Busy work or meaningful impact?

It’s should and will always be about how productive those hours actually are. You see, no knowledge worker puts out more than 2.5 to 5 hours of real work in a day. That’s 12.5 to 25 hours of productive work in a week. The rest? It’s just meetings, updates and moving things around. Five-day work weeks? If you’re measuring by butts in seats, sure. But if you’re looking at actual output, it’s a joke. We need to obsess over productive time, not clocking hours. The attendance/week hours mindset is a pseudo-metric killing the workforce, making us focus on quantity over quality. Think about it: As a knowledge worker - your days are filled with meetings, status updates, and email threads. How much of that is real, impactful work? Very little. We’re stuck in busyness, mistaking it for productivity. But then again, if orgs obsess on outcomes only, employees will call them out: 'You don’t see my effort to go from A to Z, you don’t acknowledge it.' Hence, orgs measure you by hours. And for those thinking, 'Pay me by hours, overtime factored in' – great on paper, but useless for knowledge workers. IMHO, we are way more more comfortable measuring by hours than outcomes. We rave about deep work, about focus hours, but in reality we laude how long someone stays logged in. Weird isn't it.

My current salary is 42LPA. I am from IIT, have 7 years of experience and work in product. Honestly, my value in the market is higher than what I’m being paid but I am very demotivated to optimise for that. When I do see less deserving people minting more money, I feel that I am doing injustice to myself and playing the wrong hand. More and more though, the thought of earning more money chokes me a bit. I have dreams of building something of my own - that gives me control to build something my way and freedom to live my life as per my terms. But the mindset of “zyada paisa pareshaani hai” doesn’t leave me. My family also is not dependent on me and whatever is needed from my side, I actively contribute to. I also lack any motivation to focus on my investments and see my money grow. I just have money sitting around in my bank account purely for nothing I also look at my lifestyle choices from time to time and go into existential debate of why we need the things that we do. This has come to a point where I really do not understand my relationship with money and why we earn and spend it. For me at this point, it’s just a show for the world. There’s very little that you need, and really no limit to what you want to show. And I just don’t see a point in it anymore.

I’m currently working at a startup as a full stack SWE and looking to switch to a different organization soon. I want to add those “Accomplished X as measured by Y, by doing Z” bullet points to my resume… but not sure how I can quantify my exact impact in terms of revenue, productivity, or any other business or software-related metrics. (I work at a B2B company, so I work on internal tools and dashboards instead of direct customer-facing software.)

What are generally the metrics used during layoffs ? Is it division by division or each employee is vetted for his performance and contributions ? Do high salaried folks generally targeted even if they have good performance and history with company ? With the overall bleak atmosphere in startup ecosystem and lack of transparency in this process from employers wanted to know how are decisions made. Most say it is performance based in news, how true is that ?

Gadgets? Furniture? Apps? Frameworks? Mindset? Fitness? What all did you try and what worked for you? Any communities that you can suggest for productivity and resources.

Hi all, I have noticed that the experienced senior people around me [ ICs, EMs, etc ] have too much work and they are always in a work mode. Seeing them makes me wonder whether I would want to be like them in the future. All the senior experienced people here, how stressful / hectic / difficult is your work life as you move up the corporate ladder? Is it even worth it to chase meaningless numbers, and promotions, and grow up the career ladder?

Plz can you look into my resum. I am not getting any calls. Should i improvise it? Thanks

Lately, seeing many posts on Grapevine around work being transactional. Something where you put in X hours and get paid Y. It can possibly mean a combination of two things: 1. They're not emotionally vested in the work they do everyday. Perhaps, something else interests them more. 2. They're several degrees of connection away from the impact they make. Imagine a Backend Engineer, who corresponds with their EM who in-turn corresponds to the Product team who in turn talk with the users. Essentially, the backend engineer is 2 degrees away from the users. In most large organisations you can be 5+ degrees of connection away from the people you impact. Hence, they feel that the work they do is not purposeful enough. What do you all think about this? Do you find your work purposeful?

As the title suggests, does it make sense to talk about a colleagues’s inability to deliver to my manager. The colleague’s incompetence to take ownership is very evident now to everyone and the manager is not taking any steps on it. Others have to basically cleanup and babysit him. Worse part, this colleague gets paid the highest in the team. At this point it’s just breeding resentment across the team. How to handle this situation? Any tips. Early stage startup, the manager is part of the founding team.

Shall earn half money, work from home, be near family, see my parents getting old and take care of them. And not subscribe to this Bangalore hustle anymore. I am done with this!