Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by
150 comments
·March 16, 2025padolsey
bboygravity
I can't help but think that there must be some arbitrage opportunity there: massive companies hire top notch engineers and all make them waste their time in (commute to/from) offices.
What if someone comes along and is like "I'm going to provide the exact same service, but without offices and everybody works from home".
That company would have a competitive edge, because: people from the established company would have a reason to work for WFH company instead, WFH company would have significantly less expenses (more profits/budgets).
Does the fact that WFH is not a thing mean that in the real world, for most people, coming to the office IS actually more efficient? Or does this just need more time? I'm honestly not sure, but I've sure been tempted to start a competitor to very silly old fashion "you shall come here and sit at a computer where I can see you" type companies.
xlii
That’s an unpopular opinion but given more than a decade of remote work experience I’d say: yes, people are less efficient in remote environment (on average).
The „on average” is key however. I’d say that most of the people don’t understand the cost of remote work until it hits them and simply not all can bear that cost.
It’s not like people are unwilling (occasionally you can find slackers) but it’s more often things like issues caused by functioning without micromanagement (which is the case in many companies), problem with written communication skills, communication process not efficient for remote work (e.g. water cooler knowledge share which is foundational for people breaks without water cooler) etc.
Then there’s self-drive requirement that can easily be extinguished by home conflicts, non-prepped environment or depression coming from isolation and lack of physical movement. Efficient teams are more difficult to create when there is no space for people to bond over non-work (team pizza/social events)
From my experience, both remote work proponents and opponents are right with their arguments but the crowd cannot be generalized. Some will suck at the desk, some will suck in remote.
As for „sit where I can see you” - that’s a standard offshoring practice, nothing new. You do get to the point of „who watches the watchers” conundrum sooner or later ;)
varispeed
> Then there’s self-drive requirement that can easily be extinguished
It is 99% extinguished by low pay though. Low pay means person can't afford better living environment, can't afford leaving toxic partner, can't afford to go out or hobbies which leads to depression.
> Efficient teams are more difficult to create when there is no space for people to bond over non-work (team pizza/social events)
That has nothing to do with efficiency. If you create fake family or cult environment, then it is easier to manipulate workers to do unpaid overtime. They "go hard" until they burn out and they then are thrown away like a trash by the corporation. Efficient teams are composed of happy people, who live in healthy environment. You can't have efficient worker who is worried more about their bills than their current ticket.
jorvi
> That’s an unpopular opinion but given more than a decade of remote work experience I’d say: yes, people are less efficient in remote environment (on average).
Thankfully that's just an opinion, and the stats bear out the opposite.
Regretfully, managers and workers who want to RTO will force us to do so regardless.
asmor
I still miss that one team that did async work extremely well. On my current team - fully remote, but siloed knowledge due to lack of capacity - there's a high chance that things go missing in dailies.
izacus
All this is very true. And to add one more thing that is the most problematic: many many people are horrible at determining if they're a type of person who works well from home or not.
nuancebydefault
I work 2 days from home and 2 days in the office. I couldn't bare full WFH for the reasons mentioned. I would get depressed in the end. I couldn't bare full office, for other reasons mentioned. I would get fully stressed out in the end.
mrweasel
> yes, people are less efficient in remote environment (on average).
Maybe, depending on the tasks. Also it depends on whether or not you take the view of the employee or employer. Say you work 8 hours a day (which even people in offices don't do) as the employer I do agree that you might get more done if people are in the office, but as the employee, I'll add my commute as well, so I now work 9 - 10 hours per day, part of which is completely unproductive. You also need to factor in that there is a shit ton of people who are fairly unproductive even at the office, they just look busy.
There are some fields where I can easily see the office being more productive in general, but you also have tasks where you move people for no reason. I think accounting is a pretty good example of a job that almost never require you to be at the office. Many companies even outsource this to other companies that most definitely isn't at the same office.
