The Life of a Forgotten employee | Hacker News Reader

The Life of a Forgotten employee

shii.org

158 pointsjcslzr28 comments

I'm surprised none of the comments (so far) are critical of the author. What's the point of mooching if you're not going to use that time productively? Eventually he'll have to find a new job, and not very many places want candidates with 5 years experience in pretending to work.

I can understand a few weeks of slacking, but any longer than that and I would go stir-crazy. Instead of playing games or browsing the web, he could have used his idle time to find an interesting job or hobby. He could have read books or learned a new language (computer or human). He had an opportunity to make money while improving himself, and he squandered it.

Edit: I think it's likely the story is exaggerated, but I've been in a similar situation. I used my free time to interview for other jobs and study/practice/learn. It's so easy to fall into the trap of wasting time in exactly the same way every day.

I wouldn't be able to stomach that situation, but I wonder if the hypothetical author is just much more mentally sane than I am. Maybe the story is really about sanity.

Shii isn't very sane. He was perma-banned from the Awful Forums in 2005 for umm... bad things. Google for shii somethingawful if you want to find the thread. It's definitely not safe for work.

Thanks for the info - I'll skip the Googling... :-)

Or maybe there is a lesson in that? Ie you can stomach the most awful situations by letting off steam on another forum?

shii did not write it

D'oh. My bad. Thanks for correcting me.

>not very many places want candidates with 5 years experience in pretending to work.

Except as far as any one else was concerned he had 5 years of experience "running the company" and he had the Vice President as a reference to back him up on that. I don't think it would be any harder for him to get a job than if he'd spent those 5 years actually doing his job

How does the saying go? I think it's, "The half-life of a CS degree is 7 years." (Yes I know he got his masters in physics in the story.)

Being out of practice, he'd probably have trouble answering interview questions and writing code.

He's a manager, he doesn't have to write code. He just has to show up at meetings and tell people to tell people to write code.

Dagw if I've told you once I've told you a thousand times: write some code. And where's that TPS report?

I've also been in a somewhat similar situation a few times at startups that were circling the drain, waiting to die.

Some people goofed off. Some drove themselves crazy with stress about the future. Others went off and learned new things.

After the doors closed, guess who found new work most easily?

Is the moral of the story that everyone has the same useless role? And that the need to BS is a primitive, corporate instinct where everyone ends up sending globes to each other.

The truth is scarier than the most outlandish lie.

This is why I find it funny that civil servants have such a bad reputation. This sort of thing happens in all big corporations and government is just another big corporation.

I believe you have my stapler?

It's kind of sad that it goes from 'struggling to comprehend superstring theory' to being an unknown speck at <random company>.

Agreed, it was a waste of time to try to understand a theory that predicts nothing and can't be tested.

Entertaining...I'm pretty sure it's fictional though.

I'm not so sure, there have been more ridiculous true stories on SA.

Correction: The user's name was "moonshine" as stated in the article and he has admitted to making it all up before.

please someone tell me it's fiction, it was soooo funny, I had to take a few breaks while reading it.

The clue is "sipping code red". :-)

I worked in a big company where I actually witnessed something very, very close to that happening.

The only difference is that the guy dodged projects, supervisors and reviews for a good 2 years, then hooked up with company owner's daughter. And became the all-time-absent CTO...

I can't decide if I want this to be real or not.

great story.. long, but worth the read.

The book "Whatever" by Michel Houellebecq does this much better.

Something similar happened to me, but it didn't have a happy ending.

My last year in college I had to stay for fall semester because of scheduling issues with a required class, so I needed a job for a summer. A local firm -- and let's name names: Marshall Erdman, since purchased by Cogdell Spencer http://www.cogdell.com/ -- offered me a programming job. I accepted about 4 weeks before I started, and in doing so, turned down other job offers.

My fourth working day, my boss, her boss, and an entire wing of people were laid off. In typical classy fashion, people figured out who was going when they couldn't login to outlook. Somehow they forgot about me though. So I literally spent the next 6 working days finishing already assigned work and coming to work in a wing of the office that was literally deserted except for me.

Finally, I walked into the president's office and asked what I should do. I got a general, "huh?" reception; HR fired me that day. Of course, these assholes gave me no severance or anything else -- they just said, "Oops, our bad." Since I was in college, I didn't exactly have much savings and normally by the end of the semester I was living paycheck to paycheck so this couldn't have come at a worse time.

I managed to string together enough jobs to make rent, but it was a close call. And employers wonder why employees don't feel any loyalty :rolleyes:

I applaud the author of the post above; I should have done the same thing.

awesome read. very funny in parts.

a couple of gems:

'I was talking, nodding absent-mindedly to myself, engaged in a pretend conversation with my pants'

and

'Nothing had prepared me for a meeting. Therefore I decided on the smartest possible thing to do - ignore it like that lump on my balls.'

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