However consider that there's entire classes of people who never do anything as satisfying as coding during their day. All they do is communicate in some way: making powerpoints, schmoozing with customers over lunch, sitting in meetings to discuss what the business should do. Typically you'll never find one of those people saying they don't do much. In fact, many of them feel compelled to sit in the office - face time - to look busy. If you were to narrowly define their work like I've done with software devs, many people would end up with maybe a couple of hours a day, mainly reading some docs to decide what their business unit should do.

That reads sarcastic, but in today’s workplace you really need to know the legal framework you’re working within or you’ll probably be fleeced or worse. How lawyers charge actually is instructive.

> “The time we have alone, the time we have in walking, the time we have in riding a bicycle, is the most important time for a writer. Escaping from the typewriter is part of the creative process. You have to give the subconscious time to think. Real thinking always occurs at the subconscious level.” - Ray Bradbury

> "When the manuscript had lain in a pigeon hole two years I took it out one day and read the last chapter that I had written. It was then that I made the great discovery that when the tank runs dry you've only to leave it alone and it will fill up again in time, while you are asleep -- also while you are at work on other things and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebration is going on." - Mark Twain

> ‘I didn’t stir out yesterday, but sat and thought all day; not writing a line; not so much as the cross of a t or the dot of an i. I imaged forth a good deal of Barnaby by keeping my mind steadily upon him; and am happy to say I have gone to work this morning in good twig, strong hope and cheerful spirits. Last night I was unutterably and impossible-to-form-an-idea-of-ably miserable.’ - Charles Dickens

I regularly catch myself thinking and telling my wife I've had a very unproductive day and didn't work much when I spent the majority of it working through internal memos, email, and otherwise just getting caught up on the company happenings.

It isn't really work. It's squarely in the bullshit side of "bullshit jobs".

I don't really miss label other things like documentation, research, testing or project spiking but those too very regularly get forgotten and don't feel significant to bullet point in my daily standup.

As someone who finds coding completely unsatisfying and who instead chose to have a career sitting in meetings to discuss what the business should do, I find this pretty funny.

I can’t imagine anything being as satisfying as communicating well with another person.

What a narrow world view.

There are “schmoozers” who are completely satisfied and coders who dread their work lives...

There are also schmoozers who create value beyond anything many single coders could ever dream of: by raising capital, creating multimillion sales, persuading and inspiring others, etc.

And I say this as someone who switched from a management job to designing and coding because I personally find it much more fulfilling.

Just assume the people you're writing to aren't all idiots. If you really think OP meant what you thought, ask them.

The original quote or calling non-coders “schmoozers” (their words, not mine), are in fact, no longer there as far as I can see.

It wasn’t taken out of context, there was not that much nuance to the sentence I quoted.

Apologies.

For me, I promise you that is not the case. I've always been a lazy motherfucker. I didn't get into automating things with technology because I liked to work, after all. Over the past 10 years I'd say I did honestly work a full work day when I was my most productive, but my median work day was probably around 3 hours/day. As in, I spent the rest of it reading books in a terminal so it looked like I was doing work, or something similarly useless to my employer.

My employer never complained, and in fact I earned a reputation for being the guy who can get to the bottom of hard problems, deliver the simplest and quickest solution to an immediate need, or reason out and mitigate for all the ways something could go wrong. I would say I was actually good at my job despite not actually working that much. Thus, I am constantly annoyed that my employer is so insistent on butts-in-seats, to the extent that during a global pandemic I've only been working from home during the time I was contagious with the goddamned plague (all of my department caught it thanks to this policy).

Due to my rapidly failing mental health, I'd say I put in a median 3 hours/week of work right now. Still, very few people seem to have noticed and no one has said anything.

Edit: And just to clarify, I always got stellar performance reviews, quick promotions and large salary bumps. Corporate just doesn't demand much from you so it is hard to motivate yourself to do the job when nobody else performs well either. This includes Google etc, at least the teams I worked at there.

Occasionally there is an emergency where you work the full 8 hours being the hero, then it is back to slacking off.

