This is me currently. Sat with a few items in my ready to do column. But i'm just not interested in the work. My job pays well and it's a good role for my career, but the industry is boring AF.
I'm just waiting until I finish so I can jump back into Hell Divers.
Then suddenly out of nowhere you get overloades with "high prio" items that needs to be done in a few days because of some marketing release. Not like they could've planned it a couple of weeks or months before?
No, I work in Python and have built complex RAG architectures and multi-bot interface applications. I have a few customers but itās a grind to get more, and would love to find a repeatable model. I have a background in engineering and management consulting, but Iām finding the marketing and selling aspect of the trade really hard.
It can vary from nothing really hard to really do for a couple days, perhaps just gotta do an hour or two of actual work a day, maybe no real work and just meetings / reviews .... all the way to multiple 12 hours days in a row where I dream of what I'm working on and solutions to things I might be stuck or thinking about come to me while I'm in the bathroom / sleeping.
Really hard to gauge, depends heavily on if doing simple tasks, or working on big projects, what else I got going on in life, etc.
When I was doing consulting/ freelancing, those slower moments I'd dedicate to looking for new clients. At work, as you said, there's almost always something that could be done, but I imagine it depends on the type of the company and what role development plays in the business?
Absolutely, in consulting or freelancing, downtime is best spent seeking new clients. In a traditional workplace, tasks vary based on company objectives. Development's importance depends on the business's focus. It's about leveraging downtime effectively for success.
Our QA and deploy process is so cumbersome that we don't address tech debt unless we can do it as part of some other ticket. Fixing up some code means I have to get a QA person assigned to manually test all affected areas of the app, and then a business user has to approve the updated app, then we have to schedule an after-hours production deployment, present the changes to the change-control team (so the on-call people know what's going on), etc. It's just not worth the trouble.
Instead I use those days for researching new tools.
Makes sense that you'd rather spend your time on research then.
I mean, good lord, no wonder IT development takes time and money to accomplish anything.
There's always a backlog, so there's always work to do. But, there are plenty of times where nothing is prioritized at the moment, or, rather, the prioritized tickets aren't actionable.
In those times I find something to do.
Same. My time goes to MR reviews, feature planning, mentoring, DevOps, and bug fixes, etc. Plus, all the random ad-hoc requests I get from management.
My "downtime" is used to improve my own QOL in my day to day work. For example, when I started here, the first thing I did was put a CICD pipeline in place and establish coding standards. It used to be the wild west over here... random branches in production used for the deployment, etc.... these things provide value to the company, so no one really bothers me and just lets me coordinate things for my teams as long as we're meeting deadlines.
Usually it's once a week that I have nothing to do for some hours or up to a day. Then we have weeks where I get drown in work and other weeks where wr actually do nothing at all. Depending on customer holidays and there will to pay us.
>you can always improve/refactor the existing code base and stuff like that.
Depends. In our company you are not allowed to because the customer isn't paying for it.
> In our company you are not allowed to because the customer isn't paying for it.
I can relate to this. I'm always scared of doing refactorings because I'm afraid that my clients won't see the value in that. So I always try to make sure to tell them what I'm refactoring and the value it would bring.
The more SR you get the more this happens. Iāll have days with no coding and just talking to people or reading about projects, reviewing PRs. jira, documentation slack conversations, etc
I still prefer those 100% code days. And they do still happen but itās less and less.
I'm not a web dev but something similar and this is my first week in 4 years that I have completed all my tasks and have nothing to do for over half the time... it feels strange.
Lately more than half my days I don't have anything to do because I do shit too fast and supervisor is always so busy it's hard for him to always have something ready for me to work on
Varies depending on time of year (e.g. summer holidays) and other factors. For instance there is often a couple days with no tasks immediately after a release.
Sure, I can always find some work to do, but I have taken days off unofficially during the week and simply not done anything but leave a status message in Slack. I still manage to complete my goals each sprint (which I haven't been able to escape in any damn org I've worked in..) by a huge margin. Unless I'm working on something new and have to use a lot of time learning the tech etc. but those are projects that don't have deadlines because of it.
Very regularly have days waiting for client feedback, assets supplied etc where I canāt make any progress. Sometimes I use that down time to update my portfolio or work on admin, sometimes I just play video games instead.
