Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Forgotten Employee (2002)

sites.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 130 posts

Re: Forgotten Employee (2002)

#111

Post by hamburglar »

dinosaurdynasty wrote: post #47
shubhamjain wrote: post #3

I read it a while back. The story is probably fiction, but I have no trouble believing there must be shitload of people who must have worked an arrangement like that for themselves—taking paychecks without work. What surprises me is that almost always these people don't use their free time to do something productive—like picking up a hobby or up-skilling, they squander most of it. Ex: a programmer who outsourced his…

What's the point of productivity? What if I just want to enjoy myself as much as I can? Spending my time playing games and reading stories and learning new things and such sounds pretty great. And as someone who is trying to do early retirement, the main reason is so I can own myself... I'll never have enough energy to do everything I want, even without a day job taking a tremendous amount of it. And just to add anot…

I think for me, I enjoy a sense of accomplishment, but real accomplishments don’t tend to come without the motivation of others depending on the product of my work. Feels like a personal failing, but I’m old enough to recognize I should just accept it. I could retire right now* but I like being kept busy because of this (and having my retirement account get bigger doesn’t hurt either).

* kind of lousy timing, money-wise, so it’s fortuitous that I don’t have the urge to start burning through the retirement fund yet.

Re: Forgotten Employee (2002)

#112

Post by KingOfCoders »

I once worked in a startup when we M&A several times in a row. The last time the head of sales was forgotten and didn't get a boss/reporting line and no one talked to him. He got the money but no work. I left to found my own startup and don't know what happened.

Re: Forgotten Employee (2002)

#113

Post by bigbacaloa »

shubhamjain wrote: post #3

I read it a while back. The story is probably fiction, but I have no trouble believing there must be shitload of people who must have worked an arrangement like that for themselves—taking paychecks without work. What surprises me is that almost always these people don't use their free time to do something productive—like picking up a hobby or up-skilling, they squander most of it. Ex: a programmer who outsourced his…

Their goal is time free to do nothing. It's been realized and they enjoy it.

Re: Forgotten Employee (2002)

#114

Post by wincy »

nebulousthree wrote: post #80
CodeSgt wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I might enjoy 2 months of sitting on my couch, smoking weed, and playing video games stoned out my gourd. That time would still be very much wasted.

That's just because you limit your view to 2 months and look at it in a vacuum. If you extend your timeline, you may find that you get bored or restless and want to change things up. That "wasted time" is necessary in order to get into a different headspace. It's the equivalent of riding an elevator for your brain... It takes you to a different stage of life.

Doubtful. I had severe mental trauma happen to me when I was 19 and I basically become an emotional wreck who played video games until I was 26 or so. It was just a way to avoid confronting my issues and I became an exceptionally good World of Warcraft player. I hate that I wasted so much of my prime years “self medicating” with video games. It wasn’t until I quit World of Warcraft that I met my wife (maybe a week after!)

I wish I’d gone to therapy or done literally anything else. It took years for me to finally feel disgusted enough with myself to make any sort of change and I was a wreck when I did. I’d barely improved at all, if not gotten worse than I was when I got emotionally messed up at 19.

Re: Forgotten Employee (2002)

#115

Post by registeredcorn »

shubhamjain wrote: post #3

I read it a while back. The story is probably fiction, but I have no trouble believing there must be shitload of people who must have worked an arrangement like that for themselves—taking paychecks without work. What surprises me is that almost always these people don't use their free time to do something productive—like picking up a hobby or up-skilling, they squander most of it. Ex: a programmer who outsourced his…

>I am not deriding that choice, just that it's a curious thing. We all blame our day jobs for eating most of our time. But when we do get total freedom, we hardly remain as productive as we imagined ourselves to be. I thought I was different. But no! Recently, I took a career-break and I thought I would use the newfound free time to learn all the things I was putting on the back-burner. Instead, I found myself to be dramatically less productive compared to when I was working. Lacking objective, or structure in the day, I found myself playing video games or surfing web pretty much all day.

I know the sensation! I'm currently taking a week vacation, and, although I've gotten a lot of work done around the house, my primary motivation for taking the vacation was to study cybersecurity stuff. I had been putting in 2 to 3 hours a night but had found it frustrating to have such a limited window after work/before bed. Now that I have that time, I'm either walking the dog, cutting up unused boxes, sweeping and cleaning, or watching random stuff on Odysee. It's not that those things are necessarily bad, but it is such a poor misuse of time.