If you instead hired people to do a job, not be in front of a computer for 8 hours, then you could probably have an even higher level of efficiency. Imagine working from home, have a stack of assigned tasks for the day and be informed that once those are done you free to spend whatever remain of your eight hours as you please. I assure you that people will get shit done at light speed.
It's about management, and management mostly have not, and have no desire to evolve to handle work-from-home. You need better managers, more highly trained managers and managers that works harder than they do in the office, which many of them don't want to.
muspimerol
> Does the fact that WFH is not a thing mean that in the real world, for most people, coming to the office IS actually more efficient?
I don't think the labor market is efficient to such a degree that we can draw this conclusion. Lots of startups are doing this, but it takes time, capital and luck to achieve the success of the big corporate competitors, which have a huge amount of middle management who hate WFH.
dijit
There is also the danger of being successful and then acquired by a big tech.
You will then be folded into the organisation, maybe the initially hired staff will retain certain perks but they will be eroded with time, and new joiners to the project would never be afforded the same.
gruturo
> Does the fact that WFH is not a thing mean that in the real world, for most people, coming to the office IS actually more efficient? Or does this just need more time? I'm honestly not sure, but I've sure been tempted to start a competitor to very silly old fashion "you shall come here and sit at a computer where I can see you" type companies.
Sadly yes. I was grumbling about finding a solution to a problem and a colleague overheard me and supplied a perfect solution, as he had the same issue a month before. Same colleague was grumbling about needing a specific non-OSS software and the paperwork around requesting it and I told him we have a subscription already and he can get access to it. Wouldn't have happened if not in the office.
My boss tries to keep me informed of what's happening and what will come, but often enough the best stuff is learned serendipitously at the coffee machine. A couple of times I challenged what I learned and it ended up correcting our strategy and saving money.
valzam
Ok but don't you have engineering wide slack/teams channels where these discussions can happen? If I think to my self 'man this is really hard to achieve for whatever company specific reason' I don't just stew on it for days by myself.
hasbot
But how much did your grumbling disturb other people around you and reduce their efficiency?
dwedge
I think that despite what LinkedIn influencers promote, a lot of people take advantage of wfh to be less focused on work. Not all, maybe not even most, but dealing with this (and not knowing who will fit into which camp) eats into the efficiency saving.
Also once the majority of a team is WFH, it's very tempting for management to take this one step further and start supplementing, then replacing, with off shore workers
pnutjam
Nobody is focused on work in the office, it's politics and coaster culture everywhere. WFH allows me to my work efficiently and quickly. I don't need to look busy because I'm delivering.
ptero
> a lot of people take advantage of wfh to be less focused on work
That has been my impression, too, but not for very good teams and often to a fairly small extent.
The bigger issue with WFH is that it requires a management that can write well, do virtually all comms asynchronously and still quickly spot and address both technical and people issues. My 2c.
IshKebab
What do you mean WFH is not a thing? Since the pandemic it's a huge thing.
bboygravity
It's non-existent in Western Europe around my field (electronics & embedded programming of small products that can easily be taken home in a backpack).
I mean there are tons of companies offering 1 or 2 day WFH, but what I was referring to was 100% remote. No office.
Sgt_Apone
> Does the fact that WFH is not a thing mean that in the real world, for most people, coming to the office IS actually more efficient?
WFH is still a thing despite some big names pulling back on it.
mvdtnz
> Does the fact that WFH is not a thing mean that...
That's an interesting "fact".
shepherdjerred
I would rather take a 50% pay cut than work fully remotely
bboygravity
I would rather take a 50% pay cut and work fully remotely.
asmor
They just don't get that some people can't spread their time into perfectly equal slices of productivity. Remote work and flexible time has allowed me to work a big productive burst in the morning and in the late evening, spaced way more than 8 hours apart, with busywork somewhere in the middle. Probably wouldn't work this well if I had to do that in an office, in a single 8 hour (or 4+1+4) segment.
mystified5016
That's why I'm so happy to have a salaried job with lax office hours. For whatever reason, I'm also really productive before noon and after 6. The middle of the day is mostly a waste. At current job, I work when I'm most productive and more or less goof off the rest of the time. I'm one of the most (if not the most) productive members of the company so boss can't complain.