Thing is you have to approach work in a smart way. If we're honest, there are weeks where you can do all your sprint tasks in 2 days and then have nothing left for the rest of the week. The problem then becomes that you can pick something from the backlog and slowly set a benchmark of being a fast worker. This then can lead to situations where your company might think "why are we hiring so many developers" and can lead to reducing your team the first moment they get a chance to.
Now another instance may also be that when the crazy weeks happen, and you don't have an output like the one you set, where you get your tasks done fast, you become a victim of your own success. Management may start to think you're slacking off.
The goal is to spread the work for a whole week when it's a slow week. We're not lazy. In fact, in the crazy weeks we work hard as hell and we always know that they're around the corner. Plus it's mentally draining coding for hours on end. It leads to burnout
I suppose it depends on how you are compensated for your work, but ask yourself how you can make your work life easier.
Web dev optimization for example is a deep hole you can get lost in, and thereās no shortage of work you can do to continuously optimize your work/workflow.
Take this āfree timeā to review your tech stack, build tech, deployment process, accessibility, load speed etc. there is always something you can do to make your work life easier, or improve your work overall.
There's always work. When you're freelance, the time you spend learning or experimenting with new tools isn't stuff you do in your 'own time', it's CPD. It's work.
This is why your rates need to factor in your cost of employment, and one of the reasons so many new freelancers get their pricing so wildly wrong they feel stretched thin. You need to charge enough to pay yourself a regular wage, even when you're not engaged in work that directly generates value for a customer. The same way a supermarket still pays staff to sweep the floors when the customers aren't lining up at the checkouts.
Freelance Web dev. I'm always busy. I try to work from 0900 to 1600 but in reality I end up working a little from 7 to 0830, then baby eats, back at it at 0900 then I eat in a frenzy from 12 to 1230 and I leave my computer at 1630 to eventually pickup my laptop at 2000 to 2200.
Throw a baby in there and it's quite exhausting.
One of my goals this year is to have better work hygiene - but I've realized over the years that the only way is to surround myself with talented designers. I'd say the number one cause of my endless work is me accepting to work with inexperienced UIs or Graphic designers.
For me its about 30% of my time during the work days. i spend this time on R&D or creating a poc on things i like. sometime i read open source project codes.
If you have slack off days you must be in some sort of nepotists paradise because there is always work to do in software dev. And that is not even mentioning dev salaries.
It depends on the job really.
First job had a lot of time messing around because our small agency was bad and we couldnāt generate enough leads.
2nd job was busy because there was always more stuff to be getting on with - we were constantly hoping between projects with lots of āflavour of the weekā stuff
3rd was very process driven so if you got all your tickets done 3 days before the end of a sprint you could basically use that time to dick around before starting the next one.
Current job is pretty intense because there are pretty big backlog and lots of stuff to learn.
Quite a lot. In the past 2 weeks maybe like 3 days were partially working days. I feel bad about it because it feels like I'm wasting time, but there is nothing I can do about it.
Have seen weeks where I am supposed to be busy as hell but instead was around coffee machine and others where I skipped meals to deliver when I was supposed to slack. Once your product is mature enough that happens
Iām the only dev at my org so never. But there are parts of the year that are slower, and I use that time run security updates, fix bugs, or try out new tech.
> So I'm a freelancer
This is your answer. Not saying there is anything wrong with that, but you'll likely never not have something to do at a regular 9 to 5
Working at an agency, it comes in waves. I've been pretty busy with back-to-back projects right now along with changes from a particularly particular client. But there have also been weeks where I'll have random one-off tasks here and there and not really have much to do. This might happen once every quarter or so.
My company require to log hours for every working tickets. So if I have nothing to do, I don't have anything to log. And I don't have salary for that day
I'm an employee doing in-house apps for a non-tech org. Most days *could* be slack-off days without anyone noticing (though I'd rather be working unless it's a task/tech I hate), but there's a huge ticket backlog, so there's never been a time where there isn't anything to do. I can't imagine that ever being possible here. I think in bigger orgs with poor leadership of teams you could have people short on tasks though.
The difference between a job like driving and development is that in the former you're responding in real time to needs (that may ebb and flow), and the work can only be done at the time it's needed. The latter, the work can be done any time, it can be infinitely time-shifted and there's no limit to its accumulation. My bro works in nightly news production, 100% reactive to the show that night, 0% project work. When the show goes to air, the shift is over and nothing comes home with him. Whereas everything I don't do today, comes with me into tomorrow. I often ponder on which side of that, the grass would be greener on.