It's almost a sense of fear of productivity. I can't quite put my finger on it. It's like an apprehension to get started. That, if I begin, maybe I won't want to stop. Or that, maybe if I do it, I won't make the sort of progress I would expect to make with the amount of time I can devote to studying. I justify this misuse of time as being "Time to relax, no wrong choices" Etc. Yet somehow, I know that that isn't true. I can feel the regret in the time I've already wasted. Come Sunday night, I'll probably be back to studying, wishing I "just had a few more hours".

I have to imagine that part of the issue is conditioning. We get into our various habits and when those conditions change - even when we ourselves make those changes, intended to benefit us - it puts us in a kind of state of paralysis, leading to indecision. Perhaps it's that we need meaning to define what it is that we're doing, and know that it could have been done better.

Re: Forgotten Employee (2002)

#116

Post by bink »

ta94455 wrote: post #38

My father worked for a large telecommunications provider in the late 90's, after their merger he was left as the site manager but with no employees. Just him and the custodial staff in the building for ~2 years. The site was 7 minutes from our house and was mostly defunct. He'd show up at 9am, come home for lunch, then back to the office and leave at 3. Occasionally he'd need to reboot something or ship back infrastr…

I worked for a startup in the early 2000s that got funding and moved into a nice new office building being subleased by an oil company. And odd requirement of signing the lease was that they had to hire and keep on an IT manager that used to work for the oil company. That guy did absolutely nothing all day and spent most of his time drunk. To this day I have no idea why they agreed to such a thing just for office space.

Re: Forgotten Employee (2002)

#117

Post by kragen »

thrtythreeforty wrote: post #109
kragen wrote: post #29

In Argentina the term is "ñoqui", which means "gnocchi". There's a tradition of eating gnocchi on the 29th of the month, and "ñoquis" traditionally showed up at the office only on the 29th of the month to receive their paycheck. Nowadays I assume most of them do direct deposit, but I don't know any ñoquis personally, so I can't ask. Normally ñoquis are a result of corruption, though, not bureaucratic mixups. The boss…

Is "ñoqui" also a little bit of a pun, "no aqui"? (I speak basically no Spanish, but couldn't help notice the resemblance.)

I don't think so.

Re: Forgotten Employee (2002)

#119

Post by registeredcorn »

matsemann wrote: post #31

Have a friend this kinda happened to. He joined a company as a consultant. Right before starting, the team he was assigned to got dismantled. They still wanted him for a new team/project about to start. That of course got delayed and delayed, so he had no team or tasks assigned to him for months. And it's not like he was hiding. He never got access cards etc, so he had to ask the boss each morning to come and let him…

I had something vaguely similar to this happen to me.

I was working in a secure building and for whatever reason, it took them weeks to get me basic account access to their network. I wasn't even permitted to enter the area I would be working in until everything else was all setup. So, every morning I would show up, be escorted to the break room, wait around for someone in my department to stop in and say Hi, then mention "Yeah, it's still not done yet." I would then sit there and watch TV (CNN or Fox, depending on who was hiding the remote) in a break room for the remainder of the day, and eventually be escorted back out of the building.

It wouldn't have been so bad if I was at least allowed to bring in a book to read or a phone to play some music, or anything, but no outside material was allowed unless you had some special work-related reason. I must have read the introductory booklet pamphlet thing they gave to me about 100 times. It was like 20 pages long. I could recite some of the pages word for word for about a year after the fact.

The worst part was that some employees were really set in their ways and would come around at the same time every day, down to the minute. After a day or two of me rotting in the cheap plastic chair, counting the seconds until I could go, they would just say something like, "Still nothing, huh!?" "Yep..." "Ha! Good luck with that!"

Day, after day, after day. After day.

Re: Forgotten Employee (2002)

#120

Post by jonasdegendt »

stevage wrote: post #89
natural20s wrote: post #11

This happened to someone I knew back in 2014 or so. We were hired together at C** Consulting and I was immediately shipped off to Dallas to help with an eCommerce program at a famous Watch & Accessory brand. My buddy from orientation in NJ kept in touch and was jealous I was on a project so quickly. He went back to his home and went into the C** office dutifully for the first month and just did training, enablement a…

That's dangerous. Working two full time jobs at the same time may cross over into fraud territory.

There's a whole subreddit dedicated to doing this, see /r/overemployed. There's a guy on there claiming to be employed to the tune of 5+ FTE's or something, I haven't checked in a while.
Post reply on HN