20 ms·

Forgotten Employee (2002)

• Schwolop 13y ago
  I don't know where the hell that came from, but I just laughed my arse off for a good quarter hour over here!
  • jtmcmc 13y ago
    seems like an old post from somethingawful forums.
  • yogo 13y ago
    It was very entertaining. I thought halfway in it was pure fiction--I could see this turning into a fun movie.
• elleferrer 13y ago
  loved it.
• unimpressive 13y ago
  I was trying to find this a few weeks ago. I often wonder what I would do with so much time and free money... EDIT: >I placed a sign on the wall next to the bumper, seen below. Does anybody have a backup of the picture?
• mathattack 13y ago
  I think many folks are missing that this is art. On the surface it's a story of someone who games the system. A level beneath it's about someone losing their ambition as they get sucked in to gaming the system. It could be a larger political allegory in addition to it's critique of large corporate machines. It certainly isn't the truth, but by sucking us all in it is definitely good writing.
• thomasfromcdnjs 13y ago
  Post-modern short story, loved it too!
• justtopostthis 13y ago
  For internet historians: This was originally posted on the Something Awful forums in 2002 by user Moonshine. Here are links to the original threads. Part 5: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=332580 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=332... Part 4: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=306921 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=306... Part 3: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=260220 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=260... Parts 2 and 1 are gone.
• coolnow 13y ago
  I opened this expecting to skim and come to the comments, but i'm absolutely enthralled. I just got up to get a cold drink and i'm going to savour this properly. Thank you so much for posting this!
• Uchikoma 13y ago
  This happened to a colleague of mine, he was the sales director of the company (ISP in the mid 90s) we worked for, and after 3 take overs in a row - and 3 times changing of mouse pads, business cards and email addresses in a short time - he had no responsibilities left, had no boss but was on the payroll. He quit after some months of being bored.
  • ams6110 13y ago
    Did he keep his red stapler?
    • Everlag 13y ago
      I imagine he burned the building down when they didn't let him.
  • zanny 13y ago
    > He quit after some months of being bored. Talk about a lack of imagination! Just think of all the dinky hacking projects you could do with a guaranteed paycheck and no responsibilities. I'd probably spend 12 hours a day writing qml.
    • Uchikoma 13y ago
      He was a sales guy :-)
    • dripton 13y ago
      The startup I worked for got bought by a big company, then two years later they decided to shut us down. But they wanted a fraction of us to stick around for 3 months and keep the servers running while they transitioned to the new system. And they offered us large severance checks to stick around until the end. (Basically, barely work for 3 months then get another 3 months bonus pay.) It was painfully boring. I wrote a lot of hobby code. Learned a couple of programming languages. Read a few good books. Helped people with their resumes. Had some nice long lunches. Volunteered to fix everything that broke during business hours so that I could feel like I'd at least done something useful. I wish I'd produced something more useful during those slack 3 months, but I was afraid that if I did, the big company would claim ownership of it.
• allannienhuis 13y ago
  That was a great waste of time. Now back to the rest of my HN feed...
• chillzilla 13y ago
  This guy and Kafka...
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
• sharkweek 13y ago
  Long, amazing read -- I remember it from the SA forums years ago when I was in high school -- I remember wondering then just how long I'd be able to take a job that paid relatively well but offered no... accomplishment. Well fortunately for me, that opportunity came a few years later while working for one of the large banks! The answer to my earlier question was six months; I had worked a few years through various positions into operations, only to fall into a role with little managerial oversight and no responsibility, it got boring so fast...
  • derleth 13y ago
    > a job that paid relatively well but offered no... accomplishment. Welcome to most jobs, ever, in every historical period and culture, ever since humans have had jobs distinct from whatever else they did with their lives. Progress seems to consist of reducing the number of those kinds of jobs and, eventually, finding other things to do for the people who aren't suited to anything else.
    • niels_olson 13y ago
      any job that can be replaced by a computer or robot, will be. Be the one who makes that happen, or be the one it happens to.
      • nitrogen 13y ago
        There is a third option: be the one who makes sure the second group is still happy afterward.
        • antocv 13y ago
          Smartphones, ipads, web and apps for everyone! Consume minglings!
          • niels_olson 13y ago
            > minglings please define
• iamtyce 13y ago
  This is amazing.
• jesalg 13y ago
  EPIC
• alagappanr 13y ago
  An amazing read. Loved it.
• NoodleIncident 13y ago
  I was _convinced_ that the globes were hiding drugs and that the "seeds" were something else... but it was just globes. Engrossing read.
• meisterbrendan 13y ago
  that was equal parts hilarious and depressing. I dislike how completely CONTENT the author seems to be in DELIBERATELY wasting his life away. Come on man--you can do better!
