Why can’t he be both? 
Never had a do-nothing corporate job (except security guard, but that doesn’t exactly count.) At one of my old jobs the company had a dodgy computer network that would frequently go down for hours or even days at a time. Since all my work required being connected to the network, those were days I got to do nothing except play Wolfenstein and occasionally answer the phone.
LSLGuy flew the F16, so he *was * both.
[QUOTE=MichaelEmouse]
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.
[/QUOTE]
Ha Ha Ha. In actuality, a good rule of thumb is that you have about 3 hours of work needed to get one billable hour.
That said while law can be a pretty intense profession, you can get down time. Like this morning while getting dressed, I was told by my clerk that my 9:30 bail hearing was moved to 12, and I have no other work. So its office for me, and watching Netflix (Amanda Knox documentary) until I leave for the Court complex.
Certainly there were times as a junior when I was made to sit around “in case I was needed”. Usually when there was a big transaction or major litigation going through, but my YouTube watching time was certainly not billed.
My spouse once worked at a place I nicknamed “the mafia money-laundering front”, since that was the only possible reason for its existence that I could see. The programmers did literally nothing all day, and that’s the old fashioned sort of “literally”.
Oh, well, actually no, they played computer games too. Every so often a manager would walk by, wave his arms ineffectually and say something like “look, I know you don’t have any work to do yet but can’t you just … do professional development or something?” And then wander away.
My spouse was a contractor through a company that was contracting through another company, that was contracting to them, so they were paying stupid amounts of money for him … to do nothing. Or play Doom. Every so often he would wander into a manger’s office and say “you know, if you want to drop my contract it’s really perfectly okay” and they would say “no no, we’re going to be getting some work for you any day now.”
Then the company went bust. Or at any rate, sold off whatever division it was, and everyone was let go except for I think one of the middle managers and a couple of programmers. Who were, presumably, going to get some work any day now.
I stand by my description
The trouble with all these jobs where you aren’t expected to do any work is how the hell do you tell if you are on holidays?
Because you don’t have the asshole from HR complaining that you shouldn’t be reading.
My wife’s now a semi-retired lawyer in solo practice.
She spent many years in a 20ish-lawyer firm on the associate then almost-partner track. Lots of pressure to bill hours, but no padding. Evar. Her work was mostly regulatory, with a side of contracts, so not much sitting around in case something happened. Still, 10 hours in the office usually yielded barely 5 hours in the till. Unless the day was wasted in internal meetings and then it was 2 hours in the till or three extra hours at night to catch up.
She went solo after her partner track turned into you-just-missed-partner track. Rat bastards. For a few years she was building the practice and the sales effort meant barely 3 hours billed per 10 hours of labor spent either doing, coordinating, or selling. Some weeks it was even worse. As you say, that sucked / sucks.
Finally she decided she had enough recurring clients and was ready to wind down. We got rid of the office and staff and all that overhead. So no more coordination. She’s had the last 5 years where other than her annual training to keep her license active substantially 100% of her time is billable. Clients call, fax, or email then the meter starts when she looks at it. She responds via call or email then the meter stops. The only unbillable time is her entering her time into the billing software afterwards. Her weekly volume isn’t all that impressive, but her efficiency is unbeatable.
So, AK84, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel if you can play it right and have some good luck along the way. Good luck!
When I was young, I got a job driving a delivery truck for a charity organization. They never had anything for me to do. So I twiddled my thumbs in the stock room most of the time.
When I did get to make a run, no one cared how long it took. While I was supposed to be “working”, I would go shopping for my weekly groceries and take them home. I would go home and do laundry and watch TV. One time I even mowed my lawn. It was ridiculous.
I finally quit after a year out of sheer boredom and personal respect for my own growth. All my friends thought I was crazy to quit a sweet gig like that.
At my first IT gig in London I worked for a major bank. I was stuck on a floor with a bunch of mainframe programmers who could go for weeks without working. The systems were decades old and any bugs had long been fixed. Most of them reported to managers in the main office 100 miles away.
A few of them had developed outside businesses that they would deal with during office hours. The rest of us would cover for them if their desk phones rang. Make up an excuse as to why they weren’t at their desk and then quickly give them a call on their mobiles.
One guy we did this for 3 straight days before his body was discovered. He lived alone and had an embolism in the shower. We’d been covering for a dead man and leaving him voicemails. Yes, we all got told off for it, but we were pretty upset so no-one got fired.
I know a guy who has a job doing nothing. His father owns a business, and created a position to “keep junior out of trouble”.
So, instead of an allowance, he goes in to work from 9 to 5 and collects a paycheck. He reads, surfs the Internet, straightens up his office, etc. He’s been in this arrangement close to a decade.
There are better ways (tax wise) to give money to your child, but it is working for the family.
This is actually what happened to me at a job.
I was contract writing for a website and was supposed to move to a brand-new project that was being created. Because I was moving, they hired my old position out to someone else. I was apparently forgotten about in the transfer, but my previous position was already filled.
