17 ms·

Forgotten Employee (2002)

520 points by jxub 8y ago

dang 8y ago
Big discussion in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087935 Smaller one in 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320310 Helpful explanation of its origins: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6088168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6088168
- neonate 8y ago
  It's also here for safekeeping: http://archive.is/SNn1i http://archive.is/SNn1i.
- sincerely 8y ago
  Wow, I had no idea this was of SA-origin. Crazy how influential that website has been for internet culture
  - Buge 8y ago
    It says SA in the first sentence, and mentions it several other times, even addressing "SA friends".
    - busterarm 8y ago
      Also mention of the phrase "do you have stairs in your house" http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-terrible-secret-of-space http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-terrible-secret-of-space
    - Latteland 8y ago
      SA is something awful forum apparently. We should define these terms!
      - pc86 8y ago
        One of the great things about the internet is you can search for the meaning of things you don't know. I know everyone on HN loves to use these[0][1], but not everything needs to be cited. [0] meaningless footnotes [1] you're not writing a term paper
        detaro 8y ago
        Nobody asked for a citation, and good luck googling two-letter abbreviations unless you're lucky with guessing the right context words.
        cyberfart 8y ago
        Thankfully somebody said forum. Googling "SA forum" will have correct top result.
        burger_moon 8y ago
        Even duckduckgo knows that 'sa forums' is Something Awful. Also TFA writes out Something Awful several times throughout and doesn't exclusively use the abbreviation.
tomashertus 8y ago
I would love to see a short movie based on this story:) It could be hilarious...
- aidos 8y ago
  It’s certainly not dissimilar to the plot of Office Space.
  - richev 8y ago
    So we were wondering if you could tell us, what exactly do you do here? :-D
- gcatalfamo 8y ago
  Only if the cast Tom Hanks as main character
donttrack 8y ago
Never get tired of reading this story.
rossdavidh 8y ago
To be honest, that sounds like it would be way more stressful than just working.
- callesgg 8y ago
  And soul crushing.
  - tw1010 8y ago
    Only if you let your soul be immovably coupled to a fragile and exogenous variable like your job.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - xab9 8y ago
      You are sitting on your ass (conidering you are a dev) for eight friggin hours. If you include commuting, lunch break and the time you sleep, this is more time than you can spend with your family, hobbies, recreation etc. You don't need to like or "couple your soul" to your job, it's part of your life and life shouldn't suck because there is a very good chance that there isn't another one.
    - ibeckermayer 8y ago
      If your soul isn’t in some sense coupled to the thing you spend most of your time doing, I simply do not understand what you tie your identity to...
  - PakG1 8y ago
    If you have no scruples about getting free money, you can use the time to do whatever the heck you want. If you want to feel like you earned the money or you're not allowed to do anything outside of your scope, then yes, it's probably soul crushing.
    - pc86 8y ago
adrianhel 8y ago
Magic stuff!
jopsen 8y ago
If you are a trusted senior employee then of course you can abuse your trust.. but why would you? Seems unlikely you'd get fired for asking what to do... And if you don't want to ask just find something and expand responsibilities..
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  It's most likely fictional. It starts out entirely believable, but slowly gets odder and odder.
  - nwsm 8y ago
    But probably written by someone on the clock with no work to do.
- SatvikBeri 8y ago
  At an old job, I automated my job, asked for more responsibilities, automated my little team's work, asked for more responsibilities, then automated those. Then Legal said I had too much access for a level N employee, and essentially revoked my ability to work on anything new. My manager was great, and did his best to promote me to level N+2, which should have given me rights to access that data. This took 6 months, during which I taught myself Lisp and Machine Learning. Then I automated all the new stuff I had access to within 2 weeks (including solving a project that had been estimated to take 11 people over two years.) Then I was told it would take another 6 months to get access to anything else. Four weeks later, I left for my first ML job and never looked back.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mltony 8y ago
Is this story true? The part about mid-life crisis VP sounds too good to be true.
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  To me it's pretty obviously fan fiction from the Something Awful forums. It's written in typical fan fiction style and it references SA over and over.
- staticautomatic 8y ago
  The beauty of Kafka and Kafkaesque stories like this is that they're so genuinely rooted in reality that they're essentially a form of magical realism.
  - asfasgasg 8y ago
    This story and stories like it are not rooted in reality. They're rooted in what we dream reality might be, or what we wish reality were. They are wish-fulfillment fantasies.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      I personally knew a guy who did nothing all day, and actually started practice shooting with an air pistol inside the office (when he got the night shift, when the bosses weren't around). He kept this up for at least two years (I lost contact since the person I knew at the company was fired for trading shifts with her colleagues, despite the recognition that she was a top performer in her group). The details (meetings, etc) might be fantasy, but the core fact that people get paid for doing nothing isn't.
  - lioeters 8y ago
    Searched thread for "Kafka", was not disappointed. Magical realism with a dark sense of humor..
JokerDan 8y ago
Classic read. I thought most people had read this already?
- majewsky 8y ago
  I'm seeing this for the first time. Probably a case of "10000/day": https://www.xkcd.com/1053/ https://www.xkcd.com/1053/
malmsteen 8y ago
Actually sad its a fake story cause its fun :(
watmough 8y ago
Oh man, I so miss slow times at work. * Flight simulator (on a Pentium Pro) * Reading Red Dwarf scripts * Posting on Slashdot Nowadays it's all I can do to keep up.
barbs 8y ago
I inexplicably love this story. Often if I'm at work and I feel like there's not much work for me to do and I feel like I'm being paid to do nothing, I'll read this story. I recently found it posted to this wiki, which contains a bit more information about its origins and legacy: https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/wiki/American-Dream https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/wiki/American-Dream They also reference another semi-related story which I also found entertaining (Cubicle Jungle): https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/wiki/Cubicle-Jungle https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/wiki/Cubicle-Jungle I haven't explored the rest of the wiki, but it looks fascinating. The Bibliotheca Anonoma is a research task force archiving, documenting, and safeguarding Internet Folklife. https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/wiki https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/wiki
- coaxial 8y ago
  The P-p-p-p-owerbook story is pretty entertaining as well: https://wiki.bibanon.org/P-P-Powerbook https://wiki.bibanon.org/P-P-Powerbook
- worble 8y ago
  So many good stories that I thought were lost to time are on there (especially after shii took down his site). Thank god for the bibanon wiki.
- pwaai 8y ago
  guess what I'm reading before bed....
- swah 8y ago
