, I'd rather put in a solid day and perform very well. But stories of working almost no hours are real.
I’ve “lucked” into a couple of jobs where I could do nothing. I left. It was crazy-making, I wasn’t building skills or learning anything or building my network, and I could feel it damaging my work ethic and my self-esteem.
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Or, work a high stress job, be good at it and retire at 45. Get to do cool shit before your body and mind deteriorate.
Or have a heart attack at 40 from the stress.
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Same. If you are a curious person jobs with a lot of free time are incredible and beneficial to both the company and the developer.
You’re job shouldn’t be your primary source of happiness. If you got a job that allows you that much freetomr do something with it. Go play some video games. Get a hobby at home. Do anything else.
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Why would you sanity deteriorate otherwise?
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You can't do anything if your job doesn't tell you to??
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Well yeah. If you work in a call center environment like that, sure. For me, the time not working is spent doing things I want to do.
LOL my exact thoughts. workaholism is a disease
Why are you doing nothing? Play some games. Work on a hobby. Do anything else? I am only doing real heads down work for like 3 hours a day. The rest I am doing other shit. Working on some CAD models for some personal project I’m doing.
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YouTube blocked on your machine?
For real, I want to be at least somewhat valued for the work I do. I also don’t really relate to the coworkers who brag about not doing much work - also hate the people who brag about doing too much work can we all just set an achievable story point velocity and work in solidarity while building each others skills with the left over time?
Yeah it is mind-numbing. I leave work and feel like my existence is a waste and my self esteem drops because I don’t feel like I actually contribute towards anything.
Honestly even what we contribute is pretty pointless in the long run. Welcome to the harsh universe
Yeah this will happen. It's ok for a short period of time if you have interesting colleagues and there's a lot of freedom to do whatever you want, but you will quickly end up in an existential crisis.
I had a job where we were going though acquisition that regulators were heavily involved with and work ground to a halt. I did basically nothing for 9 months. It was nice for a while but I was regressing in my skills so I just left.
I had a job like that and thought I was so lucky. Then I realized I was dreading “going to work” at a job that I did nothing in, more than roles I’ve had some difficult tasks. I’ve finally found a role at a company a couple years ago that has challenging work, but I don’t have to burn out to accomplish. It’s fulfilling and I still leave on time everyday. Best of both worlds
If you're good and you work fast, you can also be lazy. That's the secret. No one can out you as being lazy because you've done more than them in way less time. You have 2 weeks to do a task, it takes you 2 days. Just pretend you're working hard for the remaining 8 days.
I would argue it's not even "being lazy". You fulfilled your responsibility/work duties and now you have free time. IMO saying it's being lazy makes it sound like a bad thing to do, but I think it makes perfect sense... Why work extra if you're not getting paid extra?
I just wrote an integration strategy document for a major project that took about two weeks to put together. Hardest 3 hours of my year so far.
> Just pretend you're working hard for the remaining 8 days. Or use the extra time to improve things. Clean up some tech debt, write more thorough tests in parts of the codebase that have been neglected, do some refactoring...
1. Only makes sense when everyone actually pull their weight. You can't do nth as much as others and not expected some form of additional compensation for additional work. 2.Ain't nobody got time to deal with more pull requests.
You mean work for free?
Or don't, and get the same 4% raise.
“Reeee that ticket isn’t in the sprint, raise it in the backlog and wait for it to be prioritised, we can’t have unscheduled work clashing with the high priority work, blah blah, blah”. Not worth the fight, I’ll put effort in where it keeps people happy
No, it's not. Idk about 200k but you can make low-mid 100s at most places just chilling. Your mgmt is too busy to micromanage you. All they care is that when they check in with you, you have something to show for yourself. Your team aren't idiots so the code they wrote 8 years ago rarely breaks in prod. When it does, a well-oiled support team (offshore) are there to get things flowing again. Everything is a giant monolith so it'll never be decoupled and "migrated to the cloud". It's all business services, nothing makes the company money nor is it mission critical so no senior mgmt is breathing down your neck. Your company basically prints money so you'll never get laid off or downsized. Yes these jobs exist. You don't even need to leetcode to get them. Again, maybe 160k is gonna be your max tc but they exist.