So for 6 months I was still under contract, but I had no job to do. It even got the point where I had no desk. I just propped my laptop around wherever there was room and surfed the internet, listened to podcasts and read.
It was, by far, the strangest situation in my life because literally everyone knew that I didn’t have a job, and that I was being paid to just sit there, but no one did anything about it until my contract expired 6 months later.
Consulting for a big firm is not unlike what he describes.
For consulting, a lot of it depends on the nature of the contract. For example, one of my last projects, the contract specifies that I get paid for 40 hours a week over 3 month increments. Similar to how they engage contractors I imagine. So basically, even if I’m sitting in a conference room staring at the wall, I’m getting paid. And really, a lot of my job is just “walking the halls”.
In contrast, many technology projects at my last firm were “time and materials”. So we had to calculate to the hour how many hours of each staff member we plan to utilize. My standard approach was you can’t hire a consultant for less than half a day increments because it’s too hard to coordinate them between multiple projects.
Mine’s a bit like that. You guessed it, IT.
I don’t lack value, especially when things actually do need doing and people are forthcoming with what’s needed to get them done. But a lot of the time is thumb twiddling and browsing because of either: having little to do and just waiting for something to break; wanting to actually do something constructive but the contrarian department manager snapping in disagreement at my suggestion so I return to browsing; waiting for feedback on something; waiting for information/input from someone else.
I’d actually rather be kept busy and am not very good at ‘inventing work’. But it’s much like another poster noted - whilst there’s little in the way of specific requests, the department manager (not technically my boss, but as good as) is constantly watching me like a hawk, walking over to catch sight of my screen roughly once every 15 seconds (then buggering off through to the other room to play a tanks game half the time, ironically). Just have to try and make what should take 5 minutes take 5 hours…
Didn’t we just have a whole thread about how you wanted to do nothing but collect and deposit checks for a living?
Having been all over the job spectrum, I guess I can see some very limited appeal in such a job. OTOH, if it means an enforced 8 or or hours a day, 40 a week, of neither doing something useful for your paycheck nor being able to use the time very productively otherwise, I think it could appeal only to those with zero ambition and little sense of self-worth.
No, that was someone else.
Oop, my bad. But we did have that discussion at length.
Put it this way (addendum to above): If someone would pay you a median salary and benefits for your skill set, but require you to do little more than sit in an empty office eight hours a day - no distractions or entertainment of any kind - would you consider it a worthwhile deal? For how long?
Proposal management is like this (as a consultant or not). Our schedules are at the federal government’s mercy, and we never know how our next proposal will go, so we learn to appreciate any downtime. When you work for a company, though, you have to watch how much time you charge to overhead. I’ve been mostly idle for a couple of weeks now (which is why/how I’m surfing the Dope at 11:30 on a Monday morning), and I’m certainly aware of it. Between our own props we can help out other prop managers with reviews, editing, compliance checks, etc., and I’ve been doing as much of that as I can. The feds are just quiet right now. But things should pick up soon, with the start of the new fiscal year.
…at least, I hope so. I’m tired of being bored.
That’s really a big point.
Some folks here are paid to sit at work pretending to work. Others are paid to sit at work and play / hobby as best they can, making no secret of what they’re really doing. Others are genuinely off (at least sometimes) as if it was a paid vacation with no responsibility as to time, place, appearances, or results.
Doing the latter is pretty easy for almost anyone. Doing the former would be intolerable to most folks. Just sitting alone, like in an interrogation room, for 8 hours a day doing exactly zero would make many people functionally insane.
I’ve worked plenty of professional IT positions where you may end up “working” 6-10 hours a week and just being available the rest of the time. Because on occasion, you get buried and it takes a week or three to deal with everything.
That is basically just planning for peak activity and having the staff to deal with emergencies, knowing that people are just poking around for things to do the rest of the time. That may not sound very important, but I know my team uncovers and fixes a ton of minor issues all the time simply by being bored and poking around.
Zero ambition and little sense of self-worth? Where do I sign up?
Although pretending to work by staring at a spreadsheet all day would be pretty hard. I’ve had weeks at work with almost nothing to do, but I could dick around on the internet. That’s tolerable. But pretty much literally staring at the equivalent of a blank screen for 8 hours would be tough.
For the 3 1/2 months before my official retirement, I was kind of doing nothing for pay. Though I had given like 6 months notice, my boss didn’t really get that no one knew the system I developed. He suggested me working one day a week, which was fine with me - except my company didn’t allow that without some sort of medical reason. So, he and HR worked out that I would “work from home” 4 days a week. My VP approved.
Since no one else was supposed to know, they thought I was getting paid for one day a week, and some of the seven people who took over from me apologized for asking a question on email on my “day off.” I never got caught until I really retired.
The great thing was that I didn’t have to look busy at home.
I do confess a tiny bit of guilt over this, though I had been ripped off on raises for a couple of years - but hey, I’m Jewish, so I’m an expert on guilt.
I just can’t wait until the next person who is thinking of retiring tries to get my deal. But I’ll never know I suppose.