How common is it these days to have a corporate job where you have little to no actual work to do and almost no management oversight over your comings and goings?
“I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I’d say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.”
-Peter Gibbons, Office Space
The Forgotten Employee
I’ve had that little work to do on some contracts, but there was plenty of oversight. If I was away from my desk for five minutes, I’d hear about it. Hell, I’ve got that job now… I added up all my time worked on an average day and it came out to about 6 hours of work if I did the job of the entire team; we’ve got 3-4 people here plus a couple team leads on any given day, so it usually maxes out at around an hours work, unless something seriously breaks, in which case we each have several hours’ work to do.
In some positions, you’re paying someone to be available for that rare moment when things go south. For example, the guy in the boiler room who is monitoring the equipment. Most of his job is boring until the alarms start going off. Then the job gets hairy.
My wife worked for a company that was slowly dying. Went from 100k+ employees to zero in almost ten years. For the first five years it was the usual case of fewer employees constantly trying to do the work that more were previously doing. Then the business collapsed and the governments of the various countries it operated in were bailing it out just to maintain employment levels, it seemed. My wife did not actually work more than a few hours a week for about three years, then it was down to maybe a phone call or two and a handful of emails a week. In the last year, she’d have one or two minor assignments every few weeks. Finally the house of cards collapsed and they didn’t even get severance, the last 2500 or so employees. But effectively they had a few years of nearly no work. They were almost all telecommuters by then as all but a few offices had been closed. Whether you survived the quarterly reductions in force seemed to have little to do with the work that needed to be done, but how much you were liked by management. My wife was an accountant whose last job title was Industrial Engineer. Whole thing had a surreal quantity.
I also was hired by a mega corp after a big reorg and layoff. The person in the next cube had somehow been “forgotten” in the layoff. Her department had been eliminated, but for four months no one in HR realized that she had been missed on the RIF list. She came in every day and basically conducted a job search. She finally found a job and turned in her resignation.
2nd shift datacenter tech here. This is essentially a description of my job, just replace “boiler” with “server”. I sit around all day on the dope, or watching simpsond on tv. Once in a while I’ll get an email or a text saying to go reboot a server. Once in a blue moon, we’ll get new equipment in and I have to install it, or remove old equipment, or trace a cable or some such, but mostly I’m just a babysitter.
Our admin had almost nothing to do. VPs got admins, so she was there, but all of the stuff my secretary at AT&T used to do is now online. She set up meetings and travel for the VP, but that only takes so much time. She was not the slightest bit lazy, she looked hard for things to do. She arranged my farewell lunch and was really happy at being able to do it.
Back before laptops it took me a week to get a login and workstation when I started, so I had an office and absolutely nothing to do there. It was torture.
I often dream that I have such a job , and I spent a fitful night trying to look busy. I used to work with a guy who had a job like that. Several times a day, he would taken a file folder and walk the length of the building, stopping and chatting with people at their desks.
One of my family had a job like this not too long ago - they were working for an IT company with a government contract that was nearing the end and not getting renewed as the systems were getting upgraded to something else by a different provider.
They basically got paid to watch Netflix and derp around on Reddit for several months, with maybe and hour or so of actual work each day doing IT stuff as needed to maintain the systems and put out metaphorical fires.
Barring any sort of random reboot or some such, I can go weeks at a time where the only thing I did at work that was work related is a 15 min walkthrough everyday, and 10 seconds to fill out a shift handoff form when the graveyard guy comes in.
It sounds like a dream job (and it was for my relative), but at the same time he was pretty glad it had a definite finish date on it because he was also able to use to time to get up to date with some other stuff for when he went looking for a new job.
Saying “I spent five years binge-watching streaming TV and furthering the ideological aims of the PC Master Race” isn’t going to bring in the big bucks when it’s time to get a new gig which pays respectable money, basically.
Yeah, I keep telling myself I should be collecting certifications for when this job ends (it was originally a 3 month contract, but I’ve been here 3.5 yrs). Yet here I am, talking to you.
See, now I feel like the problem is much worse in “management”. You tech people actually have a system that needs to be up and running. Sure, you may have long stretches where nothing breaks. But someone still has to keep an eye on it.
In consulting, we call not having anything to do (at least for a client) as being “on the bench”. Experienced consultants learn to enjoy the downtime because soon enough they will be back on a plane working 70 hours a week at a client. Although truth be told, there are plenty of client where you just sit at a desk 40 hours pretending to work.
I was shocked when I took a management job in a large insurance company a few years back and not only did most people not seem to have much to do. Most people didn’t even show up to the office. It actually became a bit of an issue when some senior VP came to the office and made a big stink about the office being half empty. When asked by my admin if I was going to start coming into the office, I asked her “what are the odds you think this guy is going to ever come back to this office, actually start taking headcount, and actually learn who I am among the thousands of people working here?”
