One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 hours a day

Re:One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 ho... by acdha on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @08:07AM (#25927728)

This is a bad survey, both for questions of selection (busy people don’t do surveys like this) and the nebulous question of what constitutes real work (my guess: this is telling you who has lots of meeting, Jira, etc. overhead).

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.

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Re:One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 ho... by toyg on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @08:15AM (#25927830)

> is this just clickbait

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.

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Re:One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 ho... by acdha on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @08:29AM (#25927969)

It’s very appealing because it tells people that the reason they’re not making more is not due to anything they could personally improve at but rather their employees taking advantage of their trust and generosity.

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Re:One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 ho... by username90 on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @09:16AM (#25928497)

A managers salary correlates with how many subordinates he has, the more lazy people the better since then he can motivate to expand the team with even more lazy people. It all works as long as the managers superiors don't notice the entire department is lazy, so as long as butts are in seats the manager will be happy since it makes him look good for his managers.

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Re:One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 ho... by acdha on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @10:09AM (#25929076)

Lazy buys into a dysfunctional framing: it’s far more common to have poor or conflicting incentives. If managers are just measuring by how many seats are full, they are rather by definition getting exactly what they asked for.

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Re:One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 ho... by scaramanga on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @08:15AM (#25927831)

This appears absolutely to be clickbait posted for entertainment value.

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.

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