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Down Time At Work — What Do You Do?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Jan 18, 2008 04:03 PM
from the read-more-slashdot dept.
from the read-more-slashdot dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I work in IT and find fairly often that I have 'down time.' I'll usually browse the web (Slashdot) or try to find something informative or educating to read. Sometimes, I even get caught up working on my personal webpage or other project that isn't exactly work related. What does everyone else do during these times, and how much time do they spend on non-work related things while at work?"
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Submission: Down time at work - what do you do? by Anonymous Coward
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Ping Pong... (Score:5, Funny)
Box Folding (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Slashdot? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3)
So IT Satrap must be the Thrush information technology department.
Re:Box Folding (Score:5, Funny)
Is that code for eating doughnuts? If so, I am a topology master.
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Re:What is this downtime thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Ping Pong... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Asking slashdot? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Asking slashdot? (Score:5, Funny)
Evil, I know. But it's still funny.
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Re:Asking slashdot? (Score:5, Funny)
No, seriously.
Someone came to ask me a stupid question that a Google search could have answered, and yes, you guessed it: I had a deadline.
So I started barking.
He never came back again.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Particularly if the BOFHs created said downtime so that they could go to the pub.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Asking slashdot? (Score:4, Funny)
5,462 replies beneath your current threshold.
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research or education (Score:4, Funny)
Re:research or education (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm...
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:research or education (Score:4, Insightful)
You really ARE new here.
Besides, you are more productive if you take a break every now and then. So what you're saying is that you would rather LOOK like you're brown-nosing, while you're in fact making yourself LESS efficient, rather than taking time to talk with co-workers, etc., which improves the lines of communications in a company, and ultimately contributes more to the bottom line in terms of increased efficiencies.
Don't forget those new TPS reports. And your 35 pieces of flair.
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Re:research or education (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:research or education (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:research or education (Score:5, Funny)
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You ask on slashdot? (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot! (Score:3, Funny)
B) Submit stories to Slashdot.
C) Play video games stored on thumb drive.
D) Avoid getting more work.
Anything else?
obligatory bash.org quote (Score:4, Funny)
#258908 +(12416)- [X]
: If they only realized 90% of the overtime they pay me is only cause i like staying here playing with Kazaa when the bandwidth picks up after hours.
: If any of my employees did that they'd be fired instantly.
: Where u work?
: I'm the CTO at LowerMyBills.com
*** Ben174 (BenWright@TeraPro33-41.LowerMyBills.com) Quit (Leaving)
Documentation (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the most fun thing to do but it certainly something that can always keep you busy and you can never have too much of it as long as it is well written AND well organized.
Re:Documentation (Score:5, Insightful)
This is my mantra. I recently took-over network administration after a sudden firing of the sole administrator. I arrived at work to folders and folders of random word, excel and text files from 3 different predecessors.
Those before me had that philosophy of "it's what I know that makes me valuable".
For me, I'm an adherent to the notion of "it's not what I know, but what I can do."
I've found that documentation has allowed me to do so much more. I don't have to waste the mental cycles to bring-up older knowledge or to reconstruct some installation procedure from months past.
Friends of mine say that my excessive documentation is a liability: "they can just fire you and a monkey could read your notes and do your job."
If only that were true - imagine how successful I would be if I had a reputation for eliminating uneeded IT jobs. The bright-side has turned-out to be the fact that most IT jobs can't actually be eliminated so easily - because they are roles and not jobs. Thus, documentation and knowledge-dumping has no negative repercussions that I've noticed.
The only drawback to Documentation is the time, but with a wiki it's very easy to take 5 minutes here, 1 minute or 30 seconds there and the occasional hour spent looking at random articles for rectification, updates and corroboration.
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What is this "down time" you speak of? (Score:4, Interesting)
The idea of having a job where a blocking problem means its time to browse websites, or percieving that my job would allow for that, is totally foreign to me. Seriously - are you honestly saying that in these situations that there is literally *nothing* work related for you to do?
(for those noting the time of day that I'm posting this response, I'm on vacation right now
Re:What is this "down time" you speak of? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Hmmm (Score:4, Funny)
(and wonder how moderators will interpret posts on
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Funny)
http://xkcd.com/214/ [xkcd.com]
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This. (Score:4, Funny)
I visit my other cubical... (Score:5, Funny)
It's better than surfing the web or doing personal stuff at your desk because you could never be fired for taking too long to shit; that would be discrimination.
I go home. Employer calls it "flextime". (Score:5, Interesting)
If there is no work available, such as projects on hold due to waiting for somebody else (tech support, delivery, steering board decision, project member on vacation, whatever), I'll check if there's some low-priority stuff that I might do. Usually there isn't.
Otherwise, I'll just head home. My contract says I must 7,5 hours per day - on average. Not that I must stay at office 7,5h pretending to be working when there's nothing to do. Of course, it also means that I occasionally do the 10-12 hours/day crunch through weekends when stuff finally gets moving - but you didn't ask what I do on "uptime", did you?-). (And yes, I keep tab on the hours - if I get more than +40 hours on my flextime account I either get paid the 200% overtime bonus (has never happened, they haven't needed me THAT much) or stop right there).
