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Having nothing to do at work is its own form of torture. If you have to be available and connected, or much worse - physically in the office, for the full norma

Having nothing to do at work is its own form of torture. If you have to be available and connected, or much worse - physically in the office, for the full normal work day, it is torture. Once you've gone through the ceremony of getting ready for work, commuting, and being the building.. you might as well have something to do. Another a second form of torture in this category is being treated like your app/role is being dead-ended, but also everything you are working on is super urgent permanent fire drill mode. Usually this is some flavor of an app being deemed "legacy" and most of the staff being moved to "the new thing" which is perpetually 5 years behind schedule. Someone once remarked that "legacy" is often better known as "production". So while you are told all about how your team/app is going away, there's nowhere for the users to go, so you are fielding the brunt of overnight pages, mid-day fire drills, etc. Lastly, I can relate to "Recovery will take time but at least I know I wont get verbally berated every time something isn't perfect." I had two bosses like this in my career, and the behavior it encourages is for everyone to keep their head down and have sloppy shoulders. Don't be proactive, only do the immediate task requested of you because it minimizes the amount of things that could get you screamed at. These guys are harder to screen for than you'd imagine, as both of them could turn it on & off, and appear as the nicest guys in the room, especially at the pub. For me, all three are a form of feeling helpless and having lost agency.. which is what drives the most anxiety for me. Changing jobs every 4-5 years allows one to minimize their time in these situations as they occur.

CM30 4y ago
> Having nothing to do at work is its own form of torture. If you have to be available and connected, or much worse - physically in the office, for the full normal work day, it is torture. Once you've gone through the ceremony of getting ready for work, commuting, and being the building.. you might as well have something to do. This is 100% true. And the main reason is probably the fact you can never really focus on anything here. You've got no 'official' work, so that can't use up your time. But you also can't go off and do something you'd want to do either, since there's always the nagging feeling of "what if something actually does come through, and I've got to be ready to handle it?" So you just sit there wondering what to do, and probably end up either pointlessly scrolling through social media, or getting into whatever random unhealthy habit you're otherwise prone to (drink, drugs, too many snacks, etc). It also likely does a lot of damage to your ability to focus on difficult tasks for a long period of time afterwards, since you're not entirely used to be able to spend hours on a single thing.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  I think its more than a nagging feeling of "what if something comes through". Realistically, work output in our field is notoriously hard to measure. Having an unproductive year or two or five is not really grounds for dismissal, generally. However, no-showing, visibly walking in hours late or leaving hours early, being unresponsive on slack/email are easily observed and the type of things that stick out to accelerate your being fired.

CM30 4y ago

> Having nothing to do at work is its own form of torture. If you have to be available and connected, or much worse - physically in the office, for the full normal work day, it is torture. Once you've gone through the ceremony of getting ready for work, commuting, and being the building.. you might as well have something to do. This is 100% true. And the main reason is probably the fact you can never really focus on anything here. You've got no 'official' work, so that can't use up your time. But you also can't go off and do something you'd want to do either, since there's always the nagging feeling of "what if something actually does come through, and I've got to be ready to handle it?" So you just sit there wondering what to do, and probably end up either pointlessly scrolling through social media, or getting into whatever random unhealthy habit you're otherwise prone to (drink, drugs, too many snacks, etc). It also likely does a lot of damage to your ability to focus on difficult tasks for a long period of time afterwards, since you're not entirely used to be able to spend hours on a single thing.

steveBK123 4y ago
I think its more than a nagging feeling of "what if something comes through". Realistically, work output in our field is notoriously hard to measure. Having an unproductive year or two or five is not really grounds for dismissal, generally. However, no-showing, visibly walking in hours late or leaving hours early, being unresponsive on slack/email are easily observed and the type of things that stick out to accelerate your being fired.