• regal 13y ago
  This reminds me of my two years working for the U.S. Defense Department as a contractor. For a few months I worked with one of the highest ranking individuals in the building, I did a great job and finished much faster than they expected... and then after that there was no work to do, no matter who I asked, and all I could do was come in late, leave early, lift weights in the building gym, and pretend to work. No one really knew what I did. The only thing that doomed me was when I eventually found myself unable to keep from falling asleep and snoring in meetings. Tried everything I could think of... chewing gum, drinking water, screaming inside my head. No use; the dozing and snoring in plain view of everyone else continued. I think that clued them off that something was amiss, and I started being told I didn't need to come to meetings anymore... and was gone a few months after that.
  • wahnfrieden 13y ago
    You gave up at that point, or they let you go?
    • regal 13y ago
      They very nicely informed our team that they just didn't seem to have enough work for all the contractors, and I was one of the contractors they just didn't seem to have enough work for, so I was off the project, one year + 7 or 8 months after I'd stopped doing any real work. Lucky thing, too... my teammate on our initial assignment there is still on that same contract, 6 years later... getting annual raises and the odd promotion here and there.. still doing nothing. He still gets that panicky look in his eyes and starts rambling on nonsensically when you ask him what exactly he does there. He was a lot better at pretending to be busy than I was, and wasn't as gung-ho about wanting to be let go if they couldn't find anything useful or challenging for him to do than I was. Took a year for my productivity levels to bounce back after leaving that project. Was just really hard to do any work for a while... 2 years of nothing makes you quite lethargic being used to napping and web-surfing all day. Took me all day to answer the 1 email or so I'd get in the morning. Most productive things I did then were read classic literature and hone my chess skills against the computer. I play a mean game of chess vs. computer these days because of my time with the DoD.
• austenallred 13y ago
  Honestly reading this makes me a little bit sick to my stomach. Do you know what most people would give for that amount of spare time? I could build so much, learn so much, do so much... or would I just sit there and play snake?
  • colmvp 13y ago
    It's okay, just do it tomorrow.
    • Finster 13y ago
      Can't. I just penciled in some time to catch up on baseball scores.
  • LordHumungous 13y ago
    And yet here you are wasting time on HN.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • callmeed 13y ago
    > what most people would give for that amount of spare time? No, they wouldn't. You could do so much, but we live in a world where people spend 7 hours a month on Facebook and a game called Candy Crush makes over $600,000 per day.
    • rphlx 13y ago
      While way more than $600,000/day of developer time goes into making thousands of lame, derivative cell phone games that less than 100 people will ever play. Fueled by the mostly-irrational hope of creating That One Big Hit.
  • Wingman4l7 13y ago
    Seriously. At the bare minimum, you could do creative writing or art -- you don't even need a computer for those. Any internet access at all opens up a whole world of things you could do, from honing job skills or working on open source software projects, or even just contributing to Wikipedia.
• zik 13y ago
  I'd love to know what Moonshine's doing now and how long he managed to keep up the subterfuge.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • Sven7 13y ago
    High up in government. Possibly the pentagon.
• Finster 13y ago
  Guys. If you ever think you might be stuck in a meeting as described in part 2, you can set up a rule on ifttt.com to call you if you send them a text message. That way, you can pull the same trick with a single phone.
  • fsckin 13y ago
    Or just navigate to settings and start a ringtone playing. Sell it with a tinge of embarrassment and they wouldn't know any better.
    • Finster 13y ago
      Nah, that's a rookie mistake. You don't want to be the guy caught doing that when a real call comes in.
      • brokenparser 13y ago
        I bought a "dumb" Symbian phone and it has "fake call" functionality. It even allows you to configure which button to press and the timeout to wait for the event. If you answer it, you just hear nothing but it won't hang up on you. It's well worth the steep price of $5.
      • broken_symlink 13y ago
        So what if a real call comes in? Just fake it, and be like hold on, I have another call coming in, "hang up" the fake call, and answer the real one.
        • greyboy 13y ago
          Because phones don't "ring" when on a call - you get a beep in the phone speaker. At least with every landline and mobile phone I've ever seen in the past few decades. I guess there is a subset of people who may still be fooled.
    • prawn 13y ago
      Or, learn ventriloquism so that you can mimic the sound of a phone vibrating on a table. Pick up the phone before anyone notices it's not moving around.
• mh_yam 13y ago
  So good.
