Comment by at-fates-hands

I had a similar experience a few years ago.

I quit at a company I was contracting at because they kept dangling the whole, "We're going to convert you to an FTE next." in the meantime, I was working less than 20 hours a week. If you didn't have a project to bill hours to, you didn't get paid, period. I was floating between teams, fixing bugs and doing minor stuff, not being able to bill much of anything. Once I quit I was offered another contract role. I basically told the recruiter, "Listen, if I'm in the office, I'm getting paid for my time, period." Recruiter got it cleared with HR and the hiring manager.

My first day went like this:

Manager: "Ummm yeah, the two major projects we had you slated on, ummmm those got put on hold for the time being. Get your desk and PC setup and we'll have something for you soon."

I literally went 4 months and barely billed any real project work. My last two weeks I had 36 hours of non-billable time. I had two weeks where I actually billed a full weeks worth when a dev took off for his honeymoon and did exactly zero work he was assigned. The funny part is when I quit, the hiring manager told me he would hire me in a minute and to keep in contact.

In the meantime, I was able to learn AngularJS and some other stuff while I was sitting at my desk all day. In a sense, I was very productive when I was there.