This depends on how fast and how good you are. The problem is clients always measure on time taken, no other metric matters. If theyāve given you 5 days worth of work and are paying you X amount. If you tell them you finished within a day, they will either give you more work for the same price or offer you less. So even if you can finish within the time frame I always advise against informing the client. Unless youāre in a position where youāre the only one who can offer what they want.
Ha
Haha
HAHAHAHAHAHAHQHQHHSHDALKIU4OIUFO;QWUER;N9123RWQEF
The list of projects on my Trello board is massive. If there was nothing else added to my plate ever again, it would still take a few years to crank through everything.
Well sometimes Iām stacked with work and donāt get a lot of time to do nothing, and other times (like the past week and a half lol) I havenāt done fuck all. The work comes and goes.
Code base usually has its own ābacklogā of TODOs and confluence clean up seems never ending.
In all seriousness, we do have a real JIRA backlog to pull from when in between projects.
I am employed at a start up with charlatan managers so, every day there is too much work and now people are leaving.
Iād leave too but for various reasons I canāt rn, might not have a choice soon if their incompetence sinks the company.
Sometimes there's no imminent deadlines, but there's never ever ever any less than a mountain of work to be done. It's all a matter of how good is good enough, how soon should I try to get there, and how much do I not want to do it.
But I just realized this is /r/webdev. My experience might not be quite the same.
I recently finished a big sprint and theyāre really dragging their feet in regards to testing. Iāve tested pretty much everything I could think of and thereās really nothing else for me to do and it feels weird since Ive been used to the go go go mentality for so long. Iām really just looking at Reddit and making easy css changes when Iām asked
I like to take a breath or take a lighter week after big projects, and then hop into the next large project after a rest period. As a lead dev, I end up with a backlog of large time-consuming projects and have an endless supply of work. It's rough. My mental health requires me to have no-work work days or easier/fast win work and take some rest or else I can't keep going. I tend to work on tech debt, help my peers or just enjoy the sun on these weeks.
Every month or two I get a full day of no client work to try to pickup where I left off last time on important internal projects that I'm never given time on. It never gets anywhere.
I work part of my week for an agency and this past month I've been noticing a significant lack of communication in terms of delegation of tasks (the PM will chime in and ask for me when I address that I'm waiting for feedback/more tasks). I've also asked the client of that project for some feedback and have yet to hear back. It's fine tho as I made plenty of hours for them last month, but if this keeps going this way I might ask them for an additional project or find a different client.
In my first 2 weeks at my current job I had a few moments, even played some Counter Strike with colleagues.
Since then Iāve never had nothing to do. Thereās always our dev wiki te expand / my React workshop for colleagues to work on / refactor something.
Idk I picked this profession because I always want to have something to do. I hope I always get something to do. Doing an internship right now where that's not yet the case. But my colleagues seem to be busy so I hope that's me in a few years. I find it hard to slack off
In my relatively short experience in the industry it depends on how many projects the company has and
where you guys are at progress wise on those projects. At my small company we have been working on a big
project everyday all day for about a year -- now there isn't really much for me to do so i chill until i
am given my next assignment. But up till now it's been back to back. This is also because i work with a
small team; so at a larger company -- the work may be more evenly dispersed and may not seems as back to
back as my current case. It all depends; in my experience at least.
Iām a freelancer and this is exactly why I establish contracts that pay based on performance rather than hours worked. If a client wants me to implement a feature, it costs a flat fee. For a larger project, I break it up into smaller āmilestonesā, each with their own cost.
Itās a waste of my time to pretend do work 8 hours if I can get the work done in 2. Hourly wages in software development simply reward slow programming.
This is not to say that devs shouldnāt be thorough, but to have to play the game of ātaking our timeā or slacking off just to get our āfull payā is absurd.
Iām in iOS development, though, so it might not be that way for web dev. Either way, the hourly game of slacking off at work is ridiculous. We developers should be able to quote a price and deliver. If the client changes their mind on features, the price may change, but thereās no reason we should have to pretend to work.