• ChuckMcM 13y ago
  It made me sad reading it. I've met folks like the character portrayed, idling along because they can, never improving anything. Eventually they will get dismissed, and after being so may find that they are completely dysfunctional having forgotten the habits needed to get things done, and perhaps developed habits that work against them. Unemployed, hungry, and often homeless they turn to drugs or alcohol and slowly circle the drain. There was an interview with somebody who could have been this character on the CBS evening news when they were doing a story about the long term unemployed. He hadn't been employed in over 3 years and had no transferable skills from his old job and in the past three years had not developed any new skills. So very very sad. It is one thing to build up enough savings such that you can live off the 4% annual draw down stipend like MMM advocates, and then wasting your time. It is something else completely to be depending on someone else to pay you a salary.
  • tudorconstantin 13y ago
    He was definitely good at corporate politics. A great skill to have, since it makes him employable and buys him time in whatever company he'd work to learn the stuff he'd eventually need to do
    • ChuckMcM 13y ago
      Agreed but he's using his free time to play Snake? Its one thing when people use this sort of position to build a new business or develop new skills, its sad when they let that time go to waste. As you get older you realize you're never getting that time back, ever. And even though you feel the same way you did when you were 20 you can't reset the clock.
      • _delirium 13y ago
        The traditional use of that free time, of course, is to post on the internet (Usenet, Slashdot, HN, depending on your era).
        • n09n 13y ago
• fsckin 13y ago
  I've heard a few similar stories, here's one about an engineer who was 'too senior' to lay off when an office closed: They wound up with nearly zero responsibilities. Same as this story, they were relocated to a remote office and never assigned a new manager. Once a month, they received an email from someone on the QA team with updated i18n strings for the latest software update. Their sole duty was to append the strings, commit, and verify the build wasn't broken. They replied to QA with a single word: "Done!", and that was all they did. In their free time (as I recall) they made mobile games and about three years in, the company went into Chapter 11 and seeing the writing on the wall, they turned in their resignation... to whom, I don't know.
• Dogamondo 13y ago
  Enthralling read. That was 11 years ago. I wonder if he stuck around to see the 2008 recession and somehow miraculously made it through. If not he would have had a huge redundancy pay out given his tenure.
• ggreer 13y ago
  In case anyone's curious, this story was posted to HN a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320310 It's interesting how similar the comments are.
  • unimpressive 13y ago
    What's interesting is that the comments on this one are better.
• kilroy123 13y ago
  I couldn't help but get sucked in to his story. Still, a bit sad, he didn't do something better with his time. Eventually, this guy had to have gotten fired. Wonder what this guy does now.
• usea 13y ago
  A college friend of mine (with CS degree) was hired as an automated tester about 6 months ago. The project he was hired for and assigned to was put on indefinite hold right after he was hired. He's an "asset" on that project, all of which are frozen. But because he's a new employee, he can only be on one project at a time, so he has no responsibilities. He has a weekly meeting with his manager, where he informs her that he's still doing nothing and he'd be happy to do anything, while she replies that he has nothing to do. Also he is not allowed to use the internet for non-work-related tasks. Recently the CTO has begun roaming the halls in his department. The CTO gets upset upon seeing my friend doing nothing. So he has to look busy all the time. He spends hours of his day typing nonsense into Word. I told him he could be doing any number of things to improve his skills (which are lacking already). He is disillusioned with the corporate world at this point, his previous two jobs not being much better. Instead he applied and was accepted to the master's program this fall. My hopes for him are not high, but I don't know how to encourage him.
  • chaostheory 13y ago
    He could have put his skills to work on an open source project as opposed to just mindlessly typing. EDIT: Alternatively he could have even created his own internal company project for work. Whether or not they liked enough to keep is another story but at the very least it shows he has initiative, creativity, and he can learn something from his work. Unless your job has a lot of manual, physical labor; I really find it hard to see how anyone can get bored and do nothing at work especially if you can program.
    • Wingman4l7 13y ago
      That'd be arguably difficult with the "no internet use for non-work tasks" restriction. I'd suggest creative writing.
      • warcode 13y ago
        If self-improvement is not a "work-task", that is not a company worth working at.
• wahnfrieden 13y ago
  The images are gone, but there's one left in the original forums posting: http://i.imgur.com/9ioHLCt.jpg http://i.imgur.com/9ioHLCt.jpg of the VP.
• jcampbell1 13y ago
  And this is why you do "ghost employee" audits. In a past career I used to work in the Controller's office for one of the Big 3 auto companies. One day, I was sent some bullshit email that I needed to do about 100 audits including "ghost employee audit" and check a box on a web form that all were complete. For shits and giggles, I decided to take it seriously. I altavista'd "ghost employee audit" and learned it is a reverse recon of the payroll system. I did the audit by making every manager certify a list of employees. I found two employees that none claimed. One dude was well known within the plant and fixed any broken motors. No one had heard of the other guy. I convinced the payroll clerk to just stop paying the other person. He got pissed, and eventually tried to get a union rep, but the union decided not to rep him. It turns out this "ghost employee" had collected over a million dollars in salary and OT, yet not worked in about a decade. I asked about an award for the savings, but I was shot down because the union didn't want to let it out that they didn't rep a guy, and the company didn't want it known the ghost employee audits weren't actually being done. In the end, I realized I was rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic, and switched careers by becoming a programmer. Haven't looked back since.
