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.
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
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.
yeah I am the same as you. I can't respect anyone who slacks that hard
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.
Happens when you're not proud of what you're contributing to. Probably most workers, tbh.
2022
So, how did it go?
Don't worry Anon, I'm sure it'll work out.
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.
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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