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My first "real" job was on a government software project, where I guess I was deemed too junior to actually do anything important. I spent time reading, exploring the computers, sending email, etc. But we had to precisely record how our time was spent so it could be billed back to the government correctly, and they were extremely serious about utmost honesty in recording time. Nothing I did pertained to any particular project, so I used the "general" time charging code.

Management repeatedly got upset at me for billing so much to the general time code. I kept asking for work to do. Nobody gave me any work to do. So I kept billing my time to the general time code. And they kept getting upset at me for billing my time to the general time code.

Reminds me of something similar I witnessed while working in one of the big international corporations. A new guy joined our team and was waiting for a whole week to get a laptop to work with (and there wasn't really anything in the job description that could be done without a computer). A laptop was ready in the IT department, but they didn't give it to him as corporate accounts were not prepared yet. The guy was sitting at an empty desk all day long and reading newspapers, right in front of the manager desk. The manager, when asked, did not allow him to leave the workplace any time earlier, in spite of him doing distinctly nothing. Yeah, in the end who cares if some corporate money or employee's time get wasted. So the message from the company to the employees is clear - no matter what you do, as long as you comply with our policies (reagrdless of their rationality), you are paid, which means not rewarded, but recognized as "us". Other employees who generate more profit to the company will compensate for your doing nothing, because you are a member of our big family now, and our strength is in quantity, not quality..

Oh, I could tell you stories... We once had an entire PALLET full of brand-new iPads delivered to our department. Only we never ordered them, they were meant for a different department. Only the other department never claimed them, and procurement never picked them up. Not even after numerous phone calls. If it weren't for a coworker who hand-delivered them to the other deparment (they were kind of sitting in the way), they'd probably still sitting there...

What bothers me is that this was a large hospital. The amount of moneywasting I've seen is mindboggling. Nurses get laid off due to budget cuts, the quality of health care declines, but you still see this kind of shit happening.

And being nominally a guy who is supposed to get rid of these inefficiencies it just drives me crazy and really ps off that each time you finally got rid of one, it's only another excusse to get down on people. You know, we are even more effecient now, so better get up to speed.

Ahh, and I never wanted to become a cynic...

Think of the price of medical equipment, salaries, insurance, and drugs.

That pallet of iPads might as well be a pallet of stationary supplies.

Eek. That sounds like something straight out of Kafka's The Castle.

I feel for him. Likely, he should try to escalate it higher up so that he gets moved to another project. But I understand his reluctance too, as they could decide he should not be working at the company at all.

And what bugs me as strange is that the CTO knows that he's doing nothing and still not doing anything about it.

coincidentally i had almost the same situation happen to me (hired as a dev, project kept getting pushed back and back, had no work to do for 4 months). i spent my time reading books from project gutenberg, one ofthem being The Trial

He could have put his skills to work on an open source project as opposed to just mindlessly typing.

EDIT: Alternatively he could have even created his own internal company project for work. Whether or not they liked enough to keep is another story but at the very least it shows he has initiative, creativity, and he can learn something from his work.

Unless your job has a lot of manual, physical labor; I really find it hard to see how anyone can get bored and do nothing at work especially if you can program.

That'd be arguably difficult with the "no internet use for non-work tasks" restriction. I'd suggest creative writing.

If self-improvement is not a "work-task", that is not a company worth working at.

The problem with working at a company like that is that by the time you realize you are stuck, you have no relevant practical experience anymore and it can be rather difficult to get hired at places that are worth working at.

This is why github exists. IANAL but I'm guessing when you don't use company resources, do it during off hours, and the open source work you do has no relevance to your company's industry; publishing that work to github should be fine.

For most sane people this is the case. But many companies' boilerplate IP clauses claim ALL of the IP generated while working at the company. The vast majority of them won't give a damn but it still exposes you legally if you are under such a clause and have a side project/contribute to opensource.

There is an elegant way to get out of that. Approach your management (usually requires director-level approval), and say that you are doing some volunteer web site work for [insert charity] on the weekends, and they require a signed release that your employer OK's it. This can also fall under the "requires approval for moonlighting" clause in many employee handbooks.

Then, assign all copyright to your opensource work to the FSF, which is a 501c organization.

Well there's self improvement -- say, learning the ins and outs of internal company software; and then there is "self improvement" -- mucking about with a pet project in an esoteric language that has no bearing whatsoever on the company's bottom line and arguably does not sharpen the skill-set that they are paying you for.