(Yes, our project management could use refinement - usual situation that there are 5 projects on hold and the next week all five of them start up simultaneously - but that's another issue. Personally I'm comfortable with this - once you get into the "rhythm", it's much easier to just go on with the flow and do an "all-nighter"-style session - and once stuff is done, you can again have a few 2-hour workdays which consists of lunch, checking e-mails and do nothing more than say "hi" to buddies...)
Now, this model works for me. For someone with a family a more stable 9-5 mode might be more preferable. For me with my 15 minute commute it's just about perfect (means that if there's a meeting from 9-10 am and another at 3-4 pm and nothing else to do, I can stop by at home). Also my employer trusts me and my coworkers - on my first day at job, my then-manager said "we have a trusting environment in here - if you want to punch in or out for tracking the hours, go ahead, but we don't require it.".
My comment is focused on the downtime, as stated in the question. There's plenty of uptime to go around
Down Time? (Score:5, Funny)
Down what?
Down time.
What time?
Down time.
What what?
I can't decide.... (Score:5, Funny)
Make it work-related--if only tangentially... (Score:3, Informative)
I feel the more I learn and the more current I stay, the more valuable I am to my employer (and myself/future employers). Plus, if anyone were to ask, I can honestly say "I'm researching some possible implementations of the new [insert project name] system."
I should point out that this kind of pure guilt-free downtime is rare. You can always be updating that documentation *groan* or working on that nagging system with the logfile that always fills up the disk that you've been meaning to fix for months now...
Look for another job (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides, while I don't like having way too much to do, being busy providing value to your employer and yourself is more rewarding than being paid to be paid.
Sounds like you don't like the down time or feel guilty about it. Go find another job or create a better one where you are.
Empire helps... (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no downtime. (Score:4, Funny)
Other than that it is just slow response from the system.
You are new. I'll help you out! (Score:5, Insightful)
Always it's this.
Things don't reach a state of running very well without people thinking about how to get there. Your downtime is a chance to explore an idea, setup test environments, write scripts to nail annoying and recurring problems, work on your budget justification, yes --surf some
Ongoing investment in these things pays off. You are surprised less, plan better, and leverage your people, hardware and software better.
Don't worry, you won't get all the way there. Software update cockups, user error, and entropy in general will keep you busy. But, having done these things, the real downtime you get after that is rock solid! Listen to a few mp3's, surf
It depends on the manager (Score:5, Interesting)
He basically let us do anything we wanted, preferably to educate ourselves or help other team members, as long as our requests for help or special projects were attended to first, which we always did. Reading teh internet because boring after a while, because you can do all that in an hour, then you run out of things of interest to read.
I learned and managed to introduce Linux into the environment. We also developed a sophisticated network interrogation tool to gather infomration about a user's environement, applications and PC status: basically about 3 of us worked out that if we have enough information, most of the time we can fix a user's PC remotely, or do preventative maintenance prior to problems occuring. All this was done via Windows scripts which dumped data into a central folder, then another perl guru in our trio did some parsing of the reports and populated a database. This database was visible on a web site searcheable by host name. It was so useful and successful, that word reached the upper echelons of the company. We did not charge the customer anythign for this. It was all to help us do our jobs quicker. Pretty much two or three times a week we'd go out for a 2-hour lunch, and the boss sometimes joined us. On quiet days we used to even play networked games, and before the manager's responsibilities grew drastically, he used to join in.
After six years, the contract was terminated, and so the team got disbanded. That was the sad thing, the team as a whole, I later found out, was number one in terms of SLAs and customer satisfaction in the whole Asia Pacific region. It also had the lowest ratio of admin to technical staff at about 1 to 20 or so. The average in AP was about 1 to 5 and for some customers it was close to 1 to 1.
On a side note, when word reached the top of the management chain about the tools we've developed, they tried to make us stop using it because it threatened the potential sale of a "management" tool that they were trying to sell to the customer.
Back on topic, it all depends on what your manager can tolerate. A good manager would let you do whatever as long as your work comes first.
R&D, Study, Document (Score:3, Insightful)
I also document and help others on the team document their knowledge.
There's nothing worse than wanting to advance in the company and not being able to because you're the only one that knows the super secret way everything works together (or you're hit by a bus
I do a lot of reading as well. Slashdot being one but I also have a subscription to Safari so I can keep up on books without having to overload my library.
But I also pop out to hobby forums or read non-work related text. I have pdfs of most of my RPG books so I can have it open in the background and poke around in there. I also work on my web site from time to time. Since it's somewhat technical anyway, I can generally get away with it although I try not to be too obvious about it
[John]
Real work. (Score:5, Insightful)
At least, that's how it's worked everywhere I've ever been employed.