>As in, I spent the rest of it reading books in a terminal so it looked like I was doing work, or something similarly useless to my employer

What are some of your other favourite things like this? Some:

* Using rtv to browse reddit via CLI

* Browsing RSS feeds and news sites, eg with elinks.

* Learning a totally new programming language / tool / paradigm.

* Roguelikes, eg ATOM, Nethack

* Random IRC chat rooms (meh)

* And as you said, reading books

My real question: is this just clickbait or is this fodder for the kinds of companies which market things like monitoring software to toxic managers? I have memories of working at a consulting shop which tried to entertain the idea that the reason they weren’t profitable wasn’t due to two of the partners cutting deals below estimated costs but rather something like people slacking or not tracking their time precisely enough. Tracking at 5 minute intervals didn’t change the big picture but it did dramatically increase the amount of time spent on time tracking.

It's ideological reinforcement for their target audience. Most managers and business types have no idea what their underlings actually do, but they have a suspicion that they are not the lean-mean-money-makin'-machine they (ideally) should be. So business-oriented publications like this pander to their fears and strengthen their resolve to whip slackers into shape.

The actual phrasing of the single question appears to be about "real" or "focussed" work which many people seem to have interpreted as being "not meetings" or "other work I do which I feel is pointless busywork" - certainly how I would interpret it.

I get up pretty early, so I like getting a lot of work done before 9am standup. By then I've usually lost motivation/focus and may work an hour or 2 more. I really get mileage out of the "work always fills the time allotted for it" law.

Half of me can't wait to get back to an office where I'm with others which provides motivation/pressure to work, but the other half does not want to deal with the commute.

I have worked with many freelancers and worked (as tech consultant) in many big and small businesses; a lot of capable tech people, in my experience, vastly understate the time they actually work. When they are in meetings, all day, they feel they didn't work and report hours accordingly. I have to point out to them regularly that even though they reported 3 hours, I was in meetings with them for 6 (and yes, I find that generally quite pointless so I understand the sentiment), so I think it's closer to 8-9 hours.

Are you trying to reduce that unsustainable amount?

Am I supposed to count meetings I didn't need to be on, or that could've been an email, or that get rescheduled at the last minute for 15 minutes later than originally?

Still work: if it’s preventing you from focusing but not personal time, it’s work. Your employer choosing to waste your time on low productivity meetings is something to try to improve but you shouldn’t feel any obligation to make up for it with your own free time.

A Zoom call you can basically ignore but have to be around. Still work but not "working".

While not impossible, I find it implausible ;)

Eg when I am oncall out of hours, I could browse HN almost all the time, but it is still low-intensity work, even if nothing breaks and pages on that day.

The idea was two-fold: reduces paperwork, and incentivizes the SRE team to reduce alerts that have to be dealt with.

In any case, my main point was that anything that prevents me from having a beer or going bungee jumping is 'work' in my books. Though, obviously, there are different levels of intensity.

Not using part of my life in the way I see fit because I need to make a living? Work.

Also, the comment that the Amazon employee made is similar to what I hear across other online forums such as Reddit and Twitter. Seems Amazon has created a really toxic environment for everyone involved.

Playing ping pong and taking 3rd lunch and faffing on HN are not working.

- "working" is not defined clearly so it's possible everybody meant a different thing - "admit" implies some sort of guilt on the developer side.

- add 3 docstring for 3 setter functions (max 10 lines each). (1 day)

- fix a codesmell, ~15 character syntax change, whose 'fix' is given freely by the analysis plugins' web app. (1 day)

- change a version number in a file (1 day)

In total I'd say he does maybe .5 hours of work a day...

I'm probably around 4-5 hours, but knowing hes claiming overtime ontop just kills me lol.

Tech workers have a valuable and, in the grand scheme of things, rare ability that is immensely useful to Humankind. Perhaps some very talented people can do top quality work for a couple of hours a day, but deliver immense value in these two hours. Is this a reason for concern?

"My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as 'lines produced' but as 'lines spent': the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger."

Also I don't know exactly how they measure this, but I have a feeling it might be the time people spend pressing buttons..

As others have said, it all depends on what you call "work".

In my experience, working part-time means getting paid only the proportional amount for the benefit of only having to be present for that part, while at the same time having to deliver the same output as the full-time.