From my experience once you have ~1,000 employees AND a complicated org chart/raci/etc then it’s fairly easy for people to do little work and hide. In smaller orgs too many people see you, and in orgs that are running efficiently if you don’t do your job it causes issues.

Tons of people hiding at oracle from my experience :)

My problem with big orgs is how inefficient they can be.

At IBM I worked 5 hours a week and still was in the top 20% of my team.

I used to work for a government organisation and it was the same. Once I got disillusioned with what I was doing I would put in bare minimum effort which was, show up for standup every day, filibuster a bit then checkout. I was still one of the highest out-putters in the department.

The way you phrased that, I'm not sure if you were a programmer or a senator.

Showing up for standup every day might be more than what’s required for senators.

I just quit a vaguely similar kind of environment because there's always a few internal wars and suddenly people invent shit about who is the reason nothing happens and spread lies to save their ass.

And then there's turnover. People might just never get to know those people. Some may proactively avoid contacts through various means so nobody steps into their office only to realize nothing happens.

We had a remote freeloader find a position at Oracle before his short-term contract with us was done.

Onward and upward :)

I'll do you one better. My friends from a team I used to be in had a guy who simply didn't know how to code. My friend would at times act as a ghostwriter(for free) so that the poor bastard wouldn't get fired.

Eventually the guy was promoted.

The Dilbert principle is real.

Management often spends so little time with you that the difference between them perceiving lots of work and little work comes down to what you say in your daily standup.

I’m a fully remote worker.

To my managers the work I do is a lot.

To me it’s about 4 hours a day. There’s no deceit in this. What I tell them I’m working on is what I’m working on, what I’ve declared as ‘finished’ is factually ‘finished’.

To the company, I’m still contributing the things I agreed to, responsive to the people who come to me for help (as a senior) and on track with the projects assigned to me.

When the wall comes and I just cannot will myself to stare at the same problem anymore, that’s it for the day. Sometimes that takes longer than others, sometimes it’s 5 hours instead of four. Sometimes it’s a whole 8 hour day.

So..matter of perspective, I guess. The agency and autonomy are nice, though. Some people want a shorter work day given. I’ve just decided to take it.

> To me it’s about 4 hours a day. There’s no deceit in this. What I tell them I’m working on is what I’m working on, what I’ve declared as ‘finished’ is factually ‘finished’.

I've come to realize this isn't always a mistake on management's part. I work at a company where developers use the full day to get tasks done because there is so much on our road map. There is absolutely no slack, when something new comes up, something else needs to drop.

We are hiring, but now I spend some of my time training them. I've seen friends work for companies that keep some % of their experienced developers time idle so those devs tackle issues that might pop up.

Ha! We could be on the same team. The person would sit with someone to get help for each of his tasks. Eventually he was the only one promoted.

I want to know how this happens :)

The fundamental problem is that the bar for "get hired" is higher than the bar for "get fired." Invariably, this means some people will sink to the minimum just shy of the latter.

People bitch about stack ranking, and it is terrible for moral and politics, but it solves exactly this problem.

Because there isn't enough manager gumption & attention time to address this systematically, manually.

Or sometime you gave up on the organization being able to provide a meaningful workflow.. that’s usually when I switch job because it depress me to fake it too much and fuck around all day on a computer while not being actually free to do whatever I want. It’s fine for few months while looking for something else and trying to let management know that you have no backlog.

It's as if the Robin Hood mentality met with Jack Sparrow: take what you can and give nothing back. However, they aren't interested in the well-being of the company because they have more important places to put their effort and dime, such as hobbies or their family. It's an aversion to doing 50% more work for a 15% raise.

As long as it pays more to half-ass your current job and take on a second, then people will prefer doing that. 100% effort is rewarded correctly almost nowhere.

In the software industry it should be pretty easy to track tickets someone is working on and compare that to how long similar tickets are completed by coworkers.

With low level coding cogs that might be somewhat feasible, if you have enough of them. But there are a few things that I've seen which get in the way of that kind of metric.

1. Story pointing is not granular enough, i.e. one 2-point story is not necessarily the same as the next one. Freeloaders pick off the easy ones and pace themselves to keep their 'productivity' in the acceptable range.

2. I've seen a lot of teams, especially smaller ones, evolve into a situation where each member has an area they specialize in. Then stories start getting preassigned to them. Hard to compare two coders not pulling from the same pool of work.

3. As an IC becomes more senior, a larger fraction of their work happens outside of stories, and becomes more difficult to quantify. Some of the most effective freeloaders I've witnessed were mid/senior devs who could crank out a typical story very fast and craft plausible explanations for where the rest of their time went.

That would need a boss who knows how much work each ticket really entails.

"Where's my red stapler?"