My job is currently like this (web development), and it’s good to know I’m not the only one who is doing a lot of thumb-twiddling.
The part that sucks is that it’s my own business so while I am sitting around waiting to perform services for and answer the requests of our clients, I also am sitting under this huge cloud of dread that my inactivity will be noticed and payment halted. Which is why I am here every day 9-5 in my pajamas waiting to do whatever they want, because I want them to feel like (and know) that I am working for them 40 hours a week.
It hasn’t always been this way. When we started the business we regularly worked 24 hours a day. I have put in countless sleepless nights and marathon work sessions on behalf of my clients. We’re just sort of shifting how things work now, and it’s creating a bit of a lull.
Like this, I’ve had plenty of projects where the tasks were caught up and we were in “support mode”, waiting for something to happen. I would have been great to read a book, or watch a movie/TV show, etc., something engaging. But instead it’s reading stuff on the internet. A part of me senses the minutes and hours of my life ticking away…
I’m a software developer. Where I am now, we do a fixed number of releases per year. We do a development cycle, then a testing cycle, then it goes out the door. Usually, between the end of testing and the start of the next development cycle I have a good week or week and a half with absolutely nothing to do. Sometimes I’ll get a few small things to work on early, but really, there’s no work for me to do because they haven’t finalized what we’re even doing yet.
But wait, there’s more! Let’s say the development cycle is twelve weeks long. I get all my assignments at the beginning, and they’re all assigned a value for how long they should take. Add up the values for all the tasks I have and it’ll be about twelve weeks. I’m good at this job, and I’ve been here a long time. I, no joke, can easily get all of my tasks done in half the time or less. Then I sit here. This job is killing me.
If I mention the fact that I’ve got all my work done, they’ll take some tasks from another developer and assign them to me. Then I’ll do those, and after that neither of us will have anything to do. If again I bring up how I don’t have anything to do, then we get into busywork territory. So I sit here. Job, killing me.
I’ve learned (through repeated attempts) that there is a firm No Boat Rocking policy in place, so again, I sit here.
I’d get something else but this job pays, is six miles from my house, there’s no travel, and rarely any overtime. So, I sit here, awaiting the cold embrace of death.
Your clever boss doesn’t need another hire to spread the load does he? One who telecommutes and doesn’t need an expensive cubicle?
If so, please PM me about particulars. I’m looking for a dev sidelight and your outfit’s culture sounds ideal. If my tech matches yours this could be sweet! Mostly serious with a side of ;).
I seem to do 2 - 6 hours of actual work a day, usually trending toward 2. I’m a business analyst currently. It’s not that I don’t want to work. It’s that my job is so much collaboration with other people that even with 3 or 4 projects assigned to me simultaneously I spend a lot of time waiting for meetings with them. Often I’ll schedule a meeting - typically the earliest I can get everyone together is next week - and then end up sitting around, reading the internet.
In my last job where I was a software engineer, management had a huge problem coordinating work, so I sat around there a lot also. I’d have nothing to work on for 3 or 4 months, and then suddenly four project managers would tell me to start on their projects simultaneously. I’d have to decline one because I couldn’t be in three places at once, and then when the projects were done I’d sit around for 4 more months with nothing to do. It drove me batty.
I used to try to ask coworkers if I could help them with their workloads. Sometimes that was fine and would get me another half hour of work. Usually it would take them days to get back to me with something I could do, so eventually I stopped bothering. One thing I did learn though, was that I work very quickly and efficiently compared to nearly all of my coworkers. I finish in hours what they take days to do. I just don’t screw around when I finally actually have something to do. I suspect they’re no better than me because they just stretch things out to look busy. I prefer to deliver quickly and look like a superstar and then find other ways to look busy when there’s no pressure to deliver.
I’m an analyst for a large corporation. When I first started the job, I wrote a lot of custom queries and macros to do the job more efficiently.So within a few months I started doing double the output of the person before me, and still only worked about 1/4 of the time I was in the office. And the thing was, everyone thought I was great. My reporting was accurate and on time. Whenever custom stuff came down the pipeline people were so apologetic for interrupting my work, but if I could please spare the time… I was able to complete the requests quickly (and get back to web surfing), and they were so grateful I was able to find the time to help them in my busy schedule. I’m such a team player! Always got above average reviews. Convinced my boss to let me work from home a couple days a week, so I didn’t have to pretend to be working on those days.
I finally applied for another job within the company. I’m much more busy now, and I actually like it. The work is more stimulating, the pay better, and I still get to work from home.
We had someone at a previous employer who would basically show up in the morning, open a soda and a bag of chips and put them on his desk, then leave for lunch. Many hours later, he would return from lunch, finish up his snack, send a couple of emails, and then leave for the day.
He did this for a very long time, until the people who(m) he tended to park next to - not in our department - asked a few semi-innocuous questions about, “Who is this guy?” and he got busted and let go.
We must have worked with the same guy. The one I used to work with would show up around 10, go to lunch from 11:30-1:30, then leave at 3. That was when he was in the office. He also went to industry meetings out of town, so a Wednesday meeting in Chicago meant he would be gone all week. He did that for 10 years until new management came in and eliminated his position.
The term for such a position is a sinecure. I know a person who has one. Hell, I had a retail sinecure when I was a freshman in college. My boss at Goldsmoth’s wanted me to stay in school, so he told the workers in one department to leave certain tasks undone during the week and had me come in on Saturdays and Sundays to do them. It was about six hours work that I had twelve hours to do, so I would get it all done on Satruday, then hide in the office and study on Sunday.
I think that term is used for positions where there is no work by design in order to provide someone with income or status. Like giving your nephew a BS Vice President job he doesn’t need to show up for.
Most of the time, I think having nothing to do is mostly due to bureaucratic inefficiencies. Like years ago, when I was hired for that job I described up-thread. My director quit before I started and his VP retired 3 months later. For the better part of a year, I had essentially no management structure above me. If the financial crisis didn’t hit, forcing a restructuring of the company, I probably would have stayed like that for years.
Einstein’s position at the patent office was considered a sinecure to allow him to work on his early ideas and papers.
In general, though, I don’t think we’re talking about people knowingly kept on to do little, but jobs that end up under-loaded or even dead because of corporate changes and the like.
I’m in the same boat as some of the other IT posters here in that I’m basically just a babysitter for computers (servers, routers, etc). I spend more time signing for incoming customer shipments than I do actually touching any equipment. When I took the job I thought it would include troubleshooting of network issues and such, but that’s all done off-site/off-shore. Boring as hell, but it pays well enough and the benefits are pretty good. I’m gonna retire in a year and a half anyway, so I can put up with being bored until then.
When I first started at Numbingly Gordian Conglomerate, it took six weeks to get a computer into my office. In the mean time, all I could do was read and re-read the procurement manual.
I sat there, stultifying, until I finally went to the Business Manager’s office (equivalent to a VP in other companies) and said I would take another job offer if they didn’t have any actual work for me to do.
Computer was in my office the next morning, but I never quite recovered my momentum at that company.