  How did you first found it?
mamurphy 8y ago
Redditor claims this happened to them in 2018: https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/8qmayg/update_i_am_a_forgotten_employee_who_has_been/ https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/8qmayg/update_...
austinl 8y ago
This reminds me of a practice in Japan, where employees who can't be laid off (for legal reasons) are sent to the "Boredom Room", to essentially do nothing until they're motivated to quit. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-illegal-japan-workers-are-sent-to-the-boredom-room.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-i...
- nomocrypto 8y ago
  Oh, I know plenty of people who do IT at a local big (US) university and promoting someone downward (i.e. into a role designed to be so boring they quit) is absolutely a thing.
- patio11 8y ago
  In some cases it is worse than doing essentially nothing: you're made to, e.g., perform some data processing task on a newspaper (e.g. write the readings of every kanji in this newspaper; that will take you about a day) and then, at the end of the day, your work product is checked for ~15 seconds to verify that you're not slacking and then shredded in front of your eyes. See you tomorrow.
  - PakG1 8y ago
    That reminds me of the story of Nazi officers telling Jews to carry big rocks from one fence to the other each day. The work was so meaningless that the prisoners couldn't take it anymore and started to jump onto the electric fence to kill themselves. I think such a practice where you make someone feel completely worthless is inhumane.
    - aaron695 8y ago
      I doubt this is true, source? Doesn't sound logical. Humans are very resilient, they adapt to misery quickly. People often kill themselves when things get better, when life is so bad you just get on with it. They know the war can't go on forever, so there's hope. Sounds like work for the guards, why would they waste their time organising it. It'd be lazier to confine people to barracks. Why waste slave labour when there's a war going on. I'm not saying people don't suicide in concentration camps, one did the other day on Manus island, but this is not the story you're telling.
ufmace 8y ago
I find it interesting how many people on the linked HN threads for previous discussions say they've been in similar situations. I've never had a position where I didn't have anything at all to do for an extended amount of time, though I've only worked for one really large company. I did work at a pretty reasonable pace on projects that were obviously not a practical idea and would probably never amount to much, while numerous good ideas that could have saved substantial money got ignored. But I didn't really know of anyone who really didn't do anything. Though there was one guy who had less than a dozen commits in a year, all just a couple of lines. But after trying to work with him on something for another project, I think he really was just that bad at coding.
- flukus 8y ago
  > I think he really was just that bad at coding Count your blessings, bad coders that work hard screw up the entire codebase for everyone. They also seem to get promoted for their hard work.
  - PakG1 8y ago
    That is literally the Dilbert Principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle
- wolco 8y ago
  This exists. I've been in situations where doing development is seen as risky and not doing anything can earn you a promotion.
- Tade0 8y ago
  Eight years ago I was an intern(actually a budget filler) in a large corporation. My tasks included: -Translating table columns(results of this were thrown away) -Preparing "use cases" (actually training a real intern who majored in business administration so she had no idea how to do this) -Reading a 900 page Tibco product API reference. I took two weeks off - arranged with my manager. I was told that after a week someone finally asked "Where's <my name here>?" I noticed that other employees had Eclipse opened at all times so I downloaded it and started learning Java - after all my position was "JAVA intern". No one bothered me during these three months after which I had enough money to buy a laptop and get a driving license. I was also offered a position but I declined on the grounds that I was yet to graduate back then.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
Can anyone verify if this is fact or fiction?
- zootam 8y ago
  here's a newer one: https://np.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/5psadr/i_have_become_a_forgotten_employees_for_a_few/ https://np.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/5psadr/i_have_b... >This is in Texas. >About a year ago I was "fired" for something I did not do. Basically they thought I was stealing from the company and had me fired in the system before they informed me in person. >When they caught the real thief, literally 5 minutes before I got the axe, I got called into HR where they apologized to me profusely and told me they would be working to reinstate me without losing my tenure or my vacation time. They asked me if there was anything they could do in the mean time. I asked for the vacation right then and there which made HR real happy because me being gone for 2 weeks made it easy for them to unfuck the situation. >While on vacation I broke my leg and was wheelchair bound for a month. When I informed HR of this they offered me the satellite office for temporary use since it was literally one block away and I could get there safely using my wheelchair. >The company had a satellite office close to my house that was basically just 2 rooms. One had a desk power socket and internet access and the other was the bathroom. The office was purchased for an exec who was wheelchair bound because of cancer. The office stayed empty for a few months when her cancer went terminal and eventually she passed on. When I was offered it they moved my PC and everything out there getting me set up. >That was the last time I have had any face to face with anyone in the company. Even after my leg healed I did not return to the normal building. I stayed in the office until HR wanted to move someone else in. >Well that never came. Five months ago my department was shuttered. My boss, several employees, and a few other management people were quietly let go. Some kind of thing happened at the top that caused a lot of people to be let go. By this time I was pretty much using the office as a second home and had not had any real contact with anyone outside of emails and the occasional phone call. >Once this happened I was just coming in to work everyday completing my tasks until they stopped coming. Then I just came in every day waiting until the hammer fell. It never did. >I have been coming in every single day, walking since its only a 5 minute walk unless its raining, hooking up my gaming laptop and hopping on discord with my friends to play. Sometimes I will bring my ps4 or xbone into the office and play that too. >I have been using this office and collecting a paycheck for the last 5ish months with no contact other than the company wide emails and former coworkers of mine calling me asking how things are going. To put it into context of how much I have stopped caring, when I told my girlfriend about my job situation she came to visit me at work. I will keep it G rated here for you guys and will let you use your imaginations as to the nature of her visit. I do not state this to brag but merely to pain the picture of how things are at my current "job" >All of this brings us to today. I have been using my free time to also study for several PC certs and have finally acquired them. I am getting job offers for a few places that will be a pretty big step up from my current position. >What are the pros and cons of taking the new jobs without "quitting" my first job? I know that technically I am currently in the clear legally. But I want to know if that changes if I start working at another job and collecting two paychecks? I am guessing very much yes but wanted to know more. Does the situation change if one of the companies allows me to work from home and I use my office to work at both jobs? >Yes I know I am being incredibly greedy but I am legitimately wondering here cause its like a very lucky situation I find myself in and it would be a complete waste to throw it away without a good reason. As in I could get in legal trouble is a very good reason to throw it all away and work at the new job.
