I’m in the top 30th percentile for household income in the United States. I recently had a performance review, was qualified “fully successful,” and when I specifically asked my supervisor if I was doing anything wrong, he reassured me that there was not a thing I could change to do better. I receive regular monetary bonuses and praise, and was rewarded with a certificate of achievement just two days ago.
All of this despite the fact that I perform real, skilled work approximately one or two hours per week, and spend the rest of my time surfing the web, in plain view of everyone walking down the hallway, not even bothering to alt-tab when my supervisor comes into my cube to chat with me. (ETA: personally, I consider my work ethic to be atrocious, and if I were my supervisor, I would not tolerate what I have just described.)
I take the money provided and I spend it on various frivolous pursuits, and donate to SIAI. I’m not sure about long-term promotion potential, considering my lack of actual work, but it seems fairly rational in some sense that I take from the irrational and put in only what effort is required to achieve my goals, thus maximizing output/input (productivity).
The emotional impact of not making a difference is distressing, I agree, but that’s a different, rather involved, topic.
One of my coworkers (like you, at a government job involving software) had occasionally said “you can only read Dinosaur Comics so many times before you have to find an open-source project to start contributing to”.
We created a lot of our own work; we were given a lot of leeway to find and fix problems ourselves, even if the problems hadn’t actually appeared yet. We were encouraged to find research areas to work on, and use our time to do that as long as it didn’t detract from our other duties, which probably only consumed 4-10 hours a week. So, we had license to work as diligently as we wanted, and for the most part on nearly anything we wanted. However, we generally found that most days, we weren’t able to be productive for more than 4-6 hours, and ended up spending a lot of time reading webcomics, writing toy programs, and drinking tea in the break room.
I think for most people, 30 hours of high-quality creative work a week is about their limit. I’m sure some people are exceptions, but some of the most productive programmers I know (from FOSS projects I worked on to government jobs I held and even a stint at Microsoft) spend about half their “day” goofing off.
Can your job description be in any sense likened to guard labor? That might change my interpretation of your position somewhat. (I don’t mean to pry, by the way; disclose as much as you feel comfortable disclosing.)
Why do you interpret the situation as reflecting poorly on your work ethic? Both you and your employer have exit clauses from this work contract, and nothing you wrote suggests you are deceiving your employer into keeping you on the rolls. I’d feel perfectly OK about the situation, ethically at least.
Emotionally is, I agree, a different matter. I once found myself in a slightly similar situation (temporary rather than long-term, a couple months more or less). My issue wasn’t so much that no-one was interested in giving me work to do, and that I could for a while show up at the office a couple of hours a day and get away with it. The main issue was that I wouldn’t knowingly violate the exclusivity clauses in my contract, and so this job was preventing me from doing meaningful work. So eventually I quit.
But I wouldn’t mind at all a situation in which I got paid by someone who didn’t get anything in return, if the contract otherwise allowed me to to meaningful work. (You wouldn’t call someone like that an employer but probably a “patron”.) I’m self-motivated enough that I believe this would be a net gain to society.
it seems fairly rational in some sense that I take from the irrational
...and you give to the rational. A modern Robin Hood, I like that. ;)
Can your job description be in any sense likened to guard labor?
It’s “firefighter labor.” Supposedly, if the system I support goes down, it’s $1,000,000 per hour, which would mean if I save an hour of downtime, I’ve paid my salary for several years. But the number was likely a wild guess in the first place, and I received it 5th hand, so I have no idea as to the truth of the matter. All I know for sure is that it’s an important and costly system.
I can’t feel that number at all, and certainly no one around me seems to care much about it, either. Everyone I work with on problems with the system cares more that there’s a “red light” that our Big Boss will see. Big Boss gets upset with red lights, not that anyone ever gets blamed, punished, or held accountable. Must be a status thing.
Why do you interpret the situation as reflecting poorly on your work ethic?
Potentially because I’m idealistic, and realize that I have “untapped potential” and other buzz-phrases. More likely, I have emotional problems dealing with an on-call, firefighter position, and inappropriate low self-esteem. This is not helped by the fact my bonuses are not linked to actual events, nor are the awards. My supervisor lies on the applications for political reasons (quotas, etc.).
But I wouldn’t mind at all a situation in which I got paid by someone who didn’t get anything in return, if the contract otherwise allowed me to to meaningful work.
I don’t have an exclusivity contract preventing me from doing additional work, but I do have rigid security on my work computer, and I don’t have any projects I feel like contributing to at the moment. “Meaningful work” is an elusive concept to me.