  • bkor 13y ago
    I heard of an example where an employee was paid for 6+ years without them showing up. The employee was forgotten or something during some restructuring. The only reason this was discovered is because the employee complained towards HR about not receiving a salary increase. HR then tried to contact the manager, couldn't find one, etc.
    • Wingman4l7 13y ago
      I find it difficult to believe that someone is that stupid.
      • SteveGerencser 13y ago
        Then you need to get out more. Stupid knows no limits.
    • 13y ago
• nathana 13y ago
  :%s/Something Awful/Hacker News/g
• dano414 13y ago
  I sometimes think these stories are made up by Harvard MBA types? I was honestly, too lazy to verify the source. I have seen guys like this--15-20 years ago, but thought times have changed? The one thing that always always irked me about programmers--game testers, etc; is the undeserved Hugh egos that went along with their bag of random "talents"--some of you. Those days are long gone--I thought? I honestly believe anyone who dosen't have to break a sweat at work is lucky. That said, I still think these stories are going to be much nore common. I hope true BS sniffers farret out the honest bloggers, from some lackey with a degree in psychology. I'm not sure why this story irrated me. I know I need to follow with "I could be that guy?". But I work differently. If I don't like a company--I smile, while I destroy the entity. Just being truthful.
• drewying 13y ago
  We have a guy kinda like this at our current company. He is a co-founder of the company. When our angel investors came in there was some drama and disagreements. End result he was demoted and stripped of all his responsibilities. They can't fire him since he helped found the company and has some protections. But he refuses to do anything they ask him. Now both sides have given up. Guy won't even come into the office most of the time. I don't know if it's a position I ever want to be in.
  • na85 13y ago
    That company is going nowhere and you need to leave.
    • pbhjpbhj 13y ago
      The co-founder is just not an employee. They're more like an owner that demands a payment without commensurate input in to the company. Not sure that makes the company so bad you have to leave; it's an historic glitch. Can you expand on your reasoning.
  • marme 13y ago
    this kind of stuff happens all the time. It is not that they cant fire it is that he is partial owner of the company since he is a founder. Founders get into a fight and someone is forced out. You cant stop him from owning the company so he is still entitled to everything the other owners are and probably guaranteed himself a seat on the board so they can do nothing but put up with him. Even Steve Jobs was fired from Apple in the 90s when he lost control of the company. He was still a major stock holder of the company but all the other stock holders decided he should not participate in the operation of the company and he had to just sit back and watch the company he founded go on with out him
  • zerr 13y ago
    Isn't that a passive income that we all try to achieve here?
• warmwaffles 13y ago
  I read this a long time ago and I found it amusing then and I found it amusing now. Truth or lie, it is still a fun story.
• agilebyte 13y ago
  "Upper management written all over him".
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• ivanbrussik 13y ago
  frigging brilliant - longest fiction ive read in about a decade
• datalus 13y ago
  The story has internet fiction written all over it. Definitely one of the better examples of it, still a good read 11 years on :)
• dirktheman 13y ago
  I was in a similar situation once. I was outsourced to another company to do a rather specific sysadmin job. After a couple of months they switched systems, making my job obsolete. For some reason however, I never actually met the IT-manager. We nodded at each other in the hallway, sure, and he new I was the outsourced guy, but I’m sure he never knew what I really did. In fact, nobody knew what I did exactly. Even before the system swap, since it was a very specific task. Apparently he wasn’t aware that I was hired as a sysadmin for the previous system only, or maybe they replaced some paperwork, I don’t know. Fact is that for some reason my contract wasn’t terminated. After a while, I began coding my own projects. Which was a bit of a challenge, since IT wouldn’t let me install software. I did have Notepad, and a WAMP-server on my USB thumb drive. Mind you, I did not have an office of my own, it was basically an office garden. Co-workers (testing, helpdesk, project management, not too technical stuff) could watch my screen directly. So I had to disguise my project websites as a corporate intranet page. Every once in a while someone would say ‘wow, that looks difficult’ and I would say ‘well, you know’. Mind you this was just basic HTML and PHP stuff. The next problem was internet access. They did have internet there, but most websites were blocked by IT, and they were monitoring internet traffic, too. So I learned how to set up a proxy server, and figured that if I kept the amount of traffic down I’d be allright. Besides, I couldn’t have my coworkers seeing me browse SO all day, right? It’s amazing how resourceful you get when your resources are limited! The funny thing is that when you look busy yet can still ‘find the time’ to help others, people hold you in high regard. They even sent praise about me to the IT manager, who came down to me once and told me he heard great things about me, and he passed the praise on to my outsourcing company. After a year or so I learned a great deal about web development, and finished a couple of side projects. I started to get some remorse. As funny and unique as the situation was, it didn’t feel right at all. Eventually I quit (to everyone’s surprise, because I was doing such a great job!), moving on to more challenging work, and above all a more ‘fair’ way to make money. What struck me from those days is that nobody in my department actually knew what the others were doing. For all I know everybody was coding up their side projects in the boss’ time. And that was just my department, let alone the whole company. Large corporations (I’ve worked for several) are just so inefficient, I think that at least 50% of all employee hours is wasted on politics and sherades. The number is even higher if you count in useless meetings.
