How productive are you at work? Busy from start to EOD?

[Zeze]

I had my stint of working my ass off in production support. Couple people had meltdowns on the leadership calls because the pressure was so intense.

Nowadays, It's pretty easy. I have my busy days but I've been leaving work at 3pm and log on at home to 'work' this entire year.

Let's see how long this lasts.

My boss makes good six figs and he says he doesn't do crap either.

 

[local]

Completely variable. If an emergency happens I am busy as hell, if we have no work I don't have much to do. At 3pm on a Friday we could go all hands on deck after doing very little all day.

 

[vi edit]

Just depends on the day. Some days I have 4+ hours of conference calls and meetings and get one 1 ticket that is an absolute bitch to troubleshoot. Very little "productivity".
Other days I can come in and hammer out 20 requests and respond to 100+ emails.
And some days you run out of sites to read, look at your watch every 15 minutes and just waiting for the day to end.

Completely random. Some of the days that look the easiest end up being the worst. Just depends on what system goes down or how bad somebody screwed something up.

 

[Mr.IncrediblyBored]

Depends. We're between releases at the moment, so things are pretty slow until we start the next version. Things here in general aren't that stressful even during "crunch time" I'm not typically working 9-10 hour days.

 

[BoomerD]

Almost always. Assholes and elbows!
I always believed that if you didn't HAVE something to do...find something to do.

 

[highland145]

Almost always. Assholes and elbows!
I always believed that if you didn't HAVE something to do...find something to do.

Netflix counts.

 

[RockinZ28]

Job I'm on is ridiculous. Maybe an hour per day most days. Days crawl, but it pays very well.

 

[Zeze]

Job I'm on is ridiculous. Maybe an hour per day most days. Days crawl, but it pays very well.

What do you do and what is 'very well'? You sound like also in prod support.

 

[BoomerD]

Netflix counts.

 

[highland145]

You ain't my Daddy.

 

[Humpy]

It's impossible to say really, I work for the government.

Being busy is different than being productive.

 

[BoomerD]

You ain't my Daddy.

Maybe...are you SURE?

 

[highland145]

Maybe...are you SURE?

My Mama said my Daddy was a real famous musician person. Talented. That's where I get my good looks from.

 

[RockinZ28]

What do you do and what is 'very well'? You sound like also in prod support.

Do testing and commissioning in the field for railroad signal systems. Lot of tax free dollars for housing, car and food, but comes out to $11.5k/mo net for 40 hour weeks. Get paid overtime as well. Bay area, so its not outrageous compensation, but still very comfortable.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I work in a NOC so it's a pretty cushy job. Sometimes absolutely nothing happens and you pretty much just surf the net or w/e. I don't do it so much in the day but on nights when I'm the only one in the building I'll typically watch youtube videos, TV episodes etc. Though lately I've been working on an unofficial project to get our shit together because everything is so disorganized.

But it only takes one fibre cut, or a wind storm and it will be gogogogogo busy with the phone going off the hook. We're kinda like a fire department. Might sit around and do nothing at times but when that bell rings it's all hands on deck.

It's far from a high profile job but it's only one of the highest paying ones at my company. Not a lot of people want to come work at this job, but the ones that do don't end up leaving. I personally enjoy the shift work too because I get way more time off.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

I work in a NOC so it's a pretty cushy job. Sometimes absolutely nothing happens and you pretty much just surf the net or w/e. I don't do it so much in the day but on nights when I'm the only one in the building I'll typically watch youtube videos, TV episodes etc. Though lately I've been working on an unofficial project to get our shit together because everything is so disorganized.

But it only takes one fibre cut, or a wind storm and it will be gogogogogo busy with the phone going off the hook. We're kinda like a fire department. Might sit around and do nothing at times but when that bell rings it's all hands on deck.

It's far from a high profile job but it's only one of the highest paying ones at my company. Not a lot of people want to come work at this job, but the ones that do don't end up leaving. I personally enjoy the shift work too because I get way more time off.

Worked in a NOC as well, similar workload. Half the time I'd be pissing time away playing dwarf fortress on a laptop, other half it was 'Colonels on hold, shit's on fire, planes aren't landing' workload. Good times.

Now, I'm a normal-people sysad, so it's still on and off but far less extreme.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Sometimes during a major incident or deployment, it can be major chaos, doing enough work for 4 or 5 people over a long 19 or 20 hour day. Thankfully most days its 8-10 hours, and generally busy, but not horribly overwhelmed.

 

[lxskllr]

I probably average 7 hour days, almost never ot. If people leave me alone, I don't bill my slack time. I'd be fucking around with a computer anyway. Pester me, and it goes to misc office.

 

[IronWing]

I probably average 7 hour days, almost never ot. If people leave me alone, I don't bill my slack time. I'd be fucking around with a computer anyway. Pester me, and it goes to misc office.

I painted my parents house one summer. The deal I offered my mom was straight time if I was left alone, double time if dad watched, triple time if he directed my work. She agreed and paid.

It really didn't matter as they paid for my college anyway so the work didn't really cost them anything they weren't already paying.

 

[KentState]

Lets put it this way, I never complain and try to do as much as I can because it's pretty much a gravy train right now. We are on a SoW that pretty much renews yearly because it's not high enough to raise eyebrows, but also pays very well since we have a low headcount. I'm not suppose to really be coding or doing any development, but I spend my free time doing as much as I can.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I probably average 7 hour days, almost never ot. If people leave me alone, I don't bill my slack time. I'd be fucking around with a computer anyway. Pester me, and it goes to misc office.

The random pestering is what bothered me the most when I was a server tech. People walking in asking for help etc. We used to have a sign on the door that said not to enter unless you have a ticket number, but the IT manager got rid of that because he wanted the department to be more "open". Essentially what it meant is that if you come in with a trouble we have to drop everything we're doing. People got the hint of that so instead of putting in tickets they'd just come straight to the IT office.

My favourite though was blackberry zombies. If the BES or exchange server went offline within like a minute they just come in droves spinning the thumb wheel looking down at their phones. "mail down? Blackberry? error? Help?". They'd actually beat the server monitoring software at notifying us that it was down.

 

[Chaotic42]

I stay pretty busy. I have enough work to keep my days filled. I'm not super chatty with the people around me, and they usually leave me alone, so I can get a lot done. Most of the time I'm not actively typing, I'm waiting on someone else or on the computers to finish their tasks. I'll check the news or read up on emerging tech at that point.

 

[rcpratt]

I have 3-5 hours worth of meetings most days and a long laundry list of things to do that I will never catch up on. So, busy. I used to have a lot more downtime at my prior job (same company), but I guess that's the price of trying to move up.

 

[Chaotic42]

I hate having downtime at work. I love what I do, but if I'm just going to sit there doing nothing, I'd rather be completely slammed or at home. Fortunately things would have to be really bad for me to get any downtime.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I have 3-5 hours worth of meetings most days and a long laundry list of things to do that I will never catch up on. So, busy. I used to have a lot more downtime at my prior job (same company), but I guess that's the price of trying to move up.

Meetings are the worse, they just slow you down and interrupt your actual work. When I worked at the hospital they LOVED meetings there. Thankfully it was always the senior IT guy that got dragged into most of them. Though sometimes it would be both of us. My favourite was when we got pulled into a meeting while we were physically installing the new SAN and the meeting was to discuss why the SAN deployment is taking so long. The SAN came in the day before.