Don't listen to this guy. You don't have to change your own identity and your own personal compass to fit your company. You also don't have to succumb to the "starving Ethiopians" fallacy and take whatever crap job is given. This life has a billion paths you can take. Understand the tradeoffs and make a calculated decision but follow your own path. Granted you may end up homeless. But from experience there are way more people slogging it out at work doing the 9-5 putting in the bare minimum than people who find a passion and go for it. If your passion is basket weaving you are probably screwed but given that you are an engineer there are a million problems that need to be solved. Find one, might even be within your own company.

>You say the company is evidently pleased with your work and that may be true, but now you're part of the problem. You think the company tolerates shitty work, so you've decided to tolerate shitty work. Don't.

For a non-manager in a large organization, the choices are pretty much accept your work environment or leave it. Fighting the entire company's culture as a low level employee is like trying to move a mountain by pushing harder.

To OP: Accept the pace your department moves at, and look for little victories. Your never gonna get to write a new app in a week and be a hero in your current company/department, but there is still some satisfaction to be found in ironing out little wrinkles one at a time.

If/when you leave, look for a job you want to go to, rather than just looking for a way out of your current job.

I have a subtly different take on this; op is cheating themselves. They work in a field famous for people deriving immense satisfaction from their job, but they aren't because they are living down to the expectations of others.

This seems like good advice, but is presented poorly.

You're meeting expectations, which is great, but don't stop there. You recognize that you (and your teammates) could be doing more, so make it happen. You're entirely capable and empowered to do so:

- Fix that technical debt. - Identify better tooling and demonstrate it's value to your teammates. - Proactively find things your software could do better and write about them. Don't be discouraged if people don't bite on the first few, you'll find one eventually that's too good to not pursue.

Sure, you could accept the status quo and coast like some of your teammates, but you'll be unhappy (and bored). Do what makes you happy -- identify, evangelize, prototype and build.

All of this doesn't mean you're lazy for having posted this -- just that you need encouragement to make the things happen that'll make you happier and more fulfilled at the end of the day.

This is nuts. This guy doesn't owe the maximally extractive amount of his labor to the FAANGCorp. If they're happy with his work output, fine. He fulfilled his end of the bargain.

Totally deranged protestant work ethic run amok to think otherwise.

It's also extremely not this guy's fault other people have to work exploitative shit jobs during a pandemic, and his working harder (for FAANG!) isn't the thing that will fix it.

I wonder your background.

Do you know how demoralizing it is to work in an organization where the people trying to lead have no power to effect change, and the leaders are incompetent and force bad decisions on a constant basis? Where there is no real vision for the company?

The OP is describing being trapped in a tar pit, and you're saying "run faster".

AKA, please work harder for your corporate masters because poor people are suffering. What's that? You want your corporate masters to pay a fair share of tax so poor will suffer less? No, just work harder and that extra work won't benefit people who need it.

To be fair, they didn't say they're working one day a week, they said it takes them only one day to provide equal value to what their teammates achieve in one week, a value that seems to meet their company's expectations.

FAANGS employees are salaried, and not paid by hour, because you are compensated for ROI. If it takes you one hour and you bring in lots of value, that's still a good deal. On the flip side, you could also work 60 hours week if that's what it took you to meet and exceed on the value expectations.

Still agree with much of your comment though. Since they're complaining about the situation, something does feel off.

It’s a transaction. The goals of the company and employee parties is to maximize their own gains with as little effort as possible. The moral imperative argument is very dubious, and sounds one-side to further the gains of the company party at the expense of additional energy from the employee. Raising matters of social change as if the employee should have some gut wrenching “come to Jesus” because “they’re so lucky” relative to global social and market changes is a bunch of smoke and mirrors to, again, unevenly place the gains from the employee-business relationship on the company. Business is only a transaction; maximize gains for minimal effort, between all parties.

That “million people would kill for a chance” to be at a FAANG is not the employee’s problem anymore. The moment the company extended the job offer already created “a million” job applicants who didn’t get an offer. Behaving in a way that suggests continually begging “to stay in” just to get to create the net gains for other people, the investors and top management, deserves a therapy session on personal self-worth, which is a personal problem not a business matter.

