Comment by layabout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by layabout | Hacker News Reader

Just to add probably the millionth example to this, I currently have a nothing job where I show up for work every day, read the news, play on my phone, network, and generally sit around doing very little. It was not always this way, I used to do work as a developer, then I moved several times, now I work in a special projects team that have no defined remit. The team had a remit when set up and has existed officially for 2 years but the original head was fired 8 months in, and since then the team has had no purpose. We tried for a while to revive the team and have the original remit reinstated, but efforts of myself and others were in vain. For probably the last 9 months I have had no defined job to do, so I swan around some days trying to be useful, others trying to do nothing (depending wholly on my whim) but always trying to look busy (which I am not). The company is massive so I contribute to internal open source projects when I want to, and have recently started looking for another job in company time as I am mind-numbingly bored. Reading this story was like reading someone living the life I've had for the last 9 months, but with them actually seeking to prolong it (which I don't want to)...

While it's nice to know others are in this boat, it's depressing that any company lets this happen, particularly when I see people working hard at much less well paid things: the cleaners are working much harder than I!

I just can't understand how this happens. I know it does, since I have a friend to which this did happen, but it was a govt job and they are known to be wasteful with budget.

For a private enterprise, the budget can't possibly be this free!?

Can confirm this does happen more often than not, especially in very big companies.

As of now, my team of 5 + a manager is basically doing nothing (mainly because the manager is an asshat and I think higher ups have given up on him but cannot fire him for some legal reason). A big bunch of budget was devoted to this team, but when the expected ROI doesn't pan out higher ups just give up on the team and would rather force you to resign rather than fire you - at least in my country, getting fired also means getting a nice compensation, and I think they want to force us into boredom and resigning just to not pay us even more when leaving.

I'm honestly considering a master's degree at this point, corporate life really is awful.

On the contrary, private enterprises lack the external visibility that lets people see the waste. In a private business, in a "cost centre" like development, this kind of thing can happen very easily.

It can also easily coexist with stupid cost saving measures like cutting the free soda.

A company of significant size will always have cracks that can be fallen through, and accounting and payment systems are often so automatic that no central authority will ever notice unless it’s brought to their attention. Such places usually assume middle management’s responsibility is to flag cases that need attention, but if things shake out such that a person winds up disconnected from the broader org tree like in this case it’s entirely possible that nobody notices for months or years.

I have the same situation. Not quite as severe but I'm in management yet have no reports, no projects, no budget and no accountability. I've invented a few tasks for myself but I could drop them all and not get in trouble. My VP sits 6 feet away and the last feedback cycle he gave me a raise and said I was doing fine. The whole situation just causes me massive anxiety.

It'd be so interesting to try run a side business during your "work" hours!

Presumably it would be grounds for legal trouble once/if they realize.

Open source contributions might work though. Do them under an fake name/alias (so they can't correlate with the hours you're supposed to be working), using your own machine and internet access (so it leaves no trace as far as the company is concerned).

Depends on what type of business, nothing is stopping you from say, writing a novel or something.

So if you ever wondered, this shows you how random reviews are and how little attention they really pay to them.

Every other place I've worked for took reviews pretty seriously. I think that for me in my current role, my boss would have egg on his face if he admitted to having opened a very expensive job req for a role he didn't need.

I make a point to work toward some tangible goal so that I always have something to point to - although I've never actually been in a position where I'm asked, "justify the time you've spent here", I go out of my way to make sure I do have a good answer in case somebody ever does. However... nobody ever really asks. Instead, they always try to put a "process" in place to automate that; Scrum, the unholy beast that "agile" has spawned into is the ultimate automated "are you doing anything" checker. I can't help but notice how infinitely gameable it is, though - story points and sprints almost _invite_ abuse. I do get useful work done in spite of the time that's wasted feeding the "prove that you're doing something" beast, but it would be trivially easy to spend all my time making myself look good on paper while not actually producing anything defensible.

You'd be surprised. I just left a Fortune 50 company for the same thing. I'd never worked at a company that large before and it was, in many ways, more wasteful than the government contracting gigs I had years ago.

As for the how... At this particular company it seems like the core issue was middle management was not evaluated based on the ROI they delivered for their given budgets.

The idea that private enterprise is more efficient than government is a myth. Waste scales with any organization.

It's similar to how Florida seems more messed up than other states, but it's only because of the state's public information laws. There's probably a term for the bias where something seems more prevalent only because information on it is more accessible.

Even a "public" company only shares so much with the general public. Much less than even the smallest government.

Some version of the Streetlight Effect.

It's like when a mainland Chinese student sneered at former lady Korean president for being some brainwashed cult puppet, and proudly exclaimed the superiority of a single party centralized architecture.

I found it sad that he thought Tianmen Square was just a nice park after seeing nice censored pictures in the search results (he didnt know what it was before so he had to baidu it).

This made me wonder, what other fucked up shit are they hiding from naive citizens?

This made me wonder, what fucked up shit is being hidden from me?

One major problem is that managers tend to be judged by how many people work for them. You'll often get paid more if you have a 20-person department that accomplishes nothing than if you have an extremely effective 5-person team.

Combine this with the fact that most people hate firing someone - it's just an awful experience - and most managers won't fire anyone unless they're actively destructive.

The owners or CEO would want line managers to fire do-nothing employees, but they're not the ones making the decision.

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