The Mexican replied, “only a little while.” The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.

The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?” The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”

The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.” “But what then?” Asked the Mexican.

The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”

“Millions – then what?”

The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

> "Anekdote zur Senkung der Arbeitsmoral" ("Anecdote concerning the Lowering of Productivity" in Leila Vennewitz' translation) is a short story by Heinrich Böll about an encounter between an enterprising tourist and a small fisherman, in which the tourist suggests how the fisherman can improve his life.

I don't know Leila Vennewitz, but her translation of at least the title isn't all that great: "Anekdote zur Senkung der Arbeitsmoral" means not "Anecdote concerning the Lowering of Productivity", but "Anecdote for the Lowering of Productivity".

> The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

> I don't catch them. I just go to one of the other fisherman's boats from my company and take a few of their tuna. That way they get up at 5am and work there asses off and all I have to do is carry a couple of their tuna in to earn a living.

Note: I didn't say he stole the tuna. All the tuna needs to be carried in. He just didn't do as much work as the others. He did the minimal work, "carrying in a few tuna", instead of the full work, "spending hours catching tuna and also carrying them all in".

The OP isn't running their own business. If they were sure, they could decide to only work enough to pay the bills and enjoy the extra time. Instead the OP is at a company. If they're not doing the work then others are probably picking up the slack and the OP's possibly effectively riding off their work. I get that's harder to account the larger the company but it becomes very clear on small team or small company.

What an incredibly odd moral distinction, if you step back and think about it from an objective perspective. As long as there exists an idle class that lives off of previously accumulated capital (including intellectual or social capital), 5-10 hours a week will be a commendable contribution to society in my book.

Why does owning a business exempt you from contributing to society? That's an extraordinarily value-laden judgement.

So. If we're going to moralize like this, I'll flip the tables and assert that receiving stock dividends from companies at which you've never worked is theft that should be criminalized ;-)

Morality is no guide here because we immediately happen upon deep issues of political-economy. It's more productive to focus on the law. OP's employer carefully chose their corporate structure and hired devs into exempt salaried roles FOR A REASON. If they want him to work a certain number of hours and have recourse if he doesn't, then they can switch the role to hourly non-exempt. They won't. For a reason.

Excusing all the ways in which corporations short-change tech workers while moralizing about watercooler talk or reddit time or whatever is textbook master-slave morality.

General hard agreement on the "is this really how you want to spend your life?" comments, though.

No, because when you receive dividends, you have provided something of value to the company (capital). Without your money, the company wouldn’t be able to generate that revenue.

When you steal fish, you are providing absolutely no value.

No, for the absolute majority of stock and stockholders that's not true. You only provide capital to the company when you buy stock in an IPO. Otherwise, the money you paid -- usually much more than the company received in the IPO, which could have been a century or more ago -- went to the previous owner of the stock, who sold it to you.

> When you steal fish, you are providing absolutely no value.

As I understood the parable, carrying fish to market for the more hard-working fishermen was the protagonist's cushy sinecure of a job.

My point was simple: the moral question here is far from obvious. Whole books have been written, whole wars have been fought. We will not resolve this issue in an HN thread. But it is an issue on which people disagree.

So. Focus instead on legality.

And, in a legal sense, you are absolutely 100% dead wrong. Even in the US, which is extremely friendly to capital and has very lax labor laws, OP is NOT stealing. Not in a legal sense.

There is nothing illegal about a salaried employee sitting at his desk and twiddling his thumbs. To the extent that you could build a case, it would be PR suicide to actually prosecute.

If the company OP works for wants to count unproductive time as theft, then they would make their devs hourly non-exempt employees. They choose not to do so for good reasons.

But what's good for the goose is good for the gander. If the company is constrained only by law, then labor should be constrained only by law. Don't impose moral boundaries on yourself when your employer insists on at-will contracts, non-competes, NDAs, and exempt status.

Again, I think working 5-10 hours a week at a job where you're nominally expected to work 40 hours is probably not the ticket to a good life. But the issue isn't one of morality or even shop ethics. OP's employer almost certainly doesn't give two shits about any sort of morality or ethics that aren't enforced by the law or the marketplace. So imposing a moral expectation on OP is gross asymmetry.

Should OP think of this as a problem and fix it? Yes. But sure as fuck not because some trust fund kid's dividend is slightly smaller than it could've been.

When you steal from other fisherman and call it your own, that's different because there is not necessarily consent from the other fishermen. So the two are different scenarios.

