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I've always found it surprising how easy it is to find yourself in a no-work situation like this at a large corporation, without even trying! Projects will end

I've always found it surprising how easy it is to find yourself in a no-work situation like this at a large corporation, without even trying! Projects will end, people and managers will get shuffled around and suddenly you have no direct work responsibilities for months and months. Sometimes years if you were to let it go on like that. It is something that sounds great, but if you have any drive at all it will drive you crazy after a month or two. I'd hop on Hacker News only to find all the links were already visited. I would try to learn some new technologies but it didn't have the same impact that learning them out of necessity had. Eventually you have to sound the alarm to people that you don't have work to do, sometimes repeatedly, before they will 'fix' the problem by assigning you somewhere else. I honestly think that this is the default state that workers settle into at many large companies. There are some small percentage of highly productive workers doing a ton of work, and a lot of very low productivity workers making up the rest of the ranks. I've never worked at a startup, but one of the things that I think I would find appealing about them is that there are so few people that everyone's function would be important and that situations like the above would be difficult to go unnoticed.

vanderZwan 10y ago
> It is something that sounds great, but if you have any drive at all it will drive you crazy after a month or two. My laptop is being repaired since last week and I'm on a temporary desktop now, desperately trying to find things to do that won't cause merge conflicts with the unpushed work that's on my harddrive. Just got told the CPU fan that arrived was the wrong size and I'll have to wait another week to resume work on the tasks that I was doing before. I feel like I'm going crazy already, and it's been just a week!
s_kilk 10y ago
> It is something that sounds great, but if you have any drive at all it will drive you crazy after a month or two. Jeez, I get disheartened waiting for a docker image to build. I think I'd go nuts if I had to sit around with (effectively) nothing to do.
southphillyman 10y ago
Ha this happened to me once when I was hired as a contractor to take over another employee's responsibility. The guy refused to train me (or talk to me) and I just sat around for 6 months with absolutely no work to do. I've had other instances where work was really light after a big release and we essentially did busy work until the next iteration was approved by the higher ups
otikik 10y ago
I did this for a Big Co for some months. In retrospective, it was probably the best time I had in that company. That's how I got back into programming after spending several years "consulting" (sending emails, doing powerpoints and excel spreadsheets, doing meetings, blegh), which was a very good way to get my startup up and running when I was finally laid off. The only bad part was when someone came looking for "someone unassigned". These were really dull tasks which literally anyone could make, like moving data from paper to spreadsheet. Or that time when I had to "help" a this guy with a MS Access database that he had been working on for weeks. It was such an atrocious thing. I remember there was a column called "Money". Sometimes it had a number. Others it had a currency name. I redid the whole thing in an afternoon, with Excel. But the guy was someone's son and was impossible to let go. So they let me go. The severance package was great, a good safety net for my startup, so it was ok at the end :)

vanderZwan 10y ago

> It is something that sounds great, but if you have any drive at all it will drive you crazy after a month or two. My laptop is being repaired since last week and I'm on a temporary desktop now, desperately trying to find things to do that won't cause merge conflicts with the unpushed work that's on my harddrive. Just got told the CPU fan that arrived was the wrong size and I'll have to wait another week to resume work on the tasks that I was doing before. I feel like I'm going crazy already, and it's been just a week!

s_kilk 10y ago

> It is something that sounds great, but if you have any drive at all it will drive you crazy after a month or two. Jeez, I get disheartened waiting for a docker image to build. I think I'd go nuts if I had to sit around with (effectively) nothing to do.

southphillyman 10y ago

Ha this happened to me once when I was hired as a contractor to take over another employee's responsibility. The guy refused to train me (or talk to me) and I just sat around for 6 months with absolutely no work to do. I've had other instances where work was really light after a big release and we essentially did busy work until the next iteration was approved by the higher ups

otikik 10y ago

I did this for a Big Co for some months. In retrospective, it was probably the best time I had in that company. That's how I got back into programming after spending several years "consulting" (sending emails, doing powerpoints and excel spreadsheets, doing meetings, blegh), which was a very good way to get my startup up and running when I was finally laid off. The only bad part was when someone came looking for "someone unassigned". These were really dull tasks which literally anyone could make, like moving data from paper to spreadsheet. Or that time when I had to "help" a this guy with a MS Access database that he had been working on for weeks. It was such an atrocious thing. I remember there was a column called "Money". Sometimes it had a number. Others it had a currency name. I redid the whole thing in an afternoon, with Excel. But the guy was someone's son and was impossible to let go. So they let me go. The severance package was great, a good safety net for my startup, so it was ok at the end :)