2022
So, how did it go?
I’ve told this story a few times now, but I never get sick of it.
Back in 2011 I left a startup that got acquired. On my last day we had a Christmas Party with our parent company, and we got to speaking to one guy that was on his own. After a few drinks, he blurted out that he had worked there for maybe 12 years, but at least 5-6 of those he was “unassigned”. When we asked what that meant, he said that his manager left and he was never assigned to a new team. He badged in every day, and after doing maybe 6 months of busy work and asking “wtf am I doing” to no answer from his department or HR he just came in to do his own stuff or play Unreal Tournament. He had yearly reviews with the head of department, and these were just high-level goal meetings where they reviewed the department, asked what he wanted, and left at that. Each year he was getting between a 2-5% pay rise, and outside of badging in he was only ever judged on his department output.
I always wonder what happened to that guy. The company is quite large and is still going strong, so he’s probably still there. I won’t name them, but another thing I loved about them was that they didn’t really know where to put Software Engineers, so they just assigned them to Marketing and gave each engineer a marketing budget to personally use - around £10k each. The best part? Everyone in marketing knew it was bullshit, but they pushed everyone to spend it because otherwise their budget would go down. Some highlights were a trip to Toronto to buy some books, a full team trip to Amsterdam to go to a React conference and live in basically 5-star accommodation, and renting a hotel lobby to quickly burn some money on interviewing interns. I think they actually have a tech department now, but I know many people I worked with that stayed for close to a decade because the WLB and perks were just too good to ignore.
This is why downsizing isn’t always bad
Imagine being so poorly managed that you downsize to cut back on unnecessary spending but literally lose track of an employee. Let’s keep the expense of an employee with none of the revenue generation!
Sometimes you just have to many people
Well… Let there be some fun in this world.
Apart from this … middle management is a real bloat nower days. Layers after layers of managers without contact to the actual product. (Now seen in Microsoft, Google and Enshittification)
Oh god, i only once worked in a company large enough where it felt like there were more middle managers than actual workers. The middle manger that was assigned to my team suddenly got sick. Like cancer sick and he basically stopped working within a week. They panicked, because there was no one to replace her. Some guy that i have never seen before told us that we just have to hang in there for 2 weeks or so until they found a replacement. They never found a replacement and i think they just forgot, because nothing has changed about our job, we did the same amount of work and everything. Legitimately the only difference was that they had one less paycheck to pay.
Don’t worry Anon, I’m sure it’ll work out.
Long ago I worked at Wal-mart’s tire center while going to college and to get as many hours as I could they let me work with the overnight people after we closed at 7. In theory. The problem was the overnight managers never got told about this so I would just hang out doing nothing for 3 hours every night and getting paid. This went on for 3 months until I got a better job and no one ever questioned me about it.
Don’t you still feel bad about defrauding Walmart for 180 hours worth of pay?
Cause I don’t.
Anon playing a dangerous game with management.
It’s all well and good until they find you, figure out what you’ve been doing (or rather not doing), then fire you and attempt to sue you for damages.
CYA. Make at least some attempts to be noticed. If they do notice you, at least you got a little bit of easily excusable free time - if they don’t, now you get the easy life AND a paper trail so they can’t say “why didn’t you try to tell us”.
I heard many similar stories like that from friends and it’s always a bit shocking to me. I’m no go getter or anything, i run my own business, but even then, i don’t want to work more than i really have to. But i just really can’t imagine what that must be like.
I had a friend who worked as a static engineer. He then worked for a company that made bearings for big machines, which wasn’t his line of work but he liked it. The company got bought by another company who did something different and he just fell through the cracks. At first he was super anxious and just pretended to draw on his drawing board and had excel open on his computer. But no one cared, a lot of people switched jobs and suddenly he didn’t really know anyone anymore and after a few month he told me that he doesn’t really know what his job is.
I’ve had jobs that amounted to sitting around waiting for work and hated it. I’m the first to tell people that I work just hard enough to not be bored and to keep everything under control
disclaimer: I’m not a bootlicker, all’s fair game for how you earn your keep
but there’s no way a competent person finds themselves not knowing what their job role is
that being said: a dubs a dub I guess ?