• chaostheory 13y ago
  This was first posted on HN about 3 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320310 I agree with the old comments. It's probably just a nice fictional short story
• ryantcarter 13y ago
  This is epic, is there any more I can read?
• Dr_chaos 13y ago
  This is weird, I read this on reddit last night under /r/askreddit or something, it was a comment buried half the page down 2 comments up. I stayed up WAY past my bed time to read it, amusing story. THEN i find out it is the top spot here :| what am i going to read this morning !!!!!:(
  • josephpmay 13y ago
    I'm in an identical situation as you.
• EnderMB 13y ago
  My first job was at a "non-technical" startup, in a technical capacity. Despite being essentially a beginner, I was able to build a good product and web presence for us, and after almost two years we were acquired by a huge company. The new parent company separated the technical team and moved them into their own department in the main business, and left the rest as a separate entity (which has now been dissolved). As a part of the new team they were invited to their companies Christmas party. It's tradition for many people to get hilarious drunk and say things they shouldn't. I had left the company as this point to take a job elsewhere, but the friends I worked with saw some crazy things. One story that stood out was about one guy who was drunk, and spoke. He hung around with the new people and told them about the company. They then asked him what he did, and he said "oh, nothing really, just this and that". He had worked there for twelve years, was promoted in his eighth year to work under a manager, but after his manager left he was never assigned anywhere else in the company. During this time, the recession hit, and some restructuring was done, and he was promoted to manager of his department, despite him being the only member in the department. His project was long-finished by then, and he just stuck around, did around an hour of work a day helping others. I hear that he doesn't slack off though, and that he spends his time improving his skills, uses up his training budget to gain new skills (apparently he gets a lot), and basically does the stuff around the office that no one else wants to do, like rewriting a ton of their internal systems.
  • antitrust 13y ago
    At several workplaces, I have known people in similar situations. However, these people were among the most important parts of the workplace. They were valued for both having a lot of background knowledge in their area, and having an ability for judgment about detailed problems that could only be called "wisdom." Management kept them around like wise elders because once or twice a week there'd be some task that others could do, but not as well or as thoroughly (use of judgment, again) as these people. Thus problems got transferred to them. The counterpart to these people are Suzannes, named after the first one I met. You can have an office full of highly technical people, but Suzanne -- who usually doesn't get paid much, and is some kind of administrative staff -- is the person everyone asks questions of nearly constantly because she knows all the ins and outs of the business. Every office has a Suzanne, and often the place won't function if he or she is out sick for a day.
• reledi 13y ago
  Isn't there a story about a guy who was in a similar situation at Apple or Microsoft and built a well-known piece of software during that time?
  • bkor 13y ago
    It is referenced here every so often: http://www.pacifict.com/Story/ http://www.pacifict.com/Story/
    • lostlogin 13y ago
      Thank you. I had not read that before and its great.
• phryk 13y ago
  I've been thinking about switching jobs for a long time; I guess 'workplace safety inspector' is now on the list of jobs I'd potentially apply for. :F
• davidjgraph 13y ago
  So, we do know this is fiction, yes? He was about to lose his job and happened to catch a VP having a five knuckle shuffle that same night. Interesting read, but untrue.
  • jmcgough 13y ago
    Yeah, this was posted on SA years ago as fiction.
• xmpir 13y ago
  nice read! I cannot understand, why the guy is happy with doing nothing...