But also I can't tolerate WFH for more than a few days at a time. I need external structure to tell my brain that it's work time.
jimmydddd
This is my issue. For whatever reason, i used to get most of my work done between 4PM and 10PM. Unfortunately, I had to be at my desk at 9AM.
jahnu
The Lynx browser came in handy for these sort of situations in the past for me too
varispeed
Most of the programming I do outside of computer. I like to think everything through in my head before I type something in. I see no value in putting something that maybe works maybe not and then fiddling with it. That would slow me down too much. That said I also have ADHD so I can't stare at IDE whole day. One time a junior developer complained about me to the manager, that I spend most time on Reddit or outside of office (some best work I created whilst walking in the park). Manager called me in and said there are complaints from team members that apparently I am "slacking". I asked him if I deliver on time and whether there were any complaints about my output. He said no. I was back to my desk. I had no further complaints. Though that manager and that developer were sacked couple of weeks later for poor performance.
forinti
I've never had such intrusive management, but I have worked at places where I had to justify every minute of the day.
So my tasks were inflationed to occupy the whole day on those days I didn't have enough work for 8 hours.
That really messes up your statistics.
ionwake
After 20 years working in and around London in IT I empathise. Thx for sharing this story.
mrweasel
> a manager who could remote-log-in to my machine at random times to spot-monitor my work
Is that a British thing? I've only ever heard that from people working in the UK, but there it doesn't seem to be uncommon.
Artoooooor
Did the stream include sound? Certain music genres can discourage the boss from logging in again:)
vzaliva
That reminded me:
Back in the early '90s, I wrote an MS-DOS TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) "boss key" program. It would bring up a fake TurboC compilation screen whenever I pressed a key - just in case my boss walked in while I was playing a game. (The tricky part was restoring the graphics state back to normal, but that's another story.)
My boss wasn’t stupid. After a few close calls, he started asking why my compilation was taking so long without producing any results. That motivated me to improve my "boss key" app - I ended up adding line numbers that incremented on the screen, making it look like the fake compilation was actually progressing.
incanus77
I recall playing an 80s-ish submarine (WW2?) game with a "spreadsheet mode".
nwellnhof
Better known as "boss key": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key
netsharc
Lots of old games have this, I played many MicroProse flight simulators and they all had it.
stevekemp
These days even Tinder (website version) has a boss-key.
But yeah I remember a lot of games had boss-keys that would let you pretend to be working.
relwin
That's probably Gato (1984): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gato_(video_game)
hakaneskici
Creative use case for a TSR :)
The classic "fun" TSR use-case was to make an app that installs an interrupt vector to decode mouse hardware "events" directly from the RS232 port before exiting via 0x21h, so that DOS screen would display a pointless "native" mouse cursor that doesn't do anything :)
When I say mouse cursor, I mean an ASCII block character with the blink bit on.
wruza
Some mouse drivers used an upper ascii range (less used) and rendered 4 “arrow” cursor parts into it over 4 chars over which the cursor ought to be. And then replaced those 4 chars on screen temporarily. As a result you had a fully pixel-perfect cursor in text mode.
kdmtctl
Norton Utils had it. Mind blowing for its time.
hakaneskici
That's clever!
fragmede
why was it pointless? it worked in the text guis of the time
hakaneskici
You're right, TUIs had mouse support. This is a TSR, and exits to shell after running, so there's a mouse cursor visible without any app running. Like, there's nothing to "click" :)
fasteo
Another use of TSR !
I implemented a password protected access to A:
kazinator
So, yeah, yes he was.
csprimer-in
[dead]
dijit
Never underestimate the power of colour on a terminal.
