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I'm gonna play devil's advocate here and point out that apparently this is the kind of place where people can in fact fall asleep during work hours, even during

by dudul 7y ago

I'm gonna play devil's advocate here and point out that apparently this is the kind of place where people can in fact fall asleep during work hours, even during calls. That opens up a lot of possibilities. How about doing the bare minimum and working on bettering your skills on your own? Or even do some side hustle?

rhizome 7y ago
A side hustle on company time and equipment? That might not be as good an idea as you portray!
- veb 7y ago
  Especially because OP said he works for a "... fairly large software company...". I bet they've got a lot of lawyers on the speed dial.
- Tade0 7y ago
  I've worked for a company(or, should I say, corporation) where side hustling was fairly common. Mostly because the employer had enough money to keep a lot of staff and make them do bullshit projects, half of which wouldn't reach production. Only instance when someone got a slap on the wrist was when they, ahem, showed the wrong demo. Hilariously enough the only objection here was the perpetrator used company equipment. The guy who got escalated for going to the swimming pool during work hours(even thought he stayed later to make up for the lost time) upon hearing that was furious.
  - cwivbly 7y ago
    > Mostly because the employer had enough money to keep a lot of staff and make them do bullshit projects, half of which wouldn't reach production. This is incredibly common, and not just at big companies. I bet half my time as a developer has been spent building products or features that never went to production. Includes work for startups or small companies where you might expect that in the case of extreme failure, but also for household-name bigcos and everything in between. Throw in products that are scrapped before being the market long enough to make the effort seem worth it, and my experience of this industry has been pretty damn nihilistic. Alienation, I guess you'd say.
davidajackson 7y ago
Best to find another team/job. The thing with jobs like this is it's like when you were in high school and you were the only kid in a group that did anything. Everyone just 'expects' you to do everything, because you're 'smart' and 'good' at your job. You push out everything product. It will make you really angry and depressed in the long term, and you will resent the people around you for being so lazy. And you arguably should resent them, but you also will end up resenting yourself for staying.
commandlinefan 7y ago
> doing the bare minimum and working on bettering your skills on your own? If done correctly, this isn’t doing the bare minimum - it’s actually going above and beyond. What he didn’t clarify is whether or not somebody is breathing down his neck to produce results. If they are, then he needs to push back on that person that he needs some help getting up to speed. If not, he can spend as much time as he wants/needs learning the existing codebase - write some unit tests, try to create an isolated testing environment, do some profiling, read up on all of the libraries/frameworks/tools that the product uses… find useful (but relatively safe, for now) things to do. That may be what they actually want from him. I personally wouldn’t be in a hurry to find a job where somebody was handing you daily assignment, but I also wouldn’t take unreasonable advantage of the situation - if you don’t have a specific task to work on, do something that’s at least work related.

by dudul 7y ago

rhizome 7y ago

A side hustle on company time and equipment? That might not be as good an idea as you portray!

veb 7y ago
Especially because OP said he works for a "... fairly large software company...". I bet they've got a lot of lawyers on the speed dial.
Tade0 7y ago
I've worked for a company(or, should I say, corporation) where side hustling was fairly common. Mostly because the employer had enough money to keep a lot of staff and make them do bullshit projects, half of which wouldn't reach production. Only instance when someone got a slap on the wrist was when they, ahem, showed the wrong demo. Hilariously enough the only objection here was the perpetrator used company equipment. The guy who got escalated for going to the swimming pool during work hours(even thought he stayed later to make up for the lost time) upon hearing that was furious.
- cwivbly 7y ago
  > Mostly because the employer had enough money to keep a lot of staff and make them do bullshit projects, half of which wouldn't reach production. This is incredibly common, and not just at big companies. I bet half my time as a developer has been spent building products or features that never went to production. Includes work for startups or small companies where you might expect that in the case of extreme failure, but also for household-name bigcos and everything in between. Throw in products that are scrapped before being the market long enough to make the effort seem worth it, and my experience of this industry has been pretty damn nihilistic. Alienation, I guess you'd say.

davidajackson 7y ago

Best to find another team/job. The thing with jobs like this is it's like when you were in high school and you were the only kid in a group that did anything. Everyone just 'expects' you to do everything, because you're 'smart' and 'good' at your job. You push out everything product. It will make you really angry and depressed in the long term, and you will resent the people around you for being so lazy. And you arguably should resent them, but you also will end up resenting yourself for staying.

commandlinefan 7y ago

> doing the bare minimum and working on bettering your skills on your own? If done correctly, this isn’t doing the bare minimum - it’s actually going above and beyond. What he didn’t clarify is whether or not somebody is breathing down his neck to produce results. If they are, then he needs to push back on that person that he needs some help getting up to speed. If not, he can spend as much time as he wants/needs learning the existing codebase - write some unit tests, try to create an isolated testing environment, do some profiling, read up on all of the libraries/frameworks/tools that the product uses… find useful (but relatively safe, for now) things to do. That may be what they actually want from him. I personally wouldn’t be in a hurry to find a job where somebody was handing you daily assignment, but I also wouldn’t take unreasonable advantage of the situation - if you don’t have a specific task to work on, do something that’s at least work related.