Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work

Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work
509 by awaythrown1 | 363 comments
For as long as I've been working professionally, I have been slacking around a lot of the time, reading blog posts, HN, often even reading (tech, biz-related) books and just doing the bare minimum for appearances sake but no one seems to notice. In the office I book a booth to work in to have some peace & quiet and have a couple of code commits prepared to not arouse suspicion. In companies with perf reviews I get some useful feedback here and there but most of the time it's positive, people love to work with me, I do get stuff done if I have to, but as soon as I can get away with doing close to nothing, I'll take the chance. I don't think I'm blocking other teams and I don't think I'm preventing my own team from having accomplishments and often people refer to me as being either partially or mostly responsible for shipping something because I manage to have a clear mind and focus when things get close to a deadline. If I am motivated and the task/project/product is fun I throw myself into it but that isn't sustainable. I've read a few of these posts from people at FAANG doing almost the same so I don't really feel bad about it. I'm just wondering how wide-spread this is. One of my theories for this behavior is that this is related to 40+ hour work weeks. I think I'd be able to get my devopsy work done in ~3 hours/day if I manage my time well and schedule most meetings on Mondays.