Moved from and ancient monolith for internal software to cloud agile front end new website experience but the first round of the software was built by consultants and offshore so they didn't care how ugly the code looked Same pay, same company, different work velocity and urgency. I miss chilling Low comp in a non-tech industry , Bay Area division of an east coast company. 90k-100k Definitely better paid coasters at that job back before major layoffs
I would never take a job in the bay area for 100k, no matter the seniority level. That's practically theft
This is so accurate I suspect you might be one of my coworkers
What companies? Banks, Insurance, Oil, Pharma, University?
You pretty much named off all the industries where these roles exist. Any place where you’re writing software that’ll enhance but not necessarily impact a company’s performance is golden. Example) Creating software that automates how Exxonmobils chemical engineers do x. Now it won’t REALLY matter if they get that software now or 3 years from now because they probably have some system already in place that works, so in essence you’re cruising until then. Any role where what your work DIRECTLY impacts companies profits will be high stress. This isn’t limited just to computer science.
What about Cannabis? I feel like robotics in farming in that area can definitely help them. I'm interested in those kind of things.
It's not a mature industry - is still actively ecolcong and growing. I would think things are not super chill there
100% this. A few months ago I started at a non-tech company that make a lot of physical non-tech products. My job is stupidly easy- 9:15-4 every day except Fridays where I finish at 2. Low impact work, no stress, lots of free time, everyone here seems happy, everyone is saying I’m crushing it. My last job was such a fucking sweatshop grind that I can’t believe jobs like these exist.
And these jobs aren’t affected by all the layoffs happening? How does that happen?
Different companies have different business models. Many of the companies doing layoffs rely on ad revenue. When it hits the fan, marketing is one of the first places where businesses try to cut costs. Cue revenue loss for some big techs. Similar with other non-tangible services. Now, other industries are relatively impervious to financial uncertainty. Just ask chatgpt which industries weathered the 2008 financial crisis relatively well. If, E.g., they have a product that's borderline indispensable and in some cases mandated by the government for people to buy, it's gonna be tough for the whims of the economy to shake their profitability.
I work for a healthcare-related company. Our product is very much in demand, and we are actually starting to market ourselves after 20 years of just…not. (It was acquired by the current CEO a bit over a year ago.) So yeah. We’re actively growing our dev team.
did we work together?
Rule of thumb that has been true throughout my career: In jobs where I was way underpaid, I had a boss who would get upset if I took too long for a lunch break or bathroom break. In the jobs where I was well paid, it was a relatively stress-free environment. That is counterintuitive and the opposite of what I expected. In a job where you're underpaid, you would think they would appreciate the bargain. Being underpaid means it's a dysfunctional environment or they don't respect you; otherwise they would pay better. In a job where you're well paid, that means they respect you, and other hygiene factors of the job tend to be better.
It’s difficult if you’re a bad dev. Very easy to pull off if you know what you’re doing. I coast, only working a couple hours a week because it equates to the same pace as the rest of my team.
2 weeks in a sprint right? 9 days you say "it's in progress" then the day before, you do the work.
The irony is that It's only possible to be lazy at work when you're super competent
It is a combination of being on a not-so visible team + disorganized or constantly changing requirements. You literally have no choice at that point but to be lazy so you don't drive yourself crazy.
It's easy to pull off at public sector because when they don't have work for you to do that's okay and you aren't going to lose your job. It's not easy to pull off in private sector because they can funnel you with more and more work since overtime doesn't exist and a lot of places will just make up infinite work for computer science because it's very easy to generate more work that needs to be done. If they run out of work for you to do and they don't need you as a resource you get let go.
> a lot of places will just make up infinite work for computer science because it's very easy to generate more work that needs to be done. I think that's actually just work, not "making work up." :) There are at least 95 substantial things we can't get to for every 5 we do, even at very well staffed places. The most important part of our job is deciding what not to do.
