Doing Nothing at Work

A translated article from a former GitHub staff engineer argues that top engineers should not stay busy all the time.

Instead, they should keep about 80% utilization, leave slack for high-stakes moments, and be ready for launches, outages, and big deals.

The piece warns against glue work and reactive busyness, emphasizing calm focus over frantic responsiveness.

The takeaway: in tech teams, how engineers allocate time can directly affect performance, burnout, and the ability to capture important opportunities.