Now, as for the matter of personally going above and beyond, that’s actually a separate matter - no need for emotional entanglement of the the business reality and personal reality. If the employee wishes, as they’ve expressed, to go above what is satisfying the business (given they’ve reported no management has complained) then by all means, find more work with outside teams within the company, tactfully speak to the manager about the concern, or just leave and start a new job or venture.

The moral guilt argument over the transactional relationship between an employee and the business, though, is at best naive, and at worse unevenly extracting more energy from the employee than the business. If the company has continued to pay the employee without complain, that’s their own moral dilemma for allowing it.

> Millions of people are desperate to receive $600-1600 from the government this month because they are unable to work. Millions are putting on shitty facemasks and still showing up to work at grocery stores and warehouses and wherever, risking disease because they have no other choice. Meanwhile you can't be bothered to work at home on your laptop more than one day a week, because the build system and tech debt makes you sad?

I'm always impressed at how much American culture promotes labor vs. labor infighting instead of recognizing that the issue is not the 1%. It's the top 0.1% (and 0.01%) that's causing this problem.

https://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2017/article/never...

lol. this is insane. he's doing his job and asking a question.

Lets say he decides to start being more diligent and taking the initiative to do as much work as is possible. His company is the only entity that benefits from this arrangement, and the benefit is marginal at best. Ultimately, this literally provides the resources for the company to pay the salaries of more useless workers and perpetuates the issue this post is trying to address.

Nonsense and completely detached from reality.

Every worker's duty is purely to themselves, not some sort of bizarre worship of their employer.

Your duty to yourself under capitalism is to extract as much capital and benefit as possible from the market in exchange for your labor. If you can commit a line of code a week and still get paid your salary, you're working EXTREMELY efficiently. Even better if you manage to get a job where they're failing to get any labor from you at all.

Conversely every employer is focused on extracting as much production as possible from their employees. Efficient companies will cut off under-producing workers without a second thought and will continuously strive to minimize the cost of any employee.

I agree with this guy.

You feel the bar is being set very low. The hard part of your job is working within the established environment (the technical debt?). You're choosing to put the effort in 1 day a week because you're comparing your contributions to your coworkers.

If you're unhappy in this dev environment that's one thing, and if you're unhappy with your contributions that's another.

I would try setting expectations for yourself if it's easy to impress the company. You could be a huge asset even assisting your team. It's concerning that you aren't aware of why their progress is slower and that no one has spotted your complacency. Perhaps you have something to offer as a mentor and maybe that will give your work more meaning/value (something to consider).

As the guy above me said, a lot of people are facing crisis right now. I honestly don't blame you for having an easier time of it if most of the week you're just collecting money.

PS: I learn best by teaching others. I think you should get more involved with your team to help them :-)

PPS: I have grown SO MUCH as a developer by forcing myself to "do as the Roman's do". Watch your mental health. If you feel like you're losing your identity you should walk, but otherwise try immersing yourself in understanding your companys' stack and design decisions. Make your contributions indistinguishable from all that code that together makes something amazing. It's bad to measure progress by SLOC. You can always switch to Sprite if you don't like the Koolaid.

PPPS: You may be able to be honest with your supervisor and ask for time at work to work on passion projects. They care about your meaningful contributions and would likely do whatever you need to keep those rolling in. A FAANG company would accomodate this.

The danger here is that others might be happy with the pace and lack of stress, or they might simply not be good enough to do any better. In either case, they're happy with the situation, and don't want it to change.

If you do good work, they'll fear managers might notice, and it'll make them look bad. So they won't be happy with that. They'll sabotage you, bully you, not proactively tell you things you don't know you don't know, etc.

Before you start that fight, make sure you want to fight that fight, and that if it happens you stand a good chance of winning.

Otherwise you'll just put in more effort than now, and the result will be that more people than now will hate you, and eventually you'll get fired because your work will suck because your colleagues have deliberately withheld information.

OP is a freeloader at a rent seaker. Your simplistic morals fail to account for the bigger picture.

you’re right if the person was not working at a FAANG. so what if they’re one of tnt most valuable companies in the world? one way they became so valuable is by vacuuming up all the talent and giving them tedious work to do so they don’t compete with FAANG itself.

We could get into the conversations about entitlement, sociopathy, whatever, but lets try to help:

Situation: "I only have to work one day a week to keep up, and so I only work that one day and slack off the rest of the time".