Back when I was first becoming an adminsys, colour in the terminal was pretty rare. Emoji's certainly didn't exist even as a concept in the west at that point either.
However, a senior sysadmin on my team said "when you're writing your management scripts, remember to add colour codes if things are good or if they are not good. Managers freaking love that". He was incredibly right, and though the development team avoided colour codes (they can mess with things like stdout redirection) the admin team leaned into them- and the managers lapped it up like crazy.
"Red bad" is a universal language in our culture, and it makes managers feel like they understand, I guess.
otherme123
We were once warned that the TV was comming to make some interviews with the bosses. I though it will be funny to pipe a nginx access log slowly (5 lines per second or so) through a coloring log program, and leave it running, to show in the background.
I left the room because I didn't want to be on camera, and in no time they were recording in front of my screen because it looked "cool, busy and profesional".
pasc1878
Even worse - My part of project just did a release of new functionality making things much quicker. Others just did a change of the screen colours making no difference and got massive praise for their work.
iammrpayments
Red means good in a lot of Asian countries, I bought my macbook there and the stock market shows red when it goes up.
dijit
yeah, I’m aware, which is why i was careful to say “our” culture, like- predominantly english speaking countries.
it is interesting how this difference can exist though.
greenchair
mind blown, thanks for sharing.
itsTyrion
You also originally confirm with circle and cancel with cross/X on a Japanese PlayStation, that’s why the symbols are what they are
ellis0n
Amazing! Finally, the design of Rust is being used not only for interviews but also for bureaucratic reports, which is what it was designed for. Now, the bureaucracy within the team has improved and the bosses will be very pleased. A very useful tool.
I had an experience where a team of Rust juniors did whatever they wanted in a separate chat and the CTO, PM and I (Lead) had no idea what was going on. This tool would have helped. Now, I’ll focus on the code review to see how Rust's safety helped solve this issue. I think this will be a topic for a great new article about the power of Rust.
mirekrusin
Ain't perfect it's only 99.9% rust according to github.
ChadNauseam
won’t be perfect until issue #1 is resolved
robomartin
My rule has always been very simple: If you are goofing off, don't hide it. The worst thing you can do if you work for me is think I am stupid and pretend you are working. I'd rather someone say "My head just isn't in it right now", which is honest and something that happens to all of us.
I understand the need to unplug every so often as much as anyone. There are days when my brain just isn't in sync with what I have to do. Pretending you are doing work is insulting.
BTW, I didn't come up with this idea. This rule was given to me by a former boss when he hired me. The idea stayed with me as I launched and ran my own businesses.
otherme123
Not bullet proof. I have coworkers that are very specialized in looking busy, like sending mails at late hours, always in meetings, micromanaging and bike shedding other people work, and so on. They get lauded by the bosses for working so much.
robomartin
> Not bullet proof
Nothing is, of course. For me it is a simple statement of what should be obvious consequences for an action.
I usually present it like this: If you are going to goof off, goof off. Don't pretend you are working. We all need mental breaks. Don't think people are stupid. If you choose to insult them by pretending to be working, you are going to lose you will be fired.
I had to institute this when I realized a salesperson was spending time on eBay and dating sites rather than, well, selling. He would do the thing where he'd click over to Excel or whatever when I approached. Again, how stupid do they think people are?
He would wait for sales to come in by phone or through the website, rather than actively networking and prospecting. The lack of engagement was obvious from the numbers he was (or, more accurately, was not) producing. So, I installed software to remotely monitor his company-provided computer (and record it for evidence). While I was doing this I thought "How stupid are you that you think you can fuck with an engineer?".
It didn't take long to amass a week's worth of data showing he was spending over 50% of his time (Even up to 75% on some days) during work hours on eBay, dating sites and more. The following week he was gone.
What sucks is that we spent time and money training this idiot and bringing him up to speed with products, technology, etc. What a waste of time and human potential.