I'm not saying that OP is in the right or in the wrong. In OP's case, it seems like the company usually consents. And it's unclear whether OP is actually plagiarizing others' work. Maybe the company is just happy with their "low" output.

To be 100% clear, I'm not making a statement about whether it's ethical/moral/legal to twiddle your thumbs on the job or not. I'm pointing out that your analogy is not a good one.

I’ll definitely be referring back to your comments when I need to convey my similar thoughts.

I don't take fish off other people's boats. I tell people I was fishing for 8 hours when I was really fishing for 2 and maybe blame the weather for why I didn't catch more.

----

Take an electric pencil sharpener

Take a case of white-out; you might need it one day

Take stuff from work

It's your duty as an oppressed worker to steal from your exploiters

It's gonna be an outstanding day

- King Missile, Take Stuff From Work, emphasis mine.

Second, I claim that the wealthy character in the story above has significantly greater ability than the non-wealthy character to: (1) have accurate situational awareness about disasters (e.g., can distinguish shit actually hitting the fan from shit narrowly missing the fan (possibly via superior sensing apparati, more likely, just by delegating the task)); and (2) have well-equipped (read: expensive) bug-in/out plans in place. Thus, even in cases where disasters are mitigated against collectively as you claim is possible, the wealthy character will be in a better position to maintain their pre-disaster quality of life than the non-wealthy character.

That said, this is all a little too removed from a concrete comparison for my liking. Maybe you have one in mind? Ideally, an example where collective efforts at disaster mitigation basically made outcomes for individuals insensitive to the wealth of those individuals.

That leads to doing nothing but mucking about on the Internet, not actually furthering anything for yourself. So it can have an impact on you mentally. I've felt that myself before.

Now, some people have a well-defined work output where the boss just says "I want this, that's all". So if you do it in 3 hours in one day or 40 hours in one week, it doesn't matter, meaning you can actually use those other hours for yourself.

I mentioned in another comment how working remotely has been a big productivity boost for those non-working work hours. Similar to tayo42 in another reply, it provides me the opportunity to do a lot of things that I previously did outside of work hours. One example is that I used to wake up an hour earlier to get exercise in before work. Now I sleep in and get that exercise in during the work day.

I characterized this as a problem because a) you made it sound like one, and b) in my experience, people in this situation are usually unhappy and struggling in other areas. If you can do hard work when you want to, and simply choose not to, great. When I have coached people who are in this situation, that is not usually the case - usually, they got in to software because they liked programming, and they enjoyed their work previously, and now they don't, and want to get back to that.

If that doesn't apply to you, great. I would say by way of warning though, that a) it's very likely your teammates have noticed and are frustrated with carrying you, and b) I would urge you not to get over-confident about your job prospects never changing. Any programmer over 50 can tell you that working a few hours a week was a totally viable career in 1998 and totally unviable in 2002.

Oh and one more thing: if the main thing holding you back from 40 hour weeks is that you wouldn't capture the value, the solution is well-known: become a contractor. It pays better, and your income will scale linearly with hours worked. A lot of people find contract work less satisfying, but you said you don't care about that, so there you go.

My guess is, you are doing enough and aren't enough of a troublemaker that your boss cares to do anything about it, but you're not fooling anyone either. In a structural downturn, they're getting pressure to downsize and you're at the top of the list. None of your colleagues who move on to better pastures will vouch for you anywhere else because they don't trust you to pull your weight. You find yourself pretty unsupported at that point.

At the end of the day, I personally choose to stay sharp at work because it's my personal ethic, but there's also a real risk component that you may want to consider, although as long as the industry is structurally growing you probably don't have to worry too much about it.

The OP said they’d been in the industry for 2 decades, so they may have got into the workforce at the end of the dot com bubble. It wasn’t pretty for people who had been in the industry for a 5-10 years. Many forced career changes, big salary cuts, early retirements, depending on the person’s reputation, CV, and skills.

I don’t think the next contraction will be nearly as globalized as the dot com contraction, but it’s worth assessing whether your niche or specialty is prone to that kind of lull in the hype cycle.

In a contraction, the interview charades of big tech are replaced by street cred, because nobody can afford to hire deadwood. It’s brutal to be mid-career with no street cred in a recession, and one should try to avoid it.

I’m not saying one should avoid work in web3, autonomous driving or whatever, but it’s prudent to have an escape hatch just in case.