Not every company can afford to let employees "self-improve" on the latter level.

Learning new technology and new programming skills is not "internet use for non-work tasks". It's an expected, constant, never ending part of the job for almost anyone technical; unless they want to have stale skills in 1-2 years.

I would agree with that iff the learning that you were doing was closely related to the skill-set that your company hired you for and/or one they could utilize. See my related comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6089570

I strongly disagree. Learning a functional language that is very different from your language at work still has a lot of value. It can help you with patterns and even when your own language evolves. For example, Java 8 will have lambdas. If you're already familiar with it from other "esoteric" languages, it'll be very easy to take advantage of it.

I'm sure others can provide better examples than I can.

It is dangerous to write code and try to copyright it yourself while you are on the job. It puts the FOSS project at risk for all his code contributions possibly being under copyright of the company and if they found out they would probably pull all his commits.

I feel if the point is

1) to avoid boredom

2) to do something constructive

3) to learn

4) to show your value to the company

That will be a minor problem, especially if someone like that just decided to do a project from scratch.

If it is their time and their equipment, then it's their IP. Even if they didn't know about it. In that situation, the last thing you need is the legal department on your case.

Plus, what if the project got bug? How can you base something on shaky legal grounds?

Who cares? Just re-time commits after work hours and lie. It's better than doing nothing. Just make sure your machine is not bugged.

As I've already posted above, who cares if your main goals are to not be bored and to do something constructive at the same time.

I guess it depends on how badly they enforce the ban on "internet for non-work-related" browsing. Could make it difficult, although it sounds like he is a programmer at a tech-ish company, so he should probably have access to most tech/programming oriented sites. Worst case, he could get a wifi hotspot and go to town.

At my last job, I kept a few programming books at my desk, and during slow periods would crack those open and do some self-learning. It was a consulting job though, so those moments were few and far between (as much as I hated having to fill out timecards, billable rates were a good approximation of employee productivity, if you weren't billable, you needed a really good excuse).

An internal project is definitely a good idea -- it can get you noticed in all the right ways. At the same time, it can draw attention to you -- "how do you have time to be messing with this project? Don't you have tasks you should be doing?"

It seems that much of what's going on in that department is CYA activity, but it seems to me that an internal project or open source project are the most defensible uses of the time.

Instead of sitting there doing nothing, he applied and sharpened his skills in a way that was productive for someone. His first response should be, "Can the company take credit for my time on this open-source project?" and "If this internal project is useful, can I use these skills to make anything else easier in our department?"

The risk is that he'll violate the "don't rock the boat" principle that is the bedrock of CYA. The possible benefit is that if you have two employees, and one is creatively loafing while the other is creatively applying himself or herself, you know which one will offer long-term value (and be easier on a manager, who won't have to constantly nag the person to keep them from screwing off for 40 hours a week).

Instead of typing nonsense, he could type blog articles into Word and schedule them to be published throughout the week on his weekends. BAM. Traffic, revenue.

I would recommend that your friend:

* make a list of technologies/skills that he would like to learn;

* make a list of technologies/skills needed in his job, and in his upcoming project;

* look for any conceivable overlap in those two lists, and spend his time doing that - justify it as "prepping for the project".

I had a similar situation. I used the time to teach myself some new programming languages and really studied a lot of business management processes and techniques that were somewhat related to my job. That was how I got around the Internet usage policy. That and using a text only browser.

I actually learned a tremendous amount and was very thankful for the opportunity.

Tell your friend to figure out how to bring his own internet into work. Turn his phone into a usb-hotspot and plug it into his work computer or bring in his own laptop / mini-pc (size of a raspberry pi, there are plenty of options) and plug it into the monitor and keyboard of his work computer.

One way or another, get access to the net and if he doesn't want to do something productive at least he can read Hacker News all day long. Just stay off facebook in case that CTO looks over his shoulder. That would be too easily recognized.

Is he interested in creative writing at all? Sounds like a perfect environment for that. You'd look very busy, for sure.

This is where you start working on Your Novel.

Idea to play with,

Hire random candidates, they may or may not have potential as the interview/hiring process is broken/exploited anyway, then do this to them, break their spirits, make them believe corporate world is like this, they are serfs at the mercy of their company, stiffle their learning and desire to improve by not letting them to anything, not even browse randomly, give them donkey work to do.

Result is that potential competitors are denied a great candidate, they too get broken spirits and a weak workforce. But then, you take new hires and treat them good.

Evil but could work on local markets.