Bored to Tears by a Do-Nothing Dream Job | Hacker News Reader

Bored to Tears by a Do-Nothing Dream Job

nytimes.com

98 pointsthehoff53 comments

I've had one of these jobs for years. Each day I come in and expect the gig to be up. It never happens. This has been across 2 companies, for 10 years. From the outside it looks like a dream job, from the inside I'm highly depressed because the work is so unfulfilling. I have a need to be busy constantly, instead it's slowly seeing your skill set rot and dying a bit each day.

A good chunk of my time at my first real "professional" job was like this. After a while, you kinda get used to the boredom and it becomes less boring. But what terrified me the most, was pissing away my hard-earned education and potential during the formative years of my career. I was glad when I left, and did so at the first opportunity.

The thing is, on the outside, it looked like an excellent job to others. After all, it had great stability and benefits. But to me, it felt like I was wasting my life.

Does this not grant you the perfect opportunity for personal improvement?

Work on some pet projects to keep your skill set fresh, and in an ideal world, come up with something that makes you money and you can eventually turn into your full-time job.

Usually workplaces ban working on pet projects, or at the very least claim all IP rights on them.

This is quite true, but if the goal is to develop skills more than it is to develop IP, this shouldn't really matter.

I suspect very very few individuals have hit a grand slam startup idea out of the park while simultaneously learning a new language or domain.

Without sounding rude, can you not get another job?

I look daily, I've had several interviews over the years but nothing has worked out. I share custody of my 8 yr old daughter and live in a somewhat isolated area of the US that has very few development jobs (like 5 employers, most of them undesirable). I've made the decision to stay here until she is older. I've looked for remote jobs but that can be intimidating, most are looking for that 'rockstar' developer. I'm just in a bad place, I'm highly educated (bs, ms,Mba) and feel like that was just wasted.

How about _trying_ a remote job - being intimidated means you don't _think_ you are fit for such job, on the other hand it's your own perception. If you are depressed, believe me your perception is strongly biased negatively ;-)

I know nothing about you, but your comment hit me. For some reason I write this - I hope it won't hurt you in any way.

Thanks - I did not the advice negatively. I've gone down that route and plan to pursue in the future. A lot of it is perception that I'm not good enough.

I assume this means that there are no options with your current employer?

Don't want to assume but a number of years ago with my current employer I started out doing work that was seemed interesting but a year or so in it started to get old real fast (also lots of education). I too started to get somewhat depressed and felt like I was 'rotting'.

So I started doing some projects on the side that started to have some real impacts over the next year. This eventually started to get some attention (the good kind) which lead to other things which eventually led to what I do now which I really enjoy doing. I'm at my same employer, same boss but through letting her know what I wanted and my side-projects I was able to parlay that into something more interesting.

(I realize that this may not work for all employers.)

I've approached my boss several times about this, and any changes are temporary - it's a management issue (same management at both places). I have a need to be on high profile high performing projects (I've lead development on the last several at our company) but then there are low activity periods where management does not provide direction. I can work on my own but it's hard to gain traction (technology company that's doesn't understand technology).

technology company that's doesn't understand technology

I love this, though. Coming up with something technical that makes sense to these people is a hugely beneficial skill.

They would also expect it for dirt cheap or free :(

Company is very small ~10 people, 4 devs. I manage several of the projects and resources.

Develop some app to have fun with your daughter, you are the right person in the right place with right job to do it.

amatxn, no promises but let's talk. More info is in my profile.

@sn - no direct contact info on the profile other than co-founder info, don't want to be too stalker-ish in finding you :)

I was a chef on private yacht. Fortunately we had satellite TV, internet in marinas, I was expected to fish if we were underway, if it was windy the mister would ask if I needed help getting the windsurf board off the top deck, I could use the boat credit card at all the tiki bars at the end of the dock, unlimited food budget, cook anything I wanted, and crew and owners always made them selves breakfast. Bored I started teaching myself how to code. Now I'm stressed not having done that in a few years distracted by Hacker News trying to build an Angular directive wondering why I didn't use React which I know nothing about. :(

should have taught yourself how to sail and become a pirate

or do a course for captains

>We all need a reason to get up in the morning, preferably one to which we can attach some meaning.

Author makes a generalization here - one I have seen first hand not to be true on many occasions.

My first job was effectively working 2-3 hours a day in a medium sized company (>400 employees). The company inherited local market monopoly and a lot of employees had shares after privatization from communist era - which kept the communist hiring/work policy for almost 15 years after the fall of the regime.

Very few people actually disliked the fact that they accomplished little to nothing in their 8 hours at work, a lot of them were involved in stealing (drivers using company gas for their cars, reselling raw materials, stealing product labeled as "defective", etc.)

I would say 95% of the people were not only happy but probably proud that they were getting decent salaries for below reasonable amount of work (by any standard). There were people who didn't like that kind of environment and incentives (myself included) but we were in minority. I would say that what separated us from the others was ambition - we actually wanted to accomplish something in our career and majority of people working there were perfectly happy where they were.