• qoo 13y ago
  網絡潮文共賞
• Killah911 13y ago
  I'm having a hard time believing the post. It's way too entertaining. I feel like I just watched an episode of The Office. Sure there are inefficiencies in corporations, but coupled with this type of storytelling and walking in on a VP in such a compromising position, it just seems scripted. Not to mention, I was in a similar position for a couple of months. But given that I'm generally a hard worker (much like the guy in the post), I almost went crazy for not doing anything productive and ended up writing code for much needed tools at the company. And I don't think I could put up with not doing anything for that long. So, something smells fishy about this story...
  • rantanplan 13y ago
    Too familiar to me to consider it as fictional. As for your "almost went crazy for not doing anything productive" - give it time it'll come to you ;)
  • keypusher 13y ago
    It's from Something Awful, not meant to be taken as verifiable truth. More like internet art, appreciate it for what it is.
• iliis 13y ago
  I'm surprised nobody mentioned the Bastard Operator from Hell yet. It's a similiar story if somewhat more violent and on the technical side. Recommended reading for every sysadmin. http://bofh.ntk.net/BOFH/index.php http://bofh.ntk.net/BOFH/index.php
• secretdark 13y ago
  This is a slightly different take on this 'forgotten employee' story. I was made redundant by a large, rather famous web-giant once, only they managed to screw it up (forgetting that firing employees in Europe, especially in a large group, is apparently somewhat harder than firing employees in the US). As a result, their intention of firing 120+ techies in our office in one day turned into a 4 month long arbitration period (exacerbated by the fact that we only found out we were all fired via a company-wide webcast, intended to only be broadcast to the surviving employees. They had actually forgotten to come tell us we were fired.) Since we were all still technically employed during this arbitration period, we were vaguely expected to come to work. Since our managers were all fired as well, though, no one really bothered checking. Since they'd fired an entire department - an entire floor of one in a large, beautiful building - the floor was filled with 100+ geeks, all on a paycheck but with no expected output. Some simply didn't bother coming in, deciding instead 'to work from home.' Most, however, did come in - to play the Wii & foosball, work on their own projects, and idly look for new jobs. A few small startups came out of it. A few fun open-source projects. My favourite aspect of it, though, was that my old manager made it his personal job in the remaining time to ensure that each and every one of the people he was responsible for had a new job waiting at the end of the 4 month period. He organised recruiting drives with local startups, got everyone's CVs, even rented a pub one evening so we could all catch up with a few local startups. That large web-giant is hiring again apparently. Not many of my old colleagues are interested, it seems.
  • girvo 13y ago
    That is both depressingly Kafkaesque and heartwarming at the same time. I could see a lot of cool projects coming out of six period like that. It's almost a small scale negative income tax experiment :P
• BellsOnSunday 13y ago
  I had a job for about a couple of years that gave me enough spare time to read Proust's 1.2m word epic In Search of Lost Time. There was some work to be done but it never took me more than an hour or two, and then my boss was quite happy for me to drift off to the Belle Epoque. I couldn't really get into reading it at home because, as the father of young kids, I was too busy most of the time and you really need to concentrate on P's page-long sentences. I alternated between leisurely, engrossed reading and teaching myself web development skills...happy days! At the same Not that I consider reading Proust a waste of time,
  • hkon 13y ago
    Thanks for mentioning this, involuntary memory themed book sounds awesome. How long did it take you to read through in calendar time, not active reading time?
    • BellsOnSunday 13y ago
      A bit more than a year. There are some extended longeurs, especially Sodom and Gomorrah, during which I was getting a bit fed up with it so once or twice I gave myself a few weeks off. It is a magnificent novel though, worth sticking with it.
• karlgrz 13y ago
  I enjoyed every word of this, real or not. Great story!
• kabdib 13y ago
  When Atari fell apart in 1984, we discovered an office in New York City with about 20 "employees" who did nothing but collect paychecks. We figured it was an organized crime thing; I don't know whether there were actual people, or just an empty office.
• smurph 13y ago
  I worked with a guy like this who didn't realize he was doing nothing useful. He thought that printing updated spreadsheets and reading random documentation was worth his likely 6 figure salary. It was no secret though, all of the younger employees knew about him. I think the managers avoided dealing with him because they were afraid that he would wind up assigned to their team and bringing their productivity down. He would get really upset whenever we got an email about a new VP or Director being promoted, because he though he was in line for that sort of thing. Eventually he convinced his manager, a remote guy who didn't really know who he was, to promote him to a senior engineering position. I left soon after that.
• mydpy 13y ago
  This is awesome.
• steven2012 13y ago
  Not exactly the same, but I felt like a forgotten employee at Yahoo when I was there. I had enough work for maybe 1 day a week. The rest of the time was spent doing nothing. Unlike this guy, though, I quit after 9 months (and started looking for a job after 6) because I was worried that my technical skills were being eroded. Unlike this guy, my career is way more important to me than collecting a free paycheck, and I'd rather be earning my keep than sitting around screwing the system.