pwaai 8y ago
God! I couldn't stop reading this it was so entertaining but it's also similar to my experience. The type of jobs where the incompetence of your superiors creates the absence of responsibility due to the sheer number of hierarchial and useless processes and departments. It's ironic that it's at these type of jobs where the bar is ridiculously low, like you really have to seriously put in an effort to get fired. If you are thinking this is the life, please don't, the boredom from not having intellctually stimulating work and responsibilities is very real... but at the same time you are not doing hard labor and making minimum wage so obviously it's a very good deal for most people....I just didn't feel like I can do that for long because of the boredom is too much.....
- cornellwright 8y ago
  Along with the boredom I'd image you have the anxiety of getting fired or laid off if someone realizes you don't actually do anything. Then when you go to get your next job you won't have anything to show for the last n years.
  - pwaai 8y ago
    Well when your CEO is convinced you have product market fit when you dont, raise millions and burn it all in a few years thinking you can hire your way to a robust sales pipeline, it doesn't feel as bad. Especially when the best sales ppl are leaving and you cant hire new fast enough so they stick with whatever they have, even if their book rate is at the bottom. Basically sales teams are for selling but they cant sell products which have no demand and so eventually you are "that" company in the expo with nobody coming to the booths since your marketing involves using shady eastern European seo backlinks and believe repeatedly spamming CEOs and partners. In fact, when your partners turn on you, it's a sign that there is problems at the top level. Usually these type of CEOs are egomaniacs with no discernable skill other than walking around the office taking up conference room to meditate, and thinking he is at TEDtalk...
- le-mark 8y ago
  I've never actually been forgotten, but I've definitely spent months unutilized. Once was as a consultant through a third party. Job was a 1 year contract to help implement some APIs. they had enough work planned for about one month, then nothing for a loooong time. I worked on some load testing busy work sporadically during this period. It was the type of situation where the on site manger knew he didn't have anything for me, so we just sort of mutually agreed to not discuss it. I was offered to convert to full time by the same manager. I said "Seriously? I haven't done sh-- here?" He replied yeah but I contributed more than a lot of the others. I declined as I had another job lined up already. But I was stunned, still am when I reflect on it.
orionblastar 8y ago
I lost a job in November 2001 that was sort of the same types of feelings. Management was incompetent a new HR manager was appointed to downsize. I got sick on short term disability so it made me a target when I returned. I was fired for taking too many sick days even if I had doctors notes and an excuse. They lost them so they had to fire me.
- busterarm 8y ago
  This is why you never give HR your original documents and only your copies.
gok 8y ago
Reminds me of the legend of a guy who realized his job was so unaudited and lacking in responsibility that he got a second job... at the same company.
- T2_t2 8y ago
  Got a link to that? Sounds amazing.
- mdrzn 8y ago
  Ditto, I'd love to read that story! Tried googling something, nothing relevant came up.
- RugnirViking 8y ago
  Please if you can find this story written down somewhere online I'd love to read it!
piinbinary 8y ago
> I am a monster of the corporate world. Within twenty seconds I can tell you the capitol of Madagascar. That line struck me as oddly brilliant. It wouldn't take 20 seconds if you knew it off the top of your head, so it means that you can have someone drop everything and give you that information.
- VoidSetAndMatch 8y ago
  It means he has a globe
- danjayh 8y ago
  I think that maybe you missed it -- it means that he can find it on his Management Globe within 20 seconds.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    But globes don't have capitols...?
    - michaelt 8y ago
      What do they put on globes if not political maps including capital cities?https://www.duraglobes.com/media/catalog/product/cache/3/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/m/i/mini201281_2.jpg https://www.duraglobes.com/media/catalog/product/cache/3/ima...
      - icebraining 8y ago
        Capital != capitol.
        michaelt 8y ago
        I'm pretty sure the use of capitol was a mis-spelling in the original article.
    - n4r9 8y ago
rbosinger 8y ago
That was a really fun read. Reminded me a bit of when I used to read Bukowski and friends back in college. I should start reading more non-technical stuff again.
known 8y ago
aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
rejschaap 8y ago
In a similar vein https://kenrockwell.com/business/two-hour-rule.htm https://kenrockwell.com/business/two-hour-rule.htm I don't really agree with this, but it is an interesting symptom of modern business.
BadassFractal 8y ago
I miss the good old days of Something Awful, their threads where people would share stories of that sort were priceless. A combination of it being a gated community, no filters, anonymity and encouragement of long form writing made for one hell of a combo. I tried logging in a few times recently but it didn't quite feel the same.
AllegedAlec 8y ago
Sort of similar sort of story: https://imgur.com/gallery/iJD8f https://imgur.com/gallery/iJD8f
isostatic 8y ago
How depressing. Is there really nothing better he could do with his life than read some crappy forums? Even if there's nothing beneficial for the company, surely there's something else he could do other than play snake - learn a foreign language perhaps.
- RankingMember 8y ago
  I see it as a sort of purgatory- you don't want to do anything too involved because real work could intrude at any moment and make you lose your place, but doing nothing at all is too boring. You end up doing the equivalent of consuming brain junk food.
layabout 8y ago
Just to add probably the millionth example to this, I currently have a nothing job where I show up for work every day, read the news, play on my phone, network, and generally sit around doing very little. It was not always this way, I used to do work as a developer, then I moved several times, now I work in a special projects team that have no defined remit. The team had a remit when set up and has existed officially for 2 years but the original head was fired 8 months in, and since then the team has had no purpose. We tried for a while to revive the team and have the original remit reinstated, but efforts of myself and others were in vain. For probably the last 9 months I have had no defined job to do, so I swan around some days trying to be useful, others trying to do nothing (depending wholly on my whim) but always trying to look busy (which I am not). The company is massive so I contribute to internal open source projects when I want to, and have recently started looking for another job in company time as I am mind-numbingly bored. Reading this story was like reading someone living the life I've had for the last 9 months, but with them actually seeking to prolong it (which I don't want to)... While it's nice to know others are in this boat, it's depressing that any company lets this happen, particularly when I see people working hard at much less well paid things: the cleaners are working much harder than I!