I took a job in the 90s for a company that was dying (which I had no idea when I said yes to the job). The office building was shaped like a Y and myself and two other people had one of the branches of the Y to ourselves. Three people in a section that could hold dozens. Then one of those two left and then the other and I had it all to myself. There was work to do but I would finish my week’s worth in a couple of hours. This was before the Internet was pervasive and I didn’t even have a computer at my desk so to pass the time I would bring in books and read.
Eventually one Friday our checks were late. After waiting an extra hour for mine, the HR woman said, “I would cash this now if I were you while they still can cover it.” I cashed the check and quit the next day.
My situation is sorta like the server babysitters.
I’m paid to sit at home and do absolutely nothing even slightly work-related. They have zero legit expectation that I will do anything, so my doing nothing is not shirking either practically or morally. But … If the company calls I drop whatever I’m doing and promptly dash off to the airport to work for anywhere from 10 hours to 4 days.
Today was a work day. I 'Doped. I polished off a magazine. I chatted with friends on the phone. I cooked & ate 2 meals. I worked out in our gym. I went out to dinner. Wife and I went for a walk on the beach. We talked of many things, though not of cabbages nor kings. The phone did not ring.
Tomorrow is another work day. Perhaps I shall work. Perhaps I shall not. All will be revealed in the fullness of time.
In the days before cellphones you had to stay home or call in from a payphone every 30 minutes or so if you were away from your landline. Now it’s like being retired. Except the checks are still coming in. I go about my daily quasi-retired life with all-but zero regard for the potential to work.
Some months we get beat to death; we’re barely home long enough to do laundry before it’s time to leave again. That sucketh greatly. Other months it’s not quite a 30-day vacation but it’s close. That is truly a thing of beauty when it happens. Most months are somewhere in the middle.
The one thing you learn doing this gig is to *never *buy expensive non-refundable tickets to a date-specific performance. You may have been unmolested for the last 3 weeks but sure as sunrise the day you have a pair of $300 50-yard line seats is the day they call and you’re halfway across the country when your game kicks off.
All in all it’s a good life. Incompatible with pets and needy family members, but good for strong couples or families who genuinely like spending time together but don’t mind multi-day separations either.
LSLGuy, hypothetically, what is this gig? How would one pursue it?
Pretty sure he is a pilot for an airline
Dang it. Little bit outside my skill set. :smack:
I had a job like that once - it was my last corporate gig. I was hired as an engineer with the understanding that they were grabbing me while I was available so that once a management slot opened up they could move me into it.
The first day I worked they called a big department meeting to say that they weren’t sure when but we’d be having layoff that year and by the department head’s estimate we were about 20% overstaffed. I spent the rest of the week reading all of the tech summaries for the new area of operation and catching up on current operations then went to my boss to get started working. He told me that as a new employee I was in the penalty box and wouldn’t be given any work to do nor could I assist the other engineers I was just supposed to watch and learn until he thought I was ready. At that point in time I had 4 times the total number of years of experience of his staff and they were working 12+ hour days to keep up.
I took me over 6 weeks of going to his office every day and asking if I could help out the other engineers before he decided that I could start to work. I spent that entire time giving advice on how to do things faster or easier and surfing the web. After the 6 weeks I got a lecture on how the other engineers didn’t like me much and I needed to make sure they liked me. Of course I’d hate someone who was bored out of their mind watching me drown in work. I have never been so happy to get laid off and the department manager called it it was a 20% haircut.
Of course the other insane part of the management there was they were still hiring and paying signing bonuses two weeks before the layoff. I know an engineer who received one year’s pay in one month with that firm between her severance package and signing bonus.
By LSLGuy’s description, either airline pilot or hitman.
I wonder how often consultants/lawyers/accountants etc pretend to work to keep billing hours up. If a lawyer “reviews case law” for 10 hours or “drafts contract” for 5 hours, the client may have a lot of difficulty determining what’s reasonable.
I don’t know about licensed professionals like lawyers or accountants (or consultants in fields like engineering, for that matter), but I do consulting in a bunch of creative fields. I got a come-to-Jesus talk from one of my early clients – still a client, now also a friend – about how Thinking Time Totally Counts, and I needed to build it in to my invoices. You wind up legitimately billing for stuff like reading pre-publication copies of novels on the train, or standing in the shower for forty-five minutes trying to figure out the exact frame sequence for an animation.
As for how clients determine what’s “reasonable”, IME, they don’t. They hired you as a consultant because they needed to use someone else’s brain to get their thing done. Either they figure you know what you’re doing and they pay whatever you’ve invoiced them for, or they suddenly decide you don’t know what you’re doing and you have to argue with them to get paid. Most clients are the first kind.
Consultancy, I’ve found, has an alarming number of things in common with repping myself as a writer or a model. It’s not exactly smoke and mirrors, but it does depend a lot on you telling people what you can do, and them just figuring you mean it.