Possible causes:

1. Depression / Mental health issues

Seek help. I know: depressed; so hard to do.

2. Doesn't actually enjoy programming.

Wait till the pandemic is over and get a different job or start a company doing something you enjoy.

3. Enjoy programming, Team sucks.

FAANGs are huge companies with thousands of teams. Find a different team.

Have you ever worked for a company like this? I have worked for a startup which was acquired by a FAANG company and later transferred internally to a "normal" team within the FAANG company. That's three different scenarios: 1) startup 2) recent acquisition; small startup-cultured enclave in a big company 3) pure big company.

I was an extremely motivated worker in scenarios 1 and 2. I had a lot of "momentum" and worked extremely hard. Burnout was a consideration not just because of long hours, but because I liked working so much that it was easy to overwork over the course of a couple months. In scenario 3 it is a constant struggle to remain motivated and I constantly feel as though all of my momentum is lost.

Here are some differences I noticed: Scenarios 1 and 2: a. Extremely aggressive goals and deadlines. Deadlines constantly missed, but our velocity was impressive. Goals were very short term - few goals were more than 1 business quarter in the future. This changed once we were acquired because the acquiring company demanded longer term deadlines.

b. Scrappiness and the pride in your work and yourself that accompanies scrappiness

c. Iteration speed prioritized highly. Build and deploy times to a staging environment often less than 3 minutes.

d. I wore many hats. DBA, sysadmin, full stack software engineer, product guy, security person, devops. Worked in many domains - search, distributed systems, building in the Cloud, etc.

e. Hard work and ownership are seen and rewarded.

---- Scenario 3: a. Smaller goals. Every goal was designed to be hit, since missing goals is anathema in my FAANG company.

b. No scrappiness whatsoever. Just meet the deadlines.

c. Iteration speed barely prioritized. Since your tasks have been mapped out months ahead of time, what need do you have to iterate quickly? Just build to the spec. Build times were extremely long. Deploy times were often 12 hours (you think it wouldn't take that long to deploy something, but when your company has strict rules about only deploying to 1 region at a time and taking 30 minutes to monitor metrics in each region before moving to the next, it adds up). Many of the best tools or tricks I used to iterate quickly in scenarios 1 and 2 don't work due to security measures, or more likely, due to the FAANG company leveraging their own tools rather than open source ones I used in scenario #1 and #2.

d. I wear 1 or 2 hats.

e. Hard work and ownership aren't really seen unless you're in the right project.

I can't tell you how many times I've told my manager I feel like I haven't done a lot of work recently, or feel like I could be doing more. I'm always assured that I'm doing very well in his eyes and meeting all my deadlines. From my perspective I've done a disgustingly tiny amount of work since I started.

Anyway, I wrote all of this out to try and illustrate that it is really hard to work hard in a scenario where you are actively discouraged from working harder. I didn't really do a good job of doing that, but I hope I've kind of hinted at the problem. Most of your teammates at FAANG companies have worked at FAANG or other large companies their entire careers and have no idea how slow the entire freight train is moving. They have no idea that in other companies the role of being a software engineer is much more dynamic than their experience has been.

There are a lot of compounding issues other than just unimaginative deadlines that I don't have time to touch on. Legacy systems, defined promotion processes that make it so that you know ahead of time which projects actually stand a chance of promoting you, a strong hierarchy, entrenched politics, etc etc.

I just want to say that I have been in scenario 3 for a year and it has taken about that long to build my momentum up again to where it was in scenario #1 and #2. It is really, really hard to keep your motivation to work harder when almost every part of the job is incentivizing you to just sit down and meet your pathetic deadlines.. Trying to motivate someone by shaming them is never going to work here.

No - the company appears satisfied with OP's performance. Therefore they're not freeloading, rather they are selling the company services at the price point the company set. If someone comes to my business and we agree that I'll provide a widget for $10k, if it costs me only $1k to make it, we call that profit - i don't give them 10 widgets or a refund. A salaried job is an agreement that i will provide X KPIs, if it takes me more than 40hrs I don't get extra money, so if it takes me less an 40hrs I shouldn't give back money.

Now there may be laws or authoritarian morals around how I should lick the boots of my boss and give away more hours or outperform the KPIs, but basic capitalism says that's just a thing for suckers.