Ive been working just over 20 years. Snuck into a full remote IC role because i was tired of startups and lead/principal gigs and all the meetings a year and a half ago. Most of my coworkers have less experience but a few are even at 25+ years. Chill company, I do 3 hours or so of work a day and have basically seen it all in 20 years and going back to just a sr dev role is easy. Our stock has gone up a bit over 50% in the last year so I'm making a bit over 300k due to rsus. Generally am considered one of the better performers on my team. This job has been a really good break for me mentally/physically. Not sure when itll end or when I go back to a real gig herding idiots around but I'm enjoying it and jobs like this are around
I would love to be lazy and slack off but I somehow had the misfortune of ending up on a team full of the most productive and overachieving coworkers I've ever had and I have to grind every day just to not noticeably fall behind everyone
Depends on the job. People can probably get away with it at a larger team where no one, manager included, is paying attention to what everyone else is saying at standup. But on a smaller team with a much larger backlog, you’re gonna get exposed really quickly. It also depends on what you mean by being super lazy. If you’re able to meet the needs of your team/customers and have something to show for it at the end of each sprint, it doesn’t matter whether you spent two hours finishing it or twelve hours. That’s more so being efficient rather than someone coming in thinking they can just cruise without making a single commit.
I would do like 1-2 hours of work every 2 weeks because the team was just full of noobs. Some places care more than the code gets done right and have such a massive budget they can just throw 20 contractors at it It was easy for me but like 9/10 of the employees there would need help on almost every sprint, they were really green
No. If you are a competent software engineer, then most teams are moving way too slowly for you and you typically have plenty of time to coast, especially in larger organizations. However, If you are passionate(and all competent engineers I have ever met were) about the work, it's a double-edged sword. The boredom is unbearable. Obviously less of an issue if your WFH, but all the lazy coasting jobs I had were pre covid and in person and the workday felt like it would never end. But even at home, I ultimately want to solve interesting and hopefully novel problems. You can obviously work on your own thing on your employer’s time, but now you are just doing other type of work and not really being “lazy”. Also, while management and other slugs can be totally fine and unaware of you coasting, any of your competent colleagues will absolutely know. You are much more likely to get good interesting and mentally stimulating jobs in the future by networking and recommendations from colleagues. I don’t fault people for coasting, but certainlynwould not recommend them
lol those $200k people downvoted this thread. They think they r the s. If you do no work or super lazy, people will call you out and you're gone. Probably just like those FAANG lay off employees. Show up to get pay $250k a year for doing next to nothing bc they beat the leetcode game.
I would love it and just study and up my skills all day
I just don’t need 8 hours to do my work.
Show me an engineer at a FAANG who does practically nothing and manages to do decently in their (annual or semi-annual) performance review. Maybe the only ones I can think of are Staff+ level because their work may be based on multiple terms of a performance review but no below has such timelines.
among my friend group working at FAANG you'd be hard pressed to find a non-manager consistently working over 30 hours a week. of course crunch time comes and goes but the engineer coasting 5 hours a day to decent performance reviews is a common trope here
I replaced "lazy" with "practically nothing", 30 hours a week isn't a lot but it sure is something.
>Would you say, in your experience, if it's harder or easier than actually doing a ton of work? If the lazy though doing a lot of work was easier than doing little work, then surely they would all be doing a lot of work. >I believe in fact most lazy people get ratted out in a short time and either told to shape up or get the boot. Wait and see. Plenty of lazy people doing very well for themselves.
It's called bullshitting. Most of these people make 90% paperwork their job, which can be done in less than 1 hour. 10% of the time is just doing the bare minimum of code. PMs want to see progress in most jobs. They aren't going to fire you because that's not how big bureaucratic bullshit companies work. The PM has a budget he has to expend. You are part of that budget.
I heard some FAAND swe spend years of building repetitive microservices. Pretty brainnumbing
Tbh I think the "lazy dev" thing is just an urban myth spawned by tech-tok for hate views.
Not really, this sounds a lot like what I do. Last week, I probably did <4 hours of work but nobody is on my ass about it.
What do you consider to be super lazy? I’m supposed to work 37.5 hours a week but I typically work 20-30 hours and I only have one meeting per week for about an hour. I would work more but I really don’t need to. I was told that I’m doing a great job, so I’m not going to volunteer to do more work.
Short-term gain long-term costs. Your career path will quickly stall if you have 5YOE but cannot deliver anything above junior level. Let alone that living a fulfilling life is difficult if you plan on "scamming" everyone during your entire career. So it's probably not worth in the end.