- chii 8y ago
  I just can't understand how this happens. I know it does, since I have a friend to which this did happen, but it was a govt job and they are known to be wasteful with budget. For a private enterprise, the budget can't possibly be this free!?
  - devilmoon 8y ago
    Can confirm this does happen more often than not, especially in very big companies. As of now, my team of 5 + a manager is basically doing nothing (mainly because the manager is an asshat and I think higher ups have given up on him but cannot fire him for some legal reason). A big bunch of budget was devoted to this team, but when the expected ROI doesn't pan out higher ups just give up on the team and would rather force you to resign rather than fire you - at least in my country, getting fired also means getting a nice compensation, and I think they want to force us into boredom and resigning just to not pay us even more when leaving. I'm honestly considering a master's degree at this point, corporate life really is awful.
comm1 8y ago
I think this is what Eric Schmidt’s life must be like.
pinebox 8y ago
Many years ago I (a USian) was hired by a massive Indian company famous for outsourcing that had begun "insourcing": Hiring US labor for jobs with US companies within the US, but managing these hires through their offices in India. The job didn't start for months, but the weirdness started immediately. I had filled out all the onboarding paperwork, but as there had been almost no vetting I assumed this was all still preliminary and my "actual" hiring would hinge on another round of interviews (possibly with the US client company). Then I checked my bank balance one day and found it to be significantly higher than expected due to automated deposits that continued for the duration: The hiring process was over, I was now a full blown employee as far as the company was concerned. The original position was in Chicago (a city I was not in) however after a month or so of waiting this seemed to fall through and I was asked to select from a short list of other cities I would be available to relocate to. I chose New York and eventually was given a weeks-away start date that I was expected to begin work there, however no hint of a corresponding salary bump. Being unwilling to relocate to NY for a Chicago salary, I patiently explained to the management in India that I would need to know my new salary first. After they blew through a few soft deadlines while continuing to insist that I was expected to be at work in New York on the same start date, I finally got my direct supervisor on phone at the beginning of his workday and made it clear that I needed this number before his close of business or else. When that deadline was also blown, I followed through on my promise and quit immediately (a move that seemed to surprise him). During these three or four months I had shown up at no office or been assigned any tasks.
- busterarm 8y ago
  I had an eerily similar experience subcontracting with a massive Indian company that was itself subcontracting for an American contractor for General Dyanamics. They spent a bunch of money on a background check and I was hired but weeks dragged on without a start date. I kept explaining to them that I had to give notice to my previous employer and would need to know the date in advance. After several more weeks of "soon", I told them that if they didn't give me a start date by EOW, I would be resigning at the close of business day Friday. This was before ever actually starting even though I'd been hired. They blew the deadline and I quit on the spot, and they immediately countered with telling me that I could start the following Monday. Clearly they did not understand a single thing that I was trying to tell them or did not care. No regrets walking away from that one.
weirdkid 8y ago
My guess is the guy worked for a Tier 1 auto supplier. It's probably the biggest reason why any company would open a field location in Detroit that's large enough to warrant the presence of several director-level staff. Also, it's quite typical that an auto OEM would contractually require a supplier to have safety inspectors at each site, so he may not have been as forgotten as he thought. Just a theory.
megaman22 8y ago
This reminds me a lot of the Bastard Operator From Hell stories (BOFH). Another classic http://bofh.bjash.com/ http://bofh.bjash.com/
sidcool 8y ago
In my previous company I had a friend who worked on production support. His main task was ensuring that whenever a ticket landed in the support inbox it was redirected to someone. The maximum number of tickets he had to redirect in a single day was 20. Each ticket took around 5 minutes to redirect. So the maximum he had ever worked in a single day was just over an hour and half. On most days it was half an hour of work out of the 9 he had to be available. It continued for 3 years. No one bothered him since he was a billable employee. In a fit of frustration he resigned one day. Although his job was very unskilled, there was no one else who wanted to do it, and to retain him he was given a pay hike. He accepted the hike and continued for a couple of more years before resigning for good. He now teaches at a school and is very happy.
_Donny 8y ago
I really enjoyed the story, but it really scares me that I might end up the same way. I am a CS student, but I have had a lot of student jobs related to my studies. At most workplaces, they appreciated my skills and abilities, but being able to only work 1 day a week, the tasks I get assigned are not of any real value to the company, and I suspect my managers never really cared if I finished them. Since nobody cared about what I did, I quickly got demotivated, and I usually ended up browsing Hot Questions on SO, IRC, and HN. These sites look somewhat relevant, and did not cause any suspicion, like Facebook or Twitter. Now I am soon to finish my degree, and get a full-time job. However, I am really anxious whether I am actually able to work for 8 hours in succession every day, 5 days a week. University is a lot of work, but it is scattered throughout the day. I am not sure if I have ever programmed for more than 2 hours in succession. Programming 8 hours a day seems like an incredibly burden, and mentally unbearable...
- lainga 8y ago
  Nobody has to program for more than 2 hours at a time (unless you want to). In practice, actually, your time is half coding (or less) and half meetings, design, testing, writing documentation... as you gain experience and motivation, you may actually come to desire opportunities where you can write code for 2 hours without interruption.
- nomocrypto 8y ago
  In a broad sense, 40-hour weeks can be pretty draining, but welcome to modern work in the US. ;) (We meet at the pub at 6:00.) But more specifically, it’s not eight solid hours of coding. Sometimes it’s meetings, sometimes it’s code/PR review, sometimes it’s design, sometimes it’s documentation, and sometimes it really is coding. But it all depends on your role, your team, and your company. And even if you get a good mix, it’s not necessarily evenly distributed. Sometimes I have days where I pretty much do just code, and other rather painful (but not unnecessary and not unwelcome!) days that are all meetings and emails. I hope that’s somewhat reassuring. And if it doesn’t work out, hopping fairly frequently isn’t that big of a deal. But do try to limit that because outside of the Bay Area, a few year-long stints starts to not look good.
- jama211 8y ago
pagnol 8y ago
I am hungry for this kind of writing, what else can I read that is somewhat like this story?
- rogual 8y ago
  - BOFH series - Google Ultron story from 4chan - "Escalation" I think it was called, a story about nerf gun wars. Can't find it now. - Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect

520 points by jxub 8y ago

dang 8y ago

Big discussion in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087935 Smaller one in 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320310 Helpful explanation of its origins: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6088168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6088168

neonate 8y ago
It's also here for safekeeping: http://archive.is/SNn1i http://archive.is/SNn1i.
sincerely 8y ago
Wow, I had no idea this was of SA-origin. Crazy how influential that website has been for internet culture
- Buge 8y ago
  It says SA in the first sentence, and mentions it several other times, even addressing "SA friends".
  - busterarm 8y ago
    Also mention of the phrase "do you have stairs in your house" http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-terrible-secret-of-space http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-terrible-secret-of-space
  - Latteland 8y ago
    SA is something awful forum apparently. We should define these terms!
    - pc86 8y ago
      One of the great things about the internet is you can search for the meaning of things you don't know. I know everyone on HN loves to use these[0][1], but not everything needs to be cited. [0] meaningless footnotes [1] you're not writing a term paper
      - detaro 8y ago
        Nobody asked for a citation, and good luck googling two-letter abbreviations unless you're lucky with guessing the right context words.
        cyberfart 8y ago
        Thankfully somebody said forum. Googling "SA forum" will have correct top result.
        burger_moon 8y ago
        Even duckduckgo knows that 'sa forums' is Something Awful. Also TFA writes out Something Awful several times throughout and doesn't exclusively use the abbreviation.

tomashertus 8y ago

I would love to see a short movie based on this story:) It could be hilarious...

aidos 8y ago
It’s certainly not dissimilar to the plot of Office Space.
- richev 8y ago
  So we were wondering if you could tell us, what exactly do you do here? :-D
gcatalfamo 8y ago
Only if the cast Tom Hanks as main character

donttrack 8y ago

Never get tired of reading this story.

rossdavidh 8y ago

To be honest, that sounds like it would be way more stressful than just working.

callesgg 8y ago
And soul crushing.
- tw1010 8y ago
  Only if you let your soul be immovably coupled to a fragile and exogenous variable like your job.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - xab9 8y ago
    You are sitting on your ass (conidering you are a dev) for eight friggin hours. If you include commuting, lunch break and the time you sleep, this is more time than you can spend with your family, hobbies, recreation etc. You don't need to like or "couple your soul" to your job, it's part of your life and life shouldn't suck because there is a very good chance that there isn't another one.
  - ibeckermayer 8y ago
    If your soul isn’t in some sense coupled to the thing you spend most of your time doing, I simply do not understand what you tie your identity to...
- PakG1 8y ago
  If you have no scruples about getting free money, you can use the time to do whatever the heck you want. If you want to feel like you earned the money or you're not allowed to do anything outside of your scope, then yes, it's probably soul crushing.
  - pc86 8y ago

adrianhel 8y ago

Magic stuff!

jopsen 8y ago

If you are a trusted senior employee then of course you can abuse your trust.. but why would you? Seems unlikely you'd get fired for asking what to do... And if you don't want to ask just find something and expand responsibilities..

PhasmaFelis 8y ago
It's most likely fictional. It starts out entirely believable, but slowly gets odder and odder.
- nwsm 8y ago
  But probably written by someone on the clock with no work to do.
SatvikBeri 8y ago
At an old job, I automated my job, asked for more responsibilities, automated my little team's work, asked for more responsibilities, then automated those. Then Legal said I had too much access for a level N employee, and essentially revoked my ability to work on anything new. My manager was great, and did his best to promote me to level N+2, which should have given me rights to access that data. This took 6 months, during which I taught myself Lisp and Machine Learning. Then I automated all the new stuff I had access to within 2 weeks (including solving a project that had been estimated to take 11 people over two years.) Then I was told it would take another 6 months to get access to anything else. Four weeks later, I left for my first ML job and never looked back.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mltony 8y ago

Is this story true? The part about mid-life crisis VP sounds too good to be true.

SiempreViernes 8y ago
To me it's pretty obviously fan fiction from the Something Awful forums. It's written in typical fan fiction style and it references SA over and over.
staticautomatic 8y ago
The beauty of Kafka and Kafkaesque stories like this is that they're so genuinely rooted in reality that they're essentially a form of magical realism.
- asfasgasg 8y ago
  This story and stories like it are not rooted in reality. They're rooted in what we dream reality might be, or what we wish reality were. They are wish-fulfillment fantasies.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    I personally knew a guy who did nothing all day, and actually started practice shooting with an air pistol inside the office (when he got the night shift, when the bosses weren't around). He kept this up for at least two years (I lost contact since the person I knew at the company was fired for trading shifts with her colleagues, despite the recognition that she was a top performer in her group). The details (meetings, etc) might be fantasy, but the core fact that people get paid for doing nothing isn't.
- lioeters 8y ago
  Searched thread for "Kafka", was not disappointed. Magical realism with a dark sense of humor..

JokerDan 8y ago

Classic read. I thought most people had read this already?

majewsky 8y ago
I'm seeing this for the first time. Probably a case of "10000/day": https://www.xkcd.com/1053/ https://www.xkcd.com/1053/

malmsteen 8y ago

Actually sad its a fake story cause its fun :(

watmough 8y ago

Oh man, I so miss slow times at work. * Flight simulator (on a Pentium Pro) * Reading Red Dwarf scripts * Posting on Slashdot Nowadays it's all I can do to keep up.

barbs 8y ago

I inexplicably love this story. Often if I'm at work and I feel like there's not much work for me to do and I feel like I'm being paid to do nothing, I'll read this story. I recently found it posted to this wiki, which contains a bit more information about its origins and legacy: https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/wiki/American-Dream https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/wiki/American-Dream They also reference another semi-related story which I also found entertaining (Cubicle Jungle): https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/wiki/Cubicle-Jungle https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/wiki/Cubicle-Jungle I haven't explored the rest of the wiki, but it looks fascinating. The Bibliotheca Anonoma is a research task force archiving, documenting, and safeguarding Internet Folklife. https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/wiki https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/wiki

coaxial 8y ago
The P-p-p-p-owerbook story is pretty entertaining as well: https://wiki.bibanon.org/P-P-Powerbook https://wiki.bibanon.org/P-P-Powerbook
worble 8y ago
So many good stories that I thought were lost to time are on there (especially after shii took down his site). Thank god for the bibanon wiki.
pwaai 8y ago
guess what I'm reading before bed....
swah 8y ago
How did you first found it?