I’d rather be reading a book, but that’s too blatant to get away with.
Fire up a VM then, or shell out somewhere. You’re technically competent enough that any network access—much less unfettered recreational web-browsing access—is enough.
and I don’t have any projects I feel like contributing to at the moment. “Meaningful work” is an elusive concept to me.
I feel like you’re not even trying. There genuinely are no FLOSS project you want to contribute to? Well, I suppose that’s possible. Then why not become an auto-didact and start working through textbooks? SICP may be too elementary for you, but SICP is far from the only textbook available online. Why not pick up a productive hobby like Wikipedia editing, or proofreading for Project Gutenberg? Or, or, or...
If you have plausible rationales for all of these, I think I would diagnose your real problem as akrasia or general depression/lack of energy.
I would like to explain that, intellectually, I understand that I have severe akrasia and likely clinical depression. However, it primarily manifests itself in the form of the phrase, “I don’t care,” and it is a recursive lack of caring, such that I do not care that I do not care; at least, that’s how it feels. I find it very difficult to acquire motivation under such conditions.
How does one start to care? I’ve thought about it a great deal, and never came up with an answer outside of, “you just do.”
I’m surprised no one has suggested it, but if you think that you have clinical depression I would strongly suggest seeking help. I have been depressed, I sought help and life moves on.
I hardly needed a sad person’s false praise. Not being in pitiful emotional state, that has been described more lucidly that I could by others, is all the reward I need.
You asked for advice, I gave some. If you’re a jerk to others in a similar situation you may not have much to care about afterwards.
I don’t know about you, but if I eat too much high glycemic food, I get “I don’t care, I don’t care” running in my mind, and it’s very hard for me to do things.
I’ve got akrasia problems anyway, but too much refined carbs makes it worse, and it took me quite a while to find out that the “I don’t care” soundtrack wasn’t just an emotional problem—I was poisoned.
The other traps in this are that it’s hard to remember that I need to eat more carefully if I’m knocked out, and the taste of sweetness does a good job of briefly cutting through the depressive haze.
I’d be surprised if anyone who doesn’t care has cared enough to figure it out.
That said, you might start examining the things you do care about. You bother to go to work every day, after all. And you eat food rather than poison. You might try to examine those for general categories of things you care about.
I’d already thought of that: looking at implicit cares and attempting to shift them into a position of explicit cares, but it’s not easy, especially since most of it feels arbitrary and is carried out through habit or aversion to discomfort. If all I “really” care about is present physical comfort, I’m in bad shape.
This made me think of what pjeby calls the pain brain. In short, our actions can be motivated by either getting closer to what we want (pull) or away from what we try to avoid (push). Generally, push overrides pull, so you may not even notice what you want if you’re too busy avoiding what you don’t.
It may be useful to explore your goals and motivations with relaxed mental inquiry and critically examine any fears or worries that may come up.
One of my side projects is trying to figure out whether programs in a self-maintaining computer architecture I’m in the middle of designing would be pushed to foom. If they would, obviously I wouldn’t build it. If they wouldn’t it might have a fairly big affect on the future trajectory of computer systems.
Be warned though making it and making programs in it to make it actually useful is far more than a two man project.
ETA: I’ve become uncomfortable with this line of conversation, and feel that people are putting too much pressure on me in an attempt to other-optimize. Thank you for your attempts to assist, but I would rather that this thread end here.
I was in a similar situation. I fixed it by convincing my employer to allow me to work from home. Now I spend my slack hours on other contract jobs, math or music, not surfing the web.
Troubleshooting, enabling new functionality in, or patching a ridiculously expensive piece of software managed by a ridiculously large team of technical people.
ETA: I understand that those one or two hours are potentially capable of making up the rest of my salary, at least from the perspective of someone who might want to pay me to perform such a duty, but I would also state that the lack of general feedback for the other 38 to 39 hours, and the requirement to show up to the office and generally pretend not to be blatantly non-busy, is akin to the problem humans have with large numbers: it’s very difficult to feel like I’ve accomplished something for a few, tiny moments of work involving check boxes and following documentation, and it’s highly irrational that I have to pretend I’m getting paid for 8 hours of hard work a day, when all they really want is 1 per week. That’s in addition to the fact the dollar amounts involved invoke the large number problem itself...