‘Systemic dysfunction? Sounds like a personal failing.’
Have you ever worked in corporate?
I don’t know if they have much of a case to sue you, if you fall through the cracks on their own negligence. Fire you, yes. Sue, I am doubtful most larger businesses would even try. They’d rather solve the problem and sweep it under the carpet in my experience. Not USA experience of course, but still the attitude would be similar I expect.
I would worry a bit about whether they’re allowed to give negative references though. Because if so, it might not be so easy to get another job after.
Best move would be to line up another job to start like a month before the review, and never reach the review stage. Even if discovered, most people that would “know” wouldn’t really be driven to report anything if they’re leaving anyway. The “not my problem, and this will make it my problem” attitude in big companies is real.
I would love to hear someone leverage this negative review as cleverness in an interview though
There is no case to sue them. It’s the management responsibility, not the workers to assign work. They don’t need to go out seeking it.
While this is technically true, some pissed off business wanting to make an example of you, can most definitely cost you a lot of money trying to sue you in court.
trying to sue you in court.
Hmm, You’d probably get by fine representing yourself. Given it’s a bad idea…
I’d probably pick up a remote side job to work during the first job and store about 10k away to handle eventual legal fees. You wouldn’t need much of a lawyer to defend yourself.
slowly divert my work to different people in the company
So you’ve been promoted to a management position.
You can make fun of managers not doing work. You know what’s worse than someone at manager/director level that doesn’t do any work? One that insists on doing so! Trust me, first hand experience.
I worked for basically Michael Scott at some point in my life. Everyone knew that he had the easiest job on the planet, and he still didn’t do it, and we were all glad he didn’t. He could talk to a room full of people for hours and explain his position in the company for so long that you forgot what you even asked.
If you think the connection to Michael Scott ends there, you’d be wrong. You would always know when he had a new girlfriend, because he would talk about her all the time. One time he connected his laptop to the projector and the first thing that opened was a picture of his girlfriend. He looked at it, said: OH. Made sure everyone saw her and then pretended to hurry to start his speech.
One day he came to work, sat in my car (i was on my way to a jobsite and had no idea why he was there.) i didn’t want to talk, so i just took off. After some awkward silence, he said: i’m not even supposed to work today. I nodded, i had no idea. He asked if i knew why he’s here. I said nope. He said he was supposed to get married today but his girlfriend fucked two dudes in the jacuzzi yesterday.
There are countless stories like that and all i could think about was: this guy makes 60k a year by working two days a week. And i don’t mean because he was slacking off the rest, he was only employed 20%
The absolute worst are the micro-managers. They don’t want to do work, but they also don’t want to delegate.
Instead they opt for that limbo between, where the only “work” they do is redundant at best, and every employee under them feels like a vole being tracked by a hungry hawk.
OP is working for a huge corporation, so slacking off and getting paid for that is ethical.
I’d go even one step further and say that slacking off is more ethical than actually working in that situation.
depends on what huge organization it is
Organizations don’t get big from kindness.
Red cross, EPA, and FDA are all large organizations imo. Definitely outliers, but theyy do exist and I wouldn’t consider it ethical to take their money without working.
I would absolutely consider it ethical to take money from the american red cross without working.
The EPA and FDA didn’t get big from kindness.
Tf part of Lemmy did I find myself in?
The thread you are replying to is discussing whether or not it can ever be more ethical to not slack off at work while working for a large organization.
Given that context, your comment can be taken as you saying there is no such large organization that is more ethical to not slack off at work for, as there is no large organization that is kind.
I am providing examples of large organizations that I find more ethical to not slack off while working for. I was not trying to provide examples of large organizations that are kind.
Big subgenius energy in anon’s post.
The subgenius MUST have slack!
What would you say, you do here?
Fuck this guy. Living out my dream ;'(
If we ignore the actual stress of a manager suddenly finding out and asking you to report what you have been doing. Probably still possible to bullshit long enough in a big company to recover a normal situation or find another job.
This is why you shouldn’t get rid of all your work. Keep a bit and make it immaculate. If they ask why you haven’t done more, just say “nobody asked me to.”