Eventually the financial crisis hit, the market shifted, company profits went to shit, employees dumped their shares in panic and all of those incompetent people found themselves on the street with no career prospects after 20+ years of doing practically no work. The guys who were semi competent were long gone by then.

My point is - this sentiment of needing to accomplish something at work is not shared by everyone (some may pay lip service to it but in practice won't behave accordingly) it's not something I would generalize.

I can confirm. This is the case in the whole "Eastern Block". Most people do no work and are perfectly fine with that. At the same time they complain about their low salaries and shitty countries.

It does not mean they didn't have a reason to get up in the morning, just that those reasons were unrelated to the business line they "worked" in.

I have known a bunch of such people, in a variety of mostly governmental jobs (but one high level banker too and even one in a tiny 5 employees company !). They were going to work like you go to the pub. They went to socialise, engage in petty status/influence wars, and indeed, there was this competition to see how to profit from the system.

And even then, all of that is relative. Money alone is a powerful reason to get up in the morning for the vast majority of the world. That's really a first world problem that you want to be paid to do something with meaning. Hiring people to do nothing all is routinely done in third world outsource centre. You keep team around for months before a project starts and you don't hear much whining.

> It does not mean they didn't have a reason to get up in the morning, just that those reasons were unrelated to the business line they "worked" in.

I agree - but it seems implied in the text (maybe I am misreading it).

I would say people who actually want meaningful work are an exception not the rule - most see it as a way to get money. Which I am not criticizing btw. - everyone has their own values - I am just saying you shouldn't assume that people care about the work they do on their jobs (and I've seen many people idealistically assume it, even I believed it before I started working).

If you liked this article, you'll like this one too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087935 ("forgotten employee, something awful forums")

I had a kind of job like this once...weeks might go by with nothing at all assigned to work on, and then a sudden hellstorm of unstoppable shit for a few days, then back to boredom.

I tried to work on other things, but you never knew when a pile of nonsense would end up on my table (and the boss was one of those terrible managers who exemplified all the things managers shouldn't do), if I tried to work on anything outside of what my job description entailed, I'd immediately get shot down.

So I slept a lot, worked out, studied languages, anything that could keep me occupied, but wouldn't count as "IP" the company could claim since I did it all on company time.

It was one of the most stressful jobs I've had and I finally just left, even though the pay and benefits were phenomenal.

It would have been better, and I would have been more productive when they needed me, if they had just turned me into an on-call employee with benefits and just let me do whatever else I wanted on the side.

Exactly this ^^^. In fact those that leave my company all end up as contractors.

To me this just says "I don't know how to find interesting problems by myself; I need somebody to supply them for me."

There's plenty of people out there who have problems they care about independently of anyone telling them to, and have to just work on these in the time left in the day that isn't taken up by their job and chores. If I got one of these do-nothing jobs I could get plenty of math done with that!

Yes but that is because you are a mathematician (or at least appear to be so). Private math can be done in so many places. I'm not criticizing as I would do the same with coding (and is how I started my own company).

However I would say predominantly most vocations/interest require considerable infrastructure (other people to work with and/or other resources) and cannot be done during a menial office job.

Even most academic studies require resources (like telescope time) that you really can't do with out full commitment. I would argue even the most brilliant will probably run out of creativity with out the right social interactions.. I could be wrong.

I had a similar experience. I worked at a travelling agency in the early 2000's. There were days without a single customer, and I was the only employee at that particular office. Internet access was shielded (and monitored!), and we had no radio. On 9/11 someone barged in and told me the news, because I was unaware.

Anyway, I got some books about HTML, and later PHP from the library and started coding in notepad. To this day I think this has been a blessing, a lot of my friends learned by copy-pasting scripts, but I had to learn from the bottom up.

Long story short: I learned how to code and got the hell away from that dead-end job.

I think living a stress free life can turn out to be a bad thing. You need physical stress i.e exercise makes you healthy + happy. I wouldn't be surprised if purely mental stress had similar effects on Humans.

Obviously there's a threshold after which it starts affecting people negatively.

Also, just because a job seems like a dream doesn't mean that the day to day grind is for you. I know a lot of pilots who, after a few years of flying commercial airlines, can't stop bitching about the tedium of the job.

I think that's conflating "stress" with "challenge". One makes you and grow, while the other is just an incentive not to die.

There are challenging things which are not stressful, and stressful things which are not challenging. (Especially if they hinge on something beyond your control.)

My dad retired from the Air Force. He didn't go the airline pilot route, because he said it would be "driving a bus" and "boring holes in the air". He went back to school to get a PhD instead and had a second career as a professor.

>I’ve often wondered why the so-called Masters of the Universe, those C.E.O.s with multimillion-dollar monthly paychecks, keep working. Why, once they have earned enough money to live comfortably forever, do they still drag themselves to the office? The easy answer, the one I had always settled on, was greed.

