This is mostly all true. At my last corporate job I definitely did this and it was very good for my career.
It also made me hate my life.
Doing nothing at work
81–90 of 168 posts
Re: Doing nothing at work
#82I’ve had a half-written blog post in this vein for a while now using a fantasy RPG analogy: if you play a character that uses mana in any of these games, you’ll learn fairly quickly that using it all up all the time on trivial battles and running around empty leaves you with none when you genuinely need it. Your mental energy deployed at work is not so dissimilar: keeping some in the tank gives you the option to depl…
or if youre like me you end an RPG with like 29 ethers that using early would have made life a lot less grindy
Re: Doing nothing at work
#83This is mostly all true. At my last corporate job I definitely did this and it was very good for my career. It also made me hate my life.
Working a corporate job is more like a marathon than a sprint.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#84This reminds me very much of Buffer Time from Star Trek: Lower Decks, but applies pretty well to a lot of life. No slack = no margin for error or the unexpected...
Re: Doing nothing at work
#85It's kind of refreshing to see a "pontificating about what it means to be a SWE" blog post that doesn't have anything to do with the industry impact of LLMs. Like it's 2013 again.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you fix some bugs? Please?
The testers have the latest build, and have not reported any bugs. I don't even know if the project I am working on is even going to be funded after a few more months. I am just in this sort of limbo that really sucks.
I would try to learn some new tech. Definitely not something you can do in a vacuum with no goal for months in a corporate setting, but e.g. learning more about a programming language you already use, or some libraries, some tooling, you can easily spend a few weeks.
After that, yes it'd make sense to find something else.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, I think it depends on how engaged your supervisor is. One of the last people I want to work with is the “it’s not my job” guy. I want to work with people who see a problem and offer a solution, whether it’s in their job description or not. If you’re not being recognized for your work that’s a leadership problem. Stiff arming work feels like a way towards an ossified lumbering work culture.
My pushback isn’t the credit part it is when they try to spring things on you directly instead of going through normal channels. A lack of planning on someone’s part is not automatically an emergency on my part. I see this far more often than credit stealing
I can see that. The counterpoint is that it can create bureaucratic bloat.
If the proper channel means coordinating with finance to allocate money, get it assigned to labor codes, and reflected in my bi-monthly time allotment, I think I'd rather just jump the job and get it done this week than get it properly assigned two months from now. It does require a certain amount of cover and trust within an organization, though.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
unless you're contracted (fixed bid) working on jobs then you're getting paid hourly, salary, whatever... boss tells you to stand around and shoot the shit, thats what you do. I dont know why people think 'not my job' is a relevant answer... the job is what they tell you to do...
I do agree with you, and most jobs have a "and other duties as assigned" for that reason. But I'll equivocate by saying there are exceptions. If you work a union gig (technically a contract), you have to be careful to stay in your lane unless you want a grievance filed. If you are a licensed engineer and your boss tells you to design/stamp something outside your domain of competence, you have a duty to say no. But th…
Yes I sincerely doubt that the court of opinion, or the real court, would see the difference between "I use MySQL not MSSQL! you cant make me write this analysis" versus sometihng understandable like, you are a for example, a aging and lovable secretary who is being tasked to clean radioactive material from a jobsite because there are no calls coming in.
As for unions - yeah thats what got them kicked out of the convention center. Only certified electricians are smart enough to plug in laptops into sockets!
Re: Doing nothing at work
#89I wanted to love this, but:
> Most incidents resolve on their own.
This is most definitely not true.
Re: Doing nothing at work
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except ... the collapse never happens. Once your engineers burn out or age out you just hire fresh meat and the cycle repeats. The issue I have with these types of articles (and books like Peopleware / Slack) is they never provide any actual metrics that may convince the beancounters to try a different approach.
Your systems just continue working at full capacity when all your engineers burn out and you hire new people who know nothing? Huh, that's a new one to me.
Your baseline capacity is always lower than it would be with experienced, fully trained, happy engineers. It seems normal because the system doesn’t support anything better.