Yeah, that’s the worst. That’s how I discovered SDMB like 20 years ago. I was sitting next to Shagnasty with long stretches of nothing to do. I was ok with it at the time because I was getting my MBA in the evenings and my previous job was working at an insane dot-com consulting firm where we worked until 10pm+ every night. I remember at one point I wrote a small Java app to simulate the physics of a bouncing ball and would spend hours just bouncing it around the screen. I also spent a lot of time on Vault.com (it was the late 90s) researching companies to work for once I graduated.
In my case there have been:
- jobs where it was understood that people had a) urgent stuff, b) stuff to be done in between the urgent stuff and c) time when the above was done and you could take out a book, study, do some stretches or pet the factory cat.
- jobs where, while the situation was that above, managers did not understand it.
- jobs where there was barely time to breathe.
- one job where I was given a junior with no prior warning, when I’d already been one month ahead of schedule (nobody had asked), and then the (new) team lead would pout at my not having anything to do, yet refuse to give me any further work. I almost had to hit him over the head with a chair to get assigned the Security part of the project: normally this would be done by the technical personnel, but the programmer we had could not analyze his way out of a wet paper bag and was completely overwhelmed by tasks an average coder would consider totally boring and routine.
- one job where I had 1 effective hour of work per week on average but was required (not by my non-responsive and 1000km distant supervisor, but by the local HR idiot) to be in the office 45h/wk.
There are also times when what I have to do is think. And the way I think looks to some people as “not doing anything”. Bosses who are ok with people taking out a book or going for a walk are IME also capable of understanding staring at the ceiling or reading a website as being a prelude to flurries of activity. Those who aren’t tend to also love face time (puke).
I worked for a defense contractor that made, among other things, aviation and space computers[sup]1[/sup]. As a subcontractor we were making a space-borne processor for a classified project and it was too large for our environmental chambers. We had to rent a chamber at Honeywell and, since the box was classified[sup]2[/sup] it had to have someone watching it 24/7. My Boss d’Idiot was trying to work out a schedule where four of us could do so with no overtime. “Can’t be done,” I told him. “There are 168 hours in a week[sup]3[/sup]. You’ll either have to bring fifth guy for one shift a week or pay the overtime for one of us.” He insisted I was wrong and that he’d find a way but wound up coming in himself for the extra shift.
Anyway, once the vacuum was pulled the cycle was to test it at 50C for a half-hour or so, drop the temp to -30C in a span three hours and soak it for six, run the tests, then ramp back to to 50 in three and soak for six ad infinitum. As you can see, at most the work consisted of starting the test program, waiting a half-hour for it to finish, telling the Honeywell guys to change the temp, and bundle the printouts up and put them in an envelope[sup]4[/sup]. There were shifts where we did nothing at all but watch the box.
This was before PCs were common among us mere mortals and they, quite reasonably, wouldn’t let us install anything interesting on the DOS-box that controlled the computer being tested so we read a lot. d’Idiot tried desperately to find something useful for us to do, considering even having us count inventory, but it was deemed too much trouble[sup]5[/sup] to ferry it from where it was stored to the Honeywell site and back. He was never happy about it, though.
It was about two months to complete the test and I think all of us were happy to be back were we were when it was done.
[sup]1[/sup]Some of you might remember my mention in the “Death of Cassini” thread working on a tiny bit of that.
[sup]2[/sup]I have no idea why because it was a regular ol’ bit-munching box; it was the software that was classified. We had no idea what the mission was about, never mind what might have been going on with the software, and the program we had at Honeywell was speed and reliability testing stuff to execute while we ran the temp up and down.
[sup]3[/sup]Thanks to standing watches in the Navy, that constant is engraved in my memory as deeply as 24 hours in a day or 7 days in a week.
[sup]4[/sup]This was before digital storage was common.
[sup]5[/sup]Translation: He would have had to fetch it himself.
I’m convinced a significant portion of people in large corporations don’t really do anything at all. They are mostly evaluated on whether they show up at their desk at the appropriate time and get along with their boss (if they ever actually see them).
Case in point:
I was consulting for a big insurance company as part of a “PMO” (Project Management Organization/Office - a bullshit construct who typically have to real power or decision making ability whose purpose is to advise on project management stuff). Now for the year I was there, I was actually managing a group of projects. Fairly interesting ones at that around using predictive analytics to detect fraud.