  • seldo 13y ago
    As a former Yahoo, I can certainly think of a number of former colleagues whose function was unclear and possibly nonexistent but continued to be paid for years.
• hosh 13y ago
  You know, I've seen many comments that lamented how this guy is wasting time. Yet this is what someone looks forward to when setting up enough passive income to cover living expenses. In 4HWW, Tim Ferris talked about his emotional breakdown when he realized he had set things up so he had nothing to do. It's something to think about, examining just what is the motive and underlying emotional current behind the lamentations of "wasting" time. Besides which: the guy had also a period of his life where he worked his ass off and was obviously coasting on the goodwill and reputation generated from there. People respected him and seemed to think he was very busy, because in the past, they've seen him work the 70 hours a week.
• kstop 13y ago
  In a previous workplace, there were multiple redundant management tiers on the technical side, and lots of managers were well-known for never really doing anything apart from attending meetings and finding creative ways to get out of doing performance evaluations. Which usually involved buttering up one of their employees and fobbing the work off on them. Some of them had only a couple of reports. I know of at least one who had none. Then came the "solution." A program whereby managers had to spend 90 minutes a week on the floor talking to their employees. Work was actually supposed to stop while this happened. This got inserted into everybody's objectives. I found this particularly galling because I'd locked horns with a couple of the worst offenders in some of the few meetings I'd managed to dodge, and because, managing a team of 15 devs, I already made 1-on-1 time available to them weekly and easily spent 90 mins a day with them doing actual work. (You just can't manage technical folk without some involvement and understanding of their daily challenges. There's a respect issue otherwise, on both sides.) The program came and went. Nobody failed the objective, though after the first week the usual suspects just hid in their office or spent their 90 minutes playing with their phones. And when the next budget crunch came, management layers only increased (because they were all high performers going by their performance review) while people who did actual work got laid off. Of all the stuff I saw in that corp, that one annoyed me the most (and it wasn't even the most serious - 7-figure vanity projects were a real problem).
• peterjancelis 13y ago
  In my first job I was 'on the bench' literally ALL the time, from October 2008 to when I quit mid 2009. It was a strategy consulting job (at one of the famous 3) and I was assigned on a bank bailout project that kept being delayed. It is hugely depressing as you are doing nothing productive yet you can never plan to have the next x months available to do a project on your own. What most bugged me down was the BS busywork, which kept coming as the office was small enough for people to know I was on the ever delayed project. If I could do it again I would just go skiing fulltime and tell them to fire me or staff me, but I was an extremely ambitious 22 year old and stuck in a role that is generally considered at least a 2 year commitment. I finally quit 9 months in, with my "mentoring partner" reassuring me the project really would start in 2 weeks. Literally 20 minutes before he had said that there had been an email from HR that it was delayed again. The idiot just didn't care. When I asked him to explain how the company had not wasted my time over the past 9 months and why I should trust their promises going forward, he went all office politics on me saying that this was an evaluation only I could make. That was the last insult to my intelligence that I tolerated from that company. I'm still extremely angry over it, as I was doing everything right. I had a ton of savings in index funds already and had it all planned out to work hard and retire extremely early. When I quit I was so depressed that I did not even fight for the extra 3 months of severance, which I'd have gotten if I had let them fire me officially. I also didn't stay another 3 months so I could take unemployment benefits. The bit of money in the company pension plan was also lost as it had a 12 month vesting schedule. Basically, here was a guy who had been top of class all his life and with a savvy personal finance plan, so broken from 9 months of soul destroying nothingness that he quit without any backup what so ever. It took me 3 years to get over it. Literally, for 2 years and 4 months I sat at home reading stuff. It was only when I was almost 26 and completely broke that I applied for a startup incubator, got in, and got back on track somewhat. Now that that company failed, the rational thing would be to apply for a rails developer job. I found some rails shops that I like, but I just can't get myself to press "send" on the application email. I don't think I will ever trust anyone enough to work for them fulltime. If you're still reading this at this point, take away one lesson: Do not hire ambitious, talented people if you don't know FOR SURE you can give them meaningful work. Better to remain friends with a talented person who is now working for somebody else than to employ him and turn him into an enemy for life. (Because yes, I will have my revenge and it will be fucking brutal. Legal, but oh so brutal.)
• antitrust 13y ago
  From the previous thread: The book "Whatever" by Michel Houellebecq describes this situation very well, and is very funny. Some quotations from it: http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/56842-extension-du-domaine-de-la-lutte http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/56842-extension-du-doma... And a great interview: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6040/the-art-of-fiction-no-206-michel-houellebecq http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6040/the-art-of-fic...