Be known as a hard worker, smart, and genial, and invest in developing skills that legitimately create value for any company, and you’ll be OK. It can be tempting to coast, but it’s not an effective strategy if your industry i has bearish downturns during your career.

I founded a company and we were successful, but we really tried to continue the momentum. We had a group of 7-10 engineers, built over time and strenuously recruited and managed. And we have plateaued over the past 5 years. Now looking back I realized that probably a lot of the engineers had an attitude similar to what you describe. So they really ended up damaging their co-workers, because less growth at the company means limited advancement and less money all around, some layoffs during tough times, worse company culture, etc. It also wasted some of my professional time, because I am passionate about the industry and want to accomplish something in it.

Do you feel bad when the Product Manager is eagerly contacting you and trying to pull together all requirements and engineering estimates for the next sprint, or whatever, that you are sandbagging that person's career?

Now, I know what all the HN burnouts will say, "Screw them! If I can trick somebody out of a wage, that's my right!"

But also think about why they weren't pushing harder to help the company grow. Were you not compensating them enough? Did you allow morale to go down, and then do nothing about it? Did you push your people to work unreasonable hours because you should have hired more people, but didn't want the added expense?

Or maybe your product just wasn't compelling enough, or your addressable market not big enough.

There are plenty of places where I would expect the blame to go, and "my employees didn't work hard enough" is likely at the bottom of that list.

In our case, it wasn't about options or compensation. It was a slow poisoning of the well as a few obvious slackers were allowed to persist without consequences. If your team lead is only showing up for 4 hours per day and nothing bad happens to them, you suddenly don't feel like putting in more than 4 hours per day yourself. In fact, you get paid less than the team lead, so maybe you only put in 2-3 hours. Then your junior teammate sees this happening and decides to push it even further to 1-2 hours per day.

Meanwhile, the backlog piles up more and more. If you take a task, you're just inviting more work on yourself because you'll be responsible for it. You'll also have to convince the lazy teammates to help you with all of the blockers that fall in their domain, which they don't want to do. Better to just sit tight and claim you're still working on something else.

From the management side, it's critical to address severely underperforming employees before the mindset is allowed to spread. Some times it's a simple matter of engaging with the employee and determining what's wrong. Other times, some people just like pushing the limits of how much they can get away with. They won't do any work unless prodded by a manager. They either need constant attention from their manager, or if that's unavailable they need to be removed from the company (sadly).

If you feel happy, you are happy. No need to over think it. If you feel you have what you need and are meeting your professional, emotional, familial, and financial responsibilities, sounds like you're good to go to me.

> There are literally days in which the only time I spend on my job is the few minutes it takes to attend the morning stand-up. Then I successfully bullshit my way through our next stand-up to hide my lack of production.

At that point, it's not about grinding harder or going above and beyond. This is a problem of misleading everyone around you.

It's not just the company that suffers. These situations usually result in the rest of the team having to pick up the slack to get things done. The person doing little to no work is taking advantage of their peers' productivity.

Had a gig like this, the codebase was so shit it took days to do simple stuff, it was highly domain specific logic I cared nothing about and I was going to leave ASAP.

Most of the time l bulshited my way through turns out a lot of the features got scrapped because they weren't necessary in the first place (ie. there was another way to do it for eg. or client didn't really need it), requirements got updated that would have made any progress I did worthless,etc. There were two crunch weeks before releases where I did some OT to help push stuff out the door (wasn't even my backlog) other than that yeah - did two months of work in 6 months I was there.

In the real world, someone who is 4-8X more productive than their peers is also significantly more senior and therefore paid significantly more. You don't see seasoned experts on the same teams as inexperienced juniors all getting paid the same.

In my experience, the best team cohesion happens when everyone is putting in similar amounts of effort.

What if the seasonal expert is the 5 minutes work person, and the juniors the 5 hour work people (yeah, I said 4 hours because I don't believe any developer can output 6+ hours per day consistently)

On the other hand, as a seasoned expert, I sometimes solve an issue in 5 minutes which took a junior a day to still not figure it out.

I think 15 years would do, to be named a such.

I guess you end up in a 5 minute job when your work is really boring.

> You don't see seasoned experts on the same teams as inexperienced juniors all getting paid the same.