Reading and updating documentation; assisting related teams; developing improvements to the system; refining existing business or technical processes; coordinating between various technical teams; other things I can’t think of right now, I’m sure.
The reason I don’t do any of that (or make it my one hour a week for a particular week) is that I get all the rewards without it. See the thread on incentive structures.
So, is your quality of life suffering because your employer is being blatantly stupid? Would you be happier if you were actually working 40 hours a week?
What do you do? Having something to do, and having something asked of one, is far more fulfilling than being asked to do nothing. Eliezer’s example of the exhausted peasant comes to mind. Who would actually enjoy doing nothing all day?
I am afraid your question is based on a misreading of my question. I didn’t mean to imply that the “correct” answer was that having nothing to do was better than having to do work. I was honestly asking, so that I could provide actually useful advice, instead of simply assuming and possibly saying something stupid.
My apologies. I took “Would you be happier if you were actually working 40 hours a week?” to be sarcasm, since it seemed like Rain had already answered the question. I hope I didn’t offend too greatly.
My apologies. I took “Would you be happier if you were actually working 40 hours a week?” to be sarcasm, since it seemed like Rain had already answered the question. I hope I didn’t offend too greatly.
Yes, it is suffering, and I would be much happier. For the moments when I have had steady work, in the form of large projects taking actual effort (the last was a couple years ago), I much enjoyed showing up to work and oftentimes would stay a bit late just to solve the intellectual puzzles.
Note that “work” like pointless meetings, forms, etc, are not satisfying either, but I’m able to largely ignore that part of the environment if I wish.
Have you considered working in a start up? Rolf Nelson who writes The Rational Entrepreneur may be able to help. I assume that you are relatively skilled at programming and thinking, since you post here and get away with only 2 hours of work a week. Where are you currently working? A really well known firm, a legacy firm, or what? If a start up wouldn’t work (if, for example, you need someone to enforce the work on you), you might want to consider applying to work at Google or another top valley firm.
ETA: I’ve become uncomfortable with this line of conversation, and feel that people are putting too much pressure on me in an attempt to other-optimize. Thank you for your attempts to assist, but I would rather that this thread end here.
I’m in the top 30th percentile for household income in the United States. I recently had a performance review, was qualified “fully successful,” and when I specifically asked my supervisor if I was doing anything wrong, he reassured me that there was not a thing I could change to do better. I receive regular monetary bonuses and praise, and was rewarded with a certificate of achievement just two days ago.
All of this despite the fact that I perform real, skilled work approximately one or two hours per week, and spend the rest of my time surfing the web, in plain view of everyone walking down the hallway, not even bothering to alt-tab when my supervisor comes into my cube to chat with me. (ETA: personally, I consider my work ethic to be atrocious, and if I were my supervisor, I would not tolerate what I have just described.)
I take the money provided and I spend it on various frivolous pursuits, and donate to SIAI. I’m not sure about long-term promotion potential, considering my lack of actual work, but it seems fairly rational in some sense that I take from the irrational and put in only what effort is required to achieve my goals, thus maximizing output/input (productivity).
The emotional impact of not making a difference is distressing, I agree, but that’s a different, rather involved, topic.
One of my coworkers (like you, at a government job involving software) had occasionally said “you can only read Dinosaur Comics so many times before you have to find an open-source project to start contributing to”.
We created a lot of our own work; we were given a lot of leeway to find and fix problems ourselves, even if the problems hadn’t actually appeared yet. We were encouraged to find research areas to work on, and use our time to do that as long as it didn’t detract from our other duties, which probably only consumed 4-10 hours a week. So, we had license to work as diligently as we wanted, and for the most part on nearly anything we wanted. However, we generally found that most days, we weren’t able to be productive for more than 4-6 hours, and ended up spending a lot of time reading webcomics, writing toy programs, and drinking tea in the break room.
I think for most people, 30 hours of high-quality creative work a week is about their limit. I’m sure some people are exceptions, but some of the most productive programmers I know (from FOSS projects I worked on to government jobs I held and even a stint at Microsoft) spend about half their “day” goofing off.
A similar statement I use: “It’s a lot harder than you might think to do nothing all day.”
Can your job description be in any sense likened to guard labor? That might change my interpretation of your position somewhat. (I don’t mean to pry, by the way; disclose as much as you feel comfortable disclosing.)
Why do you interpret the situation as reflecting poorly on your work ethic? Both you and your employer have exit clauses from this work contract, and nothing you wrote suggests you are deceiving your employer into keeping you on the rolls. I’d feel perfectly OK about the situation, ethically at least.