>But as I watched the hours slowly drip by in my cubicle, an alternative reason came into view. Without a sense of purpose beyond the rent money, malaise sets in almost immediately. We all need a reason to get up in the morning

I enjoyed the article, but this is painful. Is it really that hard to imagine why someone with a lot of money would want to keep doing what they do, or that it might not be primarily about the money?

A very related TED talk: The way we think about work is broken, by Barry Schwartz [1]

I found the book in a bookstore this weekend, and I ended up buying the audiobook [2].

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_way_we_think_ab...

[2] http://www.audible.com/pd/Nonfiction/Why-We-Work-Audiobook/B...

Hey, the grass is always greener...

Why does this guy seem to have jobs where he either does nothing or where he works every waking moment? Seems to me like he should read up on work-life balance.

yeah, the wonderful effects of real-life socialism & communism. same experience here, luckily I am young enough to only see and hear about it, not experience it (on) myself. luckily i moved away, since this mentality ain't gone completely yet.

every time I hear people bching about capitalism and glorifying some nice-on-the-paper utopias, where all will be happy and working for greater good of mankind (ie not entirely but in same ballpark - basic income), I just recall good old memories of this. haven't yet heard a theory that is "this"-proof, but boy I sure would like to...

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10613961 and marked it off-topic. Generic ideological tangents nearly always are.

Yep, I noticed it on this forum recently as well. People complain when profit incentives don't lead to value creation in some instance and see that as a basis to reject capitalism. They don't consider what happens when you replace profit with politics - incentives end up being perverse by default (as we are seeing more and more in the West with regulatory capture and government granted monopolies).

I think basic income is the least disruptive of all as it keeps the incentives for industry there but still creates a floor for everyone. It would change availability of various services/disrupt pricing but I would prefer that to socialism any day.

What GP is talking about is a centrally planned economy, and what you are referring to (basic income) is wealth redistribution, these are basically orthogonal issues.

You can have a centrally planned economy where people are only paid if they work, and their pay is proportional to the value they create (so no wealth redistribution occurs), and you can have an economy built entirely around unregulated enterprise where the government taxes income/consumption/use of common goods like land or oil etc. and pays everyone an equal share of the taxes collected.

You can on paper have a centrally planned economy where people are paid according to the value they create, but not in practice. The trouble is that bureaucratic proxies are used to determine value, and people inevitably game those proxies.

This is not just true of governments, but any large coordinated human activity like corporations.

I would imagine that the majority of salaries in the U.S. get determined by bureaucratic proxies.

There is some use of proxies (with the inevitable attendant gaming), but in profit oriented companies it remains largely at the discretion of the manager(s).

Unless you are directly working for the owner of the company your manager is just a bureaucratic proxy for the Owner/CEO/Board/Shareholders.

Managers also generally only have limited control over your salary. If your engineering manager thinks you as a developer contributed more than a VP because of your innovation he would not be able to write you a check for $200,000 as a bonus to reward you for your value creation.

My point is the manager is not a bureaucratic rule. Rules can and inevitably are gamed. Managers know who is producing and who isn't - heck, everyone in the office knows who the performers and slackers are. It's really hard to game that.

Managers can't authorize a check for $200,000, but they can go to bat for you with top management, who can. It would be a mistake to assume this doesn't happen.

I have a colleague from the "eastern bloc" with a similar set of stories: factories in which everyone had a side business with stolen material.

But it really, really shouldn't be seen as a binary choice between unfettered winner-takes-all capitalism and full zero-freedom communism. There are lots of possibilities in the middle which should be selected on a pragmatic basis.

After all, the point of the original article is that in capitalism people can also end up in unsatisfying useless makework positions. Most companies are centrally planned internally.

I think that socialism and communism are too often equated.

Why should a corporation not pay fair taxes, they benefit from the infrastructure, legal system, police not to mention an educated workforce.

It's a spectrum, western Europe style socialism works and fairly well, I'd sooner live in France or Germany than the US frankly.

Winner takes all means the losers get nothing.

Now add some books and some experience to what you heard and you'll be good to go.

dude, I lived in that society, seen how my parents, both university educated were punished, because they didn't belong to communist party and high education was something undesirable (like in all similar oppressive regimes). my luck was I was young enough to see things as they were (lack of freedom of speech, movement and all else), but I wasn't grown up yet to be a cog in the wheel, with very strict boundaries of what is allowed and what not.

now, what's your experience? (next time, read properly before you subtly attack, HN has higher standards than this)

In a world where I find every time more difficult to pay for the medicines to combat the ailments that keep me from being useful to society, I happened to discover that socialist ideas do have a point here and there.

I fail to see how my personal experience is of any relevance to the issue.

Did he now have a computer with internet? How can you be bored when you have the internet.

not

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