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Comment by imadethis | Hacker News Reader

I interned at a large insurance agency on their corporate security team. My task for the summer was to setup a third party service that integrated with their Jira install. This was all done in their test environment, with nothing touching prod.

Week 1: met the team, requested access to a VM and a service account for Jira.

Week 8: the VM was provisioned. I installed the application in about 2 minutes.

Week 10: I was granted access to a service account. I entered the credential into the application and confirmed it worked.

Week 11: I presented to the team the installed and working service.

Week 12: the internship was done.

All in all I did maybe 30 min of actual work across the 12 weeks. They extended me a comfortable job offer as they were pleased with my performance, which I declined.

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This is utterly insane to me! I work in a lumber yard (yeah, physical labor <SHUDDER!!!>) where doing 30 minutes of actual work in a _12_hour_day_ would get a person fired, much less in _12_weeks_! I'm stunned that this sort of thing is fairly commonplace in the tech industry. Utterly atrocious productivity as measured by productive man-hours (pardon me-- person-hours^), yet billions upon billions of dollars get thrown at companies with the faintest of business propositions. No wonder our economy is fucked! But thanks for the highly entertaining stories, y'all! It makes me thankful to work for a (mostly) sane company, in a (mostly) sane industry, even if I have to bust my ass to make a living.

^ I am a proud East Texan, where we don't put a whole lot of stock in all the woke bullshit. No offense meant if you're about that life, but from our perspective, y'all are fuckin' crazy people. ;-) Love ya anyway, because we're all one big, dysfunctional American family, right? Hell, I've got family members who are batshit crazy, but I still love 'em. Anyway, /tangent

What makes it worse is the incompetent or lazy people making $300k often complain about compensation

In response to your tangent, I’ll note that this took place in one of the reddest states in the US. This isn’t endemic in the tech industry so much as it is in large corporations. Check the back office of your largest suppliers and you’ll hear similar stories.

Yeah, I've read a fair amount about business, and I have to admit you're right--I referred specifically to the tech industry, but it does seem to be corporations, generally speaking. I actually work for a medium-sized corporation, and it's the same issue, just not to such a grand scale--plenty of fuck-offs around me, but they get a decent amount of work done.

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