Emotionally is, I agree, a different matter. I once found myself in a slightly similar situation (temporary rather than long-term, a couple months more or less). My issue wasn’t so much that no-one was interested in giving me work to do, and that I could for a while show up at the office a couple of hours a day and get away with it. The main issue was that I wouldn’t knowingly violate the exclusivity clauses in my contract, and so this job was preventing me from doing meaningful work. So eventually I quit.
But I wouldn’t mind at all a situation in which I got paid by someone who didn’t get anything in return, if the contract otherwise allowed me to to meaningful work. (You wouldn’t call someone like that an employer but probably a “patron”.) I’m self-motivated enough that I believe this would be a net gain to society.
...and you give to the rational. A modern Robin Hood, I like that. ;)
It’s “firefighter labor.” Supposedly, if the system I support goes down, it’s $1,000,000 per hour, which would mean if I save an hour of downtime, I’ve paid my salary for several years. But the number was likely a wild guess in the first place, and I received it 5th hand, so I have no idea as to the truth of the matter. All I know for sure is that it’s an important and costly system.
I can’t feel that number at all, and certainly no one around me seems to care much about it, either. Everyone I work with on problems with the system cares more that there’s a “red light” that our Big Boss will see. Big Boss gets upset with red lights, not that anyone ever gets blamed, punished, or held accountable. Must be a status thing.
Potentially because I’m idealistic, and realize that I have “untapped potential” and other buzz-phrases. More likely, I have emotional problems dealing with an on-call, firefighter position, and inappropriate low self-esteem. This is not helped by the fact my bonuses are not linked to actual events, nor are the awards. My supervisor lies on the applications for political reasons (quotas, etc.).
I don’t have an exclusivity contract preventing me from doing additional work, but I do have rigid security on my work computer, and I don’t have any projects I feel like contributing to at the moment. “Meaningful work” is an elusive concept to me.
I’d rather be reading a book, but that’s too blatant to get away with.
Fire up a VM then, or shell out somewhere. You’re technically competent enough that any network access—much less unfettered recreational web-browsing access—is enough.
I feel like you’re not even trying. There genuinely are no FLOSS project you want to contribute to? Well, I suppose that’s possible. Then why not become an auto-didact and start working through textbooks? SICP may be too elementary for you, but SICP is far from the only textbook available online. Why not pick up a productive hobby like Wikipedia editing, or proofreading for Project Gutenberg? Or, or, or...
If you have plausible rationales for all of these, I think I would diagnose your real problem as akrasia or general depression/lack of energy.
I would like to explain that, intellectually, I understand that I have severe akrasia and likely clinical depression. However, it primarily manifests itself in the form of the phrase, “I don’t care,” and it is a recursive lack of caring, such that I do not care that I do not care; at least, that’s how it feels. I find it very difficult to acquire motivation under such conditions.
How does one start to care? I’ve thought about it a great deal, and never came up with an answer outside of, “you just do.”
I’m surprised no one has suggested it, but if you think that you have clinical depression I would strongly suggest seeking help. I have been depressed, I sought help and life moves on.
Congratulations.
?
I hardly needed a sad person’s false praise. Not being in pitiful emotional state, that has been described more lucidly that I could by others, is all the reward I need.
You asked for advice, I gave some. If you’re a jerk to others in a similar situation you may not have much to care about afterwards.
I don’t know about you, but if I eat too much high glycemic food, I get “I don’t care, I don’t care” running in my mind, and it’s very hard for me to do things.
I’ve got akrasia problems anyway, but too much refined carbs makes it worse, and it took me quite a while to find out that the “I don’t care” soundtrack wasn’t just an emotional problem—I was poisoned.
The other traps in this are that it’s hard to remember that I need to eat more carefully if I’m knocked out, and the taste of sweetness does a good job of briefly cutting through the depressive haze.
I’d be surprised if anyone who doesn’t care has cared enough to figure it out.
That said, you might start examining the things you do care about. You bother to go to work every day, after all. And you eat food rather than poison. You might try to examine those for general categories of things you care about.
I’d already thought of that: looking at implicit cares and attempting to shift them into a position of explicit cares, but it’s not easy, especially since most of it feels arbitrary and is carried out through habit or aversion to discomfort. If all I “really” care about is present physical comfort, I’m in bad shape.