  • evacuationdrill 13y ago
    After reading the long quote about rules, I bought it on Amazon. It sounds awesome, thanks for the recommendation. Link below for anyone else. http://www.amazon.com/Whatever-Michel-Houellebecq/dp/1846687845 http://www.amazon.com/Whatever-Michel-Houellebecq/dp/1846687...
• CountHackulus 13y ago
  When I was in university I had a similar experience for one of my coop jobs. I got hired to do testing, mostly print testing, and managed to automate my full day's work into about 2 hours with diff and grep. Then the company acquired another very large company, and my entire team got either laid off or reshuffled. My entire row of cubicles was empty. My manager had no clue what to do with me, so had me make a "web event portal" where he could track the latest events in certain places. It was a nice 2 weeks where I learned SQL and JSP, but I was still low on work. I ended up writing a rasterizer from scratch, then writing a text mode demo, and also using my used paper (print testing remember?) to make progressively more complex origami. That was the one coop job I wasn't sad about leaving, on my last day I just handed the person who used to be my manager my pass and walked out.
  • dirktheman 13y ago
    Origami, excellent! It never seizes to amaze me how creativity gets to the surface, no matter what people do. Origami, fiction writing, making pixel art in MS paint, that kind of stuff. Awesome!
• KeepTalking 13y ago
  I have seen employees at a large high tech firm do something similar. Basically the person "X" was told don't bother applying for time off if its less than 10 days. Well "X" has done travels around the world without ever taking any vacation time off.
• cafard 13y ago
  "The Director of People Services - AKA, Human Resources Nazi. I was a Warsaw Jew, face to face with Himmler." I guess I shouldn't be astonished that people can write such stuff, but I think I'm allowed to be disgusted.
• bjhoops1 13y ago
  This was incredibly engrossing and amusing. It was interest timing to see this, since today is actually my last day working as a contractor/consultant at a large financial company doing a job that repeatedly left me with days or weeks on end with no real work to do. What made it more painful was that this place blocked Gmail, Facebook, etc. so I was pretty much relegated to reading HN articles and screwing around on Twitter. Somewhat amusingly, they blocked POST requests to Twitter, but not GET requests, so I could view tweets, but couldn't post any. Fortunately, I was able to use Buffer to get around this. :) Happy ending - after 10 months in the corporate jungle, I am now going to work remotely for a startup! Very excited to be part of the startup scene instead of peering in from the outside.
• HackyGeeky 13y ago
  !!! This person can change his life ! He could learn something from scratch & become a master at it given the spare time he has. I think he lacks the motivation and doesn't have a good friend circle.. Sad to see that someone with so much potential is now slowly withering away.. Not too late ! Rather - never too late.
  • piqufoh 13y ago
    It is a little late - the article was published in 2002.
• nicolethenerd 13y ago
  Not quite the 'forgotten employee' story, but when I started a new job a few years ago, the company ordered me a Macbook Pro (or so they claimed...) While I was waiting for it, they gave me an old Linux box to work on, but I didn't really set up a full dev environment because it was temporary and the laptop would be here "any day now". Weeks passed, we checked in with support repeatedly, no sign of the laptop... but it would still be here "in a few days" or "next week", so I continued to put off customizing the Linux box and just installing things slowly, as I needed them. Finally, 6 weeks after I started, we hired a new dev. Support immediately handed him a Macbook Pro that they apparently just had lying around (that is, the one they ordered for me 2 months earlier). My manager thankfully made sure it went to me, and the new dev received his own machine two days later.
  • icefox 13y ago
    Don't leave us hanging like that, did you finally fully configure linux on your new laptop? :D
    • nicolethenerd 13y ago
      Haha, no. I'm really a Mac person at heart, and I used OS X happily until the laptop was stolen out of my office two years later :-( - this time, the company replaced the laptop (with another Mac, of course) within days.
• dakimov 13y ago
  Where can I find such a job doing nothing and getting paychecks?
• dakimov 13y ago
  Very well written, enjoyed it. (Obviously fictional, just in case).
• gaahrdner 13y ago
  Here's a similar story, except this guy did it for 11 years. http://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/1agon8/this_is_unbelievable/ http://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/1agon8...
• tsax 13y ago
  This had me laughing, crying, fearful, among a whole host of emotions. Amazing. Bravo.
• C1D 13y ago
  All I could think about is having the ability to work on side projects full time with pay.
• jgeerts 13y ago
  Is this real? This sounds a lot like fiction, all these things happening, the shady deliverer, the globes, the dog/hjob thing, crawling out of the window when feeling haunted, finding his boss jking off and giving him his freepass. Anyway, this guy has to become an author.