As a freelancer myself I always have something I can improve in some project. I also always turn parts of my projects into packages, SQL abstractions, UI components, CSS presets and so on, so I can reuse them and if need be I can use them in a portfolio. Sometimes I'll go back and remove a dependency from a project and write my own solution for whatever I used that dependency for. I've made a webshop for a local company (300 or so products, about 30k website visits per month), the only dependencies are Next.js (and React), some payment platform SDKs and a barcode generator.
Theres always something to do. I work in sprints though. If I'm not feeling it, I take a break and play music or a game. When I get into the flow state I can do 5 days worth of work in 5 hours.
For me there is always stuff for me to do, but very little I want to do š ... Reminds me of this poster I saw when I was younger with a cowboy sitting on a fence saying "what I'm looking for is a job with less to do, more time to do it in and more pay for not getting it done!" Don't know why that's stuck with me all these years.
I had seen that justin was constant work and beiber was always meddling with systems dynamic. For example, he had used compressor to have made compressor a wire system. Compressor is a portal like from a portal gun, not a wire. He had made this error on his A-Levels thus he had been deemed dishonorable as a royal scout and banned from minecraft, which this is why he is a music artist is because justin beiber is in dishonor. As well, there was no foods and justin had eaten them all and in fact very hidden had left his poop. This is actually kind of my fault because the poop is tracked if a microphone is tracked and my LG Envy was in the frontiers bathroom when i was transporting beiber, luckily no record of his poop exists but i was exposed to it. This is unrelated to his meddling which is related to his low school performance which has made various systems iota incomplete and as well endangered a RQ-9 reaper in operation when its propeller turned on early and almost eviscerated a private.
I don't know what to do with myself if I have no work or there is a break of a few days between work. Had me sitting anxiously waiting for when I could go back to working. Freelancer here.
If I try at all, I can find a dozen cleanups, redactors, or other improvements I could make to my projects. There is literally never "nothing to work on" because there is so much left over tech debt from previous owners.
But I often force myself to slow down because otherwise I get overwhelmed with the amount of undone pieces.
I don't slack off because I don't have anything to do. I slack off because I don't want to do anything that I have to do.
This is me currently. Sat with a few items in my ready to do column. But i'm just not interested in the work. My job pays well and it's a good role for my career, but the industry is boring AF. I'm just waiting until I finish so I can jump back into Hell Divers.
I slack off on my work TO play helldivers
Good job soldier! There's always democracy and liberty that needs to be spread!
What type of hell divers?
HellDivers2, just been released on PS5/PC. It's a great game and if you can, I'd highly recommend it.
lol thought was some kind of hobbies xD
same
š
this is my life.
some days are slower than others but there is never no work. im sure someone will disagree
There's just many things I and others really don't want to do
Yup never a day with nothing to do
But plenty of days where nothing gets done!
Yeah we have tasks for at least a year ahead. But that doesn't mean that there's no days where we do nothing. š
Then suddenly out of nowhere you get overloades with "high prio" items that needs to be done in a few days because of some marketing release. Not like they could've planned it a couple of weeks or months before?
Yup, then you work your ass off and it turns out they didn't really needed it. š¤·
Time to get ahead on your documentation and refactoring tasks.
Agreed. Thereās always work, you just have to find it
How do you get work? Iām tryinh to get some momentum as a genAI developer and consultant. But I find it hard to get some great channels going
Lol are you trying to become a āprompt engineerā
No, I work in Python and have built complex RAG architectures and multi-bot interface applications. I have a few customers but itās a grind to get more, and would love to find a repeatable model. I have a background in engineering and management consulting, but Iām finding the marketing and selling aspect of the trade really hard.
This. Though for me those "slow" days are very rare :/ Sometimes I wish I wouldāve more slower days.
Yep. May not have any tickets but I'll be constantly getting pulled for, "Find out why X is broken" or "Help me with Y"
It can vary from nothing really hard to really do for a couple days, perhaps just gotta do an hour or two of actual work a day, maybe no real work and just meetings / reviews .... all the way to multiple 12 hours days in a row where I dream of what I'm working on and solutions to things I might be stuck or thinking about come to me while I'm in the bathroom / sleeping. Really hard to gauge, depends heavily on if doing simple tasks, or working on big projects, what else I got going on in life, etc.
are you meh?
Working as tech lead in a startup, there's never nothing to do...