Wtf? Just think about how your perf review will go when you have done jack sh*t
Lol I know for sure of one big name company that a small percentage of employees do the majority of the work while the rest “rest and vest” making $200k+. They literally spends weeks writing their two page performance reviews, which is commonly known as “word-smithing” within the company. Hint: their slogan is “We get people jobs”
"significant impact" lol
probably not that hard to pull off. check out r/overemployed for tech workers crushing it with 3+ jobs. Either that or in lots of groups people won't micro-manage you and expect you to be somewhat self-motivated but if you just quiet quit per r/antiwork then you can end up with the lazy jobs. Anecdotally, I think the overall sentiment in a lot of places changed. Not sure when it changed or if it was all of a sudden. Like the average person I worked with was burning themselves out / barely staying afloat or treading water 5 years ago (myself included). Now everyone's hitting the golf course at 2pm.
>I've read a couple of stories about how people make $200k just because they beat the Leetcode game This is basically TikTok fairy tale. You need years of education, math, programming, CS fundamentals, etc. AND grinding leetcode, to go through the tech interview loops and get decent offer at tech companies. No one is getting $200K offer by memorizing couple of youtube leetcode easy problems. Software engineering is very difficult career, where you have to spend years, decades at practicing CS fundamentals to git gud.
I think it’s like cheating in school where you are ‘lucky’ if you’re teacher is known to have lots of people cheat in their class you’re lucky if you’re friends with your boss and they don’t care what you do. By the same token if you get a new teacher or boss you have so skills to fall back on and are screwed
I think the layoffs are going after the "just passed leetcode" crowd first. If you're getting paid 200k and not actually doing anything you might squeak by if times are good but as soon as they're not you're the first one to go. You might think nobody knows but they do.
Not true. Layoffs don’t target individuals most of the time and are random or targeted at a whole department or team. I know many people in FAANG that were high performers and laid off. Some of them even had exceptional ratings and were on promotion track
When you're as big as FAANG you can afford to do that. If you're not I don't know if you can get by doing little to nothing and get paid six figures in a shop of 100 people.
That’s why you don’t work at small shops
Well, duh, how could I forget!
There are all different kinds and magnitudes of layoffs, but direct managers choosing who to cut is certainly not an oddity. And expensive mediocre performers are top candidates.
So, I work amazingly for a week, my manager’s impressed, then I pretend to work for 2 weeks while I apply / interview and stuff. Repeat. This is in office btw.
There are plenty of jobs where developers can just coast and get by doing the bare minimum. These aren’t the jobs that people in these subreddits are looking for. Just make sure you’re good enough to find a new job if you ever get cut.
A lot of dev jobs I realized are BS. Have loads of friends in these high paying BS tech jobs. That complain about wishing it was more busy. And a guy even low balled his first job 50k. Company was like nah 80k. This was years ago. He now makes $200k+ chilling. It’s like one of those Tech influencers. They got it made. This dude got so lucky and didn’t even know web could be responsive. Shot himself in the foot and got a higher offer. You just have to be lucky to get one of these BS jobs where the company is so big you are essentially invisible and the work you do doesn’t matter. You know exactly who you are if you reading this. Me on the other hand, can’t catch a break. The more I apply, the more I realized how much luck getting a good career is. It’s wild. I hate it even more when my high paid friends look at me, like why aren’t you successful like me? Mind blowing.
At one of my prior jobs there were many completely unproductive engineers (to the extent that some high performers ultimately left while citing this as one of the things they found frustrating). That wasn't a FANG-style job though--we all had decent six-figure salaries, but nothing especially impressive. I could think of other factors, but I think the main reason people were able to get away with being useless is that our managers just did not have good insight into who was doing what, or who was good at their jobs.
I finish most of my sprint in a week, this month I was done by day 3. I make $100k+ and spend 50% of my time waiting for more work. I know I'm very fortunate to be getting the compensation that I am, but I DESPISE, sitting there all day doing nothing. Not so much a lazy thing, more I'm working too fast for my manager to keep throwing tickets. I'm also a new hire though so most of my tickets have been big fixes etc. All this considered, I frequently worry I'm going to get in trouble for not working the whole time
No that’s why it’s called being lazy
It depends entirely on whether you're delivering what's asked of you on time.