Anyhow, Shortly before my contract ended, I found out from my full-time colleagues that I was the only one on our team actually working on a real project. So I have no idea what the rest of them were doing, except for:
a) spending a couple days before the end of the quarter helping to build the quarterly management report deck.
b) once a month, one PM was tasked with asking the eight or so Directors in the group on the status of their projects. A task that maybe took an hour all together. He acted like it was the most difficult thing in the world.
I never have nothing to do. I just have things I’d rather blow off than do. Lowest on my list is digitizing 70 years of customer invoices. The percentage of them that I’ll ever need is rather low, but when I need them going through filing cabinets is tedious.
I’m a regulatory product manager. My work depends on upcoming effective dates of new regulation. Given the change in administration and their dedication to providing almost no information whatsoever, having limited work to do has become distressingly common. On the one hand, that’s good - it saves the company money. On the other it’s bad - we really don’t need the number of people we have now, but we will when more regs come out and it’s impossible to train someone on legislative implementations in just a couple of months.
So yeah, it’s kind of feast or famine. I never in a million years thought I’d say this, but when Tom Price resigned, we were all really disappointed. I hate this current administration for many reasons, one of them that it’s obvious they have no clue how regulation works, but we were waiting with bated breath, about to receive some new regs we’d been waiting for for months; then he left and…nothing. And unfortunately, unless new law replaces old law, the old law still is required to be implemented as written even if it’s a shitty requirement. One way or the other, said shitty requirements are effective until superseded. Things came to a standstill for months while we waited for new requirements to supersede the old terrible ones. Now we’re set to get some new ones April 2nd. Probably just in the nick of time.
A big organization needs a portion of people that have nothing to do available, and large corporations
refuse to admit this. My old team was 15 people at its peak - that’s 60 weeks of vacation and 30 weeks of available personal time that needs to be covered. Then there are the usual peaks and valleys of workflow, and figure your team count for whatever the bare minimum is for member productivity. You’ve got a situation where either 2-3 people don’t have much to do or the entire team is easily hitting the targets. And that’s not counting the dead weight of relatives/spouses/girlfriends/what-have-you that are there to do nothing because some higher-up wants them out of the house.
Then you get the efficiency fads like Six Sigma and LEAN and TCF and blah-blah-blah telling them they can save tons with cross-training and job eliminations and they buy into it like Southern Baptists at a revival meeting. Only the guy you cross-trained can’t leave to help because someone’s called in or on vacation and even with him you’re not going to make production deadlines and you can’t get help because someone’s on maternity leave over there and OMGhowdidthishappenweneedmorepeople!
The bigger an animal, the more fat reserves it needs to survive long-term. They’ll never accept that, it seems.
I worked 12 years for Safeway, the last 5 managing the night crew. There was always something to do, because we were always up against the wall with shelf stocking, back stock, sale items, tags, etc. If I’d had twice the manpower and triple the hours we’d still never get it done. And no matter what you accomplished each day, the next time you walked in the doors you were starting all over again fresh, every single night.
My current job is in a library at a US military medical school, in the interlibrary loan department. I used to audit the database which was an never-ending ongoing process (verify all the records, when you get to the end, start over again at the beginning), but now I don’t have anything to do until somebody wants something we don’t have, and even then it only takes a minute to process the request. The rest of the job is just customer service, but since our patrons are 100% students and faculty, they are for the most part self-sufficient. They’ve all got college degrees already so they know how a library works and rarely need help with anything. And so I have almost nothing but free time at work. It’s completely a “just show up and you’re doing great” job. As a younger man I thought I would hate this sort of job, and at the time I was probably right, but at this point in my life this is just perfect.
No, I’m quite busy, as is everyone here. I take little breaks on here because it keeps me sane but I’ve lots of things to go back to. Getting people’s time here is a bit of a struggle, because there’s so much to do.
If your job involves a lot of nothing to do on a frequent basis, someone has fucked up.
I work in a company of 15,000 people.
Definitely! My job as the Help Desk is basically to sit around and wait for something to go wrong. Sure, I have assignments outside of that like inventory, etc., but they don’t come close to using all of my time every day.
I pass the time by playing games and haunting a major message board site. I forget the name … 
Intriguing … could you talk about one or more of these?
What if your job is to prevent things from happening?
I’ve described them in passing on a few space-oriented threads. Search for “PlaTePos” for an example.
Stranger