Hacker News Reader

Comment by stepvhen | Hacker News Reader

I haven't had a work task at my job for 6 months, sans a week of QA testing, and a few days in SQL. I come to work, and have to be left to my own devices, and I never connected my personal laptop to the internet there. I tried to study text books and work on projects, and that worked most of the time, but not all the time. Its absolutely exhausting finding something to do that looks like work, for at least 4 hours every day, for 6 months, with very limited options.

That tendency for boredom has leaked into other parts of my life and I am actively trying to fight it, and that is difficult. I hope this research continues and turns up decent conclusions.

For the record, I gave my two-weeks this past week. 6 months is long enough.

View on HN

My last job was a little similar, and only towards the end did I realize how other people dealt with this. Here is what they did (I never did it):

Get to work kind of early, put your stuff on your desk, fill coffee mug, etc. Make it look like you're there. Re direct your office phone to your cell.

Take your laptop or books you want to study to the nearby coffee shop, and do whatever you want there - side projects, learning, teaching yourself programming languages, etc. etc. Be sure to answer your cell and respond to work emails.

Come back into the office around lunch time and sit in the lunch room to eat, then head out again for the afternoon. It's easy to cover your tracks by saying you were in a meeting, or working with so-and-so, or whatever.

It took me a long time to understand it was better to do the above, than it was to sit at your desk and be seen to not be working hard (i.e. reading a programming book, or reading HN)

That's a pretty sloppily run place if nobody notices structural behavior like that. And even if nobody notices, that's pretty bad behavior. I've worked in a place once long ago where people did everything they could to avoid actually working and I left simply because of that. Being told to 'slow down because you're making us look bad' is extremely de-motivating.

I've been told that at just about every job I've been at in the past, and you're right.. It's incredibly de-motivating.

Most recently, I quit my job after 4 months because I tried to make too many improvements. Every time the topic of an improvement came up, I was told "You're the new guy. You can't expect to know the nuance of our infrastructure/application/code." It's the biggest cop-out, especially considering it began with, "You're the new guy with a fresh pair of eyes and great experience. If you see any problems, let us know!". It's a silly state of affairs when folk think of good intentions entirely in the lens of a threat model.

In fairness, I suppose I was a bit too critical. Maybe it comes from reading too much HN. :)

Hang in there, not all employers are equal in this respect. Try to find a company with a high hiring bar, that will improve your chances of finding a team without that mentality.

You'd be surprised. Most places I've been to initially say that they aren't, but as soon as anything goes mildly south, that mentality changes in a heartbeat. I'm generally "the young rockstar", so a lot of it is an aspect of a lack of trust, I think.

I stopped hanging in there, rented out an office and started working on my own thing. ;)

Hehe, even better.

For the record, I tried getting my phone to work back when I was hired, and it just wouldn't. I never contacted somebody to fix it, why bother. I virtually never got emails either. People would just show up at my desk unannounced if they needed me, which was quite rare.

I just want to say, well done on giving your notice.

To someone who's never experienced it, it might seem like having no work would be great, but it's actually terrible for our sense of self-worth in my experience. A surprising number of people are too afraid to leave a position even if they feel it's soul-sucking. It takes serious guts to leave a steady job even if it sucks.

Good luck finding a more exciting position!

I was in a knot of people like this. We spontaneously organized a software engineering quality team out of ourselves. We bribed one of the IT people for the admin password to a desktop PC they failed to deprovision after firing a guy (a case of an admin's favorite beer is worth at least 10x the retail price in terms of bribing power). We setup a rogue server on it for source control and ticket tracking. By the time anyone figured out why we were generating high quality documentation and fulfilling our few assignments in record time, we had a full-blown lifecycle management process of our own. By the time anyone figured out what they should do about it, we had our own ERP system that integrated with and automated most of the excruciatingly repetitive tasks their Salesforce-based system made us do. We were so hyperproductive over everyone else on the company's own business tasks that they couldn't ignore it anymore and they adopted our systems and practices.

And then they fucked it up by adding a bunch of top-down, manufacturing oriented process, but by that point I was able to find another position and Gee the Eff Oh. At least my skills didn't stagnate, and I didn't have a sword hanging over my head on one of my personal projects.

If they didn't give you any work to do you could always use your own initiative to create tools/apps that they might need, or work on improving processes. If that doesn't seem like fun, you could contract out or just look for another job. All that free time sounds like fun to me.

I wrote a few tools when I found myself in a similar position, and was rewarded with being told that writing code (while not technically a developer) was a "security risk"[0]; and I was then given a bunch of useless Sisyphus-type jobs that management never quite agreed were finished (they were gold). To this day I think they were surprised, but not sad, to see me go. Only managers I've ever had who didn't absolutely love me and my work ethic. Easily the worst job I've ever had. Took me awhile at my next job to shake off the "bad vibes".

[0]I'm still kinda baffled by this one. I had root access to everything already and could easily have written any malicious code I wanted to introduce at home.

Edit: Formatting

Amazing how dysfunctional IT auditing has made management in so many places. We have auditors worried that devs can push to production, but there's no one to audit the code except us, and we have full access to production databases. You'd think they either trust us or don't, but the half assed security of not pushing to prod seems just needlessly malicious. "You guys are a bunch of untrustworthy scoundrels, but you can access prod DB's and possibly hide evil code in your apps, but at least someone else will push it to production for you".

I was once in a similar position at a startup in the early 00's that was trying to "pivot" to a service model that was more profitable. Like you, it was hard for me to keep my boredom and lack of work productivity from spilling over into other areas of my life. I was starting to worry that it was going to damage my work ethic and ability to focus. I eventually got laid off and found another job that was more fast-paced and challenging and was relieved to find that I was able to jump right back into it. I hope the same is true for you!

Did you have a new job lined up or leap into the unknown? If you had a new job, was the pay higher, lower or same? I guess I'm asking if people are willing to take less pay for less boredom.

Due to the family illness I mentioned in another comment, I have come into some money. I am actually going back to school, and don't have much desire to work. Maybe at a coffee shop, just so weekends don't lose their meaning.

I always wonder when I read stories like these: what if you had connected your personal laptop to the Internet, and worked on your own projects? You wrote that you had no "work task", so I guess you asked for some and you got none. Why do you have to do something that "looks like work" then, if you're not the one to blame?

"I haven't had a work task at my job for 6 months"

Is there a specific reason, or has your manager just forgotten about you? I'm confused.

I work as a teacher and I can recommend teaching to anyone who wants to avoid boredom. Never a dull moment, honestly. Always something to sort out. Not unicorns and butterflies, but never boring.

I was hired at a large software consulting company, that sends people all over the place. I established with them that I was a backend/lower level developer. But due to some family illness I requested to stay in the city I lived in. The only account they have in my city is one that does support, not development. That's one reason, at least. Why I was never reassigned I don't know. I assume that's where I got ignored/forgotten.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com