mamurphy 8y ago

Redditor claims this happened to them in 2018: https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/8qmayg/update_i_am_a_forgotten_employee_who_has_been/ https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/8qmayg/update_...

austinl 8y ago

This reminds me of a practice in Japan, where employees who can't be laid off (for legal reasons) are sent to the "Boredom Room", to essentially do nothing until they're motivated to quit. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-illegal-japan-workers-are-sent-to-the-boredom-room.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-i...

nomocrypto 8y ago
Oh, I know plenty of people who do IT at a local big (US) university and promoting someone downward (i.e. into a role designed to be so boring they quit) is absolutely a thing.
patio11 8y ago
In some cases it is worse than doing essentially nothing: you're made to, e.g., perform some data processing task on a newspaper (e.g. write the readings of every kanji in this newspaper; that will take you about a day) and then, at the end of the day, your work product is checked for ~15 seconds to verify that you're not slacking and then shredded in front of your eyes. See you tomorrow.
- PakG1 8y ago
  That reminds me of the story of Nazi officers telling Jews to carry big rocks from one fence to the other each day. The work was so meaningless that the prisoners couldn't take it anymore and started to jump onto the electric fence to kill themselves. I think such a practice where you make someone feel completely worthless is inhumane.
  - aaron695 8y ago
    I doubt this is true, source? Doesn't sound logical. Humans are very resilient, they adapt to misery quickly. People often kill themselves when things get better, when life is so bad you just get on with it. They know the war can't go on forever, so there's hope. Sounds like work for the guards, why would they waste their time organising it. It'd be lazier to confine people to barracks. Why waste slave labour when there's a war going on. I'm not saying people don't suicide in concentration camps, one did the other day on Manus island, but this is not the story you're telling.

ufmace 8y ago

I find it interesting how many people on the linked HN threads for previous discussions say they've been in similar situations. I've never had a position where I didn't have anything at all to do for an extended amount of time, though I've only worked for one really large company. I did work at a pretty reasonable pace on projects that were obviously not a practical idea and would probably never amount to much, while numerous good ideas that could have saved substantial money got ignored. But I didn't really know of anyone who really didn't do anything. Though there was one guy who had less than a dozen commits in a year, all just a couple of lines. But after trying to work with him on something for another project, I think he really was just that bad at coding.

flukus 8y ago
> I think he really was just that bad at coding Count your blessings, bad coders that work hard screw up the entire codebase for everyone. They also seem to get promoted for their hard work.
- PakG1 8y ago
  That is literally the Dilbert Principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle
wolco 8y ago
This exists. I've been in situations where doing development is seen as risky and not doing anything can earn you a promotion.
Tade0 8y ago
Eight years ago I was an intern(actually a budget filler) in a large corporation. My tasks included: -Translating table columns(results of this were thrown away) -Preparing "use cases" (actually training a real intern who majored in business administration so she had no idea how to do this) -Reading a 900 page Tibco product API reference. I took two weeks off - arranged with my manager. I was told that after a week someone finally asked "Where's <my name here>?" I noticed that other employees had Eclipse opened at all times so I downloaded it and started learning Java - after all my position was "JAVA intern". No one bothered me during these three months after which I had enough money to buy a laptop and get a driving license. I was also offered a position but I declined on the grounds that I was yet to graduate back then.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

Can anyone verify if this is fact or fiction?

zootam 8y ago
here's a newer one: https://np.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/5psadr/i_have_become_a_forgotten_employees_for_a_few/ https://np.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/5psadr/i_have_b... >This is in Texas. >About a year ago I was "fired" for something I did not do. Basically they thought I was stealing from the company and had me fired in the system before they informed me in person. >When they caught the real thief, literally 5 minutes before I got the axe, I got called into HR where they apologized to me profusely and told me they would be working to reinstate me without losing my tenure or my vacation time. They asked me if there was anything they could do in the mean time. I asked for the vacation right then and there which made HR real happy because me being gone for 2 weeks made it easy for them to unfuck the situation. >While on vacation I broke my leg and was wheelchair bound for a month. When I informed HR of this they offered me the satellite office for temporary use since it was literally one block away and I could get there safely using my wheelchair. >The company had a satellite office close to my house that was basically just 2 rooms. One had a desk power socket and internet access and the other was the bathroom. The office was purchased for an exec who was wheelchair bound because of cancer. The office stayed empty for a few months when her cancer went terminal and eventually she passed on. When I was offered it they moved my PC and everything out there getting me set up. >That was the last time I have had any face to face with anyone in the company. Even after my leg healed I did not return to the normal building. I stayed in the office until HR wanted to move someone else in. >Well that never came. Five months ago my department was shuttered. My boss, several employees, and a few other management people were quietly let go. Some kind of thing happened at the top that caused a lot of people to be let go. By this time I was pretty much using the office as a second home and had not had any real contact with anyone outside of emails and the occasional phone call. >Once this happened I was just coming in to work everyday completing my tasks until they stopped coming. Then I just came in every day waiting until the hammer fell. It never did. >I have been coming in every single day, walking since its only a 5 minute walk unless its raining, hooking up my gaming laptop and hopping on discord with my friends to play. Sometimes I will bring my ps4 or xbone into the office and play that too. >I have been using this office and collecting a paycheck for the last 5ish months with no contact other than the company wide emails and former coworkers of mine calling me asking how things are going. To put it into context of how much I have stopped caring, when I told my girlfriend about my job situation she came to visit me at work. I will keep it G rated here for you guys and will let you use your imaginations as to the nature of her visit. I do not state this to brag but merely to pain the picture of how things are at my current "job" >All of this brings us to today. I have been using my free time to also study for several PC certs and have finally acquired them. I am getting job offers for a few places that will be a pretty big step up from my current position. >What are the pros and cons of taking the new jobs without "quitting" my first job? I know that technically I am currently in the clear legally. But I want to know if that changes if I start working at another job and collecting two paychecks? I am guessing very much yes but wanted to know more. Does the situation change if one of the companies allows me to work from home and I use my office to work at both jobs? >Yes I know I am being incredibly greedy but I am legitimately wondering here cause its like a very lucky situation I find myself in and it would be a complete waste to throw it away without a good reason. As in I could get in legal trouble is a very good reason to throw it all away and work at the new job.