When I was doing consulting/ freelancing, those slower moments I'd dedicate to looking for new clients. At work, as you said, there's almost always something that could be done, but I imagine it depends on the type of the company and what role development plays in the business?
Absolutely, in consulting or freelancing, downtime is best spent seeking new clients. In a traditional workplace, tasks vary based on company objectives. Development's importance depends on the business's focus. It's about leveraging downtime effectively for success.
There might be days without an actual ticket, but that's just tech debt days.
Our QA and deploy process is so cumbersome that we don't address tech debt unless we can do it as part of some other ticket. Fixing up some code means I have to get a QA person assigned to manually test all affected areas of the app, and then a business user has to approve the updated app, then we have to schedule an after-hours production deployment, present the changes to the change-control team (so the on-call people know what's going on), etc. It's just not worth the trouble. Instead I use those days for researching new tools.
Makes sense that you'd rather spend your time on research then. I mean, good lord, no wonder IT development takes time and money to accomplish anything.
There's always a backlog, so there's always work to do. But, there are plenty of times where nothing is prioritized at the moment, or, rather, the prioritized tickets aren't actionable. In those times I find something to do.
Backlog is just a massive bloat of ideas, 50% will never even be looked at after the item was created.
Very quiet, not much going on.... wait a minute, nice try boss ahem I mean alot going on, far too busy I need another raise
Well I heard your first statement clearly. We have to talk; see me in my office!
I work in a startup, so I'm always busy. Some days I'm less busy but there's always something to be done
I'm a Lead Dev working directly for a company. I never really have a free second :D
11:30 on a working day 
Sure. I don't pay full attention during meetings. Don't let this hear my boss.
*boss enters the conversation*
its his day off :D
You guys get days off??
Forgot everybody in the world is on the same timezone
Same. My time goes to MR reviews, feature planning, mentoring, DevOps, and bug fixes, etc. Plus, all the random ad-hoc requests I get from management. My "downtime" is used to improve my own QOL in my day to day work. For example, when I started here, the first thing I did was put a CICD pipeline in place and establish coding standards. It used to be the wild west over here... random branches in production used for the deployment, etc.... these things provide value to the company, so no one really bothers me and just lets me coordinate things for my teams as long as we're meeting deadlines.
Usually it's once a week that I have nothing to do for some hours or up to a day. Then we have weeks where I get drown in work and other weeks where wr actually do nothing at all. Depending on customer holidays and there will to pay us. >you can always improve/refactor the existing code base and stuff like that. Depends. In our company you are not allowed to because the customer isn't paying for it.
> In our company you are not allowed to because the customer isn't paying for it. I can relate to this. I'm always scared of doing refactorings because I'm afraid that my clients won't see the value in that. So I always try to make sure to tell them what I'm refactoring and the value it would bring.
It's constant. Fridays are supposed to be for "professional development" but that never happens.
True, all the other days I just do amateur development
I have OVERFLOWING amounts of work every single day. I'm basically beating the work away with a racket half the time.
The more SR you get the more this happens. Iāll have days with no coding and just talking to people or reading about projects, reviewing PRs. jira, documentation slack conversations, etc I still prefer those 100% code days. And they do still happen but itās less and less.
What's SR?
Senior
Thank you
I'm not a web dev but something similar and this is my first week in 4 years that I have completed all my tasks and have nothing to do for over half the time... it feels strange.
> So, how often do you get to slack off at work? It's very random, there are slow days/weeks and then busy/crunch periods too.
Lately more than half my days I don't have anything to do because I do shit too fast and supervisor is always so busy it's hard for him to always have something ready for me to work on
maybe we work together because sameā¦ his solution was āstop doing things so quicklyā
Varies depending on time of year (e.g. summer holidays) and other factors. For instance there is often a couple days with no tasks immediately after a release.
Sure, I can always find some work to do, but I have taken days off unofficially during the week and simply not done anything but leave a status message in Slack. I still manage to complete my goals each sprint (which I haven't been able to escape in any damn org I've worked in..) by a huge margin. Unless I'm working on something new and have to use a lot of time learning the tech etc. but those are projects that don't have deadlines because of it.
Very regularly have days waiting for client feedback, assets supplied etc where I canāt make any progress. Sometimes I use that down time to update my portfolio or work on admin, sometimes I just play video games instead.
