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Comment by bschne | Hacker News Reader

I once had a job where I somehow didn't get assigned much work for a long period of time right after starting — something about no projects having open staff positions, and them not being able to use me anyway because they were using up all the budget with the existing staffing already and didn't want to do "free work" for the clients.

For a while, I spent my days mostly doing tutorials, reading ebooks and papers, watching lectures, ...

Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible luxury to get a consistent salary and be able to do that! But the thing is, you can't help but feel utterly useless after a while. It's especially bad if everyone else has their projects, so you also don't really feel like part of a team.

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I joined a FAANG during the pendemic, and for the entire year I was there, I never got assigned a single task. Of course I kept myself busy trying to identify and solve problems around me, but I never had a deadline or anything associated with what I had chosen to work on. After a year I just couldn't do it anymore. A few acquaintances thought I was out of my mind and that I should continue milking that for all it's worth, but there's just something that makes me need to feel like someone else actually cares about what I do (or don't) do.

What you feel is the "Competence" part of core motivation according to deci & ryan "self determination theory". Their original paper is from 2008 i believe and states people need the perceived Autonomy to choose their life, perceived Competence over that choice and the perceived Relatedness that others respect and encourage your activity of choice.

So it's very understandable that if 1 of 3 is missing your psyche becomes strained.

I used to study this theory as part of my game design interests and found it extremely useful to analyse a lot of stuff from your own situation to a game or even customer experience. Just be aware of the word perceived here... allowing the theory to be used for dark patterns.

SDT's from the 70's, not 2008. However, in 2009 Daniel Pink published a book that seems to basically neatly package up SDT in a much more directly consumable way, maybe that's where your timeframe is coming from? I actually think Pink's take has some insight but it's not very scientifically oriented.

As another person who left a FAANG company because I found the work meaningless, I can assure you that what you were feeling is real and you probably made the right choice. My life is significantly more enjoyable now that I’ve joined a smaller company where the job actually motivates me.

For what it’s worth, almost everyone I talked to before leaving had the same take as what you described—that I should do the safe thing and just keep working there because the pay was high and it was relatively easy. I thought I was going crazy, because it seemed so obvious to me that I needed to move on.

Human beings are just animals and we have a set of needs. Beyond physical needs like air, water, food, we have emotional needs. Those are things like the need to be seen, to be valued, to be among a community of our peers, and to have productive work to do for the benefit of that community.

Sounds like you had plenty of chance to fulfil your needs for free time, and the ability to pursue your own curiosity and carry out intellectual inquiry. Which is definitely nice, and which most people lack the time and space to do (I imagine friends and family telling you that it sounds like a dream job, etc.).

But I think anyone who has been in that situation knows that after a while, it's kind of a nightmare :)

I went through a period like that, I wish my manager had put some boundary (even admittedly artificial) around how long it would be, that it was going to be OK, and help me set some soft goal for that time. It would’ve made the exact same activities feel dramatically nicer.

Been there too. It felt a little paradoxical at first. It’s like a gift! But you really do start feeling really shitty about yourself because you know you’re useless.

David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs has a good analysis of this. Standard capitalist theory is that people are lazy and will not work unless force to do so by threat of immiseration. But in reality people HATE bullshit jobs where you spend the day playing solitaire or whatever. People don’t want to burn themselves out but they do want to feel helpful. Good management is about helping people realize their natural desire to help out.

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