Problem with that approach is that they will argue that if you didn’t have enough work to do, you should have asked for more. OP knowingly slipped through the cracks to, so the argument of ‘I don’t have a line manager to give me any’ probably isn’t going to cut it as their work will argue that OP should’ve gone to HR to sort their responsibilities as soon as they were aware.
Do things that are never finished. Optimize the everloving bejeezus out of some code. Endlessly fiddle with webpage layouts. Explore and review all the ways not to reticulate a spline.
They might get fired but no one has to “seek” extra work, there’s no legal obligation. If they do their simple existing task, they are meeting known expectations.
I mean it doesn’t sound like they’re seeking ‘extra’ work, because Anon is not doing any work at all. I’d argue there’s a difference between ‘extra work’ and ‘any work’.
They’re not meeting expectations either because the expectation for their role is unlikely to be ‘doing fuck all’, the expectation is doing whatever job is outlined in their JD, which they’re demonstrably not.
Again, I don’t really care either way. Do what you can get away with, but be cognisant of the risks, and how that might affect your future employability otherwise you may find yourself doing nothing because you don’t have a job at all.
I agree that anon shouldn’t have given away their existing tasks. And that being fired is the likely end of this road.
Just clarifying that if you are doing your stated tasks, you aren’t in some sort of legal violation by not seeking more work. You.might get passed over for a later promotion, or deemed as dead weight in a layoff round, but you aren’t doing anything criminal
I don’t know what kind of fucked up country you live in, but in my the employer- employee relationship means that the employer dictates what work you do and when, so if they don’t give you anything to do that’s on them.
Going further even better if you are self employed and on a cintreact thats fix rather than hours based, they have even less of a case, contract says you will charge x amount every month, if they don’t contact you with any issue that’s on them.
I’m from the UK. In most working environments there is an expectation of maturity and responsibility. If you don’t have enough work to do there is an expectation that you, as an employee, are responsible and mature enough to ask your manager for more as ultimately that is what you’re being paid to do - work, whether you like that or not. If you have nothing to do, and deliberately do nothing about that then your employer has reasonable grounds to at least raise this as an issue. If you’re not seen as a someone who takes their job seriously, then you may find yourself looking for a new one if your department needs to downsize, for example.
Also, regardless of whether your manager should’ve known or not, that doesn’t mean your not also at fault for not telling them. If you tell them, and nothing changes, then that’s a different story entirely.
Let me put it this way: if your manager turned around and asked what you’ve been doing for the last X months and your response was ‘nothing’ and then tried to pass that off as their fault, I wouldn’t imagine many employers would be too sympathetic to your arguments.
I wouldn’t imagine many employers would be too sympathetic to your arguments.
Duh, they’re butthurt they fucked up, but also who cares if they’re sympathetic?
If your employee can go months doing nothing then you’re a shite boss who’s even worse than that employee, frankly
Duh, they’re butthurt they fucked up, but also who cares if they’re sympathetic?
If you want to keep the job, you should.
Look, if this works for OP and others, great. More power to them. But the reality is that, in most situations this isn’t going to end up with the whole office applauding you for gaming the system and ‘sticking it to the man’ all whilst your manager looks on dispondantly from the background. It’s going to result in a lot of uncomfortable discussions with HR and you potentially losing your job, or at the very least be given a written warning. If that’s not a problem then great.
If your employee can go months doing nothing then you’re a shite boss who’s even worse than that employee, frankly
Sure, but that doesn’t mean that the employee is not culpable as well. They have a responsibility to inform their line manager that they have no work to do. If the manager still does nothing, then great, enjoy the free time. But they should at least try. Your company expects you to be working in exchange for payment. I’ve seen situations where someone taking money for work they were knowingly not doing was accused of fraud. Maybe that sticks in court, maybe it doesn’t, but is it worth the hassle to find out?
“I’ve been awaiting my next job”
Probably get fire but oh well, easy run until that point.
2022, pretty sure they are job hunting 2024
I’ve seen this happen with coworkers of mine. Folks who never did any work. And slipped under the radar for many years. at least two (and one other to a lesser extent) come to mind.
