Imagine figuring out how to get paid for nothing, and deciding to spend your days sitting on the couch watching TV instead of going out and living life.
What a wasted opportunity.
this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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I don't get people like this. I'm currently underemployed and it's one of the worst feelings in the world. It's almost as depressing as being unemployed for me. I'd much rather be productive and have something to actually contribute instead of wasting my time and my life away.
Yeah same here.
I'm in a similar situation at the moment where my team is pretty unorganized, most employees are from an external company, and noone bothers to explain shit to me, even after I asked several times already. Plus, because of unenforced rules, it's basically 100% home office and noone is ever present, even if I go in the office. I COULD just do nothing and pretend like I'm working all of the time, noone ever contacts me anyway. But that would genuinely make me wanna die.
I'm already feeling super useless most of the time and try to chew through old legacy code to at least gain an understanding of the project. It's somewhat working, but it's tough to keep up my motivation. Overall I kinda oscillate between feeling useless and frustrated because I'm just not as productive as I would want to be as an employee.
Anyway, I'm already sending out CVs to other job offers. This is not the ideal life for me and I don't plan on keeping it going for longer than necessary.
Some people don't dream of, or need, labor. I know I don't. I have enough hobbies to keep me entertained forever.
I think the whole "still getting enough money to survive" really makes a difference in how the unemployed see themselves
I was in a position like this once. The first two or three months were great. TBH, I mostly played video games and cleaned the house. It felt like free money. By the six month mark, I quit to go to something else. It's surprising how mentally draining it is to just do nothing.
I think I took two things away from that experience: One, I think people generally have an innate need to produce something. We don't want to just sit around and entertain ourselves, we want to contribute. Two, I think the 40 hour work week isn't quite the right balance. Maybe 30 would be better.
Gah, a 4-day work week would be wonderful. I might actually work on my side projects.
yeah I am the same as you. I can't respect anyone who slacks that hard
Happens when you're not proud of what you're contributing to. Probably most workers, tbh.
I've told this story a few times now, but I never get sick of it.
Back in 2011 I left a startup that got acquired. On my last day we had a Christmas Party with our parent company, and we got to speaking to one guy that was on his own. After a few drinks, he blurted out that he had worked there for maybe 12 years, but at least 5-6 of those he was "unassigned". When we asked what that meant, he said that his manager left and he was never assigned to a new team. He badged in every day, and after doing maybe 6 months of busy work and asking "wtf am I doing" to no answer from his department or HR he just came in to do his own stuff or play Unreal Tournament. He had yearly reviews with the head of department, and these were just high-level goal meetings where they reviewed the department, asked what he wanted, and left at that. Each year he was getting between a 2-5% pay rise, and outside of badging in he was only ever judged on his department output.
I always wonder what happened to that guy. The company is quite large and is still going strong, so he's probably still there. I won't name them, but another thing I loved about them was that they didn't really know where to put Software Engineers, so they just assigned them to Marketing and gave each engineer a marketing budget to personally use - around £10k each. The best part? Everyone in marketing knew it was bullshit, but they pushed everyone to spend it because otherwise their budget would go down. Some highlights were a trip to Toronto to buy some books, a full team trip to Amsterdam to go to a React conference and live in basically 5-star accommodation, and renting a hotel lobby to quickly burn some money on interviewing interns. I think they actually have a tech department now, but I know many people I worked with that stayed for close to a decade because the WLB and perks were just too good to ignore.
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2022
So, how did it go?
Long ago I worked at Wal-mart's tire center while going to college and to get as many hours as I could they let me work with the overnight people after we closed at 7. In theory. The problem was the overnight managers never got told about this so I would just hang out doing nothing for 3 hours every night and getting paid. This went on for 3 months until I got a better job and no one ever questioned me about it.
Don't you still feel bad about defrauding Walmart for 180 hours worth of pay?
Cause I don't.
I do not.
Don't worry Anon, I'm sure it'll work out.
slowly divert my work to different people in the company
So you've been promoted to a management position.
You can make fun of managers not doing work. You know what's worse than someone at manager/director level that doesn't do any work? One that insists on doing so! Trust me, first hand experience.
I worked for basically Michael Scott at some point in my life. Everyone knew that he had the easiest job on the planet, and he still didn't do it, and we were all glad he didn't. He could talk to a room full of people for hours and explain his position in the company for so long that you forgot what you even asked.