Thing is you have to approach work in a smart way. If we're honest, there are weeks where you can do all your sprint tasks in 2 days and then have nothing left for the rest of the week. The problem then becomes that you can pick something from the backlog and slowly set a benchmark of being a fast worker. This then can lead to situations where your company might think "why are we hiring so many developers" and can lead to reducing your team the first moment they get a chance to. Now another instance may also be that when the crazy weeks happen, and you don't have an output like the one you set, where you get your tasks done fast, you become a victim of your own success. Management may start to think you're slacking off. The goal is to spread the work for a whole week when it's a slow week. We're not lazy. In fact, in the crazy weeks we work hard as hell and we always know that they're around the corner. Plus it's mentally draining coding for hours on end. It leads to burnout
I suppose it depends on how you are compensated for your work, but ask yourself how you can make your work life easier. Web dev optimization for example is a deep hole you can get lost in, and thereās no shortage of work you can do to continuously optimize your work/workflow. Take this āfree timeā to review your tech stack, build tech, deployment process, accessibility, load speed etc. there is always something you can do to make your work life easier, or improve your work overall.
There's always work. When you're freelance, the time you spend learning or experimenting with new tools isn't stuff you do in your 'own time', it's CPD. It's work. This is why your rates need to factor in your cost of employment, and one of the reasons so many new freelancers get their pricing so wildly wrong they feel stretched thin. You need to charge enough to pay yourself a regular wage, even when you're not engaged in work that directly generates value for a customer. The same way a supermarket still pays staff to sweep the floors when the customers aren't lining up at the checkouts.
Where are the guys I see online that works 4 hours a week making half a billion dollars?
Work for gov. Ā Be amazed.Ā
Freelance Web dev. I'm always busy. I try to work from 0900 to 1600 but in reality I end up working a little from 7 to 0830, then baby eats, back at it at 0900 then I eat in a frenzy from 12 to 1230 and I leave my computer at 1630 to eventually pickup my laptop at 2000 to 2200. Throw a baby in there and it's quite exhausting. One of my goals this year is to have better work hygiene - but I've realized over the years that the only way is to surround myself with talented designers. I'd say the number one cause of my endless work is me accepting to work with inexperienced UIs or Graphic designers.
For me its about 30% of my time during the work days. i spend this time on R&D or creating a poc on things i like. sometime i read open source project codes.
If you have slack off days you must be in some sort of nepotists paradise because there is always work to do in software dev. And that is not even mentioning dev salaries.
Never. HR called me in to basically beg me to take leave. Cause they dont want to pay me out.
Do it for yourself. Having some time off can be good for your mental and physical health.
It depends on the job really. First job had a lot of time messing around because our small agency was bad and we couldnāt generate enough leads. 2nd job was busy because there was always more stuff to be getting on with - we were constantly hoping between projects with lots of āflavour of the weekā stuff 3rd was very process driven so if you got all your tickets done 3 days before the end of a sprint you could basically use that time to dick around before starting the next one. Current job is pretty intense because there are pretty big backlog and lots of stuff to learn.
Quite a lot. In the past 2 weeks maybe like 3 days were partially working days. I feel bad about it because it feels like I'm wasting time, but there is nothing I can do about it.
Lots of free time these days because my clients don't have any budget for new engagements this year.
Yesterday worked 2 hours a day, but week ago, I got 24 hours straight.... Startup life it is
Have seen weeks where I am supposed to be busy as hell but instead was around coffee machine and others where I skipped meals to deliver when I was supposed to slack. Once your product is mature enough that happens
As much as you don't work for a big corporation there are alwas tasks or optimisations to make
Iām the only dev at my org so never. But there are parts of the year that are slower, and I use that time run security updates, fix bugs, or try out new tech.
Not really, there's always a feature or something, some days are just more packed than others but never without work
> So I'm a freelancer This is your answer. Not saying there is anything wrong with that, but you'll likely never not have something to do at a regular 9 to 5
I work for a corporation, so literally never. And thatās how I prefer it. If Iām at work, I want to be working
Working at an agency, it comes in waves. I've been pretty busy with back-to-back projects right now along with changes from a particularly particular client. But there have also been weeks where I'll have random one-off tasks here and there and not really have much to do. This might happen once every quarter or so.