For example, in a Windows-only school at which the only person who'd ever heard of Linux (the IT manager) treated mention of it like some kind of first word from a child ("Oh, you use Linux. That's cute. Tell me when you make something 'useful' out of it."), I had a few hours of downtime. Found a spare "obsolete" PC. Found a couple of network cards. Was tired of the "Linux being nothing more than a toy" digs.
In three hours (including install, configuration and a lot of testing) I implemented a caching, transparent proxy/filter which to this day is still filtering the Internet (with zero configuration changes either on the clients, servers or any other devices) for over a thousand users without anybody noticing any difference and saving the school in question several thousand pounds on buying their own filtering appliance (from the prices we were quoted). I implemented it in an afternoon and it went into full live service when school finished that day and is still there churning away. It's zero-maintenance (unless someone wants a particular website blocked, in which case they just stick its name into a plain text file), "invisible" to the network users so, unlike some of the other network equipment, the kids don't try to "hack" it and even if they do only the squid port actually does anything.
It's never been rebooted, never caused a problem, is the only thing standing between the kids and the nasty side of the Internet, is now the de facto and only Internet filtering within the school and if it ever "breaks" it has a Cat5-coupler taped to it with instructions - couple the "In" Ethernet cable to the "Out" cable and, without doing anything else, you bypass the filter without anyone noticing more than a seconds downtime. Obviously, it's in a secured cabinet so that only the IT manager can do that, but the demonstration of "now we're filtered, *click*, now we're not, *click*, now you're running off my proxy, *click*, now it's all back how it was before today, *click*"... was enough to silence the Linux-critic once and for all.
Then there's the school running a Jabber IM system that they "would never use". Then there's the school running the PHP helpdesk for which they had no use. Then there's the one whose IT department are running their own recording CCTV computer which nobody but the IT department know about, which emails them movies of any movement in the IT office overnight or when nobody is supposed to be in - it's already caught several "wanderers" who just happened to walk through the locked IT office when they had no need to and "just looked" at the pile of laptops hidden away. That system later got re-used to record classes for approximately £500 less per camera then our usual CCTV supplier.
All the best projects are done when you let the people who know how just let loose with their own ideas and not worry about whether the end product will be useful. Downtime is perfect for this and turns the most boring moments into the most interesting, especially if you have a large IT team who can all "show off" to each other.
When you're the Boss... (Score:3)
Most of the time, when I closed my door it was to get work done, undisturbed.
But sometimes, I closed my door to eat, nap, or occassionally even rub one out.
(Sounds good, until you realize that when you're the second-highest ranked, there's not much room to rise. I left there to go work at a place where some upward mobility remained. And even the VPs work in cubicles here.)
Rock Band! (Score:3, Funny)
When more than one of us has downtime at the same time, we actually play "Rock Band"! There's no room for the drum kit, but we routinely have three people playing at the same time. The addition of vocals (compared to the Guitar Hero series) means we actually get a lot more of the ladies at our office to participate. (Though sometimes they force me to try and sing "Roxanne".)
(God, I love my job sometimes.)
Here's the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
During down time, try to look busy.
I used to work for a guy who was the president of the company, and thought of himself as a sort of royalty.
I was a Unix/windows admin/helpdesk/database admin/tech support.
I would come in at 10:30 and finish my daily workload around 3:30 including daily projects he would give on a whim, such as "design this database for me".
Usually, I would stick around until 6:00 to finish up extra projects he asked me to do.
He thought because I was coming in at 10:30, I was cheating him out of work. He then made me punch a time clock just to punish me.
Any time after finishing tasks, I had to look busy, he really thought I wasn't working hard enough.
Since it was a medical billing company, he started asking me to fill in my down time by doing data processing.
What a tool. Goes to show you, down time can really be rough.
Yeah, self-study really is the smartest thing (Score:5, Interesting)
During the normal workday, it's always nice to check the news for a few minutes between tasks. When a company is in the death spiral, it's tempting to do nothing but. But that's the time when study becomes the most important. With the last couple of death spirals I've been in, I've self-studied to the point of being able to land the next job with the skills I picked up while on the clock. If the company isn't wanting to pay for new kit or approve new systems, there's still plenty of skills that can be picked up via simulation or installing the packages on VMware.
If I'm honest with myself, I have to admit I was on the lax side with the self-study. I picked up my skills and got my next job after the layoff but I could have advanced the time table a bit. But I'm in a better position than other co-workers I've been with who have let their depression with the job turn into paralysis and then the layoff comes out of the blue and they have no prospects, no current skills.
So yes, there is the temptation to goof off during downtime but you're not cheating the company -- they'll fuck and chuck without a second thought, you owe them nothing -- but you will cheat yourself. In this economy, you should keep one eye on your current job and one eye on what you plan to do next after you get laid off from this one. If your current job has you working with hot shit technology, no worries. If you end up in a tech ghetto with skills that won't be applicable on the general market, make the time to self-study.
Re:Isn't it obvious? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:get to work! (Score:5, Insightful)
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