I love the line from Phantom Menace: Your focus determines your reality.
harvey9
I once had a boss who told me to buy some games on the company dime for those times.
jama211
Isn’t it just smarter to clear your actual build folder and then rebuild it with a script? Bonus points if you limit resources to it so it takes ages? That way if they ever actually look closely, they’ll see it’s the REAL work you’re supposed to be doing that’s building, and you’ll never get in trouble
huijzer
If I was a boss and saw someone being busy building Rust all day I would offer a faster computer.
jama211
If you were a boss and you were staring at my screen all day, I’d find another job ;).
In all seriousness though, we’re assuming in this case that you’re taking a break, and a stakeholder happens to walk past - hopefully not a constant occurrence.
i-zu
Anxiety wouldn't allow me to go for a break without locking my workstation first.
loxs
Win-win I guess :D
freehorse
Is this the way to get your boss buy you a faster computer?
teleforce
> Implemented non-euclidean topology optimization for multi-dimensional data representation
Based on Google Scholar the best match is this article by researchers from Imperial College, London:
Tensor Networks for Multi-Modal Non-Euclidean Data:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14998
Looks like a very legit game changing and ground breaking work.
9dev
Seriously, they should use something like this in movies when showing hacker screens. Those are so ridiculous, sometimes I think it’s a deliberate inside gag to display an HTML page on a terminal when someone purportedly „hacks“ into a government computer.
genezeta
Someone already mentioned hollywood [0]. From its homepage:
Hollywood was created in 2014 and has been used by NBC News, CNBC, on Saturday Night Live, the Netflix series Unit 42, Yahoo Finance, and in TV commercials for Experian and SentinelOne, the DEFCON music channel, Full Frontal by Samantha Bee, an episode of Map Men, a parody music video by SUSE, the Spy Ninjas series on Youtube, and magazine articles such as this one from Texas A&M University.
anta40
Look interesting, but seems like it's Linux only. And closed source.
jama211
They do this on purpose… it’s pointless to try and appease realism pedants, so they just make an aesthetic instead. It’s the computer equivalent of every phone number implausibly starting with 555.
Liftyee
This is a cool project! Reminds me of `hollywood`[1], but specifically geared towards programming. It'll be a useful tool in my arsenal of "things to run to impress non-terminal-users".
chihuahua
HackerTyper is a worthy addition to that arsenal:
kevdoran
the true king of productivity tools, glad someone mentioned this
noufalibrahim
Thanks for this. It's really trippy.
Svenstaro
This is cool! I once made a project very much like this: https://github.com/svenstaro/genact
Check it out if you like this kind of thing.
bellboy_tech
Love Genact!! Fantastic job
seinecle
This reminds me of my time as a professor at a business school, where I worked in an open space with my screen visible to everyone. I spent a lot of time coding, so my IDE was always in plain sight.
Yet, it was only when I had the terminal open, running a few basic commands, that people would stop by and say—impressed—"Oh, I didn’t realize you could code."
bilekas
This is hilarious, at work sometimes I need to catch up on some friend through irc and use weechat so as not to draw any attention, most non devs simply ignore anything terminal related. I even tend to use the hn-text cli for hacker news just to not give anyone a reason to think I’m slacking.
I remember working for a small agency in London with a bit of a top-heavy management structure. Many times would my shoulder be subtly gazed over to "check on progress". I ended up using IRSSI to chat with friends, wgets to read my fav blogs, and my twitter stream pouring into what looked like an excel spreadsheet UI . I always got my work done in the first couple hours of the day. I will always resent those managers, and the time spent wasted sitting in office chairs whiling away hours to meet some pointless proxy of worth: time and physical presence.
A worse experience I had previously was a manager who could remote-log-in to my machine at random times to spot-monitor my work. I'd see a little icon pop up in the menubar which would tell me he was there, so I'd make haste to busy myself with the appearance of grokking hard code. May he find a never-peace in purgatory.