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Comment by strathmeyer | Hacker News Reader

I met someone who once worked a summer changing addresses from all uppercase to mixed case. I was once given two employees for a day at my job to change the file extensions in a folder of HTML documents. Why don't our bosses understand what we're capable of?

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If you someday become a boss, you’ll understand a big part of your job is finding work to keep your employees busy, so that when the “real” work comes along you’ll have the staff to do what’s necessary.

There’s nothing more annoying than people with nothing to do who don’t have the personal drive to seek and solve problems.

I'll be blunt: That is moronic.

If your employees are busy doing garbage work, they'll only be good at doing garbage work. And the idea of keeping them busy so they're present for later "real" work, you won't perceive your staff as being capable of doing the real work or you actually won't be able to do it.

1) Perception: You'll perceive your staff as too busy to take on the work, and hire more people. You've lost the benefit of that capacity reserve.

2) Actuality: The garbage work will still need to be done. It can't be skipped, and you won't have the ability to do it in 5 minutes (how long it actually takes), it'll still take you weeks to get it done and you'll have no capacity for the "real" work.

If you don't have work for all your staff, that's 100% fine. Find them useful work until the billable hours become available. Send them to training classes so they're a hair better when the work comes in. Have them do maintenance work on your infrastructure (test systems, servers, build systems) so that when the real work comes in everything around them is working smoothly and efficiently.

But under absolutely no circumstances should you ever give them garbage work to keep them busy. It's the dumbest thing a manager can do.

>I'll be blunt: That is moronic. If your employees are busy doing garbage work, they'll only be good at doing garbage work.

That's totally fine. Garbage work makes the most money for bosses.

I believe you’re confusing “nothing to do” with what the OP task was: “making upper case letters mixed case”. It needs to be done right? This work is analogous to what is done every day in every office in every country. Believe it or not, most of what people do is this type of work (again, my opinion).

If there’s not other pressing needs, and there’s a business need for the work, and you have a sure fire way of solving your problem, then take the path of least resistance and keep your staff from being idle.

Having people do that manually is garbage work. It can be done with a quick script by any competent programmer or system administrator. Having people sit down and do that for hours, days, or weeks, is a sure-fire way to kill any interest they have in contributing meaningfully to the business. They will hate you, themselves, the company, and either seek out a new job (best case) or remain and occupy space continuing to do garbage work.

If your staff is idle, give them meaningful work, training, or the day off. All of those are better than giving them garbage work.

Many companies dont employee a competent programmer or system administrator. They do have employees in other disciplines who have capacity.

I had this happen to me. I was hired as a contractor for a big company and was shown to a cubicle I was to share with another developer. Only, I had nothing to do. I was told what I'd be doing when I interviewed but that project got put on hold by the time I started. After about a week of not being assigned anything I started to kind-of freak out. My cube-mate assured me that everything was fine and he explained that the department head was given the OK to hire someone and he took advantage of that opportunity so that he had me available when he needed me.

I was a contractor there for almost a year and was never really given anything of importance (that I could see, anyway) to work on. But, I guess I was still providing value somehow... I hope?

Why not just let them go home and pay them for what you're really paying them for: being available when needed.

Nothing worse than the boss showing up and asking “where is everybody?”

That’s how Friday WFH got cancelled at my previous job

if you start sending staff home then your management will question whether or not you need them, and you might not be able to keep the head count.

Then a few days or weeks later some difficult work comes by and you’re understaffed and overworking the people you were able to keep.

Besides, the lower case letters still need to be upper case. Don’t you know that most “work” being done around the world isn’t much different?

> If you someday become a boss, you’ll understand a big part of your job is finding work to keep your employees busy, so that when the “real” work comes along you’ll have the staff to do what’s necessary.

Are you an engineering manager? This doesn't match my experiences at all.

As engineering orgs are usually so bad that they consistently have a years' work "to do" regardless of actual usefulness or business need.

The opposite problem of people without the drive to find work to do is people driven to constantly change or improve things without clear ideas about why it needs to be done or if it is justifiable. Repeat for a few years and your product is a mish-mash of half completed upgrades held together with twine and yet another rehash in planning to finally fix it all.

There's mechanistic work that this was true for. With the Advent of Fiverr and Upwork you no longer need to do this unless you have some sort of sensitivity on the data (it's personal, or health, or something secret). These companies are the cloud computing of drudge work. You can burst capacity in half an hour.

Matches my experience very much.

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