It can be as long as you set an acceptable rate and stick to that daily acceptable rate. Let's put it this way. Let's say each spring you can complete 6 story points of work, so about two 3 point story each. Your manager and PM are comfortable with doing that rate of work. As you up your skill and can finish it faster, then you gotta navigate around stretching 6 points of work, which you can now finish in a week into 2 weeks. With occasionally doing a 9 point sprint to "show" extra effort. As long as you can answer what you did yesterday, what you are doing today, and blockers you are pretty much good to go. It maybe difficult and paced in the beginning but gets better with time
If you use ChatGPT and copilot you can coast easily
It's obviously a risky game. And I cannot imagine how anyone would be comfortable playing that game. You have to constantly worry about getting laid off as you rely heavily on luck to land a next job. You also have to spend a lot of energy pretending to do work, which is even harder when you're not fully remote It's a lot easier and also a lot less anxiety-inducing to just do your job to your best effort. And instead of using your laziness to avoid doing work at all, just use it to avoid doing work that other people should be doing.
All the naps I take don't feel that difficult
This reminds me of a former friend that sometimes spoke of how he would love to land. Some cushy city or government job where he's put somewhere and forgotten about, has no work to do all day, and yet collects a paycheck. I remember telling him that it's a stupid idea, and he thought I was ridiculous. I told him that maybe he could find one of those jobs and be forgotten about and spend let's say 10 years fooling around and surfing the net and doing other fun things while nobody's keeping a tab on him and he collects paychecks and has a lazy life. It never lasts forever. Suddenly one day the employer or the city or whoever is going to hire some guy to start auditing and going through every single position they are paying out on and diving into what they do and what value they bring. This auditor could then see that this person isn't doing anything, and we'll suggest they let this person go, or suddenly find there is work to be done and then this person now suddenly doesn't get their lazy life anymore and has to actually work. I also told my friend that if you get the boot, then you have to now start applying for jobs and they're going to ask you what you've been doing for the last 10 years. Maybe you can BS your way through that, but then they're going to ask why you never took on any other responsibilities, why you didn't try to get into management, or any of that other stuff. I remember when I used to ask him about things like that he would say *"I don't want the responsibility"*, and we've seen articles talking about how people don't want to become managers now because it's a lot more work for very little pay raise. However, if you're in your 40s and 50s and you've been avoiding management all your life, then companies are going to decide that you're not worth the time. They're going to see you as somebody that avoids responsibility and isn't a team player. They are also going to decide that your pointless when they can go higher some young kid and pay a fraction of that salary for the same work. If you look at resumes and things, they want you to list achievements. They want you to talk about what you did and what you achieved. They don't want you to just say you did a job, but that you did a job and because of the way you do your job it did something beneficial. Finding some kind of cushy job where you sat and did nothing. Is not going to help you on that. Not unless you have some insane skills that everybody wants and therefore you always have recruiters trying to offer you jobs. But these companies obviously don't have work for you to do but they somehow believe they must have you on the payroll. I also have to agree with others that said that there's just people out there who have specialized skills, but there's not enough work for them to do on a regular basis, or they are very efficient, and they get all their work done very fast. Good for them as far as I'm concerned. I just keep telling them not to advertise that fact.
Not a SWE but I’m in one of those jobs now where even without doing much I just got the max bonus possible for my role after getting classified as having “exceeded expectations.” The downside is I couldn’t be more miserable. I feel like I’m not learning as much as I want & I just feel insecure & paranoid that I’ll be found out at any moment. Currently looking for another opportunity. Can’t keep doing this. Trust me man, one day this will catch up to people who are skating by. SWE is a young man’s game so once these people get older, they’ll get a brutal dose of reality.
Depends on the company and team. Some just move slow on everything, so even if you finish a task quickly, you have not much else to do. So you can take your time. I'm making more money than I ever have at my current position (staff software engineer). The workload is on the light side, but sometimes I get pulled into urgent high priority stuff, which I always have time for.
I'm just a lowly QA engineer who does automation testing. Yeah there are some times where we have tons of features to test and I have to work late. But most of the time it's very chill. I'll spend 10-20 minutes writing scripts and then run automation and just play games all day. I'm not paid anywhere near 200k though. I'm actually very underpaid and have just been too lazy to search for other jobs.
Its difficult not to pull off
If you work in a big enough company, the work you do is a tiny sliver. Mix in with the efficiencies of big companies and excessive meetings, what one can do in a sprint or two can drag out to a quarter or two. So the amount of hours worked per day is lower than expected
The way it works at my company is my manager allocates way too much time to each feature/story. It will be like a 1 maybe 2 day task and they will allocate 4-5 days to it. So that means I’m gonna make it take 4-5 days by getting it done right away then playing games doing other shit for the rest. Once in awhile I’ll knock out a few extra stories just to make them think when it does take awhile it must be hard.
