Comment by osrec
7 years ago
You should try working in an investment bank as a contractor. You need to find the right team, but a lot of them are massive collections of people doing virtually nothing but getting paid great daily rates. The trick is to look busy and wrap your team/yourself in a perceived sense of enigma and complexity. If you play your cards right, you can end up in a situation where no one will ask questions as long as you fire off an email now and again. You can keep getting paid for doing almost nothing for years.
The George Costanza way of doing business. The more I grow less young (I’m close to 40 now) the more I realize that the Costanza character is one of the closest approximations of daily life in a society like ours. Dilbert or “The Office” TV series are also very good fits but George Costanza is in a world of his own.
Ugh, but who wants to do nothing all day? You get one life; why waste your days?
Having nothing to do but being forced to look busy is a special kind of hell.
I work in energy trading, and understimulated traders over low-season periods like Summer are extremely dangerous.
So dangerous that a lot of events take place in Q2 and Q3 to emphasize networking over mindless bored trading.
I agree with you, but a lot of people are happy to take the money for doing nothing. Sometimes this is driven by lack of capability - if you're not good at much, not very driven but still want a great income and lifestyle, this sorta hits the sweet spot.
Also a lot of these people lie to themselves about their own importance, in order to have a (false) sense of self worth (but they're okay with it).
I'd assume you'd just double dip your time and work on something personal while doing nothing at work...
2 replies →
Are your days any less "wasted" laboring away?
Labouring away can be hell, unless you're like me and doing what you love :)
Yep. I’ve got something to show for the time that has passed other than just a pay cheque.
I have a theory that in most large companies the 80/20 rule applies. 20% of the engineers do 80% of the work.
Sure, because the other 80% of engineers have to clean up after the 20%.
That doesn't mean the other 80% are useless. They generally work on less important things that are still bringing in more revenue than they cost in salaries.
It also feels like those same 80% of the engineers doing nothing are taking home 80% of the compensation
Because those other 80% are focused on posturing and tasks associated with getting higher pay.
This describes >80% of engineering departments at past large firms where I've worked. Ironically, these people are 'architects' and get paid handsomely.
The IT department in my company is full of “senior architects” and “principal architects” who are very pleasant talkers but don’t do anything from what I can tell. They have a ton of stories how they helped others but whenever I needed something from them nothing ever happened besides a lot of meetings.
This is precisely why corporations have so many meetings. Without them, there's whole divisions of people that would be doing nothing all day, every day. No code reviews, no specs, no code, no operational capacity, just taking the credit for other people's actual output.
What is handsomely? Like Netflix handsomely or 140k?
The trouble with bank that I had - most of the websites were firewalled.
I was gardening various projects on GitHub and increasing my StackOverflow reputation.
I wasn't enjoying it.
At some level there is a need for accomplishment.
Poor work ethics become a virus, difficult to concentrate at home later.