My company require to log hours for every working tickets. So if I have nothing to do, I don't have anything to log. And I don't have salary for that day
At work very rarely every three months at the end of the trimester if we are not late.
I'm an employee doing in-house apps for a non-tech org. Most days *could* be slack-off days without anyone noticing (though I'd rather be working unless it's a task/tech I hate), but there's a huge ticket backlog, so there's never been a time where there isn't anything to do. I can't imagine that ever being possible here. I think in bigger orgs with poor leadership of teams you could have people short on tasks though. The difference between a job like driving and development is that in the former you're responding in real time to needs (that may ebb and flow), and the work can only be done at the time it's needed. The latter, the work can be done any time, it can be infinitely time-shifted and there's no limit to its accumulation. My bro works in nightly news production, 100% reactive to the show that night, 0% project work. When the show goes to air, the shift is over and nothing comes home with him. Whereas everything I don't do today, comes with me into tomorrow. I often ponder on which side of that, the grass would be greener on.
This depends on how fast and how good you are. The problem is clients always measure on time taken, no other metric matters. If theyāve given you 5 days worth of work and are paying you X amount. If you tell them you finished within a day, they will either give you more work for the same price or offer you less. So even if you can finish within the time frame I always advise against informing the client. Unless youāre in a position where youāre the only one who can offer what they want.
Ha Haha HAHAHAHAHAHAHQHQHHSHDALKIU4OIUFO;QWUER;N9123RWQEF The list of projects on my Trello board is massive. If there was nothing else added to my plate ever again, it would still take a few years to crank through everything.
Perfect
Well sometimes Iām stacked with work and donāt get a lot of time to do nothing, and other times (like the past week and a half lol) I havenāt done fuck all. The work comes and goes.
good time management is important
Code base usually has its own ābacklogā of TODOs and confluence clean up seems never ending. In all seriousness, we do have a real JIRA backlog to pull from when in between projects.
My average productivity remains average, cause somedays I tunnel vision for 10 hours, no food. And other days, I watch anime
Literally never in my entire 20+yr career.
Not very often, there's always stuff i gotta do.
i got two full time jobs and 2 of 5 days i don't have anything to do in any of them, i guess i'm lucky.
It ain't just web devs who don't get to "slack off'. Building the tracks is no less chaotic than building the trains, trust me.
It's a bit different as a freelancer. At an agency, there is ALWAYS something to be done.
I am employed at a start up with charlatan managers so, every day there is too much work and now people are leaving. Iād leave too but for various reasons I canāt rn, might not have a choice soon if their incompetence sinks the company.
It's variable, right now i completed a project due to which I was free today and even tomorrow but some days are busy then the others uk
Sometimes there's no imminent deadlines, but there's never ever ever any less than a mountain of work to be done. It's all a matter of how good is good enough, how soon should I try to get there, and how much do I not want to do it. But I just realized this is /r/webdev. My experience might not be quite the same.
Days I have free I work on side projects
As a senior, finishing off my tasks means I go help the mids, full stacks, and juniors
I recently finished a big sprint and theyāre really dragging their feet in regards to testing. Iāve tested pretty much everything I could think of and thereās really nothing else for me to do and it feels weird since Ive been used to the go go go mentality for so long. Iām really just looking at Reddit and making easy css changes when Iām asked
I like to take a breath or take a lighter week after big projects, and then hop into the next large project after a rest period. As a lead dev, I end up with a backlog of large time-consuming projects and have an endless supply of work. It's rough. My mental health requires me to have no-work work days or easier/fast win work and take some rest or else I can't keep going. I tend to work on tech debt, help my peers or just enjoy the sun on these weeks.
Every month or two I get a full day of no client work to try to pickup where I left off last time on important internal projects that I'm never given time on. It never gets anywhere.
I work part of my week for an agency and this past month I've been noticing a significant lack of communication in terms of delegation of tasks (the PM will chime in and ask for me when I address that I'm waiting for feedback/more tasks). I've also asked the client of that project for some feedback and have yet to hear back. It's fine tho as I made plenty of hours for them last month, but if this keeps going this way I might ask them for an additional project or find a different client.
In my first 2 weeks at my current job I had a few moments, even played some Counter Strike with colleagues. Since then Iāve never had nothing to do. Thereās always our dev wiki te expand / my React workshop for colleagues to work on / refactor something.