pwaai 8y ago

God! I couldn't stop reading this it was so entertaining but it's also similar to my experience. The type of jobs where the incompetence of your superiors creates the absence of responsibility due to the sheer number of hierarchial and useless processes and departments. It's ironic that it's at these type of jobs where the bar is ridiculously low, like you really have to seriously put in an effort to get fired. If you are thinking this is the life, please don't, the boredom from not having intellctually stimulating work and responsibilities is very real... but at the same time you are not doing hard labor and making minimum wage so obviously it's a very good deal for most people....I just didn't feel like I can do that for long because of the boredom is too much.....

cornellwright 8y ago
Along with the boredom I'd image you have the anxiety of getting fired or laid off if someone realizes you don't actually do anything. Then when you go to get your next job you won't have anything to show for the last n years.
- pwaai 8y ago
  Well when your CEO is convinced you have product market fit when you dont, raise millions and burn it all in a few years thinking you can hire your way to a robust sales pipeline, it doesn't feel as bad. Especially when the best sales ppl are leaving and you cant hire new fast enough so they stick with whatever they have, even if their book rate is at the bottom. Basically sales teams are for selling but they cant sell products which have no demand and so eventually you are "that" company in the expo with nobody coming to the booths since your marketing involves using shady eastern European seo backlinks and believe repeatedly spamming CEOs and partners. In fact, when your partners turn on you, it's a sign that there is problems at the top level. Usually these type of CEOs are egomaniacs with no discernable skill other than walking around the office taking up conference room to meditate, and thinking he is at TEDtalk...
le-mark 8y ago
I've never actually been forgotten, but I've definitely spent months unutilized. Once was as a consultant through a third party. Job was a 1 year contract to help implement some APIs. they had enough work planned for about one month, then nothing for a loooong time. I worked on some load testing busy work sporadically during this period. It was the type of situation where the on site manger knew he didn't have anything for me, so we just sort of mutually agreed to not discuss it. I was offered to convert to full time by the same manager. I said "Seriously? I haven't done sh-- here?" He replied yeah but I contributed more than a lot of the others. I declined as I had another job lined up already. But I was stunned, still am when I reflect on it.

orionblastar 8y ago

I lost a job in November 2001 that was sort of the same types of feelings. Management was incompetent a new HR manager was appointed to downsize. I got sick on short term disability so it made me a target when I returned. I was fired for taking too many sick days even if I had doctors notes and an excuse. They lost them so they had to fire me.

busterarm 8y ago
This is why you never give HR your original documents and only your copies.

gok 8y ago

Reminds me of the legend of a guy who realized his job was so unaudited and lacking in responsibility that he got a second job... at the same company.

T2_t2 8y ago
Got a link to that? Sounds amazing.
mdrzn 8y ago
Ditto, I'd love to read that story! Tried googling something, nothing relevant came up.
RugnirViking 8y ago
Please if you can find this story written down somewhere online I'd love to read it!

piinbinary 8y ago

> I am a monster of the corporate world. Within twenty seconds I can tell you the capitol of Madagascar. That line struck me as oddly brilliant. It wouldn't take 20 seconds if you knew it off the top of your head, so it means that you can have someone drop everything and give you that information.

VoidSetAndMatch 8y ago
It means he has a globe
danjayh 8y ago
I think that maybe you missed it -- it means that he can find it on his Management Globe within 20 seconds.
- icebraining 8y ago
  But globes don't have capitols...?
  - michaelt 8y ago
    What do they put on globes if not political maps including capital cities?https://www.duraglobes.com/media/catalog/product/cache/3/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/m/i/mini201281_2.jpg https://www.duraglobes.com/media/catalog/product/cache/3/ima...
    - icebraining 8y ago
      Capital != capitol.
      - michaelt 8y ago
        I'm pretty sure the use of capitol was a mis-spelling in the original article.
  - n4r9 8y ago

rbosinger 8y ago

That was a really fun read. Reminded me a bit of when I used to read Bukowski and friends back in college. I should start reading more non-technical stuff again.

known 8y ago

aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

rejschaap 8y ago

In a similar vein https://kenrockwell.com/business/two-hour-rule.htm https://kenrockwell.com/business/two-hour-rule.htm I don't really agree with this, but it is an interesting symptom of modern business.

BadassFractal 8y ago

I miss the good old days of Something Awful, their threads where people would share stories of that sort were priceless. A combination of it being a gated community, no filters, anonymity and encouragement of long form writing made for one hell of a combo. I tried logging in a few times recently but it didn't quite feel the same.

AllegedAlec 8y ago

Sort of similar sort of story: https://imgur.com/gallery/iJD8f https://imgur.com/gallery/iJD8f

isostatic 8y ago

How depressing. Is there really nothing better he could do with his life than read some crappy forums? Even if there's nothing beneficial for the company, surely there's something else he could do other than play snake - learn a foreign language perhaps.

RankingMember 8y ago
I see it as a sort of purgatory- you don't want to do anything too involved because real work could intrude at any moment and make you lose your place, but doing nothing at all is too boring. You end up doing the equivalent of consuming brain junk food.

layabout 8y ago

Just to add probably the millionth example to this, I currently have a nothing job where I show up for work every day, read the news, play on my phone, network, and generally sit around doing very little. It was not always this way, I used to do work as a developer, then I moved several times, now I work in a special projects team that have no defined remit. The team had a remit when set up and has existed officially for 2 years but the original head was fired 8 months in, and since then the team has had no purpose. We tried for a while to revive the team and have the original remit reinstated, but efforts of myself and others were in vain. For probably the last 9 months I have had no defined job to do, so I swan around some days trying to be useful, others trying to do nothing (depending wholly on my whim) but always trying to look busy (which I am not). The company is massive so I contribute to internal open source projects when I want to, and have recently started looking for another job in company time as I am mind-numbingly bored. Reading this story was like reading someone living the life I've had for the last 9 months, but with them actually seeking to prolong it (which I don't want to)... While it's nice to know others are in this boat, it's depressing that any company lets this happen, particularly when I see people working hard at much less well paid things: the cleaners are working much harder than I!