If you think the connection to Michael Scott ends there, you'd be wrong. You would always know when he had a new girlfriend, because he would talk about her all the time. One time he connected his laptop to the projector and the first thing that opened was a picture of his girlfriend. He looked at it, said: OH. Made sure everyone saw her and then pretended to hurry to start his speech.
One day he came to work, sat in my car (i was on my way to a jobsite and had no idea why he was there.) i didn't want to talk, so i just took off. After some awkward silence, he said: i'm not even supposed to work today. I nodded, i had no idea. He asked if i knew why he's here. I said nope. He said he was supposed to get married today but his girlfriend fucked two dudes in the jacuzzi yesterday.
There are countless stories like that and all i could think about was: this guy makes 60k a year by working two days a week. And i don't mean because he was slacking off the rest, he was only employed 20%
The absolute worst are the micro-managers. They don’t want to do work, but they also don’t want to delegate.
Instead they opt for that limbo between, where the only “work” they do is redundant at best, and every employee under them feels like a vole being tracked by a hungry hawk.
Anon playing a dangerous game with management.
It's all well and good until they find you, figure out what you've been doing (or rather not doing), then fire you and attempt to sue you for damages.
CYA. Make at least some attempts to be noticed. If they do notice you, at least you got a little bit of easily excusable free time - if they don't, now you get the easy life AND a paper trail so they can't say "why didn't you try to tell us".
I heard many similar stories like that from friends and it's always a bit shocking to me. I'm no go getter or anything, i run my own business, but even then, i don't want to work more than i really have to. But i just really can't imagine what that must be like.
I had a friend who worked as a static engineer. He then worked for a company that made bearings for big machines, which wasn't his line of work but he liked it. The company got bought by another company who did something different and he just fell through the cracks. At first he was super anxious and just pretended to draw on his drawing board and had excel open on his computer. But no one cared, a lot of people switched jobs and suddenly he didn't really know anyone anymore and after a few month he told me that he doesn't really know what his job is.
I’ve had jobs that amounted to sitting around waiting for work and hated it. I’m the first to tell people that I work just hard enough to not be bored and to keep everything under control
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I don't know if they have much of a case to sue you, if you fall through the cracks on their own negligence. Fire you, yes. Sue, I am doubtful most larger businesses would even try. They'd rather solve the problem and sweep it under the carpet in my experience. Not USA experience of course, but still the attitude would be similar I expect.
I would worry a bit about whether they're allowed to give negative references though. Because if so, it might not be so easy to get another job after.
Best move would be to line up another job to start like a month before the review, and never reach the review stage. Even if discovered, most people that would "know" wouldn't really be driven to report anything if they're leaving anyway. The "not my problem, and this will make it my problem" attitude in big companies is real.
I think in Spain there was a legal case, but that person was paid for decades without any work. And it was also public funds, as the employer was some municipality iirk
I looked at that. Actually I would argue that was even more negligence by the management there. I mean they couldn't even say how long he'd not been working for.
But in reality he was paid for at least 6 years of work (and they suspected more) and only fined for 1 year of pay. So, he's still a winner I think. And yes, public funds likely did help in bringing that case forward.
Most larger private businesses tend to avoid going to a court for such things unless they need to in my experience.
I mean it's kinda embarrassing for the company to pay people to do nothing. It makes them seem a bit incompetent. I worked in a military branch where the three biggest fish of the branch got fired (maybe sued) because they hardly did anything. They would go to work, and then go on hunting trips together or shit like that. They did that for years, but they didn't really know how long. So now people obviously began to wonder what else they are doing with their money, and why no one realised that there were 3 people making an absurd amount of money for a job that is already super chill and overpaid, that didn't even do the work of one competent employee. I remember they had trouble finding replacements, so no one did their job until i left like a year or two later.
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There is no case to sue them. It's the management responsibility, not the workers to assign work. They don't need to go out seeking it.
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OP is working for a huge corporation, so slacking off and getting paid for that is ethical.
I'd go even one step further and say that slacking off is more ethical than actually working in that situation.
depends on what huge organization it is
Organizations don't get big from kindness.
Red cross, EPA, and FDA are all large organizations imo. Definitely outliers, but theyy do exist and I wouldn't consider it ethical to take their money without working.
I would absolutely consider it ethical to take money from the american red cross without working.
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What would you say, you do here?
I've seen this happen with coworkers of mine. Folks who never did any work. And slipped under the radar for many years. at least two (and one other to a lesser extent) come to mind.
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