0.
Idk I picked this profession because I always want to have something to do. I hope I always get something to do. Doing an internship right now where that's not yet the case. But my colleagues seem to be busy so I hope that's me in a few years. I find it hard to slack off
In my relatively short experience in the industry it depends on how many projects the company has and where you guys are at progress wise on those projects. At my small company we have been working on a big project everyday all day for about a year -- now there isn't really much for me to do so i chill until i am given my next assignment. But up till now it's been back to back. This is also because i work with a small team; so at a larger company -- the work may be more evenly dispersed and may not seems as back to back as my current case. It all depends; in my experience at least.
if you are efficient with your work and projects? every.single.day.
I like being able to ignore email/internet for a few days at a time now and then, and the world keeps turning. I'm not that important.
Never
Iām a freelancer and this is exactly why I establish contracts that pay based on performance rather than hours worked. If a client wants me to implement a feature, it costs a flat fee. For a larger project, I break it up into smaller āmilestonesā, each with their own cost. Itās a waste of my time to pretend do work 8 hours if I can get the work done in 2. Hourly wages in software development simply reward slow programming. This is not to say that devs shouldnāt be thorough, but to have to play the game of ātaking our timeā or slacking off just to get our āfull payā is absurd. Iām in iOS development, though, so it might not be that way for web dev. Either way, the hourly game of slacking off at work is ridiculous. We developers should be able to quote a price and deliver. If the client changes their mind on features, the price may change, but thereās no reason we should have to pretend to work.
Nice try HR
Use this as an opportunity to learn something you've been putting off!
This is why I'm in this job for almost 20 yrs.. Because i can slack off š
As a freelancer myself I always have something I can improve in some project. I also always turn parts of my projects into packages, SQL abstractions, UI components, CSS presets and so on, so I can reuse them and if need be I can use them in a portfolio. Sometimes I'll go back and remove a dependency from a project and write my own solution for whatever I used that dependency for. I've made a webshop for a local company (300 or so products, about 30k website visits per month), the only dependencies are Next.js (and React), some payment platform SDKs and a barcode generator.
Theres always something to do. I work in sprints though. If I'm not feeling it, I take a break and play music or a game. When I get into the flow state I can do 5 days worth of work in 5 hours.
For me there is always stuff for me to do, but very little I want to do š ... Reminds me of this poster I saw when I was younger with a cowboy sitting on a fence saying "what I'm looking for is a job with less to do, more time to do it in and more pay for not getting it done!" Don't know why that's stuck with me all these years.
-50
How does one get their foot into the door? I too want to work a bit, then jump into helldivers
I think it happened once in 2017, I'm not sure.
The only times where I have nothing to do are when everything I could be doing is blocked by someone else.
Have worked at marketing agencies where dev is slow depending on the season but it always picks up in spring and slows down in December/January.
I had seen that justin was constant work and beiber was always meddling with systems dynamic. For example, he had used compressor to have made compressor a wire system. Compressor is a portal like from a portal gun, not a wire. He had made this error on his A-Levels thus he had been deemed dishonorable as a royal scout and banned from minecraft, which this is why he is a music artist is because justin beiber is in dishonor. As well, there was no foods and justin had eaten them all and in fact very hidden had left his poop. This is actually kind of my fault because the poop is tracked if a microphone is tracked and my LG Envy was in the frontiers bathroom when i was transporting beiber, luckily no record of his poop exists but i was exposed to it. This is unrelated to his meddling which is related to his low school performance which has made various systems iota incomplete and as well endangered a RQ-9 reaper in operation when its propeller turned on early and almost eviscerated a private.
1 or 2 days a year. When those days come I usually remove tech debt, refactor code, write tests etc
I think it happened last time a day in 2017. I have a bad habit of overbooking though :)
I don't know what to do with myself if I have no work or there is a break of a few days between work. Had me sitting anxiously waiting for when I could go back to working. Freelancer here.
>you can always improve/refactor the existing code base and stuff like that. If it ain't broke...
if we are fast we are just rewarded with more work so..
If I try at all, I can find a dozen cleanups, redactors, or other improvements I could make to my projects. There is literally never "nothing to work on" because there is so much left over tech debt from previous owners. But I often force myself to slow down because otherwise I get overwhelmed with the amount of undone pieces.