chii 8y ago
I just can't understand how this happens. I know it does, since I have a friend to which this did happen, but it was a govt job and they are known to be wasteful with budget. For a private enterprise, the budget can't possibly be this free!?
- devilmoon 8y ago
  Can confirm this does happen more often than not, especially in very big companies. As of now, my team of 5 + a manager is basically doing nothing (mainly because the manager is an asshat and I think higher ups have given up on him but cannot fire him for some legal reason). A big bunch of budget was devoted to this team, but when the expected ROI doesn't pan out higher ups just give up on the team and would rather force you to resign rather than fire you - at least in my country, getting fired also means getting a nice compensation, and I think they want to force us into boredom and resigning just to not pay us even more when leaving. I'm honestly considering a master's degree at this point, corporate life really is awful.

comm1 8y ago

I think this is what Eric Schmidt’s life must be like.

pinebox 8y ago

Many years ago I (a USian) was hired by a massive Indian company famous for outsourcing that had begun "insourcing": Hiring US labor for jobs with US companies within the US, but managing these hires through their offices in India. The job didn't start for months, but the weirdness started immediately. I had filled out all the onboarding paperwork, but as there had been almost no vetting I assumed this was all still preliminary and my "actual" hiring would hinge on another round of interviews (possibly with the US client company). Then I checked my bank balance one day and found it to be significantly higher than expected due to automated deposits that continued for the duration: The hiring process was over, I was now a full blown employee as far as the company was concerned. The original position was in Chicago (a city I was not in) however after a month or so of waiting this seemed to fall through and I was asked to select from a short list of other cities I would be available to relocate to. I chose New York and eventually was given a weeks-away start date that I was expected to begin work there, however no hint of a corresponding salary bump. Being unwilling to relocate to NY for a Chicago salary, I patiently explained to the management in India that I would need to know my new salary first. After they blew through a few soft deadlines while continuing to insist that I was expected to be at work in New York on the same start date, I finally got my direct supervisor on phone at the beginning of his workday and made it clear that I needed this number before his close of business or else. When that deadline was also blown, I followed through on my promise and quit immediately (a move that seemed to surprise him). During these three or four months I had shown up at no office or been assigned any tasks.

busterarm 8y ago
I had an eerily similar experience subcontracting with a massive Indian company that was itself subcontracting for an American contractor for General Dyanamics. They spent a bunch of money on a background check and I was hired but weeks dragged on without a start date. I kept explaining to them that I had to give notice to my previous employer and would need to know the date in advance. After several more weeks of "soon", I told them that if they didn't give me a start date by EOW, I would be resigning at the close of business day Friday. This was before ever actually starting even though I'd been hired. They blew the deadline and I quit on the spot, and they immediately countered with telling me that I could start the following Monday. Clearly they did not understand a single thing that I was trying to tell them or did not care. No regrets walking away from that one.

weirdkid 8y ago

My guess is the guy worked for a Tier 1 auto supplier. It's probably the biggest reason why any company would open a field location in Detroit that's large enough to warrant the presence of several director-level staff. Also, it's quite typical that an auto OEM would contractually require a supplier to have safety inspectors at each site, so he may not have been as forgotten as he thought. Just a theory.

megaman22 8y ago

This reminds me a lot of the Bastard Operator From Hell stories (BOFH). Another classic http://bofh.bjash.com/ http://bofh.bjash.com/

sidcool 8y ago

In my previous company I had a friend who worked on production support. His main task was ensuring that whenever a ticket landed in the support inbox it was redirected to someone. The maximum number of tickets he had to redirect in a single day was 20. Each ticket took around 5 minutes to redirect. So the maximum he had ever worked in a single day was just over an hour and half. On most days it was half an hour of work out of the 9 he had to be available. It continued for 3 years. No one bothered him since he was a billable employee. In a fit of frustration he resigned one day. Although his job was very unskilled, there was no one else who wanted to do it, and to retain him he was given a pay hike. He accepted the hike and continued for a couple of more years before resigning for good. He now teaches at a school and is very happy.

_Donny 8y ago

I really enjoyed the story, but it really scares me that I might end up the same way. I am a CS student, but I have had a lot of student jobs related to my studies. At most workplaces, they appreciated my skills and abilities, but being able to only work 1 day a week, the tasks I get assigned are not of any real value to the company, and I suspect my managers never really cared if I finished them. Since nobody cared about what I did, I quickly got demotivated, and I usually ended up browsing Hot Questions on SO, IRC, and HN. These sites look somewhat relevant, and did not cause any suspicion, like Facebook or Twitter. Now I am soon to finish my degree, and get a full-time job. However, I am really anxious whether I am actually able to work for 8 hours in succession every day, 5 days a week. University is a lot of work, but it is scattered throughout the day. I am not sure if I have ever programmed for more than 2 hours in succession. Programming 8 hours a day seems like an incredibly burden, and mentally unbearable...

lainga 8y ago
Nobody has to program for more than 2 hours at a time (unless you want to). In practice, actually, your time is half coding (or less) and half meetings, design, testing, writing documentation... as you gain experience and motivation, you may actually come to desire opportunities where you can write code for 2 hours without interruption.
nomocrypto 8y ago
In a broad sense, 40-hour weeks can be pretty draining, but welcome to modern work in the US. ;) (We meet at the pub at 6:00.) But more specifically, it’s not eight solid hours of coding. Sometimes it’s meetings, sometimes it’s code/PR review, sometimes it’s design, sometimes it’s documentation, and sometimes it really is coding. But it all depends on your role, your team, and your company. And even if you get a good mix, it’s not necessarily evenly distributed. Sometimes I have days where I pretty much do just code, and other rather painful (but not unnecessary and not unwelcome!) days that are all meetings and emails. I hope that’s somewhat reassuring. And if it doesn’t work out, hopping fairly frequently isn’t that big of a deal. But do try to limit that because outside of the Bay Area, a few year-long stints starts to not look good.
jama211 8y ago

pagnol 8y ago

I am hungry for this kind of writing, what else can I read that is somewhat like this story?

rogual 8y ago
- BOFH series - Google Ultron story from 4chan - "Escalation" I think it was called, a story about nerf gun wars. Can't find it now. - Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect