Not sure how others here feel, but I have to say that when I've found myself in situations where there isn't much work to be done I find it utterly soul destroying.
Always feel guilty doing anything else in down-time when I'm billing a client and so sometimes end up sitting in a weird stand by mode, feeling like I'm somehow being lazy.
Building software should not be paid by the hour. It's a weird thing.
If I can build a piece of software in 10 hours, and another dev needs 40 hours....it seems kind of odd to pay the slower less resourceful dev MORE for a slower delivery?
That's all part of work when you do this kind of work. You can not just write code 8 hours a day, indeed, it's impossible, and if an employer tries to make you work that kind of sweat-shop environment (sometimes it seems like that's the actual goal of some Scrum implementations), it won't actually get them your best or even most productive work.
But there are people on HN who say that they literally spend the majority of their day the majority of days just doing things that are not work at all. I dunno, watching TV, running errands, riding their bike, mindlessly social media'ing, playing video games. Like they only spend a few hours a week on anything related to work at all.
I agree with GP that for me that's utterly soul-destroying, I end up feeling useless and unmoored. (The other day on the radio I heard someone reference a study that busy-ness to life satisfaction graphed as an upside down U, if you have too little free/leisure time you are unhappy, but people with too much are unhappy too, there's a sweet spot in the middle. Perhaps that's what we're talking about here).
But maybe different people are different.
Or maybe in new remote world, if you spend that time on projects you find rewarding (writing poetry, I dunno) instead of just goofing off, then it's not really "leisure" anymore, and you won't have that problem. If also you don't have any ethical problems with it (maybe your employer is awful and deserves to be drained of money), or just worry about getting caught.
Nobody can sustain that much work for a long period of time.
I would much rather be a good well rounded reasonable dev than someone doing others work. That is a huge red flag. Every dev should be responsible for THEIR work, not their team mates. Unless of course they are doing code reviews.
Arbitrary deadlines are bullshit but I never mentioned deadlines. At the end of the day, people get paid to do a job and businesses earn revenues by doing things. Someone needs to do those things, and if these hypothetical developers "barely doing any work at all" aren't doing it, someone has to at the end of the day or everyone is going home.
What is more common is that effort levels are similar within the same department, but wildly different across companies. I've worked at places where people considered themselves slackers when they were doing 60 hours plus on call time. I've also worked at others where entire teams did about 2 hours of actual work a day, and the rest was spent on long lunches, ping pong and retro consoles.
Sometimes I need to take my foot of the gas. But I also appreciate that, when I do, someone else has to pick up the slack.
When I encounter teammates who only take, take, take, and never give, either they leave or I do (depending how much influence I have over their employment)
I'm a long time paramedic who has seen more people die than I care to remember.
some days I'd rather be an order picker at Amazon. It's a lot easier to clock out and not bring work home with you. I might actually make more money at Amazon, to be honest.
Devs can get by working few hours a day, some barely do any work at all.
I refuse to stare at a screen 8+ hours a day. I take healthy breaks and create boundaries.
I rarely have to solve puzzles at work. The grunt of the work is almost the same thing over and over.