The Fine Art of Looking Busy in Tech

I’ve noticed a worrying trend at my workplace. It just happened — a colleague gave me a call on Friday evening about their trash code.

I know nobody is working at 5pm on Friday. On Teams we all have orange availability (meaning we’re not fully online). Yet they said they were busy with updating some documentation, and that’s why we hadn’t spoken earlier in the day.

Yeah. No. You weren’t. You’re doing your best to appear productive while doing as little as possible.

It’s the following made real:

“IT mein kaam tumhe ho ya na ho, aisa dikhaate raho ki boht kaam hai”

or in English:

“Whether you have work in IT or not, keep showing that you’re very busy.”

Why Looking Busy Works Better Than Being Busy

In the tech world, competence often takes a backseat to optics. How else do you explain the existence of entire teams who seem to do nothing (DevOps in our place).

The thing is, “looking busy” plays to the biases of most management. If your Slack status is set to “in a meeting”, people assume you’re a high performer. Work late into the night and people think you’ve too much on and are doing great juggling it all.

It’s like the corporate version of peacocking — only instead of bright feathers, you wield Jira tickets and Google Docs.

I hate the attitude. It often seems to take more work to pretend to be working than to actually work.

But, but, I’ve seen too many people successfully employ this strategy. They’re doing something right, and it’s time for me to join the facade “keeping up appearances” train.

Tactics for Looking Busy Like a Pro

If you’re going to play the game, you might as well play it well. Here are some time-tested techniques for seeming busier than you are:

 Strategic Calendar Management

Nothing says “important” like a calendar overflowing with back-to-back meetings. Pro tip: block off “focus time” as if you’re wrestling a gnarly production bug. In reality, you’re watching Netflix (or writing a blog post).

 The Slack Shuffle

Always have at least two Slack threads open at any time. Type furiously in one, drop a cryptic “FYI, looping you in” message in another, and react with a thumbs-up emoji to a third. Bonus points if you send a message in the team channel at 9:30 PM with no context.

Jargon Overload

Casually sprinkle sentences like, “We need to align on cross-functional OKRs while leveraging our tech debt mitigation strategy” into every conversation. Nobody understands what you mean, but everyone will nod and silently fear that they should.

Code Reviews for the Win

Leave a nitpicky comment in someone’s pull request about variable names or whitespace. You’ve now “contributed” overtly while doing the actual opposite. People will begrudgingly accept this masterful play.

Virtual Presence Mastery

Turn your camera off in meetings. This keeps people from realizing you’re working on a side hustle (or asleep, or Switch).

When the Fakery Becomes Reality

It’s so much work to appear busy. Your manager might stop assigning you interesting tasks because you’re so busy.

That’s where your performance review gets interesting because you’re going to have to create interesting tasks to justify all of this time and not get assigned anything tricky. It’s such a delicate balance of “I’m swamped, but I can’t actually do anything” becomes critical.

I’m sure you can do it though. I think you’ve got time.

Conclusion

This is in jest. You should be working to get better at your job and be recognized for doing so.

Or is that last sentence the joke? Hard to tell, isn’t it?