But don't you? There are tons of accounts now of juniors joining and getting inflation adjusted salaries, and a loyal old dog discovering that his 'high salary' is actually just a smidgen above what this new young buck is getting

It's possible that you've got cause and effect the wrong way round: consider maybe that your self worth is derived mostly from your extracurricular activities because you're failing at work. You put almost no effort in, achieve very little, are almost entirely disengaged, but, since you're a normal human, being a loser doesn't fit your self-image so you look to find meaning elsewhere in areas where you are engaged, connected, even passionate. It's a coping strategy.

Finding meaning at work doesn't mean you no longer get to derive self worth from your family or your hobbies, rather it just enlarges the pie of your self worth.

The advice given in the comment you're replying to is to find a job or career where you will be able to apply yourself. It really isn't bad advice. You should work more because you cannot exist without working, and what you're doing now is damaging yourself psychologically.

Now I'm not trying to be mean here. I was in your shoes VERY recently. I suspect you've got yourself to a point where a couple years of pandemic stress and working from home has disconnected you from your colleagues and your company and you no longer want to reconnect. Whatever mission you are working towards was probably never all that engaging for you, but take away the human connection and that's been laid all too bare. And I expect you're worried about this ending, and having to go back to a grey office and a shit commute and losing the freedom that you think you have today. You don't want to "lean in" (as awful managers would say) because you recognize the mission as unfulfilling, but you can't separate yourself entirely because you need the money. It's not healthy.

It could be time to take a risk and move. You know you can work remotely, there are jobs out there. There are better missions, companies with values that perhaps align closer to your own. That's scary, but finding a new gig where you'll have to work will not erase all the progress you've made in your hobbies and domestic life; those are things which make you more rounded, and they're yours forever. You can keep up with all that - because, after all, you're mostly just wasting time on the internet today.

I say all this as someone who's struggled with your situation in the past and made a move recently to tacke it. It was frightening for me. I will say that I am considerably happier when my days are full of work, and it hasn't got in the way of any of my side projects or interests, which are numerous and very consuming. If anything, it is more energizing.

You say that like it's a bad thing. I would much rather my self worth be derived from the things that I choose to do, versus something I have to do in order to survive.

The bottom line is, you have to find a way to get satisfaction from somewhere to be mentally healthy, and if have to work anyway, getting some satisfaction out of it is preferable to not getting any.

Even in tech, we don't always get to work on what we want, or what we'd find most fulfilling. Often the best we can do is put up with bullshit 75% of the time while we try to carve out some meaning in the other 25%.

Sure, "well find another job". Often easier said than done, and there are no guarantees that the new job will be more fulfilling.

I know a lot of people who get satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment from their jobs. I also know a lot of people who don't. I also know a lot of people in a weird middle state: they derive that sense of accomplishment, but they have to deal with so much bureaucracy/politics/bullshit, that it erases most or all of the good feelings they get from that accomplishment.

> The bottom line is, you have to find a way to get satisfaction from somewhere to be mentally healthy, and if have to work anyway, getting some satisfaction out of it is preferable to not getting any.

Absolutely! But I think you overestimate the number of people who are truly able to do that (HN is definitely a skewed population in that regard). And there's nothing wrong with just punching the clock, and deriving happiness outside of work.

> Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

If you so choose, you can set up your life so your non-work time is damn near close to 100% happy and fulfilling (and if you find something lacking, you have the ability to change it). I doubt there is a person alive who can claim their work time is 100% happy and fulfilling and that they have control over it.

I have a hard time imagining Steven King doesn't enjoy writing. Same for people like Ken Thompson.

But the strategies mentioned to find more meaningful work are probably more useful if you're doing 10-15 hours of real work a week and then spending the remaining hours sitting in front of your computer browsing YouTube and doing nothing of value while pretending to be at work. If you have to pretend to be at work, then you can at least fill that time at the computer with something productive.

I will also say, most discussion usually paints the devs not working as much as less productive, whether explicitly or implicitly. But that isn't necessarily true either. I'm the top contributor for this calendar year at my company (public but not F500, about 100 developers) but averaging ~4 hours a day of actual work.

well, if you measure skills by amount of time people spend on HN, I think you miss something.

Yeah, you don't have to work more. But imaging what would be if you wanted to work more. Not because you have to or forced to. But because you find your work so interesting that you want to put more hours where just to do it. Thats what at least some of commentors are trying to tell you. I were in positions where I could simply don't do anything the whole week and nobody would care (I was TL of the great team). But I didn't want to. Even when I actually avoid doing tasks my manager wants from me, I always find some cool stuff to do, to improve code I already have or investigate something or just bring shiny new tehcnology thing.