I have a coworker like that in a shared office. Guy fucking watches movies on speaker with the boss next door.
Who’s the real boss in this situation
Good point.
The one paying for it, of course.
wastes his time watching movies all day.
Really?? Smh
Take the opportunity to acquire skills for the inevitable firing that’s coming later.
There was a story like that on Tales From Tech Support (buddy automated all his work while not making himself essential to support the automation) and when the guy got caught and had to find another job, it had been so long since he had actually worked that he had forgotten all about programming.
Or just get a second job and wait for the first one’s paychecks to stop rolling in.
There might be an issue with some contract clause about the company you work for owning anything you create while at work so if you’re working two jobs at once it can create quite a mess
Right? Like at lease pick up some hobbies or something. I can’t imagine having all that free time and just sitting there letting my brain and body fester.
World doesn’t have to be just hustle and grind. The man can enjoy himself however he likes, especially if he’s getting paid too.
Depending on the state you’re in you can get sued for all that money back, best to CYA
So this answers the question what universal basic income would lead to — sitting at home and watching movies
So your brilliant mind sees someone emphasizing how little work they have by saying they watch movies and you think “Hmpf, that’s probably what UBI is like!”
And now because you think it, it’s evidence? Fuck right outta here chump.
Even a cursory search online provides evidence that that isn’t the case: https://www.givedirectly.org/2023-ubi-results/#design
If he could read, you would have made him very upset.
Ah yes, the super-informative anecdotal sample size of…
*checks notes*
… one.*checks notes again*
Eh, an unreliable source at thatI’m mean, there’s a part of me that would say “fuck yeah, I would get a second job and get two incomes”. The other part of me is really sleepy, so I’m honestly not sure who would win this internal debate.
Probably the sleepy bit for the first few months as you recover from a lifetime of wage slavery. Then the second job part comes along, once you’re in the right place and you figure out what you would love to do all day.
Yeah, beside having an “official” job, I think people can still have personal projects that are great for society if they don’t have to work all week for money.
you’d be sleepy, perhaps for months or years, until you realize that a fulfilling life is not one spent in oblivion and you find a better way to use your time!
You didn’t report that you don’t have a manager is a reason to fire you, but doing two jobs is both easy to find (if they’re looking) and fraud.
That’s why it’s safer to get an other job asap. Just in case you lose the first one.
Having two jobs is fraud? What…?
Have you never heard of Overemployment? There are people out there working multiple easy WFM jobs and just raking in three incomes.
You’re allowed to have two jobs lol
It’s not fraud but it’s a breach of contract, unless you find a different company that’s ok with you having a full time job and working after hours, and you clear the air with your existing employer.
If you’re found doing this, good luck explaining your next employer why they can’t ask around for references.
Because nobody ever accepts more work or responsibility for higher pay to afford more or better things. Most people work just enough to pay for rent and groceries and are perfectly happy with that.
Difference between UBI and this is that you get paid the minimum for living, which would mean him being able to live like this would only be possible for a short amount of time or with really restricted funds
Love that you’re getting down voted but we had something approaching universal basic income in my country trough wellfare plans that were not exclusive with each other and had super lax requirements (since corrupt officials would take a cut of them) and it resulted in a very marked increase in poverty and a very marked cultural decline in work ethic on the lower classes
Why work or study when you can just stay at home and get paid enough to survive if you vote for the “right” candidate. People love to dream about theorized ideals but reality is often more complicated
love random comments dismissing potentially good policy because “in my country” which you didnt name, it doesn’t work
what kind of fucking scientist says “huh that attempt didn’t work i guess it never will”?
You’re not even going to tell us what country it is so we can see? probably not, because it is probably a shitty comparison.
and for the record, parent comment was downvoted because it’s fucking stupid. there’s no UBI in this post. it’s as if i take a day off and go to the park and say “Hmpf this is why UBI doesnt work!” like what the fuck are you talking about, UBI is not just when lazy day. the only thing that could make this post dumber would be calling me triggered for pointing out how dumb it is
what kind of fucking scientist says “huh that attempt didn’t work i guess it never will”?
We also do know how this supposed UBI was implemeted and by which metric it did not work.