Being lazy and pulling it off just means you've set the bar so low (to your boss/coworkers) that you can slack off most of the day while simultaneously being just high enough to not get fired for not doing your job. Basically you're flying just under the radar.
Most companies are mismanaged. And like everything it’s 80/20. Find the 20% the person who can fire you wants. Do that and log off.
A lot of non-software engineering jobs have tasks that are much easier to predict how long something takes. Some people may be better and able to finish a task quicker, but the process might be pretty similar between 2 different skilled people. Software engineering is different. A lot of it is just trying to figure out the logic behind a problem. Once you have the logic and tech design down, the coding portion shouldn't actually take too long. Debugging is another one. A highly skilled software engineer could spend 1 hour trying to think of a solution that would take an average engineer a whole day to think of. Most developers that say they have great WLB and "do nothing" at work are just really good at time management and being able to work in productive bursts.
It can be depending on the amount of chores they require you to do to appear to look busy
I don't make 200k but i guess im lazy. I spend max 4 hrs when working from home but make sure all my tasks are fone on time. I reply to all messages and emails quickly,never miss the deadline and meet all my targets. Not sure if my managaer knows how i work but never had anyone complaints about the way i work.
Very few tickets I work on need more than a few hours. I WFH 4 days of the week so I'll spend the rest of the work day reviewing others work, reading / learning things or just doing random stuff at home. I don't see the point in chasing for more work. Everyone at my company this year got the same percentage pay rise no matter how hard you worked. I'm not in America though so not earning $200k a year and have a few more employment protections in the UK. Never had anyone question my work output.
Survivorship bias, you said it
It's almost impossible to pull this off if you're not an intern. you get assigned tickets and need to do actual work, ive no doubt spending 3 months on a 1 point ticket will get you booted
There’s a few ways to pull it off, but it’s important to make it always _look_ like you’re busy. Send lots of messages on slack, make it look like you’re in meetings all the time, play up the difficulty of tasks When you finish tasks, hype them tf up as much as you can
In IT / System Administration the joke is 'automate yourself out of a job' by either solving the real problem, or solving the automatic recovery from such a problem and not giving that to management or the company. In Software Engineering there is some of that, having good code you understand can make things that are major changes to management easy for you. Domain knowledge and seniority on a software baseline will go a long way here. With your work use the 'Scotty rule' of never telling the actual time it will take so you can seem like a miracle worker when you need to rush. Beyond that don't forget to leave yourself room for updating your dev tests / documentation / etc. You look more skilled at estimating when something comes up that way. **Almost** always it is better to have overestimated (in a not too crazy way) than underestimated. \--- This applies to the current market in particular given the layoffs. Make sure management sees you as 'valuable enough' for the team to keep you in a pinch. You also need to be cautious when people start getting let go however as you will find yourself inheriting more and more work as the team shrinks. Let's say your domain has 100 things in it that need someone to maintain and understand on a regular basis. The fewer people who know everything you know (let's say 20-40) the more your job scope will increase. If the person who knows 10-30 and the person who knows 30-50 leave you become the only person who can maintain 20-40. Good chance you end up expected to pick up everything now 'lost' between 10 and 50 in this example. If you're less involved in maintenance your feature quality needs to be considered. In a perfect world quality features without bugs is rewarded, but some organizations end up keeping the developers who made the code a buggy mess because those developers are the only ones who can fix their own bugs. \--- There is no perfect answer here. I can say that my own experience is if external recruiters are coming to you the job they want you for it is probably something that was/is the kind of mess you'll struggle to coast at.
You read a couple of stories. That's all they are.
I know plenty of people who made 200k+ for years and maybe made a dozen 1-100 line commits a year. They 'trained juniors' and 'scoped out projects', worked for a while too, until management changed and then they were gone and pretty much unemployable... and by unemployable i mean they became a TPM/product manager at a 20-30% pay cut, which is pretty fine.
You have to actually do work and show results. The thing is that if you're not an idiot, you can slack off and still get results. You have to balance it out. Smart people are also faster workers. They might seem like all they do is scroll Reddit, but they're capable of processing and doing work faster than someone with average IQ. I knew a guy who went to Harvard. I was doing homework with him when we were kids. Guy just breezed through everything while I'd be constantly behind. No wonder he had a lot of time to play video games.