This made me think of what pjeby calls the pain brain. In short, our actions can be motivated by either getting closer to what we want (pull) or away from what we try to avoid (push). Generally, push overrides pull, so you may not even notice what you want if you’re too busy avoiding what you don’t.
It may be useful to explore your goals and motivations with relaxed mental inquiry and critically examine any fears or worries that may come up.
Oh. Well, I suppose if you already understand and accept it, then there’s nothing more for me to argue for.
One of my side projects is trying to figure out whether programs in a self-maintaining computer architecture I’m in the middle of designing would be pushed to foom. If they would, obviously I wouldn’t build it. If they wouldn’t it might have a fairly big affect on the future trajectory of computer systems.
Be warned though making it and making programs in it to make it actually useful is far more than a two man project.
Fancy wrapping your brain around that?
No, thank you. I’d rather suffer where I am.
ETA: I’ve become uncomfortable with this line of conversation, and feel that people are putting too much pressure on me in an attempt to other-optimize. Thank you for your attempts to assist, but I would rather that this thread end here.
No requirement for moving, just something to do rather than surf pointlessly during you job.
Do you work for the government?
Yes.
Did you know the phrase, “good enough for government work,” actually used to be a compliment?
If you get done in two hours what they expect to take a week, more power to you.
I was in a similar situation. I fixed it by convincing my employer to allow me to work from home. Now I spend my slack hours on other contract jobs, math or music, not surfing the web.
Yes, that would help a great deal.
What do you do when you’re performing skilled work?
Troubleshooting, enabling new functionality in, or patching a ridiculously expensive piece of software managed by a ridiculously large team of technical people.
ETA: I understand that those one or two hours are potentially capable of making up the rest of my salary, at least from the perspective of someone who might want to pay me to perform such a duty, but I would also state that the lack of general feedback for the other 38 to 39 hours, and the requirement to show up to the office and generally pretend not to be blatantly non-busy, is akin to the problem humans have with large numbers: it’s very difficult to feel like I’ve accomplished something for a few, tiny moments of work involving check boxes and following documentation, and it’s highly irrational that I have to pretend I’m getting paid for 8 hours of hard work a day, when all they really want is 1 per week. That’s in addition to the fact the dollar amounts involved invoke the large number problem itself...
What do they actually, explicitly expect you to be doing when you’re not doing what they (really) pay you to do?
Reading and updating documentation; assisting related teams; developing improvements to the system; refining existing business or technical processes; coordinating between various technical teams; other things I can’t think of right now, I’m sure.
The reason I don’t do any of that (or make it my one hour a week for a particular week) is that I get all the rewards without it. See the thread on incentive structures.
So, is your quality of life suffering because your employer is being blatantly stupid? Would you be happier if you were actually working 40 hours a week?
What do you do? Having something to do, and having something asked of one, is far more fulfilling than being asked to do nothing. Eliezer’s example of the exhausted peasant comes to mind. Who would actually enjoy doing nothing all day?
I am afraid your question is based on a misreading of my question. I didn’t mean to imply that the “correct” answer was that having nothing to do was better than having to do work. I was honestly asking, so that I could provide actually useful advice, instead of simply assuming and possibly saying something stupid.
My apologies. I took “Would you be happier if you were actually working 40 hours a week?” to be sarcasm, since it seemed like Rain had already answered the question. I hope I didn’t offend too greatly.
My apologies. I took “Would you be happier if you were actually working 40 hours a week?” to be sarcasm, since it seemed like Rain had already answered the question. I hope I didn’t offend too greatly.
Yes, it is suffering, and I would be much happier. For the moments when I have had steady work, in the form of large projects taking actual effort (the last was a couple years ago), I much enjoyed showing up to work and oftentimes would stay a bit late just to solve the intellectual puzzles.
Note that “work” like pointless meetings, forms, etc, are not satisfying either, but I’m able to largely ignore that part of the environment if I wish.
Have you considered working in a start up? Rolf Nelson who writes The Rational Entrepreneur may be able to help. I assume that you are relatively skilled at programming and thinking, since you post here and get away with only 2 hours of work a week. Where are you currently working? A really well known firm, a legacy firm, or what? If a start up wouldn’t work (if, for example, you need someone to enforce the work on you), you might want to consider applying to work at Google or another top valley firm.
No, thank you. I’d rather suffer where I am.
ETA: I’ve become uncomfortable with this line of conversation, and feel that people are putting too much pressure on me in an attempt to other-optimize. Thank you for your attempts to assist, but I would rather that this thread end here.